Do-It-Yourself Tradition

By Alan Jacobs
First Things

Copyright (c) 2009 First Things (January 2009).

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community
by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay
Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $23.95

Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices
by Brian McLaren
Thomas Nelson, 240 pages, $17.99

New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church
by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Brazos, 160 pages, $14.99 paper

Over the past forty years the Christian evangelical movement in America has been branching and forking in interesting ways. Because that movement is rooted in the rise of fundamentalism a hundred years ago, it has tended to emphasize the necessity of sound doctrine, especially regarding the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and the absolute authority of Scripture.

But thanks in part to the work of such scholars as Robert Webber and Thomas Howard, and thanks in part to increasing evangelical fondness for Anglican and Catholic writers, about thirty years ago a subset of these evangelicals began to feel that doctrine was not enough. It was necessary, for evangelicals who wished to be not just doctrinally sound but also spiritually vibrant, to connect with ancient traditions of worship. Almost simultaneously, others were being drawn into the rather different but equally worship-centered traditions of the charismatics and Pentecostals.

Now, many evangelicals—most, I think it’s fair to say—did not feel the need to move in either of these directions. But the shifts were nonetheless significant, involving millions of Christians. So evangelicalism grew branches that, while not necessarily neglecting doctrine, place a great emphasis on the centrality of worship to the Christian life.

More recently, we have heard from a third generation of evangelicals for whom worship is not enough either. For them the watchword is practice—as in the practices of the Christian life, especially those promoted by venerable, pre-Reformation Christian traditions. This movement is related in significant ways to the cultivation of the spiritual disciplines that rose to prominence a couple of decades ago, courtesy of Dallas Willard and Richard Foster; but those who emphasize practices often believe that the disciplines, at least as taught by Willard and Foster, tend to be overly individualistic, focused on personal piety, and disconnected from communal living.

For these advocates of traditional Christian practices, we need visibly different ways of living in the world and with one another. Hugh Halter and Matt Smay call this “incarnational community”; Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove advocates the slightly more specialized practice that he calls “the new monasticism.” Whatever we call it, this movement claims to be both deeply historical and vibrantly contemporary. But it seems likely to me that only one of those claims can be sustained. Thinking historically is hard; acting historically well-nigh impossible—at least here, in America, today.

All you need to know about Halter and Smay’s book The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community may be this: Their chapter on the history of the Church since the fourth century is called “The 1,700-Year Wedgie.” That neatly captures the book’s tone and its level of intellectual seriousness. If we can call this an argument, it’s a familiar one. From Luther’s time to our own, every generation of Protestants produces people who rise up to proclaim that the Church lost its way within decades of Jesus’ death, leaving the true gospel forgotten and unproclaimed until . . . well, us.

The perfect image of this attitude may be seen in Philip Yancey’s 1995 book The Jesus I Never Knew, in which he claims that the Christian Church has consistently obscured the character of the true biblical Lord. Thus the book’s cover, on which a hand—presumably Yancey’s—wipes away centuries of grime from the pictured face of Jesus so that his countenance is revealed in all its glory. We are obviously meant to think of the restoration of artistic masterpieces, and, indeed, Yancey employs just this metaphor, claiming that at times in the writing of his book he “felt like an art restorer stretched out on the scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel, swabbing away the grime of history with a moistened Q-tip. If I scrub hard enough, will I find the original beneath all these layers?”

The difference between Yancey’s book and that of Halter and Smay would seem to be that Yancey sees history only as “grime,” while Halter and Smay want to reclaim (as the book’s cover has it) “the posture and practices of the ancient church now.” But you need a microscope to find references to “the ancient church” in The Tangible Kingdom. The book is almost wholly composed of anecdotes and the occasional chart or table. Halter and Smay have read the Acts of the Apostles, and they know that the first Christians cared for one another materially as well as spiritually, and that’s what they want us to do. Their constant implication is that “traditional churches” have almost completely neglected this apostolic ­example.

Halter and Smay would insist that they are not so critical. Their book contains twenty or more statements such as this one: “The point of this discussion is not to judge this traditional Church structure, to call it bad or out of date.” But just a few sentences before that particular disclaimer, Halter tells a story about a time when he was preaching and got a biblical fact wrong—oddly, he calls this “an inaccurate theological statement”—only to be corrected by his worship leader, just an instant before he would have corrected himself. He then says, “In many churches, I’d have been fired before the next Sunday for incompetence. In my church, we all just laughed and made the correction as a community and moved on.”

Really? Many churches would fire a pastor for a single misstatement that he knew to be a misstatement and was on the verge of correcting? I wonder if there has been a single church in the history of the faith that has done such a thing—but this is the way Halter and Smay consistently present traditional churches: as focused so pedantically and pathologically on intellectual minutiae that they can’t recognize the deep “tangible” needs of their own people and of strangers in their midst.

It’s clear that Halter and Smay have a genuine zeal for the gospel, and my guess is that they have reached many people for Christ who would never darken the door of a “traditional church.” May God bless their work. But neither good hearts nor good works can make a good book out of a very bad one, and nothing here lends credence to their claim to have recovered the priorities of “the ancient church.” They don’t appear to know anything much about the ancient Church; they certainly aren’t aware that the social, economic, and political strategies of that Church varied greatly from one location and period to another; they’re simply not serious about their historical judgments. I am not even sure why they go to such pains to claim an attachment to our first Christian ancestors—though that is a question we will need to consider before we’re done.

This brings us to Brian McLaren. I should probably pause here to note that McLaren is the man most often named as the leader of the “emergent Church movement,” though by this point I am already sick of the “[insert adjective here] Church movement” formulation. The title of his new book, Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices, indicates that he too is engaged in a historical salvage operation, but in this case the indication has more justification.

In many respects McLaren’s book resembles The Tangible Kingdom. It has the same fondness for sweeping historical generalizations and for charts that are just cleaned-up PowerPoint slides. He tells a lot of stories, some of them about fishing. (All these books may set out prescriptions for changing the world, but one verity they never question is the absolute necessity of having at least one-third of their text taken up by folksy anecdotes.) He has a fondness for sage statements that don’t add up to anything discernible. For instance, “Jesus never makes ‘Christians’ or ‘converts,’ but he calls disciples and sends them out.” Okay—but does this mean that we’re not to use the term “Christian”? That we’re not supposed to speak of “converts” or “conversion” to “Christianity”? That we’re not supposed to use language Jesus didn’t use? And if not, then what is the point of this sentence? McLaren never explains.

Also, like Halter and Smay, McLaren tends to disparage mere doctrinal correctness. “We must rediscover our faith as a way of life,” he says, “not simply as a system of belief.” Now, it’s true that many evangelicals have a tendency to focus on right doctrine to the near-exclusion of other aspects of the Christian life, but it’s simply unhealthy to respond by minimizing the importance of such doctrine.

McLaren is probably using the word system disparagingly, but, if we take that word in a better sense and think of the various affirmations of the creeds as interlocking and mutually reinforcing statements, such that any given affirmation loses some of its force if it is not in proper relation to all the others—well, in that case, the achievement of a genuine system of belief is anything but simple. In lectures and speeches, as well as in his books, McLaren often pauses to say that he really does believe that doctrine is important. But he has to say this because he doesn’t otherwise show signs of being interested in it. As far as I can tell, McLaren thinks getting the doctrine right is easy—comparatively speaking, anyway. But the history of Christianity scarcely bears out that confidence.

Certainly orthodoxy is not truly right unless it produces the fruits of virtue, service, and prayer. And while this has always been understood within the Church—it was not Brian McLaren who coined the statement “Faith without works is dead”—we Christians have always been tempted to content ourselves with just part of the picture. McLaren rightly wishes to commend to us the personal and communal practices of a lively Christian faith.

Missional is the word he uses for those practices that connect the Church with the world, believers with nonbelievers: “Practicing neighborliness, including towards enemies,” “Speaking truth in love,” “Giving to the poor,” “Proclaiming the good news in word and deed.” Some may be inclined to ask, “Those are practices?” And indeed, by halfway through Finding Our Way Again you may well wonder what isn’t a practice. Fasting, feasting, contemplation, Bible reading, listening, interpreting, singing, being still, serving, confronting evil, speaking and working for justice, showing up on time for church—all these and many more turn up in McLaren’s lists, without a word to explain why we would call all these things practices, or how they are to be distinguished from other kinds of acts, or what is particularly ancient about them. (Many of the most ancient ones are ones that we’ve never stopped doing: Singing, for instance, is not a forgotten practice.)

But then, near the end, McLaren’s book takes a curious turn. He asks his readers to imagine themselves cast back into the Middle Ages, as wanderers in a strange land, who then come upon a monastery. The monastery is run by an abbess—you’re not looking for historical plausibility here, I trust?—who knows, and is willing to teach to the pilgrims, the ascetic practices of both the Western and Eastern Church traditions. So, under her guidance, we are introduced to katharsis (or the via purgativa), fotosis (or the via illuminativa), and theosis (or the via unitiva). Again, let’s not pause to ask whether, say, theosis and via unitiva really are synonymous—as former President George H.W. Bush used to say, it wouldn’t be prudent. And anyway, there are more interesting things afoot here.

First, let’s note that this “threefold way” isn’t a practice, or set of practices, but rather an overarching scheme that gives us reasons for employing spiritual disciplines. We employ these disciplines so that we can be cleansed of unholy and unhealthy affections, turned toward God, and then united with Him in love. It would have been helpful if McLaren had presented this structure at the beginning of the book rather than at the end. That he did not may simply be a testament to his own informal, not to say disorganized, style, or it may be that the evident interiority of the threefold way is itself a problem—for it presumes a person who is devoted to the contemplative life and does not invoke (explicitly, anyway) either the “communal” or the “missional.” It would have been difficult for McLaren to shoehorn everything he writes about here into this simple structure.

Few of us are able to live the contemplative life; at most we pursue what in the Middle Ages was sometimes known as the “mixed life.” Which makes it interesting that, when McLaren introduces the threefold way, he does so by taking us out of our own time and our own forms of living. I think he does this because it is difficult to imagine how we can order our own twenty-first-century American lives according to this ­pattern.

McLaren, like Halter and Smay, wants to commend to us the wisdom of “the ancient church.” Apparently that phrase could refer to the Acts of the Apostles or to a period fourteen hundred years later, but, in any case, the idea is that these long-ago Christians did things that we ought to be doing, with habits of prayer and worship and service that we ought to have. But it is also true that those Christians had very different lives than we have. Even if we think in material terms only, the world of Acts is in almost every way alien to our own; all the monastic movements that arose later demand daily routines that bear little resemblance to ours. These facts do not seem to occur to Halter and Smay, while McLaren’s invocation of his fictional abbess suggests that he is aware of them but is unsure what their implications are.

Halter, Smay, and McLaren are all pragmatic people and (to borrow a fancy but useful word from the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss) bricoleurs. A bricoleur is someone who takes up whatever tools are at hand to get a job done. He doesn’t worry about consistency or perfect fit but about making progress toward a goal. So McLaren gathers some Anglican liturgy here, some Orthodox ascetic spirituality there, and adds to them a few tricks picked up from Western monastic traditions. Do they all fit together seamlessly? Probably not, but there’s something here for everyone, surely. McLaren’s model of spirituality seems to be predicated on that most American of phrases: “You’ve got to find what works for you.”

There’s a certain urgency to the bricoleur. He doesn’t have time to step back and get a broad overview of his project; he’s got to get moving, to keep moving. But there is also, on another level, a curious kind of fixedness to him. If he is determined to work with “whatever tools are at hand,” that means that he’s rooted to the spot. He’s going to work here. And maybe that’s what he has to do.

But then, as we know, some people move. Some people come to believe that they can’t get the job done where they are, that, if they are going to pursue what’s really important to them, they have to find a different location, a different set of conditions. Some of the people who come to that realization we call monks and nuns, anchorites and hermits. That some of the things a Christian might want or need to do simply cannot be done where we are—or can be done here only by some—is a possibility that McLaren and Halter and Smay never seriously entertain. Their consistent assumption is that American Christians are going to live where and how they currently live, and that any spiritual practices they adopt are going to have to be fit into those pre-existing structures.

But the sense that some practices of Christian disciples are linked to certain forms of life and cannot be developed just anywhere underlies every form of monasticism and retreat from the saeculum. Many of the practices that McLaren recommends were formulated by people who had left everyday life precisely in order to devote themselves to those practices. Would a serious abbess think that the lifelong disciplines of her people could simply be transferred to the daily experience of a lawyer or a plumber?

It’s an awareness of this potential problem that has prompted a movement with which Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove associates himself: the “new monasticism.” At least, that was the impression I got from the book’s cover, so I turned to his account with some hopefulness. And some of that hope was fulfilled—especially in his emphasis on the value of “relocation”—though the movement that Wilson-Hartgrove associates himself with is misnamed: There’s nothing new about it, nor is it a form of monasticism.

Wilson-Hartgrove and his family and friends live together in what is sometimes called an “intentional Christian community”: a group of people, some married, some unmarried, who all live in the same city neighborhood and agree to practice the Christian faith in the same way. Wilson-Hartgrove is happy to announce his debt to certain great predecessors in this kind of endeavor: the Catholic Worker movement led by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia Farm in Georgia, and the Bruderhof community, which began in Germany and has now spread elsewhere.

But none of those efforts was new either: Nineteenth-century America was full of such communities, as was eighteenth-century Germany (especially among Pietists), and, a century earlier, England gave us the first Quakers and the Anglican Nicolas Ferrar’s beautiful experiment at Little Gidding. . . . It’s hard to know when to stop adding to such a list, since such efforts are about as old as Christianity itself. But none of these communities is properly called monastic. Set the bar for monasticism as low as Wilson-Hartgrove sets it and you might as well call a Christian college dormitory a monastic institution. Frugality, fidelity, and consistency are very good things, maybe even essential things, but they aren’t the same things as poverty, chastity, and obedience.

This is the point where I think we have to stop and ask what the heck is going on here. We have three books by very now-minded American Protestants who are noticeably eager to connect their projects to things ancient and, well, Catholic—or, at the least, pre-Reformational. And these books are by no means unique: It’s worth noting that the same man who was so instrumental in calling evangelicals to a renewal of their worship lives, my late friend and colleague Bob Webber, spent the last years of his life promoting very similar ideas, which he gathered under the rubric of “the Ancient-Future Faith.”

The connection to the ancient in all this is tenuous at best, but the earnestness with which it is proposed remains consistent. It’s hard to say what’s more curious, the earnestness or the tenuousness. Clearly these books and the general movement they represent constitute an attempt to borrow or transfer charisma: Ancient and monastic traditions of piety embody a community-building power and a devotional richness that these folks want to appropriate—but not at the cost of embracing either the doctrine or the authority of the Catholic Church or any other church. (Both McLaren and Wilson-Hartgrove invoke the example of St. Francis, but you’d never guess from either of them how anxious Francis was to get papal approval for his new community—how determined he was to be a faithful and obedient son of the Church.) A key assumption of all these books is that the beliefs and practices of other traditions that we like are detachable and transferable: It’s a buffet, not a home-cooked meal. Bricoleurs love buffets.

New Monasticism strikes me as the most serious of these books because it confronts the possibility that you can’t embrace certain practices unless your daily life takes certain specific material forms. Wilson-Hartgrove is careful not to allow anyone to think that he’s telling them what they should or shouldn’t do—all of these authors are utterly terrified of being judgmental about anything except (in Wilson-Hartgrove’s case) the Bush administration—but, if living in modest and faithful community is just one option among many, the example loses a lot of its force. Whatever happened to comforting the oppressed and oppressing the comfortable? Wilson-Hartgrove should be as bold as Paul Farmer, the great doctor and advocate for the world’s poorest, who says this about white liberals, whom he calls WLs: “I love WLs, love ’em to death. They’re on our side. . . . But WLs think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.”

I suppose what I’m saying to all these authors is that I wish they would treat their own messages with more reverence and excitement—to see the “ancient church” as the radical challenge that it truly is. Think again of Paul Farmer. He doesn’t say, “Here are some ways of helping the poor you might find helpful.” He doesn’t say, “I’ve chosen to live in a certain way, but I certainly wouldn’t presume to tell anyone else what to do.” Instead he says, with the poet Rilke, “You must change your life.”

Some of Paul Farmer’s political and religious beliefs strike me as misguided—he thinks Cuba an admirable regime, and he’s a big advocate of liberation theology—but for a quarter century he has lived and worked in Haiti among the most miserable people in the Western Hemisphere. He has been their advocate, their doctor, and their friend. So when he speaks, when he says “You must change your life,” I have to listen. Surely he has earned that much from me, that much at the least.

I am not saying that Halter and Smay and McLaren and Wilson-Hartgrove all need to be Paul Farmers before I will listen to them. There are hardly any Farmers in the world; he is an outlandish force of nature, as was Mother Teresa before him. Moral and spiritual heroism cannot be expected. But if “the ancient church,” whatever that is, knew things about the faithful Christian life that we have forgotten, then for God’s sake—and our own—let’s hear about it. Let’s hear it commended and celebrated, and let woe be proclaimed unto those who neglect it.

Must we change our lives? I fear we must. But how? There are, it seems to me, two general options. The first is that most radically Protestant of all models of sainthood, Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith.” There is nothing visible about this knight’s sainthood; his transformation is purely internal. Kierkegaard’s mouthpiece, Johannes de Silentio, scrutinizes the man: “I move a little closer to him, watch his slightest movement to see if it reveals a bit of heterogeneous optical telegraphy from the infinite, a glance, a facial expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that would betray the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from top to toe to see if there may not be a crack through which the infinite would peek. No! He is solid all the way through.” Will the knight of faith practice the spiritual disciplines? Certainly he will, but one would miss the point by naming them or treating them as tools or instruments toward the end of knighthood. The man’s whole life is a discipline, the single one of devotion to his Lord. Purity of heart is to will one thing.

For some, the idea of imitating the knight of faith will seem too easy—after all, you can do it while living in a middle-class neighborhood in Copenhagen—but for the wiser it will seem too hard. Many monks and nuns say that they retreat to the monastic life because their faith is too weak to flourish in the saeculum. And if such a retreat, in any of its forms, is not as attractive to Christians as it once was, it may be because we have more protections than our ancestors did from an experience of utter exposure.

Some of our protections are material, some political, some psychological, but in any case the world has seen, over the past few centuries, a move from the “porous self” to the “buffered self.” These are terms coined by the philosopher Charles Taylor. “The porous self is vulnerable,” he writes, “to spirits, demons, cosmic forces”—and, I would add, to ­unpredictable natural forces and political authorities who know little or nothing of the rule of law. “And along with this go certain fears that can grip it in certain circumstances. The buffered self has been taken out of the world of this kind of fear.”

The practices of the ancient Church were forged in eras of the porous self and were responsive to its fears and vulnerabilities. Can they be nearly as meaningful to us, surrounded by our protective buffers, as they were to our ancestors? Does their evident power suggest to us that we have paid too high a price for our buffers, that we may need to be more exposed? The self that can pursue the via illuminativa—that can be illuminated by God—may open itself to the demonic as well as the divine. The disciplines and practices of our Christian ancestors are not toys or tools; they are the hope of life to those who are perishing. This is what Alasdair ­MacIntyre had in mind when he said that, here among the ruins of our old civilization, what we may be waiting for is a new St. Benedict: someone who can articulate a whole way of life and call us to it.

The turn to the Christian past is indeed welcome, but it may demand more of us than we are prepared to give. In contemplating the witness and practices of our ancestors, we may discover that we’d rather remain within our buffers—if we can. But can we? Current electronic technologies—from blogs to texting to online banking to customer-specific Google ads—may be drawing us into a new age of porousness, with new exposures, new vulnerabilities. And in such a new age the hard-earned wisdom of our distant ancestors in the faith may be not just a set of interesting ideas and recommendations but an indispensable source of hope. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

Playground Morality

By Paul Spears
Scriptorium Daily

Elementary school is a rather treacherous place to learn to navigate as a child. The first time I ever read Calvin and Hobbes, I discovered a kindred spirit. Calvin’s view of elementary school was akin to an intergalactic prison where the alien life forms torture you for what seems like their own pleasure—at times I resonated with that analysis.

Elementary school is one of the first places that we begin to be, as philosopher Alasdair Macintyre puts it, “inculcated into duty and responsibility.” For example, elementary school children are told from the beginning that it is always wrong to hit others. They are told that if someone hits them they should not act in retaliation and hit back, but that they should tell the teacher.

Similarly, they are told that if someone is “making fun” of them they should not retaliate either physically or by any type of name calling. Again, they are to enlist the aid of a teacher who will act in a judicious manner and justly arbitrate the infraction. So the students are taught that the authority (teacher) must arbitrate school yard spats. If the student who is being bullied takes the conflict into their own hands (e.g. punches someone in the gut) they are violating the social structure of the elementary school and are punished (much to the delight of the bully).

Quickly students find themselves in a dilemma. For example, a student “Bob” knows that the rules of the school are part of the social structure he lives under, and to go against it leads to punishment. He also understands that all bullies know how to circumvent the codes against hitting and name calling. All of us know, mostly through personal experiences at one time or another, that the last people to know or do anything helpful in most cases of schoolyard conflict are the teachers. Additionally, Bob must also deal with the unwritten code of the playground that states, “Even under pain of torture (or even worse being ostracized) you must not tell on anyone (AKA squeal, narc or tattle-tail).”

This dilemma hits close to home with anyone who is a parent. How often children come home crying about a schoolyard scenario similar to the one above, and the parent has no idea what to do. They want to respect the authority (because they too have been “inculcated into duty and responsibility”) of the school, and are unable to think outside of the established social structure. Parents will say, “Let’s go talk to the teacher about this.” And the child will beg the parent not to do it—ultimately, because the child knows how ineffectual at best that course of action is.

This above scenario is indicative of our inability to think outside of the foundational social structures towards actions that actualizes the reality of the situation. Adults know that bullies take advantage of the busyness of the playground to intimidate their victims, but punish the child that justly defends themselves against a bully. This injustice happens because the social structure that is in place is ineffectual at protecting the student from the miscreant (and may even exacerbate the problem), and the parents limit their consideration of the situation to the social structure of the school.

We need to come to grips with the fact that this is only one of the ways in which we compartmentalize our actions based upon socially constructed norms. We are taught to respect the authority of the educational system, and do not question their abilities to maintain order at the school—even as an adult, who should know better.

Until we begin to think beyond our culturally inculcated responsibilities we will find that concepts like justice and truth are only phantoms wrapped up in accepted practices within our culture. It is only when we step outside of cultural expectations that we can see the conflicts that may be inherent in the structure. As moral agents, we must be able to have categories that transcend our own society.

This means that we need to be able to critique from a vantage of truth that is grounded in philosophical and theological principles (e.g. logic and the scriptures). If we want to do what is just and to be merciful we do not have the luxury of accepting in an unthoughtful manner what our national or world cultures tell us is within community standards. Of course, this means that we will be asking questions that by their nature call into account the propriety of the community standards, and this will lead to conflict with those who toe the “societal standard” line.

Christianity necessitates a critical view of “societal norms.” It is important that we do not thoughtlessly allow cultural standards to be the fundamental guide in our behavior. It is very easy to let society think for you, but as time-consuming and convoluted as it often is we must work to properly arbitrate the propriety of the society with the reality of the transcendent truth that comes for the word of God. When we do so we will be able to more effectively arbitrate schoolyard dilemmas as well as treat the widows and orphans properly with the respect and love God demands, and not just throw another ineffectual social program in their direction.

For a more detailed discussion of this topic I would highly recommend “Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency” which is in the book Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2, by Alasdair MacIntyre and is the inspiration of this post.

Why I’m Not Emergent — By a Guy Who Should Be

By Allen Yeh
Scriptorium Daily

I admit it—I stole the title of my blog from someone else. That someone else is my friend Kevin DeYoung, who went to seminary with me. He’s now the pastor of a church in Michigan. Kevin and his co-author Ted Kluck wrote a book entitled Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be.

I should explain something, though: I have not seen or talked to Kevin since I graduated from seminary in 2001, so I am not unduly influenced by him, nor have I even read his book (though I’ve heard about it). So the following observations/opinions have all come about quite recently and with very little influence from anyone else. If it’s possible to have a “jury” member (mostly unbiased based on little experience) comment on the Emergent Church, I think I would qualify! In fact, I think I would not only qualify as someone who is unbiased, but perhaps (based on my background) inclined to be sympathetic to the movement.

Just to set the stage for this discussion, the Emergent Church is a particular group within a larger movement called the Emerging Church (though I will use the two terms synonymously as many people do). Again, like Kevin’s book, it is a movement that I’ve heard about but have otherwise had little interaction with.

Of course, the movement’s big proponents are becoming household names among evangelicals: Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones, among others. I felt like, as someone who has the responsibility to teach or shepherd people, I ought to be at least educated on what all this is about.

What got the Emergent Church on my radar was the fact that I attended the National Pastors’ Convention (in San Diego) last week and both Brian McLaren and Rob Bell were there as featured speakers. I went to McLaren’s seminar and Bell’s keynote address, and I’d like to speak from my experiences.

But first, just to set the stage briefly, the Emergent Church is characterized by several hallmarks:

1) It is “missional.” However you define that, broadly speaking it means that it is focused on reaching people and makes that as a priority.

2) It is community-oriented. It eschews the gross individualism of Western society for an authentic interrelatedness.

3) It is postmodern, contemporary, and relevant. “Behind the times” and old-fashioned it is not.

4) It is social justice-oriented.

If anyone should be Emergent, it should be me! Why? Let me give you four reasons, corresponding to the above:
First of all, I am, by academic training, a missiologist. Contextualization is my thing. I love to spread the Gospel and study how it spreads. Secondly, I come from an Asian culture where community is highly prized, and I certainly prefer that over rampant individualism. Thirdly, I am young (relatively so—I’m in my early 30s) and the Emergent Church is geared toward people in their 20s and 30s. Fourthly, I studied Latin American liberation theology for my doctoral dissertation. Social justice is another one of my big interests. I attend an urban church in Long Beach that ministers to the poor. I even subscribe to the e-newletters of Sojourners and Evangelicals for Social Action.
If there is any type of person who is “ripe” for the Emergent movement, then I am surely it. Why then do I not resonate with the Emergent Church? Because I feel like it has robbed Peter to pay Paul.

Consider my circumstances at the National Pastors’ Convention. I showed up to Brian McLaren’s seminar, and he started off with a bang. He told a story about how he once asked a crowd of younger people what issues they think the church is concerned about these days. The answers came back: contemporary vs. traditional worship music; eschatology; whether women should be ordained; method of baptism; Calvinism vs. Arminianism; etc. He wrote those on a large piece of paper and stuck it to the wall. He then asked what they thought the world’s issues are these days. The replies were: the AIDS pandemic; global warming; nuclear disarmament; poverty and starvation; etc. He said, “Take a look at these two lists and tell me what’s wrong with this picture.”

I take his point. The church is irrelevant. Our concerns are not the world’s. That is a correct diagnosis. However, I did not have a problem with his diagnosis so much as his remedy. He concluded that we, as the church, need to focus on the second list instead of the first list. Ah, but that’s where we differed. So I raised my hand and said, “I agree that the church’s agenda is often irrelevant. However, aren’t you, then, just letting the world set the agenda instead of letting Jesus do it? After all, I don’t think people are good at self-diagnosing their problems. You ask most young people what they care about today, and it will probably be something about the next Batman movie or their iPhone. Only Jesus is able to offer both the correct diagnosis of our problems as well as the correct solution to those problems.” McLaren responded, “Like how? Give me an example.” So I said, “The woman at the well. She wanted regular water, but Jesus told her she needed Living Water. She tried to fill up her emptiness with many men, but Jesus told her that she needed eternal life.” McLaren dismissed me with, “Well, the trouble is that we all think we know what Jesus’ agenda is.” And I thought to myself, “But don’t you? After all, what you’re advertising here is what you think Jesus’ agenda for the world is, right? What Christian doesn’t operate with what they think Jesus’ agenda is?” Well, the room was full of McLarenites who all nodded affirmingly at his statement, and one guy even piped in, “Yeah, the problem with the church is that all we talk about is the soul.” !!! I wanted to say, “The problem with the Emergent movement is that you’ve left the soul out of the picture altogether!” In fact, McLaren never mentioned the soul once during that entire first hour of his talk. He wanted to replace the first list with the second list. I think that both lists are insufficient and need to be replaced with Jesus’ list, one that is far more holistic than either.

Remember, I’m the guy who wrote this blog on why I am a radical evangelical. But the difference between being a radical evangelical and being Emergent, it seems to me, is that radical evangelicals try to keep that tension, that balanced holistic middle ground, whereas the Emergent movement has sacrificed its biblical roots to remain relevant.

What was interesting to me, as I looked around the room of McLarenites, was that I was not only the youngest person in the room, but I was the only non-white person. Well, ethnic minorities are used to being the odd one out (by the very definition of “minority,” that’s just a fact of life we have to deal with every day) but this particularly disturbed me because it was supposed to be a “national pastors’ convention” and I’m pretty sure that not all the pastors in the nation are white and 50! [Please don’t think I’m being derogatory; instead of “old and white” I could’ve said “old and Asian” or “young and black” if that was the case. It wasn’t. I am merely using descriptive words of what were the plain facts: the demographics in the room just happened to be old and white].

In some ways, I applaud this reversal of trends. Old white people are not typically the demographic to be on board with the social justice thing! On the other hand, it disturbed me that everyone in the room was old and white. If the Emergent Church is meant to be missional, why is it hitting only one age demographic, and only one ethnic demographic? It’s obviously not doing a very good job of recruiting the very people it tries to reach. It’s like Latin American liberation theology. One adage I’ve heard is, “Liberation theologians chose the poor; but the poor chose Pentecostalism.” If it purports to be a grassroots movement but is only effective top-down, then it implodes upon itself, like Communism.

And that’s the major problem with the Emergent movement: like liberation theology, it starts not with Scripture but with the situation. I’ve studied Latin American liberation theology for the past seven years during my graduate studies, and I know it when I see it. The Emergent movement is essentially a cousin of liberation theology. Contextualization crosses the line when it allows the world to set the agenda. It’s one thing to be culturally relevant; it’s quite another thing altogether when the church is bowing to the whims of the world. And that’s just not the Gospel. McLaren is allowing the world to set the agenda for us. He’s so sick of the church’s petty concerns that he buys the world’s concerns wholesale. But I think he threw out the baby with the bathwater.

A second problem is that McLaren and the Emergent Church movement thrive on overstating their point to be radically different. That’s fine for shock value, but it is not lasting. Eventually people need substance, not just dazzle. A third problem with Emergents is that they’re built on an isolationist policy. They build their identity on being marginal. But if they recruit enough people to their cause, will they cease to be “different” and “edgy” and “alternative” and effectively collapse as “the other voice”? After all, anyone who wants to be non-denominational or anti-denominational becomes, in effect, their own denomination.

Look, don’t get me wrong—there are some great points about the Emergent movement, and I think its pushback against individualism is one of its greatest contributions. I also think it’s great that it’s trying to make the church relevant to non-Christians. I just think that, in trying to right the ship that’s leaning too far in one direction, it caused the ship to tip over the other way.

I’m a radical evangelical and deeply social justice-oriented, but I’m not Emergent, and definitely not cool. I don’t reach people with my leather jacket and trendy glasses, or rock music. I believe Jesus wants to reach people, heart, mind, body, emotions, and soul. He cares about whether we have believed Him in our hearts and confessed Him with our lips (Romans) and live that out with our lives (James) in helping the oppressed and keeping ourselves pure. The Gospel is that Christ died for your entire being, now and later, justification and sanctification and glorification, inside and out, and you ought to live for Him in prayer, social justice, worship, fellowship, purity, and reconciliation. That is Jesus’ list, which is different from the church’s list and different from the world’s list. It is a third way, one that I hope to follow, and that is why I am not Emergent—by a guy who should be.

P.S. Though McLaren did not resonate with me, I did like Rob Bell however! He came across as far more “hip” than McLaren was, but he preached forgiveness which is the center of the Gospel. And he did not keep it on the theoretical realm, he talked about real, hard, concrete forgiveness of people who have wronged you.

Great Ideas Do Not Oppress—They Enlighten

By John Stevens
Pope Center

A professor defends his advocacy of a Great Books program against an attack by politicized faculty members.

I recently proposed to expand the East Carolina University Great Books curriculum. Amid general support, I encountered one group of faculty that erupted into the most vitriolic exchange in recent memory.

The opposition boiled down to this: Why should they support the teaching of books that had justified (or been silent at) the oppression and enslavement of women and minorities—the majority of the world's population?

This brief skirmish in the canon war made me stop to ask why educated people should become enraged at the idea of teaching books read by the founding fathers and every educated person before the last century. My opponents’ underlying assumption seems to be that a modern curriculum should be political and be comprised of lessons on women's rights, African-Americans' rights, the self-determination of peoples, and freedom from imperialism. Of course, any good teacher brings a modern sensibility to the Great Books classroom and does not endorse sexism, racism, or imperialism. But that isn’t enough.

This outburst goes further, suggesting a new civic virtue that has thrown out the other virtues of wisdom, courage, and temperance, leaving only a narrow form of justice. The paramount virtue is opposition to sexism, racism and imperialism, as if that equates to an education. My outraged faculty colleagues seem to dismiss the importance of knowing how to think, of understanding nature, and of developing a disposition of character that would enable one, for example, to control the temptation to erupt in vitriol.

True, there are many time-honored claims against the justice of the Great Books. For example, the misogyny of Greek poets was notorious. Hesiod, who wrote a generation after Homer and was much admired by Roman poets, famously quipped, “Don't let a woman with a fancy tail turn your head with flattery and coaxing. She only wants your barn.”

In book one of Politics, Aristotle argues that some people are slaves by nature and may be justly "possessed" by others. Vergil justifies Roman imperialism in Aeneid during Aeneas' underworld encounter with his father, who warns, “Remember, Roman, to rule the nations with power (these will be your arts): add law to peace; in war spare the submissive but fight to the end against the proud.”

But by reducing Greek poetry merely to a justification for misogyny, Aristotle to racism, and Vergil to imperialism, advocates of this new civic virtue dismiss open inquiry and ignore everything positive these books have to offer. Hesiod also wrote catalogs of heroic women; Aristotle provided an interpretive framework within which to debate slavery—and nearly sides with the abolitionists— and Vergil's “proud enemies” were a metaphor for dark powers in the human soul where war truly originates.

Those who attempt to reduce Great Books to single ideas do violence to the public conversation. It is one thing for teachers of the very young to use excerpts from the Iliad to teach courage. It is another for adults to suppose that complex books have single definite meanings on moral questions. Mortimer Adler's attempt to organize the Great Books according to an Aristotelian schema of Great Ideas is perhaps the most elegant form of this mistaken approach.

In the wrong hands, the reduction of complex works to single ideas has led to some of the great tyrannies in history. Socrates was sentenced to death for being the teacher of Alcibiades and Critias, who were instrumental in the fall of Athens into tyranny—even though Xenophon tells us that they did not want to study philosophy: they only stayed long enough to learn clever rhetorical tricks necessary to achieve political power.

There are many other examples. Alexander the Great believed that in order to become Aristotle's “great-souled” man like Achilles, he needed the resources of the entire world to do the greatest good. Hobbes' Leviathan gave justification for the absolutism of seventeenth-century monarchs like Louis XIV. Schopenhauer's theory of the will was read by Hitler, but also by Beaudelaire, Proust and Yeats, none of whom felt the need to take over the world.

After every war, facile readings of the Great Books have led to new claims that they are politically dangerous. Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est, written during the gas attacks of World War I, mocks as sadistic the Roman poet Horace's claim that “it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.” At the end of World War II, Karl Popper published The Open Society and Its Enemies, which denounced Plato's Republic for glorifying totalitarianism. Beginning in the cold war (and as a herd after Vietnam), scholars decided that Vergil can be tolerated because subtle clues suggest he secretly detests Augustus' militarism and absolutism. And in the midst of our own Iraq war, the flawed basis for invasion has been partially blamed on “the noble lie” of Republic III, that sometimes in a democracy government must lie to get people to do the right thing.

If we rule out every book that could be the source of evil if misunderstood, we would have few left to choose from.

My faculty opponents are claiming new political virtues that supposedly supersede the merit of free inquiry through reading Great Books. But let us consider one of these virtues—truth-telling in government. How does one teach a citizen to desire truth for its own sake rather than because it conveniently suits our political desire of the moment? The Great Books teach such valued abstractions.

The books are thought-provoking texts that ask “the human questions.” Primarily fictional, they are ideal for educating the mind because their imaginary complex worlds and spheres of action arouse our curiosity over whether to embrace or reject their conceptions of our human experience. Popper's claim against Plato's Republic is a prime example: Plato wrote the work as a fictional discussion in which logic seems to suggest that to achieve a just society (by forcing all citizens to be virtuous), we must create a terribly repressive state. Plato imagines a reader sensitive enough to irony to reject the idea as absurd, however necessary and logical the case for totalitarianism may seem.

The open-ended structures of fictional worlds provoke different interpretations, and to entertain different interpretations stretches and tones the moral judgment. Of course, the Great Books also include foundational scientific and philosophical texts that provide important knowledge, but even these are primarily valuable for forcing the mind to consider whether to accept their conceptions of nature or logic.

One ancient argument suggested that if virtue were easy and pleasant, everyone would be virtuous. Virtue is something that requires effort both to understand and to begin to desire. Moral education seems to come about better from books that require active attention, close comparison of patterns of action, and repeated application of critical judgment; that is, engaged reading and re-reading.

The paradox of education is that before these books can help question absurd and dangerous political ideas, we must already be inquisitive, engaged readers. How are the Great Books to be established amid such prejudices in the modern university? And should Great Books be read if the ignorant may misuse them, possibly to become tyrants and destroy the state?

Fortunately, the very liberality of the American system usually allows even unpopular ideas to be taught. It is reasonable for faculty to object that we should not teach books that promote injustice, but, in fact, these books don’t promote injustice; instead, they entreat students to think more deeply about human problems and conflicts. And marvelous things happen when a community reads together. As one student recently remarked, “reading books with other people is more 
productive than reading them alone.”

Yes, education should be political, but in its most elevated sense in which we are all part of a rational dialogue, with tolerance for individuals and books that challenge the all-important political virtues of the moment.

Faith and Works Got Married (Hannah More)

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

Hannah More was a wildly popular author in her day because she had the common touch and a style that perfectly suited the tastes of her time. Here is one of her doctrinal poems (from volume 5 of her collected works), in which she carries out a homey reconciliation of faith and works in less than 100 zippy little lines. (I’ve broken it into stanzas to make it a little easier on the eye.)

Dan and Jane, or, Faith and Works. A Tale.

Good Dan and Jane were man and wife,
And lived a loving kind of life.
One point, however, they disputed
And each by turns his mate confuted.
‘Twas Faith and Works, this knotty question,
They found not easy of digestion.
While Dan for Faith alone contended,
Jane equally Good Works defended.

“They are not Christians, sure, but Turks,
Who build on Faith and scoff at Works,”
Quoth Jane; while eager Dan replied,
“By none but Heathens Faith’s denied.

I’ll tell you, wife,” one day quoth Dan,
“A story of a right good man:
A Patriarch sage, of ancient days,
A man of Faith whom all must praise;
In his own country he possess’d
Whate’er can make a wise man blest,
His was the flock, the field, the spring,
In short, a little rural king.
Yet pleas’d he quits his native land,
By Faith in the Divine command.
God bade him go; and he, content,
Went forth, not knowing where he went:
He trusted in the promise made,
And, undisputing, straight obey’d.
The heavenly word he did not doubt,
But proved his Faith by going out.”

Jane answer’d with some little pride:
“I’ve an example on my side;
And though my tale be somewhat longer,
I trust you’ll find it vastly stronger.
I’ll tell you, Daniel, of a man,
The holiest since the world began
Who now God’s favour is receiving,
For prompt obeying, not believing.
One only son this man possess’d,
In whom his righteous age was blest;
And more to mark the grace of heaven
This son by miracle was given.
And from this child, the word Divine,
Had promised an illustrious line.
When lo! at once a voice he hears,
Which sounds like thunder in his ears!
God says, ‘Go sacrifice thy son!’
‘This moment, Lord, it shall be done.’
He goes, and instantly prepares,
To slay this child of many pray’rs,
Now here you see the grand expedience,
Of Works, of actual, sound obedience.
This was not Faith, but act and deed;
The Lord commands the child shall bleed:
Thus Abraham acted,” Jenny cried,
“Thus Abraham trusted,” Dan replied.

“Abraham!” quoth Jane, “why that’s my man.”
“No, Abraham’s he I mean,” says Dan.
“He stands a monument of Faith.”
“No, ’tis for Works the Scripture saith.”
“‘Tis for Obedience I commend him.”

Thus he, thus she; both warmly feel,
And lose their temper in their zeal.
Too quick each other’s choice to blame,
They did not see each meant the same.

At length, “Good wife,” said honest Dan,
“We’re talking of the self-same man.
The Works you praise, I own indeed,
Grow from that Faith for which I plead.
And Abraham, whom for Faith I quote
For Works deserves especial note.
‘Tis not enough of Faith to talk:
A man of God with God must walk.
Our doctrines are at last the same,
They only differ in the name.
The Faith, I fight for, is the root;
The Works, you value, are the fruit.
How shall you know my creed’s sincere,
Unless in Works my Faith appear?
How shall I know a tree’s alive,
Unless I see it bear and thrive?
Your Works not growing on my root,
Would prove they were not genuine Fruit.
If Faith produce no Works, I see,
That Faith is not a living tree.
Thus Faith and Works together grow;
No separate life they e’er can know.
They’re soul and body, hand and heart;
What God hath join’d let no man part!”

Dawkins' Critique of the Ontological Argument

Dr. William Lane Craig
ReasonableFaith.org

Question:

Greetings Dr. Craig, both my heart and mind feel very blessed and fulfilled through your presentation of God's character. I am a fan of the ontological argument for God's existence (scary I know). In Richard Dawkins' book, "The God Delusion," he references Douglas Gasking's 'Proof' that God does not exist, which goes like this:

1. The creation of the world is the most marvelous achievement imaginable.

2. The merit of an achievement is the product of (a) its intrinsic quality, and (b) the ability of its creator.

3. The greater the disability (or handicap) of the creator, the more impressive the achievement.

4. The most formidable handicap for a creator would be non-existence.

5. Therefore if we suppose that the universe is the product of an existent creator we can conceive a greater being namely, one who created everything while not existing.

6. An existing God therefore would not be a being greater than which a greater cannot be conceived because an even more formidable and incredible creator would be a God which did not exist.

7. Therefore, God does not exist.

Have you ever rebutted this formation or come across it? What are your thoughts on this formation? Thanks!

Jeff

Dr. Craig responds:

I have to confess that I had never come across this argument until I read it in The God Delusion. The reason for its obscurity isn't hard to divine: it's so wrong-headed that even detractors of the ontological argument who understand that argument would agree that this objection is no good. To see why, let's review the ontological argument.

The version below comes from Alvin Plantinga, one of America's premier philosophers. It's formulated in terms of possible worlds semantics. For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology of possible worlds, let me explain that by "a possible world" one doesn't mean a planet or even a universe, but rather a complete description of reality, or a way reality might be. To say that God exists in some possible world is just to say that there is a possible description of reality which includes the statement "God exists" as part of that description.

Now in his version of the argument, Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is "maximally excellent" in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to include such properties as omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls "maximal greatness." So Plantinga argues:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.

2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Premises (2)-(5) of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God's existence is even possible, then He must exist. The principal issue to be settled with respect to Plantinga's ontological argument is what warrant exists for thinking the key premiss "It's possible that a maximally great being exists" to be true.

The idea of a maximally great being is intuitively a coherent idea, and so it seems plausible that such a being could exist. In order for the ontological argument to fail, the concept of a maximally great being must be incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor. But the concept of a maximally great being doesn't seem even remotely incoherent. This provides some prima facie warrant for thinking that it is possible that a maximally great being exists.

In his book Dawkins devotes six full pages, brimming with ridicule and invective, to the ontological argument, without raising any serious objection to this argument. (He notes in passing Immanuel Kant's objection that existence is not a perfection; but since Plantinga's argument doesn't presuppose that it is, we can leave that irrelevance aside.) He then cites the parody of the argument you mention above, which is designed to show that God does not exist because a God "who created everything while not existing" is greater than one who exists and created everything.

Ironically, this parody, far from undermining the ontological argument, actually reinforces it! For a being who creates everything while not existing is a logical incoherence and is therefore impossible: there is no possible world which includes a non-existent being which creates the world. If the atheist is to maintain—as he must—that God's existence is impossible, the concept of God would have to be similarly incoherent. But to all appearances it's not. That supports the plausibility of premiss (1) of Plantinga's argument.

I think you can see that Dawkins doesn't even understand the logic of the ontological argument, which moves from the logical possibility of God's existence to its actuality. A parody of the argument that moves from a logical impossibility to actuality is not parallel to the argument.

Dawkins chortles, "I've forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong" (God Delusion, p. 84). This is just embarrassing. The ontological argument is an exercise in modal logic—the logic of the possible and the necessary. I can just imagine Dawkins making a nuisance of himself at this professional conference with his spurious parody, just as he similarly embarrassed himself at the Templeton Foundation conference in Cambridge where he describes his confronting sophisticated philosophers and theologians with his flyweight objection to the teleological argument!

If you're interested in further responses to Dawkins' critique of theistic arguments, have a look at Chad Meister and my new book God Is Great, God Is Good, forthcoming this year with Inter-Varsity Press.