There were a couple of diaries at Street Prophets reflecting on some of the political and social aspects of two strategy/war games -- Chess and Go: "Metaphor and The Game of Go . . ."
One of those common misconceptions that I run into is expressed in this comment.
And here we differ because I cannot believe in a loving God who created me with a long size ten foot only so that he can break the arch and bind it into a child's size four.At this moment, I am not sure what exactly what was being commented on. And, frankly, I am not sure its important - this post is about what it provoked in me and not about what it was meant to convey. So, lets look at a couple of things I have posted on in the past:
That is no God of love. It is no deity I can fuel with worship any more than I would willingly feed someone who raped me.
[Point one of Jared Wilson's criticism of the "culture wars": (Index)]
Jared Wilson: "The 'culture war' is going to Hell because . . ."
1. Its expectation is foolish. Whether you believe America was ever a Christian nation or not, it is theologically naive and demonstrably false to think laws or policies make anyone a Christian. You cannot create or recapture a people for Christ by illegalizing sin. (Which, by the way, is not to say that certain sins shouldn’t be illegal. It is only to say that, for instance, outlawing gay marriage or repealing Roe v. Wade won’t make anybody a Christian, much less make America “a Christian nation.”)Read more!
Luke at Common Sense Atheism is continuing his series Arguing about Evil with the post "Plantinga’s Free Will Defense". Go read that.
This was started as a comment there, and then got to long-winded to keep as a comment.
Wherein I look around the web - hopefully once a week - and draw some attention to things I see there that interest me.
If you want to know where I go, look at the links on the left of my blog under "Places I Frequent". From there, I will go places those places may point me. Typically, I will also list up to three of my favorite posts from the current Christian Carnival - and may go somewhere those blogs take me.
Sometimes they will be topically organized, and sometimes just in order of the links I visited. Enjoy:
[Inspired by the comments to this post; and modified from this comment]
Certainly one of those most difficult Christian doctrines is the idea of total depravity
The doctrine of total depravity, rather, holds that by virtue of the Fall, human beings are turned entirely away from God. Augustine understands this in terms of love: humans love God with the love due creatures and love creatures with the kind of love due to God. Luther understood it in terms of trust: we will trust anything with our ultimate well-being other than God. Either way, all of our faculties--even our good ones--are no longer directed at the love, trust, and glorification of God but are rather turned inward towards ourselves or outward at other created things. Moreover, our own power cannot, under any circumstances, turn ourselves back to God. People in this state (i.e., everyone) are entirely capable of doing wonderful things, but they are not capable of turning those wonderful things to the love and glory of God.I think few Christians today actually believe that "original sin" or our "sin nature" is somehow passed down from generation-to-generation as Augustine apparently did. The idea, shown above, is that we are born with a sin nature as a natural condition. This is a result of the Fall - but it is not, as some outside or inside of Christianity might suggest, some sort of genetic/physical inheritance from our parents.
Romans 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the life-giving Spirit in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. 3 For God achieved what the law could not do because it was weakened through the flesh. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and concerning sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the righteous requirement of the law may be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.If we are free from the "law of sin and death" - then why do we not just do as we please: why talk about the "rules" at all?
John 14:21 The person who has my commandments and obeys them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and will reveal myself to him.Certainly, that passage gives plenty of reason to believe that falling out of Jesus' love is both possible, and dangerous to our salvation. However, the point is that obey because we LOVE Him - and love cannot be coerced by threats or rewards.
John 15:8 My Father is honored by this, that you bear much fruit and show that you are my disciples. 9 Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; remain in my love. 10 If you obey my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. 11 I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete. 12 My commandment is this – to love one another just as I have loved you.
"to be broken, be broken in pieces, be broken asunder".The first actions after eating can be taken a couple of ways:
Romans 7:14 For we know that the law is spiritual – but I am unspiritual, sold into slavery to sin. 15 For I don’t understand what I am doing. For I do not do what I want – instead, I do what I hate. 16 But if I do what I don’t want, I agree that the law is good. 17 But now it is no longer me doing it, but sin that lives in me. 18 For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh. For I want to do the good, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but I do the very evil I do not want! 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer me doing it but sin that lives in me. 21 So, I find the law that when I want to do good, evil is present with me. 22 For I delight in the law of God in my inner being. 23 But I see a different law in my members waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that is in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.Paul used "flesh" and "sin nature" almost interchangeably. This is about serving ourselves and our own needs rather than the law of God - which is again those things Christ told us to obey: take our eyes off our self and place it on God and other people.
[Number nineteen in a series]
I am continuing to look at Chapter 7 ("Appropriate Smallness: The Practice of Servanthood") of John Ortberg's The Life You've Always Wanted. The study questions are from the back of the book, and were written by Kevin G. Harney.
The book is about spiritual disciplines. The most important thing I have gotten from the book about spiritual disciplines in general is that we should not do them just so we can check them off a list. They are not a barometer of spirituality or a way to earn favor with God. They are a way to enable the transformation God wants to make in your life.
Jesus took a little child in his arms and said, in effect, "Here's your ministry. Give yourselves to those who can bring you no status or clout. Just help people. You need this little child. You need to help this little child, not just for her sake, but more for your sake. For if you don't, your whole life will be thrown away on an idiotic contest to see who is the greatest. But if you serve her - often and well and cheerfully and out of the limelight - then the day may come when you do it without thinking, 'What a wonderful thing I've done.' Then you will begin serving naturally, effortlessly, for the joy of it. Then you will begin to understand how life in the kingdom works." -- John Ortberg
Another form of service might be called the ministry of availability. In the Russian church certain people called poustinikki would devote themselves to a life of prayer. They would withdraw to the desert (poustinia) and live in solitude, but not in isolation. (The Russian word for solitude means "being with everybody.") By custom, "the latch was always off the door" as a sign of availability, according to Tilden Edwards. "The poustinik's priority at any time was his neighbor's need (which might stretch beyond prayer and counsel to physical labor, as at harvest time)."
"Why do you choose to be so busy?" he persisted, which made me uncomfortable because then I had to think about it. The only honest answer was that, more than anything else, I was running on grandiosity. I was afraid that if I declined opportunities, they would stop coming, and if opportunities stopped coming I would be less important, and if I were less important, that would be terrible . . . As a result of this encounter I developed a small "personal schedule group," with a covenant that we would not take on any added commitments in life without discussing them with each other and with our families first. The covenant also gave us full permission to talk not only about our schedules but also the motives behind our activities.
Perhaps the least practiced form of servanthood today is what Bonhoeffer called "the ministry of holding one's tongue."Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we absolutely refuse to allow them to be expressed in words . . . It must be a decisive rule of every Christian fellowship that each individual is prohibited from saying much that occurs to him.This behavior flies in the face of the conventional wisdom today, when saying "everything that occurs to you" is taken as an essential component of mental health. But sometimes this "ministry of the closed mouth" is a victory for the kingdom
We are called to bear each other's burdens. Sometimes this may involve praying for another's need, or trying to comfort someone in pain. But at times it may feel as if an entire relationship is burden¬some. I may need to "bear with" people until I learn to love them. . . The ministry of bearing with one another is more than simply tolerating difficult people. It is also learning to hear God speak through them. It is learning to be "for" them. It is learning that the difficult person I have most to deal with is me. . . . "Bearing with them" does not require becoming best friends, but means learning to wish them well, releasing our right to hurt them back, coming to experience our common standing before the Cross.
[Number eighteen in a series]
I am beginning to look at Chapter 7 ("Appropriate Smallness: The Practice of Servanthood") of John Ortberg's The Life You've Always Wanted. The study questions are from the back of the book, and were written by Kevin G. Harney.
The book is about spiritual disciplines. The most important thing I have gotten from the book about spiritual disciplines in general is that we should not do them just so we can check them off a list. They are not a barometer of spirituality or a way to earn favor with God. They are a way to enable the transformation God wants to make in your life.
"The writer of Genesis states that it was through pride that the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden: 'For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.'" -- John Ortberg
"One who is often reproved, yet remains stubborn, will suddenly be broken beyond healing," says the writer of Proverbs. Stubbornness is the pride that causes us to shun correction. It renders us unable to stop defending ourselves. When someone points out an error or flaw, we evade or deny or blame someone else. (This is difficult to penetrate. Defensive people rarely thank us for pointing out their defensiveness.)" -- John Ortberg
"At the deepest level, pride is the choice to exclude both God and other people from their rightful place in our hearts. Jesus said that the essence of spiritual life is to love God and to love people. Pride destroys our capacity to love. . . . pride is a form of antilove. Pride moves us to exclude instead of to embrace. Pride moves us to bow down before a mirror rather than before God. Pride moves us to judge rather than to serve. Pride means not only that we want to be smart and wealthy, but also that we will not be satisfied until we are smarter and wealthier than those around us. Pride is essentially comparative in nature"
What does it mean to "humble yourself' in everyday life? Let's say we take this seriously. Someone compliments us on the way we look. We are trying to live in God's kingdom and respond as Jesus would if he were in our place. What do we do?Ortberg points out that this is an elusive pursuit because, how on earth do we pursue humility?Humility is not about convincing ourselves - or others - that we are unattractive or incompetent. -- John Ortberg
- Look down at the ground, shuffle our feet, and say, "I'm not really attractive. It's just that the light in here is pretty dim."
- Boldly speak the truth by saying, "I'm terribly interested in what you say. Tell me more, and let us celebrate this good news together."
- Quote Proverbs 11:22 in order to correct the other person's superficial focus on physical appearance: "Like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman without good sense." (This will pretty much remove any problem of receiving too many compliments.)
- Be direct and to the point: "You are giving me a swelled head. Get behind me, Satan."
- Smile, say "thank you," then be quiet.
One of the hardest things in the world is to stop being the prodigal son without turning into the elder brother.
More than any other single way the grace of humility is worked into our lives through the Discipline of service. . . . Nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service, and nothing transforms the desires of the flesh like serving in hiddenness. The flesh whines against service but screams against hidden service. It strains and pulls for honor and recognition. -- Richard Foster
Philippians 2:6 who though he existed in the form of GodOrtberg talks about a different way to view that second passage:
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave,
by looking like other men,
and by sharing in human nature.
8 He humbled himself,
by becoming obedient to the point of death
– even death on a cross! -- NET Bible
"Jesus did not take on the "outward form" of a servant. Paul uses the same term to describe both Jesus' servanthood and his Godhood. (It is the word morphe - our little morphing word again.) When Jesus came in the form of a servant, he was not disguising who God is. He was revealing who God is.
I remember hearing a Christian speaker say once that pride is forbidden to human beings, but is okay in God because, after all, he is God. This is wrong. God is the Infinite Servant. God is the most humble being in all the universe. Jesus did not come as a servant in spite of the fact that he is God; he came precisely because of the fact that he is God." -- John Ortberg
"Jesus knew that his own followers would wrestle with the messiah complex, so he decided to put them in a small group together. For two years they ate meals together, met together daily for group discussions, went everywhere together. And sure enough, one day they "argued with one another who was the greatest." It will happen in any gathering of human beings: Hang out with a group of people long enough, and the messiah complex will rear its ugly head.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it like this:'We know who it is that sows this thought in the Christian community. But perhaps we do not bear in mind enough that no Christian community ever comes together without this thought immediately emerging as a seed of discord. Thus at the very beginning of Christian fellowship there is engendered an invisible, often unconscious, life-and-death contest. "There arose a reasoning among them"; this is enough to destroy a fellowship.'"
"There is another way to help people out instead of trying to be the Superpeople we aren't. The primary reason Jesus calls us to servanthood is not just because other people need our service. It is because of what happens to us when we serve."
[Number six in a series]
The last post looked at organic society as represented by one which embraces vocation; and the organized society created by modern western culture:
This wasn't just an outgrowth of the rise of modernity - it was a requirement. Therefore, the theme of this post:
that modern western culture requires the severing of folks from vocation - and its attachment to family, tradition, religion, etc. - in order to build a culture rooted in production and conquest.Indeed, as A. J. Conyers points out in The Listening Heart, the "reason" taught by the enlightenment wasn't reason in general [other than items in brackets by me - this completely follows Conyers]:
It is often noted that Enlightenment thinkers emphasized reason. Yet the real effect of their emphasis is almost always lost. This certainly could not mean that they emphasized reason while earlier ages neglected it, or preferred superstition and unreason: who indeed were more devoted to the arts of reason than the disciples of Aristotle in antiquity, or those who, in medieval times, submitted everything to reason in the most rigorous fashion, the schoolmen from Anselm to Aquinas and beyond? The specific way in which the Enlightenment used reason was as a replacement for the idea of vocation. One could then make reasoned choices. The true locus of personal decisions was to be found in the individual who "thinks for himself:' as Kant would put it, and who declines to depend upon the "guidance of another."and
It is not without significance that Kant, like others following the same pattern, appeals to a virtue of the will, courage. For in many ways the movement of modernity has been a shift from the intellect and the affections as guiding faculties for human beings, to the will. Kant does not say, develop the skill to think for yourself. Nor does he say learn what best to love so that you may guide yourself toward what is good. Nor does he suggest that you have the courage to follow what you know is good and true. The will is placed ahead of the intellect and the love of good. He says instead, ''All that is required for enlightenment is freedom. . . ." and "Men raise themselves by and by out of backwardness if one does not purposely invent artifices to keep them down."[An interesting contrast in this will vs. good discussion might be Matthew Yglesias' "Thinking about Prostitution"; and Joe Carter's "Prostitution and the Pollution of Moral Ecology" or PastorDan's "Eliot Spitzer Self-Immolates". None of the three mention the "elephant in the room" in regards to prostitution (and pornography) - the international trafficking in sexual slaves. I am getting to slavery in this series.]
The stages of this recession are not surprising, though the extremity in which it has manifested itself (and the real name of that extremity) is something modern people would generally reject, although they, more than any other peoples of any other age are most acquainted with it. . . .1. Progress in technology suggested that progress was a general rule in human experience and that it was a force that operated throughout social, moral, and artistic life; that what was the rule for technology was also the rule for civilization and culture, bringing all things under the power of an unseen evolutionary hand.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought impressive advances in technology, or-to use plainer language-in the use of implements or tools to accomplish practical tasks. This advance was so impressive and made such a remarkable impact upon society that a number of direct or indirect consequences made themselves felt.
that something more or less permanent no longer undergirded, nourished, and protected them: the land to which they belonged, and that was the common environment of all-rich and poor, old and young, from birth to death-was in smaller and smaller measure the environment that determined the shape of their lives.but to the company, the standing army, or the state:
to belong to a "company:' let us say, means that one is subject to the will of another and in some ways is sustained only by the arbitrary good will of others. It implies that one belongs in a way that is not true of a family or a church, for this "belonging" is made possible by the activity and initiative of those who are in positions of power.In the next post, we will see what Conyers calls these folks alienated from family, place, community, church, and tradition; and now organized, like parts of a machine, for production and conquest. Read more!
[Number five in a series]
Probably the toughest thing for me as a writer is finding a "hook to hang" my post on. I know things I want to write about - but the topics are either too large or I simply do not know how to proceed. Thankfully, folks are nice enough to provide those hooks for me. The blessing this time was provided by these comments about my writing:
I have read through your last two diaries and continually see you commenting on the thoughts and beliefs of others. Do you have any "original" thoughts are beliefs of "your own" that do not simply leave it up to others to form your opinions?and later
What I would most like to hear from you is the same thing. A diary of your OWN beliefs without one single quote from any place except your own heart.This idea that we have our own ideas, from our own heart, that we should "be true to" is the core of the philosophical counter positions to the idea of vocation, or calling:
Precisely the point of vocatio is that you don't choose. And this is precisely why and how the idea jars against conventional modern sentiment, the sentiment that since the Enlightenment has succeeded in making a primary virtue of self-determination. "What is Enlightenment?" asked Immanuel Kant. It is the capacity "to use one's intelligence without being guided by another." "Have courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment". Thus stand side by side, in unmistakable opposition, two ideas of the way one lives in the world. One is that of attentive listening to the guidance of another, whether of a wise guide, or tradition, or of God. The other is the notion of the self-determined "free" man, who without listening to another, becomes the master of his own soul.Now it is difficult to know how to proceed. There are two themes, highly interrelated, that underlie the rest of the book:
1 Corinthians 12:12-27: For just as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body – though many – are one body, so too is Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Whether Jews or Greeks or slaves or free, we were all made to drink of the one Spirit. For in fact the body is not a single member, but many. If the foot says, “Since I am not a hand, I am not part of the body,” it does not lose its membership in the body because of that. And if the ear says, “Since I am not an eye, I am not part of the body,” it does not lose its membership in the body because of that. If the whole body were an eye, what part would do the hearing? If the whole were an ear, what part would exercise the sense of smell? But as a matter of fact, God has placed each of the members in the body just as he decided. If they were all the same member, where would the body be? So now there are many members, but one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I do not need you,” nor in turn can the head say to the foot, “I do not need you.” On the contrary, those members that seem to be weaker are essential, and those members we consider less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our unpresentable members are clothed with dignity, but our presentable members do not need this. Instead, God has blended together the body, giving greater honor to the lesser member, so that there may be no division in the body, but the members may have mutual concern for one another. If one member suffers, everyone suffers with it. If a member is honored, all rejoice with it. Now you are Christ’s body, and each of you is a member of it.This is not just a "religious view" of the Body of Christ - this is a view of the pre-modern nature of organic, and primarily agrarian societies:
Since the sixteenth century, the state has become a new kind of community. It is not a true nation, since it is made up generally of many nations, although there is a dominant national culture. Its influence then arises from the fact that it is organized in a way that dissolves what is organic and to some extent voluntary. It should not be surprising then that the concepts of "vocation" and the concept of vocation as it is embedded in the liberal arts has subsided in the public consciousness. Organizations do not need such ideas or experiences, but organic communities do. And it should not be surprising that modernity has been marked by the exaggeration of the freedoms of the individual, the alienation of the person, the dissolution of families, and a culture of pathological loneliness: for these features are in the very design of the organized society which replaces the organic society.The second point above is continued with "The Decline of Vocation II" Read more!
[Number four in a series]
A. J. Conyers, in The Listening Heart, explained the point of the book in this way:
"Why in this modern world have humane communities - communities that for brief moments in history rise above strife and in fact nourish the human spirit, enrich the mind, provide for the safety and education of the young - proven so hard to come by, so difficult to maintain, and known it seems only to our most nostalgic moments? Why have the 'wars and fightings' of this past century taken more lives, destroyed more communities, exiled more people, decimated more ethnic groups than ever before in any comparable time? Why have more people been killed by their own governments in this past century than in all other times together? How is it that this new century has gotten off to such an unpromising start? James had an answer that tapped into the root of human nature, and into the human lunacy: 'Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war'His answer is the decline of vocation, and the rise of "choice", since the dawn of modernity in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. This post examines the first of those.
This book might be considered a commentary on that one question and its answer, and on the hope which frames this question."
The familiar term "vocation", used in both religious and secular contexts, is rooted in the Latin vocatio, meaning "call" and is related to Latin-based words such as "voice" and "invoke." The Greek word is klesis and is found in our words "cleric" and "ecclesiastical". It is the root of the New Testament word for the Church, ekklesia, a point that is not etymologically significant except in that assemblies of all kinds were referred to with the same term. To say that the church consists of those "called out", however, is significant for more reasons than can be traced through linguistic usage: it was the reality to which the church had always attested.Conyers points out that the idea of a divine call plays a central role in Judeo-Christian and non-Judaic contexts - and gives the communities and societies a distinctly non-modern character. I would broaden that: even the ideas of civil religion and nationalism are designed to give folks a sense of calling that is outside of, and higher, than themselves. Conyers doesn't disagree with this in the book, and implies agreement, but he just doesn't focus on it. This is the idea of a "higher power" encouraged in 12 step programs - even for folks that are not believers in God.
One does not simply "choose" a course of action, but one responds to a summons. A person might be "free" in either case; but in the case of one responding to vocation, the freedom is not an inner-directed impulse, but the use of the will to respond to an unforeseen and perhaps unknown reality. This summons is characteristic of various reports, in a great variety of communities, from the summons of Zarathustra (the Iranian Zoroaster), to the calling forth of Abraham and the divine election of Moses, to the call of Isaiah, the baptism of Jesus, the blinding of Paul, the spiritual apparitions of Joan of Arc, and the divine compulsions of Martin Luther. The character in each case is founded on the summons that is external to the one who is called.
Muhammed first believed himself to be mad. Moses complained that the Israelites, to whom God sent him, had never listened to him and therefore neither would Pharaoh, "poor speaker that I am." Jeremiah, the Hebrew prophet, not only resisted the call, but continued to complain that God had overpowered him and placed him in an impossibly difficult circumstance, even protesting that God's call had made him "like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter." Jonah attempted to flee from the Lord to Tarshish, rather than going to Nineveh where he had been called. Jesus prayed to be delivered from his appointed calling.
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Muhammed, Mani (the founder of Manichaeism), Socrates, Jesus, and Paul all found themselves under threat of death by their community. Zarathustra is sent into exile. Jesus' moment of public vocation is followed by temptation in the wilderness. Paul's vocation is accompanied by physical ailments, imprisonment, beatings, and exile.
The whole of Joshua's reiteration of the covenant with Israel, after they had settled the land of Canaan, was devoted to the threat and the consequences of being distracted from their promise to "serve the Lord" and to the warning against being tempted by other gods. In all of the Deuteronomic history of Israel . . . the chief standard by which the nations of Israel and Judah and their kings are judged is their faithfulness to God, measured by their resistance to distraction by the religions of their neighbors. And the last petition in Jesus' model prayer, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil;' is an invocation against this distraction.
I was struck with how far we had lost sight of the sentiment embedded in "vocation" when I ran across the title of a mid-twentieth century book that was given as "How to Choose Your Vocation"! Precisely the point of vocatio is that you don't choose. And this is precisely why and how the idea jars against conventional modern sentiment, the sentiment that since the Enlightenment has succeeded in making a primary virtue of self-determination. "What is Enlightenment?" asked Immanuel Kant. It is the capacity "to use one's intelligence without being guided by another." "Have courage to use your own intelligence! is therefore the motto of the enlightenment". Thus stand side by side, in unmistakable opposition, two ideas of the way one lives in the world. One is that of attentive listening to the guidance of another, whether of a wise guide, or tradition, or of God. The other is the notion of the self-determined "free" man, who without listening to another, becomes the master of his own soul.It is that notion of "choice" that I will look at next.
[Number three in a series]
I have been intending to more extensively about The Listening Heart: Vocation And the Crisis of Modern Culture by A.J. Conyers; and have been waiting for a "handle" on how to approach the topics in the book - that handle never came (or maybe I have too many). I did do two posts on slavery - "The Bible and Slavery" and "Christianity and Slavery" - based on the book intending to segway into the books position on slavery and modernity:
In a stunning insight, Conyers shows that the quintessential institution of modernity is slavery, for the slave is the ultimate autonomous individual. Stripped of every human tie, he belongs to no community but to a stranger. It is no accident, then, that the rise of modern slavery coincided with the Enlightenment itself.Actually, not so much the Enlightenment but a little earlier in the Renaissance - however that doesn't actually damage his main point either about slavery, or overall.
A culture built upon the ideology of individual choice will be a culture of alienation, loneliness, and violence . . . Conyers shows that Western culture was once informed by a sense of vocation, that men understood life as a response to a call from outside and above themselves. Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the sense of vocation began to fade, to be replaced by the modern celebration of the unfettered human will. In such a society, Conyers argues, where relations among men are based on force, true community is impossible.Pastor Dan at Street Prophets stated at one point that theologically conservative Christians were pre-modern. There is some accuracy to that statement, but it is a bit off. Conyers isn't so much pre-modern as he is a believer that modernity, or at least a major premise of it, has failed and failed violently. Actually, I would say he is contending for the pre-modern understanding of vocation as the something that needs to be recovered in a post-modern age. [BTW: I did not say he was a post-modernist.] . His question, now that the critique of modernity is clear and the post-modern agenda is before us, is
. . .
This wide-ranging study, refreshingly free of sentimentality, makes the barbarism and unparalleled violence of the twentieth century explicable. For a society that casts off the burden of vocation abandons that which makes it human.
"Shall we heal a broken society through love, or through power?"His indictment of modernity is scathing on many levels (too many to even sort out and list here) but he centers in on one main indictment, and one main question, to focus the book on:
His critique of the modern quest for power and wealth is unambiguous. One of his indictments is "the army of 'homeless' in the cities and along the highways in a land of unimagined wealth". However, he believes we are a nation of homeless people split off from the concepts of family, community, and over-riding principle in order to make us fair game in the "rivalry of competitive desires" which is modern Western culture."Why in this modern world have humane communities - communities that for brief moments in history rise above strife and in fact nourish the human spirit, enrich the mind, provide for the safety and education of the young - proven so hard to come by, so difficult to maintain, and known it seems only to our most nostalgic moments? Why have the 'wars and fightings' of this past century taken more lives, destroyed more communities, exiled more people, decimated more ethnic groups than ever before in any comparable time? Why have more people been killed by their own governments in this past century than in all other times together? How is it that this new century has gotten off to such an unpromising start? James had an answer that tapped into the root of human nature, and into the human lunacy: 'Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war'
This book might be considered a commentary on that one question and its answer, and on the hope which frames this question."
Sooner or later violence overtakes a society that functions chiefly on the basis of the rivalry of competitive desires, on the basis of choice, or on the basis of "freedom" defined as the unhindered will. Modern secular society is the longest experiment in history attempting to elevate "choice" or this kind of freedom to the level of a basic social principle. It should not be surprising, though I think to many the awareness of this has not surfaced, that modern life is also the most violent period in the history of mankind.He takes the critique straight to the core of Enlightenment philosophy upon which modern Western culture is founded - and the bloody ground from which many political liberals will make their stand.
However, as Conyers states, The Listening Heart heads in a different direction . . .All three of these views overlap at a critical point: human beings naturally reach for meaningful action, and not finding it, resort to irrational and destructive action. All of these theories begin, as we can easily see, with what James has called "the passions . . . at war in your members." All of these theories, I believe, are important for understanding the kinds of conditions that give rise to violence and the uses to which violence is traditionally given over."
- "First, Hannah Arendt suggested that where power, in the sense of effective action within a community is missing, violence takes its place. Moreover, once the institutions of government have outgrown the individual and the neighborhood, so that the very scale of governance no longer permits effective action for most people, then those people are more likely to take to the streets and address their grievances in destructive ways.
- Second, Rene Girard claims that violence gives focus and directs our competing desires in such a way that community is strengthened by a mutual turning against a scapegoat or an enemy. Thus the collective shape of society, its very possibility for community, feeds off a fundamental injustice and attachments to common hatreds. Moreover, in Girard's view, modern society, long tutored by the Christian gospel in the awareness of injustice and the innocence of its victims, finds itself in a crisis of contradiction precisely over the issue of violence and peace.
- Third, Eric Voegelin taught that once society becomes closed to those experiences by which it is shaped, namely its reach for transcendent meaning, and the human quest focuses instead on worldly goods, the competing demands are satisfied by nothing short of bloodshed and revolution
A number of posts have, and will, come out of The Listening Heart by A. J. Conyers:
and a bit about the church plant.
Paul (the pastor not the apostle) has been in a series called "In" launched from
Mark 16:15 And He said to them, "Go in to all the world and preach the gospel to all creation."There have been four messages [as I post this the audio of yesterdays isn't up yet] in the series on the subject of Christians at Westport getting in to God's agenda in the world: in short it has been a series on evangelism and being involved in the Body of Christ. The recurring theme has been:
SomewhereIn the case of this series, this has been about following Christ - but it is true in all walks of life. Wherever you are, and whatever you are doing, you were brought there by someone else influencing you, inviting you, and getting involved in your life. Go and do likewise. That said, it isn't why I started the post . . .I started it because the church played a great video as part of the ministry fair we had this week - showcasing the work that must happen for church to occur each Sunday; and the places people are needed to get in-volved. Go watch this and come back.
Sometime
Somehow
Someone [influenced you, invited you, got involved with you and for you]
usually regarded as a signal of the beginning of the organized fundamentalist movement, was one of the sources for the movement’s name...The authors of the essays were mostly respected Bible teachers. A few were widely recognized conservative Protestant scholars, such as Benjamin B. Warfield and James Orr of Scotland. Not all the authors were dispensationalist. Rather, they were chosen to present a united conservative “testimony to the truth” (as the subtitle to the volumes put it).at Street Prophets - and blew the guys bandwidth out. In looking for another linkable copy, instead I found Logos Bible Software with their Logos Digital Library System (LDLS).
Of the ninety articles bound in twelve volumes (bearing no systematic organization), about one-third defend the Bible, usually against higher criticism. Another third are either presentations of basic doctrines or general apologetic works. The rest include personal testimonies, practical applications of Christian teaching, appeals for missions and evangelism, as well as attacks on various “-isms.” Some of the articles had been published previously.
The essays were generally moderate in tone and a mix of both scholarly and popular interests and styles...The central themes of the volumes...were that conservative evangelical Protestantism could be defended on two major counts. First, its affirmations of miraculous divine interventions — as expressed in fundamental doctrines such as the inspiration of Scripture, the incarnation, the miracles and the resurrection — were fully compatible with modern science and rationality. Second, the testimony of personal experience was also important in confirming Christian belief.
The Fundamentals represented an early stage in emerging fundamentalism, an alliance of a variety of conservatives alarmed particularly over the spread of false doctrines. After the 1920s fundamentalism generally became more militant. Eventually, when in the 1940s and 1950s the main part of interdenominational fundamentalism broke between “neo-evangelicals” and stricter separatist dispensationalists, that split reflected a tension that had been present in the alliance that The Fundamentals helped forge.
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