Full Contact Christianity

In the course of doing a little study on Luther’s attitude toward science, I ran across this little gem:

We are beginning to regain a knowledge of the creation, a knowledge we had forfeited by the fall of Adam….Erasmus does not concern himself with this; it interests him little how the fetus is made, formed and developed in the womb. Thus he also fails to prize the excellency of the state of marriage. But by God’s mercy we can begin to recognize His wonderful works and wonders also in the flowers when we ponder His might and His goodness. Therefore we laud, magnify, and thank Him. In His creation we recognize the power of His Word. By His Word everything came into being. This power is evident even in a peach stone. No matter how hard its shell, in due season it is forced open by a very soft kernel in side it. All this is ignored by Erasmus. He looks at the creation as a cow stares at a new gate.

from Luther’s Table Talk, quoted in John Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible p. 5.

There’s a ton of material out there, and it can be hard to find speakers that consistently deliver ideas and commentary worth thinking about. Here are three that do:

Stories are Soul Food

The Theology Pugcast

The Aaron Renn Show

I commend them to you.

Academics and other “smart” people regularly feel that they are drastically undervalued, and ought to be paid vastly more than they are. They are badly mistaken, but it’s a very common sentiment. Where does it come from?

It comes from their formative years. At a very early age, we immerse our children in a totally artificial environment in which the whole official incentive structure (grades, honor rolls, access to enrichment activities) hinges on academic performance. For the very formative thirteen years from kindergarten through high school, this is the case. All that time, incentives and advancement are tied to being smart, to academic performance. Although they are often socially penalized, the smart kids are on top of the academic heap. A child who performs well in that environment is likely to get a chance to spend more time in it — college, then often grad school, for a total of six to ten more years.

Some of them will even do so well in the academy that they will be offered an opportunity to never leave — they can stay and teach. If they continue to publish and ticket-punch their way up, they can work their way into a tenured research position where they don’t have to teach actual students; they just research and publish their work. Which is to say, they do school papers for the rest of their lives, and get paid for it. They work their way up by producing academic work that pleases a professor, and then join the ranks of the professors and produce more academic work that pleases their professorial peers. At no point in this process do they have to produce something of tangible benefit to the rest of the world. It’s easy to start thinking you don’t ever have to — and if they stay in academia, they really might not have to.

Those (un)lucky few aside, the rest at some point enter the workforce, where a very different set of rules and incentives is in play. Now in the corporate world, there’s sometimes a degree of unreality similar to academe, but set that aside for a moment and assume that our case study — a smart student with at least a college education — has been forced into productive work.

Being smart doesn’t get you anything in the economic mainstream. The trait most rewarded is your ability to serve. If you can provide a service that people need or want — scrubbing toilets, computing taxes, polishing widgets, keeping their vehicles DOT compliant, fixing cars, cooking food, setting bones, whatever — then they will give you money. The rarer the service, and the more they need it, the more money they will give you. Being smart helps to the extent that you can use your smarts to serve better, faster, more efficiently. But nobody pays you to just sit around and be smart. Mostly, nobody pays you for ideas. They pay for execution, which is the hard part.

Knowledge workers might seem like an exception, but they’re not. Knowledge workers are paid for delivering the relevant facts to the people who need to know them, when the body of possibly relevant information is so large and confusing that it’s very hard to learn it for yourself. A good knowledge worker is generally smart, with an encyclopedic knowledge of a hard-to-master field. But that’s not what he’s paid for – he’s paid for telling you what you need to know about that field, and saving you the trouble of having to master it yourself – in other words, he’s paid for turning his specialized knowledge into a service. 

This focus on service and performance is not some rude shortcoming of an imperfect world. It is absolutely as it should be. Like the song says, ya gotta serve somebody.

Once upon a time Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a brief essay on minimalist ways to resist tyranny. You should read it. As our culture slowly shakes off its Christian hangover and wanders further from reality, the lies will get more egregious and therefore more fragile. Accordingly, the demands to pretend that the lie du jour is eminently reasonable, even self-evident, will get more strident. In “Live Not By Lies,” Solzhenitsyn gives some very good advice. You may be called to do far more than he advises, but I doubt you’ll be called to do less.

Once upon a time there was a guy named Jack. Jack liked to talk about his girlfriend, Michelle. He told all his friends about her — how witty, beautiful, and kind she was, the latest funny thing she said, where they went for a date last night. All his friends were sort of excited for him at first. But time went by, and nobody met her. She always seemed to be somewhere else. After a while, they began to be a little suspicious.  Was she real? Hadn’t she always seemed a little too good to be true, after all?

They began to argue among themselves. “She was always a little too good to be true,” said some. Others said, “No, look how different Jack is. Obviously she’s real.” But nobody really knew.

Then one day, one of Jack’s friends, Lance, met Michelle. She was everything Jack said she was, and then some. Not everybody believed Lance when he reported back. Among Jack’s friends, the arguments about whether Michelle was real continued. But to Lance, the arguments suddenly seemed a little silly.

I expect I’ll have more to say later about Aaron Renn’s very provocative think piece in First Things, but for right now, just go read it. It’s worth your time.

I had a chance to guest with Drew of the Provisionist Perspective, discussing GES’s critique of provisionism. You can watch it here.

A friend and I had the opportunity to start a Theopolis Conversation on proclaiming the gospel. The way Conversations work, we contribute an opening essay, other writers respond, and then we conclude the conversation with a rejoinder. It was an enormous amount of fun, and you can find it here.

You can find my latest essay “No One Dared Join Them” over at Theopolis.

In the first “We’re the Weird Ones” post, we looked at the way we tend to assume something is normal because our culture does it, and how we often think that what is “normal” is right.  As we broaden our view beyond the provincial culture of our historical moment and begin to look at other places and other times, there are some temptations waiting for us.

When we realize that our culture is out of step with pretty much everybody, everywhere on an issue, most of us are easy prey for one of two temptations.  Either we assume that we must be wrong, or we assume that everybody who came before us is an idiot, we got it right, and the people who are still doing it the old way are backward and behind the times.  To put labels on these, the first one is simple peer pressure applied on a grand scale, and the second one is modernism.

The peer pressure temptation is familiar to all of us.  We want to fit in, to do what everybody else is doing.  To apply it on a grand scale, all we need is a stack of anthropological studies telling us what most of the human race does, and then follow the crowd.

On the surface, the modernist temptation resembles a proper Christian response to peer pressure.  Rather than caving in, the modernist seeks not to conform, but to transform himself.  We are not made to undertake transformation without divine help, and without that help the modernist finds himself unable to simply grow from the past into the future in a natural way.  Instead, the modernist must resort to a paroxysm, a violent break with the past.  He wants to make all things new, in his own image — and quickly.  The modernist says that there’s a better way, that those who have come before are benighted and backward.  He throws out the past without a second glance.

The modernist seeks a new world, but not the same new world as the Christian.  The Christian seeks a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.  The modernist seeks a city of his own making, where he can make a name for himself — which is to say he is building Babel, not the New Jerusalem.  Although we associate the modernist impulse with with relatively recent times — hence the name — there is nothing new under the sun.  Modernists are in fact succumbing to a very old temptation: the ancient sin of father-hatred.  

As a society, we have lived with modernism for enough generations to see a third temptation arise.  Some people would call it a feature of postmodernism; others would call it an “ancient future” approach.  By either name, what we are seeing is a recognition that our modernist fathers destroyed and abandoned many good things in their war on the past.  Sadly, when we attempt to address this issue without divine help, we revisit the habits of our pre-modern grandfathers as a way of rebelling against our modernist fathers.  We end up exactly like our fathers: they rejected their fathers, and we in turn commit the same sin.  The problem with rebellion is that you can’t compartmentalize it; once you let it in, it leaks all over everything.  Consequently, we don’t really submit to the ways of our earlier forebears any more than we submit to our fathers.  Rather, we walk down the anthropological and archaeological smorgasbord and take a little of this, a little of that, and bit more of a third thing — whatever happens to suit us at the time.  The modernist tries to build the world in his own image by rejecting the past, and the postmodernist tries to custom-build his own life as a collage of bits and pieces of the past, but both of them place themselves in rebellious judgment over their fathers.

But we are Christians; we are citizens of a kingdom whose capital city is in heaven.  In that future city, the New Jerusalem, Jesus will perfectly honor His Father, and so we too are called to honor the fathers that God has providentially given to us.  At our moment in history, we are inheriting several generations of father-hatred, so there is no way out of this without repentance.  We must repent of our culture’s endemic father-hatred, and we must return to proper honor of our fathers — all our fathers.  They are imperfect to be sure, but in God’s providence they are a repository of wisdom that we are called to heed.  We may not simply cut ourselves free, modernist-fashion, and reject everything that came before us.  Nor may we treat the wisdom of the ages as if we are above it all, and it is just a smorgasbord from which we may pick and choose, as the postmodern or ancient-future folks would do.  We must submit to the wisdom of our fathers, at the same time testing what they tell us against the counsel of God, because “There is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor counsel, against Yahweh.” 

So we require a discerning vision of the past and a sanctified imagination of the future.  “What is everybody else doing?” is the wrong question; the question is “What is God doing, and how can I be part of it?”  The answer to that question starts with the story of a coming new world whose capital is the New Jerusalem, a city that is literally heaven on earth. God is bringing heaven to earth, and He calls us to pray for it (“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”) and to be the present reflection of it, the sign that it is coming — and to reflect both the newness of the New Jerusalem and its culture of father-honor.  Frankly, this is an impossible task; the flesh simply cannot do it. But in living relationship with God, all things are possible for those who believe.

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Prayer Exercises

1. It’s easy to talk about trends of whole societies without bringing it down to personal practice.  We cannot repent of societal father-hatred if we do not first repent of personal father-hatred; this is a case where the personal really is political.  Ask God if there are personal sins for you to repent of before you try to go any further.  If He brings something to mind, deal with it.
2. Having addressed personal sins, you’re ready to ask God about the sins of the society you live in.  Don’t ask about “the sins of our culture” in the abstract.  Ask God to show you places in your own life where you have assimilated the sins of the culture.  As God reveals these areas to you, accept your cultural identity, confess the sins of your culture, renounce the sin, and ask God to heal the damage that you have done to yourself through the sin.  Ask Him to guide and guard you as you learn to live differently.