Oscillating, Not Vacillating: Simeon at Both Extremes

By Fred Sanders
Scriptorium Daily

This is a continuation from a previous blog post on Scriptorium Daily, Charles Simeon of Cambridge.

***
Charles Simeon knew the secret of staying centered on the Gospel even when the centrifugal forces of controversy conspired to knock him off balance. His approach was classically described by HCG Moule in his Simeon biography (starting around page 96).

Simeon’s main goal in all his preaching was to emphasize what God wanted emphasized, and he did this by putting the stress on what Scripture stresses. Every time he went to Scripture, his goal was to see what the author of that book was particularly insisting on, and then to insist on that in his exposition of it. Simeon’s own words for this: “I love the simplicity of the scriptures … I wish to receive and inculcate every truth precisely in the way and to the extent that it is set forth in the inspired volume … My endeavour is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head; never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding.”

“Were this the habit of all divines,” he goes on, “there would soon be an end of most of the controversies that have agitated and divided the Church of Christ.” Simeon’s age was rocked with all sorts of controversies, and divisiveness was the trend of the times. But for the sake of the gospel, he intended to hold as many evangelical Christians together as possible. He kept a sharp eye on his own teaching to ensure that he didn’t develop pet topics or favorite doctrines. “My endeavour is to bring out of Scripture what is there, and not to thrust in what I think might be there. I have a great jealousy on this head; never to speak more or less than I believe to be the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding.”

“I would run after nothing, and shun nothing.” In the preface to his Horae Homileticae, Simeon pointed out that you can always tell when your theology is getting in the way of your ability to read the Bible: If you had been sitting beside the apostolic authors at the moment when they were composing their books, are there phrases that you would ask them to omit, clarify, or re-phrase? That desire to fix up the Bible is the tell-tale sign that you have adopted the wrong attitude toward biblical truth, especially if all your answers are predictably partisan: “Oh, Paul, leave out that Calvinist stuff please,” or “Could you mention predestination a few more times here when you’re talking about faith?” Here is Simeon in the preface to the Horae Homileticae:

The author is disposed to think that the Scripture system is of a broader and more comprehensive character than some very dogmatical theologians are inclined to allow; and that, as wheels in a complicated machine may move in opposite directions and yet subserve one common end, so may truths apparently opposite be perfectly reconcilable with each other and equally subserve the purposes of God in the accomplishment of man’s salvation. The author feels it impossible to avow too distinctly that it is an invariable rule with him to endeavour to give to every portion of the Word of God its full and proper force, without considering what scheme it favours, or whose system it is likely to advance. Of this he is sure, that there is not a decided Calvinist or Arminian in the world who equally approves of the whole of Scripture . . . who, if he had been in the company of St Paul whilst he was writing his Epistles, would not have recommended him to alter one or other of his expressions. … But the author would not wish one of them altered; he finds as much satisfaction in one class of passages as in another; and employs the one, he believes, as freely as the other. Where the inspired Writers speak in unqualified terms, he thinks himself at liberty to do the same; judging that they needed no instruction from him how to propagate the truth. He is content to sit as a learner at the feet of the holy Apostles, and has no ambition to teach them how they ought to have spoken.

When Calvinists and Arminians are fighting, it’s easy enough to assume an imaginary moral high ground and say “I’m a Cal-Minian.” You can make it sound a little more thoughtful by saying “Both positions are true in what they affirm and false in what they deny.” And in our times, it’s even easy to say “we just can’t know how these two truths are to be reconciled, so we should stop trying to be consistent and just affirm two incompatible truths simultaneously while repeating the word MYSTERY a lot for its hypnotic effect.” But Simeon wasn’t anti-system; he just believed that Scripture, precisely as it stands, has a system too complex for us to subject to our mastery. “The Scripture system is of a broader and more comprehensive character” than the theologies that we put together by following out the inferences. One way of adhering to “the Scripture system” is to make sure you never let your carefully-constructed tower of inferences and implications overshadow the clear statements of Scripture. If your predestinarian calculus keeps you from the basic math of God calling out to you to repent and choose to follow him, you have made a mistake somewhere. If your Arminian algebra keeps you from recognizing the clear biblical affirmation of God’s sovereignty in salvation, you are wrong.

In 1825, Simeon wrote to a friend that when he avoided the factiousness of theological controversy, he was not advocating a compromise between two extreme positions. No, he fully intended to occupy both positions at once. “I can say in words what these thirty years I have proclaimed in deeds, that the truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes.” He enters an imaginary dialogue with Paul:

“Here are two extremes; observing days, eating meats, etc. —
‘Paul, how do you move? In the mean way? ‘
‘ No.’
To one extreme?’
‘No.’—
‘How then?’
‘To both extremes in their turn, as occasion requires.’

Here are two other extremes, Calvinism and Arminianism (for you need not to be told how long Calvin and Arminius lived before St Paul).
‘How do you move in reference to these, Paul? In a golden mean?‘
‘No.’
‘To one extreme?‘
‘No.’
‘How then?’
‘To both extremes; today I am a strong Calvinist, to-morrow a strong Arminian.’
‘Well, well, Paul, I see thou art beside thyself; go to Aristotle, and learn the golden mean.’”

But I am unfortunate; I formerly read Aristotle, and liked him much; I have since read Paul, and caught somewhat of his strange notions, oscillating (not vacillating) from pole to pole. Sometimes I am a high Calvinist, at other times a low Arminian, so that if extremes will please you, I am your man; only remember, it is not one extreme that we are to go to, but both extremes…. Now, my beloved brother, if I find you in the zenith on the one side, I shall hope to find you in the nadir on the other; and then we shall be ready (in the estimation of the world, and of moderate Christians, who love the golden mean) to go to Bedlam together.

Simeon’s sermons repay a close reading in our own time because he is so masterful at maintaining both extremes in conflict after conflict. It wasn’t just a mental habit with him, and he recognized error when he saw it: anti-trinitarians were just wrong, and Roman Catholicism was hobbled by grievous errors in doctrine and practice. Simeon’s judgment about holding both extremes could only be invoked in cases where both parties had robust biblical warrant. The conflicts of his age presented a different face: long before Pentecostalism, he fought for a greater awareness (even an “extreme” awareness) of the supernatural work of the Spirit in the life of an orderly church. On another front, when one party taught that Christianity consisted exhaustively in joining the right church and partaking of her sacraments (”the church party”), another neglected baptism and the Lord’s Supper in favor of proclamation of the message of salvation (”the evangelical party”). One side let its ecclesiology swallow up its soteriology, while the other had a soteriology so all-encompassing that church became an afterthought. Simeon, of course, emphasized both at once, as loud as he could, full force, all the time. That may sound hard to do, but the alternatives have the disadvantage of lacking faithfulness.

Free People Are Happy People

By Arthur C. Brooks
City Journal

The earliest American definition of liberty—stated frequently by the Founding Fathers—is about constraints on personal actions: if I don’t hurt anybody else, I should be free to pursue my own will. As Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, “A wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” Despite more recent attempts to expand our understanding of freedom to include claims on one another or on government—FDR’s 1941 State of the Union speech, for example, which mentioned “freedom from want”—about two-thirds of Americans still define freedom in terms of doing what they want, being able to make their own choices, or having liberty in speech and religion.

Understanding freedom is a matter of no small importance. The Founders believed that it was one of at least three fundamental rights from God, along with life and the pursuit of happiness. These three rights are interrelated: not only does liberty, of course, depend on life, but the pursuit of happiness depends on liberty. In fact, evidence shows that freedom and happiness are strongly linked. But what kind of freedom makes Americans happiest? And what can government best do to promote freedom and help us pursue happiness, as is our inalienable right?

A large body of social-science research over the past decade has been devoted to studying happiness. In general, researchers rely on self-reported measurements of happiness—which, according to considerable work by psychologists, statisticians, and neuroscientists, are actually quite accurate and comparable among individuals. (This has been shown by comparing people’s survey responses to psychological evaluations, surveys of family members, and even tests of brain activity.) And over the past three decades, the nationwide General Social Survey (GSS)—undertaken approximately every two years by researchers at the National Opinion Research Center—has been one of the only repeated surveys to ask people about their happiness and has therefore been used in many happiness studies.

In 2000, the GSS also asked adult Americans about their attitudes about freedom. About 70 percent of the respondents said that they were “completely free” or “very free,” and another 25 percent said that they were “moderately free.” Further, about 70 percent thought that Americans in general were completely or very free.

Perhaps such results are not surprising in the United States. But the GSS also revealed that people who said that they felt completely or very free were twice as likely to say that they were very happy about their lives as those who felt only a moderate degree of freedom, not much, or none at all. Even when holding income, sex, education, race, religion, politics, and family status constant, we find that people who felt free were about 18 percentage points more likely than others to say that they were very happy.

Graphs by Alberto Mena

Freedom and happiness are highly correlated, then; even more significant, several studies have shown that freedom causes happiness. In a famous 1976 experiment, psychologists in Connecticut gave residents on one floor of a nursing home the freedom to decide which night of the week would be “movie night,” as well as the freedom to choose and care for the plants on their floor. On another floor of the same nursing home, residents did not receive these choices and responsibilities. The first group of residents—no healthier or happier than the second when the experiment began—quickly showed greater alertness, more activity, and better mood. A year and a half later, they were still doing better, and even dying at half the rate of the residents on the other floor.

Many subsequent studies replicated the experiment in different settings, including foreign ones. One 2003 study of German senior citizens asked participants to keep diaries recording their activities and moods. The researchers found that a low level of perceived personal freedom strongly predicted depression; they went on to suggest enhanced freedom for nursing-home residents as an efficient way to improve their quality of life.

The data and evidence don’t prove that all kinds of freedom bring equal happiness, or that more freedom is always better than less. For example, what about economic freedom? Pundits and politicians on the left often tell us that a free economy makes for an unhappy population: the disruptions of capitalism make us insecure, and we would prefer the security of generous welfare programs and national health care. But for most people, it turns out, that isn’t true.

To begin with, those who favor less government intervention in our economic affairs are happier than those who favor more. When asked in 2004 whether it was the government’s responsibility to improve the living standards of Americans, 26 percent of those who agreed called themselves very happy, versus 37 percent who disagreed. When asked in 1996 whether it should be “the government’s responsibility to keep prices under control,” those who said it “definitely should be” were a quarter less likely to say that they were very happy than those who said it “definitely should not be.”

You might be tempted to ascribe this correlation to the unhappy poor who favor government intervention to improve their lot. But a look at entire nations, it’s important to note, shows that freer economies mean happier populations in general. In 2002, the International Social Survey Programme measured happiness in nearly three dozen countries. In the same year, as in every year since 1995, the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation compiled the Index of Economic Freedom, scoring nations on such criteria as the freedom to operate a business, trade with other nations, ease of investment, property rights, and level of business corruption. The result was an aggregate score from 0 to 100, where 100 meant maximum freedom. Near the top, scoring around 80, were most of the Anglophone countries; most Western European countries scored in the 65–75 range; formerly Communist countries and developing nations were lower; and at the bottom sat North Korea. If you apply these data to the International Social Survey Programme’s nations, you will find that a 1-percentage-point increase in economic freedom is associated with a 2-point rise in the percentage of the population who say that they are completely happy or very happy.

So it’s not surprising that in 1990, at the end of the Communist era, one cross-country survey found that 41 percent of Americans said that they were very happy—contrasted with just 14 percent of East Germans, 6 percent of Russians and Czechs, and 2 percent of Latvians. Of course, regimes behind the Iron Curtain were not just economically unfree; they were politically unfree as well. And like economic freedom, political freedom—democracy and participation in the democratic process—is strongly associated with happy citizens. Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer made this point convincingly in the 1990s, comparing happiness levels across various Swiss cantons, which vary dramatically in how much political participation they afford their citizens. Cantons that allowed citizens more direct democratic rights, as well as meetings with leaders to discuss political and financial matters, proved significantly happier than cantons where political access was more restricted.

Religious freedom—known to the Founding Fathers as the “first liberty”—probably brings happiness, too. That assertion is hard to test internationally because there are no widely accepted global indexes of religious freedom. It is even hard to test within the United States because no one without religious freedom exists to tell us how unhappy he might be. Yet we do know that people who support freedom for those with unusual religious beliefs are happier than those who do not. In a 2006 survey asking if respondents endorsed the right of people with antireligious views to speak publicly, those who said “no” were a third likelier than those who said “yes” to say that they were not too happy. In other words, religious tolerance—even tolerance of anti-religiousness—is strongly linked with happiness.

Furthermore, many of the happiest people in America achieve their happiness through faith. When asked in the 2000 GSS about the experiences that made them feel the most free, about 11 percent of adults put religious and spiritual experiences at the top of the list. And these people were more likely than those mentioning any other experience to say that they were very happy.

Surprisingly, one reason that religious experience is satisfying may be that religion imposes constraints on behavior—and these constraints point to a kind of freedom that isn’t conducive to happiness.

In the mid-1990s, researchers at Stanford University set up two booths in a supermarket and handed out samples of jam. One booth offered six types of jam; the second, 24. While more shoppers stopped to sample from the wider array, people who sampled from the narrower one were ten times likelier to buy a jar of jam later. In another experiment, the same researchers gave college students the opportunity to write an extra-credit essay. One group could choose from just six essay topics; the other had 30 to pick from. Those with fewer choices not only were much likelier to complete their essays; they did better work as well.

The reason that people often prefer less choice to more, psychologists believe, is that choice can overwhelm, as the costs of processing information and making a decision outweigh the gains from having more options. This idea is called the “choice overload hypothesis.” A similar concept—“moral freedom overload,” to coin a phrase—may apply in cases of moral choice. Here, too much freedom leaves us insecure and searching, unable to distinguish right from wrong, and thus miserable. And religion, which often shapes and limits people’s moral choices, is one way people have found to mitigate moral freedom overload.

The GSS again provides evidence for this claim. Do you think that a woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason? You are 9 percentage points less likely to be very happy than those who do not believe in abortion on demand, and this difference persists even after correcting for your age, income, education, race, and marital status. If you think extramarital sex is “always wrong,” you are 10 points more likely to say that you are very happy than if you think it isn’t always wrong. Premarital sex, drug legalization, the social consequences of religion, you name it—on all these issues, the moral traditionalists who abridge their own freedom are happier than the moral modernists who bar themselves from little or nothing.

Many would suggest that the best way to avoid moral freedom overload is not through religion but through government power. We do have many legal prohibitions that mirror religious and ethical injunctions. Prostitution, for example, is illegal because many—perhaps most—Americans feel that it is indecent; so is incest. Various “blue laws,” mostly relating to serving and selling alcohol on Sundays, remain on the books in some states.

But using the law to enforce moral behavior—and thus, in theory, to promote happiness—can miss the mark for three reasons. First, government is better equipped to constrain people’s actions than to change their morals. Worldviews depend on culture more than on politicians. True, laws can affect culture, but principally they entice people to behave in a way that avoids penalties—or to hide their actions from the law. Not only does this do little for happiness; it also can turn immoral people into criminals. Second, though extreme licentiousness isn’t a good idea, a large body of

evidence suggests that what many would call vice (moderate alcohol use, for instance, and sex within committed relationships) is associated with much virtue—happiness, health, and prosperity. Saint Augustine himself taught that moderation is more difficult than abstinence and hence can be more virtuous. And third, of course, government restrictions on morality tend to stifle the very freedoms that make people happy. For enforcing morality, government is a terribly blunt tool, potentially stripping away large amounts of economic and political freedom in order to hone a bit of good behavior.

Is it ever appropriate for the government to abridge moral freedom? Obviously it is, when my moral license unreasonably harms you. Then it becomes a question not of protecting me from myself but of protecting you from me. Thomas Jefferson made this point explicitly when he said that “to close the circle of felicities,” the government had to “restrain men from injuring one another.” Of course, the boundary between my liberty and your harm is often fuzzy. Proponents of smoking bans believe that smokers harm others when exposing them to secondhand smoke. Opponents, by contrast, see the bans as an example of the nanny state on steroids, protecting people from their own indulgence in a relatively minor vice. Far more seriously, the pro-choice position is that abortion does not hurt a human being and is therefore a private moral matter. The pro-life camp, meanwhile, believes that the fetus is a person who deserves protection from violence, meaning that the issue is one of public, not private, morality.

But in cases where all can agree that our private, immoral behavior does not harm others, our happiness is best served with rules in our private lives that constrain our morality and protect us from excess in moments of personal weakness. The recipe for happiness is a combination of individual liberty, personal decency, and moderation. And government protects our freedom best when it forgoes infringements on our moral choices but vigorously defends our right to restrict these choices ourselves.

If the importance of liberty to happiness sounds obvious to you—as obvious as the importance of life to liberty—it’s probably because you’re an American. In many countries, you would find yourself fined, imprisoned, or worse for asserting your right to vote, worship, or even open a business as you wished. America is an oasis of happiness-producing freedom in a world that generally doesn’t believe that citizens can handle freedom and doesn’t trust them to try.

As Americans, we understand that people can be entrusted with freedom, which is why we guard it so jealously. But happiness requires that we also use freedom responsibly—which means, both as individuals and as a nation, balancing abundant private liberty with healthy personal morality.

Just What Are Schools to Do? The Aims and Purposes of Education

By Dr. Al Mohler
albertmohler.com


Schools are never just about education. For that matter, education is never just about education. The school as an institution is founded and supported as a means to some end. In ancient Israel, education was to produce a faithful member of the chosen nation -- a son who would bring pride to the family and his people and glory to God. In ancient Greece the school was to produce a productive citizen, wise and mature. Rome followed the example of Greece.

In the Christian tradition, education was first about making disciples. The earliest Christian schools were catechetical schools for new believers. The early church borrowed from the classical models and established new traditions.

Christianity and Christian culture would later give birth to monastic schools, the universities, and community schools. The university would emerge from the Christian conviction that all truth is established in the one true God, and is thus rightly studied as a unity -- in a university.

Many of the early community schools in Europe and England were established by churches and Christians who wanted to improve the prospects of the poor, especially the urban poor. This movement gained ground in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, as cities such as London, Manchester, and Liverpool filled with indigent children. The same was true of American cities such as New York, Boston, and (somewhat later) Chicago.

In the United States, the public schools emerged out of a vision to inculcate certain common values and a common vision of citizenship. This movement gained momentum in the early twentieth century, when "progressivist" educators saw the public schools as a mechanism to reduce the segmentation of urban areas into ethnic and religious enclaves -- a very real problem in cities like Boston and New York. The "common school" would produce a generation of Americans --not just Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and others drawn by the great migrations to the United States.

Rather early in the twentieth century, that vision was modified to add other concerns. Theorists such as John Dewey argued that the public schools must be pervasively secular in a sense they had not been before. Dewey wanted to see the schools separate children from the religious prejudices of their parents. Front and center in his concern was the influence of the Roman Catholic Church, and much of the public momentum behind the movement was driven by explicit anti-Catholicism. Many Protestants bought into the secularization concept because they were pleased to see Catholic influence checked. They would later learn that what they had set loose against the Catholics would lead to unintended and unwanted consequences.

Later influences on the public schools included the emphasis on science and technology that came in the midst of the "Sputnik scare" and the Cold War. The federal government poured millions upon millions of dollars into science and math education in the public schools, afraid that young Americans were falling behind young Soviets in terms of scientific know-how. Others wanted the schools to produce capable workers for the assembly lines and factories of the age of the machines.

The 1960s and later decades saw the public schools driven to take therapeutic concerns as a prime "educational" goal, with concepts such as self-esteem and "authenticity" coming to the fore. In addition, those with aggressive agendas concerning sex and sexuality education, "values clarification," and a host of other ideological fads and fashions pushed those agendas into the public schools.

Even as the early movement to separate children from the religious "prejudices" of their parents set the schools in opposition to parents, the same was true with much of the sex education that was established in the public schools during the 1980s and 1990s. Those battles continue today.

In reality, any debate over education is an ideological debate -- a worldview clash. There is no neutrality in education. The education is designed to produce some kind of result, some kind of citizen. There is no way that this can be separated from character, morality, and worldview.

All this comes to mind when looking at a news report out of Britain. The respected headmaster of an admired school is taking leave of his position -- resigning in protest of what he laments as the schools' descent into "social engineering."

As The Telegraph [London] reports:

A leading headmaster who is leaving one of the most popular schools in the state system to work in the private sector has accused the Government of turning teachers into "social workers and surrogate parents".

Rod MacKinnon, the head of Bexley Grammar School, south-east London, said schools were being forced to shun traditional lessons as ministers manipulated the education system for the purposes of "social engineering".

He said schools "cannot solve all of society's ills" and should be left to teach.

More:

"There are those who wish to use children and schools as social engineers with a view to creating a different society but we should not even be trying to do such things," he said. "Children need to be nurtured, educated and cared for, not thrown into the frontline of social reform. Muddled thinking is guaranteeing failure for the noble aspirations we all commonly hold for the education of the young."

Mr. MacKinnon reached the conclusion that school teachers "simply do not have the contact time to 'create' behaviours and attitudes within children. They are not – and cannot be – social engineers and social workers and surrogate parents, as well as subject teachers, all rolled into one."

That is an eloquent lament from an anguished educator. There are many American principals and teachers who share these concerns, and millions of citizens who should. Education is always controversial when worldviews and expectations collide -- and for good reason. Seen rightly, education is all about what we want children to know, how we want them to think, and what kind of people we want them to be. Education is never only about what most people think of as education.

Statistics on Religion in America Report

The Pew Forum

A major survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life finds that most Americans have a non-dogmatic approach to faith. A majority of those who are affiliated with a religion, for instance, do not believe their religion is the only way to salvation. And almost the same number believes that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion. This openness to a range of religious viewpoints is in line with the great diversity of religious affiliation, belief and practice that exists in the United States, as documented in a survey of more than 35,000 Americans that comprehensively examines the country’s religious landscape.

This is not to suggest that Americans do not take religion seriously. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey also shows that more than half of Americans rank the importance of religion very highly in their lives, attend religious services regularly and pray daily. Furthermore, a plurality of adults who are affiliated with a religion want their religion to preserve its traditional beliefs and practices rather than either adjust to new circumstances or adopt modern beliefs and practices. Moreover, significant minorities across nearly all religious traditions see a conflict between being a devout person and living in a modern society.

The Landscape Survey confirms the close link between Americans' religious affiliation, beliefs and practices, on the one hand, and their social and political attitudes, on the other. Indeed, the survey demonstrates that the social and political fault lines in American society run through, as well as alongside, religious traditions. The relationship between politics and religion in the United States is particularly strong with respect to political ideology and views on social issues such as abortion and homosexuality, with the more religiously committed adherents across several religious traditions expressing more conservative political views. On other issues included in the survey, such as environmental protection, foreign affairs, and the proper size and role of government, differences based on religion tend to be smaller.

Religion in America: Non-Dogmatic, Diverse and Politically Relevant

Most Americans agree with the statement that many religions – not just their own – can lead to eternal life. Among those who are affiliated with a religious tradition, seven-in-ten say many religions can lead to eternal life. This view is shared by a majority of adherents in nearly all religious traditions, including more than half of members of evangelical Protestant churches (57%). Only among Mormons (57%) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (80%) do majorities say that their own religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life.

Most Americans also have a non-dogmatic approach when it comes to interpreting the tenets of their own religion. For instance, more than two-thirds of adults affiliated with a religious tradition agree that there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their faith, a pattern that occurs in nearly all traditions. The exceptions are Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, 54% and 77% of whom, respectively, say there is only one true way to interpret the teachings of their religion.

The lack of dogmatism in American religion may well reflect the great diversity of religious affiliation, beliefs and practices in the U.S. For example, while more than nine-in-ten Americans (92%) believe in the existence of God or a universal spirit, there is considerable variation in the nature and certainty of this belief. Six-in-ten adults believe that God is a person with whom people can have a relationship; but one-in-four – including about half of Jews and Hindus – see God as an impersonal force. And while roughly seven-in-ten Americans say they are absolutely certain of God’s existence, more than one-in-five (22%) are less certain in their belief.

A similar pattern is evident in views of the Bible. Nearly two-thirds of the public (63%) takes the view that their faith’s sacred texts are the word of God. But those who believe Scripture represents the word of God are roughly evenly divided between those who say it should be interpreted literally, word for word (33%), and those who say it should not be taken literally (27%). And more than a quarter of adults – including two-thirds of Buddhists (67%) and about half of Jews (53%) – say their faith’s sacred texts are written by men and are not the word of God.

The diversity in religious beliefs and practices in the U.S. in part reflects the great variety of religious groups that populate the American religious landscape. The survey finds, for example, that some religious groups – including Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of historically black and evangelical Protestant churches – tend to be more likely to report high levels of religious engagement on questions such as the importance of religion in their lives, certainty of belief in God and frequency of attendance at religious services. Other Christian groups – notably members of mainline Protestant churches and Catholics – are less likely to report such attitudes, beliefs and practices. And still other faiths – including Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims – exhibit their own special mix of religious beliefs and practices.

The Landscape Survey also reveals that people who are not affiliated with a particular religious tradition do not necessarily lack religious beliefs or practices. In fact, a large portion (41%) of the unaffiliated population says religion is at least somewhat important in their lives, seven-in-ten say they believe in God, and more than a quarter (27%) say they attend religious services at least a few times a year.

The findings of the Landscape Survey underscore the importance of affiliation with a particular tradition for understanding not only people’s religious beliefs and practices but also their basic social and political views. For instance, Mormons and members of evangelical churches tend to be more conservative in their political ideology, while Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and atheists tend to be more politically liberal than the population overall. But the survey shows that there are important differences within religious traditions as well, based on a number of factors, including the importance of religion in people’s lives, the nature and certainty of their belief in God, and their frequency of prayer and attendance at worship services.

One of the realities of politics in the U.S. today is that people who regularly attend worship services and hold traditional religious views are much more likely to hold conservative political views while those who are less connected to religious institutions and more secular in their outlook are more likely to hold liberal political views.

The connection between religious intensity and political attitudes appears to be especially strong when it comes to issues such as abortion and homosexuality. About six-in-ten Americans who attend religious services at least once a week say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, while only about three-in-ten who attend less often share this view. This pattern holds across a variety of religious traditions. For instance, nearly three-in-four (73%) members of evangelical churches who attend church at least once a week say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, compared with only 45% of members of evangelical churches who attend church less frequently. (more)

Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness

By Benjamin R. Barber
World Affairs Journal

Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty from without. In collaboration, the trends are dealing a ruinous blow to democracy—to our capacity for common judgment, citizenship, and liberty itself.

The common thread that winds through these two stories is the erosion of national autonomy—and, with it, the state’s monopoly over violence, the power to enact binding laws, and other essential aspects of sovereignty. Sovereignty, in turn, is an obvious precondition for democracy (which you cannot have without a state). When the sovereign state erodes, democracy erodes. It is that simple—and, beset from within and without, it is happening even today.

There is, to begin with, an accelerating process of internal disintegration—and the engine, consumerism, that drives it. Critics such as David Riesman, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Baudrillard have been writing about conspicuous consumption, keeping up with the Joneses, outer-directed men in gray flannel suits, the dialectic of enlightenment and one-dimensional men since the end of World War II. The story is by now well chronicled: Productivist capitalism, molded by a Protestant ethos conducive to work, investment, deferred gratification, and service, has long since given way to consumerist capitalism, defined by an ethos of infantilization conducive to laxity, impetuousness, narcissism, and consumption. Where once Americans worked harder than almost any other people, today pop commentators such as Thomas Friedman can worry about the “quiet crisis” in which the tendency to “extol consumption over hard work, investment and long-term thinking” creates an America whose vaunted productivity is in decline and where kids “get fat, dumb, and lazy,” squandering the very moral capital the Protestant culture once promoted and sustained. Tellingly, President Bush after 9/11 did not invite Americans to sacrifice or work hard in order to defeat terrorism; he invited them to go shopping.

In the civic realm, meanwhile, hostility to the commonwealth has intensified since the early 1950s, when social science critics such as David B. Truman insisted there was no need to take account of the common good in discussing public interest “because there is no such thing as the public interest.” Politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (the latter asserted that “there is no such thing as society”) were only echoing and reinforcing a powerful skepticism about government and society, a skepticism accompanied in recent years by an astonishing faith in the limitless capacity of markets to “coordinate human behavior or activity with a range and a precision beyond that of any other system, institution, or social process,” as political and economic theorist Charles E. Lindblom has put it.

In this revival of laissez-faire economics and political libertarianism, liberty has acquired an exclusively negative connotation: to be free from. Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist, offered definitive language. Nearly a half century ago, he insisted that “every act of government intervention limits the arena of individual freedom directly and threatens the preservation of freedom indirectly.” Put into practice, what this means for liberty (as Reagan was to argue) is that government is always part of the problem. That belief has encouraged the privatization of any and all government functions, a process that has become a crucial ally of the dominion of consumers.

The problem is that, in the name of abstract personal liberty, libertarians and privatizers actually pervert and undermine real autonomy, given that as Hannah Arendt argued, “political freedom, generally speaking, means the right ‘to be a participant in government,’ or it means nothing.” The tension between private choice and public participation is clearly embodied in the tension between the consumer as private chooser and the citizen as public chooser. Citizens cannot be understood as mere consumers because individual desire is not the same thing as common ground; public goods are something more than a collection of private wants. A republic is by definition public, and what is public cannot be determined by aggregating private desires. Asking what “I want” and asking what “we need” are two different things: the first question is ideally answered by the market, the second by the community. When the market is encouraged to do the work of democracy, our culture is deformed and the character of our commonwealth undermined.



In thinking about modernity and modern capitalism, Max Weber spoke a century ago about an iron cage. Consumerism brings to mind a different cage. There is a fiendishly simple method of trapping monkeys in Africa that suggests the paradoxes which confront liberty in this era of consumerism. A small box containing a large nut is affixed to a well-anchored post. The nut can be accessed only through a single, small hole in the box designed to accommodate an outstretched monkey’s grasping paw. Easy to reach in, but when the monkey clasps the nut, impossible to get out. Of course, it is immediately evident to everyone (except the monkey) that all the monkey must do to free itself is let go of its prize. Clever hunters have discovered, however, that they can secure their prey hours or even days later because the monkey—driven by desire—will not release the nut, even until death. Is the monkey free or not?

And what of the consumer? There is of course endless talk about giving people “what they want,” and how the market “empowers” consumers. The market, indeed, does not tell us what to do; it gives us what we want—once it gets through telling us what it is that we want. It promises liberty and happiness while, in truth, delivering neither. More to the point, consumerism encourages a kind of civic schizophrenia, a disorder that divides the citizen into opposing fragments and denies legitimacy to the part that we understand to be “civic” or “public.” The market treats choice as fundamentally private, a matter not of determining some deliberative “we should” but only of enumerating all the “wants” that we harbor as private consumers and creatures of personal desire. Yet private choices inevitably do have social consequences and public outcomes. When these derive from purely personal preferences, the results are often irrational and unintended, at wide variance with the kind of society we might choose through democratic deliberation. Such private choices, though technically “free,” are quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our values and norms. Privatization means the choices we make eventually determine the social outcomes we must suffer together, but which we never directly choose in common.

This explains how a society without villains or conspirators, composed of good-willed but self-seeking individuals, can produce a culture that so many of its members despise. Consumer capitalism does not operate by fielding self-conscious advocates of duplicity. Rather, it generates thinking on the model of the narcissistic child, infantilizing consumers to the point where puerility is not simply an option; it is a mandate. If the attitudes and behaviors that result turn out to undermine cultural values extraneous to capitalism’s concerns—however deeply relevant they may be to moral and spiritual frameworks and to the shape of an ideal public culture—that is too bad. This ethos does not disdain civilization; it is merely indifferent to it. Consumer capitalism encourages individuals to indulge in behavior—however corrupting to civilization—that is useful to consumerism.

Even as an ethos of limitless consumption encourages us to regress, privatization compels us to withdraw from our public selves, to secede from the public square and fence ourselves in behind gated communities, where we deploy private resources to turn what were once public goods, such as garbage collection, police protection, and schooling, into private commodities. What we fail to see is that when public goods are privatized, they are subverted. You cannot protect a few in the midst of general insecurity; you cannot educate a few in the midst of societal ignorance.



Such, in brief, is the story of consumerism and the privatization of sovereignty. The story of globalization is easily as old, marking a dramatic journey that started at the end of the nineteenth century and quickened after World War II, a journey in which nation-states found their sovereignty undermined by global markets and by the emancipation of corporations from the very countries that had harbored and nurtured them.

Where states once ruled, corporations and cartels not rooted in national identities became more prominent; where power had been rooted in assets and goods—natural resources, manufacturing prowess, and military capability—it grew progressively more transactional, ever more dependent on culture, information, and networking, ever less grounded in national sovereignties. The story of globalization is a story that reinforces the run-amok tendencies of consumerism, since the globalization of market relations exempts them as well from regulation and oversight by democratic institutions. In the global setting, there is neither sovereignty nor legitimacy—nor justice, either.

The story of globalization, already visible in economic relations before World War I, became a political narrative in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent establishment of the United Nations, international monetary institutions, and the new European order. With the assistance of the hegemon that had helped them move beyond a history of warfare and mass slaughter, Europe’s rival nations sought new forums for transnational cooperation and “pooled sovereignty.”

The narrative was by no means linear. During the Cold War, the economic logic of globalization was overshadowed by the political-military logic of bilateral enmity. In 1989, the fall of Communism and with it the bipolar world yielded not genuine multipolarity but a burst of capitalist triumphalism in which the United States reasserted its global hegemony. The American military and economic power that had shaped the postwar era was now reinforced by cultural power and information networks that did as much to cement a new American empire as to foster globalization. National sovereignty, however, could no longer be understood as the distinguishing feature of that empire.

This was brought home murderously on September 11, 2001, when unelected but self-proclaimed representatives of fundamentalist Islam offered a brutal tutorial to the United States about the meanings of both interdependence and anarchy. The emergence of noxious and anti-democratic forms of anti-imperialism, or whatever term one prefers for the creed that brought terror to New York, should have taught us something. Although America was the only truly global sovereign power left standing, sovereignty itself seemed to have lost much of its historical meaning on that day. To speak of the end of sovereignty would of course be absurd; in a hundred ways, the United States continues to dominate the world just as sovereignty continues to dominate the affairs of nations. But to think that sovereignty’s dynamics have not been fundamentally altered in this interdependent era of global communications, global markets, and global terrorism would be equally foolish.

Regarding the last of these, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas forge alliances with weak states or operate to a degree in their stead, but they are palpably not themselves states and thus not fully vulnerable to the defeat of the states with which they associate. “Taking out” Taliban Afghanistan and Baathist Iraq is of little avail; non-state actors like al-Qaeda constitute a kind of malevolent NGO, with branches across the globe. Overwhelming American firepower is of limited use in this asymmetrical world, where civilians are soldiers and soldiers are permanent migrants of no particular nationality or national loyalty. The balance of terror during the Cold War functioned because the adversaries had addresses, known to one another. Deterrence today is a recipe for irrelevance. Absurdly, a counterstrike against the 9/11 perpetrators could have just as logically been aimed at New Jersey, where several of the conspirators had lived, as at Iraq, where none had ever set foot.



On globalization’s parallel track, demarcated by markets rather than territorial boundaries, corporations and firms have displaced nation-states as the key players on the international scene. They more often use the political institutions created by nation-states to work their will than they are used by those states to enact sovereign political objectives. Even philanthropies such as the Clinton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation have become weighty actors in the international marketplace, boasting an economic clout that many nation-states cannot begin to exercise.

Consider the ways in which the powerful do business nowadays. When President Hu Jintao of China came to visit President Bush in 2006, his first stop was not in Washington, DC, but in Seattle, Washington, where he met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (the eminence grise of real American power). When President Bush visited China later in the year, the most important message he delivered was not to the government but to Chinese consumers. The message was, “consume more, save less” (so America might reduce its trade deficit).

The lesson implicit in these examples is that private power now trumps public power, because globalization has robbed sovereignty of its force. The United States cannot stop capital and jobs from flowing out and illegal immigrants from flowing in. Its public health campaigns cannot interdict HIV or avian flu or the West Nile virus. Secure borders will not impede terrorism or illegal immigration any more than a radical reduction in American auto emissions (were Americans ever to legislate such a thing) will curb global warming.

In absolute terms, sovereign nations like the United States, China, and Nigeria may not have become less powerful. But the world’s interdependent realities have become far less susceptible to sovereign power. No nation-state has ever enjoyed the unrivaled hegemony that defines the United States today. Yet no superpower has ever been less capable of managing its own destiny. This is the paradox of American power as exerted in places like Iraq, Hong Kong, Colombia, Russia, India, and Sudan: nation to nation, the U.S. should be able to prevail and its interests should dominate. But the issues in question are not national at all, so the powerful sovereign often fails to secure even its minimal interests.

As to enthusiasms for the market’s ability to further the American cause, it is not the beacon of liberty that shines forth from YouTube, and it is not the spirit of patriotism on display at MySpace. Nationalism’s advocates cheer privatization and globalization and seem not to recognize the contradiction. They desire sovereignty without the state, and global markets without a loss of American greatness. They will get neither.

If sovereign power is in decline, and anarchy on the rise, the soft power of the West—its branding and commercial influence—flourishes. Washington is losing the propaganda war to fundamentalist adversaries, but American films and television programs continue to win the media war. The soft brands, however, distance themselves from sovereign America (McDonald's, for example, has embraced the Gallic cartoon figure Asterix and now serves “McLutece” burgers in Paris). Shrek and Spider-Man go where the First Cavalry Division no longer dares. Americans no longer win real wars, but they dominate the video war-game market. It is no longer a Nixon in China who incites transformation in a culture, but Google in China that does so—both bolstering traditional Communist tyranny (Google has removed democratic keywords to please the government) and undermining it (Google pokes holes in China’s closed society).



While granting that sovereignty has passed from the political sector to the economic sector, and at the same time has migrated from the national to the international arena, some suggest that this has merely shifted the venue of sovereignty without altering its character. In fact, it has undermined sovereignty’s core meaning, which is inseparable from the meanings of both politics and the nation-state. The changes have yielded rational control over daily life, traditionally exercised in legitimate political communities, to non-state powers with no legitimacy, or to the chaos of a lawless international system.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, medieval jurisdictions and the residue of an ever less potent Holy Roman Empire could no longer contend with the national aspirations of peoples organizing themselves around language and history rather than around feudal loyalties. They had instead to yield to the new idea of the sovereign nation-state as articulated by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. Today, the sovereign nation-state can no longer preserve its own autonomy or accomodate the new transnational forces that erode its power and test its capacity for justice. The twin forces of global capital and consumerism leave little room for global citizens to emerge. But neither can sovereign states any longer offer the traditional benefits of citizenship, or even contend with the anarchy loosed by interdependence. Inasmuch as working democratic institutions are tethered to sovereignty’s throne, the gradual passing of sovereignty presages the slow death of democracy.

Even within states, where a diluted sovereignty still obtains, consumerism steadily degrades its meaning. The conflation of consumption and citizenship is poisonous to democracy’s survival: When prudent adults become grasping children, the concept of public interest forfeits all meaning. If there is hope, then, it must be in restoring a balance between consumers and citizens, between markets and democracy, and in finding innovative ways to establish that balance globally, where there exists little in the way of democratic oversight or regulation.

For what interdependence really means is that all of the pathologies and problems corroding the modern state have fled the nation and gone global, beyond the reach of sovereign power, while citizens and democracy and institutions of social justice remain trapped inside a sovereign box. The problems are all interdependent, the solutions still tied to independent states; the great questions are global and beyond sovereignty; the remedies are local and bound by sovereignty—a dire asymmetry that puts all at risk.

If globalization and democracy cannot be reconciled, there is likely to be no answer. The center will grow weaker without making the periphery stronger. The entire world will look more and more like Darfur or Basra or Gaza on a bad day—out of control and threatening to all, but without any real benefit to those in whose desperate name the chaos advances. Within nations, the sovereign center to which liberty is tethered will not hold. Among nations, there will be neither center nor sovereignty. Democracy will have no home.

No Silence! On the Wedding of Jamie and Michael (June 22, 2008)

By John Mark Reynolds
Scriptorium Daily

It is an honor to be here today. It is especially significant to Hope and to me, because it is the day after our own wedding anniversary.

Yesterday we were looking at the few pieces of glassware that have survived all the moves and four children. Our marriage has proven more durable than most of it. Looking at pictures of our wedding reminded us that our love has proven more timeless than the dresses of the bridesmaids.

Our marriage, and the love it created, turned out to be stronger than even our affection on that first day of our wedded life. What we made that day weathered sin, disappointment, and the death of a beloved child.

There was more to our marriage than us.

This is the reason for all the elaborate ritual today. It is the heart of why it is appropriate to bring all the party and the pomp to this moment as we can muster.

The reason is simple. We are not here to officiate at making a legal contract. We are not here to celebrate the private affections of two people who love each other. Both those things will happen today, but they are not the important thing. Legal contracts can be legally undone. Private affection can wax and wane, but it is not the basis of what is happening here today.

There is a deeper romance to Christian marriage.

Romance is no longer fashionable, because it is so demanding. Emotions can be satisfied, at least sometimes, but romance cannot. Recently I was reading someone say that the notion that one man and one woman can be satisfied with each until ‘death parts them’ was just silly.

I prefer to think it romantic and divine.

Let me speak plainly to you, Michael and Jamie. As human beings, you have (at least!) two parts. There is the physical and the spiritual component to what makes you human. Whatever philosophers and scientists decide is the relationship between the two, the two exist.

There is a marvelous tension within you, between the desires of the body and the aspirations of the soul. Both are good as created by God and both are deeply harmed by the fall from grace that so plagues humanity. The body is good, but broken. The soul is good, but fallen.

At times your soul will try to ignore the simple wisdom of your body. You must never forget that though you are both more than just physical, you are incarnate!

Your soul will make demands that your body cannot meet.

Hope and I know both of you well enough to know some of the temptations you will face.

Michael: beware the temptation of the workaholic.

Jamie: beware the temptation to forget your own health while helping others.

More common, however, is for the body to make demands on the soul that prevent your higher nature from lifting you from the level of the merely animal to that of the divine image within you. Today you both aspire to something greater than your mere physical desire could ever sustain or produce.

You desire to bring together the Male and the Female and so recreate the whole Image of God in humankind. You long to bring together the fundamentally different expressions of the divine nature in the Man with that expression of God found in the Woman. In becoming one flesh, Holy Scripture says you will have done something great.

Jamie and Michael in desiring each other, you do what any higher creature can do, but in marriage you do what even the angels cannot.

You help produce a divine image of that greater, and even more mysterious, coming together of Christ and His Church.

Your body, fallen as it is, is out of harmony with your soul. It does not, in itself, need this higher thing. It can be more easily satisfied than through the hard work of marriage.

The desire to leave and eternally cleave is the desire of the soul and not of the body. Looked at only from the viewpoint of the physical, the cost is too high and benefits too little. The body looks out from the basement windows and sees the difficulty of reaching the heavens!

From the viewpoint of the romantic, from the higher windows of the soul, such a journey into exclusivity and ever deeper knowing may not by easy, it may even be impossible without divine aide, but it is as necessary to the lover as air is to drowning man. There may none available, but still he longs for it.

Keep longing for it, because the best news on this wedding day is that you are entering a relationship like no other. It can be imitated and aped, but not duplicated. You are coming together in this union of two others and God Himself as blessed your foolishly romantic aspirations.

He sanctified them by His first miracle of at Cana. There the Christ saved the wedding party from ending, in fact made it better after human fears, because marriage is His best image.

There will be times when the wine of your marriage, the physical affection that provides the spice of your love, will run out. Do not be afraid! If you persist, if you get the right help as the wedding party did in Cana, He will see to it that the wine of your love is renewed.

I am here to testify that the new wine is better.

Michael and Jamie:

You told us that you wished to be this holy image to the world. You will fail frequently. You will fail when you are cruel to each other or are selfish. Isn’t it silly to think that you can become less cruel and selfish?

Not silly, but deeply romantic and miraculous in a world where every traditional Christian marriage is a miracle. When you fail, repent and renew your vow.

Even failure at a glorious quest is nobler than those who give up and settle for less. Some settle for the merely sensual satisfaction of mental polygamy. Others grit their teeth and are chaste, but without love. There is no beauty in mere endurance. The death to self, the bloodless martyrdom of dying to self for the sake of the beloved, is extravagant to the point of folly . . . or to the point of being divine!

God Almighty in on your side in this quest. By faith, through grace, you will see glimmers of it in the life to come and the fullness of what you hoped for in each other in the world yet to come.

Our culture does not understand this mystery and even mocks it, but

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not be quiet,
until her righteousness goes forth as brightness,
and her salvation as a burning torch.
The nations shall see your righteousness,
and all the kings your glory,
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the LORD will give.

Michael:

You are the groom today. Though it should humble you to your knees, you are a picture of God to us. You are the one who receives the bride and gives her a new name. Of course, this is not because you are, in yourself, superior to Jamie in any fundamental way. You act as her head as a part in a play.

The wedding garments you wear are your very best. You will give your new bride the best wedding feast and honeymoon that you can. Your beneficence (which must continue toward Jamie!) serves as a picture of God’s superabundant jollification in our direction!

You stand today crowned as the spiritual head. The Kingdom of God is not a democracy and you are not elected head. You lead by the grace of God and not by your merit. Like a high school actor called to play Hamlet, the scope and greatness of the role exalts you, but also lays you low.

The very grandeur of today’s unmerited role indicates the very humble tones in which this divine image is painted through you today. You are an image of God painted in earth tones!

In one way, you are an image of the Divine Bridegroom, but playing such a part reminds us even more strongly of human smallness!

You are not just an image of the Lord Jesus, but also of humanity whenever it leads.

Like any man or woman called to lead you do so not by any great merit, for your wisdom to do so is always inadequate, but by the Grace of God. You are called to be prince . . . and I know from many conversations you know that you lack the wisdom.

As Aslan said to Caspian so we, in a less impressive way of course, say that knowing you know you are inadequate is why we trust you to play this part in the drama. We would not trust a spiritual head who thought he was called by merit!

You act today in a divine drama that reminds us of the greater relationship with God that we must all enter in this life.

Jamie:

You stand for all of us today as you take on a new name and become part of a new family. We are the bride of Christ and are given a new name. Your external beauty today is simply a reflection and promise of the inner righteousness that Christ will work in you, and in Michael, and in all of us.

The purity expressed by your gown is a symbol of the holiness of spirit, the purity of love, that God will work in you and in Michael and in the world to come. Your purity was kept for him, just as our worship and the ultimate end of our love must be kept for God.

This very maiden modesty is a picture of humanity before God, but in its seeming smallness and its real humility, it elevates you. The role of the human in this marriage play is painted in gold and silver!

In bowing the knee, you also remind us of God!

Your submission to Michael is an act of supreme charity. As his equal in creation, you bow the knee today and take his name. In this way, as you will if God blesses you to play the role of mother, you remind us of the Incarnation where a greater stopped to serve the lesser.

The image of God is clear in you today.

For both of you, if you are faithful, it can be truly predicted and certainly anticipated that:

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

My guess is that there are some more weary couples who wish that they could start again. There are others, single by providence, that wonder how they can share in this holy mystery.

But that is the point of this ceremony!

Nobody is left out! Nobody needs despair!

We can be born again in our resolve. We can renew our vows, both earthly and heavenly. Those of us who have failed our earthly vows can renew them as we participate in Jamie and Michael making them for the first time.

In God’s providence, through the timeless forgiveness He lives in, it can be as if it were the first time.

But all of us, married or single, can renew the deeper vow to adore the God of Love. We can participate in the divine romance of which this is only an image.

This is not an image of our choosing, which means we cannot change it, but we also cannot truly destroy it! Its meaning is available for all to see!

For the single the news is good. Acting out the roles and forming the image may not be an individual souls calling, but the substance behind the image is freely available to all. We can all be part of the Wedding of the Lamb that Was Slain!

Nobody is forgotten at this wedding feast. Nobody needs to be left out.

You shall no more be termed Forsaken,
and your land shall no more be termed Desolate,
but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her,
and your land Married;
for the LORD delights in you,
and your land shall be married.
For as a young man marries a young woman,
so shall your sons marry you,
and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,
so shall your God rejoice over you. […]

So Michael and Jamie, you have done us a great favor today.

We love you and thank you for letting us be here.

You are an image of hope to us. You are an image of the future and it is good. Thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you for your holiness. Thank you for your zeal for romance.

I speak over you these words as if I could see the future:

Go through, go through the gates;
prepare the way for the people;
build up, build up the highway;
clear it of stones;
lift up a signal over the peoples.
Behold, the LORD has proclaimed
to the end of the earth:
Say to the daughter of Zion,
“Behold, your salvation comes;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.”
And they shall be called The Holy People,
The Redeemed of the LORD;
and you shall be called Sought Out,
A City Not Forsaken.

Tangled Up in Blue

By Matt Jenson
Scriptorium Daily

Many of us who are evangelicals have one eye in the rearview mirror as we drive as fast as we can away from our fundamentalist hometown. Remembering the “don’ts” that seemed to summarize legalistic upbringings, we rejoice with Paul’s dictum that “all things are permissible.” We have encountered the freedom of the wide-open space of the gospel. So far, so very good.

My worry is that we have forgotten holiness. We are enjoying the gospel’s freedom so much that we forget its call to holiness. We forget, too, that holiness is for the sake of mission and worship. The Father sets us apart to live as witnesses who invite others to live holy lives of worship.

Paul’s wonderful metaphor of entanglement reminds us that, though the decisive battle has been fought and the foe defeated, we continue to wrestle with spiritual forces, forces that would like nothing more than to insinuate themselves into our lives, to creep and crawl and cover us with worldly concern. They know that they don’t need to create titanic falls; they only need to harry, to worry, to distract, to get us to window-shop, maybe to daydream – that is, to entangle us. They know, too, that tangles are self-perpetuating. In fact, even trying to untangle a tangle can lead us to further tangles! (more)