Category Archives: Christianity

Culture War is Necessary

The first issue of Good Work contains an article explaining the mission of the magazine. Man, that was tough to write. I wanted to reframe the terms of the “culture war” without a) throwing down my weapons or b) picking unnecessary fights. I’m not 100% sure I succeeded. Judge for yourself.

Or you could read this excerpt from Doug Wilson’s recent newsletter on education (paywalled, unfortunately). Leave it to Doug to say what I’m thinking more lucidly than I can.

Chesterton spoke wisely of the man who fights, not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him. And I have taught (for decades I have taught) that just as you cannot have a naval war without ships, or tank warfare without tanks, so also you cannot have culture war without a culture. And a culture is something you must inhabit, as one who loves his home, and so you must inhabit it as a dutiful citizen who is devoted to . . . culture care.

This means an essential part of culture care is fighting off invasions, and resisting predation. When the Germans conquered France, and were confiscating enormous stores of rich wines, culture care needed to include hiding wine from the Nazis, as in fact it did. But in order to do this, there would have to be some recognition of why they were needing to hide wine from the Nazis. Not to be too obvious about it, they were having to do this because of an invasion. There was a war on because someone was attacking. There was a culture war because someone was invading and seizing the cultural artifact—wine.

As he says, “you cannot have a culture war without a culture.” This means someone has to be plowing, sowing, watering, and harvesting to feed the man on the front lines. Good Work is that first guy.

The flaw in my analogy is that, in a real war, the farmer and the warrior are mutually exclusive. As long as the farmer’s planting, he’s not fighting. When he takes up his pitchfork to fight the bad guys, he has to ignore his fields for a bit. For Christians, good work, done to the glory of God, is an act of war. The man who cares for his family, goes to church, reads the Bible, sings the Psalms, and prays for his country is a culture warrior even if he never holds a picket sign. In other words, a faithful Christian life is always warlike, though it may not look like it from the outside.

You may have seen the video of Doug torching a bunch of cardboard cutouts with a flamethrower. Lots of people loved it. Lots of people hated it. But most of them ignored the most important part, which came near the beginning:

Doug Wilson NQN screenshot - family at table

Here we footage from the front lines of the culture war. Want to do your part to demolish the city of man? Eat dinner with your family.

That said, there are times when Christians must behave like warriors in the conventional sense, when we must be belligerent and accept nothing less than victory. What if Martin Luther had been content to read Romans in the privacy of his own home (for the sake of not causing a fuss) and never challenged the authority of the pope? For that matter, what if the apostles had kept the news of the resurrection to themselves, so as not to ruffle any feathers? Sometimes, being a faithful Christian means picking a fight.

How do you know when to tend to the farm and when to grab your flintlock? Good question. We’re certainly living in times that require us to work through the answer.

What Church is For

Imagine, instead of asking someone “Where do you go to church?” or “Where do you worship?”, you asked, “Where do you go every week to renew your covenant with God?”

It throws a different light on your choice of church, that’s for sure.

Speaking at the Areopagus

Brian Suavé Sauvé justifies his decision to speak at the 21 Convention:

The minute I heard that pastors are speaking at this event, I knew that Acts 17 would be used to justify their decision. Paul welcomed the chance to present the Gospel to Gentiles on their own turf. Shouldn’t we?

The problem with the argument is that Paul is manifestly an outsider on Mars Hill, speaking to the insiders. He emphasizes the fact (Acts 17:23). He was not one of an array of approved speakers, preaching to an assembled crowd. The philosophers were the crowd. If Pastor Suavé Sauvé really wanted to imitate Paul, he would go to a red-pill convention on the condition that he get a private session with the speakers only. Perhaps he has done this. Perhaps not.

One more thing: Christians love jumping onto runaway trains in order to “turn things around.” It never works. Didn’t we learn something when we tried this with the public schools? Let the dead bury the dead.

UPDATE: I still don’t know about Pastor Suavé Sauvé, but another pastor who will be speaking at the conference, Michael Foster, posted this, in which he says he agreed to speak at the conference on the condition he be allowed to say whatever he wants. That is similar to what I posted above. So, good for him.

More on Jacobs

Alan Jacobs has not responded to my post (the nerve!), but in an attempt to treat him as fairly as possible, I draw your attention to this post about his love for Jesus — or perhaps more accurately, Jesus’s love for him.

Every day I want to evade him, to look the other way, and when I do my faith wanes and weakens; but when I look, when I draw near, I remember what I’m all about, what the world is all about. When I look towards Jesus I am caught and held, even if sometimes shattered by what I see.

Alan Jacobs and the Bible

If you’re no stranger to me, you’re no stranger to Alan Jacobs. I’ve only met him in person once or twice, but I read everything he posts on his blog and his essays when I have time. His book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction was jammed so full of reading recommendations, I almost started it again as soon as I finished. Reading a book or essay by Dr. Jacobs sometimes feels like watching a juggler perform. He has an amazing ability to weave multiple literary ideas into a coherent pattern, and just when you think you’ve been impressed, he brings in another book and sets it whirling. I would love to take a class from him.

Christian people, books, and ideas appear frequently, almost inevitably, in Dr. Jacobs’s writing, but he rarely talks about what it means to live as a Christian or what standard a Christian ought to operate by. When he does, I often find myself cocking my head and going, “Huh.” In one post, which I can’t find right now, he said that his Christianity informs his life hardly at all, a statement to which the only right response is, “That doesn’t sound like Christianity.” After reading many similar posts over the years, I have come to the conclusion that my main issue with Dr. Jacobs is not so much a quibble over theology as it is a disagreement over the Bible. In a recent post, he says this:

It’s also fascinating to note how little the apostles understand the message they been entrusted with. They know that Jesus is the Christ, the promised Messiah of Israel, and they know that the Christ’s own people rejected him and demanded his death – but beyond that they’re a little fuzzy about what the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus mean. The idea that what Jesus offers them (and all of us) is God’s limitless grace is rarely mentioned. It’s there, but only in tentative and vaguely articulated form.

I didn’t pick this post because it’s particularly egregious, only because it’s recent. He makes an interesting point about the psychology of the apostles, but then he says, “They’re a little fuzzy about what the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus mean.” I assume Dr. Jacobs is saying that Peter and the rest had only a vague understanding of God’s grace until Paul fleshed it out for them.

I’m not opposed to the idea that God’s people gain understanding over time. Just think of the wealth of commentary and tradition built up over the past two thousand years. In many ways, the church fathers were, in fact, church babies. My disagreement, I think, is actually a different stance toward the historical figures in the Bible. I assume that the words, decisions, and actions of the people of God are right, unless Scripture explicitly says otherwise. The zeal of the apostles post-Pentecost was not wrong or even misguided. Even the zeal of Apollos was not wrong, though his did have to be redirected (Acts 18:26). When we read the book of Acts, we shouldn’t assume we know something Peter doesn’t. Instead of smiling indulgently at his cute naivete, we should ask ourselves why the apostles spent so much time preaching Jesus as Messiah, rejected by His own people. Surely there’s an explanation beyond “They didn’t know any better.” We should be humble and charitable in our interpretation, a position Dr. Jacobs would certainly support in other contexts.

As I said, this particular example doesn’t bother me that much. But it does reveal something about the way Dr. Jacobs views the Bible, which is the view of most American evangelicals (I believe Jacobs is Anglican, which makes him evangelical, I think?). According to this common view, the Bible is a historical record of how human beings fail. Everything from Genesis to Jude describes God’s attempts to communicate lovingly and graciously and being given constant cold shoulders. Jesus came to save us despite our best attempts to ignore Him. As Dr. Jacobs’s friend Francis Spufford puts it, we all have the Human Propensity to F*** Things Up, and without Christ, not one of us could stand. So far, so orthodox. But this view gives rise to a rather awkward question: If the Bible is nothing more than a record of human failure, why is it so long? Couldn’t we have a few chapters here and there (the Fall, David and Bathsheba, the book of Amos) and then cut straight to Jesus? Evangelical Christians seem remarkably uncurious about the Bible and what it has to do with their everyday life.

It’s true that the actual people in the Bible did not know the full picture — Eve thought Abel was the promised seed (Gen. 4:25) — but that doesn’t mean that the full picture wasn’t present. The whole Bible is one prophetic book, not created by the will of man, but by the movement of the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21), which means God’s limitless grace is as present in the story of the Flood as it is in the letters of Paul. That means the Flood story is still important and we need to study it. We don’t forget the candles just because the sun has risen. Candlelight is light, and remembering how it held back the darkness helps us understand the nature of the sun.

The thing that makes me nervous is how often Christians who doubt the power and wisdom of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, quickly drop other points of Christian dogma. They become squiffy on Creation, on biblical chronology, on Christian economics, on politics, on marriage, on the ordination of women, on abortion, ad inferna. Jesus doesn’t talk about most of these things, after all, and Paul can be controversial, which leaves us wandering through the philosophers, picking out whatever strikes our fancy (and won’t get us in too much trouble). The only antidote to such theological cherry-picking is embracing the wisdom of the whole Bible, whether the embrace makes us uncomfortable or not.

Despite our disagreement, I value Dr. Jacobs’s writing highly and hope he continues to poke his finger in all the right eyes (including conservative ones). I should also mention that he doesn’t easily fit into any camp, and if somehow this blog post swims into his ken, he may very well take issue with the way I’ve presented him. He will do so kindly, I’m sure.

All that said, I urge him to find a solid book on biblical theology and spend some time reading it as charitably as possible. (Here’s a good one.)

Words to Live By

Last night T and I attended the funeral of a good friend’s mother. The young pastor gave a wonderful homily, and the words he said that hit me with the greatest impact were these, spoken to him many years ago by the woman who had died:

“You don’t have to compromise because you don’t have to survive.”

Every Christian business, every Christian college, every Christian school, every Christian non-profit, every Christian artist, every Christian church, and every Christian home needs to engrave these words on a plaque and hang it on the most prominent wall available.

Tim Keller and Poetry

A few weeks ago, I finished Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. His practical knowledge, gained over many years of talking to atheists, really shines, especially on things philosophical and historical (and matters categorical). On the other hand, his perception of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is dim. His sympathy with evolution and old-earth creationism appears in several places throughout the book, but one argument stuck out to me, since it was purportedly based on the Bible itself.

In a nutshell, Keller argues that Genesis 1-2 follows the pattern of Exodus 14-15 and Judges 4-5. In both the latter passages, the author relates a historical event, then follows it with a song recounting the same thing in poetic form. The exodus from Egypt is followed by the Song of Miriam, while the battle with the Midianites is accompanied by the Song of Deborah.

According to Keller, this is what’s happening in the first two chapters of the Bible. Genesis 1 is a poetic treatment of Creation. Genesis 2 is the real deal. The seven day thing is metaphorical. The real story begins in Chapter 2, verse 4, with what I suppose is an ancient Hebrew explanation of the Proterozoic period (a term I just learned from Wikipedia). There are several problems with this, which I’m sure many fine Christians have explained online. I’ll just point out two that occurred to me while I was reading.

  • First, if Keller is correct in thinking that Genesis 1-2 follows the same structure as Exodus 14-15 and Judges 4-5, wouldn’t Genesis 1 be the historical treatment and Genesis 2 the poetic one? History followed by poetry, right?
  • Second, the Bible does have poetic descriptions of Creation (Job 38, Psalm 33 et al., Proverbs 30), none of which resembles Genesis 1. If anything, Genesis 1 has the same spare style we see throughout most of the Old Testament books of history.

Any argument based on style supports the idea that Genesis 1 is, in fact, describing what actually happened.

A Man is Mostly Wright

My friend Grant invited me to a lecture at Samford last night by none other than Bishop Tom himself, the Reverend Doctor N. T. Wright. The main thrust of his talk – or what I took to be the main thrust – was excellent. He argued that natural theology is a good and worthwhile pursuit… as long as we agree that “Nature” includes the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus was a part of the natural world, and so we must include him in the catalogue of “natural things.” Once we’ve done that, we ought to have no trouble reasoning our way back to God the Father. In fact, that’s kind of what the whole New Testament is about.

Whenever I listen to or read Wright, I come away with the same feeling: he is extremely concerned with how he comes across to his audience. Obviously, this can be a good thing. He (usually) takes care to explain himself in language the average person would understand, and he always defines his terms (sometimes multiple times).

But Wright’s concern for his audience can trip him up, as well. For example, last night, he kept putting down “theologians” for misunderstanding important aspects of the Old Testament, which causes them to misunderstand Jesus. Their vaunted theology gets in the way. (Nothing wrong there. I’d do the same thing myself, given the opportunity. No one is more fun to make fun of than theologians.) The trouble is, Wright simultaneously takes great pains to maintain his own status as a respectable theologian. He mocks the in-group, then assures us that he is a member in good standing.

You can also see this in Wright’s use of extra-biblical texts to support his understanding of the Bible. Do we really need Fourth Ezra to understand Jesus’s use of the phrase “Son of Man?” Should we read Cicero’s de Natura Deorum to get the gist of Paul’s argument in Romans? Neither of those texts is out of bounds, but neither is necessary to understanding the content of the Bible. The Bible is its own interpretive key. Radical, maybe, but true. Wright seems to be a humble man and a true Christian. Many of his theological positions, however, smack of the academy he dismisses so readily.