Being Really Pro-Life

I heard on the news today that the House of Representatives voted to strip Planned Parenthood of its federal funding, with the swing in public opinion away from the organization after a number of highly publicized fouls in the last few months. These fouls include a police raid on a Planned Parenthood office where eight children who had survived botched abortions had been stabbed to death with scissors, and more recently, when video footage was leaked to the press of a conservative undercover investigator posed as a pimp, and was trying to procure under-the-table abortions for underage girls, the victim prostitutes of sex trafficing.

A few thoughts on this new development. Firstly, let us rejoice at this victory for life. The second thing is that, far from this being the result of action, this vote should now be the basis for action. It is not enough to have a philosophy of absence – we don’t want abortion. We must instead have a positive plan. If this bill passes in the Senate and PP is stripped of its funding, the Church must move quickly to aditional acts of compassion.

Let us run a thought experiment. Planned Parenthood is de-funded, and are forced to close up a large number of their clinics. Now what? The women who would have gotten abortions now have their options limited, and they go into crisis mode. Now they don’t know what to do, because they’ve had four kids with four different dads, and this will be number five, and they’re on welfare and can’t afford another kid, who will be raised in poverty, to grow up malnourished and hungry, to be pushed into a life-cycle of street life no one should have to live through. This doesn’t describe all of the women who get abortions, obviously, but it does describe enough of a demographic that most of PP’s locations are in inner city and low-income areas. What do they do? The Church has done this, put them in this situation. How do we respond? If we push this bill through the Senate and sit back on our heels, thinking our job done, we are still not blameless in God’s sight. If, having pressed for so long and so hard for the right to life, and then allow those children to live in abject squalor, or be abandoned in dumpsters because the broke mothers cannot afford to feed them, then that is still on our head. Once allowed to be born, to enter this life, the child now has more than a right to life, but the obligation of the Church to be a home for the homeless, the father of the fatherless, and the hope of the hopeless.

We must throw open the doors of our churches, our houses, our families and say to those who cannot take care of these children, “Bring us your homeless and they shall be given a roof. Bring us your fatherless and they shall be adopted. Bring us your unwanted, for here they are wanted and will be welcomed.” We must do this. It is the obligation and privalege of the church, of the Christian family, and if we shrink back from this challenge, then we are undeserving of the name “pro-life.” Let us rise to the occasion.

Egypt and the Breaking Open of Culture

I think it would be remiss to be dealing with God’s method of cultural change without taking the ready-made real world example of Egypt. Watching the crisis on television, I realized that this is a good example of what I have been talking about.

Before I delve into the situation, however, I want to make clear that I am not on one or the other of the political sides in this confrontation. I support neither Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood, nor the populist riots of the people. Watching it is like watching a circus, or more aptly, like a gladitorial match. On the one hand we have the side of the dictator and power in Egypt. We are told by some that we should support the regime because they are American allies, but it is also true that that regime has supported the persecution and martyrdom of many Egyptian Christians. A Christian cannot support the regime. On the other hand, we are encouraged to support the move towards democracy in Egypt, because wouldn’t that be wonderful if the Egyptians could have a government like ours. But the mobocracy has demonstrated the people would vote in favor of Sharia law, which would result in more persecution of Christians in that nation. This, not to mention, that democracy is not the form of American government, but that of ancient Greece, and is actually a great idol, and one that Christians must strike down. American government is that of a constitutional, representative republic; rule by elected representatives of the people, emphatically not democracy, which is rule directly by the people. The establishment of a democracy, in Egypt as in anywhere on earth, will result in more blood, more upheaval, and more chaos.

But this brings us to the point, which is that the Muslim Brotherhood, or the desires of the people, have not resulted in this crisis, but instead the Church has. Far from being fearful of these events, the Egyptian Church should rejoice that God has begun to respond to their prayers, their liturgy and their sacrificial lives of faith. He is shaking down the powers in Egypt. He has used one idol to topple another, but not all idols are the same. For all of its ills and worship of man, democracy is a lesser idol than a straight dictator. Instead of the decision to persecute Christians being in the hands of one man and his police, the right to persecute must now be fought at the ballot box and in the courts. Initially, the swell of euphoria will carry on some of the old persecutions, but if the Egyptian Christians pray and worship God faithfully, in another thirty years this new idol will be toppled just as was the old. This ought to be a great encouragement, to us as much as to them. Let us pray with them, and for them, for their protection, but also for the toppling of their idols.

Christ and Cultural Transformation

My recent jag on cultural death and resurrection brings me to another thought, which is how we may unify my understanding in the previous posts with the concept of Christ and Culture, and how the twain meet. Christian thought on culture has been dominated by Richard Niebuhr’s classic book, Christ and Culture, in which he posits five relationships the Church has held to over the centuries. For Niebuhr, there is “Christ against culture,” “Christ of culture,” “Christ above culture,” “Christ and culture in paradox,” and “Christ the transformer of culture.”

In the first of Niebuhr’s categories, Christ is pitted against culture, and never the two shall meet. This is the view of the Anabaptists. The second is that of the “Christ of culture,” in which Christ, or the Christian faith, is virtually identified with a culture, such as the view of Rome. “Christ above culture,” was Tertullian’s view, and he argued that Christ was always above a given culture. “”Christ and culture in paradox” was the position of Augustine, who said that the relationship between them was paradoxical and mysterious. The Reformational view was that of “Christ the transformer of culture,” and understood Christ as the agent of change in any given culture.

Niebuhr’s insights were genuine and helpful, but they tend in an abstracting direction. He tends to talk about his five views on Christ and culture as though culture were some sort of abstract, universal category, the same everywhere on earth at every point in history. This abstracting tendency has bled over and haunted all those who have followed in Niebuhr’s shadow. But we cannot really talk about “culture,” as though it were some philosophical idea. There is not “one” expression of culture; there are, rather, many cultures.

It seems clear, then, that we cannot really understand our position in any given culture without understanding thatparticular culture’s position to Christ. The Church has manifested all five of Niebuhr’s positions at one time or another, and which position we take depends upon the relationship already present between that culture and Christ. Are there great, glaring idols propping up our culture? If so, then Christ may express several of our categories in relationship to that culture. He will be against that culture to the extent and pervasiveness of idolatry. He will always be above any given culture, because as we have already discussed, no culture perfectly expresses Christ or the faith. He will be working in that culture to transform it from the inside.

D. A. Carson, in his wonderful extension of Niebuhr’s thesis, Christ and Culture Revisited, takes a similar tack, and suggests that we must look at specific cultures to understand the Church’s response to it, and that one or more of Niebuhr’s categories will apply at any given time. Carson correctly argues that only one of Niebuhr’s categories is unBiblical, that of the “Christ of culture.” Because the world is still corrupted by sin, we can never say that Christ is everidentified with any culture. No matter how perfect a human culture before the New Earth, there will always be a gap. In his magisterial work The Road From Eden, John Barber radically expands and reformulates Niebuhr’s categories, and suggests that there are actually twelve approaches that the Church has historically manifested with regards to the culture around it. And David Hegeman’s Plowing in Hope is a helpful corrective to many of Niebuhr’s problematic formulations by reshaping our understanding of culture from a battlefield (culture “wars”) to culture as a place of peaceful building and construction.

This brings me to another point, which is that Christians have viewed American culture as a battleground, not a fertile field in which to take dominion and build a culture. Hegeman writes,

We would also do well to avoid the prevailing “culture war” view: culture seen as an ideological/religious struggle between good and evil, godly and rebellious art, literature, politics, philosophy, etc. While we must never lose sight of the antithesis and Paul’s call for us to “take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” (2 Cor. 10:4-5), we must assert that culture is, at its foundation, about building and not about conflict. Doing culture from a positive, earth-transformational perspective will help uls build a more comprehensive, radical, holistic culture in line with the principles of Scripture . . .” (Plowing in Hope, 20).

Perceiving culture as a place of warfare and ideological struggle is a central trap in keeping up imprisoned to the idols of our age. It keeps us bickering and enslaved to the rhetoric of our “side,” instead of building a real alternative.

A Genuine Third Way

Following my last two posts on the death and resurrection cycle God puts nations through, I wanted to tackle a related question, which is how the church can know what direction to move in. We live in chaotic times, and part of the chaos is the debate between a whole lot of options. Because the foundations of Western civilization have been broken open by God, and we stand on the threshold of a new era, a post-West era, but not a post-Christ era, the Western man is having an identity crisis.

That crisis regards the very nature and fabric of who we are. The chaos in the Church reflects this cultural madness by running in all sorts of diverse directions. Some run backwards to frontier times. Some throw everything out and become progressive yuppies. Some hold to this slice of the past, but reject that bit. And the average Christian, trying to make his way in the world (but not of the world) is left at a loss. Who does he believe? Who does he read? Trust? Out of all these wide options, upon what foundation does he build? Can he be certain that the foundation he chooses is the right one?

In such times, it is important to emphasize God’s sovereignty. He is in control, and we must understand that this confusion is part of the Spirit’s work. It is part of the process of breaking up a civilization and the cultural assumptions that are ingrained in our nation’s world-and-life-view. Our lives, even our cultural life, is vapor, and the Spirit blows where He wills. He is leading the Church in all sorts of different directions on purpose. We cannot see all ends, otherwise it would all make sense. But we can be confident even in the midst of our confusion and uncertainty that the eventual end He will bring in the building of this new era will be a new certainty. He will use our present confusion to bring about a new theological mindset, a new dogma, a new Church — or rather, an old theology, an old dogma, and an old Church, with new life breathed into it. The new thing to come is not a radical disconnect with the old, but rather the maturation and glorification of the old.

There are many dangerous places along the path, however. In the face of the absolute unknown, many times our nerve will fail us, and we will look back to the idols of Egypt for comfort. I’d like to lay a few of these bare for us, so as to make it easier for us to identify and reject these idols.

While it might be initially counterintuitive, both conservative and progressive ideologies are two sides of the same idol. They are polar ends of the same spectrum, and it is the entire spectrum that must be cast aside by the Christian. This spectrum runs from the conservative, who attacks big government in favor of the protection of the corporations; to the progressive who attacks big business in favor of big government. Each has their rhetoric, and that rhetoric, whether intentionally or by historical accident, has resulted in neither side realizing that they are actually feeding the monster they are trying to destroy. By enlarging the government, the progressive unwittingly attracts the eye of the corporation, who is interested in being protected from competition, and so funds the progressive candidates who will enlarge the government. The more protected a corporation is, the larger it grows. The conservative, in protecting the corporations, allows them to grow larger, and to fund more politicians, who will inevitably be beholden to big business. This system is a trap, and the common ideological divide is actually a sham. The corporations fund both left and right, because they can’t lose. Either way, in more protectionist government, or in less governmental oversight, their financial bottom line gets fatter. The third parties, libertarian, green, constitutionalist, etc., fit somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and therefore do not represent a genuine third way, because the foundational assumptions are the same. It is all mutually reinforcing.

The conservatives are trying to preserve the status quo in America and the West, but as I mentioned in my last post, in a culture’s life error becomes calcified. Thus, the conservative really is fighting a losing battle, because none can stand when God moves in a nation and purposes to break it open at the foundation. They are clinging to yesterday’s false gods. The progressive, on the other hand, realizes that the old gods are crumbling and we need something new. Unfortunately, they seek to replace the old idols with new ones that are twice the servants of hell. And all too often, those new gods are just the old ones all over again, in partially convincing disguise.

The rhetoric of the system is that “those liberals are evil, but conservatism will save America.” And the reverse is argued by the liberals. Yet nothing ever changes, no matter who is President, because they are trapped into the systemic black hole. The principalities and powers are strong, but the chaos evident in our cultural life is a sign that God is remaking the world order and shaking down the powers in the West.

The Christian, the Church, must foster a genuine third way. This third way must not simply be compromise between the conservative and liberal path, but one that rests on a foundation utterly distinct assumptions. In ancient Greece, it was believed that the universe fluctuated between the power of Apollos and Dionysus, who represented order (the cultural status quo) and chaos (upheaval). These are parallel to our conservatives and liberals today, but the Church did not overturn Rome by mixing Apollos and Dionysus, but by speaking into that mutually-reinforcing duality with a genuine third way, the way of Christ. And this brought disorder, but a disorder unlike that of Dionysus. This disorder and cultural mayhem brought about an order, but an order unlike that of Apollos. Such is needed again in our day.

Character, Not Magic

“Were his adventures set mainly in the nonwizarding, Muggle world, Harry would in fact be a far less interesting literary character. His magic would set him apart from everyone else and this magical difference would be the key component in the eventual resolution of all the novels’ plots. But as we saw in Chapter One, magic is not the key component: character is. Because Harry’s adventures are set in Hogwarts, where absolutely everyone (except Mr. Filch) practices magic – and where Harry’s skill is therefore average . . . the qualities that make him great, and able to defeat Voldemort, are the kind of essentially human qualities that readers share with most of Potterworld’s characters.”

– Rev. Francis Bridger, A Charmed Life, p. 47-48.

More Thoughts on National Resurrection

It occurs to me to delve a little deeper into the subject I broached in the last post. American culture is not strictly pagan, of course, but a lapsed Christian one. This requires some expansion.

The church is never perfect. Our doctrine and teaching are always in need of refinement, so when you get a certain expression of Christianity built into a culture or civilization, it is never a perfect expression of the faith. These errors eventually become calcified in that culture, the church moves on and learns its errors, but the systematic weight of the culture hold onto the errors. To change after all this time would throw the culture into upheaval, attack its very foundations, endanger its very way of life, and so forth.

But that cultural expression of the faith is now inadequate for the church, which is propelled into the future by the draw of the Spirit. For a time, short or long, the Christians in this culture will attempt to live in both worlds, but this inevitably causes cognitive dissonance. A confrontation is shortly to come, because the Christian is unable to apply the new insights God has given His Church in the old civilization. God must burst the old wineskins with new wine. The civilization has become so entrenched in those foundational errors that they are familiar comforts for the people. They resist any attempt to change them, and so to build His future and grow humanity up into maturity, God must break that civilization open at the foundation so that the new foundation can be laid, and a better civilization established. This is the death and resurrection cycle. Or perhaps it is more of a spiral?

Because, of course, this new civilization the Church founds has its own errors, and will eventually need to be broken open like the last one.

Was Augustine Wrong?

St. Augustine’s magisterial opus, Civitas Dei, or The City of God, is commonly understood to be an apologetic against the pagan Roman Empire. The empire was falling down around the pagans’ ears, and they started to blame the Christians for displeasing the gods. So Augustine wrote the City of God to counter their attacks.

But the question remains: was Augustine right? I do not think so—at least not entirely. It was true that God was judging the pagans for their false beliefs and bringing their civilization down around their heads. True enough. Is there a different angle from which the fall of Rome actually was the Christians’ fault?

I would like to suggest that the Church destroyed Rome through its worship. All of history is Christo-centric, but this means that it is actually Totus Christos-centric; the whole of world history revolves around the total person of Christ, head and body. This means that history is radically Church-centric, and when we look at the history of the Church in the world we find that it does battle with every cultural and systemic manifestation of sin it finds.

It does this in two ways; the first is overt assault by preaching and discipleship. The sins of the culture are decried from the pulpit and put to death through Christian discipleship. In this way the Church destroys any culture it finds itself in. Non-Christian cultures are built on sin. Their systems and structures depend on unrighteousness. By bringing the Word of God to bear on a culture and ridding it of its prevailing sin, the Church actually destabilizes a culture and brings about its eventual demise.

The second way is through prayer. As the Body and Bride of Christ, gathered together in liturgical worship, the Church beseeches Christ to work in their culture and change the hearts of those around them and to defend His people from the evil plots of the wicked. Are we surprised when He actually does it? Revelation 8 describes the prayers of the saints in worship ascending to heaven as incense, which is then poured out as judgment upon the wicked. This too causes the destabilization of a culture.

Of course, this can also be called a repeated cycle of death and resurrection. The Church’s preaching, life and worship destabilizes the pagan system of culture and life. This makes a mess, causes confusion, stress, and pain. The unGodly system fights back and tries to entrench itself, causing persecution. These are the death-throes of the serpent. Spiritual, psychological, legal and cultural persecution are the first stage. Physical persecution is the second stage, and we can know that when people start killing Christians, the conversion of that village, city, or nation is ripe. As has been said, the blood of the martyrs builds the church. At some point, there comes the breaking. The persecutors know that Christians are innocent of any crime, and the guilt eventually breaks them. In the two-thirds world, it is clear just from the historical record that when a village or tribe kills a missionary, soon after they convert. The same is true of nations in history. When a nation persecutes Christians in a systematic way, it always converts. The Greco-Roman world murdered thousands of Christians, and they converted. Now, it took about three hundred years to break Rome’s back, but it eventually bowed the knee. The Germanic tribes of Europe fought ferociously against the Church, and they are all now tamed by the Gospel.

This should do two things for us. It should give us confidence, and it should train us to look at the long haul. Rome wasn’t converted in a day, and it wasn’t changed by short term missionary work, urban plunges, or by running around in a frenzy. The Christians who toppled Rome lived their lives, did their thing, prayed, trained their families, and attended public weekly worship. They were killed for it, and the Spirit honored their prayers and their martyrdom.

So when we look at the persecution of Christians in Islamic nations, in Israel, in China, we should understand this to be a signal that these nations are already ours. Whether in twenty or two hundred years, the witness of the persecuted saints around the world testify to the reality of the death and resurrection of Christ.

It wouldn’t be fair to end such reflection without also taking into account the current state of things in America. We keep hearing that more Christians are getting engaged with their Biblical Worldview than ever before, and the culture waxes worse and worse. This has baffled many Christian commentators, who simply don’t understand it. We all shake our heads and point at the errors of the other Christians out there making things worse. But what if I were to suggest that things weren’t getting worse at all?

Recall, when the gospel gets into any given culture, it must of necessity wage war with that culture. The Christian faith has become so wedded to anti-Christian elements in Western culture, for so long, that God is taking us apart. As more ministers preach the word and bring it to bear in the lives of their parishioners, the more destabilized American culture becomes. This is actually a good sign.

There are deeply idolatrous elements to our culture, our family life, our economy, our political system, and the wild, sometimes erratic fluctuations we see, and the panic we observe afterward, are both indications that God is shaking down the kingdoms. The natives are getting skittish. When the economy stumbles and people freak out, this exposes the hidden idol. The family in our nation is an absolute mess. There doesn’t seem to be consistency from generation to generation, and people fly wildly from this to that, desperately seeking solutions. This is actually a mercy, because God is shaking down the idol of “the family” in America to break off the bad roots. This actually gives the Church something to build on. When a people will not stop clinging to their idol, God must shatter it so that there is nothing to cling to, so that their only recourse is to turn to the true God.

This is a painful, but necessary step in the reformation of any civilization. God puts nations to death, but He is faithful, and He raises them to life in a new form. We must worship God in public assembly, and ask Him to change the hearts of our people. God is faithful, and His Word will not return to Him void. The upheaval in our country is only proof that God has heard our prayer, and the great shakedown of our idols has only begun.

So Maybe We All Best Cool Down

“In the end, Joanne Rowling’s books fundamentally are not about witchcraft and wizardry, although witchcraft and wizardry play a key role. They are about a gifted, vulnerable boy called Harry; his equally gifted and equally vulnerable friends Ron and Hermione; their respective and variously dysfunctional families; their adventures in and out of school; their friends and enemies; the problems they face growing up; and the decisive role they play in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Wizardry is important to the stories but they are not about wizardy. Magic is an integral part of the plot but if she had chosen to Rowling (like Shakespeare but not Lewis or Tolkien) could potentially have found an alternative plot device and still have retained most of the essential components of the story.”

– Rev. Francis Bridger, A Charmed Life, pp. 28-29.

Women in the Church

Yes, it’s true. I’ve neglected my blog. I’m a terrible parent. It’s anemic, shrunken, out of date. There’s a haunted look in its eye. But I have remembered, and I am here to feed it sweet nourishment.

Over Christmas, I visited my parent’s house, where I have a number of my books stored. As I perused them ran across an old textbook, Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition, by Barbara J. MacHaffie, a professor I studied under in my religion classes. She is a liberal, and this book defends women in the ministry (primarily). Since this is a hot button issue, I thought I would blog through some parts of the book that are relevant to that discussion.

In this post, I’m going to hit on methodological issues. MacHaffie starts her book off with some “critical principles” of interpretation. The first is this: “the Bible has been written, translated, and interpreted for centuries by men in cultures that were patriarchal” (5). This means, for MacHaffie, that men have suppressed translations and interpretations which give women more power over the local church and government of the institution. But she does not limit herself to this, but says that the Bible was written in a patriarchal context, and thus it becomes the job of the critical interpreter to determine what was “really” meant by God, and what was the addition of man in the text of the Bible itself. This approach will, however, get us nowhere, for it is an approach that does not submit to the Bible, but subjects the Bible to the purview and whim of the mortal human.

What this means is that the Scriptures cannot actually be heard. Once we begin to pick what is “really” in the Word of God, we have lost. The Bible is designed to shape us after the image of Christ, through studying what God has revealed in his Word. If we have the option of chopping it down to size, playing games with the text, and removing that which we don’t like, then the heart of man will cut out everything that makes it uncomfortable – when it is precisely those places in which Christ is trying to reshape us the most!

For instance, MacHaffie finds the passages on the submission of women to their husbands and in the church to be “Deutero-Paul,” or pseudo-Paul, sections added later by the resurfacing patriarchal faction in the Church. THis is ample demonstration of how this approach works. What a relief that through critical methods of dicing Scripture, MacHaffie happens to believe the very things she disagrees with are not really part of the canon! I shudder to think what would have happened if she had found out it was the passages she likes that were added later, and therefore shouldn’t have binding force.

Trustworthiness is the key here. If there are all sorts of contradictions (which MacHaffie believes there are: p. 17) and editors adding all kinds of stuff later, and redactors, then the natural question is whether we can trust the Bible at all. How do we know that these passages are authentic, and these are not? How do we know that it’s not the opposite. After all, critical methods come up with all kinds of diverse ways of splicing this stuff together. So the trustworthiness of the whole is undermined.

Now, nobody is questioning that there are editors who put things in the Bible. Moses writes the book of Deuteronomy, but there is an account of his death and what happens after at the end. Somebody else told that story. But these things are not difficult to solve. Who would be the most likely candidate to have written that end? Joshua. Genesis was most likely assembled from a collection of earlier accounts by Moses, with some finishing touches added by Samuel. But the trajectory here is to solve problems, not create them by inserting a bunch of non-existent writers with different agendas all over the place where there is not a shred of evidence for it. That is unbelief.

Newish Year, New Look

It’s sleeker. It’s swifter. It’s sneakier. It’s more aloofer. And every once in a while, it comes up with something snappy. It’s like a face lift, only without the vanity. It’s an episode of theological Nip and Tuck. Nobody saw it coming, and moreover, nobody saw where it went. It’s an online butterfly; a digital phoenix. And a lot of times its activity is more mythological than a Phoenix. It had to be dusted off and spring cleaned. There were dust bunnies romping together, and once, I swear, I saw an Ent scolding the weeds. They were criminals; they were growing up through the sidewalk cracks. There was vacuuming and sifting and sorting to be done, and a whole thing with a killer rat (gimme a scotch on the rocks and I’ll tell that one sometime). But now it is free, free from the oppression of old structures and strictures. It’s the end of a haiku – your view goes from the concrete image to the whole world, and all in three sentence fragments. All the other caterpillars mocked it, but it didn’t mind then and it doesn’t care now.

I come awake, a wyrm from hibernation, a life through birth, leaving a puddle of birthing html fluids all over the midwife. I blink around myself bleary-eyed, like a camera with a smeared lens.  Find myself in a strange world, a brave new world which is braver and in point of fact newer and braver than Huxley could have imagined. This world has a digital sheen, a world of glossed pages, lights and suffused with graphics and animation. Life as blockbuster film. It is a world of enlightenment and endarkenment, equally mixed and with a splash of lemon on the side. You know, for zest. Is it a world of substance or of mere lonely soulism, as unfilling as cotton candy? I suppose it depends on how you use it.

Cognition is now. I blog, therefore I am.