Infantilization, Part Two

[This is] where Cuddle Parties come in. For the uninitiated, these are basically pajama parties where you cuddle with strangers in a non-sexual way.  “It was just really interesting to me that people were engaging in healthy non-sexual touch,” said Hunt, who has attended three Cuddle Parties in Murfreesboro. “I thought, ‘That’s what the world needs.’ “

…

A Cuddle Party typically works like this: People pay $10 (to cover the price of snacks) and bring their jammies, which they change into in a private room. There’s a “welcoming circle” where people introduce themselves and talk about why they’ve come, and a facilitator goes over the Cuddle Party rules, such as keeping your pajamas on at all times and always asking permission before touching anyone, among other things.  Then, there are two hours of freestyle cuddling and the evening ends with a group “puppy pile,” where people pile on top of each other and hug.

“Cuddle Parties”.  Yes, this is exactly what the world needs.  Commoditization of affection to satisfied people’s perceived (and probably legitimate) needs for physical contact without the drudgery and sacrifice of actually building and maintaining good relationships.

Full story here.

Thoughts on Augustine’s Enchiridion

Calvin gave us a tulip, but Augustine planted the bulb.

Limericks

While visiting relatives in Florida the other night, I made up a bunch of limericks to “entertain” my family.  Here are a few of the results:

There once was a boy from Kentucky
Who was feeling brash, and plucky.
He bought a ring with a pearl
And proposed to a girl,
But it turned out he wasn’t so lucky.

There once was a young man from France
Who never wore shoes, nor pants.
He visited the cafe,
Said, “Dinner, s’il vous plait,”
But the waiter said only, “Fat chance.”

There once was a man from Catan,
Had too many sheep on his lawn.
So he traded the meat,
For lumber and wheat,
And now his sheep are all gone.

There once was a wife from St. Clair
Who had golden, wavy hair.
She spent more than a few
Hours on her doo,
But her husband didn’t seem to care.

There once was a man from New Delhi
Who thought his veggies were smelly.
So eat ate only cake,
And occasionally steak,
And now he has quite a big belly.

Dehumanization

The danger of devaluing human persons has oft been noted in books and around the internet. The danger is insidious. I have a few recent stories that have caused me to think about this.

1) My wife and I went to see District 9 a few weeks ago. It’s a very well-done film, with some very interesting allegory in the first half hour or so, but you should be prepared for the non-stop onslaught of action and adrenaline that makes up the rest of the film.  (Also, it would seem that people in South Africa know only one curse word.)  Anyways, without giving too much away, one of the characters in the movie starts losing his humanity, both physically as his biology changes, and socially as the pressures of an evil megacorporation leave him few options for survival.  The definition of humanity becomes blurred.  Then the lightning gun comes out.  By the time it was all over, we were left in a state of shock.  Driving home, the people around us did not seem like people at all.  They were nothing at best, threats at worst.  I didn’t quite feel like a person myself, and the trip home was more like floating than driving.  We sat up and talked for a few hours over tea to get “back to normal” so we could go to bed.

2) I’ve had similar feelings, though never quite as acutely, after playing first-person shooter video games like Unreal Tournament.  When you spend a few hours running around blowing computer people away with a rocket launcher, something in you about the nature of human persons disconnects.  However, the regular little spurts of adrenaline can make such games quite addictive.  I see the same thing in some of my younger relatives, who frequently play historical first-person shooters, like Call of Duty.  The graphics and the gameplay are indeed impressive, and it was clear that the designers of the game had done their historical homework, but I ended up a bit disgusted at the same time that I was amused.  Different people had different reasons for fighting in WWII, and while my own understanding of Jesus’ teachings would make it very difficult for me to fight in a war, I’ll not fault the men and women who went to war in the 1940’s for being willing to sacrifice themselves to protect what they loved.  I’m pretty sure their decision to make a sacrifice was not so that bored teenagers (and increasingly, “adult” men) could get a few kicks in a battle simulator, where the bombs sound real but don’t shake your house, where the blood and smoke smell like Febreeze, and when you die you immediately come back to life with a shiny new gun.

Those are just two recent and relatively minor examples of the larger war on the human person.  Of course, the actual wars of the 20th century were some of the biggest volleys, and we continue to see their aftershocks in (for instance) the ongoing killing of unborn children.  All of this has been well-noted elsewhere.

How can we “fight back” and affirm the integrity of the human person?  I’ll list a few ways that occur to me, but perhaps some wise reader will have better answers.

• Pray and commune with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• Pray and commune with other humans.
• Refuse to idolize the violence culture.
• Try, as far as possible, to avoid the “benefits” of the dehumanization of others.
• Make things from scratch, and enjoy them with others.
• Unplug yourself as far as possible from anything powered by flowing electrons.
• Talk to, listen to, and love your family.

Mes Aieux – Degeneration

Infantilization

These are largely anecdotal, but I can’t help but feel that American adults are becoming more and more childish as the decades go by.

• The first inkling I can remember is when I was in junior high school, where there were pictures up in the cafeteria of students who had won sports competitions and so on.  I think the pictures were mostly from the 70’s.  The students were all the same age as the ones around me, but compared to my peers, these looked like they were in high school.
• Flipping through my mother-in-law’s old yearbooks from when she was in college, I couldn’t get over how adult all of the students looked, not just in their portraits, but in the every-day shots around the campus.  Again, my peers when I was in college looked liked children by comparison.
• Go back further if you want, and look at a high school or college yearbook from the 40’s or 50’s.  Crazy.
• Grown men are perfectly comfortable today wearing shorts in public.
• Grown men also seem to have no problem spending huge amounts of time and money playing video games.  They continue to buy the latest game systems, not for their children, but for themselves.
• There is a recent rash of movies based on children’s books.  (Alice in Wonderland, Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc.)  Most of these barely pretend to actually be made for children.
• On a recent visit to a nursing home, I observed elderly men and women with their mental faculties fully intact being treated like children, with little stars put up on bulletin boards to mark their attendance at asinine social gatherings.  These are men and women who have earned degrees, raised families, started successful businesses, and fought in wars, reduced to wearing stupid hats and condescended to by teenagers.
• We are obsessed with looking young, and perceive getting old as a death sentence.  We assign value to human life based on age.
• If we have made a stupid mistake by not controlling our bodily urges, we choose not to value human life at all.
• Young people are waiting longer and longer to get married and then start families.  I can understand this to a small degree, as there are ever more “school” hoops that they have to jump through in order to be considered capable of doing real work.  This, of course, is a lie.
• Rather than deal with marital problems when they arise, we decide not to be friends any more.
• I think many Americans don’t have a clue where food comes from, and would be in a real bind if they actually had to find a way of directly providing it for themselves.
• There are men, women, and children dying around the world, both Americans and non-Americans, and we bury our heads in the sand by watching the Jay Leno and the Biggest Loser circus and tell ourselves that all that stuff going on out there somehow protects our freedom, by which we mean less and less actual freedom and more and more the ability to distract ourselves with gadgets and meaningless amusements.
• Rather than acting like responsible adults and dealing with the problems we face, we beg political heroes (of whatever party) to come to the rescue and solve all of our problems for us.  They can’t really do much, of course, without major sacrifices on the part of their electorate, so they spend our grand-children’s money to defer (but also enlarge) the problems and line their own pockets while they’re at it.  The guilt for this belongs to us.
• We feel unable to worship God unless the tempo is upbeat, the music is rockin’, and the message is uplifting.  We have to be properly distracted before we can “get in the spirit”.
• We trash our planet, our bodies, our culture, and our cities for our own convenience, amusement, and fashion, and think very little of the repercussions over the coming decades.  This is another way of saying that we do not love our children.
• We believe that everyone and everything that came before us is somehow inferior to us.  This is another way of saying that we do not love our parents.

There are probably more I can’t think of right now.  Some of these are very serious, others are merely symptoms of the deeper problem.  I am by no means immune, and I struggle in many of the areas listed above to behave like an adult.  Now, someone may mention Matthew 18:4 at this point:

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

This is true, but right after that he says:

“Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

I suspect that the childishness I have criticized above stems not from humility, but from arrogance, selfishness, and pride, and these have no place in the kingdom of heaven.

Quote from FPR

“Tax cuts without spending cuts are not really tax cuts at all; they are tax shifting, mainly from the current to the future generation. Spending our children’s money is both economically unsound and morally reprehensible.” — John Medaille

That, plus much more good stuff, here: Building the Ownership Society

Board Games

After such an intense (though beneficial) theological discussion (see the previous post), perhaps it’s time to post on something a bit lighter.  If you came here for theology and don’t really care about games, it certainly won’t hurt my feelings if you decide not to hang around.

There have been some great-looking board and card games coming out in recent years, and since I’ve been on a games kick lately, I thought I’d post about a few of them.  My wife has wisely requested that I restrict myself to at most one game purchase per month, which is probably a bit generous, to be honest, so many of the games I’m about to list I haven’t actually played, yet, but based on their rules and online reviews, I may be picking them up in the next few months.

The purpose of this post is two-fold.  First, if it’s a game I’ve actually played, consider its inclusion here as an endorsement by me and a recommendation to play it if you have the opportunity.  If it’s a game I have yet to play, consider this a request for second opinions from folks who may have played it or who have read some reviews themselves.

First, card games.  We picked up Canasta several months ago, and I think we play it about once a week.  You can buy a specially-made deck with labeled cards that include scoring values, but later we found out that most people play the game with two decks of regular playing cards.  It’s a classic game that’s easier than Pinochle, but still has plenty of strategy.

Next up is Bang!.  This game could be described as “Mafia meets spaghetti westerns.”  We learned this one last week and ended up playing it several times back-to-back, as it is quite fun.  Players (except the Sheriff) have secret roles and a different set of winning conditions based on their role.  The game-play boils down to a shoot-out, where players shoot at each other with BANG cards, dodge bullets with MISSED cards, and “drink” BEER cards to regain life points.  There are a ton of other cards that players can use to do more exotic things.

Now for three card games I haven’t tried, yet.  I’ll only comment on the first one, as it is the most interesting, and simply link to the other two.  The first one is called Dominion.  The mechanics of this game are very similar to Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, but this is not a collectible card game.  All of the cards you need in order to play as a group are included in the box, and what makes this game interesting is that you build up your deck as you play.  The advantages of this seem tremendous to me.  I (thankfully) never got into Magic back in middle school and high school, even though it seemed to be what half of our Boy Scout troop spent most of our meetings doing.  Although collectible card games can be very involved and quite entertaining, they require you to spend a pretty good deal of money to build up your deck, and if you don’t take the time to purchase and plan and build your own deck, you generally can’t play.  If you borrow a deck from a friend who has multiple decks, you will generally lose in short order, as you won’t know much about either deck, and your opponent will know what both decks are capable of.

But enough about Magic.  In Dominion, you spend treasure cards to purchase other cards from supply piles in the middle of the table.  You win by having the most victory point cards in your deck at the end of the game, but during the game itself these cards are useless, and thus you also need to buy action cards in order to help you build up your deck.  This game looks like a ton of fun, with enormous replay value, as there are 25 types of action cards, but only ten will be used in any given game.  The rules are also a bit simpler than Magic, which means my wife might actually be interested in playing this with me.

The other two card games are Bohnanza (“bohn” is German for “bean”), and Citadels.

Now on to board games.  I think all of the following would fall under the category of “Eurogames”.  Check this Wikipedia page for more info about what that means.  The first and foremost, and one you are most likely to have heard of is The Settlers of Catan.  In Settlers, players try to build and expand their settlements on an island by collecting resources to build roads and cities.  Players can trade with each other and with the bank, and may also earn points for things like the longest road.  This is sort of “the game that started it all” for many people, and it has become a family favorite for us.  It’s a great introduction to this genre of games.  It also happens to be the only board game I’m going to mention that I’ve actually played.

Next up is Agricola.  I’m very excited about Agricola.  In Agricola, players each have a small farm which they are tasked to develop over the game’s fourteen rounds.  The land may be used to expand your house, plow fields, or fenced in to hold sheep, pigs, and cows.  Each player starts out with a husband and wife, but later on the small family can choose to have children.  The larger your family, the more actions you can take in a given round, but there are also harvests that occur after every few rounds, and you must have enough food each harvest to feed your entire family or you lose major points.  At the end of the game, the farms are scored and the winner is the player with the best farm.  Puerto Rico, which is mentioned below, held the #1 spot on Board Game Geek’s ranked games list for about five years, until it was recently displaced by Agricola. Here is a link Scott Nicholson’s entertaining video review.

Another game that I’m very excited about is The Pillars of the Earth.  If that sounds familiar, it’s because this game is based on a series of novels from a few years ago.  In this game, players work together to construct a massive cathedral — the first of its kind, in fact — in medieval England.  The winner is the player who contributed the most to the cathedral’s construction.  It is similar to Agricola in that players compete for a limited set of actions each round.  Not only does this game look like a lot of fun, but the board is absolutely beautiful, and it comes with a nice 3D cathedral you build out of blocks as you go. Scott Nicholson’s hilarious video review of this game is here.

The last board game I’ll comment on is Puerto Rico.  Puerto Rico seems to have been an inspiration for many of the recent popular board games.  As I mentioned, it held the highest ranking on Board Games Geek for multiple years.  Your job as the governor of the island is to manage the city of San Juan and its surrounding plantations in order to generate resources to send home to Europe for points.  The actions you are permitted to take are determined by role cards that the players choose in order.  Once again, this looks like a fun game, though I’m not as excited about it as I am the previous two.  Here is Scott Nicholson’s review.

Finally, a runner-up “train” game that I unfortunately don’t have time to comment on: Ticket to Ride.  (Review here)

What’s a Church of Christ Boy To Do?

One of the core axioms of Church of Christ theology is the supremacy of reason in discerning matters of doctrine.  It is said that, while our emotions may lead us into all sorts of danger, the faculty of reason can always be trusted, if applied honestly.

For my part, this thread started to unravel when I began to look at the history of the Restoration Movement (from which come the Churches of Christ, the independent Christian Churches, and the Disciples of Christ). It is said that Alexander Campbell, one of the primary founders of the movement, carried a copy of John Locke with him in his saddlebags, next to his bible. As you might imagine, he believed that scripture should be read in a very rationalistic way. This has produced one of the core tenets of Church of Christ belief, which is that that anyone who approaches the scriptures rationally and with honesty will reach the same conclusions about belief and practice as anyone else who does the same. It is believed that if we can use reason to agree on the true meaning of scripture, we can unite the Christians from all of the denominations into the one Church of Christ. The only hinderances to this process are the existing traditions, creeds, and biases that men (and women) bring with them when they read. Thus, creeds and traditions must be rejected outright. It is believed that such an approach to God’s word will enable us to fully recreate the church of the first century, which is now so long obscured by the abuses of history that we must discard all we have inherited and start afresh. Indeed, the New Testament is viewed as the blueprint for the Church of Christ, sent down to us by the Master Architect, and we must follow its pattern exactly. This is sola scriptura, par excellence.

The problem with this framework, as it has turned out in practice, is that men do not and cannot read the scriptures alike.  To make matters worse, if two individuals disagree on an interpretation of scripture, it follows that at least one of them is either mentally deficient or perverse in some way.  This lends a serious air of vitriol and superiority to any debates on doctrinal issues.

The truth is that it is not possible to read the “plain” meaning of scripture, because it is not possible avoid the coloring of our reading that comes from our own experience. It is interpretation “all the way down.” The postmoderns among us would say, “well, duh,” but I think the Orthodox do a little better than that in pointing out that our reason is just as much a part of our fallen nature as, for instance, our emotions. That is not to say that reason is useless, but in practice it fails to be authoritative. Even within the Church of Christ, there are the mainstream, the non-institutionals, the one-cup non-Sunday school crowd, the progressives, and so on, and all claim an authoritative reading of scripture based on reason.

To further emphasize the point, the mainstream churches of Christ have changed dramatically over the last century, though from what I can gather, we have no idea of it. A Church of Christ 125 years ago would have been functionally non-institutional, non-Sunday school, and had one-cup communion. Its women wouldn’t have dared show up without their heads covered, and only the elderly and infirm would have prayed while sitting in a pew. Everyone else would have been on their knees when praying, or occasionally standing. There would have been no located salaried “minister”, rather, the preacher would have varied from week to week or month to month, as preachers were itenerant and focused primarily on evangelism and church planting.  Many congregations would have been staunchly pacifist, and regularly heard pacifist sermons.  All of these practices were considered “scriptural” and based on a rational reading of scripture, just as today, we base our non-practice of them on a rational reading of scripture. Clearly, something is wrong with our basis of authority!

This, however, is where I find myself in a pickle.  Once you reject the authoritativeness of a rationalistic reading of scripture, where do you go? Where do you get your authority?  At the moment, I can see three basic options, represented by three groups: the Charismatics, the Emergents, and the Orthodox.

The first option, represented by the Charismatic and Pentecostal churches, is the direct and immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit.  That is, the Holy Spirit speaks to us directly as individuals to give us guidance in all matters of belief, practice, and life.  If there seems to be a contradiction between those directions and the scriptures, we should go with the more recent orders of the Spirit, who is the final authority.  From the little experience I have of the Charismatic movement, this does not look like the way for me to go.  The situation is ripe for abuse, as when I visited a Charismatic mega-church a few years ago, and one of the pastors got up to say that he was receiving a message from the Holy Spirit at that very moment that the congregation needed to be putting more money in the collection plates that were being passed around.  Often times, it all seems to devolve into “Jesus made the light turn green for me,” or, “I can hear the Spirit telling me to move on to this bigger paycheck and buy a new SUV.”  Perhaps I am being unfair, but for multiple reasons, this option is unappealing.  How do I discern between the messages of the Holy Spirit and my own delusion?

The second option, which I have said is represented by the Emergents, as far as I can understand them and as far as they can be pinned down, is that I myself become the final authority.  Of course, they would never put it that way, but the practice seems to be to take (for instance) a little contemporary worship music, a little Orthodox artwork, a little Reformed theology, a little classical spiritual formation, a little Quaker discernment, all from different “traditions”, and roll them up into one until you get a church.  (Anything edgy like a soul patch or a tattoo is a bonus.)  In full postmodern style, whatever works for you is OK, as long as you don’t judge the way I choose to respond to the story of God.  So for instance, one might hold that the Virgin Birth is true, not because it actually happened, but because it is beautiful.  Again, perhaps I am being unfair, as I know some Emergents who are good, loving, righteous believers and whom I consider friends.  But the final authority in this model is what I consider to be beautiful and helpful, and as we all know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  This seems too much to me like the days when Israel had no king, and “each one did what was right in his own eyes.”

In addition, I don’t think it is fair to scavenge ideas from all of the existing Christian traditions to piece together your own hybrid church.  The pieces you are scavenging were formed within the context of the tradition from which you scavenged them, and only reach their full expression within that same context.  Thus, to play Gregorian chant to create a “mood” of reverence before the praise band starts jamming at the beginning of service is to do a disservice to both the Catholic church which originated the musical style and the participants in the service, who get musically and cognitively lurched around a bit.

In this model, as there is no authority outside the individual, there can be no heresy either, as we all are just in “different stages of our journey towards God.”  Therefore, even though I am a generational Millennial, I’m afraid I cannot go along with the forecasters for my demographic into the trendy new Emergent churches.  Whatever authority I end up accepting, I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be me.

This brings us to the Eastern Orthodox.  Most of what I’ll say here could be applied to the Roman Catholic Church (and to a lesser degree the Anglican Church) as well, but for multiple reasons the Orthodox are where my interests lie.  The interpretation of scripture that the Orthodox hold to be authoritative is the one they received from the previous generations of believers, all the way back to Jesus and the apostles. This is a part of what is referred to as the Tradition.  Tradition and scripture are not at odds for the Orthodox; rather a part of the Tradition is a particular reading of scripture that is purported to have been given by Christ directly to his disciples.  For more on this topic, I point the reader here and here.

This view of the matter is very appealing.  For one thing, it makes a place for history in discussions of the life of the Church.  Indeed, as G. K. Chesterton said, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”  It also relieves some of the burden I’ve placed on myself of having to have it all “figured out”.  I don’t have to fully comprehend everything, I just need to accept what has been faithfully passed on to me.  It is possible for distortions or impurities to enter into the Tradition, but there is also the ongoing work of the Spirit and of the bishops to repent and return to the purity of the Faith that has been delivered to us.  When problems arise, Christ is seen as still active in his Church through the Holy Spirit, and this is particularly manifested in the collective discernment of the bishops in councils.  Thus, the doctrinal purity of the Kingdom is preserved by Christ himself.  Of course, the things that matter most for me are those that pertain to communion with God, to salvation and sanctification, and these are clearly established and do not change.

I mentioned the work of Church Councils, and this topic points to an important reality that we have long ignored in the Church of Christ: as much as we like to claim that we have restored the New Testament Church, we are deeply beholden to the believers who have come before us, indeed to the Tradition which they have passed on to us, despite the fact that we normally consider them to be apostates.  The canon of scripture was established by the painstaking work of the early Church Councils, as they sought to determine which books and writings were consistent with the Tradition that had been passed on to them, and which were heretical or superfluous. The canon was later revised by the Reformers (also “apostates”), and this version of the canon we have accepted unquestioningly.  The way we generally explain this (if somebody asks troubling questions) is to say that the Holy Spirit was at work in these men, even though they were apostates, so that the pure canon would be faithfully delivered to us a few centuries later, who could rightly discern it.  This is an extraordinary exercise in hubris, to say the least.

As I have said earlier, reason is not without a place in the life of the Christian, it is just not our final authority.  And it so happens that many of the “new” conclusions that Campbell and others reached about the life of the Church are those that Orthodox Tradition had taught all along: for instance, weekly Communion, baptismal regeneration, and acapella worship.  To me, this is a good sign.  In fact, with the exception of this core matter of interpretation, as far as I’m aware there is little-to-nothing the Church of Christ teaches or practices that Orthodox believers would find problematic.  (Obviously, the reverse does not hold.)  Yet, the beauty of the faith and practice presented by Orthodoxy is absolutely stunning to me.  These people really know how to be in the presence of God, to partake of his Body and Blood, to worship, to repent, and to pray.  Orthodoxy has been described as “the fullness of the Faith”, and when confronted with such richness and fullness, it is hard not to feel sometimes that one has been living in theological poverty.

So then, what’s the dilemma?  Why have I not yet jumped on board with the Orthodox Church?  There are multiple reasons, one of which is that my wife and I are attending a Church of Christ congregation that we love very much.  We have formed some wonderful relationships with the Christians there, and we can see the image of the “family of God” at work among us.  Such ties should not be dissolved lightly or quickly.  More deeply, the Church of Christ is my heritage; it is what I was raised to believe.  I am chafed by the idea of following the generational herd and ditching my parents’ church for whatever is new and exciting to me.  Again, such decisions are often made too quickly, and care is advised. I must “count the cost”, lest my latter state become worse than the former.

Finally, in good Protestant style, I have a “hang-up” with the Tradition as delivered to me by Orthodoxy, and that is infant baptism.  The topic has taken up all the more importance as my wife and I begin to think about having children.  I have read arguments for both sides, and both sides have some darn good ones.  It is not my desire to start a debate on this issue here, but simply to say that I am not ready to embrace this practice.  The Orthodox baptismal liturgy itself, which is quite beautiful, seems so much more meaningful if engaged in by an adult catechumen, rather than a proxy godparent.  And yet, here I judge myself, for I am elevating my own Reason to the place of final authority against the claims of Tradition.

There may be yet another option, besides the three I have discussed.  I have seen it referred to here and there as “re-traditioning”.  The idea is that we (the Church of Christ) let go of this paradoxical stance of being an a-traditional tradition and rather embrace the tradition from which we have come.  Reaching back into our past, we dust off our copies of Cambpell, Stone, Lipscomb, Sommer, Lard, Richardson, Srygley, and all of our other “Fathers”, and allow them to critique who we are today. We drop the pretense that our interpretations are authoritative on the basis of Reason, and accept that they may be quite valuable, nonetheless. This would also allow us to accept the idea that we may not be the only True Christians while at the same time affirming that the issues on which we disagree with others still matter. Closely related to the strict Church of Christ re-traditioning option is to reach back even further and embrace what we have rejected from Christian history.  This would include things such as liturgical worship, the works of the Church Fathers, and the communion of the saints.  We could do either one, or both.

This course is not without its own perils, though.  Any Church of Christ congregation which started to do this would quickly find itself anathematized by the rest of the brotherhood, “congregational autonomy” be damned.  My own attempts (in conjunction with a few others) to introduce some old-style Church of Christ as well as some liturgical elements at our congregation have not been very successful. According to Father Stephen, the liturgical side of these attempts are misguided, and I’m somewhat inclined to agree with him.  And once again, I am judging myself, for like the Emergents, I am pulling practices I like out of their ecclesial contexts and trying to get them to take hold in a place where they don’t make sense.  But perhaps a strictly Restoration Movement re-traditioning may yet yield some valuable fruit.  I point here to the work of Richard Hughes, John Mark Hicks, and many others.

To conclude, it seems I cannot escape making myself the ultimate authority in some sense, because I am the one who has to decide to which authority I will ultimately submit.  For now, I am biding my time, praying and repenting with the Church, and waiting for more clarity in my path. The only thing that is clear right now is that I cannot stay where I am, theologically speaking, forever. Thus, I welcome your comments, readers, especially if you see other options I have not considered, or if you believe I have mischaracterized something or someone.  And I put the question to you: what’s a Church of Christ boy to do?

Wednesday Night Bible Class: I Timothy 6:11–21

These are my notes from the second of two bible classes I led this summer as part of a series on the Pastorals our congregation is doing. The other one is here.  There was a good bit of discussion that night, particularly about dealing with wealth. Unfortunately, I cannot capture the interesting debates we had about this important topic here. Also, I left out of my notes the important point about God’s glory that is indicated by the ‘unapproachable light’ in the assigned passage.

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Good evening.  Tonight we will be finishing up First Timothy.  The passage assigned for this week is chapter six, verses eleven through twenty-one.

But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.  Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.  In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about at the right time – he who is blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.  It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion.  Amen.

As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.  Avoid the profane chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge; by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith.

Grace be with you.

We’ll go verse by verse quickly, and then we’ll have some discussion on a few of the topics related to this passage.

But as for you, man of God, shun all this;

What is the ‘all this’ that Timothy is to shun?  It is conceitedness of the false teachers, their disputes, and the love of money that accompanies them, as Paul talked about last week.

pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.  Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

The word ‘fight’ here refers to a contest, like a boxing or wrestling match.  It does not have a strong warfare connotation, but it does involve a struggle.  I mentioned a few weeks ago that we would talk about this tonight, so here it is.

Our salvation is a free gift, given to us by God through Jesus Christ.  It is a gift we cannot earn, but one nonetheless that requires some effort on our part to receive.  You may have heard the analogy before, but I think it bears repeating.  Suppose you come to visit my house one day, and in the course of our conversation I tell you that I left a piece of pie for you in the refrigerator.  The pie is a free gift to you, but unless  you get off the couch and open the refrigerator, you won’t be receiving it.  Your act of walking to the refrigerator required some effort, but it certainly did not earn you the pie.

The same may be said for our salvation.  God has established it in such a way that we have to do something in order to receive it.  This process begins at baptism, but it certainly doesn’t end there.  As Paul says in Philippians, “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”  Presumably, he is talking to believers who have already been baptized, so there must be something more.  This something more is the process of sanctification that occurs as we live a life in obedience to Christ.  It involves seeking to know God, worshipping Him, communing with him, praying, confessing and repenting of our sins, doing good works, loving the people around us, sharing our possessions, speaking the truth, and being content with our lot in life.  Our salvation is not handed to us on a platter, we must reach for it, work for it, struggle for it.  You might say that this is a bit harsh, as in, “How can anyone know they are saved?”  I don’t think we can KNOW we are saved in the sense that we can know that two plus two is four or that true is the opposite of false.  We can, however, trust God and the promises he has made, and have confidence in the seal of the Holy Spirit he has given us.  However, though a constant state of anxiety would not be fitting for us who have tasted the love of God, it would be no more fitting to lay around in a state of idle luxury and ease, neglecting the state of our souls.  “Perfect love casts out fear,” but it does not permit idleness.

‘The good confession’ here likely refers to a baptismal confession that Timothy would have made when he became a Christian, the many witnesses being not only the Christians who were present on that day, but God, Jesus, and the angels.

In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which God will bring about at the right time – he who is blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.  It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion.  Amen.

Paul says here that God is the source of life, and that he alone is immortal.  This is an important point that we shouldn’t miss.  You may have heard the phrase, ‘immortal soul’ in evangelistic contexts, as in O Brother, Where Art Thou? when Delmar asks Tommy, who has just sold his soul to the devil in order to become a great guitar player, “For that you gave up your immortal soul?”  (To which Tommy responds, “Well, I wasn’t usin’ it.”)  But our souls are not immortal!  God alone is immortal and the source of life, and it is only through his continued support of our lives that we live from moment to moment.  If our souls are sustained throughout all eternity, it is not because they naturally live forever on their own, but because God alone sustains them.

‘Without spot or blame’ here refers to the commandment, not to Timothy.  In other words, Timothy is to keep the teachings and faith that Paul and others have given to him pure from the outside corrupting influences of the false teachers.  Timothy is to preserve the faith and traditions he has been given and pass them on to those who will follow him, unless of course Christ return first.

It seems that one of the preferred images in the New Testament for the return of Christ is that he will be ‘manifested’ or ‘revealed’ or ‘appear’.  The ‘coming on the clouds’ image also appears (see Rev. 1:7), but revelation seems to be the more operative one.  These words point us towards a different picture of heaven and earth than we are accustomed to.  Typically we see God as ‘up there’ in heaven while we are ‘down here’ on earth.  But it has often been said that the difference between heaven and earth is more like a thin veil that will be ripped away when our Lord returns.  This can also inform our understanding of what it means that God is in our presence when we come to worship Him.  He is not far off, but near to each of us.

As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.  They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.

The next paragraph almost seems out of place, after such a glorious doxology that Paul has just issued.  Some would even say that this is evidence that this section was added later, or that Paul did not author this letter.  But I think that this inclusion here is intentional, to remind those who may be listening in on the reading of the letter that they are in the presence of a much greater power than themselves.  That is, Paul is gently reminding them of their place in the scheme of things.

When he says that they are not to be haughty, they are not to think of themselves too highly or as too important, or to use the weight of their money to push people around.  I think this is a phenomenon we have seen plenty of times in churches, where they wealthiest of families can decide the course of the congregation simply by threat of removing their funds.  Paul here rebukes such behavior, and tells those who are rich to give their riches away readily, and count as wealth only that which is unto their salvation, the doing of good works.  He says they should take hold of ‘the life that really is life’, in other words, our material lives here are not really life at all, at least when compared with the life to come.

That God has ‘provided everything for our enjoyment’ is another barb at the false teachers, who are suggesting that some of God’s created gifts are evil and should be completely avoided.

Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you.  Avoid the profane chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge; by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith.

The personal note here suggests that Paul may be closing the letter with his own hand, as he often did elsewhere.  His instructions are a repeat of what he said before, so we won’t say to much about them here.

Grace be with you.

‘You’ here is plural; this lends credence to the idea that the letter, though addressed to Timothy, was expected to be read in the presence of the congregation at Ephesus.