Theology is an Acquired Taste

Posted on August 11, 2012 by Matt

Coffee is typically considered an adult beverage–not because children are incapable of drinking it responsibly, but because they’re uninterested in drinking it at all.  At 31, I myself don’t drink coffee for the same reason children don’t:  1) I have no reason to, and 2) I tried it once and I didn’t like the taste–it was way too bitter.  Those who do regularly drink coffee generally have a specific reason for starting.  Maybe they were cold and it was the only hot beverage available.  Maybe they were with a group of other coffee drinkers and wanted to fit in.  Maybe they had a long night ahead and needed something that would keep them awake.  But regardless of what got them started, most coffee drinkers do something that kids who have just taken a little sip could never do–they genuinely enjoy drinking coffee.

Coffee is what we call an acquired taste.  It’s not something people like naturally, but it’s natural to learn to like it.  Most of life’s worthwhile endeavors are like this.  Because it takes real effort to enjoy, reading Dostoyevsky may not provide the immediate gratification that reading the latest Dresden Files book does.  However, once the effort is made, the return is well worth it.  Whether its the edification that only comes through capital-A Art or the satisfaction that only comes with a job well done, there are some things in life that we need to learn to enjoy and work to appreciate.  One of the chief tasks of parenting is to encourage children to develop these kinds of tastes.  A child may prefer to stay home and play video games*, but good parents will nevertheless take them to see plays or visit nature preserves.  Sometimes they’ll love it & sometimes they’ll hate it, but regardless of the outcome, parents have a responsibility to lead their children into opportunities to live deeply whether they want to or not.

This is why it’s such a travesty that our churches have largely abandoned this responsibility to the youth in their charge.  With so many dying congregations in America, an irrational fear of irrelevance and a misguided drive to “save” the church has lead many Christians to try and bury their youth with instant gratification because that at least gets some immediate reaction.  Rather than doing what they’ve been given to do (baptizing and teaching everything Jesus taught), their resources must be dedicated to actions that bring about measurable results.  They gave their youth a sip of theology once, but the youth thought it was bitter.  For the marketeers, that simply means action taken, measurement recorded, time to move on and find something that “works.”  And for children, nothing gives a more immediate positive reaction than sugar.  Action taken, measurement recorded, let’s find more sugar delivery mechanisms.  The church cannot afford to be such a lazy parent.  She needs to teach her children to enjoy and appreciate the doctrine and theology that have been handed over to her so that she might, in turn, hand it over to them.  We have more important things to offer than sugar.  And if we don’t…  let’s face it, the world generally makes better candy than we do.

Unfortunately, the marketeers aren’t the only ones failing the youth.  Many Christians oppose that erroneous approach and even do so for the right reasons:  because Word & Sacrament are what build the church, they must be at the center.  However, too many of these anti-marketeers fall into the trap of over-correcting for the error.  If the marketeers teach anything, they generally teach a kind of self-help–a shallow subset of the Law which contains exhortation divorced from the Law’s full convicting power–and the Gospel is off in the corner somewhere.  In overreaction to this, the anti-marketeers decide that they will preach the Gospel accompanied only by those parts of the Law they can “trust” to fully convict–completely divorced from any part of Scripture they fear might be taken as exhortation or instruction.  Whereas the marketeers want all law to be third use, the anti-marketeers want it all to be second use, and both sides end up re-engineering the law rather than simply preaching all of it and letting the Holy Spirit decide how He will use it.

The sad consequence is that the anti-marketeers likewise fail to help those in their care acquire a taste for theology.  Despite the fact that they, of all people, should know better, they only have the sacraments and a subset of the Word at the center of their ministry.  They do not preach the whole counsel of God.  Oh, they preach sermons and hold Bible studies, but they’re so scared of “making a law out of the Gospel” that they seldom, if ever, actually instruct anyone to come.  On Pentecost, those who were cut to the quick by the law asked Peter what they should do.  Whereas Peter told them to repent and be baptized, the anti-marketeers would rather tell them “No!  You don’t do anything at all.  God does all the work.”  Meanwhile, the hearers reluctantly repent from their repentance, and then scratch their heads and wonder to themselves “God does all of… what… exactly?  Just send me to heaven when I die?  Why do I bother going to church again?”  The Gospel seems needed only because everyone is technically guilty of everything (the shallow understanding of original sin), and forgiveness is a check-box that was apparently marked off at Baptism.

The anti-marketeers certainly provide the divine service and Bible studies.  The youth are even welcome to attend.  However, they are not rigorously instructed, exhorted, encouraged, or even welcomed to attend.  The anti-marketeers set the table with a wonderful feast (minus some items that look too much like candy) and then simply stand there and hope the Holy Spirit makes the youth leave the candy shop to join them.  The youth, however, tasted theology once.  They found it bitter, and so they avoid it because nobody ever trained them otherwise.  They keep eating nothing but candy because their parent didn’t want to appear too legalistic by telling them to eat their vegetables.  They don’t have any particular animosity towards the church, but neither do they have any clue why they should be part of it.

Neither the marketeers nor the anti-marketeers have taken on the responsibility of training and disciplining the youth, and those studies showing the vast majority of young Christians leaving the Church in their late teens/early 20’s indicate the grim result.  By God’s grace, many blunder back into the Church later in life, but that does not take away our failure.  In the long-run, nobody is going to be particularly glad that they got to sing “Jesus is my boyfriend” music.  They’re not going to feel much attachment to those who provided pizza parties and gross-out games with an awkward prayer tacked onto the end.  Though immediate, such gratification is also short-lived.  If that’s all that’s keeping them in church, it’s only a matter of time until they move on.  Likewise, the youth aren’t receiving anything from those adults standing in a corner and occasionally casting a furtive glance in their direction hoping that the Holy Spirit will somehow lead them to spontaneously participate.

The very same youths will, however, build their lives on a foundation provided by those who taught them to understand what they believe and why they believe it–whether it comes from their pastor or an atheist college professor.  They will be attached to those who give them an opportunity to understand a liturgy that tangibly expresses continuity with something greater than themselves–whether it’s the chants & rituals of some activist group, or the chants and rituals of a communion of saints going back thousands of years.  They will keep coming back for forgiveness every week when they understand they actually need it every week–otherwise they’ll just keep going to whoever tells them they’re doing fine.

Coffee is not essential to life.  We can afford to let that taste go unacquired.  Theology, however, is essential.  Good parents will recognize this and train their children accordingly.  Those children whose mother is the Church deserve no less.

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*This is not to say that there aren’t video games that are legitimately Art (Silent Hill 2, Xenogears, I’m looking at you).  However, like most movies, most books, most television, etc, most video games are pretty shallow.

Posted in The Modern Church | 2 Comments

Excellence in Vocation: Chick-fil-A Day Wasn’t a Big Deal, and It Didn’t Need to be.

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Matt

“All you did was go and eat a sandwich!”

After Wednesday’s huge show of support for Chick-fil-A, marriage, and/or free speech (depending on the patron), such comments are really all that the bullies have left.  It’s just hard to verbally bully people when they’re not inclined to go along with it.  And so the protest is being minimized instead:  “It didn’t involve a painful sacrifice.  It didn’t require courage.  It therefore doesn’t matter.  You all are making way more of this than it really is.”

True, we shouldn’t make it more than it is.  But let’s not deceptively make it less than it is by pretending it’s being overblown and then denouncing the pretend overblowing.

Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was exactly what a protest should be: a proportional response to the problem at hand.  Some big city mayors and media figures tried to pretend that believing two men or two women can’t marry is this radical & bigoted position that just isn’t tolerated in civil society.  In response, lots of people proved them wrong by going out to eat sandwiches made by someone who holds that view.  Mission accomplished.

In our pride, we think excellence in a vocation is performing some grand act of virtue. When it comes to protesting, we like to imagine ourselves as the one who calmly stares down the firing squad or risks everything to make a stand for what he believes.  In reality, excellence in vocation is no less about simply doing the day-to-day necessities well.  Far from making simple protests irrelevant, we wouldn’t even need grand acts of courage and sacrifice if people were actually consistent about these straightforward, day-to-day needs.  How many small good works are lost because we’re holding out for opportunities for big ones?  Some days require more courage and sacrifice than others, but excellence in vocation is always in taking up whatever trial the day brings.  That is how we do well.

This simple act of protest was done well, and I am thankful for that.  Good on everyone who participated.

Posted in Ethics, Politics, Vocation | 3 Comments

The Persecuted Atheist

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Matt

Earlier this year, the Financial Times put together a sob story about the ruthless persecution of atheists in the United States.  The writer collects a number of anecdotes of discomfort at family gatherings, difficulty rising through the ranks of the Boy Scouts, and worst of all, lost baby-sitting opportunities.  Of course, I doubt that any of these brave atheists would be inclined to trade places with the 100,000 Christians who are murdered for the faith every year.  What is most striking about the piece, however, is not the triviality of the “persecution”; it is the complete obliviousness to exactly why atheists rank lower on America’s social totem pole than gays, lesbians, Jews, Muslims, and so forth.

The author inadvertently provides the quintessential example at the end of the piece with a woman living in Alabama.  Though this poor, persecuted young lady admittedly has the love and pride of her family, one thing is still missing:  she’s not allowed to babysit.  This might just seem like another trivial discomfort brought on by her beliefs, except for the fact that she goes on to explain exactly why she’s not allowed to babysit:  “I have all these cousins who need babysitters but they’re afraid I’ll teach them about evolution, and I probably would.”  So… she’s not allowed to babysit because she has every intention of undermining parents on a subject they obviously find to be important.  How she can complain about not being trusted when she is admittedly untrustworthy is a mystery.  It’s not just her, though–the only thing the author finds “extraordinary” about the situation is that the parents would hold such a view.

The ongoing misunderstanding in this article and society at large is that discomfort at atheists fulfilling certain societal roles is some kind of a religious test.  As the article notes, “Americans” tend to be more ok with minorities such as Jews and Muslims despite their different religions.  For that matter, a polytheist will probably receive the Republican nomination for president.  In light of such facts, the better explanation is that the test is ethical rather than religious.  Yes, I know; atheists can be just as moral as Christians.  This is true to a point, but there is still the matter of the first table of the Law–the one with commandments necessarily excluded by atheism. As many scholars have noted, the common ethical beliefs across cultures nearly universally mirror a generic reading of the Ten Commandments.  This includes the commandments about respecting the supreme benevolent being or beings and refraining from blasphemy.  Why then should we expect people to not look in askance on those who intentionally flout these universal ethics?  Mormons and Muslims may be blatantly wrong in their beliefs, but they do respect a higher power–they’d fail a religious test, but pass a generic ethical one.  On the other hand, go right back to the example of the baby-sitter girl to see what happens when one sees herself as the highest possible authority by default.  Even those atheists who do embrace a “higher power” tend to embrace the constantly shifting and politicized winds of scientific consensus.  Even if it were reliable, however, the fact that it’s methodologically blind to things like goodness and beauty make it a poor higher power indeed with respect to ethics and how we ought to live amongst each other.

When religious people see the most popular atheists openly compare religious upbringing to child-abuse & write books about ending religious faith and then look at the track record of 20th century atheist political leaders who have actually had the power to do something about it, we get understandably nervous.  After all, a substantial part of those ongoing 100,000 annual martyrdoms are still at the hands of atheists in countries like North Korea, Vietnam, China, etc.  We aren’t oblivious to people condemning us as hopelessly ignorant and then desperately trying to make sure our children and our society are “safe” from us.

Posted in Atheism, Ethics | 2 Comments

It’s ART!

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Matt

Art Patrons Pay $100 for the Privilege of Eating Rat

I think my favorite part of “Tomorrow We Will Feast Again on What We Catch” is that this attempt to “explore self-sufficiency in an urban environment” and “put people outside of their comfort zone” involved hiring a chef to prepare rat bruschetta and rat braise with rats purchased from a company that processes “perfectly safe” and “humanely killed” rodents.  How very urban and self-sufficient!  Tomorrow we will feast again on what we order from a catalog.

The current tradition of making the arts all about causing offense and provoking discomfort is a symptom of our decline, but it’s telling that they can’t even bring themselves to actually do that anymore.

Posted in Culture | 1 Comment

Preaching the Law vs. Preaching About the Law

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Matt

About a month ago, I posted a comment over at Brothers of John the Steadfast on a thread regarding legalism and a high view of the law.  The gist of the original post (with which I completely agree), is that anyone with a genuinely high view of the Law is going to be desperate for the Gospel.  If you actually take the Law fully & seriously, there’s no way you could be under the impression that you have upheld it or can uphold it in the future.  Ironically, legalists don’t take the law seriously enough.

However, I thought that one part of the original post needed further commentary:  how does one analyze complaints from laity who think they’re getting too much Gospel and not enough law?  I’ve noticed an unfortunate tendency for confessional pastors to dismiss such complaints as indicative of legalism, self-righteousness, and “itching ears” without really examining whether they might be in any way legitimate.  My comments don’t usually occasion people tracking down my email and thanking me.  Since this particular comment resulted in multiple such emails, I thought it might be worth re-posting here:

I completely agree with Machen & Tullian. If you have a high view of the law (relative to one’s view of man), you want more Gospel because you realize how badly you need it.

However, while I cannot speak to your specific situation, there is at least one more possibility that can lead to parishioners making the kind of confused complaints you recount: a pastor who has a high view of the law but does not preach it accordingly. I raise the possibility precisely because of Machen’s argument. A high view of the law should lead to a greater desire for the Gospel, and yet… they were complaining not just about not enough law, but also about too much Gospel. So could there be a reason the high view was not passed on?

Unfortunately, many pastors with precisely the high view of the law that you describe end up preaching about the law rather than actually preaching the law. For example, they’ll tell their congregation that nobody lives up to the Law but never tell them that God condemns fornication. They’ll tell their congregation that we are all tainted by original sin but never inform wives that God wants them to submit to their husbands. They’ll tell their congregation that none of us love God with our whole hearts or our neighbors as ourselves, but never address the man who doesn’t bother bringing his children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. When they do mention specifics, they do so in a shotgun approach intended to cover everyone in the congregation–a mere rhetorical restatement of “everyone’s guilty.” In short: they proclaim their high view of the law without really proclaiming the law itself.

Pastors really need to do both. The law without the proper interpretation just leads to legalism or despair. But the proper interpretation without the law leads to original sin being seen as nothing more than an abstract check mark on some divine spreadsheet. I only recognize the gravity of original sin because I recognize how pervasive is my desire to commit sins. I only recognize the pervasiveness of my sinful nature when I begin to wonder what kind of person would so frequently want to punch someone who is being irritating, or stare at scantily clad women, or play video games instead of fulfilling my vocations, etc. I only wonder such a thing when I am consistently told that such things are sinful–after all, my culture spends a lot of time and effort telling me exactly the opposite. Without specifics from the pulpit, sin just becomes an abstract concept. It’s hard to have a high view of the law and therefore thirst for the Gospel until one recognizes the sin enfleshed in their own lives.

If we simply preached the whole counsel of God instead of trying to game the system by trying to artificially bring about results (e.g. “every sermon’s got to be 49% law & 51% gospel” or “I have 15 mintues to use today’s Bible reading to make everyone feel equally guilty for a second and then make them all stop feeling guilty before I finish”, etc), this wouldn’t be an issue.

Later in the thread, in response to a question about what we then make of the sanctified man and examples of Scripture’s loving exhortation, I also commented:

In my opinion, verses like that have both law and gospel in them. I can still see my sinfulness in falling short of what a sanctified man is supposed to be. They’re also promises of what God will one day make me and is now making me. They remind me that my salvation will one day be enfleshed in a full and abundant life of faithful obedience (which is even now at work) and graciously instruct me on what that looks like. Whether or not they’re “full” of either, they are part of the whole and should be part of the whole that’s preached.

At the end of the day, it’s not the preacher who decides whether we’re restrained, crushed, or graciously instructed by the law–the Holy Spirit does. The preacher’s responsibility is simply to preach the whole counsel of God, including the verses you list. They’re not authorized to restrict their preaching to verses with loving exhortation because they’re more concerned about their flock doing good works (as some missional Lutherans and Evangelicals do). Neither are they authorized to skip or minimize those verses because they’re afraid their flock might become self-righteous after trying and succeeding in doing some good works (as some confessional Lutherans do).

Posted in Law, Lutheranism, Theological Pietism | Leave a comment

The Dark Knight Rises is too Good to be either Liberal or Conservative

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Matt

Is new Batman movie liberal or conservative?  There’s already been a lot of back-and-forth on this.  Like some idiotic Obama supporters, the idiotic Rush Limbaugh thinks that the villainous “Bane” is an obvious reference to the villainous “Bain Capital,” Mitt Romney’s old company.  Meanwhile, others have claimed that the film is unabashedly Reaganite.  I’m kind of sympathetic to conservatives on this one because the movie can’t help but look pro-conservative in comparison to what Hollywood usually puts out. But it’s simply not pro-conservative or pro-capitalist.

Having seen the movie yesterday, I’m happy to report that it is not particularly political one way or the other. Political values are shallow values, which is why overtly political movies usually just aren’t very good. Good movies reach so far deeper than politics that although they may contain political commentary, they end up transcending that commentary and making it part of something far more important. Both conservatives and liberals will find some of their values crystallized in the film because ultimately conservatives and liberals are all humans and have the same law written on their hearts even if sin has twisted that law in different ways.  Nevertheless, the film isn’t so myopic as to be blind to any deep value that isn’t clearly seen through a liberal or conservative filter.

I’ve heard that the movie is inspired by A Tale of Two Cities, and that certainly seems to be the case. But while some would impose modern notions of “social justice” on Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities is a classic work that goes way too deep to be boxed into modern partisan politics. The Dark Knight Rises is similar. It is decidedly anti-occupy-wall-street in the same way that Tale was certainly anti-revolutionary. In both, the “revolution” is undeniably ugly, brutal, and offers nothing but destruction and false hope.  Any veneer of nobility in the revolution is quite obviously just that–a pretense that hides what’s underneath.

This must not, however, be read to imply that either one is “for” the other side. Tale is not kind to the aristocracy and Dark Knight is not kind to wall street or capitalism. Each work describes a corrupt society which is corrupt precisely because both “sides” are rotten. Virtue and decency are found in the individuals who know something deeper and pursue something more than what either “side” has to offer. If either “side” wins, everyone loses. Both Batman and Bane buck the trends of their natural “side.” But whereas Bane hates people because they’re infected by the culture’s wickedness and wants to destroy them, Batman loves people despite the infection and wants to pull them out of it.  Regardless of what liberals and conservatives might want to believe, that particular virtue of Batman isn’t liberal or conservative.

Conservatives and liberals will both find their sides represented in this movie somewhere and cheer when the other side gets zinged.  Some will like that Gotham’s upper class are portrayed as snobbish, self-indulgent, and out-of-touch or that a wealthy corporate suit makes such a substantial contribution to Bane’s villainy for the sake of greed.  Others will appreciate the unsympathetic treatment of the blatantly socialistic rhetoric of Bain and his thugs or the brilliant scene with where Catwoman laments that a seized apartment “used to be someone’s home” and her apprentice’s shallow response that “now it’s everyone’s home” only highlights that a place that’s “everyone’s home” isn’t really a home at all.  If they’re shallow, partisans will assume the movie must be on their side, where all goodness is located, simply because the movie is very good. But in the end, the movie is just too good for that.

Bonus Mini-Review

It amazes me that each film in Nolan’s Batman trilogy is so different from the others despite being so similar.  That alone makes them hard to compare to one-another.  I can say that this movie is excellent.   Though not as good as The Dark Knight, I think it’s better than Batman Begins.  Thematically, it’s greatest strength is that it desperately grapples with the one flaw I thought the second movie had–that victory in the battle for Gotham’s soul hinged on lying and manipulating the people of Gotham.  Its greatest flaw is probably that, for a movie about the battle for Gotham’s soul, the people of Gotham are conspicuously absent as compared to the second movie.  Rises really needed a “ferry” scene.

Posted in Culture, Politics | Leave a comment

Why is the Church Obsessed with Sex?

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Matt

The direct answer to this frequent complaint about the church is a very practical one:  American churches are obsessed with sex because American culture is obsessed with sex, and American churches are full of Americans.  Seriously; the best selling book at the moment is straightforward verbal porn based on Twilight fan-fiction–I don’t think you can lay this one at the Church’s feet.  Now, God obviously has different things to say about sex than our culture does, and churches are supposed to pass along God’s teachings rather than the culture’s, so the shared obsession does take the form of a cultural war between Christian and mainstream views of sex.  This conflict makes many people uncomfortable at best and outraged at worst, which is what leads to people asking this question in the first place

But for offended skeptics, both inside the Church and out, another question usually lurks behind the straightforward one.  Why does God teach the strange things He teaches in contrast to our culture’s entirely sensible views on sexuality (you know, the ones that lead to the popularity of Twilight fan-fiction porn)?  Where they don’t consider it blatantly harmful, skeptics usually consider God’s view on sex to be either archaic, unimportant, or both.  Without any reason for its existence, one naturally asks why one should bother wasting a breath passing it along–let alone the many argumentative breaths wasted by churches today.  Accordingly, I would like to take the opportunity to provide two reasons:  one for Christians, and one for everyone (including Christians).

We like to think of our bodies as things that we have and use rather than things that we are–as though a body was some kind of shell that we inhabit.  The upshot is that we can use a screwdriver as a chisel if we like without any kind of deeper meaning, and we think we can use our bodies for fornication if we like without any kind of deeper meaning.  This false dualistic view is often held to in response to atheists and materialists who proclaim that we’re just our bodies or no more than our bodies.  If we are our bodies, aren’t we just soulless bags of meat walking around an absurd world?  Not at all. We are our bodies, but we are not just our bodies.  It is not that we are no more than flesh, but that we are no less than flesh–there is no “me” without my flesh.  This can be seen quite easily.  I can change how you feel by pumping you full of hormones.  I can change what you know by hitting you in the head.  Having sex with someone against her will is not the same as wearing someone’s sweater against her will.  If I punch you in the face, I’m not just punching some flesh and bone that you’re particularly fond of–I am punching you.

Because we don’t do things with our bodies but simply do them, we don’t get that extra layer of abstraction to moderate what our doings mean and accomplish.  You can use a screwdriver to accomplish one thing or to accomplish another, but you can never strangle a person without accomplishing hate and destruction.  Strangulation can never mean “I love you” no matter how hard we try to use it for that purpose.  Strangling an innocent man means hate and accomplishes murder–we don’t get a choice in the matter.  In the same way, sex means things and does things regardless of what we would like it to mean and do.  When we sleep with someone, it bonds us to that person (what the Bible calls a “one flesh” union).  For example, upon orgasm, a flood of the hormone oxytocin is released that emotionally bonds one to one’s partner (the same hormone is released during childbirth and contributes to a mother’s bond to her new baby).  Like it or not and regardless of agreements not to think differently of each other in the morning, sex attaches you to a person in a way that other activities do not.  Instead of two people with two fleshes, the result is two people in one flesh.

Another thing sex does is create children.  Here the complainers scream, “But nowadays we’ve separated sex from procreation!”  Have we?  Think about it:  the procreative tendency of sex is so strong that despite absolutely unprecedented amount of time, effort, money, education, equipment, and drugs all dedicated to making conception optional, nearly a million unintended children are murdered before their birth every year and still more “accidents” run the gauntlet successfully.  Once again, we cannot change human nature as much as we think.  And so sex not only creates a bond, it creates new life that requires that bond to thrive.  Two persons in one flesh bring yet more persons who share the same flesh as the parents.  To Christians, this should begin to sound very familiar.  We are created in the image of God–specifically a God who is three persons in one essence.  Our families are an image and proclamation of Him.  To simply create and then tear apart our one-flesh unions is to desecrate the very image of God Himself.  And so one reason Christians should appreciate for the Bible’s teachings on sex is that our culture’s view of sex is rank blasphemy.  A Christian should have no desire to go around putting graffiti on pictures of Jesus.

The reason that everyone–including Christians–should appreciate is that fornication harms ourselves and our neighbors.  Because our sexuality is a bonding agent, there are negative consequences for tearing apart those bonds we make and become part of.  J. Budziszewski provides a brilliant example in the form of duct tape.  It doesn’t matter whether you tell a piece of tape not to stick;  sticking is simply what tape does.  So if you put it on your arm, it will stick.  When you tear it off, it will hurt.  Do it again, and it will stick less and hurt less.  After repeated sticking and tearing, you may eventually reach the point where the tape no longer does what tape does and it can be removed without causing any pain, but that is because the tape is destroyed.  Nothing in the world will make that tape stick again.  In the same way, abusing our sexuality by using it outside of marriage (a lifelong promise to love and never separate) damages it along with that of our partner.  Eventually it will no longer do what sexuality does, and the ability to be emotionally intimate with another in that way will be lost.  There is a reason people speak derisively of “sloppy seconds” and “damaged goods” while still others think such shaming language shouldn’t be used at all:  the truth hurts.  “Sleep with whoever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone” is just about the stupidest ethic ever conceived.  You might as well say “strangle whoever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone” (and, of course, euthanasia proponents say precisely that).

God’s law also does what God’s law does.  It shows us how bad we are, instructs us on how to love our neighbors, and restrains our wickedness so as to reduce the harm to our neighbors.  His law on sexuality is no different, and churches are right to proclaim it in the face of a culture desperate to cover up even the limited portion of the law written on their hearts.  For the sake of our neighbors, the church must speak out on the subject.  It must do more, for our responsibility is to proclaim the whole counsel of God and not just the parts about sex.  We therefore must resist the temptation towards obsession.  But though the Church must do more, it can surely do no less.

Posted in Apologetics, Chastity, The Modern Church | 8 Comments

Do Not Resuscitate

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Matt

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?

Better question:  why would we want to?  So-called Liberal Christianity (which is a theological category, not a political one) is a massive tragedy.  But nobody is doing anyone any favors by trying to help this zombie maintain some semblance of life.  By all means, preach and teach Christianity to them, but there’s no sense in Christians keeping a false religion afloat.  Let this poison dissipate and help those afflicted.

Posted in The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism | Leave a comment

Let Exceptions Be Exceptions

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Matt

Perfection in design is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

As a software engineer, I can appreciate this statement.  Good engineering isn’t cluttered and doesn’t have extra parts left over.  It cleanly and efficiently does what it’s supposed to do, and nothing else.  Unfortunately, the modern mind is the mind of an engineer, and we often forget that what is a sound proverb in engineering makes little sense when applied to other pursuits.  Shall we take brush strokes off of paintings as long as they could do without?  Shall we replace literature with Cliff’s notes that cover the essential points without all that unnecessary prose?  While there can be a kind of beauty in clean efficiency, it is not the only kind of beauty.  Good design is not Truth.  Perhaps the greatest crime against the humanities has been modernism’s ongoing attempts to reach the essence of a thing by stripping away everything that’s non-essential.  An effective strategy for the mechanical is downright destructive for the spiritual and the organic.

The same holds true when we try to apply this to theology.  Consider baptism.  Lutherans believe what the Church has historically taught and the Bible has always taught about baptism.  In short, we believe that Baptism saves us (“Baptism now saves you” 1 Peter 3:21, “No one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit” John 3:5, etc).  More modernistic theologies, however, attempt to strip baptism and salvation down to their essential parts and end up separating the two.

This is typically reached, not through Biblical instruction, but through the use of exceptions to trim the edges of Biblical instruction.  Sometimes these exceptions come from the Bible:  for instance the thief on the cross.  He was told he’d be with Jesus in paradise, but he (probably) wasn’t baptized.  More often, the exceptions come from life.  What about unbaptized babies that die?  What about a man who believes because he here’s the Word, but he’s killed in a car accident on the way to his baptism?  Such folk aren’t baptized, but surely must be saved!  Must we therefore be good modernists by stripping salvation down to its essence and removing baptism from it?  Shall we make salvation more efficient and get rid of all the “false positives” of baptized who reject Christ later in life?

I think there’s a different and entirely legitimate answer to the exceptions:  “So what?”  Do these examples really prove that Baptism is unnecessary?  Only in the same way a broken Chevy rolling down a hill after pulling the wedges out from underneath its wheels proves that a car doesn’t need an engine to accelerate.  There might be some narrow, abstract, & theoretical sense in which it’s technically true, but it’s also completely irrelevant.  There’s nothing for the Church to do about a man who dies on his way to be baptized.  There’s nothing for the Church to do about unbaptized infants whom we have not been given the opportunity to baptize–otherwise they’d be baptized infants.  Let God sort that out.  That whole sacrificing His Son and dying for our sins thing makes me suspect that we can trust Him to accomplish whatever end is good and right.  The thief on the cross was saved by Christ’s personal promise–that he would be with him in paradise that very day.  We too are saved by Christ’s promise–His promise to the whole world that He saves us through baptism.  Why cut off perfectly good legs just because it might technically be possible to move around on bloody stumps?

We have not been authorized to make salvation more efficient than what God has taught.  God has given us the means of grace that He has given us:  Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the Word.  By receiving these we receive faith & salvation.  He has taught us these things, and His teachings are trustworthy and true.  There’s nothing to be gained by misusing modernistic thought trends in a vain attempt to “improve” God’s instruction.

Posted in Lutheranism, Theology | Leave a comment

I Do Not Wish We Had Women’s Ordination

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Matt

Back in June, Rev. Matthew Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, had a Q&A session at the Northwest district convention.  One of the questions (starting at 34:50)  was how he would explain the LCMS’ refusal to ordain women as pastors to a daughter and whether we would one-day see women’s ordination in the LCMS.  His response centered around three main points.  1) He wishes women could be ordained, 2) but an honest reading of scripture prohibits it, and 3) in order to address the broader call to ordain women, we should work hard to put as many women as possible in non-pastoral offices (which he has personally done).

Unfortunately, I don’t think this is a particularly good answer.  I mean this with all due respect to President Harrison; though I do not know him, he is very well-respected by a great many people I respect.  Nevertheless, the answer he gave was, in my opinion, a poor answer I’ve heard elsewhere, and I think it needs to be discouraged.  As such, my purpose in writing is not to call into question President Harrison himself or even his views, but simply his response as it was delivered.

There’s a big problem with simply saying “I would very much prefer that we did have women’s ordination… but I can’t get away from the text” and then “the response to women pastors is… to open up [women’s service in the church] to give women every possible opportunity to serve.”  It reminds me of a husband saying “I really wish I could have a few mistresses on the side, but the Bible doesn’t let me, so I just want to surround myself with attractive women and come as close to having an affair as possible without taking my clothes off.  I’ll “harmlessly” flirt with women, have a roving eye, and view whatever extent of pornography I can rationalize with my look-but-don’t-touch attitude (from Victoria’s Secret catalog to Playboy to strip clubs, etc), but I won’t actually have an affair because the Bible says that’s wrong.

Now President Harrison’s response does have good points and could indicate other unspoken good points behind the statement.  For one thing, “I want women’s ordination but God’s word forbids it” is much better than “I want women’s ordination, so I’ll twist God’s word until it agrees with what I know is right.”  That it is against God’s word is the reason to oppose it.  It’s also important to remember the human tendency to fall into error by overreacting against another error.  Because of that, I believe it is indeed possible to encourage the women’s ordination crowd by treating women badly.  They then overreact to the problem and think the only way they can “save” women from the Church is by rebelling against God and ordaining them.  Inasmuch as President Harrison sought to communicate that in his comments, I’m completely on board.  Likewise, we must remember that our sinful desires are legitimate desires that have been corrupted.  When a husband lusts after other women, the problem isn’t that he shouldn’t desire sex, it is that his desire has been twisted by sin.  In the same way, it’s entirely legitimate for women to desire to serve God’s people or to want them well-pastored, and that desire should be encouraged.  The problem is when sin twists that desire towards what God has not given us.

Nevertheless, with all that said, attempting to half-satisfy sinful cravings does not make the cravings go away–it only whets our appetite.  It’s not as though a man who wants an affair is going to be completely satisfied with flirting, or being near attractive women, or making a habit of glancing down blouses.  None of these things are the sexual fulfillment he’s seeking.  As a result, the more he gets into the habit of trying to satisfy his desires in small ways, the more he is going to look for additional small ways.  The satisfaction will never be met, and the quest will continue.  Even small dalliances add up to affairs after awhile.  Trying to look but not touch just sets him up for a procession of failures that will tempt him to look harder until his eyes are at their limit and he will need to use other members to start getting closer still.  There’s a reason Bill Clinton found himself publicly making what everyone else recognized as a ludicrous claim that oral sex doesn’t really count as adultery.  This doesn’t just happen overnight.  In the same way, trying to get women as close as possible to the pastoral office by putting them in as many offices as possible without actually ordaining them is never going to satisfy those who want women to be ordained.  No matter how appealing those offices might be, it is not ordination.  Worse yet, after years of such practice, we will all be in the habit of working to get them ever closer–the next step will always be easier.    All we’ll end up with is pulpits ever more frequently occupied by laity until the only distinction left is a job title–and even that distinction will pass away as people realize that job titles make no real difference anyway.

But there is a better way:  God is good.  He loves us enough to have died for us.  We can therefore be sure that when God tells us that he does not call women to be pastors and does not allow His Church to help women pretend otherwise, we can be confident that he is not doing women (or anybody) an injustice.  When we find ourselves thinking and saying “I wish we could have women’s ordination, but the text doesn’t allow it” that highlights a sinfulness of our own which needs to be repented.  Publicly wishing we could have something God has explicitly forbidden in any context other than a confession is not a good apologetic because it is fundamentally sinful.  Furthermore, it harms our neighbors because it reinforces others who have confidence in those same sinful desires.  Just as a man commits adultery in his heart when he looks at a woman lustfully, we commit heresy in our hearts when we desire women’s ordination.  Like lust, this desire is something to be repented of rather than indulged in a piecemeal fashion.

Rather than whetting our sinful appetites in a misguided attempt to hold them at bay, I believe a better solution is to explore and discover how God is being loving towards us by forbidding women from becoming pastors–to teach our people why we should be glad that God does not call women in such a way.  It’s easy to complain, but it’s time for us to take on the more challenging task of finding the good in what God has gifted to us.

Posted in Feminism, Lutheranism | 2 Comments