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.
__________

[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

A Pair of Post-Something Band I Like

The Decembrists

The Decembrists have emerged as one of my favorite bands over the last couple months. I was originally intrigued on Pandora, but it was my friend Justin’s recommendation that got me to actually purchase an album. They can be incredibly dark, but very sweetly so. People die in Decembrist songs with a frequency comparable the novels we read in high school English. By my count 61% of the songs in 'The Crane Wife' and 'Picaresque' involve a death of some kind[1]. The Shankill Butchers is the best example. It is an intoxicatingly beautiful song about religious massacre that I find myself singing to my little girl in the grocery store:

And everybody knows if you don't

Mind your mother's words

A wicked wind will blow

Your ribbons from your curls

Everybody moan, everybody shake

The Shankill Butchers want to catch you awake

But they can also be sweetly dark (with the stress on the sweet). Charis and I have often danced around the living room to After the Bombs:

After the bombs subside

And this long, low campaign

Calls it good for the night

We meet in the streets

Will we meet in a bar’s cold light?

We grip at our hands

We hold just a little tight

Then we’ll go dancing

Yes, we’ll go dancing

Won’t we go dancing?

Until it all starts over again

But the other day it suddenly struck me, the Decembrists are the quintessential postmodern band[2]. Now I use the word postmodern[3] neither as a pejorative nor as an epistemological savior. I don’t believe in ‘the good old days’ philosophically but I don’t believe we are marching triumphally forward either.[4] Postmodern values and tendencies are often beautiful and true and often flawed and dangerous…putting it in good company with every world view permutation that we have been through. But at the heart of what postmodernism means[5] is the rejection of meta-narrative, large stories with explanatory power for vast swaths of reality, in favor of situated story telling that has limited scope but can be easily adopted as part of a fragmented mosaic of meaning. Most indie bands might be horrified to learn that they are still desperately modern, appealing to broad moral categories to tell their angst ridden, over arching tale of establishment failure.[6] But not the Decembrists. They are all about situated narrative.

Colin Meloy is a story teller. Nearly every song The Decembrists sing has characters and a narrative arc. And, as if being a story telling inde band didn’t make them distinctive enough…as if to exacerbate the role of situatedness in their music…the stories often are set against a backdrop of a specific historical event.

The Crane Wife 1, 2, and 3 are based on a Japanese folk tale
Yankee Bayonet is a love story from the Civil War south
Many think The Island is based on Shakespeare’s Tempest
The Shankil Butchers is about anti-Catholic violence and terrorism in the Northern Ireland conflicts of the 1970’s that included late night abductions and throat slashing
The Bagman’s Gambit is probably based on the late 80’s sex for secrets scandal
The Mariner’s Revenge Song and A Cautionary Song are set against the nineteenth century Atlantic maritime trade though the former definitely borrows themes from the book of Jonah

Even their name – The Decemberists – refers to a specific movement of proto-communist revolution in early 19th century Russia

Additionally, they experiment with non-linear story telling, often cited as another symptom of postmodern sensibility[7]. The Crane Wife album opens with its most lovely song. The Crane Wife 3, however is the conclusion of the album’s 11 minute bifurcated ninth track.

The Decemberists are certainly not ideology free. Colin has some strongly held and widely know beliefs. But they do not engage in a didactic, ideological frontal attack. Instead they tell stories that can be adopted as discrete units of meaning into our navigational apparatus fragmented by information overload.
Rilo Kiley

I am relatively confident that Rilo Kiley would also self identify as a postmodern band. At times it even seems like they are trying too hard with song titles like: Don’t Deconstruct[8] or Science vs Romance. But, while they intentionally tap into postmodern themes, they are not as experientially postmodern as the Decembrists[9]. However, while I was listening to my favorite Rilo song the other day (Picture of Success), it struck me, they are the best example of a post-Feminist[10] band I listen to. By post-Feminist, I neither mean that feminism has failed nor that it has yet accomplished all of its valuable societal goals. What I mean is that it has been a widely accepted ideology and we are currently living with two types of consequences of that acceptance: (1) intended and (2) unintended.[11] I think Rilo Kiley’s music explores the emotional costs and benefits of navigating these consequences.

First the relational and sexual themes:

They question the value of marriage on the title track of More Adventurous:

Wanting to say I will as my last testament

For me to be saved and you to be brave

We don't have to walk down that aisle

Because if marriage ain't enough

Well, at least we'll be loved (More Adventurous)

Yet seem to long for a sustaining beauty and commitment that is, at the same time entirely original and unlike the relational norms provided by previous generation:

I'm only a woman

Of flesh and bone

And I wept much

We all do I thought

I might die alone
…
So let's take a loan out

Put it down on a house

In a place we've never lived

In a place that exists

In the pages of scripts

And the songs that they sing

And all of the beautiful things

That make you weep

But don't have to make you weak (I Never)

But she is startlingly honest about the fundamentally unsatisfying nature of contemporary relationships and sexual gender roles, where sex comes too soon and seems encapsulate the vast majority of male interest. She seems disillusioned with the results of post-Feminist sexual expectations:

There's blood in my mouth Because

I've been biting my tongue all week

I keep on talking trash but I never say anything

And the talking leads to touching

And the touching leads to sex

And then there is no mystery left

And it's bad news Baby, I'm bad news

I'm just bad news, bad news, bad news

I know I'm alone if I'm with or without you

But just being around you offers me another form of relief

When the loneliness leads to bad dreams

And the bad dreams lead me to calling you

And I call you and say, "C'MERE!"
…
There's a pretty young thing in front of you

And she's real pretty and she's real into you

And then she's sleeping inside of you

And the talking leads to touching

And the touching leads to sex

And then there is no mystery left (Portions for Foxes)

It seems to me that the sexual revolution was a remarkably clever hoax. The male sexual urges were projected onto women by suggesting that equality of professional and personal opportunity was somehow validated by, in the famous words of that skinny, shoe-philic, blond character that used to be on HBO, “having sex like a man”[12]. I suspect that if I was an alien that was studying earthlings during the 60’s and 70’s[13] I might have concluded that an arrangement had been made: men would open professional opportunities to women in exchange loosening the extramarital sexual ethic. This is, obviously not how it went down. Professional and sexual opportunities were both intended consequences of the movement. But, in my opinion, only the former was pro-woman.

I think Rilo’s more interesting post-Feminist themes, however, deal with the juxtaposition of opportunity and expectation. Consider the following excerpt from Picture of Success.

build your own television receiver

staying home can't be that bad for me

cause i'm not scared

but i'd like some extra spare time

easily earn me big money

i'm a modern girl but i fold in half so easily

when i put myself in the picture of success

i could learn world tradeor try to map the ocean

they say california is a recipe for a black hole

and i say i've got my best shoes on

i'm ready to go (ready to go)

i'm ready to go X15

these are times that can't be weathered

and we have never been back there since then

The line ‘I’m a modern girl, but I fold in half so easily’ is at the heart of why I consider this a post-feminist anthem. She has nearly unlimited options, and is equipped with a world view of equality and capability, but finds the world brutal and dehumanizing (highlighted by a ubiquitous, alternate theme of death interspersed throughout the track).

I guess Picture of Success could be a basic coming of age song. I personally resonate with the themes deeply. But there is something decidedly feminine about it. The resolution of strapping on your best shoes and taking on the task of being a modern girl gives me the impression that Jenny Lewis is facing different coming of age challenges than I am.[14] Lewis skillfully articulates the tyranny of unlimited possibility…the loneliness of individual expectation…and uncertainty in the face of multiplying demands. Most of us resonate with these themes, but I think contemporary western women have more societal expectations than either gender bore in previous generations.

I am much more interested in the intended and unintended consequences of Feminism since I became the father of two girls. Honestly, I think I really started connecting with this band after Charis was born. I am thrilled that she will have nearly unlimited professional opportunity[15]…but I am nervous about what the cacophony of contemporary (and often conflicting) demands women navigate in our culture will do to her. And I desperately hope that she rejects the hoax of female sexual conquest and anti-marriage sentiment. I want to do what I can to raise her with a brave and confident expectation that she can do anything she puts her hand to…but that her value and humanness are not defined by those tasks. _________________________
[1] More disturbingly, he will sometimes sing about rape like in The Island or A Cautionary Song. I read somewhere: ‘One thing I like about the Decemberists is that they put really horrible stuff in their lyrics without trivializing them.” I think that is a pretty interesting analysis. (Footnote on the footnote: I love this youtube clip that also includes A Cautionary Song. They are at Messiah College, a Christian school where my friend Tiffany went...and someone throws a bra at Colin.)
[2] There are occasional existential themes as well…most notably “A terrible autonomy/Is grafted onto you and me/Our trust put in the government/They told their lies as heaven-sent” – which is surely influenced by Sartre.
[3] I know that ‘postmodern’ has never had a single meaning and has become even less descriptive as time has passed. But I have not encountered a better signifier of the half dozen or so, cultural moods that typify our post-Cartesian thought forms…so I will doggedly continue use it.
[4] As Tim Keller says, ‘Our grandchildren will almost certainly be embarrassed by huge swaths of what we believe.’
[5] Or at least used to mean.
[6] And, to be fair, I usually love it.
[7] You can see how this would undermine the importance of meta-narrative and focus attention on the specific contribution of a narrative fragment.
[8] This might indicate that they see themselves a post post-structural or something like that.
[9] It has often been said that as soon as you start talking about post-modernism in categories of system you are being modern. This is certainly what I am doing in this essay, and strikes me as what Rilo is up to.
[10] Again, I realize my categories lack precision here. But this is a theme I would like to explore so I will proceeded within the limitations of my sparse understanding.
[11] Feminism has also had positive and negative consequences (and I would argue, more positive than negative), but these do not have a 1-to-1 correspondence with the intended and unintended.
[12] I have never been able to tolerate ‘Sex in the City.’ But I do think that, in a sense, they were dealing with the same post-feminist themes of opportunity, expectation and, mostly, if the sexual revolution was actually a win for women…or a masculine hoax.
[13] So I could make visual observation undetected by didn’t understand language.
[14] And then there is her voice, which (I think intentionally) exudes brave little girl in a big scary world.
[15] And am hopefull that this will be even closer to a reality when she actually leaves our house.