The new Avett Brothers album I and Love and You has recently been released.  The one song in particular that has been playing on my Ipod quite a bit is “Ill With Want.”  I don’t know if the Avett Brothers are believers, but “Ill with Want” perfectly summarizes the Apostle Paul’s struggle in the final verses of Romans 7.  The song speaks specifically of greed, but greed could easily be substituted with any idol such as lust, pride, or fear.  Read lyrics below:

I am sick with wanting
And it’s evil and it’s daunting
How I let everything I cherish lay to waste
I am lost in greed this time, it’s definately me
I point fingers but there’s no one there to blame

I need for something
Now let me break it down again
I need for something
But not more medicine

I am sick with wanting
And it’s evil how it’s got me
And everyday is worse than the one before
The more I have the more I think:
I’m almost where I need to be
If only I could get a little more

I need for something
Now let me break it down again
I need for something
But not more medicine

Something has me
Oh something has me
Acting like someone I don’t wanna be
Something has me
Oh something has me
Acting like someone I know isn’t me
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed

Temporary is my time
Ain’t nothin on this world that’s mine
Except the will I found to carry on
Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone

I need for something
Now let me break it down again
I need for something
But not more medicine

Something has me 
Oh something has me
Acting like someone I don’t wanna be
Something has me 
Oh something has me
Acting like someone I know isn’t me
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed

Peter Leithart at CREDNDAagenda makes some good points about technology and amusing ourselves to death:

Why do I bristle when my son sits in the back seat of the car, white wires hanging from his ears, flipping through what must be a million songs downloaded onto his iPod?  No doubt, it’s the threat of the new.  I rarely carry a cell phone, and now I hear tell of compact computers that will use holographic keyboards.

Stodgy as I certainly am, I don’t think that’s all there is to it.  It’s white, but its purity is, I suspect, only apparent.  There’s something deeper going on, some more fundamental worry about those earplugs, those wires, that uncannily, seductively thin wafer of entertainment.

For starters, I feel that the iPod is an assault on family culture.  A culture is a pattern of life and habit passed from one generation to another; a culture is inherently authoritative, imposed from without.  I want my kids to pick up the passions, the likes and dislikes, the habits and the ways of being that make the Leitharts something more than a random collection of individuals and something different from the Larsons or the Lawyers down the road.

But what we call culture is no longer authoritative, and the iPod and its friends are among the culprits.  In an age of iPods, satellite television, XM radio, Napster, and CinemaNow; in a time where you can choose to follow any of a thousand different religions, or none; in our epoch of pop culture, when we can always find something suitable to our tastes – culture loses its traditional authority.

Pop culture does shape our conduct, but more importantly, by our choices, each of us creates his own culture more or less ex nihilo.  I can construct my own highbrow culture with my Stravinsky CDs and my art house DVD collection, while in the next room my children can form their own culture listening to country music and watching Blue Collar Comedy.

As Todd Gitlin has pointed out, the portability of new technologies realizes the modern aspiration to autonomy in a way that it has never been realized before.  With all the latest technology strapped on, we’re good to go.  Of course, each of these technologies is also a connection, but it’s a connection we turn on and off at will.

I can put my cell phone on silent mode, and punch the off button on my Palm Pilot or my iPod.  Those white ear plugs are, it turns out, removable.  I am only as connected as I want to be.

Nomadicity of this sort is not conducive to culture, because nomadic popular culture lodges authority in only one place – in me.

This may still seem self-serving and stodgy: I’m peeved by the iPod because it means my son won’t turn out like me.  But it’s not just a matter of family culture and losing whatever ability I have to shape my son’s tastes and character.  I bristle and I worry, because I am worried about his soul.

Partly, of course, because of what he might be listening to.  A soul tuned to U2 and Pearl Jam and whomever will not, I dare say, be as resonant as a soul tuned to Bach and Mozart.  Stodgy that may be, but I’ll take my stand.

Bouncy or grinding rhythms, silly or smarmy lyrics – that’s only a small part of it.  It’s the sheer fact of listening, and listening in such alienation, that rankles.  Pascal, with his unparalleled attention to the human capacity for diversion, helps give expression to my worry.  To Pascal, the glory and the misery of man are both evident in our obsession with diversion.

First the glory: We all have some dim knowledge that we are made, as Augustine said, for rest in God.  So we have an instinct for repose.  At the same time, our misery is that we seek only “agitation” in order to forget our misery, which, in the long run, only multiplies our misery.  Double-minded at the core, we blindly pursue a “confused project,” striving for “repose by agitation” and live in the expectation that “the satisfactions [we] don’t have will come, if, by surmounting some difficulties that [we] envisage, [we] can open the door to peace.”

This is the self-defeating, internally contradictory motivation behind a great swath of human action.  Games, seductions, sports, even war and diplomacy are sought, but not because they provide happiness.  We don’t want them to give us settled happiness.  Rather than “looking for this soft, peaceful existence which allows us to think about our unfortunate condition,” we fill our minds and our hours with danger, busyness, bustle, whatever we can find to “distract and amuse us.”

As Matthew Maguire has written, for Pascal “diversion must agitate toward repose; yet repose must never still diversion’s agitation.  Imagination must not lose its capacity to agitate desire because it despairs of reaching its self-created goals.  The imagination must find a kind of repose in agitation, and agitation in repose.” Distraction screens us from the hard realities of our condition at bay.  Distraction induces a pleasant forgetfulness that keeps us ignorant of our misery.  Distraction above all enables us to forget our mortality: As Pascal says, “diversion deceives us, amuses us, and makes us arrive insensibly at death.”

“Insensibly” is the key word here, for Pascal wants to urge us to prepare ourselves for death, so that it doesn’t take us unawares.  To the extent that the iPod diverts, to that extent it distracts from the real business of life, which, however defined, must include a good death.  I worry the iPod will keep my son distracted to the edge of his grave.

Pascal’s analysis of diversion is part of an apology for the life of faith.  Diversion is a temptation that must be renounced in favor of a starkly ascetic pursuit of peace in God.  But here Pascal’s own legacy is mixed, for what he names diversion is quite the effective substitute for piety.

Pascal is one of the first to recognize that distraction works, and Pascal has a hard time convincing the reader, especially the reader without a predisposition to faith, that his path is the better.  Pascal is too honest an observer of human life to pretend, as many Christians do today, that diversion always ends up as a dry dusty taste in the mouth.

Pascal takes a wrong turn, I think, by over-playing the ascetic dimension of the Christian life.  When the Preacher meditates on death and the vapourousness of it all in Ecclesiastes, he turns Epicurean rather than Stoic: Eat, drink and rejoice now, because you don’t have much time to get it done.  Pascal would have been more convincing had he been slightly less Augustinian, and slightly more Solomonic.

But there’s my son, still sitting behind me, now listening to a movie sound track or Johnny Cash.  What do I tell him?  Sometimes, I tell him to unplug himself and read, play with his little sisters, have a conversation.  Sometimes, frequently, the iPod must be put to the side to engage in common activities that cultivate the family, and the church, culture.  Sometimes, though, I might be able to turn the iPod into a memento mori: Next year, your iPod is going to be outdated, all your friends will have better ones, and you’ll be hankering for something new.  Your iPod is vapor, vapor of vapors, most vaporous vapor.  Just like everything else.  Just like you.

Therefore: Eat, drink, and enjoy your music.

Read it for free online here.  Buy it here.

I saw Avatar this past weekend and thought that it was pretty awesome.  This morning I read a New York Times article that speaks of the pantheism that is throughout the movie. I think that they get it exactly right:

Heaven and Nature

From the December ‘09 edition of byFaith Magazine :

The Calling of Christian Writers

Richard Doster, December 2009

Ask your neighbors for an off-the-cuff reaction to the words “Christian literature” and you’re likely to hear them stumble through a list of belittling adjectives. Despite the swelling ranks of able Christian writers, the reaction demonstrates that we—heirs to the tradition of Chaucer, Milton, and Donne; successors to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov; the literary descendants of G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, and of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy—are now viewed as an inconsequential presence in the world of literature. We have, volitionally, banished ourselves to the “inspiration” section at the back of Barnes & Noble. And by doing so, we may have abandoned our neighbors and left literature in the hands of writers who’d leave them hopeless. 

All the names just mentioned were, of course, great writers because of their Christian faith, not in spite of it. They appreciated the inherent goodness of God’s creation; they knew the pervasive consequences of mankind’s Fall; they relished the hope of Christ’s resurrection, and anticipated the day of His cosmic-wide redemption. They combined talent with an irresistible urge to tell stories, and then—armed with this gripping a worldview—they made sense of a seemingly pointless world. Their books and poems provided eternal significance to the mundane; they held out hope while never flinching from the cold, hard truth of life in a sin-afflicted world. As a result, their works are appreciated today across the entire breadth of our literary culture. 

Dorothy Sayers took the lightly regarded “detective novel” and transformed it … to illustrate the conflict between sin and Christian virtue.

Beowulf, for example, after 1,300 years, is still required reading on college campuses, and still deemed essential to the education of well-rounded students. Writer and teacher Donald Williams, in his essay Christian Poetics, Past and Present, explains how the poet wrestled with the tension between his Christian faith and Teutonic heritage. He made this grand synthesis, Williams says, “in which the heroic ideal was enlisted in a cosmic war of good and evil.” Williams also reminds us that Dante, in the Divine Comedy, “created concrete images that allegorically incarnated Christian doctrines ….” And that Chaucer gave us a “humane and sympathetic portrait of God’s plenty.”

Transforming the Detective Story

Dorothy Sayers’ work is more recent, and much more accessible. Between 1923 and 1935 Sayers wrote 11 Peter Wimsey detective stories. A savvy and gifted believer, Sayers elevated the genre. She took the lightly regarded “detective novel” and transformed it, employing who-done-it plots and a recurring cast of characters to illustrate the conflict between sin and Christian virtue, and to show readers how, at least from man’s perspective, evil might be restrained but never ended.

Sayers wrote the most popular sort of fiction. Believers and non-believers anticipated each new installment, and her stories today, some 70 years after they were written, are still available at Barnes & Noble. And they still depict, as author Joyce Brown, puts it, “… the horror and irrevocability of evil and the power of virtue, which relentlessly battles against it.”

Perceiving Life Through the Central Christian Mystery

Twenty years later Flannery O’Connor, with the wit she was known for, addressed the tension that confronts contemporary Christian writers. There was an assumption, O’Connor noted, that Christians should write for only one reason: “… to prove the truth of the Faith.” When pressured to tame her “grotesque” characters and to sanitize her Southern, gothic fiction, O’Connor balked. She’d seen the sentimental drift in Christian writing; it was, she said, “… a distortion that overemphasized innocence.” And innocence, when exaggerated in a fallen world, not only mocked the true state of man and society, but the price that was paid for their redemption.

Writers must learn, “to be humble in the face of what-is,” O’Connor argued. They must understand that concrete reality—the things we see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—are the only clay a novelist can mold. They aren’t to persuade with argument or develop abstract theories or disguise essays in the garb of story. Rather, they’re to create characters, invent action and dialog, and concoct settings that look a lot like the places we know. If the novelist’s work is to ever transcend the here-and-now, O’Connor said, it must be firmly rooted in it.

O’Connor griped that Christian writers tended to be concerned with “unfleshed ideas and emotions.” They’re reformers, she complained, who “… are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, …of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.”

That mystery, underscored for her by life in the “Christ-haunted South,” was the theme she couldn’t escape. The Christian writer, O’Connor explained, perceives life from the “standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that is has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.” This, she knew—when understood and applied—expanded the writer’s vision. It inspired investigation. It meant that nothing is off limits. And that everything—regardless of how common—matters.

O’Connor—because she was a Christian, because she was concerned about her vocation, and because she knew the world and the Church looked on warily—cared about quality. A Christian’s novel, she said, must be “complete and self-sufficient and impregnable in [its] own right.” When told that good Catholics, because they were responsible for proclaiming the gospel, couldn’t also be good artists, she replied “ruefully” that, “because I am a Catholic, I cannot afford to be less than an artist.”

An Imagination Sent Soaring by the Gospel

C.S. Lewis, a contemporary of O’Connor’s, was as a gritty a realist as she was. And yet our neighbors—practically all of them, regardless of their religious beliefs or affiliation—love his fantasy. The genre might have been his natural, literary inclination. George Sayer, in his biography Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, notes that Lewis’s most “precious moments” were when he was aware of the supernatural’s intrusion into the workaday world. “His success in translating these moments into his fairy stories gives [The Chronicles of Narnia] a haunting appeal,” Sayer wrote, providing readers with “a taste of the other.” Read the rest of this entry »

This is not a joke. Consider Conservapedia, the conservative perspective Wikipedia site that features this translation project.

When it first started, it was difficult to tell if it was an authentic conservative phenomenon or a parody along the lines of “The Colbert Report.” Attempts to parody an extreme group often simply end up resembling an even more extreme, possibly very fringe, but equally real group.

But it has become clear that what looks like an attempt at satire is a real project proposed by people who don’t seem to grasp the irony of their endeavor.

Now, with similar irony, the Conservative Bible Project plans to replace text in the Bible, which is often open to more than one interpretation, with new text that will be in accord with how the members of the project interpret the text; in some cases, what they think it really ought to say even though it doesn’t….

A good example is the discussion on the Conservative Bible Project page about whether the manager in Luke 16:8 should be referred to as “shrewdly dishonest.”

The discussion on the Web page suggests that he should rather be considered “resourceful,” a “better conservative term, which became available only in 1851.” No mention is made of what the actual Greek term might mean, much less of whether relevant linguistic parallels or cultural evidence might provide clarification of the Greek term’s meaning.

The meaning of words in the underlying languages is simply ignored, and the “translators” make clear that their interest is to make the English text mean what they believe a conservative Bible ought to mean.

The fact that the Greek text in the same verse explicitly calls the manager “unrighteous” or “unjust” is likewise never mentioned. It seems that for a project like this, all one has to do is “translate” that word as meaning something else, and the problem is solved.

Why not go even further and add a parable in which Jesus praises employers who pay their workers as little as possible, or one that extols Caesar Augustus for not providing universal healthcare, while they’re at it?

These “translators,” if they are serious about what they are proposing to do, are exalting themselves above the Bible and, from the perspective of conservative Christianity, above God.

If nothing else, the project illustrates the fact that “conservative” and “Bible-believing” are not the same thing, despite what you’ll often hear.

James F. McGrath is an associate professor of religion at Butler University in Indianapolis.

From the White Horse Inn blog:

The Manhattan Declaration, released November 20, 2009, firmly yet winsomely takes the stand in defense of truths that are increasingly undermined in contemporary Western societies, including our own.  Drafted by Princeton law professor Robert George and evangelical leaders Chuck Colson and Timothy George, this declaration focuses on three issues: (1) the inherent dignity and rights of each human life (including the unborn) by virtue of being created in God’s image; (2) the integrity of marriage as a union of one man and one woman, and (3) religious liberty, also anchored in the image of God.

There is a lot of wisdom in this document.  For one, it does not breathe the vitriol that is often too common on the religious right and left.  In this declaration one will find more light than heat, yet a sense of personal concern for the humaneness of the common culture, even for those who are pursuing antithetical agendas.  May this more thoughtful approach to public engagement become more characteristic!

The framers wisely appeal to natural law as well as to Scripture and its revealed doctrines.  After all, these three issues are grounded in creation.  They are deliverances of the law that God inscribed on every human conscience, not of the gospel that God announced beforehand through his prophets and fulfilled in his incarnate Son’s life, death, and resurrection.

However, it is just for that reason that I stumbled over a few references to the gospel in this declaration.  It took me back to the old days of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” when I joined others in raising concerns with Chuck Colson, Richard John Neuhaus, J. I. Packer, and others that this 1996 document announced agreement on the gospel while recognizing remaining disagreement over justification, merit, and the like. Many true and wonderful things were affirmed in that ECT document, but the gospel without “justification through faith alone apart from works” is, as I said then, like chocolate chip cookies without the chips.

This declaration continues this tendency to define “the gospel” as something other than the specific announcement of the forgiveness of sins and declaration of righteousness solely by Christ’s merits.  The document recites a host of Christian contributions to Western culture, adding, “Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good.  In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.” The declaration concludes, “It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.”  In an interview, Mr. Colson repeatedly referred to this document as a defense of the gospel and the duty of defending these truths as our common proclamation of the gospel as Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and evangelicals.

Having participated in conversations with Mr. Colson over this issue, I can assure readers that this is not an oversight.  He shares with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI the conviction that defending the unborn is a form of proclaiming the gospel.  Although these impressive figures point to general revelation, natural law, and creation in order to justify the inherent dignity of life, marriage, and liberty, they insist on making this interchangeable with the gospel.

The error at this point is not marginal.  It goes to the heart of the more general confusion among Christians of every denominational stripe today, on the left and the right.  The law is indeed the common property of all human beings, by virtue of their creation in God’s image.  As Paul says in Romans 1 and 2, unbelievers may suppress the truth in unrighteousness, but the fact that they know this revelation makes them accountable to God.  However, in chapter 3, Paul explains that a different revelation of God’s righteousness has appeared from heaven: God’s justification of the ungodly through faith alone in Christ alone.

When we confuse the law and the gospel, there is inevitably a confusion of Christ and culture, and there is considerable evidence in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and evangelical histories to demonstrate the real dangers of this confusion.  In this otherwise helpful declaration, the confusion is evident once more.  Alongside the theological claims that witness to the dignity of all people created in God’s image, Christianity seems to be defended as a major stake-holder in Western culture and society.  By tending to confuse the gospel with the law, special revelation with general revelation, and Christianity with Western civilization, the document actually undermines its own objective—namely, to defend the dignity of human life as a universal moral imperative.  Not only Christians, but non-Christians, are recipients of this general revelation.

The church has a responsibility to proclaim the gospel of free justification in Christ and to witness to God’s universal rights over humanity in his law.  This law is sufficient to arraign us all before God’s court, pronouncing every one of us guilty for failing to love God and our neighbor, and it remains the rule for all duties and responsibilities that we have to contribute to the flourishing of our culture and the good of our neighbors.  Yet the gospel itself is the testimony to God’s act of redemption in Jesus Christ, which delivers us from guilt, condemnation, and the tyranny of sin.  The commands of the law, both natural and clarified in Scripture, ring in the conscience of everyone, but the gospel is the only “power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes…” (Romans 1:16).

-Mike Horton

Online magazine, The Atlantic, posted a scathing article on the prosperity gospel called, Did Christianity Cause the Crash?  The main focus of the article is a pastor/real estate agent in Virginia who tells his congregation that God wants his people to own houses.  Some highlights are found below:

Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”

It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality—an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession—is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.

Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.”

Just How Pro-Life Are You Really?
Michael S. Horton, D.Phil.
(First published in Modern Reformation, July/Aug 1992 issue)

This essay first appeared in the July/August1992 issue of Modern Reformation magazine, when it was under the auspices of CURE (Christians United for Reformation), the predecessor to White Horse Media.

Readers familiar with CURE know that we are a group committed to recovering the essence of the Christian message. That means that what you see and hear from us will usually be in the form of doctrinal discussions, issues, and debates written with the thinking layperson in mind.

Nevertheless, there are some practical issues that walk that razor’s edge between faith and practice, to the point where it is difficult to tell whether one who engages in a certain practice is actually denying a certain essential doctrine by doing so. If, for instance, one were to cast one’s gaze on an attractive body at the beach for more than passing appreciation (it’s not difficult to figure out in which part of the country I live), that would be a sin (lust, since many of us have forgotten), but it would not involve a matter of doctrine. I can and, in fact, do engage in sins that do not affect my faith in God, in Christ, or my convictions about the way in which I am saved. While sin tolerated can often undermine confidence in any doctrine that fails to flatter our own indulgences, most of our daily failures to conform to God’s revealed will are of a practical rather than doctrinal sort.

But, as I say, there are exceptions. Abortion is one such exception. In order to engage in this serious sin, a Christian must actually deny a cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith. He or she must deny that God is the Sovereign author of life who alone has the power and right to give and take away human breath, and we also deny the creature we destroy his or her dignity as an image-bearer of God himself. In Christian belief, the significance of human beings over all other species of animal life resides in the image of God (imago Dei) stamped on each person, as an artist signs his masterpieces. Although God created all things, only humans bear his likeness, and they bear it from conception. As Calvin put it, “Though the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and the heart, or in the soul and its powers, there was no part even of the body in which some rays of glory did not shine” (Institutes 1:15.3). Bavinck, the great Reformed dogmatist, argued that “as long as Man remains Man, he bears the image of God,” however tarnished and effaced.

If this doctrine is lacking in the church, surely it will be lacking in society. Before the late Francis Schaeffer, a Reformation thinker, reminded the evangelical and fundamentalist world of this biblical doctrine, there was virtually no response from the evangelical church to the atrocity of abortion. Roman Catholics, of course, had a theological impetus behind their opposition, but it was obscured by their inclusion of birth control as well as abortion.

And now, thanks to the efforts of the Schaeffers and their many co-laborers, a wide cross section of the evangelical movement supports the protection of human life in its most vulnerable phase. Clearly, humanity is determined by the imago Dei, not by concepts such as “viability.” Nevertheless, because we evangelicals over the last two centuries have been given to feverish activity without much theological reflection (”Don’t bother with all that ‘head stuff’ – let’s just get out there and get it done!”), we are single-issue people. We can only handle one issue at a time. As important as the abortion debate is, the anger that people such as Francis Schaeffer felt in response to it was motivated by a theological conviction–the same well-spring that produced anger at the pollution of the environment (cf. his freshly released Pollution & the Death of Man), outrage at the racism rampant in evangelical circles (cf. Two Contents, Two Realities), and frustration over the injustices of the powerful over the weak.

The abortion debate has been led, like the abolitionist and civil rights movements, as a protest against the oppression of the weak by the strong, picking up on the rich biblical language. “Blessed is he who has regard for the weak” (Psalm 41:1); God “will deliver the needy who cry out, the afflicted who have no one to help. He will take pity on the weak and the needy and save the needy from death. He will rescue them from oppression and violence, for precious is their blood in his sight” (Psalm 72:12-14). And yet, while many evangelicals oppose abortion, there is a curious silence on nearly every other issue where the pro-life ethic, commanded by Scripture, is at risk. One cursory glance at a concordance will reveal how concerned God is about the treatment of the homeless, the poor, the weak, the minorities (”aliens and strangers”), and others too often marginalized.

Words like “oppress,” and pejorative barbs from God about “you cows of Bashan on Mount Samaria, you women who oppress the poor and crush the needy and say to your husbands, ‘Bring us some drinks!’” (Amos 4:1). “‘1 will tear down the winter house along with the summer house; the houses adorned with ivory will be destroyed and the mansions will be demolished,’ declares the Lord” (Amos 3:15). The people of God are entrusted with a special obligation to social justice: “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy” (Psalm 82:3-4). God hates oppression with the same intensity with which he hates abortion, but are we as consistent in our righteous indignation?

Like abortion, apartheid is a theological as well as an ethical question. To deny life and justice to the unborn or to the un-white is not only a serious sin (such as selfishness or racism), but a deliberate system, complete with biblical proof-texts twisted beyond recognition. While those committed to being faithful to the Christian creeds and Reformation confessions declared apartheid in South Africa a heresy, evangelicals here at home have shown more ambivalence. While Jerry Falwell and other leaders of the Christian Right courageously defended the human rights of the unborn, Falwell returned from his trip to South Africa declaring that Archbishop Desmond Tutu, whose pleas for a peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy have kept south Africa from bloodshed thus far, was “a phony” and urged Christians to support the racist government of P.W. Botha. In the meantime, Jessie Jackson expressed outrage at Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton’s criticisms of a rap song encouraging black violence against whites. When will “reverends” transcend pagan party lines?

Think of our other issues involving the doctrine of the image of God. It is the motivation behind our concern for the victim of a savage murder; our horror at seeing children searching for food in garbage bins behind a restaurant while their mothers hold up signs that read, “Will Work for Food and Diapers.” It is that conviction that breaks our heart when we see a prostitute selling her body to keep alive, while others (including those who participate in the same industry through pornography and other forms of sexual entertainment) pour shame and contempt on her. It is that conviction, that religious belief, that binds us to our neighbors and to their interests, regardless of whether they are believers or share our same values or our ethnic, cultural, or linguistic heritage. Not long ago, a friend and I went through the drive-through window at a fast food spot. The fact that the server had a thick foreign accent, characteristic of fast food franchises in Southern California, and that my friend never shied away from making his racism a matter of public record, made me cringe as I prepared for the inevitable. Sure enough, this friend made some typically racist remark. The sad thing is, he’s a pastor. The odd thing is, he’s a rabid opponent of abortion. But is he consistently pro-life?

Evangelicals raise no qualms when the United States commits millions to Israel or spends millions on a military campaign to free a tiny, but wealthy, oil state with no regard for democracy, but when it comes to talking about the emergency in Somalia, Africa, with hundreds dying every day from starvation, the sentiment seems to be, “We have our own problems here at home.” Evangelicals rightly protest the murder of the unborn and decry the silence of those who refuse to defend those who have no voice to defend themselves. Nevertheless, that same silence hovers secretly over the same impassioned group when children die senselessly after they are born. Shouldn’t there be an outrage of equal proportions? Isn’t life life? Or are we just caught up in the glitz and glamour of political debates? Are we really pro-life?

Until Christians put their theology first, their activism will be little more rationally motivated than that of Hare Krishnas passing out flowers in airports. We will be moved along, one issue at a time, by charismatic and energetic leaders and our internal contradictions (such as calling ourselves “pro-life” when in truth we rarely speak up for the poor and oppressed after they’re born) will not win for evangelicalism respect in the eyes of the world for having the courage of its convictions. What convictions? Activism, agendas, and practical involvement are not convictions. Indeed, these things mean nothing without convictions, and convictions come from deeply held beliefs about God and ourselves. And folks, that’s theology.

©2004 Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved

From Paul Vander Klay at Think Christian:

Protestants used to claim that Roman Catholics were idolaters because they had statues in their buildings. A couple of years ago an elder from a conservative Protestant denomination explained to me how Vietnamese people more easily came to Roman Catholicism from Buddhism because both religions worshiped idols. A new wave of literature is no longer so facile on this, understanding sin as idolatry is something deeper than carvings of wood and stone. Idolatry is making a publishing comeback. Tim Keller’s latest book “Counterfeit Gods” puts in book form many of the themes his sermons have had for years. G.K. Beale, a New Testament scholar recently authored “We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry” where traces these themes through the Bible. Jewish scholars Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit have their own book from Harvard University Press on the subject.

For most today self-definition and determination is seen as a foundational birthright of our existence. Not only does nobody put baby in a corner, but unless baby is defining herself and keeping herself out of a corner, she is failing to live up to her existential mandate. Most self-help remedies for a variety of identity ills prescribe self-definition through self-assertion. I must take control of my life by constructing a preferred identity, living that out maximizing individuality and authenticity.

If one pursues this long enough they begin to realize that this is a incredible amount of work and a tremendous burden. Not only do we have to construct this from the cultural materials available, but the merchants of cool are perpetually infusing every fresh cultural wave with yet more artifacts and options to add or replace what we’ve already accumulated. We are crushed by the pace of fashion, unable to strip ourselves fast enough of yesterday’s dowdy threads and incapable of assimilating quickly enough tomorrow’s new authenticity. We stand naked in the whirlwind trying to build a life from the debris blowing around us.

Such desperation drives us to turn good things into ultimate things. We begin to look to our jobs, our familial roles, our attributes, our gender identities, the brands in the market place for permanence and meaning. GK Beale’s title is a short cut. We need to become something so locate our selves in the roles we must play or the things we buy or the communities we choose and the daily maintenance of those things becomes our worship even if we don’t call it that. Habit and worship unites and we get what we asked for. We asked these things to fill us and now they have and will finally displace us. In CS Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” the shadows of hell were once people with attributes, but the identification has gone so far they are merely the attribute.

God is the only safe thing to worship because only God is secure enough, wealthy enough, self-sufficient enough to not need to consume us. See CS Lewis’ description of distinction from Screwtape Letters. Idolatries never satisfy and always enslave. Identities are received, not achieved and there is only one ultimate giver of our identity that will not only satisfy us, but fill us without consuming us.

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

1 in 4 pastors suffer from depression. So says this article from USA Today reporting on a number of pastor suicides that have occured in recent weeks.

An insightful piece on Halloween from the Mockingbird blog:

Halloween was last week. I’ve never been that excited about Halloween myself, owing probably to the incident in my youth, when, having to go to the bathroom while trick-or-treating far from my home, I was shocked to be refused entrance to house after house. “May I please use your bathroom?” I’d beg in my best “I’m a cute suburban white kid with good grammar and it’s barely dark out here — what could go wrong?” voice. I eventually had to run home in mortal fear of peeing my pants — the scariest Halloween ever.

From the Collision website:

SYNOPSIS
COLLISION carves a new path in documentary film-making as it pits leading atheist, political journalist and bestselling author Christopher Hitchens against fellow author, satirist and evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson, as they go on the road to exchange blows over the question: “Is Christianity Good for the World?”. The two contrarians laugh, confide and argue, in public and in private, as they journey through three cities. And the film captures it all. The result is a magnetic conflict, a character-driven narrative that sparkles cinematically with a perfect match of arresting personalities and intellectual rivalry. COLLISION is directed by prolific independent filmmaker Darren Doane (Van Morrison: To Be Born Again, The Battle For L.A., Godmoney).

OVERVIEW
In May 2007, leading atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian apologist Douglas Wilson began to argue the topic “Is Christianity Good for the World?” in a series of written exchanges published in Christianity Today. The rowdy literary bout piqued the interest of filmmaker Darren Doane, who sought out Hitchens and Wilson to pitch the idea of making a film around the debate.

In Fall 2008, Doane and crew accompanied Hitchens and Wilson on an east coast tour to promote the book compiled from their written debate titled creatively enough, Is Christianity Good for the World?. “I loved the idea of putting one of the beltway’s most respected public intellectuals together with an ultra-conservative pastor from Idaho that looks like a lumberjack”, says Doane. “You couldn’t write two characters more contrary. What’s more real and punk rock than a fight between two guys who are on complete opposite sides of the fence on the most divisive issue in the world? We were ready to make a movie about two intellectual warriors at the top of their game going one-on-one. I knew it would make an amazing film.”

In Christopher Hitchens, Doane found a celebrated prophet of atheism. Loud. Funny. Angry. Smart. Quick. An intimidating intellectual Goliath. Well-known for bullying and mocking believers into doubt and doubters into outright unbelief. In Douglas Wilson, Doane found the man who could provide a perfect intellectual, philosophical, and cinematic counterpoint to Hitchens’ position and style. A trained philosopher and and deft debater. Big, bearded, and jolly. A pastor, a contrarian, a humorist–an unintimidated outsider, impossible to bully, capable of calling Hitchens a puritan (over a beer).

It was a collision of lives.

What Doane didn’t expect was how much Hitchens and Wilson would have in common and the respectful bond the new friend/foes would build through the course of the book tour. “These guys ended up at the bar laughing, joking, drinking. There were so many things that they had in common”, according to Doane. “Opinions on history and politics. Literature and poetry. They agreed on so many things. Except on the existence of God.”

BIOS

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Christopher Hitchens (b. April 13, 1949) is a popular political journalist and the author of several books, including “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. Hitchens is regarded as one of the most fundamental figures of modern atheism. A regular contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic Monthly and Slate, Hitchens also appears regularly on The Daily Show, Charlie Rose, Washington Journal, and Real Time with Bill Maher. He was named one of the US’s “25 Most Influential Liberals” by Forbes and one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy. Hitchens lives in Washington, DC.
DOUGLAS WILSON
Douglas Wilson (b. June 18, 1953) is a pastor of Christ Church, editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine, and a Senior Fellow at New Saint Andrews College. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books, including The Case for Classical Christian Education, Letter from a Christian Citizen, Reforming Marriage and Heaven Misplaced: Christ’s Kingdom on Earth. Wilson lives in Moscow, Idaho.