Category: General

Assimilation

I have a paper due in a few days in my class on worship. The task is simple: say *something* about worship in about 5 pages. Interact with three books. And I’ve been hitting a brick wall. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about worship. Oh golly. It’s that I’ve got too much. So for the next few days, I’m going to be inflicting you, my dear readers, with some of the things I’ve had to work through in order to get on to writing the paper. It’s hopelessly biographical I’m afraid, so I do hope you’ll forgive me. It’s also incredibly long, so I’m going to be breaking it up over a few days. By the time you get to the part that pertains to my paper, the paper (God willing) will already have been turned in.

Worship has been at the center of how I defined myself for the better part of my life. Worship was who I was. I was the worship guy. Worship is what I was all about. At that time, I understood worship to be a kind of mystical experience. When God meets with man, and man sees God for even a piece of who he is, man is both lifted up and demolished, and this… experience… is what I called worship. I have something of a philosopher’s nature in me, so I parsed theories about how worship worked. Worship could be had in private or in groups of various sizes. Worship could be expressed, as God used people to reveal God’s Spirit, character, and nature to other people. This expression came out in the form of spiritual gifts and various arts which could be used to communicate in worship. However, the soul of worship was ultimately in the experience itself, somewhere between catharsis and illumination. “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). The process of being transformed, as I understood it, consisted of worship.

But in about 1999, my life came to a crashing halt. Everything I thought I had built my life upon turned out not to have enough substance to get me anywhere. It’s very difficult for me to describe this time, because there’s nothing I can point to particularly that was *wrong*. It was just that nothing was particularly *right*. I was training for ministry at a church that had no particular use for my contribution – but why is it exactly that I needed them to need me? I was lonely – though I had never before cared if I had friends. I was going through one of those classic spiritual dry times, and I should have been content to recognize it as such and ride it out. But things just didn’t add up. All around me everything was as ideal as I had ever imagined it, and yet I was discontent – crying, agonizing, discontent. Something in my worldview – my theology – was incomplete. And I didn’t have the first clue what it was.

So I started everything from scratch. Continue reading “Assimilation”

democracy fails because it does what voters want.

Greg Mankiw points us toward a new book now available on amazon.com: The Myth of the Rational Voter. There is also an excerpt available at the Princeton University Press.

The book is a critique of democracy on the basis that people are fallen and sinful. Of course, being written by economists for a secular audience, it doesn’t quite put it in those terms, but it makes essentially the same point:

Across-the-board irrationality is not a strike against democracy alone, but all human institutions. A critical premise of this book is that irrationality, like ignorance, is selective. We habitually tune out unwanted information on subjects we don’t care about. In the same vein, I claim that we turn off our rational faculties on subjects where we don’t care about the truth. Economists have long argued that voter ignorance is a predictable response to the fact that one vote doesn’t matter. Why study the issues if you can’t change the outcome? I generalize this insight: Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can’t change the outcome?

Of course, being a book by economists written for a secular audience, they go on to look into ways of forming a government that can compensate for fallen human nature. After all, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” I think this is consistent with a Christian understanding of government, regardless of the form it takes. One of those purposes is to at least put a cap on human evil until such time as the Governor comes who can eliminate all sinfulness.

I’m afraid I haven’t time to read the book myself, but it looks a very worthwhile read. I’d love to hear from anybody else who gets a chance to look at it.

Only Catholics Should Speak in Tongues?

Mark Barnes believes that Speaking in Tongues is a practice that should only be practiced by Roman Catholics:

Most Charismatics believe that “speaking in tongues is prayer or praise spoken in syllables not understood by the speaker”. Tongues, in other words, are understandable only with interpretation. Frankly, this turns the clock back on the reformation. Charismatics who practice tongues-speaking in public worship have given up the hard-won victory that the word of God should be in the language of the hearer.

I may have some thoughts later to share in response, but for now, I’d like to hear *your* thoughts.
However, I will add that his arguments in this post aren’t nearly as interesting as his earlier post that Charismatics Are Not New Testament Christians

To Have Authority

###Curious bits of 1 Timothy###

The other thing that’s been bothering me lately is less of a hot topic, and at the same time a little more complex. It has to do with the second half of the sentence “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man,” in 1 Timothy 2:12. What does this phrase “to have authority over a man mean?” Once again, it sounds obvious and deeply offensive to the modern mind: Paul is a misogynist and wants to hold women down. More charitably, he’s establishing God’s order for church, possibly reaffirming a hierarchy that has been intrinsic to humankind from the beginning: that the men should be the leaders of the community.

That may be so, and if it is, it comes with a bundle of questions about how we are to implement such a hierarchy in our society, and how that might affect our worldview. But the thing that has my attention is the idea of hierarchy itself. As I mentioned earlier, as an American, I have this gut-level *need* to make everybody basically equal. I’m very content with the idea of meritocracy. I have no problem with admitting that there must be some kind of structure, some kind of decision and command process, and awarding positions of power to those who desire them and prove their capability to fill the role. That is, I’m an instinctive egalitarian, though I recognize that there are fundamental differences in temperament between men and women which may lead to different roles.

1 Timothy seems to fly in the face of my egalitarianism. Continue reading “To Have Authority”

Let a woman Learn

###Curious bits of 1 Timothy###

Last semester, I embarked on an ambitious effort to do some analysis of 1 Timothy 8-15, one of the infamous biblical texts on whether women should have positions of authority. It was a little too ambitious, and I never quite completed it, but ever since, it’s been hanging in my mind, and I keep coming back to it with different results. Since I’ve been dwelling on it again, I thought I’d share a few of my quandaries.

First is the issue of learning and teaching. A cursory reading seems to show that Paul believes women should be allowed to learn, but not to teach. Furthermore, there is a peculiar way that a woman should learn: quietly, and submissively. “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; rather she is to remain quiet.”

Beyond the general offensiveness of this idea to modern Western minds, there have been any number of sound biblical objections to this simple interpretation, which I’m not going to bother to address. The one that has been holding my attention for a while has been that there seems to be an inherent contradiction just within those two verses: “Let a woman learn… I do not permit a woman to teach.” This is curious. Why would someone conjure a person to learn, only to abjure them to teach? I know this is ignoring the religious frame of the text, but the old one-room school house would fall apart under these orders: Imagine not allowing those who have just learned to immediately go and teach! Does knowledge rot in the mind, depending on whose mind it is encased? Continue reading “Let a woman Learn”

Jane Galt on Socialization

“Socialization” impedes socialization:

Certainly, it is not evolutionarily normal for children to spend the majority of their time immersed in a peer group composed of people within a year of their own age. Nor is it probably healthy. Children act rather like animals when they’re in groups together. Not only the immaturity of adolescence, but the barbaric cruelty of much of it, may be due to the fact that herding children into a series of age-segregated activities profoundly retards the process of socialisation. If Judith Harris is right, and peer group effects dominate parental influence, we are in effect letting large groups of children raise each other.

Find Judith Harris. Buy me her book.

Athens, Jerusalem, and… Canaan?

Dan Edelen, one of my new pneumablogger reads, has a new post up at Cerulean Sanctum on their decision to send an only child to public school, rather than a local Christian school. The argument goes something like this:

Up till now, they’ve been homeschooling, but they’re starting to see evidence of socialization problems that, partly due to his being an only child, simply aren’t being solved by extracurricular activities. He needs to be in a fully socialized environment. But a friend of theirs has insisted that, by sending his kid to a public school, he’s essentially “handing him over to the Canaanites.”

Tertullian, the 2nd century church father once asked the famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” That is, why should we bother teaching our children philosophy and the classics when all they really need to know is the Bible? Dan takes this metaphor one step further and basically asserts that, Jerusalem or Athens, all of it is Canaan. That is, public or private school, classical or modern, no matter how you do it, Christians don’t have the privilege of living in a purely separate society. We still live in a secular society, we still have secular influences. The only real choice you get is **which** Canaan you live in. In a public school, there runs a real danger of your kids being exposed to harmful ideas: unchastity, deceitfulness, vengefulness, violence. But these are obvious dangers; they can be targeted and exposed a hundred yards off. In a private school which proports to be Christian, there are just as many dangers – there are just as many fallen people – but their unchristian nature may be more subtle and difficult to weed out.

So far so good, and if he’d stopped there, I’d be singing the praises of Dan Edelen. Continue reading “Athens, Jerusalem, and… Canaan?”

Alpha Male

That’s not my term; it’s Valerie’s. The word to me draws up pictures of Gorillas in the forest. But the other night, as we were driving home, I was whining about the fact that I have so few friends, particularly guy friends. Due to a weird quirk in my personality, not having a lot of friends doesn’t normally affect me so much – I don’t get lonely. But what bothers me is that it seems pretty consistent that whenever I meet somebody I think I ought to be able to get along with, I don’t like them. This is particularly true when the person is a guy with any kind of position or prestige, or strong character. Almost inevitably, I don’t like them: they’re too harsh, too rude, too proud, too wrongheaded, too unopen to correction. Normally, I like to think of myself as an easygoing kind of guy, but it seems like I have something in me that rebels whenever I think I ought to make a friend, and I just can’t get along with half the men I meet.

Valerie summed it up in two words: “Well Kyle,” she said, “You’re an alpha male. And these other men you keep having problems with, they’re alpha males also, and you recognize that in them – it’s part of what makes you think you ought to get along so well. But when you see them leading in ways you don’t approve of, it sets off triggers so that you want to fix them.” Of course, being a dutiful wife, she also assured me that all my judgments about these other men are of course correct, that the things they’re doing that get under my skin are betrayals of their weak character, and that I’m perfectly justified in disliking them. In short, I am the very image of Jane Austen’s Mr. Knightly, and not merely a jerk with control issues, which gratified me immensely. But in one step she punched my equality button and registered an incipient dislike of silverback gorillas.

Continue reading “Alpha Male”

Terrible God

I’m sure your rss reader has been flooded the last few days with posts on Easter; I know mine has. And yet I feel guilty posting on all the other things we’ve been writing about and seemingly going on as if we had no regard for the most important Christian holiday of the year. I’ve wanted to say something, but I haven’t had anything particularly arresting to say.

No longer. In church this morning the Easter sermon was on the unlikely text of Revelation 5:9-10

“Worthy are you to take the scroll

   and to open its seals,

for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God

   from every tribe and language and people and nation,

and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God,

   and they shall reign on the earth.”

Patrick, our pastor, preached today what I believe was a terrific sermon, but I was lost around point 3 as I was struck by the terrible nature of the God we serve.

By terrible, I don’t mean evil, but frightening, incomprehensible, awe inspiring. Here is a God who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. The 24 elders and four living creatures say to the lamb, the Son of God, “worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God.” Why did Jesus offer himself up on the cross? Because God the Father told him too. Because God wanted *men* (people), and the blood of the righteous Son of God was the price for them that was set by our sin. Continue reading “Terrible God”