Relocating To Elfland

“Believe me, the worst and most miserable sort of idiot is he who seems to create and contain all things. Man is a creature; all his happiness consists in being a creature; or, as the Great Voice commanded us, in becoming a child. All his fun is in having a gift or present; which the child, with profound understanding, values because it is ‘a surprise’. But surprise implies that a thing came from outside ourselves; and gratitude that it comes from someone other than ourselves. It is thrust through the letter-box; it is thrown in at the window; it is thrown over the wall. Those limits are the lines of the very plan of human pleasure.” (Gabriel Gale, in The Poet and the Lunatics)

Scenario #1 [in a Christian home near you]: After a family dinner in which all present have been noisily discussing vacation plans, the father pulls his Bible off the shelf and reads a chapter to his family, interspersing one or two comments. The atmosphere in the room is instantly changed: the mother listens politely, without response; the children stare off into space, visibly waiting for this to be over, and answer their father’s occasional questions in bored monosyllables.

Scenario #2 [in the same home, at the same meal]: After closing in prayer, the father asks, “What did you all think of Iron Man 2?” The room fairly explodes with breathless responses (including extended quotations and reenactments), which carry on for the next thirty minutes.

So here’s my question: What has happened in this Christian home (and a thousand others like it), that the Word of the Lord of heaven and earth is treated not even with respect, let alone genuine interest, while a silly popcorn flick can carry the conversation for hours?

To be clear, I am not saying our response to the Word of God should resemble the way we react to a popcorn flick. Family worship shouldn’t look like movie night, any more than a Shakespeare reading should look like movie night. But something is wrong, surely, when those in a Christian household “check out” at the opening of the scriptures.

Few things are more discouraging to me as a pastor than seeing this household issue writ large in the church community. Sometimes I ask myself: What would it take to see fathers speak to their families in worship, with every member on the edge of his or her seat? What would it take to see discussions of Sabbath sermons in which every participant, young and old, is intently engaged? What would it take for God’s people to be so “into” the thought-world of their scriptures that they prefer to speak of its teachings, histories, promises, and precepts rather than the latest cheap entertainment? Warfront soldiers do not tolerate news of battle plans and progress; they long for any word that will give them encouragement, direction, and help in the struggle at hand. Yet to observe the soldiers of Christ in many homes and churches, one would think they are soldiers on holiday, who want nothing less than to hear anything about the realities of war.

In fairness, it may be that the father in our scenarios has never done the hard work of engaging the minds, hearts, and imaginations of his household. They may be bored because he is boring; and they imagine, then, that God and His kingdom are boring. Or he may be a hypocrite, full of pious words while living a pagan life, and they see right through it. And certainly a word must be said about personality: there are strong silent types who will never say much in response to the Word – but I have known big burly quiet types whose silence conceals a burning heart, and who stand ready in the moment of battle to do mighty exploits for their King.

“He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments; and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God” (Ps 78:5–8).

I know of no more urgent task in the modern church than to recover and execute this mandate. O God! make us faithful to it.

You have encountered Robert Wright on this blog before. Well, here he is again, giving his two cents on the ethics of extraterrestrials. We can extrapolate to the ethics of yet-undiscovered alien life forms, he says, from what we know about our own ethics – we are, after all, a fine example of what one should expect in an intelligent species. And given what we know about our human ethics, “there’s reason to hope that, actually, we’d be kinder to a new world than Europeans were to the New World” (we now being evolutionarily far beyond those boorish Europeans).

Though it must be said: the evidence doesn’t weigh entirely in favor of optimism. As Wright points out:

“Like any scientifically advanced species, we’re finding that the laws of the universe grant the technological potential for both mass affiliation and mass murder. So the question is which aspect of this technology our naturally selected nature would incline us to emphasize a century or two from now, should we stumble upon an inhabited planet.”

Ah yes, that is a rub. Natural selection has produced both what we call “good” use of technology (e.g., exploration and medical care) and what we call “bad” use of technology (weapons of mass destruction and all that); but if both potential uses – and both actual uses – are simply there in the protoplasmic play, how shall we adjudicate among them, ethically? Don’t we just have to accept whatever (i.e., everything) natural selection has handed us?

But Wright prescinds from problems of normativity; he’s only trying to predict alien behavior based on what he sees around him. And ultimately it’s unclear, from our behavior, how aliens might treat us were we to meet them someday. On one hand, as Stephen Hawking says, “natural selection does create organisms prone to belligerent self-interest” (one sees this now and then in the human species).  On the other hand, Peter Singer assures us the human race is making moral progress (you know, moral progress: good progress toward what ought to be, as opposed to plain old evolutionary progress toward what is).

Wright himself finds hope in the fact that we humans “generally grant the moral significance of other beings to the extent that it’s in our interest to do so,” and if we do that, why not aliens? Of course, such high optimism must be tempered by the fact that we are on the verge of blowing up our planet, and only after we have successfully averted that disaster we can have real confidence in our “moral progress.” We’ll have to wait and see. At any rate, the ethical picture that emerges from our species is “less than wholly reassuring.”

You know what? I think someday our great-great-great-great grandchildren are going to excavate caches of New York Times articles and conclude that we were blithering idiots. I really do. And I freely admit the ad hominem.

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While we’re on the subject of ethics, here is another fascinating piece, from a French mayor of all things. He’s defending a recently enacted ban on wearing burqas and niqabs in public, and trying to show us how this is not an assault on religious freedom.

He regards the ban as “both a legitimate measure for public safety and a reaffirmation of our ideals of liberty and fraternity”:

1. Masks endanger public security, regardless of the reason for wearing them: “Visibility of the face in the public sphere has always been a public safety requirement.”

2. Moreover, masks undermine fraternity: “Wearing headgear that fully covers the face does not constitute a fundamental liberty. To the contrary, it is an insurmountable obstacle to the affirmation of a political community that unites citizens without regard to differences in sex, origin or religious faith. How can you establish a relationship with a person who, by hiding a smile or a glance – those universal signs of our common humanity – refuses to exist in the eyes of others?”

3. Lastly, masks undermine liberty itself: “Individual liberties cannot exist without individual responsibilities. This acknowledgment is the basis of all our political rights. We are free as long as we are responsible individuals who can be held accountable for our actions before our peers. But the niqab and burqa represent a refusal to exist as a person in the eyes of others. The person who wears one is no longer identifiable; she is a shadow among others, lacking individuality, avoiding responsibility.”

Then this kicker at the end: “Muslims are the first to suffer from the confusions engendered by this practice, which is a blow against the dignity of women.”

What interests me in this piece is how frankly the author assumes a posture of moral authority on the basis of what amounts to a natural law theory. “Everybody knows” (Muslims excepted) that “our ideals” of public safety, fraternity, and personal responsibility are ethically nonnegotiable – and they should be legally so.

The trouble is, Muslims insist on the niqab and burqa precisely in the interests of public welfare; they will thank you to preserve chastity and honor by keeping your eyes off their women; and if they wish to speak about personal responsibility, it will be after consulting the Qur’an, not the latest gas about “universal signs” from Western democratic ideologues.

At some point in these twilight hours of our Western civilization, we are going to have to face head-on the fact that our sources of “authority” can no longer be taken for granted. Muslims, for example, don’t accept our high-flung theories (“our ideals”) about public security, fraternity, and liberty just because we say so. (Neither, I might add, do serious Christians.) And the imposition of liberal theories by law is simply a mirror image of religious fascism. The issue is not whether we ban certain articles of religious clothing, but on the basis of what transcending standard we presume to do so. If we can’t come up with something better than, “Well, a lot of us think people should go around smiling visibly at each other, so as to preserve individuality,” then let us be candid with ourselves: we are “liberal” fascists.

“One can not speak of God simply by speaking of man in a loud voice.” (Karl Barth, Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie)

Strange as it may sound, I think some priority reading for today’s Protestant should be something like William Maxwell’s An Outline of Christian Worship: Its Development and Forms, or Bard Thompson’s Liturgies of the Western Church. We are ridiculously ignorant of how our forebears worshiped, and why. This is part, no doubt, of our broader malady in modern Protestantism: we have a fuzzy idea that we exist because something big happened around 1517, but little grasp of the issues that sparked the Reformation, almost no idea how the magisterial Reformers differed in responding to these issues, even less idea how they differed from the radicals of the time, no conception of anything worth learning from the pre-Reformation Christians (lost as they were in the Dark Ages) – and we tend to draw a straight line from 1517 to the Second Great Awakening, where just about everything we recognize as genuine Christianity got started.

Liturgy is the church’s worshipful reenactment of the drama of redemption. It is the way in which the church, at a particular time and place, ascends Mount Zion and joins in the worship of the heavenly Jerusalem (Heb 12:18–29). Arguably, therefore, the historical liturgies of the church are some of our best sources of insight into our fathers’ understanding of redemption, and sites at which we may crosscheck our own understanding against their wisdom. (Might it follow that our ignorance of their liturgies is an implicit statement of “chronological snobbery”?)

I am personally passionate about historically informed liturgical worship because I grew up in a church in which anyone, during the “praise and worship” portion of the service, could start any song that came to his or her mind (as one of the musicians, I well remember fumbling to find the key – sometimes it was necessary to stop everything and start over, in a singable signature), or speak forth anything the Holy Spirit ostensibly inspired. The chaos was quite remarkable. When I first experienced Reformed liturgical worship, the order alone won me over.

Since then, however, I have discovered that liturgy has to do with a lot more than order. Liturgy expresses a whole understanding of how we approach the Lord our God; it is an expression of a particular covenant theology (or lack thereof); it tells the story of God’s people in a particular way. I have sat through liturgical worship that is simply dreadful, either because it is haphazard (something that cannot be said of any of the great ancient liturgies), or because it is perfunctory, or because it is theologically anemic (an anemic theology always produces an anemic liturgy). This is why I increasingly insist on liturgy being historically informed. I like old liturgies for the same reason I like old theology – they are, to put it bluntly, of better vintage.

But there is more. If we Protestants could ever, ever begin to take biblical ecumenicity seriously (note the adjective, please; no, I’m not a fan of the World Council of Churches, etc.), we might consider whether a common liturgy is not the best tool in our belt. Common liturgy promotes a practical catholicity in the church, a sense of meaningful communion both with our ancient fathers (assuming we reference them occasionally) and with our brethren throughout the world. At present, we have difficulty establishing common liturgy even within denominational lines, let alone on a more worldwide scale, but I refuse to despair.

At the local level, over against much of what passes for “praise and worship” today, liturgy has the advantage of being genuinely participational. You don’t get to stand with your hands in the air, listening to a band and trying to follow along; you get to be the choir. You don’t spectate; you listen attentively so as to respond in the corporate Kyrie eleison or Sursum corda. You shout “amen” after the declaration of pardon. You eat and drink at the Lord’s Table after hearing His Word. You lift your hands to receive His benediction. It really keeps you awake.

Something else emerges in a congregation that worships this way. We and our children become accustomed to a common liturgical language. We suddenly find we have memorized the creed. We begin to anticipate (hungrily) the words, “Grace to you and peace.” In private seasons of repentance, there springs unbidden to mind, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” We begin to hear our children singing our psalms and hymns in their beds at night (yes, it happens in my household). And not least in the glory of this: we are saying and singing the same words our fathers have said and sung since the earliest centuries of the church. Not that we don’t keep adding to the repertoire of the New Song – we do – but there is a deep continuity with the ancient forms, going all the way back to the songs of Moses, of David, and of the Lamb.

Okay, this can all degenerate into formalistic ritualism. I grant it. But I’ve got to say: I’ve heard the Aaronic blessing hundreds of times in worship, and I want to keep hearing it until the day I die. It never gets old. And if it ever does, the problem is with me, not with the church’s use of it for four thousand years. If good liturgy gets tired, it’s because we’re tired of God and the gospel. Shame on us, then. Kyrie eleison.

“Plainly this custom which enjoins us to take communion once a year is a veritable invention of the devil, whoever was instrumental in introducing it. . . . It should have been done far differently: the Lord’s Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of Christians, and the promises declared in it should feed us spiritually. None is indeed to be forcibly compelled, but all are to be urged and aroused; also the inertia of indolent people is to be rebuked. All, like hungry men, should flock to such a bounteous repast.” (John Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.46)

My family and I are currently reading through G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics. It’s marvelous.

This description of one Amos Boon (in “The Shadow of the Shark”) made me laugh; it belongs up on the wall in a few seminaries:

“Anyhow, travelling about alone with nothing but a big Bible, he had learned to study it minutely, first for oracles and commandments, and afterwards for errors and contradictions; for the Bible-smasher is only the Bible-worshipper turned upside down.”