Fragments and Links 5

From time to time I post brief thoughts on a range of topics that do not warrant their own post. This is one of those times.

I was listening to an MP3 by NT Wright on the historicity of the gospels the other day. During the Q&A someone in the audience questioned the historicity of the ‘I am’ statements in John. Wright’s response:

“I feel about the Gospel of John the same way I feel about my wife. I love her very much, but I don’t understand her.”

Can someone please explain to me why I am watching ‘Mad Men?’ I have heard it called, important, ground breaking, brilliant and the best show on television. I gave up on it after the first three episodes. But after more adulation and awards I tried the next three. I still don’t get it. I don’t care a bit about any of the characters and simply cannot vest in a self loathing, philandering lead with a devoted, if heavily sedated, wife.

The other day an engineer asked me where I went to under grad. I told him I went to a small SUNY school[1]. “Really,” they responded “You studied Islam?” Never connected SUNY and Sunni.

From The Economist[2] “Mr. Bush’s tax cuts raised the proportion of American families that pay no federal income tax (or are net recipients of tax credits) from 33% to 38%; Mr Obama will raise it to 44%...It certainly makes sense to keep poor people off the income-tax rolls, but removing a sizable chunk of the middle class weakens the political bond between the tax payers and government, and will lead to pressure for more spending.”

Now, to be fair, I am a fiscal moderate leaning liberal. I back a wide range of taxes. I fully support Obama’s restoration of the top marginal tax bracket (which we fall in) to its reasonable pre-Bush numbers. The death tax would be my favorite tax[3] if it wasn’t for the gasoline tax (which I also think should be twice what it is). And I think that it is unconciable that the primary income stream of the country’s very rich (capital gains) is only taxed at 10%. But I had no idea that such a high percentage of Americans paid no taxes. I agree that it creates a dangerous disjunction between populism and spending.

Speaking of economic politics: If you tell me your policy is a panacea for all ills and applicable regardless of situation, I will not believe you. This happens on both sides of the aisle. In a recession conservatives want to restart the economy by ‘giving people more of their own money’ while liberals want to restart the economy by large packages of government spending. In good times (budget surpluses) conservatives want to ‘give people their money back’ while liberals want to assure that everyone enjoys the prosperity by applying the surplus to large packages of government spending. Really? Seriously? They say that when you only have a hammer a screw looks like a nail. And it seems each party has a single tool[4]. Surely there is a sound economic theory that finds the appropriate application of tax cuts and government spending. Let me know if you find it in Washington.

Still reading Augustine’s City of God. I’m 390 pages (or about 1/3rd into it). I’ll write a post on it if it ever ends up deserving one.[5] Until then, here is another quote. This one isn’t actually by Augustine at all but a citation of one of the neo-Platonists he is arguing against. But I am not sure I have ever read a better description of the human condition:

“And so we come to men, rejoicing in reason, endowed with great power of speech; with immortal souls, but with physical frames destined for death; with minds unstable and unquiet, and bodies clumsy and vulnerable; diverse in character, but alike in error, persistent in daring, pertinacious in hope, ineffectual in their striving, dogged by ill-luck[6]; individually mortal, yet perpetual as a whole species, one generation taking the place of another in continual exchange; their life a fleeting span, their wisdom slow in coming, but their death swift; their life full of complaining. Such are the inhabitants of earth.” COG IX:9

So my life is officially full. Therefore, in order to fit a 1100 page book of questionable utility and a extremely fun, over beers, discussion group in despite work, school, ministry and a new baby…I made a trade. I have traded Augustine for Jon Stewart. I used to watch the Daily Show twice a week on my lunch breaks…now I read Augustine. But in his absence, I think I finally figured out why I like Stewart so much despite his bitterness, caricatures and sarcasm.

Stewart is the quintessential example of the 1st amendment self correcting. His absolute best pieces are not his mockeries of politicians or community leaders…it is his deconstruction of his fellow pundits. Until recently, ‘news’ personalities had virtual immunity. They could say whatever they wanted, the more outlandish and bombastic the better, with relative impunity. But now they run the risk of showing up in a TDS ‘not only are the media outlets stupid but they are uniformly so’ montage or, worse yet, receive their own dedicated segment. The public interest façade of most ‘news’ entertainment companies cannot abide the dry, withering, sardonic gaze of Stewart’s deconstruction. And so there is at least one person with a voice who is holding them to a standard of fact and manipulation.

Speaking of ‘news’ entertainment, I think it is pretty cool that bands as different as Pennywise and The Decembrists have great lines about the horrific cult of personality that has facilitated a culture of Voyeurism:

And the anchorperson on TV goes...
La de da de da de-dadedade-da
La de da de da de-dadedade-da
-The Decemberists - 16 Military Wives

We are the dregs of the western world
The steroid boys and video girls
We are the viral internet stars
And the anchor man can't stop lying
-Pennywise – The Western World

I think 30 Rock is a pretty watchable show. Not one of my favorites but not bad. But they won my award[7] for most memorable line of dialogue in 2008 in the final weeks of the year. Alex Baldwin’s Character was describing his feud with the postal service over their decision to print a Jerry Garcia stamp and finishes his tirade with this gem:

“If I wanted to lick a hippy I’d return Joan Baez's phone calls.”

Our friends the Gierhearts are expecting their second baby and are going through the unenviable process of selecting a name. They told us about a tool that will give you the top 5 sibling names if you type in the name of your first born. For fun, they typed in Charis, and Aletheia popped up as one of the popular sibling names.

I was hanging out with a group of college students the other day and related this story. They were as surprised as I was until I told them that it was probably other nerd parents like me. Without missing a beat, Rachel, the only girl in the conversation, said something like, ‘I think it’s nice that they are reproducing.’

Non Dairy Creamer is totally a gimmicky song. It will have a short life cycle. But the first time I heard it I laughed out loud for, like, 30 seconds at the final refrain:

And two gay guys got married

And brought the family to its knees

How did they blow us to smithereens

Just a couple of queens

How did they do it

I'll tell you now

They brought marriage to an end

And I've found myself some culprits
Its two young gay…REPUBLICANS
YOUNG GAY REPUBLICANS, YOUNG GAY REPUBLICANS’

But here’s the thing, I don’t really think it is a song about gay marriage. It is a song about things that aren’t really things (‘They call it KFC, cause it’s not really chicken’ ‘you can buy yourself some implants but you can’t buy a soul that never launched,’ ‘The guy in the pulpit is a bigot and a lie’). They ask in the refrain:

What's it gonna be?

Are you real to me?

Or are you non dairy... creamer?

It is as if they are asking the church (among others), ‘Do you really want to be a thing that is not really the thing? ‘

I have been following Joss’ new show Dollhouse on Hulu. Joss has earned my patience after Buffy and Firefly. From a purely mechanical point of view the show has a couple of interesting aspects. First of all, it runs 50 minutes instead of the normal 42. As part of the negotiations Joss nearly halved commercial time (which, I can only expect, makes the remaining spots premium). Second, he cast Fred (Amy Acker from the later seasons of Angel). Of all the characters Joss has allowed us to love and then summarily killed, I forgive him[8] for all but Fred. Third, they skipped the pilot and put the money into elaborate sets. This demonstrates a network commitment to the show and is a bit surprising after Firefly’s completely undeserved failure. But I think the reason the network got behind the show is that it has much more of a network TV feel. I’m not sure if that means Joss is maturing or if the failure of Firefly changed him. So far, apart from a couple recent cringe worthy back stories, Dollhouse is, at the least, good network fare. But I am concerned that the story arc has a limited horizon.

So I traded Dollhouse for Heroes. It took me a long time to admit it, but Heroes is dead. Too many of the characters have become morally ambiguous. This is a common plot device to generate more episodes (J.J. Abrams does it all the time with limited success) but it undermines what I enjoyed about the first season of Heroes…the Heroes. The series’ death rattle was the moment in episode 13 of season 3 when Peter Patreli gets in Mohinder’s cab and they reprise the scene from the pilot where Peter asks Mohinder ‘do you ever feel like you are meant for something extraordinary’ deep in the throes of irony. Mohnder says ‘I used to.’ Yeah, back when the show didn’t suck. It was the innocent passion for heroism of those two characters (and Hiro, of course) that made the show endearing and worth watching. But now Mohinder is dark, Peter is bitter and Hiro is powerless. Oh, and (SPOILER ALERT) the Veronica Mars character is dead (just like her far superior series).

I have been working my way through the lectures from MIT’s intro psychology (brain science) class.[9] I’ve learned some pretty interesting stuff…like Guy Pierce’s character from Memento is based on a real person, someone Professor Wolfe called “the most famous psychological subject of all time.” But recently the class has covered love and sexuality in the context of economic theory and it has been riveting. Here is the description from my favorite study that empirically validates some of the implicit assumptions that I made in a recent post where I strayed into the topic of the sexual revolution being an unequal gender benefit. A researcher described as ‘an attractive member of the opposite sex’ approached random individuals, expressed that he/she found the random individual attractive and asked one of the following three questions:

Would you like to go out on a date?
Would you come back to my apartment?
Would you like to have sex with me?[10]

Women answered the questions this way:

1. Date: Yes 50%
2. Apartment: Yes 7%
3. Sex: Yes 0%

Men, however:

1. Date: Yes 50%
2. Apartment: Yes 65%
3. Sex: Yes 75%

David Swanson, and acquaintance who would best be described as a friend of a friend, recently gave this blog its first shout out from his very good blog Signs of Life. I’ve been following his blog for a while and seem to comment on it with surprising frequency. But one exchange has really stuck out in my mind. David and his wife are about to adopt their first child and he simply asked for tips on keeping up with a passion for reading.

There is an annoying phenomena where people who have undergone a given life transition (marriage, getting a job, loss, and, especially, a first child, subsequent children, teenage children) condescendingly speak to those who are about to undergo it as if they have no idea what is coming. It is a social power play and I hate it.[11] I have enjoyed marriage and parenthood so much more than I expected to because people who wanted to justify their sad lives by blaming their bitterness and lack of motivation on their circumstances , warned us that we could not possibly understand (or survive with our basic commitments of life) the impending hardship. What I love about the comments on David’s blog is that they largely lacked this quality. There was very little ‘forget about reading, you are going to be a parent’ from people who have given up on reading and blamed their children. There was a lot of creative problem solving by those who celebrated BOTH David’s decision to become a parent and his love for the reflective life. THIS is how we should welcome new parents.

OK, I’ll say it…I love Hayley Williams voice. Some of Paramore’s themes can tend to be high schoolish (they are like 12…or maybe I’m older than I think) but Riot has demonstrated that they can write some of the catchiest songs in the pumo[12] pop genre. On straight aesthetic evaluation, ‘Crushcrushcrush,’ ‘Fences’ 'Misery Business’ and ‘Decode’ can hold their own with any lineup released last year.

So, a couple weeks after I wrote the above paragraph…I found out that Hayley and the guys are Christians. There seems to be a serious wave of bands that are skipping the ‘cross-over’ thing including Flyleaf, Breaking Benjamin, Page France (though none are even close to the notoriety of Paramore). They were never ‘Christian bands’ but they have always been and remain bands composed in part-or in whole – of Christians. It is an encouraging model. There does seem to be an inverse relationship between the quality of Paramore's themes and the quality of their music. Their aesthetically stand out songs (listed above) have pretty middling pop themes[13] but their more weighty lyrics (‘We Are Broken’ and ‘Miracle’) tend to be forgettable musically. But that is a minor critique. On the whole Paramore’s emergence is a really encouraging development. To hear a band on QWOD,[14] love them, and THEN find out they are Christians…that is the way I want it to work.

Paramore and Linkin Park are a little more popish than I usually listen to…but I have decided to borrow my guiding principals for music consumption from my friend Tyler the winemaker.[15] Tyler has two Masters Degrees: one in botany (Colorado State) and one in Viticulture (from UC Davis – the top wine school in the country). He had worked and studied wine in Germany and New Zealand and is currently a big shot head winemaker in Sonoma. So, when we first became friends and had them over for dinner, I would always make him bring the wine. I was terrified that my middling taste would be found wanting. But one day he said ‘no.’ He told me that he was a wine nerd, but not a wine snob, and that he drank as much two-buck-chuck as any one else. So that has become my guiding principal for musical consumption and discovery. I want to be a music nerd but not a music snob. I refuse to accept that just because music is popular it can not be good.[16]

Finally, here are some things I am working on or thinking about for future posts:

-Why Christian Music Sucks: And Why it Doesn’t Have To
-8ish Thoughts on 1 Clement (the earliest extra-biblical Christian writing)
-Implications of Theories of Early Warfare on Christian Anthropology
-The Spiritual Arc of Modest Mouse
-Excerpts and Commentary from Perelandra
-A Few Thoughts on Co-Parenting

This post was prepared while listening to Riot by Paramore
_________________
[1] In NY telling someone you went to SUNY Geneseo gets raised eyebrows of ‘impressedness,’ out hear they think you went to a ju-co. On the west coast, the only value my undergrad has is the education, because the degree is almost meaningless.
[2] I started getting the economist as the result of my frustration with the discourse in the last election. I simply need to be more educated to vote. I chose the Economist because they are European conservatives (so they are moderates by American perspectives), tend to take the level of discourse to a level seldom seen in stateside outlets and they reflect on the global implications of our policies. Oh, and for the basic subscription price you can download the whole magizine as a podcast read in intellgent sounding British voices.
[3] I have never understood why conservatives are opposed to the death tax. If the heart of conservative values is self reliance, personal innovation and individual responsibility, then why wouldn’t they support a generational reset…requiring each generation to forge its own way.
[4] If by ‘tool’ I mean ‘hammer, wrench, etc…’ not if you use the dictionary’s fourth definition : ‘a person who is controlled by others and is used to perform unpleasant or dishonest tasks for someone else.’
[5] I have heard a rumor that most of its value is in the second half so I still have hope that it is not a 1100 page waste of time…but I get to discuss it each week at a pub with 4 really smart, cool guys so 1100 pages turns out to be a small price to pay.
[6] I have never met anyone who thinks that, on the whole, they have above average luck

[7] I don’t really give an award like this…but wouldn’t stuff like this make the Emmeys and Oscars far more watchable?
[8] This is one of the things that makes the Jossverse more compelling than other SciFi constructs. In Buffy, Angel and Firefly, people you cared about actually died…and stayed dead. Anyone could die at any time (apart from the main character – though there were serious thoughts about ending Buffy after season 5 which would have ended the series with a panning shot of her tomb stone) which amped up the dramatic stakes. Joss purchased our dramatic tension at the price of some of our favorite characters, and that is why some of us are fans…but Fred? Really? That was too far.
[9] A couple years ago MIT pledged to put all of their course materials online. Most of these are just class notes, but a few actually have audio or visual content.
[10] Professor Wolfe expressions curious confusion about a couple aspects of this study including 1) how did it get past the ethical review board and 2) what happens after the documented exchange?
[11] I wrote a whole essay (which is far to bitter for this blog, as you might pick up from the tone of the fragment) about people who told me ‘your life is going to change’ when Amanda was pregnant. The gist is, "Really, wow, becuase I am such an unreflective, unobservant, dullard that it would never occur to me that becoming responsible for another person 24 hours a day would have the slightest impact on my daily routine.”
[12] I think I just made that genre up. I am referring to slightly off mainstream pop music with discernable punk and emo (pu(nk)(e)mo – get it, like screamo – I am very clever) influences, but cannot, in good conscience, be called either.
[13] To the point where one wonders if a ghost writer/slick producer got involved at some point.
[14] Sacramento’s alternative rock station, and pretty much the only radio I listen to any more.
[15] If you don’t think that Don Miller wishes he had a friend called Tyler the winemaker you simply have not read Blue Like Jazz.
[16] Populism can surpise you. If I decided that music can not be both popular and good, I’d miss out on one of the great works of my generation…’Nevermind,’ which got plenty of pop radio play in the mid 90’s.

‘What the F%$& is Wrong With Me?’: Linkin Park’s proto-Christian Anthropology

I’m sure I had heard Linkin Park (LP) hundreds of times before my layover in a Dubai hotel, but it was half a world away, in the city of contrasts, that I became a fan. I was in that strange haze that accompanies jumping more time zones than can be counted on both hands, about to attempt some bonafide horizontal sleep before the UN humanitarian flight taking me to Kabul departed in the morning. I was getting ready for bed with a music video channel on in the background (I know, they still have those in some places). Suddenly, I stopped whatever I was doing, sat on the bed, and stared through blood shot eyes at a rapid succession of disturbing images flashing across the screen. It was still several weeks before LP released Minutes to Midnight and was the first time I heard ‘What I’ve Done.’ The song was just such a shockingly accurate articulation of Christian anthropology that I realized they deserved more careful attention.

Upon further analysis, ‘What I’ve Done’ was not an aberration. Anthropology,[1] or human nature, in particular, a dim assessment of human nature born of a sober self assessment, is one of the primary themes of their corpus. There are at least two themes in LP’s music through which they illustrate the Christian doctrine of the Edenic nature as well or better than almost any explicitly Christian band[2]: 1) They describe a battle with a pernicious parallel consciousness and 2) they see continuity between the worst of the world’s ills and the content of their own hearts.

1. A Pernicious Parallel Consciousness

A major theme of their debut work Hybrid Theory was that there is a force at work in us that is not under our control, that pushes us in directions we do not want to go. A pernicious parallel consciousness, if you will.

Consider the songs Papercut[3] and Crawling[4] in which LP seem to almost describe a second consciousness inhabiting their bodies[5], working against them. In Papercut the consciousness takes on the role of accuser:

Why does it feel like night today?
Something in here's not right today.
Why am I so uptight today?
Paranoia's all I got left
I don't know what stressed me first
Or how the pressure was fed
But I know just what it feels like …

I know I've got a face in me
Points out all my mistakes to me
You've got a face on the inside too
and Your paranoia's probably worse
I don't know what set me off first
but I know what I can't stand
Everybody acts like the fact of the matter is
I can't add up to what you can
but Everybody has a face that they hold inside

A face that awakes when I close my eyes
A face watches every time they lie
A face that laughs every time they fall
(And watches everything)
So you know that when it's time to sink or swim
That the face inside is watching you too
Right inside your skin -“Paper Cut” – Hybrid Theory

In ‘Crawling’ (which I try not to listen to at work since it seems I can not not sing along…loudly) the alternate personality is not as distinct, but it is certainly present (“There's something inside me that pulls beneath the surface”) and correlated with a lack of self control and a loss of the true self.

Crawling in my skin
These wounds, they will not heal
Fear is how I fall
Confusing what is real

There's something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
Consuming, confusing
This lack of self control I fear is never ending
Controlling

I can't seem
To find myself again
My walls are closing in
(Without a sense of confidence I’m convinced
that there’s just too much pressure to take)
I've felt this way before
So insecure – “Crawling” – Hybrid Theory

Then, in the opening track of Minutes to Midnight we are given the image of a battle against the self:

Another day's been laid to waste
In my disgrace
Stuck in my head again
Feels like I'll never leave this place
There's no escape

I'm my own worst enemy

I've given up, I'm sick of feeling
Is there nothing you can say?
Take this all away, I'm suffocating
Tell me what the fuck is wrong with me
-“Given Up” – Minutes to Midnight

What the f%@& indeed?

Or in the words of a much older poet:

I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do…it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
-Paul of Tarsus[6]

At the heart of Christian theology is the idea that we are not OK…that we are each broken…what CS Lewis calls bent.[7] I have quoted him before, and I’ll do it again, but Malcolm Muggeridge used to say that the doctrine of human depravity is at the same time one of the least popular Christian doctrines and the most empirically verifiable.[8] We each hold the data in our own hearts. Which brings me to the second LP theme.

2. The Qualitative Sameness of the World’s Ills and the Contents of my Heart

In ‘What I’ve Done’ LP take a look at the horrors[9] human beings can visit upon one another[10] and looks for someone to blame. Shockingly, instead of self righteously projecting some illusory them, they seem to get it right:

In this farewell,
There's no blood,
There's no alibi,
'Cause I've drawn regret,
From the truth of a thousand lies.
So let mercy come, and wash away...

What I've done,
I'll face myself,
To cross out what I've become.
Erase myself,
And let go of what I've done.

Put to rest what you thought of me,
While I clean this slate,
With the hands of uncertainty.
So let mercy come, and wash away...

What I've done.
Forgiving what I've done.
-‘What I’ve Done’ - Minutes to Midnight

Contrast ‘What I’ve Done’ with this recent Nickleback[11] song:

If everyone cared and nobody cried
If everyone loved and nobody lied
If everyone shared and swallowed their pride
Then we'd see the day when nobody died...

And as we lie beneath the stars
We realize how small we are
If they could love like you and me
Imagine what the world could be

-"If Everyone Cared’ - Nickleback

The uber-annoying Nickleback song is reminiscent of the old 90’s ‘message song’ genre (a genre that was brilliantly and definitively deconstructed by The Flight of The Concords,’ ‘Issues’ – seriously, if you have never heard of FOTC, do yourself a favor, push the link[12]).

At the heart of the ‘message song’ is an us-versus-them mentality…posing the question, ‘why can’t they be like us' ('If they could love like you and me/Imagine what the world could be.') The irony is that it is precisely the same us-versus-them mentality that generates most of the world evils that the message song is decrying.

There are two ways around the us-versus-them[13] mentality. We can posit that we are united under the banner of ‘us,’ good, kind, helpful, and just. Let’s call this the Nickleback Hypothesis: With hard work and lofty sentiment and mediocre rock music, we can achieve a world where we all love, care and share and don’t lie, cry or die. But this does not really hold up empirically…or philosophically.[14]

So let’s call the second option the Linkin Park Hypohesis, an approach that ends up very close to that taken by Christian theology…exemplified by a letter to the editor written by GK Chesterton wrote in response to an article called ‘What is Wrong With the World Today?”

"Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours, G.K. Chesterton."

In my opinion, Christian theology provides sound tools for escaping us-versus-them thinking. But instead of uniting everyone under the ‘us’, some fantastic, ‘why can’t we all just get along,’ alternate realities where gnomes frolic with unicorns …we are united as ‘them,’ the self centered, the broken, the wounded, the damaged…those who require mercy. The world isn’t a mess because of what that group of people (liberals, conservatives, secular humanists, Christians, Muslims, fundamentalists, neo-cons, AIG executives) did…but because we all participate in the Edenic nature. The world is the way the world is because of what I’ve done. If we are all in need of mercy, we are all more likely to extend it. And that is a world I can live in. Not a world of the righteous and the good…but a world of the broken and bent…the forgiven. A world in which damaged people extend mercy to each other and look for cosmic mercy from the God damaged for us.

So let mercy come, and wash away...
What I've done

This post was prepared while listening to: Linkin Park :)

______________________________
[1] I will be using the term ‘anthropology’ in its role as the sub specialty of theology that deals with the fundamental nature of the human condition, not the academic specialty it has developed into specializing on cultural diversity and human origins.
[2] If you are wondering where LP is coming from spiritually, here is the best quote I could find by vocalist Mike Shinoda: “I was raised in a really, really liberal Protestant church. Two of the guys are Jewish. [Sample master] Joe [Hahn] was raised in a little more conservative Christian church and [lead vocalist] Chester Bennington has his own really unique views on religion. In general, we are all over the place."
[3] ‘Crawling’ is the much better known song with this theme, but ‘Papercut’ is far more explicit and has the added benefit of a super creepy, on theme, video.
[4] Probably their most distinctive and, maybe their best, song.
[5] Both songs describe the consciousness as somehow ‘inside my skin’ or a intellectual/spiritual force sharing their physical space
[6] From the second half of Romans 7
[7] Well before the phrase ‘get bent’ became a popular pejorative.
[8] While we are quoting the very quotable Muggeridge, check these out:
“Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.”
“The orgasm has replaced the cross as the focus of longing and fulfillment.”
[9] Actually, the video contrasts the immense beauty and deplorable wickedness we are capable of…but that is a different post…and doesn’t seem to match the theme of the song.
[10] This counterpoint emerges from the video…the real video not the sell out transformers sound track. I always cringe when a good band gets co-opted by a major motion picture. Linkin Park selling out ‘What I’ve Done’ to the horrible Transformers flick is the most egregious recent example (except maybe Evanescence’s break out with that piece of cinematic history, ‘Daredevil’). Paramore actually pulled this off about as well as it can be done recently. Twilight is a mildly dark vampire movie targeted at the actual demographic the band member are in. The video with the band playing an a dark wood, Hayley’s crimson hair the only splash of color actually…works.
[11] Aslo, Jack Jhonson ‘Where did all the good people go?’
[12] If the flight of the concords is new to you…let me enthusiastically recommend this gem.
[13] LP isn’t immune from the us-versus-them mentality. I have a couple theories about why Minutes to Midnight seems to be considerably less popular than their earlier works. The most obvious is that it just contains too much radio music. We do not buy LP albums for the ballads. It should be hard driving, dissertation motivating stuff. But the second reason is that the album has two war songs and a Katrina song, making it kind of a ‘What Bush has Done’ album. In fairness, one of the war songs is fantastic:
Do you see the soldiers that are out today?
They brush the dust from bulletproof vests away
It's ironic, at times like this you'd pray
Amen/Amen/Amen/AmeAmen
With hands held high into the skies above
The ocean opens up to swallow you
[14] Biological agents hard wired for the propagation of their genetic material simply cannot place morally binding oughtness upon one another.

What do Measles, Urban Density and Anal Sex have in Common?

According to Rodney Stark, they all influenced the dramatic spread of Christianity over the first three centuries of its growth. Stark’s primary shtick is to interpolate between sparse historical and textual data from the early years of the church by appealing to contemporary sociologicalmodels. In The Rise of Christianity he offers many convincing arguments about the social conditions that lead to the eventual supplanting of Paganism by Christianity. He argues that Church growth was arithmetic, at a rate of about 40% per decade[1] for the first 250 years, well before Constantine.[2] This fits the data, but leaves a glaring question: How did a tiny Jewish sect in a crowded, pluralistic, antagonistic religious landscape grow at such a rate. He offers dozens of explanations, but I think several have interesting application to our own time. So I will summarize and comment on three:

1. Christians Fearlessness of Death Increased their Survival Rate, Social Connections and Community Respect in the Wake of Two Plagues


Stark’s most famous argument, and the one that attracted me to his work[3] is that the plagues were central to how Christianity emerged as the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. He describes the plagues of 165 and 251[4] which each wiped out a quarter to a third of the empire. He begins his argument by suggesting that, philosophically, “Christianity offered a much more satisfactory account of why these terrible times had fallen on humanity.” But the heart of his argument is that the fearless abandon with which Christians risked their lives to care for others also made the plagues more survivable for themselves and the Pagans with social attachments to the Christian community. He cites Cyprian to convey the basic Christian attitude to the Plagues:

“Plagues and pestilence…searches out the justice and every one and examines the minds of the human race; whether the well care for the sick…Although this mortality has contributed nothing else…we are learning not to fear death.”[5]

And Dionysius:

“Many in nursing and curing others, have transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead…The heathen behaved the opposite way…they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead.[6]”



These sympathetic testimonies are collaborated by official documents and unsympathetic authors which lead Stark to the conclusion that at great risk, Christians provided basic nursing care and burial to the infected. This seems like quaint martyrdom until one realizes:

“Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate (during a plague) by two thirds or even more.”[7] So in the face of the most devastating disasters of the early life of the Church, Christianity proved not only intellectually satisfying, but efficacious. Christianity, ‘grew’ enormously because the population of Christians ‘shrunk’ much less. But this basic nursing care, not only improved the rate of Christian survival but the survival of Pagans that had Christian social networks and Pagans who owed their life to Christian theology. [8] So, Stark suggests, there were probably significant conversion rates among the surviving pagans.

Reflections on Contemporary Relevance: It seems like the contemporary application of these events was that Christian theology made the early Christians less vested in this life and generated an abandon for service of each other and outsiders. Christianity was evaluated as efficacious[9] because it had empirical, pragmatic value. This strikes me as the only kind of Christianity moderns and post-moderns would ever consider.

2. The Church was a Place Women Could Thrive

Stark opens chapter 5 with the statement “Amidst contemporary denunciations of Christianity as patriarchal and sexist, it is easily forgotten that the early church was…especially attractive to women.” He reports that men greatly outnumbered women in the Greco-Roman world. There were between 130 and 140 men to every 100 women, sex ratios that can only occur when there is ‘some tampering with human life.’

“And tampering there was. Exposure of unwanted female infants and deformed male infants was legal, morally accepted, and widely practiced…even in large families more than one daughter was practically never reared.”[10]

Additionally, abortion[11] was prevalent and dangerous in the Roman Empire. The two primary modes of abortion (taking a just-short-of-lethal dose of poison and surgery) both had very high mother mortality rates. On top of that "in perhaps the majority of cases it was the men, rather than the women, who made the decision to abort.” It is not hard to see how, at least in this context, the Church’s early and adamant opposition to infanticide and abortion was decidedly pro-woman.

As non-abortive birth control goes, there were two primary kinds: remunerated extramarital sex and intramarital anal sex[12]. I don’t suppose it is difficult to imagine that the Church’s prohibition of these was also seen in a positive light by women of the Roman Empire.

Finally, the Church’s ideological commitment to the powerless led them to support widows in a culture that did not. Bishop Fabious wrote that in 251, the church of ~30,000 people in Antioch, was financially supporting ‘more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.’



So, from conception to grave, the Church protected women, but it also honored them. Christian women married at a much later age[13], had much greater marital security and equity and held positions of leadership[14], responsibility and honor. In all, as a place that protected and honored women, the church inverted the cultural sex-ratio putting the Christian birth rate well above the Pagan rate.

Reflections on Contemporary Relevance:The Church’s mandate to honor the unborn and the elderly goes all the way back. But, I think we need to earn our right to speak on this as they did. The early church was a place of social safety nets. Part of a robust opposition to abortion would be church sponsored day care so teen mothers could go to college and pulpits that pushed foster care and adoption as hard as they decried abortion.

With respect to female leadership in the church, I do not believe in a ‘trajectory hermeneutic’ but it does seem to me that the church was founded as a place that acknowledged the fundamental and equal humanness of woman, and was a place they could thrive, serve and lead. We are each bound by our exegetical consciences, but I think the early church sets a provocative example for us.

Finally, a lot has been said about church demographics leaning and even marketing towards mostly women.  [15] But Stark made me think of it in a different way. He leveraged sociological theories to demonstrate that strong sex imbalance in a religious grouping demonstrates that the dominant group is finding more benefit. In that sense, even the contemporary church, with all our accusations of misogyny and sexism, seems to be EMPIRICALLY pro-woman.

3. The Church Embraced the City
 Stark, with others asserts that Christianity was, from the beginning an URBAN movement. Stark estimated the population density of Antioch at 195 persons per acre. Compare this to 100 for Manhattan, 122 for Calcutta and 183 for Bombay…but with many fewer vertical floors.

‘Parker (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places.”

Part of the reason for such high population density in the residential areas is that 30-50% of the city area was dedicated to public space. So urban Romans lived their lives in common, public spaces. The common use of public spaces increased the number and density of social networks[16] and kept Christianity ‘open’:


“The basis for successful conversionist movements is growth through social networks, through a structure of direct and interpersonal attachments. Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is, they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out into new adjacent social networks.”

It was, in part, the willingness of Christians to live in cities[17] and be participate publicly in the common spaces and objectives of corporate urban life that facilitated the dramatic growth of the church.

Reflections on Contemporary Relevance:  Tim Keller uses Stark (as well as Wayne Meeks, author of The First Urban Christians) pretty heavily to demonstrate that the missiology of the early church was to concentrate their efforts on the cities because ‘as the city goes so goes the culture.’ This actually sets up one of my favorite Keller quotes: “American Christians are the most anti-urban Christians in the world and as a result American cities are the most underserved by Christians. (It would take) 10% of evangelical Christians in this country to move into cities to live proportionally…Jews for example, gay people for example, Asian people, Black and Hispanic people all live disproportionately in cities, and as a result the have a lot more cultural power, and they deserve it, because there they are, than white evangelicals that don’t want to live there…I remember Jim Boice said ‘until evangelicals are willing to live in the city they can stop bellyaching about what’s going wrong with the culture.”

The Church does not thrive in contemporary suburban culture where houses are super comfortable and little time is spent in public spaces. Contemporary Christians could take an important lesson from the early church to live life in urban (and academic) population concentrations with dynamic public spaces where they can live and serve side-by-side with Christians and the city’s other inhabitants. Christianity dies huddled in McMasions with the family in front of the television and/or shuttled cautiously from one Christian function to another. As the exiled Hebrews in Babylon we are to vest in our cities, love them, serve them and represent the gospel.


This post was prepared while listening to: ‘Plans’ by Death Cab for Cutie.
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[1] As evidence of the possibility of this kind of arithmetic growth he tells us that the Mormons have been growing at a rate of 43% per decade for the last century.
[2] In fact, Stark convincingly argues that Constantine’s edict did not make Christianity the dominant religion of the Roman empire…instead his edict acknowledged a well established phenomena. “Constantine’s conversion would better be seen as a response to the massive exponential wave in progress (of the Church), not its cause.” (p10)
[3] I first heard about this work in William Dyrness Apologetics Class materials (available from Fuller with or without taking the class). Years later, Keller cited the work as well.
[4] Both before Constantinian adoption but after the last of the eye witnesses.
[5] Interestingly, this whole thing reminds me of my famous work of existentialist fiction (if, we exclude Dostoyevsky as a proto-existentialist), ‘The Plague’ by Camus. Curiously, the roles are switched in ‘The Plague.’ The Camus type characters provide care with abandon to their own safety while the Christian seems fearful.
[6] If you suspect that I included this quote just so I could make the ‘not dead yet’ reference from Monty Python…well, you might be right.
[7] The sublime paradox here is that the more reckless and fearless approach resulted in lower mortality.
[8] Pontiaus writes “there is nothing remarkable in cherishing merely our own people with the due attentions of love, but that one might become perfect who should do more than the heathen (and)…love his enemies.”
[9] Stark’s sociology of religion rests largely on the idea that since the benefits of religious belief are uncertain, our sociological response resolves around reducing the perceived risk and uncertainty of commitments.
[10] This last conclusion was reached by examining 600 family lists and finding only 6 with more than one daughter.
[11] I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but the difference between abortion (particularly late term) and infanticide always struck me as a quantitative rather than a qualitative difference. Peter Singer (the Princeton utilitarian philosopher) famously believes the same thing…but it leads him to embrace infanticide. At least it is a consistent position. I remember the first time I heard about contemporary infanticide in India and China…I was in a developing world class in undergrad, and the whole class was horrified. But many of these same people would believe that easy access to abortion should be part of the statagy to curtail world population.
[12] This was a very memorable part of the book.
[13] In the early to mid-twenties as opposed to Pagan marriages that tended to happen in a woman’s mid to EARLY teens.
[14] Stark surveys numerous references to women as deacons…and none to women as elders…but this is still an enormous move towards equity for the time.
[15] Though the vast majority of it is overstated.
[16] Anyone who knows me knows I love Facebook. I have heard several times that the most people that one person can know is about 120, which is why so many churches max out at 120, because they are pastor driven and that is how many he can know. I honestly believe that social networking sites like Facebook can almost double that number by optimizing the transfer of event based information transfer. In a sense, it is digital public space…but it does not replace the value of utilizing physical public space.
[17] In much worse health and safety conditions as even the worst contemporary cities.

A Manifesto of Personal Finance

We have short memories. I have had many, many conversations about personal finance recently. I had the same conversations seven years ago. We are a generation in charge of our own retirements[1], and we don’t really seem qualified.

I have several thoughts on this that have served us pretty well. So I thought I’d post my guiding principles of personal finance…a manifesto if you will.

1. You Can Not Time The Market

My first principal of personal finance is to embrace incompetence. The vast majority of experts cannot time the market. And I am not an expert. Day trading and moving large chunks of your retirement between stocks and bonds is not only a recipe for insanity, but a sure way to lose money. The result of embracing incompetence[2] is designing an approach to market uncertainties that is designed for all contingencies.

So I suggest forging a strategy that you can live with in bull and bear markets and sticking with it. Keep your stocks when they are crashing and hold on to your bonds when stocks are running amok. Very few people can time the market…I am not one of them…you are probably not one of them either…so make a sound strategy based on financial goals and risk tolerance and stick with it. We hold about 60% quality stock[3] mutual funds and select them based on a value approach.[4] The rest is government and industrial bonds, REITs,[5] and some emerging markets stuff. It ‘underperforms’ during bubbles but weathers crashes pretty well. Most importantly, it frees me from daily decisions. In my opinion, the quality of amateur financial decisions is inversely related to their frequency.[6]

2. Avoid Greed and Fear

At two points, in the last ten years, I have been widely advised that it was simply moronic for someone my age to be in anything but stocks. Recently someone close to me just pulled a large chunk of money out of stocks. Another contemplated a large investment in gold. These are each errors in my opinion, and they are based on the two biggest enemies of sound personal finance: fear and greed, the Scylla and Charybdis of negotiating the markets. Assets in our economy seldom seem to be in equilibrium, they tend to be in one of two states, under priced due to fear or over priced due to greed. The key to ‘beating the market’ is not timing it correctly, but making sound, objective decisions when the voices are calling you to fear or greed. Because the most profitable decisions you can make are generally counter-consensus. Making a disciplined plan and sticking to it can circumvent our emotional apparatus and help us make better decisions.

3. Buy Whatever No One Else Wants

So how do the first two principles turn into action? Well, regardless of market direction, I do not move more than 10% of our money between our stock and bond holdings based on my guess of future events. That is not my primary ‘knob.’ I am more interested in where my new money is going. I’m a sucker for a good sale.

My guiding financial principal is that most people are led into poor financial choices by either fear or greed. Therefore, I try to do the opposite of whatever the current trend is. I buy what no one wants at the time. A year ago, we stopped buying stocks and put our money in bonds and the plummeting housing market. Now, with the stock market 50% off, all our new money is going into stocks. It is all cyclical. I expect another three to five cycles before I need the money. I buy whatever assets are on the down side of the cycle. It doesn’t bother me that the market will likely loose another 10 to 15% (Or another 50% in some kind of dooms day scenario). I’ll buy then too. Probability is on the side of an eventual recovery.[7]

I am not driving myself crazy checking my dropping balance every day…I only check the balance quarterly to make sure I am on target with my overall strategy.[8] Rather than loosing sleep over how our holdings are doing, I am ecstatic to be buying whatever I am buying at a great price, confident that it has way more room to appreciate. And even the stuff that is loosing value…I knew it was over valued…I re-balanced…I kept a strategy that I could live with in bull and bear markets…and I know I got most of that stuff on sale anyway during the last correction, so most of the value it is loosing is value I didn’t pay for.



4. Ownership: The Path to Social Change

I am an environmentalist. I feel pretty strongly about the human mandate to care for the things God made. When it comes to environmental groups there are two main kinds: the litigious approach and that of the Nature Conservancy (NHC). I don’t mean to drop a pejorative on the Sierra Club et al. I think it is fantastic that there are privately funded organizations that exist solely to keep industry and government accountable to the rule of law. It is a great example of why I dislike our way of governance least[9] among the options. But they are not my favorite.

My favorite environmental organization is the NHC. Our office does a lot of work with them as they have sought a cooperative relationship with the Corps, rather than an antagonistic one.[10] But the thing that is most impressive about their approach is what I would call environmentalism through capitalism. If they see endangered habitat or a river reach prime for restoration or a unique natural resource, they don’t picket or sue or whine…they buy it.

This is also my favorite approach to the ills of capitalism. In our model of publicly traded companies, it would actually be immoral for company leadership to act outside of the best interest of the share holders. And most collections of share holders are interested in one thing…share price. I have said it before, but I get tired of people with 401k’s full of stocks complain about the evils ‘big business.’ THEY are big business.

The only way to change company behavior (other than government regulation, which I cautiously support in a number of forms) is to change share holder expectation. What if the share holders largely wanted the company to take a smaller profit to reduce emissions, or pay a higher wage to factory workers in India, or offer health care to its workers? The company would be beholden to these values, since it is supposed to act in the interests of the owners…the share holders.

So much of our money are in what I am going to call ‘advocacy instruments.’ These financial products are generally called ‘screened funds’ or the nearly comically self congratulatory ‘socially conscious[11] funds.’ We originally got into these from what I will call a ‘contamination’ angle. This is the ‘screen’ idea. We wanted a company to keep us from moral contamination by keeping our portfolio free of Philip Morris and the big polluters. But my take on their value has changed with my take on Christian ethics.[12] Now I see their value is consolidating ownership behind some sane, extra-monetary objectives. If Calvert or Domani tells a company that some costly environmental policy or health benefits or a living wage is ‘worth it’ they are not just taking a moral position, they are making an ownership request. They are affecting the mandate. So we hold much of our money in these kinds of ‘advocacy’ instruments.


So there it is, my manifesto of personal finance. Bottom line, if you are 20+ years from retirement, and can avoid the siren fear, it is a very good time to be investing. But it will be imperative to remember the lessons of the last year has held when the siren of greed comes calling.


This post was prepared while listening to: ‘The Lonesome Crowded West’ by Modest Mouse.

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[1] Though, as you might guess, I don’t really believe in retirement. One of the reasons I am wrapping up a PhD I don’t need and already have my sights on the next degree, is that I want to work in some capacity until the day I drop dead and answer for my life. But there are a couple famous parables about wise investment, so it is something I have given some thought to.
[2] Which is easier to swallow since ‘competence’ is so rare in economic projection.
[3] Presumably this number will drop as we get older and our risk tolerance drops.
[4] The value approach revolves around the idea that you want to evaluate the price of stocks based on how they compare to actual earnings. It is contrasted to the 'growth' approach that seeks to put money where things are 'hot'.
[5] A REIT is a way to invest in real estate incrementally, without buying a whole building. We started buying these in US and European markets
[6] And research backs this up.
[7] Even if the market never returns to its peak, fear discounted assets purchased today will VERY likely appreciate substantially…they have more room to. If someone thought buying stocks was a good idea a year ago…than it is twice as good today.
[8] For example, since stocks have dropped, my stock holdings are less than 60% so we move some money over from bonds. This is called rebalancing and is a good anti-bubble discipline to keep you from chasing bubbles.
[9] Sorry for the double negative, but dislike least, in this case, certainly means something other than like.
[10] And the approach has worked…they have found that in many places, reservoirs could be re-regulated for biological objectives without sacrificing ANY human objectives.
[11] The funny part is that the question of ‘who’s conscience’ turns out to be a big one. You can get into a fundamentalist fund that advocates against abortion and same-sex benefits or an Islamic fund that is usury free, or a Mennonite fund that military free or, what is suppose would be best called a ‘secular liberal’ fund that screens for promotion of women, environmental record, and labor practices…Oh, and the Mennonites and Catholics do those things too.
[12] Which, pretty much, was the result of reading Bonheoffer.

The Monthly Evangelical Metamorphosis into Gnostic Materialists: 12 Thoughts on the Lord’s Supper

So I am preaching on The Last Supper from Luke next week (it should show up on the preaching transcripts page around Tuesday). In 25 minutes I plan to talk about atonement, communion and leadership from Luke 22. That means I have many thoughts about how the Last Supper translates to the Lord’s Supper that won’t fit into my 8 minute second point…and honestly most of them are not appropriate for the venue. So they get relegated to this venue.

1. In the Lord’s Supper Jesus prescribed a sensual act of worship.[1] It is fully tactile and engages all the senses. We see the elements, hold and tear the bread, waft the wine, taste the bitter sweetness of fermented grapes and the comforting softness of bread[2], and hear the story of God’s intimate celebration of his vicarious atonement told one more time…or at least that was the intention.

2. If it is true that we are supposed to frequently remember the atonement through the engagement of our senses, then it would seem to follow that the beauty in each category would be of value.

3. The evangelical reductionism of this practice betrays a deep and insidious Gnosticism[3]. It is pretty obvious from the plastic thimble of Welches and the sub-chicklet-sized-carb-pellet, that we do not believe the quality of the experience has any importance.[4]

4. We spent much of last year considering and planning a church plant in midtown Sacramento. We discussed a weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. As soon as we had a building[5], I wanted to put in bread ovens to optimize the production of quality elements.

5. The standard pragmatic argument against a substantial sacrament is cost.[6] This emerges from a misunderstanding of the OT tithe. Every sermon I have ever heard about tithing has been based on OT texts. So churches raise money based on a First Testament mandate[7] of 10% giving but tend to ignore the OT mandate of how the money is to be spent. Check out the law for spending the tithe:

“Be sure to set aside a tenth of all that your fields produce each year. Eat the tithe of your grain, new wine and oil, and the firstborn of your herds and flocks in the presence of the LORD your God at the place he will choose as a dwelling for his Name, so that you may learn to revere the LORD your God always. But if that place is too distant and you have been blessed by the LORD your God and cannot carry your tithe (because the place where the LORD will choose to put his Name is so far away), then exchange your tithe for silver, and take the silver with you and go to the place the LORD your God will choose. Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other fermented drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the LORD your God and rejoice. And do not neglect the Levites living in your towns, for they have no allotment or inheritance of their own.

At the end of every three years, bring all the tithes of that year's produce and store it in your towns, so that the Levites (who have no allotment or inheritance of their own) and the aliens, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns may come and eat and be satisfied, and so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.” Deuteronomy 14: 22-29

It seems the tithe is supposed to be used for three things.[8] (1) The support of full time religious staff (and presumably property). (2) The poor and powerless. (3) Food for religious parties for the purpose of remembrance. Americans (including me) have all sorts of unhealthy eating habits. Church people are arguably worse.[9] But I think some of this is because of the dissociation of the spiritual and the physical. Eating is a physical thing, not a spiritual thing. Well, not to the Hebrews. And not to us. Church budgets should be structured to afford quality bread and wine (preferably as part of a larger joint meal as celebrated on the Sabbath by the early church) for a weekly celebration of the sacrament.

6. Ceremony revels in repetition and lifts the burden of novelty and innovation. It is the only part of evangelical worship that is not based on someone’s performance. Liturgical apologists boast of the value of ceremony because its effectiveness is independent of leadership personality. It is a sound point.

7. But by celebrating the Lord’s Supper weekly, you are never far from rehearsing the gospel. The vicarious substitutionary atonement is the central insight into humanness that Christianity claims to offer. Regularly rehearsing the unilateral rescue of God through God’s the annihilation of God ‘for us’[10] produces all of the things that Christianity is about: humility, repentance, worship, kindness, joy, and grateful service in the pursuit of justice, faith and beauty. At the heart of Keller/Driscoll/Chandler movement is the idea that unless the gospel is for Christians too all we have is a dry religion.

Also, my tradition has competing values: Christocentricity and expository preaching of the whole Bible. In one sense this is not a huge problem. Jesus certainly thought the OT was all about him, but a month into a series on 1 Kings[11] one can find that they have not talked about Jesus in weeks. Weekly observance of the Supper reestablishes the centrality of the gospel in Christian worship.

8. A thought from my brother, Nic: “The sacraments are not something special to let us know about something special they are something special to help us remember the sacredness of the ordinary…You need to come up to the front and take the little ridiculously processed stale piece of bread and dip it in the wine that isn’t wine and eat it and remember that God became a human being and was murdered to infuse your real life, every breath with sacredness…Nothing that you do in you life is really ordinary.”[12]

9. The medieval church believed that special men could say magical words and turn bread into Jesus. I grew up in this tradition and always found it awkward when I got Jesus stuck in my teeth. This is error. As is the belief that the sacrament is necessary for salvation. These are significant reasons that I do not belong to this tradition any more.

But the protestant reaction leaves the proverbial baby dazed, forgotten, in its puddle of thin suds, the bath water already watering the roots of the back lawn grasses. We have reduced the sacrament to a materialist[13] transaction. I eat tiny ‘cracker’, it makes me remember. The medieval right was overspecified, but at least it was supernatural. Protestants need to recover some sense of the spiritual mystery of the sacrament.

10. Amanda took my early church history class with me at Wheaton. The Apostolic Fathers[14] were the highlight for both of us. We often found them nearly Protestant in their outlook, free of some of the medieval encumbrances Luther et al were trying to reform. But there was one topic on which they looked nothing like us…their emphasis on and theology of the Eucharist. The Didache, Justin[15], Clement all cited the sacrament as central to early Christian worship. But more shocking than their emphasis, was their theology. They agreed that, in a non-trivial sense, Jesus was especially present during the sacrament. Not in the overspecified ritual of the later church, but in a mystical, super-material way none the less. This has led a number of contemporary Protestants to adopt a ‘real presence’ theology that in some, mystical, unspecified way, Jesus is uniquely present in the meal. We are among those Protestants.

11. Luther would agree. The Reformation occurred simultaneously in several cities.[16] After it was clear that they were going to form a new church Luther and his Swiss counterpart Ulrich Zwingli[17] met to try to unify their movement. They discussed 12 points. They agreed on 11. In the end, Luther could not join Zwingli because the latter insisted that the sacrament was just a symbol. Luther refused to unite the movement over his conviction that in some mystical way, Jesus is uniquely present in the meal.[18]

12. Finally a thought from Darrell Bock: “It is perhaps a great tragedy in the church that this meal often gets relegated to a minor role in the church’s worship. Many observances of the Lord’s table are relegated to a quick addition to the service, observed once a quarter or even less. This supper was never designed to be a ‘tacked on’ element of worship.”[19]

But why do we tack it on. Because in its Gnostic, materialist forms, it is virtually without value. So we do it by force of will…by rote obedience…when the pastor would rather have and extra 10 minutes to preach…and the musicians would rather have an extra 10 minutes to sing…and the people would rather spend the 10 minutes almost any other way. But in its sensual, mystical, ceremonial form, the meal could be a centerpiece, even of evangelical worship.

This post was prepared while listening to: The Fair Pandora Station

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[1] The fact that we have come to see ‘sensual’ as synonymous with sexual is unfortunate, but kind of illustrates the point here. Sex also engages all the senses, and is in no way boring.
[2] I have, sometimes, playfully called it ‘taste worship,’ but that actually short changes its sensual value.
[3] Here I am invoking the docetic nature of Gnosticism…the belief that the physical world is evil or, at least, doesn’t matter…not the weirder demiurge stuff. (But on a side note, wouldn’t ‘the demiurge’ be a great comic book or Buffy villain.)
[4] I am not making a specific critique of my church here. Every evangelical church I have ever been to (with the exception of my grandparent’s church where they passed a basket of rolls once when I visited – I was 7) uses the same ridiculous pellets (or oyster crackers).
[5] Actually, I did not want a building for a while. Most of the midtown restaurants do not open until noon and I was hoping we could rent one on Sunday mornings. I think there is value to utilizing ‘secular’ space when trying to reach a post-Christian community (an idea which should be its own post). And they would have had bread ovens we could have rented as part of the package.
[6] Actually, the reason given for using grape juice instead of wine is that we do not want to cause recovering alcoholics ‘to stumble.’ This strikes me as smokescreen. I think it is our legalistic rejection of alcohol as having value…which is also a byproduct of implicit Gnosticism.
[7] Incidentally, I embrace this mandate and think it is appropriate for Christians.
[8] The proportion question is more difficult and applying the law from a theocracy (where it was also tax) to self governing corporations of worship and mission within a secular state is, problematic, at best. But there are principals here that are binding.
[9] Amanda and I often joke that the types of food that frequent church potlucks are designed to ‘speed God’s people to glory.’
[10] In the words of the ‘first supper’
[11] In my opinion, the Kings and the Chronicles are the most boring books of the Bible. Give me the blood and holiness of Leviticus over them any day.
[12] From an excellent recent sermon called ‘Closing the Distance – A Few Thoughts on Getting Closer to God’ – seriously, he has got to be one of the best preachers of our generation.
[13] If it seems weird that the evangelical celebration of communion would suffer both from Gnosticisim (with its belief that the material is evil and should be overcome or, at least ignored) and materialism (the belief that matter is all that matters), well I think so to. This strange paradox seems like a symptom of our almost comical dysfunction on this.
[14] The apostolic fathers are those who wrote within a couple hundred years of the scriptures. There are only about a dozen orthodox authors who’s writing survive from this period. They do not bear the authority of scripture, but I weigh their testimony pretty heavily as they were the closest to the events and several of the authors were friends of apostles. A couple of these writings were actually included in early cannon lists.
[15] Justin actually suggests that it be brought to the houses of those too sick to attend the worship gathering.
[16] Incidentally, it also happened within Catholicism. Devout Catholics of this era went about the business of getting rid of the gross abuses of the medieval church. I actually suspect that if I had been alive then, that I would have joined Erasmus, Ignatius and Xavier and their in house quest for reform.
[17] If you look for images of Zwingli on Google image a surprising number of dogs come up. This confused me for a moment, but I am almost certain how it went down.
Nerd Husband: “I am so happy we are going to have a baby, honey. If it is a boy I want to name it Zwingli.”
Sane Wife: “That’s nice honey, but we need to name the puppy now, let’s use this very special name immediately.”
[18] To this day, Lutheran churches hold to a middle position called ‘consubstantiation.’ It is kind of obtuse, but I think it boils down to a special, mystical, real presence.
[19] The NIV Application Commentary on Luke

A Brief Interlude of Family Blogging

I follow two basic categories of blogs: 1) family blogs and 2) idea blogs. While I deeply enjoy both this blog falls firmly into the latter category. But my creative energy this week did not go into a written piece. It went into a person.[1] The Imago Dei, the image of God[2], seems to be the key to human uniqueness. It is a complex sort of idea that has a number of layers. In my opinion, central to what make us the image bearers of God, is our ability to co-create…to be conduits of beauty and truth. But the more basic act of co-creation…the making of a new person, a new conduit of co-created justice, truth and beauty, is pretty remarkable too. Here is my family which I adore:

This first picture is of Charis greeting her new sister Aletheia. Charis is the New Testament word for 'grace'. Aletheia is the New Testament word for 'truth'. The names were selected to go together. According to John’s gospel, ‘grace and truth’ were two of the primary things God wanted to communicate to us through the incarnation:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth… For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” John 1:13&17

One of my earliest posts was about my great surprise at loving parenthood. Amanda and I lingered in the newlywed stage for 9.5 wonderful years…and I would not trade them...but I could not have predicted how much I would love being a dad. My brother has been talking recently about the insufficiency of our prediction apparatus for guiding us to actual joy and happiness. Obedience[3] is often much more efficacious at producing the life experiences that were designed to nourish our souls.


People told me that the college years were the best of my life. I refused to believe them. They were wrong. I have found each life stage to bring more intense sadnesses and joys. These are, without doubt, the best days of my life…until the next ones.

More pictures here.
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[1] And my wife put in way more energy than I did. But still, if this post is barely coherent, I’d like to take a sleep depravation mulligan.
[2] The Bible says that human are special because we were created in the ‘image of God.’ Almost no one believes that this refers to the physical image, but many suggestions have been advanced regarding what divine characteristic we exhibit that constitutes this image.
[3] Obedience is a pretty good description of our motivational impulse to have children. Neither of us particularly wanted them. The vast majority of our premarital counseling consisted of Mark Machia trying to talk us into wanting kids. But we finally came to a place where we believed that parenthood was the normative outworking of Christian marriage…and, thus, our responsibility. (We might be the least sentimental people I know). Neither of us thought 'wanting kids' was a good reason to bring them into this world. We had to be able to tell them why they exist. I can now tell them, confidently, 'God wanted you and asked us to take care of you for a while.'

This post was prepare while listenting to: The Pennywise Pandora Station