Thursday, May 2, 2013

Machen on the Dangers of Doctrinalism

"In maintaining the doctrinal basis of Christianity, we are particularly anxious not to be misunderstood.  There are certain things we do not mean.  In the first place, we do not mean that if doctrine is sound it makes no difference about life.  On the contrary, it makes all the difference in the world.  From the beginning, Christianity was certainly a way of life; the salvation that it offered was a salvation from sin, and salvation from sin appeared not merely in a blessed hope but also in an immediate moral change.  The early Christians, to the astonishment of their neighbors, lived a strange new kind of life--a life of honesty, of purity and of unselfishness.  And from the Christian community all other types of life were excluded in the strictest way.  From the beginning Christianity was certainly a life." -From Machen's Christianity and Liberalism, pg. 47.

A great quote from Machen.  In wanting to rightly protect the sound doctrine of the church that was being compromised at the time, Machen was also aware of the danger of not connecting orthodoxy with orthopraxy.  The sound doctrine of the church should always lead to a kind of living by the members of Christ's church.  This is why Paul could tell Titus to "teach what accords with sound doctrine" (Titus 2:1) and then go on to give ethical instruction.  There is a way of living that accords with sound doctrine and thus a way of living that is not in accord with it.  May the Holy Spirit grant the church greater sanctifying graces as she seeks to walk in a manner that is in harmony with the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.  And in so doing, may she then adorn the gospel in a way pleasing to our Lord.

 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

From the Vault: Wine and Theology (first posted 1/16/12)

 
*As I have been doing some reading on the idea of a "theology of the city", I thought it would be good to revisit this post.  Hope you enjoy. 
One of the central themes in Terry Theise’s new book Reading Between the Wines is the idea of connectedness.  Throughout the book, Theise shows how globalization presents itself in the world of wine and creates disconnect and fragmentations not only in the business of wine, but also in the taste of wine itself.

With pun unavoidable, Theise longs for a rooted-ness in his wine.  Practically, this looks like artisan wine makers who know their land, their family, and their role as a steward (not a master) of the vines and barrels.   

Theise waxes poetic in his reflections upon the Mosel valley in Germany.  Every March Theise travels to Mosel to taste the new vintages that at times have been world class.  One wine family in particular, the Selbachs of Zeltingen, is his foil for explaining connectedness.

The Selbachs are a generational wine family, and in the 90’s Hans Selbach died and passed the torch to his son Johannes.  Theise, in what proves to be a powerful section of prose, contrasts the death of Hans, and the death of his own father.  Hans died in the living room surrounded by family, was wheeled through the house one last time, wheeled through the bottle cellar (with one of Hans’ other sons remarking that “it was as if you could see and hear the bottles stand and applaud papa”), and then buried on family property, in the same soil in which the vines grow.  Theise’s father, unnamed, died in a hospital room in Manhatten, and is buried in an enormous cemetery in Queens.  Theise doubts that he, “could even find the gravesite.”

Point being here, you can’t separate the Selbachs and the wine they make.  There is no substitute.  The two are connected in an invisible yet vital way.  To disconnect the Selbachs from their land, would be to disconnect them from the world of wine.  They could not, and would not, do wine anywhere else.  Which is completely contrary to the way the world of wine is going these days, with “fly-around” vintners and transplants trying to make overpriced wine of all kinds.

Given this lay of the land, Theise describes the Selbachs kind of connectedness in wine and in life as one that, “salves a kind of loneliness.  Though it isn’t my home, it is at least a home, and the people are particular people, and the wines are particular wines.  I spend too much of my life driving among strip malls and their numbing detritus, and so when I descend the final hill over the Eifel and the village of Zeltingen comes into view, sitting peacefully along the Mosel, I have a momentary thrill of arriving.  Here is somewhere.  I see it, I know it, I will soon embrace people who embody it—and I also get to taste it.”

Too much of the wine world is defined by “international consultants” and wineries that import grapes from somewhere else, hire someone else to mix, and produce wines that taste like someplace else.

This is true in many fields of work today.  Globalization has touched the world in an irretraceable way.  There is no going back.  But how do we go forward?

More important to my interest here, is do we, or how do we, see globalization in the church?  How many pastors are trying to produce someone else’s community, and farm out the task of shepherding a particular people in a particular place to homogenous ministries that anyone can buy?  To what degree does the church need a rooted-ness?

Given the fact that the Bible calls us pilgrims and exiles in this life, there is a certain degree in which Christians will always feel a longing to arrive.  There is a tension between the already and the not yet.  Whatever city or town you live in, that is not your ultimate home as a Christian. 

This reality then causes me to question, in what sense do we as churches need to be raising up indigenous leaders to plant indigenous churches (churches that somehow “embody” the culture)?  Does Theise’s kind of connectedness fly in the ecclesial landscape?  Should it fly?  How much is an indigenous leader blind to the defects in his culture so that he can prophetically speak the gospel in that soil, and seek to change it?  In other words, in so far as a pastor is like a farmer (2 Tim 2:6), isn’t his job to till up the soil, and to produce a community that does not look like the world’s community in a certain place, but to produce a covenant community that is counter-cultural, and that stands out as a light in a dark place?

I can’t help but think of Abraham in this regard.  Instead of God keeping him where he was as an indigenous leader, God called him to, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

In the NT we see Paul appointing someone like Titus who was a journeymen with Paul, to be a local pastor in a place different from his birthplace.

I guess I am wondering how much I too long, like Theise, for a connectedness and rootedness in culture, yet at the same time realize that in God’s wisdom, he constantly upsets our idea of “home” in the tender process of having us set our sights on the New Jerusalem that is yet to come.

In short, place can become idolatrous.  The city can become idolatrous, a way of hiding our real need to be connected to each other in word and sacrament, rather than with the cultural affiliations of the world. 

In a recent conversation I was reminded about Cain’s fear in Genesis 4.  His fear was that, “he would be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,” something too great for him to bear.  God then graciously marks him.  Then Cain has a son, Enoch (which means “to dedicate”) and he names the first city after his son.  His fear was disconnect, his fear was to be a wanderer, to be fragmented from a place and from a people.  So he builds a city.

In contrast, look again at Abraham.  Hebrews 11 says that, “Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance.  And he went out, not knowing where he was going…living in tents…for he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”

In a very real way, the response of faith in a fallen world is that of accepting the role of exile, the role of wanderer, the role of fugitive in the world.  In contrast, the other response is to cope by yourself, which is the response of Cain.  Building a city and building a community dedicated to your own fear of being a sojourner, and thus dedicated to a fleeting city to try and stabilize the soul, is the response of fear and not faith.  In contrast to Cain, we are called like Abraham to seek a lasting city yet to come, and let our fearful hearts find stability in the peace of Christ as he comes to us in our weak churches, and in our peculiar communities that the gospel (not the city) creates.  Our lack of faith tends to want to build communities around something other than the gospel.  We long to find identity in the structures of the world over-against the structures of the Spirit.  May God grant us the faith to look at the city and see a phoney alternative, and may God grant us the faith to look at the wasteland and see the way home.

We all have this longing for a place.  In the world of wine Theise puts it like this, “I don’t have time to waste on processed wines that taste as if they could have come from anywhere, because in fact they come from nowhere and have no place to take me.  We crave spirit of place because of our own need to be located, which reassures us that we belong in the universe.  We want our bearings.  We want to know where home is.  We can deny or ignore this longing, but it will scrape away at us relentlessly while we wonder why we feel so homesick, why we never feel whole.”  From Cain to Theise, our great fear is to be a wonderer, consumed by our disconnect.  By faith however, we connect to the world to come in word and sacrament, over-against the constant temptation to connect to the city by synchronizing its ways with the way of the gospel.

My, how I feel the tension….

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

One of Denver's Best covering one of The Best


Sometimes someone comes along who can interpret a song arguably better than the one who composed it.  Nathaniel Rateliff, one of Denver's best songwriters, went to a cathedral and played the heck out of one of Townes Van Zandt's gems "no place to fall."  I hope you enjoy. 

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

6 Ways To Serve Your Pastor's Wife on Sundays

Read a great post on this subject here.  Not a lot of folks think about this topic in depth, hopefully Ryan's thoughts can promote solid reflection on such an important aspect of church life.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Beauty, Being, Kenosis, ....and Lots of Words I Cannot Pronounce

So, yea, as expected, I didn't quite understand most of what Dr. Hart was lecturing about.  Yet at the same time, it was a fantastic lecture.  Just like if you play basketball with those who are better than you it helps you elevate your own game, so too when you listen to people who are thinking on another level than you are, it hopefully has a positive impact on your own thinking.

Bottom line, Dr. Hart is interested in how Christian truth informs human reflection on aesthetics, or what is beautiful.  One of the salient points that stayed with me from his lecture is the idea that Christ dying on the cross is more terrifying than any human tragedy.  Dr. Hart, well schooled in classics, reminded us how in ancient tragedies (specifically Greek tragedies), there is a dirge written after the tragedy so that the characters can process and cope with the tragedy on some level.  The dirge is meant to help the characters process and help humans come to grips with just how grim life can be on earth.  So for Hart then, the reason Christ on the cross is more terrifying is because it is met with silence.  Silence from heaven, silence on earth.  There is no cantor, or dirge.  It is the most terrifying silence in history, for it represents the greatest fear of any creature, the lasting death of their creator.  Thus no law, no meaning, no relationship, no hope will ever be present again.

Yet, how great then the resurrection, and how grateful we are to be in light of Christ undergoing all the dreadful silence for us.

...

Another powerful part of his lecture was simply his unpacking of his idea of beauty as simply the appearance of the thing.  Part of what makes something beautiful is that it wasn't there a minute ago.  You hear a song you weren't anticipating, you see a sunrise unimaginable, you see the new clothes of your wife right before your eyes.  It is beautiful in its appearing to you when you did not summon or anticipate that thing.  That is why there is grace in beauty.  It graciously appeared when you knew it not.

Hearing Dr. Hart lecture made me want to go back and read some of The Beauty of the Infinite.  Maybe I will understand 5.6% this time.  Its just like when I want to go play basketball with those better than me even though I know I won't have the ball passed to me (until they find out I can hit the open 3-ball).  I still want to play, and I know it will be good for me.  So it is with the works of David Bentley Hart.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Beauty, Being, and Kenosis: the Aesthetics of the Incarnation

Why are human beings prone to cult followings?  It is a phenomenon that is common to human experience, and thus one of which theological students are not immune. 

While a student at Westminster Seminary, a few classmates started randomly quoting to me passages by an author of whom I had never heard.  After a couple of days I figured out the author was American theologian David Bentley Hart, and the work they had been quoting from was The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.  And in the interest of full disclosure, I think there was a small but zealous "Bentley Hart" cult following that occurred over the next few months.  Books and articles were mined, quotes were emailed, texted, and made the stuff of "insider" theological banter.

Well all good cult followings end in either death or deliverance-by-maturity, and thankfully it was the later that prevailed on campus.  The end result was that there was a new theologian to read and a new appreciation of a writer from a different theological perspective.  Ever since, I have kept the occasional ear to Bentley Hart's pen.

Which is why recent events could not have been drawn up more providentially.  For Dr. Hart is blessing the Biola campus tonight by giving a free lecture open to the public titled "Beauty, Being, and Kenosis: the Aesthetics of the Incarnation."  It is part of Biola's larger 8th annual art symposium.  If nothing else, the lecture by Dr. Hart promises to be provocatively obtuse, poetic, and singular.  I admire Dr. Hart's attention to aesthetics and beauty in the realm of Christian thought and I am looking forward to hearing him speak on a topic which has occupied much of his career.

If I can understand the lecture, I plan on posting a summary!