Postmode

One of my deepest, most persistent, and most bitter of struggles is to treat my own parents with grace. I don’t know where exactly it has come from, although I know that it hides itself behind two virtues of which I am very fond, viz. the feeling that I am on the whole very gracious towards others, having a spiritual gift of mercy, and the feeling that I am on the whole intellectually and emotionally sound. These things are not false: I have no problem treating the worst of people with grace and mercy, and on the whole I am always seeking truth, goodness, and beauty in what I believe. The first is the reason I can maintain relatively good relationships with people in general even though I am not among the upper echelons of the socially versed, and the second is the reason that I am a Christian and inside of that encompassing area of thought and practicality what is termed “reformed” in theological circles.

But my unkindness towards my parents loves to hide behind these self-perceptions, and that they are generally correct serves as a kind of pious shield of my own sin. The common problem of lust I can battle; the attitude of disrespect I find often impossible to combat. This maddening failure has defeated me time and again: why can I treat the worst of people with grace, and yet not do the same towards my parents?

It is, I think, a testament to the pride underlying the human condition and therefore the me-condition that allows me to thrive in open disobedience to God. Though I can consider myself among the gifted intellectuals and the people for whom compassion is no challenge, it is this basic primal fear of self-deprecation that drives me to my sin.

The solution to this is so simple, that if I were not so little moved by a respect for God in this element of the life I have been given in Christ, this attitudinal extension of the call to live in light and not in darkness, I would have long ago given up the foolish things I fight for. The solution is, as with all sin, to live in obedience to the glory of God. And yet it is so hard.

Resolved, many times: to live in consistency as it regards respecting my mother and father. Failed, many times: to live in consistency as it regards respecting my mother and father.

I never knew there was actually a history to church signs. In fact, I think I probably thought they just suddenly randomly popped into existence. One week the signs existeth not, and lo, the Lord spake, and all of a sudden signage appeareth.

The Slate sideshow goes through the brief history of church signage and how it developed into the full-bodied word puns we get to laugh at (derisively or not) today as we drive by in our moving cubicle with windows up and AC on, protected from the God germs.

The one thing that struck me about this photo essay is the perceived disunity in the church that the author sees. His writing is rife with references to marketing and phrases not unlike “pulling the people into the church with the hottest item.” It isn’t just perceived disunity though. Some churches really do have this marketing mindset, like they’re in a marketing battle to the death with the other churches in town - and I think it is not an exaggeration to say that some pastors of churches see themselves in this way, as the lead spokesperson of their just-now-getting-it, recently-hip megachurch-hit-sensation - $19.95, but only if you call now and take advantage of this extraordinary offer!

The church lacks unity in its approach to life and culture. The small-town pastors with a flock of 50 get discouraged because they think that nothing is happening; the megachurch pastors thank themselves for blessing themselves with so many followers of themselves. Etcetera. It goes on and on. Few follow a consistent ethic of Christian love and unity, which translated into real life would look like this: people understanding and really grasping that the church exists for the glory of God, not a political movement that has warped and twisted his public image for its benefit, not a personal philosophy of love-is-God, not for the sappy emotional rhetoric of rich televangelists, not for the dreams of a “senile benevolence” (C.S. Lewis: see here) that looks on with a happy smile when we ignore him, or dumbly doesn’t get the fact that the joke is on him.

Needless to say, the church should not be the way it currently is. It’s a good thing culture hasn’t given up on picking our flaws out yet. The moment the culture stops doing this is the moment that reformation in the area of gospel and culture goes along at a VERY slow pace. We would not have so many opportunities to remind ourselves of the flawed ecclesiological presuppositions underlying the church’s dismal disunity today were it not for culture.

We bite our tongues rather than starting arguments that aren’t worth having. We assume a home-improvement project will take longer and cost more than our more optimistic estimates. We pay our insurance premiums, live in affordable homes and happily buy off-label clothes. Negativity is said to be about fear, and the positive thinking camp seems to consider fear a universal evil. But here on the Negative Side, there’s such a thing as healthy fear. It’s what keeps us from taking out sub-prime mortgages and accumulating credit-card debt. It’s why we wear seatbelts and keep an emergency kit in the basement during tornado season. It’s what prompts us to get the brakes fixed and the septic tank pumped. It’s why we install smoke detectors, teach our kids how to get out of the house during a fire, get annual physicals. It’s not that we never visualize a desired outcome. We just don’t count on it.
- Kris, a reader of Slate.com, on Oprah’s mushy philosophy of optimism

Though philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is, after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of “irrational” or “having the worse arguments”, he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief. He will be trailed, of course, by the philosopher furiously hurling philosophical imprecations: “What do you mean, you’re willing to be irrational? You shouldn’t be irrational because…” And although the philosopher is embarrassed by his inability to complete this sentence in a noncircular fashion - he can only produce reasons for accepting reasons - still, he is unwilling to let his adversary go.
- Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations

Nozick is right to note that the justification of reason is circular. Christianity is just as circular in its justification for reason, but we have a circularity composed of parts. We do not merely justify reason using reason, we justify reason by appealing to the sovereignty and supremacy of God in all things.

The thought I’ve been pondering over is this: Is there some kind of excellence in the many-faceted kind of circularity like we find in Christianity that is not present in singly circular reasoning?

On total depravity:

I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I think that Lewis’ comments here on the doctrine of Total Depravity highlight a shortness of thought (even in that excellent intellect of his) when it comes to this doctrine.

Most people, if they have been raised in the church, believe that the Christian view of morality is of morality as synonymous with righteousness, and therefore morals in general are synonymous with the righteousness of God, which is the virtue of in all things seeking to glorify God in a way that simultaneously respects his gracious law. This overlap view is adopted, I think, because in so many ways it happens to match the various sentimentalities that we see not only in ourselves but in others.

But morality and righteousness are entirely different beasts. Only in religion will you find the idea of righteousness. Speaking of the virtue of righteousness in atheism sounds very odd, like a desperate relic of religion. Likewise, Christians ought to recognize that their idea of morality is only one among the multitudes of moral beliefs in the world, each dictated by its god, each rooted solidly in its religion. This is even true of an atheist, who unwittingly makes a god out of the Ego or Reason. Of course I speak loosely of “gods” here; no atheist would call that a god. I am only insinuating that they have many of the same relations to their object of worship – themselves, reason, pleasure – that a theist has to their god, and they follow and love it like a god.

We can also clearly see that one can be a very moral person and yet not be righteous in any way. I have never murdered anybody, I have never had promiscuous sexual relationships - knowingly having aids and infecting all my partners in their ignorance of that fact (just to make it truly vicious); I have never done drugs or stolen cars or killed cute animals. I’m a very moral person to all appearances. But “without faith it is impossible to please God.” And if this is the case, then it means that we can keep the requirement of the law and yet never possess righteousness. Righteousness by its very nature “tracks”, in a sense, the pleasure of God. If we are not therefore pleasing God without faith, we do not possess righteousness either.

Seeing that morality as we use the word is divergent from true righteousness, not one of us should fall into this snare. This snare is what Lewis traps himself in. He says, “I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved…” We certainly do see that we are not morally depraved because we can see what is morally right and wrong - morally in its root, I think, referring to social mores, things that help society (Wikipedia: Mores). But if we were depraved in a righteousness sense, we wouldn’t know that we were depraved because we have already ignorantly suppressed the truth to follow our own desires - which may very well be moral - and there is no reason to think that we do not know we are depraved. We suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Lewis is identifying morality with righteousness here. But the meaning of the doctrine of total depravity is not that we are as immoral as possible, it is that we lack all righteousness, which means we lack faith. So total depravity is not a complete lapse into immorality, it is a complete absence of faith. This is what it means to be totally depraved: that we behave either morally or immorally, but in either case do not have faith, which is the evidence for our hope. Every one of us who is not in Christ is still under the curse of total depravity because they do not have faith. This doesn’t stop them from recognizing “goodness in human nature” as Lewis supposes.  In fact, it leads to us seeing goodness in human nature: particularly ourselves.

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some ‘disinterested’, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspect’, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. … The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble as long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word ‘love’, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. ‘Thou has created all things, and for they pleasure thy were created.’
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a wise and good Creator or the work of chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the religious problem. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side without our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving. … It [Christianity] has the master touch - the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [emphasis mine]

Never let a drunkard choose your wine.  You may be sure he knows nothing about it.  It is only sober people who know how to drink.
- M. Constantine-Weyer [via Drinking With Calvin And Luther]

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music… and of aviation.
- Tom Stoppard

But with that said, I agreed with most of what he wrote here. And that leads to another point, which is one of respect for Hitchens. We live in a time where it takes courage to speak the truth about Islam. For much of this book, Hitchens has been the bad boy in the mandatory Bible class in a parochial junior high school, embarrassing the teacher with questions and shocking the cute girls.

But when he takes on Islam this way, he is doing something that takes genuine courage. The previous two chapters, where he said a number of outrageous things about the Christian faith, will not, under any conceivable set of circumstances cause the Baptists of Little Rock to riot and burn down the city. Neither will Jerry Falwell issue a fatwa, offering a sure ticket to heaven for anyone who bumps off Hitchens. True, it is possible that Pat Robertson might prophesy that a meteor will land on Hitchens’ car, with him in it, but this sort of thing from Robertson can scarcely be reckoned as a threat. If he were to make such a statement, I would be happy to ride around with Hitchens in his car for the day, and I have to confess that I would feel perfectly safe.
- Doug Wilson on Hitchen’s comments about Islam, “Some Praise for Hitchens”