November 16, 2006

 The modern age began to come to an end when men discovered that they could no longer understand themselves by the theory professed by the age.

-Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle

I must admit to being interested in the “spirit of the age.”  Even though it is clear that Christ, and the best of his philosophical followers, emphasize that the focus should not be on the grand aeons and glacial movements of cultures.  I hope that my faith in eternity will allow this interest in cultural evolutions, devolutions and revolutions, to be a constructive interest.  I do often feel a bit like one of those naturalists who studies grizzly bears or great white sharks.  I have an awareness that the object of my study might turn at any moment and devour me; predation seems to be an integral part of any age of man.  I, for my part, hope to be an observer rather than a hunter.  The nuances of culture are things I want to understand but do not wish to have on my table.  When it comes to ingesting truth, I make a concerted effort, with God’s help, to subsist on the Word of God rather than the word of man.

            The on-going shift between the modern and the post-modern is interesting to me on an observational level and important on a practical level, since, as a practitioner of institutional religion, I am locked in a symbiotic relationship with the culture.  I am invested in the single greatest human institution of the medieval, renaissance and enlightenment (modern) ages.  My ordination is by a branch of Christ’s church known as Presbyterian, for better or worse, I am credentialed and sanctioned by that particular institutional manifestation of the church.  Faith tells me that there is a transcendent Church that is beyond the flawed, human conglomeration that we see and know but the Body of Christ is sometimes hard to see.  The church that I serve is deeply rooted in the philosophy of the enlightenment and as such is struggling to deal with the emergence of post-modernity.

            The peculiar thing about this shift in “ages” is that we are aware of it as it happens; it is not being left to historians.  We have living, vital people who stand firmly rooted in the modern age, with all its assumptions of technology, progress and scientific eminence, and firmly state that science and reason are the only ways to uncover truth and solve problems.  At the same time you have those who stand up and point out the failures of modernity, who cannot accept the “theory professed by the age” any longer.  Modernity did not fail in its attempt to explain our physical surroundings and produce better quality of life through technology.  It has plumbed the depths of nature, from galactic dynamics to microbiology and beyond; it has insulated us from the red tooth and claw of nature.  But science has failed when trying to study the human psyche and soul.  Thus as Percy says above, “the modern age began to fail when men discovered they could no longer understand themselves…” It became clear that we are something more than organisms responding to stimuli, and just at the moment when the children of the enlightenment thought they had killed God and trumpeted the ultimate foolishness of human arrogance, “God is dead!” across the covers of their magazines, the age began to crumble.

            It is ironic that the church is having so much trouble dealing with a paradigm shift that actually re-opens the door of faith.  The ultimate expression of the scientific worldview was atheism; the ultimate expression of humanism was communism.  Those things were openly hostile to God and faith; the post-modern shift represents their failure.  So why aren’t the doors of the church being used by the people who have cast off the dominion of godless technology and the soulless universe?  If this train of thought is at all valid, it’s because the church is now two steps behind the curve.  We could not, by our nature, embrace the “God is dead” end result of the enlightenment (but we did seem to like having Him in a casket).  Post-modern Christianity must come to terms with a living, dangerous God.  Modernity was so unconditionally embraced by Christian thought that we began to think we could “figure out” God the same way we study mitochondria and DNA.

“Those are the right instructions,” indeed they are.  We live in a world that is absolutely obsessed with being somebody else.  Everybody seems to walk around with a permanent chip on their shoulder, wanting to be thinner, wanting to be tanner, wanting to have more money, drive a nicer car, have more successful children.  And what does it get us, do we ever find a “better place” or a “better life?”  The people that deal with life the best, who face trials with dignity and manage to find the joy in life, are those who realize that where they are is where God has put them.  It does no good to regret your position once you’re placed, it does no good to wish you had done things differently in the past, the only hope is to live right in the future.

            People are given all sorts of places and chances, some have had better than you, but a lot have had worse, maybe much worse.  Children born to wealthy, influential families become drug addicts and children born to the desperate poor become doctors, with at least a few examples of every permutation in between.  People, driven by aspirations and dreams, or hobbled by sin and weakness, all seem to find a place, as if it were as inevitable as water settling in a low spot or vapor rising to the heavens.  There is no floor or ceiling to the human experience.

            It does no good wishing you were someone else, you are who you are, who God has made you to be.  What you should try is to live up to the standard that your Creator has set for you.  Most of us are “not all the way capable of so much,” but knowing the right instructions when we see them is an important first step.  To at least know that God has a plan and a place for you is the beginning of being truly able to “rejoice evermore.”

            You start where you are, not where you wish you were.  You use the gifts you have not the ones you wish you had.  You love the people God puts around you not the people you wish you could love.  You accept the joy that He gives you not the joy you wish you had.  You are the person God has made you, don’t be so arrogant as to think you know better than He.

            Here is the benediction I have been using for about six months, it comes out of the Acts 16:5 Initiative and was written by George Halverson:

 Continuous readaptation to suit the whims of others undermines Excellence.           -Confucius

 Fear of man will prove to be a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is kept safe.        -Proverbs 29:25

Wise men, worlds apart, with different theology, different cultures, different stations in life but truth finds them and speaks.  Confucius speaks of “Excellence,” the standard of the “Great Man;” Solomon speaks of Wisdom and the example of the Lord.  If I might make some speculation without going too far down the Unitarian primrose path, I find some important points of contact between the two great sages.  Solomon was standing in a tradition that lived with the reality of a Living God, a God who was involved, for better or worse, with the people of Israel.  Confucius lived in a world haunted by the ghosts of his departed ancestors; the spirits of his world cannot help but be involved and concerned about the honor and Excellence of their descendants.  The great wisdom of these two men comes from their connection to a deeper reality.  Confucius’ idea of “Excellence” is expansive, rather than confining, as was Solomon’s relationship with The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (his ancestors).  Solomon’s world also had a fixation of the manifestations of the “Great Man,” his father David had been one such man and in the future the prophets would look for the Messiah, the Anointed One, the definitive embodiment of the “Great Man.”

            But they both seemed to know that the path to integrity was not to be found among men but rather in something transcendent.  “Fear of man,” or, “continuous readaptation to suit the whims of others,” is not the way to Excellence, it is the way to failure and bondage.  It makes me think.  What keeps us from being an excellent church?  Is it sin?  On some level it is but Christ has conquered sin, in other words he has given us a way out of that bondage, so that if we live in him we no longer need to let sin be the great stumbling block.  Sin is, of course, always a background, a constant white noise in our ears, pollution of the soul, but this sin has caused a specific flaw in the modern church, we are lost.  We react rather than act, we retreat rather than advance, we “readapt” rather than adapt.  At our worst we listen more to the “whims of others,” than to the Holy Spirit, simply because “sighs too deep for words” just aren’t as audible as complaints too numerous to count.  The “fear of man” has taken over, whether it is the conservative/fundamentalist fear that man will somehow finally toss the straw that breaks the camel’s back and cause God to break his covenants with Noah, Abraham and the Church and just fold the whole thing in a fiery conflagration of judgment and wrath.  Or whether it is the liberal progressive fear that we are somehow violating the commandment to love one another when we stand for righteousness in the face of sin, sin which is harmful not only to society but to those who are in its grip.

            The fear of man and the fears of men undermine excellence and perhaps the worst thing we can do is tell ourselves we’re doing okay.  Jesus constantly pushed the envelope.  The Great Man seemed to have very little in the way of prudence and self preservation instincts as Confucius envisioned.  He challenged the rulers and religious authorities, he challenged secular progressives and religious zealots, he would challenge Democrats and Republicans alike, he would probably chase both Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore away with a whip of cords.  Jesus was all about excellence.  Excellence in trusting God, excellence in forgiveness, excellence in love, excellence in obedience, excellence in thought and philosophy, excellence even in the humble chores and tasks of life.  The Kingdom of Heaven that he was always going on about was nothing less than the establishment of God’s excellence forever and ever.

There are different kinds of right understanding; some have right understanding in a certain order of things, and not in others, where they go astray. Some draw conclusions well from a few premises, and this displays an acute judgment.

-Blaise Pascal, Pensees

I have known very intelligent people who cannot balance their checkbook, and I have read correspondence from highly accomplished people that reads as if it was written by a child of seven.  Yet even with the overwhelming tide of specialization in our society, most people speak and behave as if every field of knowledge were equally open to them.  We experience a world where the jack of all trades is a rapidly disappearing character.  Only a few mechanics have the knowledge and computers necessary to work on all types of modern cars.  The medical field is so highly segmented that you practically need an independent consultant to keep all your specialists straight.  Yet people who live in a world where they cannot comprehend let alone fix most of the technology that surrounds them have fallen into a mode of thought that is maniacal in its arrogance.

            The spirit of the age tries to comprehend God through the scientific method and when it inevitably fails takes up the position that God must not exist.  This is highly inconsistent with scientific endeavor, let alone with spirituality.  For years we have tried to cure cancer and AIDS, we have not yet achieved those goals but science has not given up.  We have hope that such dreams as interstellar exploration and cold fusion are in fact possible, yet we have given up on God!  Spiritual beings that we are, we must know that God is much more necessary to our existence than computers and microwave ovens.  But we don’t apply the same discipline to our “search” for God as we do to our search for technological advances.  If we did we would certainly realize that God does not need found but rather has revealed Himself to us.

            We cannot “discover” God but we can encounter Him and be in relationship to Him, and this is not job for specialists!  Perhaps one of the great errors of the modern church has been to allow the laity to become comfortable with the practice of assuming their clergy-people are specialists in relating to God.  Thus, we come to understand God about as well as we understand our automobile, and on similar terms.  Theology, doctrine and spirituality are difficult things that are just easier to delegate to someone who “feels called” to that sort of thing.  Who needs to really understand the Trinity as long as Reverend so and so seems to have a good grasp on it?  What’s worse is that this often translates into practical illiteracy when it comes to Scripture and blindness when it comes to seeing God’s ongoing creativity within the scope of human history.

            We have a God who is willing and able to communicate on many levels, using many languages but we often self impose a narrow field of hearing and vision upon our souls.  We must break out of the thin walls that our human premises surround us with and understand that God does not fit within those frames.  The premises of God are faith, hope and love, draw your conclusions well.

Then the Lord said to Gideon, “The troops are still too many; take them down to the water and I will sift them out for you there.

-Judges 7: 4a

We all know it is true, a few good people can do as much as many who are poorly trained and minimally committed.  My wife was preparing her Sunday school lesson the other night and she looked up from the commentary she was reading and said: “he keeps talking about this ‘remnant’ of Israel, what does that mean?”  I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, here we go!”  I mean how to begin with that topic; it is up there with justice, righteousness and covenant in terms of themes in the Hebrew Scripture.  God was always dealing with remnants, sometimes because He chose to, other times because He really didn’t have much of a choice.  If you look at God’s personality profile, you will get the distinct impression that He enjoys a challenge.  Gideon rallied his troops against the Midianites and in the context of battle with swords, spears and the like; more is almost always better but not in this case.  God needs to sift them out, several times in fact, to find the ones that are worthwhile and to prove that it was, in fact, the power of God and not the skill of Gideon and his army that won the day. 

            It would do us well to remember that when God chooses us, it may not exactly be flattering to our ego.  God chooses those who are weak, inconstant, even sinful and builds us up into mighty warriors.  He is perfectly comfortable with a small, sometimes impossibly small, remnant of His faithful people.  When I look around, in the local church, in denominational structures and in the relationship of the whole Church to the world, I am sure we are being sifted.  New faith is being raised up in unlikely places, in the face of oppression and poverty Christian faith is alive and central, yet amidst freedom and prosperity it staggers like a dying elephant.  We are out of touch with our own doctrine and theology and estranged from each other and the world we live in.  Western culture is entirely uncomfortable with the idea of a remnant, of a cadre of people holding on to something against all odds.  It flies in the face of populist, “living the dream,” mentality.  We look at people who hold onto truth at all costs as being anachronistic to the point of doom.  We “succeed” by embracing the new, by riding change like ideological surfers.

            However, God delights in those who are steadfast and those who can survive the time in the desert.  He has never been much pleased with large crowds but rather with the faith of a few.  Whether it was Gideon’s 300 soldiers, the fraction of Israel that returned from Babylon after 70 years or the eleven disciples who emerged into the reality of the resurrection; God loves and uses remnants.  G.K. Chesterton commented that, “we worship a God who has managed to find His way out of the grave.”  Thus we should not only be confident that God can and will resurrect His Church, even if she dies, but we should be honored to be part of the remnant that He will use for the task.

 At the post-mortem our medical experts absolutely and emphatically rejected the possibility of insanity.  –Fyodor Dostoevsky, Devils (or The Possessed)

 The last line of Dostoevsky’s novel Devils rings with a grim, bracing bit of reality.  Nikolai was in his right mind when he hung himself, he selected a strong silk cord, soaped it well so the noose would slide tight, even had a spare nail to hang it from in case the first one bent.  “Everything indicated premeditation and consciousness up to the very last minute.”  We are bent and led around by Devils and in the end we do not appear to be at all insane.  Perhaps it would help society if those beset by demons would behave more clearly as such, if they would rant and rave among the tombs like the Gerasene, if they would clearly identify the fact that “they are Legion.”

            There is too much going on in the world that seems like the deliberate preparations of one who has finally reached a decision and is going to commit suicide.  We detach ourselves from our moorings, isolate ourselves, taking great care that by the time we do the deed no one will be truly grieved, or so we think.  Romantic characters seem to have a certain fascination with suicide as a noble act that will free themselves and those they love of intolerable suffering.  They stage many small experiments in self destruction, testing their hypothesis that truly their death will be the best thing for all.

            Our society has gone into severe bouts of manic depression, frightening in an individual, nauseatingly terrible in a culture.  We are alternately depressed about our own complicity in destruction and oppression and manic about trying to preserve our “way of life” from those who threaten it: liberals, conservatives, fundamentalists, terrorists, foreigners, blacks, whites, Jews, gentiles, corporations, governments.  Truth be told we can’t figure out who the “enemy” really because “he” is “legion.”  We fear God because people can abuse His name, we fear lack of God because we don’t really trust ourselves.

            Dostoevsky prefaces Devils with the poem by Alexander Pushkin:

Strike me dead, I can’t see the track,

We’ve lost our way, what are we to do?

A devil seems to be leading us unto the field,

And making us go around in circles.

So many of them, where are they being driven?

And why are they singing so mournfully?

Are they burying a house-spirit,

Or celebrating a witch’s wedding?

Dostoevsky and Pushkin were the creative blast of a dying world, late 19^th century Russia was fertilizing the seeds of the Bolshevik Revolution.  As one reads about that Russia one cannot help but have a certain sense of dread.  So many of the root causes of the bloody revolt and tyrannical reign of the proletariat are also present in modern America.  Politics seems like a foreign world to most people, we are at least as detached from our leaders as the Russian people were from their Tzars.  We have mixed emotions, even about the ones we like; we give them power without giving them trust and they demonstrate that they probably deserve neither.  The middle class is disappearing and people are living with increasing amounts of debt, our economy seems to float on a cushion of imaginary money, more is owed than actually exists.  It doesn’t take a terribly apocalyptic imagination to envision our society imploding, exploding or just plain crumbling.

            The church seems to sing mournfully but we don’t do much about it, maybe we can’t, maybe it is the will of God that the world as it is now will end but we can’t really know for sure.  We can surely stand counter-culture but we’re not doing a very good job.  The church holds, somewhere in our confused heart, the truth of God but we are never-endingly distracted by pseudo-pagan practice, secular politics and ideological debates.  Are we “burying a house-spirit, or celebrating a witch’s wedding?”  We should be doing neither for we serve a Living God.  The Church should be able to stand above the destruction of any principality or power but we seem to be getting sucked in and flushed down.  In some ways we’re going down faster than the world around us.  We have laid out our confessions but we don’t know them well or live by them.  We go about our business with the orderly resolve of one who has firmly decided to die.  We have chosen a fine silk cord of secular ideologies and soaped it up with ignorance of God’s Word.  The only thing that remains is to hastily scribble Nikolai’s last note, “No one is to blame, I did it myself.”