In an essay in the book The Cross-Cultural Proces in Christian History, Andrew Walls disputes the conventional wisdom that Church History is the story of Christianity going from strength to strength. In fact, Christianity often has found itself in deep, deep water, only to survive by having the good sense to grab whatever lifeline was thrown to it from some distant shore.
Case in point: Christianity had essentially hit a dead end only a few years after Jesus' resurrection. If it hadn't been for some anonymous believers in Antioch who got a wild hair to preach the gospel to some Gentiles, Christianity likely would have died out as any number of apocalyptic first century Jewish sects did. Instead, Christianity uprooted itself from its Palestinian Jewish soil and flowered in Greco-Roman society. In a few centuries the Jewish Messiah had become one substance with the immutable God of the philosophers.
Examples abound. It was mighty convenient that when the dioceses once administered by Augustine, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were falling to the Muslims, Pope Gregory was commissioning a mission to the Angles and the Saxons, the new pagan overlords of Briton.
The same process is at work today. Secularism has displaced Christianity in Europe far more quickly than Islam ever did in North Africa and the Near East, yet Christianity has found a new lease on life in Africa. At the beginning of the last century, 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, 60% live in Africa, a monumental and lightning-quick shift in the religion's center of gravity with which no one yet has come to grips.
Walls makes a couple of points about this two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative.
So I was at the Y the other day, and on the treadmill was this guy running pretty hard. And every so often he'd look up and off into the air and kinda shake his hands out and punch the air. All I could figure was that he was a little too deep into the music he was listening to on his IPod, and in his head he was gallivanting around the stage saluting his adoring fans in the sold-out stadium. I assume he was the lead singer because he never broke out the air guitar.
Dude, this is what Guitar Hero is for. In the privacy of your own home. I don't wanna see it. Learn to be alone with your thoughts in the gym.
You may not know a lick of Spanish, but you recognize it when you hear it, by its sound. Same thing with French. Or German. But have you ever wondered what English sounds like to people who don't speak English? This Italian singer wrote a song with nonsense, English-sounding words so that English speakers could hear the sound of their native tongue through foreign ears:
Yes Virginia, there are crappy Christmas carols out there, but I Saw Three Ships is not one of them. In fact, the song is indestructible. You cannot murder it.
Strange coincidence: Yesterday I turned in a paper on patristic hermeneutics, specifically on the role of history in the interpretive strategies of Origen and Antiochene exegetes. The same day Thomas J. Bridges posted some thoughts on the same topic at An und fuer sich. So this has emboldened me to post my paper here now, which is probably unwise since it hasn't been graded and returned to me yet!
More coincidences. Tomorrow the Theology Discussion Group is going to discuss a few songs, including Crash Test Dummies' God Shuffled His Feet, which I guess is the perfect Antiochene retort to the allegorists: people want answers and all you give them are pretty little stories!
Mark Kleiman hatin' on Frosty the Snowman before Thanksgiving is here. Eager to avoid the wrath of Bill O'Reilly, he is careful to point out that his problem is with secularized Christmas music, not, say, Adeste Fideles. Kevin Drum, who as far as I know is not a believer, agrees, and proposes that O'Reilly and Kleiman ally themselves in a War on Bad Christmas Music.
I'm glad that there are some secularists out there who appreciate Christian artistry, if not Christian doctrine.
The comments, naturally, devolve into an argument about which Holiday Carol is the crappiest. A couple point out that Frosty the Snowman and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus are really kinda creepy and sinister, if you think about them, which reminds me to link to this post by Camassia about pop songs you loved in middle school which, in retrospect, make you want to go Eww.
But if you really want your soul sucked out of you, you should wait tables at Ruby Tuesday during the Holiday Season. The soundtrack satisfies one's spiritual and aesthetic palate as well as flat Diet Coke. The absolute dregs was Christmas Is Going to the Dogs, by eels. You can listen to it here! Since the song blatantly violated management's mandatory perkiness, a co-worker was convinced a surly employee in the home office slipped it in as a subliminal critique of where the company was going.
I don't miss waiting tables, but I do miss my co-workers, who cope with daily humiliation by cultivating the best sense of humor of any group of people I've ever met. So a dreadful song like Christmas Is Going to the Dogs is able to evoke feelings of nostalgia that I'll Be Home for Christmas could never. Ironic, eh?
For some reason I woke up with this song in my head. I blame Lee, who posted another great 70s paean to "base injustice done to my Love" last Friday. And while I hate to go all fanboy homer on you, I do have to say that Steve Perry's vocal range is, like, dizzying, and that everything they put out after 1980 was crap. Including Escape.
So I turned 40 on Sunday. And last night I went to the U2 concert in Charlottesville. And there were no, I mean ZERO, young adults in the crowd. My brother-in-law quipped, "The only young people at this concert are here with their Mommies and their Daddies." It did look like a Mothers Morning Out event at Starbucks writ large.
Something else: I'm training for the Richmond marathon. And I had a nurse come over to the house to examine me for a life insurance policy. And if her measurements can be believed, I have lost eight pounds, but gained an inch in my waist size.
How is that possible? Is that what middle age does to you? Does everything sort of, you know, sag down and forward, and no fitness regime can stop it?
The concert, by the way, was mind-boggling. Bono's, "Is Thomas Jefferson in the house?" was clever and warmly received. Muse, the opening act, performed well. I hear that they have a great following in Europe, and their style was well-suited to warm up the crowd for U2.
If they come to a stadium near you, I urge you to get on that walker of yours and hobble out to see them.
I want to briefly re-visit the horrible quadruple murder in Farmville, VA, and specifically this Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the victims to which I linked below. I'm sure more of the truth will come out later--truth which may undermine the following--but from what the article says, one can easily imagine the following scenario:
A teenage girl decides to rebel against her minister father and her criminologist mother by dabbling in the horrorcore scene. What stronger statement could a teen make? Grinding music about cannibalism and murder is about as far away from Christianity and a commitment to prevent violence against women as you can get. Criminologist's mother makes a judgment call--rather than forbid any further exposure to these people or their music, which may inspire a backlash (running away, delinquent behavior) she will try to demystify this scene by chaperoning her daughter's trip to a horrorcore festival. But things went terribly wrong.
Now that may not be the way things went down. And that may or may not be the way you'd handle the situation. But whether it went down that way or not, and whether that scenario is at all understandable, there's no excuse for this reading of the situation buried in the comment thread:
I hate to blame the victim here, but, come on, taking your child to a
concert featuring bands named “Stitch Mouth”, “Dismembered Fetus”, and
“BodyBagz”? That is clearly irresponsible parenting if not child
endangerment. How do you just expect a child to ‘grow out of it’ if you
don’t steer them in the right direction? It sounds like the mother was
probably a liberal (she was a college professor), and had that
mentality that evil doesn’t exist and that she didn’t want to
‘interfere’ with her child… give me a break!
"I hate to blame the victim here," but truth be told I can't wait to get in my licks! This commenter knows a lot about the situation. (S)he knows how the victim votes; (s)he knows the victim is a laissez-faire parent, and (s)he knows that the victim was far too sentimental about human nature for her own good. Wow, that's a lot more than I know.
And this is par for the course for any newspaper's web site. Blogs are notorious for flame wars and trolls, but blogs are an episode of Barney compared to the general American public opining on hapless schmucks who wind up featured in their hometown daily.
I swear, there's a ton of people out there who enjoy the newspaper with their coffee because they could no more face the day without feeling smug than they could without caffeine. They don't read the newspaper to learn anything. They read it because they can. Reading the paper and not showing up in it is proof positive you aren't one of the stupids who's getting what's coming to you.
I'd love to live in a world like that. If the world were really like that, I'd drop my aspirations to work in higher education in a heartbeat. I'd buy a Sarah Palin 2012 pinup calendar. I'd lock my home-schooled kids in a basement, pop in a Jonas Brothers CD, hit "repeat all" and tell them to do their math while I cleaned my guns. And I'd sleep like a baby.
But we don't live in a world where everybody gets what's coming to them.
Technically my vacation isn't over. I'm lollygagging at the 2008 Comfort Inn location of the year in lovely Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (And it is lovely! New England's rolling, nearly mountain-sized hills covered in birch trees and balsam firs are lovely. At least they are in the summer.) Anyway, I can't watch TV because I want the kids to go to sleep, so why not blog a little bit before hitting the road tomorrow?
OK, what I read. The Shack. It was on the living room table with the other detritus that made it in from my family's convergence on The McKinley House in Bass Harbor, Maine. I'd heard of the book but literally knew nothing about it, other than that it was of a religious nature. My mother-in-law brought it with her, but she didn't like it. So I decided to read it.
Quickly into the novel I realized I had ventured into the dread regions of inspirational fiction, where plot, character development, credible dialogue and a nice turn of phrase are all sacrificed on the altar of doctrinal truth and point-scoring. But I pressed ahead because I knew that you, my legions of adoring readers, were starving for new material from me, and I had to provide it for you in the form of this book review!
Until I got to the middle of the book when the protagonist, a bereaved father, chills out with the Triune God for a weekend in a log cabin in the woods. I just had to set it aside then, not because I object to the book's iconography of the Holy Trinity as Queen Latifah, Lucy Liu and a swarthy, middle-eastern carpenter. I mean, I'm a mainline Christian. I read Beyond God the Father as an undergraduate! Back in the day, everybody I knew was calling the Almighty "she." I had to set it aside because the book was so late 1980s, you know?
But that's what the conservative Evangelicals do. They ridicule "liberal" Christians for both capitulating to culture and for being irrelevant to the culture (a contradictory argument if there ever was one). And then they pick through the best mainline scholarship of the previous generation and regurgitate it. So Open Theism is conservative evangelicalism stoned on process theology, and I'm guessing The Shack is a little Moltmann, a little feminist theology, and assorted theodicies ground up into a sausage of awful prose. I swear, if liberal Protestantism didn't exist, evangelicals would have to invent it.
I'm saying I'm guessing because I didn't finish the book. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia. Is that unfair? Augustine put off converting to Christianity for a long time because he was such a literary snob that the idea that the New Testament was divine revelation scandalized him. Am I a snob?
Well, not enough of a snob to not be a Christian. But like P.D. James, I detest it when cynics mock excellence as elitism. Here's the thing: after Dostoyevsky penned Ivan Karamozov's devastating takedown of all attempts to justify God's power and love in the face of natural and man-made cruelty, the only solution to the "problem of evil" is his brother Alyosha's rejoinder, also penned by Dostoyevsky: he kisses his brother on the cheek. There is no good explanation for why evil exists if God is sovereign and good. There are only acts of love grounded in resurrection hope. By the time I was a third of the way through The Shack I had a pretty good feeling that the author wouldn't be able to demonstrate that in an artful manner.
So, onto a better written book, whose myriad of (theological?) anthropologies, while not Christian, were far more entertaining and thought-provoking. Yes, I'm talking about Watchmen. In the meantime, I googled I Hate The Shack, and the White Zombie song Shack of Hate was the third hit. That inspired me to create a White Zombie channel on Pandora. So all is not lost!
Ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA), I am a Ph.D. student at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, a husband, and father of two red-headed boys.
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