Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Why do Heathens Make the Best Christian Films

That's the title of an essay by Thom Parham that made for some interesting reading.

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A Questionable "But"

Over the years I've learned many things from John Piper, and have for a long time received some of his regular emails. Just before our 30th anniversary, one weekly message dealt entirely with recognizing a couple in the church on the marking of 30 years of marriage, 20 years of formal ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church for him, and 10 years of such ministry for her. In the middle of the piece I read this:

Their ministry has always been a partnership. There is no doubt that David is the head of his wife as the Bible says he should be. But he holds this woman in the highest esteem, as we all do. And together they have led this ministry to levels of influence beyond anyone’s dream.

The word that hit me hard falls right in the middle: but.

But is a word that is used to join two statements that, while both are presented as true, have particular relationship to each other. One only says "A but B" if either one finds that B is not typically expected when A holds, or one wants to qualify A in some manner: A is true, but only in some special or limited sense, not in the broadest or fullest sense of A standing alone.

In this case, A is the assertion that "David is the head of his wife as the Bible says he should be", which I would think has to relate at least to Paul's instructions to husbands in Ephesians 5:25-30, which immediately follows his statement that "the husband is the head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church":

Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to sanctify her by cleansing her with the washing of the water by the word, so that he may present the church to himself as glorious — not having a stain or wrinkle, or any such blemish, but holy and blameless. In the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one has ever hated his own body but he feeds it and takes care of it, just as Christ also does the church, for we are members of his body. [NET]
It has always seemed to me that any man who fulfilled this description could hardly fail to hold his wife "in the highest esteem".

So why the "but"? Why not connect these two statements with "so" or "therefore"? Why does John Piper, or the people he is writing to, seem to expect that holding one's wife in the highest esteem would not be part of the fullest sense of being "the head of his wife as the Bible says he should", or maybe even unusual or atypical of such men?

Actually, now that I think of it, why even have these two sentences in there at all? Why not just say "Their ministry has always been a partnership. And together they have led this ministry to levels of influence beyond anyone’s dream."? Is partnership in ministry something that John Piper thinks his audience will find questionable and possible evidence of the husband not being a "biblical head"? Is the notion of "headship" that is popularly affirmed in Piper's church something that a sufficiently large group of readers would assume made "partnership" and "esteem" grounds for suspicion that this pastoral staff member is maybe soft on headship?

Now that would be a sad thing indeed. But that "but" sure raises questions.

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Monday, August 21, 2006

30 Years with the Same Woman

Thirty years ago today, Yvonne and I stood together at the front of the church, in many ways still children, and made enormous and improbable promises to each other, in front of God and these witnesses, in the time-honoured tradition of those entering into the state of marriage. We really didn't know what we were getting into, although it seemed at the time that everyone, including us, understood exactly what marriage was. Today, on the other hand, it seems that there is little, if any, agreement on just what marriage actually is — but that's another subject for another post.

One might think that 30 years of living together on a daily basis — in each other's face morning and night, as it were — would be ample time to learn to know one another. And so it has — in some senses, at least. And yet, it seems more and more obvious that there is always much much more to know in order to truly know someone. Indeed, I've come to the conclusion that complete and exhaustive knowledge is foundationally impossible when it comes to knowing a person — if every one arrives at a place where there is no more to know than what is and has been known, then it is no longer the person that one knows, but something else — some thing else.

If this is true of knowing a human person, how much more must it be true of knowing God. The more we come to know God, the more we must be aware that God is so much more than we can know. Conversely, the closer we come to knowing all there is to know about God (as we may suppose we know), the more it is not God at all that we know.

This is, I suppose, why I intuitively have great difficulty with those Christian traditions that seem to have everything figured out; whose theology is neat, tidy and complete — among such groups I feel that it is no longer God that is being known, but something else — some thing else.

In thinking of these things, however, I am also reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's reason for refusing to believe in God. Sartre understood God as a being that had complete and exhaustive knowledge of every aspect of creation — including human beings, and most importantly including Jean-Paul Sartre. But so long as such a God existed, Jean-Paul Sartre could not himself exist as a person, only as a thing. And this he found intolerable. As, I imagine, would I.

Yet it is in God that I actually find my true home, my true personhood. Somehow God's knowledge of me — as extensive as it is, and certainly more extensive than my own knowledge of myself — does not reduce me to a thing, but rather elevates me to a person. Somehow God chooses to know me personally rather than impersonally, subjectively rather than merely objectively — somehow God grants to me the grace of being, to some degree and in some sense at least, unknowable, even to Him. In other words, God grants me personhood by choosing not to know me exhaustively as an object, but non-exhaustively as a person.

Today I am known more completely by Yvonne than by anyone else, and yet she continues to stick with me in spite of my many faults and the many times and ways I violate her own personhood — and perhaps more importantly, she still believes that there is more to me than she has yet known, just as I most certainly believe about her. It is an amazing thing. And yet not nearly so amazing as the way God sticks with me over even longer than 30 years, after even greater depth of knowledge of who I am and have been and have done and after an even greater degree of violation by me of His personhood. God, who knows me better than I know myself and who knew me even before I was born, still believes that there is more to me than has been seen, and is determined that we shall discover it together.

This is indeed a day to celebrate and be glad.

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Thursday, August 17, 2006

A good vacation

Yvonne and I spent last week travelling down the Oregon coast. We flew to Portland on Saturday, rented a car, and took our time moving south along the coast highway. The scenery was indeed wonderful, as most people say. And it was good to have some time to read, to talk, and just be together.

We had taken Yvonne's notebook along so I could take advantage of the wifi offerings of our hotels and do some blogging. But it was not to be — the computer failed to boot up, ending with an error message and then trying to restart in an endless cycle.

Once we were back, it took the best part of a day to recover from a corrupted registry and get the beast back to operational state — something I worked on while Yvonne was out and about with her aunt who is visiting us this week from Holland. Sunday we'll take her up to Provost to continue her Canadian visit with her younger brother and his family.

The time away certainly gave me a lot to think about and reflect upon. Maybe some of that will eventually find its way onto this blog — but probably not tonight.

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