Full Contact Christianity

Beauty is hard work.  Being good enough to produce something like Handel’s Messiah requires years of training, apprenticeship, and dedication.  The actual creation of it requires a great deal of work.  And even all that is not enough — schooling and hard work can’t put in what God left out.  If the talent isn’t there, then there will be no great work of art, no matter how dedicated the artist might be.

Not everybody is a Handel.  Maybe one or two in a generation are so talented — and not all of them have access to good training, or work as hard as Handel did.  So it becomes very important, if we are to have beauty, that we attend to our history.  If you only get the combination of hard work and talent that produces a Handel every two or three generations, and you want to have a lot of beautiful music, then you have to hoard it from your past.  There won’t be enough to go around in this generation alone — or any other generation.  Which is to say that in aesthetics and art as in everything else, “a good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children,” and we must honor our fathers and mothers.

Now, imagine what happens if a generation arises which does not honor its fathers and mothers.  The rationalizations vary; perhaps they are sweeping away the barnacles of accrued affectation and getting back to the primal essence of the art.  Perhaps they are forsaking superstition and ignorance and advancing forward into the light of a scientific new day.  Perhaps they are simply seeking things to which they feel an intuitive connection, and abandoning the past as irrelevant.  Perhaps they have pronounced all their fathers might gain of them Corban… (we’ll come back to that thought.)

Whatever the justification, the result is the same.  Failure to honor one’s fathers and mothers leads to being cut off from the benefits of their wisdom.  Forsaking the law of your father is not a good idea.  In the matter of beauty, the results are particularly bad.  The lessons of the past are forgotten and must be rediscovered, and the accumulated treasure of the past is ignored.  The result is inevitably a great deal of ugliness, and the loss of an ability to tell that it’s ugliness.  The best rock opera of the nineties may turn out to just be a trifle less terrible than a field of weak contenders.  Without the accumulated treasure of the past, there’s little basis for comparison.

This is what has happened in worship.  When we think of the “worship wars” today, we think of the battle that started in the 1970s and really didn’t go mainstream until the 80s and 90s — shall we sing praise choruses, or hymns?  The folks who argued for choruses, and against hymns, felt that they were casting off the dead hand of almost two millennia of orthodusty and revitalizing the church.  The folks who argued for preserving the hymns felt that they were guarding a great trove of wisdom and glorious worship, stretching back to the dawn of the church.  They were both wrong.

They were wrong because mostly, the hymns at issue were 19th-century revival songs that were, in their day, the music of a similar revolution.  Before that, most churches had a strong continuity in their worship and music with the preceding 1800 years of church history.  The great revivals of the 19th century, along with various good effects, also succumbed to the sin of contempt for the established church, and therefore for their fathers in the faith and the accumulated wisdom and beauty of the generations who went before them.

The result, as we’ve been discussing, was a good deal of ugliness.  In time, people noticed that it was ugly, shallow and unhelpful, and began to do something else — and the result was the present ‘worship wars,’ a revolution against the revolution.  (Not, please notice, a counter-revolution.  That would imply undoing the sins of the past, and what we got instead was more of the same.)

Which is to say that, having discovered that sin didn’t work, we decided to try compounding it rather than repenting of it.  We needed to admit that the first revolution was a sin, that we had forsaken the wisdom of our fathers.  We needed to begin to honor our fathers again.  This we did not do, and many of us still have not.

The result, predictably again, is much ugliness, and a goodly number of ridiculous spectacles.  A guy whose faith has been sustained by numerous Calvary Chapel messages about how the locust-scorpions of Revelation 9 are helicopters and the end is near — this guy is tormented by concern that his Lutheran friend is not being “fed” in his supposedly dry liturgical service.  The Lutheran fellow, for his part, visits his friend’s church once and is permanently put off Bible studies.  Jeepers.

In a preceding post I mentioned gratitude as a factor in my use of the creeds, and in discussions with friends and colleagues it has become clear to me that this requires a little elaboration.

First of all, a couple of thoughts about the nature of gratitude in general.  Gratitude is not just about warm feelings in your chest.  Gratitude is about what you do.  If your parents raised you, fed you, clothed you, loved you, and you always felt warmly toward them for these things, but you treated them badly and never once gave any indication that you were aware of how much they’d done for you, are you grateful?  No, not really.  Suppose a friend rebukes you for your ingratitude, and you protest that of course you feel warmly about all your parents have done for you.  Wouldn’t your friend be perfectly right to say “So what?”

Of course he would.  That warm feeling is not an all-purpose moral solvent that cleanses whatever you decide to to.  If you take for granted all your parents have given you, and then protest that of course you’re grateful — by which you mean that you have warm feelings toward them — this is just to say that you are only grateful where it doesn’t matter.  Gratitude that is not meaningfully incarnated is not gratitude at all; it’s just cheap sentimentality.

With reference to the early creeds,  I am grateful to those men who went before me, for their many sacrifices and their great struggle.  Even more, I am grateful to Christ for giving such evangelists, pastors and teachers to His Church.  But if this is to be more than a sticky sentiment, a warm feeling in my chest when someone says “Nicea” or “Chalcedon,” then I need to incarnate this gratitude in a way that matters.

These creeds are the weapons our fathers used in their war against heresy.  This is simply a matter of history; it is as God Providentially arranged for it to be, and we must show gratitude for the way God actually preserved His church, not the way we wish He’d done it. So we must celebrate these key aspects of the faith which our fathers so ably defended, and do so in a manner respectful of God’s design in history — which is to say, respectful of what actually happened and what they actually said.  Therefore, an aspect of this celebration will inevitably be the public reading, or the corporate saying, of the creeds.  And so we find once again that “descriptive vs. prescriptive” fails us as a useful way of categorizing.  The creeds are not just descriptions of what the church believed at one point in her history; they are also — in the fashion just described — prescriptions that govern aspects of our present practice.

But how?  How will it work in practice?  We don’t have to say the Creeds weekly, but we can’t just ignore them, either.  Some churches may simply integrate the Creeds into their weekly worship.  Others may choose to do something quarterly, or integrate the Creeds into their doctrinal statements and new members’ classes.  Others still may designate one Sunday a year to celebrate these things.  After all, if we can manage to observe Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day to celebrate the warriors who have defended our country, why can’t we find room in the schedule for a day to celebrate the warriors of the Church, who defended our faith?  (And may I suggest the Feast of All Saints as a convenient time?)  There is no One Perfect Way to do this, but do it we must, somehow.

Now, am I saying that a man is in sin if he doesn’t say the Nicene Creed at least occasionally?  Not as such.  Saying the Creed is not directly required by Scripture, and so a man can walk with God and not say the Creed — at least in theory.  However, in actual practice, I find that among American evangelicals, our particular refusal to say the creed is the result of a sinful attitude on our part:  ingratitude, sectarianism and father-hatred that ill becomes Christians.

The wage of that particular sin is a particular sort of death.  If you insist on isolating yourself from other members of the Body in defiance of Eph. 4:3, God may give you your desire, but send leanness to your soul.  Cut off from the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit in past generations, cut off from the wisdom of your fathers, you will be reduced to whatever formulations you can dream up yourself, and you get only the counsel of your living friends — which is to say that you will be low-hanging fruit for the fads of the age, and your churches, your schools, your daily practice will fall victim to a pervasive silliness.  (Oh, wait — I just described modern evangelicalism, didn’t I?)

We are ungrateful, and God has given us over to our folly.  You want to know why, when you walk into a Christian “bookstore,” you can’t hardly find a Greek New Testament or even a decent devotional book, but there are crucifix pencil toppers and “God’s Gym” t-shirts in every size you can think of, including a little onesie for your newborn Christian soldier?  This is why.  Could it be any clearer that we need to repent?