Paul being Paul and The Dialectic of Humaness: Three Thoughts on Cold Souls

Amanda and I went through an extended film slump. We watched a string of films so disappointing that we started Netflixing (verb?) almost exclusively documentaries and television shows. So after a few months of film sabbatical, we were surprisingly welcomed back with one of the best series of movies we can remember enjoying. We watched 500 Days of Summer, Cold Souls, Moon, and The Time Traveler’s Wife[1].

We really liked each of them. But Cold Souls was our favorite by a pretty substantial margin. This is how film is done. The film had us repeatedly laughing out loud, working hard to piece together and anticipate the story line[2] and interacting with big ideas. It was well written and exceptionally well acted. So, I will try to give as little away as possible, but I simply recommend seeing it before reading this post.

The basic idea is that the protagonist cannot bear the weight of his soul and in an ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ type plot device, finds a company that can extract his soul and put it in storage. But we slowly learn about an underground Russian black market in replacement souls[3] which takes the story to a darker and more interesting place.



And, with that, here are three things[4] I liked about old Souls:

1. ‘Paul being Paul’

I recently had a lively interaction with a friend about a passage in Acts. His assertion was that the apostle Paul was being a ‘total douche’ in Acts 20. Now, some of you know that I am not the guy Paul would want defending him (seeing as I often find him annoying despite being God’s vessel for a good chunk of His self disclosure) and I conceded that there were portions of this passage that was just ‘Paul being Paul.’ This phrase, comically, came to mind again as we began watching this movie. Cold Souls is an exercise in Paul being Paul.

When I recommend this movie I lead with, “It includes Paul Giamatti playing himself.” That was all it took to sell me on the film. I am a Paul Giamatti fan. I was trolling his IMDB page and found these two things that help articulate why I find him compelling.

In the 1998 remake of Doctor Dolittle (1998), Paul portrayed a human in charge of a talking orangutan, in the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes (2001), he portrays a talking orangutan in charge of humans.

“I've got to be the geekiest guy in the world in a lot of ways. I'm like a zeta male.” –Paul Giamatti

But, here is the thing; he doesn’t really just play himself. He actually plays three distinct versions of himself.[5] This is one of the great actors of our era and was stuck far too long playing nerd and tool roles because he lack’s Pitt or Bana’s marketability. I’m thrilled that he is finally getting roles worthy of his talent.

2. A Subversive Dualism

I have written a couple times about philosophical dualism[6] in contemporary art in[7] this blog…mostly with respect to Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse and, more recently, Stargate Universe. Cold Souls explicitly claims to have no interest in questions we would classify as ‘Philosophy of Mind.’ Early in the film, as the premise was explained, the film makers essentially punted on all philosophical questions.[8]

“People come here and the all want to know if the soul is immortal and how it functions…and we haven’t a clue. No clue. We only offer the possibility to de-soul the body or de body the soul. You can see it either way.”

But as the film unfolded and people start exchanging souls or simply putting them in storage, the narrative got far less agnostic about the nature of the soul. Here are a few positions they took:

-It is not a person’s intellect, memories, education or personality.
-Its beauty and value is not correlated with its appearance.
-It appears to be without gender.
-It is physical but vanishes (or at least becomes immaterial) at death.[9]
-It both affects and is affected by its physical ‘vessel’.

This last position is the one I find particularly interesting. More like Dollhouse than Stargate, Cold Souls is an exercise in what I will call ‘flexible dualism’. Despite building its whole premise on the soul-body duality, it finds the actual relation of these messier and overlapping. This, as I have mentioned before, puts them surprisingly close to a Christian theology of the soul.[10]

3. So, what is the soul?

While the film makers seem coyly unconcerned about whether it is or is not eternal, they take a surprisingly specific position on what the soul is. It seems that the soul is composed of the formative influences of our life’s most jarringly painful and beautiful events. Who we fundamentally are is the result of our cumulative response to the dialectic of joy and pain that composes our lives.

When Paul first contemplates storing his soul he says “I don’t need to be happy. I just don’t want to suffer.” But it turns out that pain and darkness and heaviness are requisite characteristics of humanness. They work with beauty to make us most fundamentally who we are.

And so the most beautiful souls in the film are those who have allowed pain and joy to do the most thorough work on them. They are the ones who have not wasted either their hurt or their happiness. They have not been sidelined or undone by either. In the film the greatest demand was for the souls of Russian poets…but the actual beauty of the soul was uncorrelated with opportunity or vocation. The most beautiful souls are those who had found a fiercely contented existence in the heaviness of this puzzling tension that is the horrific beauty of life. While this is, by no means, a complete description of the soul (and, I’m sure, was never meant to be) it is an excellent insight into our condition. Who we fundamentally are is deeply affected by what we do with our most devastating hurts and our greatest joys. In light of this, it makes a lot of sense that God would offer us the cross AND the resurrection as our supreme resources in this quest.

This post was prepared while listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron and Wine

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[1] I know this film got panned critically, but I really liked it. Seriously, I’m pretty easy…the bar is pretty low…it’s just that film has ceased to be a story telling genre. I have been putting together a post asserting the (sure to be controversial) thesis that we are currently in the golden age of music. But the opposite is true of film. It has never been so bad. The naught-ies were to film what the late 80’s and early 90’s were to music.
[2] We had to watch the movie twice to piece the story together. This is because, there is a lot of story that is not told, only eluded to.
[3] One of the best gags/plot devices in the film is that Russian women serve as soul ‘mules’ because ‘souls are volatile at elevation.’
[4] The impoverishment of pragmatism and the bankruptcy of functionalism compose a fourth really interesting theme. Here is one exchange that highlights it:
Paul: My God, how did we get here?
Doctor: When you get rid of the soul everything makes more sense. Everything becomes more functional and purposeful.
[5] One of the best scenes depicts a literally souless Giamatti delivering Chekov dialog. I simply cannot express how enjoyable this is. There is an extended version of this in the deleted scenes that breaks the rule that ‘deleted scenes are generally deleted for a reason.’ It is transcendent.
[6] This word means far too many things to be useful. I am talking about the idea that the human self is composed of distinct physical and non-physical components.
[7] Do you write ‘in’ a blog or ‘on’ a blog? I’m not really sure.
[8] To belabor the sports analogy: leading with ‘we have no idea’ then unpacking the idea for the rest of the film is like punting on first down because you have the best chance to score with your defense on the field.
[9] Sort of. It will persist if its original owner dies but the soul is in another person…but it vanishes as soon as it is freed from its carrier.
[10] I have belabored this point in this blog so I will relegate it to a footnote. Christian theology believes that the soul and body are distinct entities. However, a robust Christian theology of the seat of the self is far more complicated than the physicalist straw man (or, perhaps more aptly, straw ghost) would admit. The incarnation and the physical resurrection demonstrate that the Christian picture of ‘who I really am’ is one of an inexorable connection of physical and non-physical realities. The soul is its own thing but only in reference to the biological organism. The shocking (and overlooked) reality of the Christian picture of ‘who I am’ is that it is remarkably biological.

The ‘New Atheists’, the ‘New Calvinists’ and the New A-Team movie

I have been reading the ‘New Atheists’ recently. I am working on a serious post about things I found interesting in their writings. This is not that post. This post is entirely silly.[1] Here is the thing. I can’t get over how hansom Sam Harris is. Am I the only one that has noticed that he could choose Bradley Cooper as a Facebook[2] doppelganger?

This made me think (in light of the new film coming out in which Cooper is cast[3] as “Face”) that if the ‘New Atheists’ were the A-Team[4]: Harris would be “Face”, Richard Dawkins would be “Hannibal” and Christopher Hitchens would be a comically surly combination of “Murdoch” and Mr. T.

I don’t mean this to be ad-hominem…just a fun brain storm. So, of course, you could do the same thing with the guys closer to ‘my team.’[5] If the ‘New Calvinists’ were the A-Team[6], Matt Chandler[7] would be “Face,” Jon Piper would be “Hannibal” and Mark Driscoll would be a comically surly combination of “Murdoch” and Mr. T.

This post was written while listening to Good News for People who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse
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[1] Some of you may have noticed that in order to get weekly content up, I have been trying to alternate serious, borderline thoughtful pieces with shorter, lighter posts.
[2] There is a pun here given the next two sentences…I just can’t find it.
[3] I had a long discussion about casting for this film with my co-workers. We decided that they should have spent the Liam Neesome money on getting Ed Norton to play Murdoch.
[4] Get it, “A” for Atheist.
[5] I am not a Calvinist. I call myself a one and three-halves point Calvinist (accept total depravity, reject limited atonement and find tensioned data on the other three in the Scriptures – so I leave my theology on those intentionally unresolved). You could say that I am a Calvinist like I am a Democrat…I’m a bad one, but the label often fits better than the alternative. That said, I generally have a lot of respect for these guys.
[6] “A” for, um, well, Anti-Arminian?
[7] As I have mentioned before here, Chandler has very serious brain cancer…which has affected me deeply. I wrote this post before I saw the with a 12” scar across his bald dome. I stand by it. Somehow, he remains a remarkably good looking man…only now, his hansomeness is accompanied by a dramatic and unmistakable beauty.

The Kingdom of God is Like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem

The Kingdom parables combine Jesus’ favorite topic with his preferred pedagogy. They usually start “The kingdom of God is like…” and then go on to describe something that is empirically unimpressive that is infused with a more fundamental and powerful reality. Yeast is hardly visible but makes bread possible, the mustard seed is among the smallest of the seeds but grows into an enormous plant[1] and the ordinary field conceals treasure hidden just beneath the surface. [2]

Far from the uncritical reading that the ‘kingdom of God’[3] is talking about a future ‘pie in the sky,’[4] disembodied, ethereal state…Jesus is talking about an empirically subtle parallel reality that is more fundamentally real than our reality. In this reality, God rules truly (hence the kingdom language) and it occasionally breaks through into our reality. ‘Your kingdom come,’ is not a prayer for the end of the world but that we would be rooted enough in true reality to make this one reflect it more accurately.

One of the primary features of Jesus’ parables was their situatedness. Even the most rudimentary mental picture of Judean peasant life demonstrates that he was doing HIGHLY contextualized theology, telling the story of Israel’s liberation with the cultural furnishings of the life of a Judean peasant. I was once in a Bible study where the leader asked us to re-tell the yeast parable using something from our profession or daily life. Mine sucked. I have tried to think of better examples several times with limited success. But now I have one. The Kingdom of God is like…a Vernal Pool Ecosystem.

I am taking my first entomology class this quarter: Aquatic Invertebrate Ecology. It is simply thrilling.[5] I could not have predicted[6] how engaging I would find bugs that live under rocks. But the other amazing thing about this ‘lab class’[7] is that most of the labs are field trips. Are you kidding me?!? As if the class wasn’t already fun enough.[8]

All of that to say…our first field trip was to a set of ‘vernal pools.’ Now, vernal pools are not impressive. It is a fancy way of saying ‘really big puddle that accumulates during spring rains and dries during the summer.’ They totally fit the criteria for the topic of a Kingdom of God parable…visually unremarkable. And that is why they constitute a threatened ecosystem…because no one thinks twice before tiling them up for crop land…surely there is nothing of sublime beauty and intrinsic worth in these mucky puddles. You see, the Kingdom of God, is like a vernal pool ecosystem…empirically unremarkable but intrinsically stunning.

Careful attention to these glorified puddles tells the story of a subtle but astonishing reality. They are home to one of the most remarkable aquatic ecosystems in the world. I expected an invertebrate sample of one of these pools to turn up some wormy things and some beetley things and a few squirmy things (I am still cultivating my entomological vocabulary). Instead, the samples told the story of a complex and intricate food web dominated by creatures that look like they should be from another planet and the oldest living animal found on our own.

Vernal pools are dominated by fairy shrimp and tadpole shrimp.[9] The fairy shrimp is aptly named. It is a sublime, translucent back swimmer (we saw one, but I didn’t get a good picture - so I borrowed). It is unlike anything I have ever seen. If I saw it on a nature show I would guess that it lived in an eccentric brackish estuary of Brazil or Malaysia, not in a glorified cow puddle 25 minutes from my house.

But the real shocker was the tadpole shrimp. Triopsidae have been around for 300 million years, giving them the title of ‘oldest living animal.’ They are found in temporary waters on six continents. Our most ancient organism, our oldest living fossil, makes its home in temporary waters around the earth, but almost no one knows about them because transient puddles are perceived as unremarkable.

So that is my yeast parable. The Kingdom of God is like a vernal pool, it does not appear to be much, but it is infused with a truer, more sublime, reality that can break through into our mundane existence if you are looking for it. But the Jepson Prairie vernal pools that we visited also work as a parable of the ‘treasure in the field.’ The way this parable goes, when you find a field that has buried treasure, you sell all you have to buy the field, because it is worth far more than it seems. That is what the Nature Conservancy did with Jepson Prairie. Realizing that vernal pools were being tilled at an alarming rate, they went out and bought these (at, presumably, a huge price). To most people they looked like big puddles, but the TNC realized that they had far more value than the vast majority of people perceived. That is what the Kingdom of God is like.

This post was prepared while listening to Brother Sun, Sister Moon by mewithoutyou

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[1] That is ecologically important. I have always liked the detail in this passage that the mustard plant “so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches."
[2] And the theme that God often inhabits the empirically unremarkable is a broad theme in the larger text. The tabernacle housed ‘the glory of God’ (whatever that means) but was essentially a tent of cow hides. And in 2 Cor 4 Paul translates Jesus’ agrarian peasant analogies to a more ‘urban’ context: “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” (Note: I love referring to Paul as ‘urban.’ It is historically correct. Jesus was small town (another way in which God consistently chose to inhabit the empirically unimpressive) and Paul was thoroughly cosmopolitan. If it calls to mind the Apostle listening to hip hop and decked out in ‘bling,’ well, that is just bonus.)
[3] Or, in Matthew, ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’ Matthew will often tell exactly the same stories but with just one word replaced. The standard theory on this is that Matthew was writing to Jewish background Christians who were exceptionally careful about how they used the word G-d on second commandment grounds.
[4] This phrase is often used derisively to deconstruct religious hopes in a future better world…essentially mocking their lack of present utility. Here’s the thing, though. I LOVE pie. If you want to deconstruct Christian eschatology, you may want to choose a less compelling word picture.
[5] My Ecology graduate program does not start until the fall, but I have been taking classes to get up to speed all year. I have found each of them entirely satisfying and so full of wonder and intrigue that ‘thrilling’ is the only word that seems to consistently capture how I have felt about them. Now, you don’t accumulate the number of degrees I have without having a pathological enjoyment of learning…but this is different. I simply like biology better than math or engineering. Only my theology degree was comparably enjoyable. I finally think I know why. Because biology is a narrative in a way that math and engineering are not. By the end of a quantitative class, you know how to do something, but by the end of a biology class, you have another clue to the grand narrative of life. Each class is like an episode of Lost, leaving you desperate for the next piece of information that might move the story forward (though, like Lost, new insight usually opens more questions than it resolves).
[6] But, in retrospect, maybe I could have predicted it…since I find the rocks themselves so compelling.
[7] For those of you who were not science majors, lab classes are extraordinarily bad deals, credit wise. I never understood how 3 extra hours in class and almost 100% more work somehow only added one credit to a 3 credit class. I call it the science tax…but I digress.
[8] Here is my first insect collection (mostly Bietiae Ephemeroptera, with one very cool Placoptera and a water mite) and a Megaloptera (the most bad ass of all the aquatic insects) that someone else found in the same trip.

[9] It is their temporary nature that provides this unique niche…as the invertebrate communities of most fresh water are dominated by insects. The shrimp can survive the dry season in a cyst form, hatch before insects can colonize, and out compete for the pools resources. But they do not do well elsewhere because they are especially vulnerable to fish predation…which is conveniently absent in the temporary waters. It is a rare convergence of conditions that make being a crustacean an unqualified plus in fresh water.

And the people did feast upon the sloths and carp and breakfast cereals

So I made a sumbmission to graphjam. It started out as the opening gag for my Acts 13 talk.

Why Christians are Lame: A Graphical Investigation

I have written several times on the topic of Christian hypocrisy and uninspiring Christianity. The problem is the apparent empirical disconnect between the spiritual resources Christianity claims to offer and the apparent paucity of moral exemplars in its ranks. My basic thesis on this topic[1] goes something like: “If Jesus was who he says he was and did what the Scriptures said he did, I would expect the Church to look precisely the way it does.”
I am giving another version of this talk tonight (MP3 - the first couple minutes are community building silliness). But this time I did something a little different. Our campus ministry has an unusually high percentage of Scientists and Engineers (Davis is a relatively technical school) yet most homiletics consist of the humanities speaking to the humanities. So I thought I’d try to plot my argument for a change.[2] Here is how it goes.

Consider a statistical distribution of human ‘goodness.’ We will assume a normal distribution normalized to a unit goodness[3] (because it is the one most are familiar with), but it works with any graphical or analytical distribution.

Therefore, there is an average measure of ‘goodness’ that we can evaluate Christianity with. Does the church, on the whole produce a higher or lower average?[4] And is that a good empirical test of its claims?

Well, if we consider Jesus’ words that ‘I came not for the healthy but for the sick’ and ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ I think we could conclude that Christianity, on the whole, would recruit from the ‘low’ end of the moral goodness scale. This makes theoretical sense as well. Since Christianity requires a profession of moral failure, those for whom this condition would be most obvious are those with the most moral failure.

So we can plot a theoretical distribution of Christians with the overall population and, an expected, lower average goodness.

Now, it would be hard to assert that Christianity does not claim spiritual resources for moral progress. And I wouldn’t want to. It does and in a decade and a half in the church, moral progress has, honestly, been my overwhelming observation in this eccentric population. The Church is, in fact, a place where ground is gained in the goodness game. But it also seems like it is hard won. And this seems to be Paul’s experience of the phenomenon as well. He is constantly expressing frustration on how much progress he is NOT making.


So, back to our plot. Consider our Christian sub-sample makes moral progress. However, they started with such a dramatic handicap, that their average is still lower overall. And observable progress is not indefinite.[5] Eventually we die.[6] In the mean time, the church continues to add converts who “come in the back door” so to speak. If the church is vibrant, functional, and healthy it should have a constant stream of annoying, judgmental, hurtful people joining, keeping our overall goodness, spectacularly below average. In a sense, the healthier a church is the more potential it has for crass wickedness.
Therefore, I assert: “If Jesus was who he says he was and did what the Scriptures said he did, I would expect the Church to look precisely the way it does”…a total mess. The empirical test of the spiritual resources Christianity claims to offer is not its overall moral goodness (since we are playing with a substantial handicap) but are we, on the whole, making relative progress? The salient test is not ‘are we better than you’, but ‘are we better than we were’?

This post was written while listening to A Beautiful Lie by 30 Seconds to Mars.____________

[1] Incidentally, my whole thinking on this topic essentially emerges from a single sentence in Keller’s Reason for God.
[2] I have tried this before on this blog, including one of my all time favorite posts (and a second one that has been in the works for months) but I have never tried to preach it.
[3] Where minimum goodness is 0 and maximum goodness is 1.
[4] I think the implications of measuring the variance in addition to the average is really interesting. For example, moralism with a Christian veneer can turn people (like me) into intolerable, self righteous bigots…but then again, so can moralism with a pluralist or secular veneer. Skewed distributions are also interesting as high or low outliers affect the mean. But I digress.
[5] Though, the heart of our hope is that actual progress is.
[6] Unless you are a Pentecostal. OK, just kidding. But this was the retort that I heard to the healt and wellness movement once. If faith can translate directly into physical wellness, shouldn’t nursing homes be disproportionately occupied with Pentecostals.

YouTube Fun

Here are a few videos I have enjoyed lately.

The first three were the products of the college ministry I am involved with.

Patch Slone is a film noir trilogy of 5-7 minutes shorts by Matt Pye. Its purpose ostensibly was to promote the spring retreat, but its artistic value far outpaced its informational value (which, was considerable in its own right). Matt used some archived music that got it kicked off YouTube…but he made a trailer that captures the spirit of it.

He also shot a bunch of ‘DVD extras’ which are collected here.

Last Friday they put on a concert they called ‘The Rock Band Project.’ There was a photographer there that documented the event with exceptional artistry (link here). Five bands playing a broad range of genres (from acoustic to screamo) put on a high quality two hours of music. One of the acts has made its way to the internet.[1]



Months before I preached on Acts 20, I knew that I wanted to play the clip ‘guy love’ from the Scrubs musical episode. Acts 20 has a great passage of that demonstrates substantial intimacy in male friendship (‘bromance’, if you will). I really like the Scrubs clip because it plays with the social complexities of heterosexual male intimacy in our culture.

But then I had a brain storm. Our lead musician is a HUGE Scrubs fan and has several very close friendships with men who can also sing. I asked him if he wanted to perform it live.[2] To say he was excited to help would be an enormous understatement. (Note: The video is only a couple minutes long, there are a few minutes of dead space at the end of it.)



Finally, a I have a cyber-friend (an actual friend of my brother) who is putting together a series of comedic shorts about an executive, an independent mascot contractor and a box store computer tech who commute together. It looks very promising. Here is a teaser.

My favorite lines:

"You can't use the Mars Volta...That's like bringing Goku to a Pokemon Match."

"Curse you Phil Collins."

Moving from clips by people I know to a couple I just plain enjoyed:

I have kept no secret on this blog that I am a huge Joss fan…Buffy in particular. But, I thought Twilight might have been the worst ‘film’[3] I have seen in five years. So, I unsurprisingly LOVED this.



"You know what I feel? Bored."

It is clever cutting, but mostly it gets at why one vampire narrative worked and the other didn't. Buffy embraced its niche as ironic metaphor. Twilight tries to pull off earnest. Sorry, earnest and sparkly vampires is not a promising combination.

Then there was this:




“But you do look like a carnivore…more particularly a dinosaur (rar)”

I really have noting to add to this one.[4]

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[1] Note: the sound live was excellent…it is diminished a bit by the video.
[2] Matt Pye also filmed this. He has become my go-to guy for footage.
[3] I shudder to use that term.
[4] While I’m recommending sports related hilarity, I really enjoyed this band wagon guide to the Buffalo Sabres. If you don’t have a horse in the NHL playoffs, she is here to help.

Spirit, Blood and Kingdom: 8 Deleted Scenes from Acts 20

Acts 20 may be one of the most underrated texts in the New Testament. I will be preaching on it on Today…and I requested it over 18 months ago. So, unsurprisingly, I have way too much to say on it. In my defense, it is essentially an epistle within a narrative. In addition to being intensely intimate and shockingly personal it is incredibly dense. And, as Stott says, one of the hardest aspects of preaching is ‘not telling people 90% of what you know about the passage.’ Still, it helps me to let go of this stuff if I get to put it somewhere…so I’m blogging about it. Fair warning, Bill Simmons likes to say that the most interesting thing to emerge from the trend of DVD special features is that we have unequivocally learned that ‘most deleted scenes are deleted for a reason[1].’ And with that, here are my top 8 themes from Acts 20 that did not make my talk.

1. v25 "Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom will ever see me again.”

What topic did Jesus talk about more than any other? There is an unequivocal answer to this. It was the Kingdom of God.[2] If evangelicals underemphasize this theme, one might be tempted to blame Paul, whose imagination seemed to be captured by other aspects of Jesus’ words and works. But here we see that Kingdom thinking was an explicit, central organizing principle to Paul’s early synthesis.

2. v 23 “I only know that in every city the Holy Spirit warns me that prison and hardships are facing me.

This passage, like most of Acts, is haunted by the Holy Spirit. Paul describes an intimate interaction with the third person of God. But I find this interaction a bit foreign. It seems that there is something in his relationship with the Holy Spirit that makes this trip to Jerusalem not optional. But, it is of note, that the Spirit isn’t filling Paul with false hopes and daisies. Though he[3] constrains Paul to go to Jerusalem, he assures him that it will be neither fun nor nice. It is common for Christians to talk about the Holy Spirit as a comforter and as a convicter but we don’t often talk about his role in assuring us of coming hardships. There is presumably a fortifying role that comes with this assurance, but it is still pretty foreign to our pneumatology.

3. v28 “Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.”

The NIV (and many other translations) make this sound like a shockingly Trinitarian verse. And, I think, the best manuscripts support that rendering. However, there are enough strong variants to make it a disputed reading.[4] But the power of this verse is not its cosmic Christology but the word picture of atonement. In other words, the primary function of this verse is not theological but visceral. Whether it refers to God the Son or God himself in a mysterious hypostasis with the Son…we are purchased with his blood.[5] “Thus (we) belong to God three times over, by creation, redemption and indwelling.” (Stott)[6]

4. v35 “Everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work[7] we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"
 
Verse 35 is one of the most interesting texts in the Scriptures. It is a famous saying of Jesus: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” Beyond the fact that this is a rock solid insight into anthropology and the elusive human pursuit of contentment, there are two things that are interesting about this saying. (1) It does not appear in any gospel. (2) It is the only saying of Jesus utilized by NT authors outside of the gospels. Much is made of the time that separated Jesus’ death and the writing of the gospels. Conservative and Liberal theologians debate the fidelity of the process of transmission.[8] Regardless of how you reconstruct that period historically, it seems like this verse has to be a player.

5. v20 “You know that I have not hesitated to preach anything that would be helpful to you but have taught you publicly and from house to house.”
 
One of my guiding principles in teaching the Bible I heard second hand when I was twenty.[9] It goes something like: there is a strong tendency for preachers to try to fix people. That is altogether the wrong way of thinking about it. It derails your content and undermines your tone. The preacher’s job is to be helpful. The Bible (in the teaching context) is not your weapon you wield,[10] it is a resource you offer.

6. v13 “We went on ahead to the ship and sailed for Assos, where we were going to take Paul aboard. He had made this arrangement because he was going there on foot.”

The first word of the passage gives us insight into why there is a sudden vividness to Acts 20. Luke is a fine author and the previous chapters are complete, artful and compelling…but there is another layer to chapter 20. The first word of v13 is ‘we’. Luke joined the party in Macedonia. Hence the vividness and tenderness.[11]

7. v 28-29 “Be shepherds of the church of God…I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock.”

The shepherd analogy is ubiquitous in the scriptures as a metaphor for pastoral care. So it is not surprising, at first, that Paul goes to it here…until you realize that Paul was a thoroughgoing urbanite. His illustrations tended to be of the games or the races[12] or urban commerce. Shepherding is outside of his wheel house.[13] He is contextualizing. But he uses it for its protective connotations. He is concerned that the new church will attract a wide array of world view peddlers. He had reason for these concerns. It turns out this passage has not one, but two sequels. Fist, is the book of Ephesians[14], that demonstrates that his concerns were well founded. There had been several attempts to subvert the belief system of the church in Ephesus.[15] However, we get a part III. Ignatius, the second earliest extant, orthodox, author who didn’t make the Bible, wrote a letter to Ephesus and seemed to intimate that their doctrinal struggles are behind them.

8. v17 “From Miletus, Paul sent to Ephesus for the elders of the church.”
 
I have argued several times on this blog that I believe the Bible intentionally gives us very few prescriptive guidelines on how to organize and arrange church polity. But, one thing I believe is clear is that Pauline churches, though diverse in structure and culture, shared on prescriptive characteristic. Leadership was plural. If this story was about an evangelical or Catholic church, it would be the story of Paul meeting with one man who was in charge of the Ephesian church. But Paul was too good a student of human nature to leave behind an ecclesiology that entrusted so much to a single individual. Paul gives his pastoral charge to a group of men who were to lead the church TOGETHER in this city. New Testament leadership is, without exception, done in community.

This post was written while listening to the Thrice Pandora Station

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[1] In the case of these themes, the reason is generally that it is far too technical and not nearly practical enough.
[2] While the answer is unequivocal and unanimously agreed upon, his meaning of ‘the kingdom’ could not be more contested. Most evangelicals get it totally wrong. Sadly, most Christians of more Liberal associations get it wronger. It is neither a synonym for a future eschatological state nor a call to this-worldly social action (though it includes both those ideas)…it is the entire realm of God’s rule (past, present and future) parallel to and intersecting with our fractured reality.
[3] I follow John in utilizing the personal, male, pronoun to refer to the Spirit. For a full discussion of the horses in this race, see Pinnoch’s Flame of Love.
[4] It is of note, that so few texts are disputed that when one is, it is a story.
[5] I thought about ditching the talk I did and just doing a good Friday talk (since the message was during holy week) on this verse.
[6] It is also of note that the context of this verse is the exhortation to pastoral ministry. It is as if Paul is saying to these new leaders whose hands he is putting the young church into, ‘Just make sure you don’t forget whose church it is.”
[7] I had a whole point on ‘hard work’ and Paul’s ‘secular’ vocation in my talk that got cut. It is in the manuscript on my preaching page (link upper right)
[8] Count me in the camp that the methods of oral transmission in first century Jewish culture were optimized to high fidelity transmission. We need to be careful projecting a culture of memory from our seat in the ‘I don’t need to know anything because I can just google it’ generation (a generation, incidentally, that I love being part of).
[9] I heard it attributed to Jeff El by Mark Machia.
[10] The scriptures refer to themselves as a weapon in the context of struggles with malevolent SPIRITUAL realities, not people you care about.
[11] I also find it interesting wrt Pauline authorship of the epistles attributed to him. Luke is a fine historian. Most of his information that can be independently verified has held up very well (Bock). But this is an eye witness account…and it sounds exceedingly close to the Paul of the letters that bear his name.
[12] Like he does in v 24 of this passage.
[13] I owe this insight to one of the commentators (Boyce or Stott I think) but can’t remember who.
[14] Also Revelation and 2 Timothy (Bruce)
[15] Klosteman cites Empire Strikes Back as the best of the Star Wars Trilogy (agreed) and generalizes the insight to all trilogies. He argues that a trilogy is actually a three act story, and the second act of any story is where all of the conflict is. The same is true with the three act story of Ephesus.

Cities as Conduits of Creation: Part 1 - St Louis

I have a friend who works with a Christian wilderness adventure outfit. They pitch their service as: allowing youth to experience God through his creation. I, myself, used to lead faith based wilderness adventure trips and see it as a hugely valuable service…and have pitched it a similar way myself. However, there is something in that language that I have come to see as a little incomplete. It seems to be a limited view of creation. I have come to believe that ‘God’s creation’ can and should be experienced with the same wonder and joy in urban[1] as well as wilderness environments. There is a sense in which the wilderness gives us a special insight into the playful, severe, aesthetic and equilibrium nature of God’s making. However, in creating humans in his image, as co-creators themselves, the best of our human makings must be seen as part of his creation. It has often been noted that the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. While there are huge stewardship responsibilities that come with our role as co-creators (a process that is ravaged, like all human activities, by the scars of our falleness) human creativity is part of God’s plan for the dynamic and unfolding wonder of his creation.

All of this is to say…I love to visit new cities. One of the great privileges of my job is the opportunity to visit several cities per year. I usually pass my limited free time on these trips simply walking around and taking in the startling sense of newness of place. And, seeing as I have trouble getting blog posts off from the road, I thought I’d start a running series[2] about wandering around our nation’s great cities.[3]

This week, I am in St Louis.[4] It was my first time and I didn’t know what to expect. What I found was a River Town that seemed to have elements of a Midwest City and elements of a Southern City.

I spent the three evenings exploring the main drag between the water front and the main park.[5]

Downtown seemed cohesive and well planned. It radiates logically from the waterfront more than most cities…primarily because of the arch.

The Arch serves as a center of gravity and gives the whole town such an overwhelming sense of place and situatedness that you never fail to recognize that you are in St Louis. It is more than a land mark.


The river was right at ‘flood stage’ and came right up to the edge of the water front.

This part of St Louis punctuated with more art than most cities.

About a mile in from the river is the old Union Station train depot. This has been converted to a Marriott (where I stayed) and a remarkable covered plaza in an excellent case of urban renewal and reuse.

Saint Louis University (referred to simply as SLO around here) extends for several blocks between Union Station and Forest Park.

I found a great pizza shop there.

The trees were in bloom:

And then there was this?

Finally, Forest Park is one of the largest urban parks in the united states…bigger than Central Park. But the highlight was the zoo. It was a remarkable and well planned zoo. An excellent reptile house and an amazing array of primates. This zoo had a number of animals I had not only never seen before, but had never heard of before. Like the Malasian Sun Bear (samallest bear speices that lives in tropical forests has feet that point in as it walks and enourmous sharp claws). In the picture they are extremely intrigued by a girl with a bubble wand. The Malasian sun-bears were waddling bundles of wonder.


In addition, my ecology training is already changing the way I see things.[6] I am enjoying it far more than I thought I would. The main reason is that at the heart of ecology are a number of fantastic riddles. Why do predators exist instead of eating all the prey and then dying themselves? Why do competitors co-exist instead of the fitter competitor just winning? But the ones I find particularly fascinating have to do with biogeography. Why do certain animals live where they live, with the other species that live there, but don’t live where they don’t live? It turns out to be far more complex and intoxicating than it sounds. Anyway, I found myself drawn in by the range maps that accompanied the animals.

But the highlight was the hippos. Now, I love hippos, but I’ve seen them before. I’ve even seen them in the wild. They had no right to be the highlight in a zoo so populated with new and wonderful animals. But the habitat built for them was increadible. Not only was it spacious and part of a well designed ‘on the river’ ecosystem themed trail…but it was set up like an aquarium.[7] You could watch them swim. I had no idea hippos were so graceful.


So, that was my experience of St Louis. Great town. Next stop: Portland in June.

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[1] And, I suspect, Noah could make a similar argument for agricultural makings as well.
[2] That will mostly be photo posts.
[3] Also I was supposed to go to Turkmenistan last week. I was looking forward to keeping another travel blog. The trip got canceled 28 hours before I was supposed to leave. But then I realized that the American urban centers I get to visit are just as rich with wonder and a sense of place as the overseas travel I do from time to time. So I thought I’d blog about it.
[4] My work objectives in St Louis were of a sensitive nature, so I won’t be talking about them. But two things are deffinately worth sharing. i) I got to see the ‘micro modeling center.’ Micro models are table top physical approximations of how sediment moves in large river systems. They are very controversial. But one thing isn’t controversial about them. They are cool.

ii) I was elected to be on the ‘River Engineering and Restoration’ committee (a group of 6 to 10 experts) that visit controversial or troublesome Federal sediment sites and offer recommendations. It was an honor and I am still not quite sure how it went down. But it makes me the youngest member of the committee by about 20 years. This is typical of the community of Federal scientists. The hiring freeze during the 1980’s and 1990’s has left my agency without people in their late 30’s and 40’s. Retirements have left opportunities open that should not be available to someone my age throughout my career. But it puts more burden on me to develop technical competence in advance of my age.

[5] I recognize that this is not representative of the whole city. It is the tourist, recreational, educational center of the city. St Louis has plenty of urban blight as well as lots of neighborhoods and niches that have their own sense of place and situatedness. I saw one church with Croatian language services. But this is what I had time to see.
[6] I have only taken pre-recs to date, but was accepted into the program last week.
[7] I do not even want to think about the poor mechanical engineer who had to compute the dynamic load of a swimming hippo in order to size the plexiglass.

Greene’s Habit of Piety and Keller’s Prodigal God

I loved Graham Greene’s[1] The Power and the Glory (TPATG) almost without reservation. This was not the consensus of my reading group, however. We did agree that he was very good at periodic, sublime lyrical flourishes. Here are a couple examples:

“It was for these (children that the communist Lieutenant) was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood everything which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious and corrupt. They deserved nothing less than the truth - a vacant universe and a cooling world…He wanted to begin the world again with them, in a desert.” 58

“Perhaps when you’re my age you’ll know the heart’s an untrustworthy beast. The mind too, but it doesn’t talk about love. Love.” 199

“This (crowded jail cell) was very like the world: overcrowded with lust and crime and unhappy love, it stank to heaven; but he realized that after all it was possible to find peace there, when you knew for certain that the time was short.” 125
“How often had the priest heard the same confession[2] – Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent anew vice…It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half hearted and the corrupt.” 97[3]

The charge my friends brought against him, however, was that these flourishes seldom went anywhere substantive. We concluded that this was far from incidental. While, say, Flaubert crafted descriptions that resolved into a grand insights of vast generality, Greene consistently resisted this tendency. He seemed to be exploring human hearts rather than ‘the human heart’ which he found not only difficult to generalize between characters, but had no real consistency within characters. [4]

Regardless of Greene’s position on the fuzzy gradient that is mod-post-mod continuum, several intriguing themes emerged from The Power and The Glory. Greene was clearly haunted by the Catholic doctrine of ex opre operoto.[5] He also has far too much fun leading us into the ambiguous, overlapping territory of courage and duty (potentially antagonistic impulses manifesting similar symptoms).[6] But, by far, the most intriguing theme, from my perspective, was ‘the habit of piety.’



The Habit of Piety
We were first introduced to ‘the habit of piety’ when the courageous but morally weak protagonist, the whisky priest, found himself in a jail cell surrounded by thieves, murderers, and a woman incarcerated for religious observance. Himself an unholy amalgam of hedonist and moralist he saw the reflection of his own heart in both incarcerated types: the criminal and the religious. The surprising thing in this moment was that both reflections were troubling to him. Actually, the religious reflection was the more troubling of the two:

“It was more difficult to feel pity for (the religious woman in the jail cell) than for the half-cast (his betrayer)…but her case might be worse. The others had so much excuse – poverty and fever and innumerable humiliations.” 131

“Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He was just one criminal among a herd of criminals…he had a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove.” 128
Later he reflected on this paradox:

“The brandy was musty on the tongue with his own corruption. God might forgive cowardice and passion, but was it possible to forgive the habit of piety? He remembered the woman in the prison and how impossible it had been to shake her complacency. It seemed to him that he was another of the same kind. He drank the brandy down like damnation: men like the half-caste could be saved, salvation could strike like lightning at the evil heart, but the habit of piety excluded everything but the evening prayer and the Guild meeting and the feel of humble lips on your gloved hand.” 169[8]

The realization that his humiliation had bought him was that religion is just a refined brand of hedonism. Becoming habituated to the magnificence and wonder of the gospel is the most irrevocable form of lostness.[9]

Keller and the Prodigal God

I located the passages in TPATG that dealt with ‘the habit of piety’ relatively easily after I was done with the book…because next to each of them I had scrawled the word ‘Keller’. These passages dramatically illustrate the very idea that Tim Keller argues is at the heart of the message of Jesus and, in particular, the story of the prodigal sons.
In his neo-classic work on Luke 15,[10] Prodigal God, Keller argues that Jesus presents two possible ways to run from God: hedonism and moralism. And, in the parable’s shocking twist ending, Jesus reveals that it is the moralist (the older brother) who is actually in the more desperate state[11]:

“The lover of prostitutes is saved, but the man of moral rectitude is still lost…the younger brother knew he was alienated from the father, but the elder brother did not. That’s why elder-brother lostness is so dangerous…Everyone knows that the Christian gospel calls us away from the licentiousness of younger brotherness, but few realize that it also condemns moralistic elder brotherness…When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good you are on the brink (of the gospel).”[12]

This is the startling uniqueness of the gospel. It is not a program of moral reclamation. It is not a method to turn bad people into good people. It is not the transformation of reckless hedonists into intolerable, self righteous prudes. It is a unilateral acquittal that seduces us into better passions. It is a prodigal (recklessly extravagant) affection that subversively supplants our self destructive loyalties to self interested masters. Greene’s work has such resonance because to claim Christ is to be a ‘whisky priest’: a tired, helpless, moral failure, whose rare heroism oozes with mixed motives, but whose passions are rehabilitated by God’s prodigal love in the midst of our lostness.

This post was written while listening to Vheissu by Thrice
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[1] Green is best known for The Quiet American which was made into a descent film with Michael Cane. In the middle of his career he wrote three novels that have come to be known as his ‘Catholic period’ after his surprising conversion. The Power and the Glory is one of these and is set in an oppressive, violent, anti-religious communist state in Central America. It is a novel with a tactile sense of place since Green spent an extended period in a similar communist state researching a non-fiction expose on religious persecution.
[2] Later: “He would sit in the confessional and hear the complicated dirty ingenuities which God’s image had thought out.” 101
[3] I could go on and on. Here are a few more: “That is the fallacy of the death-bed repentance – penitence was the fruit of long training and discipline: fear wasn’t enough.” 118
“She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it – in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo – death coming nearer every year…” 33
“Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?” 155
“No, but as I was saying – life has such irony. It was my painful duty to watch the priest who gave me (my first) communion shot – an old man. I’m not ashamed to say that I wept. The comfort is that he is probably a saint and he prays for us. It is not everyone who earns a saint’s prayers.” 113
“His conscience began automatically to work: it was a slot machine into which any coin could be fitted, even a cheater’s blank disk.” (On being manipulated through his conscience.) 89
“every small surrender had to be paid for in a further endurance” 83
[4] I speculated that it is the difference between the quintessential modern (Flaubert is considered father of Realism) and a child of postmodernism. We also speculated that Dan preferred Flaubert and I preferred Greene because Dan is more of a modern and I am more formed by the latter perspective.
[5] Literally ‘the work works.’ This idea emerged from the Donatist controversy in North Africa. The question was, do sacraments administered by heretic or morally compromised priests ‘count’. The church decided, ‘yes.’ This is the sublime madness he is playing with when the whisky priest argues with the communist Lieutenant “I can put God into a man’s mouth just the same – and I can give him God’s pardon. It wouldn’t make any difference to that if every priest in the Church was like me” or in the torment of the married Father Jose “But then he remembered the gift he had been given which no one could take away. That was what made him worthy of damnation – the power he still had of turning the wafer into the flesh and blood of God. He was a sacrilege.” Greene seems to argue that this is the advantage of Christianity over communism. The later requires extraordinarily righteous and uncompromisingly selfless leaders to ‘succeeded’ while the Church’ success is independent of the moral quality of its leadership. (I couldn’t help wanting to mail this book to all of my Catholic friends as I feel it speaks peace to their movement in the midst of the horror of the abuse scandal they are broken-heartedly weathering).
[6] “Renounce your faith…It is impossible. There’s no way. I’m a priest. It’s out of my power.” 40[8] Green goes back to this well again and again. In at least two places (p 79 and 129) he suggests that there are worse things to be than thieves or murderers…and that a bad priest would be one of them. Then there is this nearly comical confessional exchange that begins to unpack the distinction between religion and gospel:
“Why don’t you confess properly to me? I’m not interested in your fish supply or in how sleepy you are at night…remember your real sins.”
“But I’m a good woman, father,’ she squeaked with astonishment.
‘Then what are you doing here, keeping away the bad people?” He said, “Have you any love for anyone but yourself?”
“I love God father,” she said haughtily. He took a quick look at her in the light of the candle burning on the floor – the hard old raisin eyes under the black shawl – another of the pious – like himself.
‘How do you know? Loving God isn’t any different from loving a man – or a child. It’s wanting to be with Him, to be near Him.’ He made a hopeless gesture with his hands, ‘It is wanting to protect him from yourself.” 173[9] “That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, and unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sin of all. Then, in all his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt…” 139[10] In some ways, Keller is the bizarro-Lewis (who often held that he was a far better writer than speaker). He may be the best Christian orator of our day which makes his writing disappointing in comparison despite its exceptionally high quality.
[11] I unpack how these themes are also the themes of the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector in my talk on Luke 18.
[12] But the response to moralism and hedonism is not just a vauge spiritualism but a dynamic Christocentric, gospel informed, communal Christianity. Keller frames this thus: “As a result (of the large populations of moralists in the church), a high percentage of people want to achieve spiritual growth without loosing their independence to a church…yet staying away from (church) simply because they have elder brothers is just another form of self righteousness.”