Pre-Reformation Worship

This morning I was listening to Andy Crouch interacting with a group of worship instructors. One of the observations he made concerned John Calvin's view of worship as being the action of the Holy Spirit moving through the actions of the people. At the time of the reformation, medieval worship had pretty much become the domain of the priesthood — the priests did everything and the people were merely spectators. Part of the reformation was a return of worship to the people, both in terms of a return of the Word to the people by the use of vernacular translations and expository preaching, and a return of acts of worship.

The observation Andy made was that in many churches today, the situation is very similar to pre-reformation worship — the priests have simply exchanged their vestments for microphones.

In looking back over almost 50 years of church attendance, I can see that there has indeed been a slow but steady movement toward this "pre-reformation" worship. At the time, I didn't notice it. Perhaps that was due in part to the so-called "frog in a kettle" syndrome — if things change slowly enough, you don't notice them until you're dead. But perhaps it was also due in part to the fact that for much of that time I was one of the "priesthood" — I didn't notice the ways in which our ways of "worship" was both permitting and promoting the disengagement of the people from the act of worship and turning them largely into spectators, because I was still busily engaged.

But it is not only in the acts of worship that we have moved back to a pre-reformation state. The place of the Word in our worship has also changed — where once the Scripture was the main thing, and the sermon was its servant (even if done poorly or boringly) as were the songs, now the talk and the music are the main thing and the scripture, if present, is their servant.

Part of this movement may be related to another observation that Andy made: it is almost impossible to enculturate an incarnate message in a culture that is itself not incarnate. North American culture in the 21st century has no real flesh and bones meat (in greek: carne) to it — it's a mass culture that exists almost only on a screen.

Of course, Western culture has not really been incarnate for a long time — before the advent of television and other mass culture media, much of Western culture had become largely cerebral — certainly Western theology has been almost exclusively cerebral and not incarnate for a very long time. The good, if late, impulse to bring theology into the indigenous culture has occurred precisly at the point when that culture has moved to becoming even less engaged with the materially "real".

Between the two factors, we've become unable to see any connection between an old and very earthy story and the virtual reality of today's culture. So just as the pre-reformation priest kept the Bible away from the people — convinced as they were that the people could never understand it, and didn't want to anyway — so too many of our present day priests are careful to keep the Bible safely measured out in small doses, pre-digested for the masses.

For me, the question now is this: do I try to rejoin the "priesthood" in order to gain some measure of participative worship, or do I instead stay with the people and try in some way to subvert the trend of the past 50 years? To be honest, I have no idea which direction to go.

Kyrie eleison

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Straight Talk to the Adulterous Man

Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk, has a hard-hitting post on the subject of male adultery. I was particularly appreciative of his second major point, “Despite a lot attention to the 'seductress'” in Proverbs, the problem in adultery is the married man, the condition of his marriage and the lies he tells himself”. He writes:

One of the marks of male juvenility, and likely eventual downfall, is the tendency to put the emphasis on flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women you laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you and so forth. I'm not saying this kind of information is all useless, because it's clearly a kind of common sense warning that anyone ought to heed. It'’s just mislocating the problem.
The guy about to commit adultery is a person with a marriage he's neglected and a wife he'’s turning into an excuse to step out on.
(Emphasis added)

I find this bit of straight, honest talk a breath of fresh air. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing about all the external things that “cause” a man to fall and destroy his marriage. The brutal honesty is that the “fall” began long, long before — not by engaging in inappropriate actions, thoughts or relationships, but by not engaging in the proper loving of his wife.

Consequently, I think Michael is spot on in his closing paragraph:

Look to that marriage of yours with the mind of Christ and the spirit of the prodigal coming home. Call upon the Lord, and he will deliver you. Declare your love for your wife, and let all your actions declare it even louder. Honor your vows, bless your children and do the right thing so that you will have no reason to be ashamed in the day of Jesus Christ.

However, there are a couple items in his first point that make we wonder if even Michael has come fully to grips with the consequences of his insight. The first point ends thus:

What would help? Communities of men that talk to one another honestly about sex, adultery, the 'plot line'” of sexual transgressions and the consequences of sexual sin. David'’s isolation and subsequent cover-up should teach us that we can be better men if we talk to one another, confront one another, and encourage one another in specific, down to earth terms.
I like sermons about Christian guyness, but frankly, having a preacher who can use sexual terms and blunt language is overrated in terms of assisting a man in the middle of the struggle not to commit adultery. Other men, talking to you face to face, are of inestimable value. To be quite honest, if you can't talk about your specific temptations to specific people in specific terms, you don'’t yet have the kind of support that will yield truly helpful self-knowledge.

Quite frankly, I hear this sort of advice all the time. And just as here, it seems always to be focused on the sexual temptation. Given the content of his first point, and the content of the other post to which he points, I'm sure that Michael wouldn't be promoting the kind of “accountability” that consists merely in lists of questions about whether or not you “looked at a woman” this past week.

But I'm convinced that the real accountability a man needs is not about specific sexual temptation but about the specific ways in which he is learning to love his wife as Christ loved the church. If you can help a man do that, you do far, far more than just helping him avoid adultery.

I'm probably resigned to the fact that I'm not going to hear that kind of accountability promoted any time soon. And I'll give Michael the point that his comment about men talking frankly to men about temptation does come early in the piece, before he makes the point about the real issue being neglecting the marriage.

The thing that really bugs me, though, is that for all his blunt talk to men about taking responsibility for their own sexuality and their own marriages, Michael still hasn't stopped blaming women. Or at least that's how I hear the opening salvos in his first point, which he heads as “Adultery happens to men who do not have a truthful perspective on their own sexuality”. He writes:

Sexuality in evangelicalism is largely discussed in feminized, moralistic terms. This isn’t helpful to anyone, male or female. Sexuality is the hard-wiring and software installation of God’s creative design. It is not something we do. It is who we are. Sexuality is as much a part of you as an ignition or fuel system are parts of a car. When the car “runs,” it is because these systems “run.” When you are a man, you are a sexual man.
The separation of male sexuality from Godly identity has been a disaster, and I’ve written about it elsewhere. Castrating men for usefulness in a prissy, feminized evangelicalism is bad. (BTW- the answer to all of this is Jesus, not hairy chested men grunting and making rude noises.)

The rest of his point is that we have de-humanized men by trying to de-sexualize them, largely because of a fear of their sexuality. But why use the adjective “feminized” to describe this evil? The same process that has de-humanized men because of fear of their sexuality has also operated to de-humanize women because of fear of their sexuality — a point with which Michael seems to agree, if only in passing. Ought we then to call such de-humanized women “feminized”? Ridiculous!

This kind of name-calling gender war, in which men call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “feminizing” or “feminist” and women call anything they find de-humanizing of themselves “masculinizing” or “masculinist” does absolutely nothing to help build the sort of self-giving commitment to one's own marriage and one's own spouse that is needed if the destructive lure of adultery upon both men and women is to be defeated.

It seems to me that the real culprit behind the de-sexing of both men and women in our supposedly Christian subculture is not feminization, but a Gnostic-like dualism that denies the goodness of the created material world, including specifically the human body, with all its God-created earthiness. The same squeamishness many christians express about sex is manifested by many urban dwellers about the source of the meat on their plate — neither are considered appropriate for discussion in polite company. And how many gospel presentations have we heard that made it seem that the best part of the “good news” was that we didn't have to make those revolting animal sacrifices anymore.

There was no need to label this very real problem mindset as “feminized” — it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that is truly feminine. To use such a label in this way simply feeds the fear of the “other” that makes living together with one's spouse in self-giving love and according to knowledge virtually impossible. Michael says:

As I grow older, I am constantly amazed at the number of men who simply have no coping skills in marriage. They are passive and helpless when they most need to act, and they are afraid — often paralyzingly so — to become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or to seek humility. They are, in too many cases, childishly distractible by someone else when they are most called to think about and love their spouse.

I say no man who is afraid of being “feminized” by his wife because she is a woman is ever going to be able to “become vulnerable, to suffer gladly, to admit error or seek humility.”

In closing, I'll go back to what I found refreshing about Michael's straight talk to men — Grow up! Stop blaming all your problems on women: flirtatious women, scantily clad women, women with cleavage, women who smile at you, women who laugh at your jokes, women who pay attention to you, the woman you're married to who doesn't seem to ever be satisfied or to give you your due, and the evil conspiracy of womankind who've totally “feminized” everything everywhere. Be a man! Take up your cross and love your wife just as Christ loved the church.

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Who are we Listening to? Thots on knowing and judging

This post is a bit of a potpourri of thoughts from several sources, that I've been trying to integrate in my mind.

First a quote from Esther Meek in Longing to Know:

Humans fight to make sense of their experience! How many times in our day and in our lives do we do this! Your roommate is acting uncharacteristically; you immediately begin to search for an explanation. Or your roses are failing to bloom. Or you take a new class in a new subject with a new professor, and you find yourself immersed in terminology about as transparent as so many pieces of granite. You fight to make sense of what he or she is saying. Or your parents divorce, and you ask yourself desparately, What happened? What does this say about me? What does it say about them? What does it say about God? Trying to make sense of experiences is somewhat of a compulsion for humans.

The act of knowing is all about making sense of a whole collection of clues and data, integrating them, and then relying on the discovery and acting on it.

One major source of difficulty, it seems to me, is that we are often too impatient to sort through all the possible explanations for the data and clues available, and so settle upon the explanation that comes most quickly to mind. You might say we tend to rush to judgement when we ought to suspend judgement until more clues and more data are available.

Quick judgements are necessary in some cases — driving in traffic for example — and morally neutral in others. But quick judgements about the character or motives of other persons are usually not morally neutral, as they then form the framework through which we subsequently relate to those persons, for good or for ill.

And neither are the explanations that spring most readily to mind typically neutral. That's one of the major points that Kyriacos Markides learns in his extended discussions with Father Maximos in The Mountain of Silence. Brent Curtis and John Eldredge go even further in The Sacred Romance and suggest that the explanations of many things, particularly painful experiences, that are most quickly suggested to our mind are deliberately chosen and expertly tailored to our pain by the Adversary in order to be easily accepted by us; and once so accepted, to get us to doubt the goodness of God.

So it becomes very important that in our search for meaning and sense that we consider carefully the ideas and explanations that present themselves to us, attempting to discern who is speaking — that we learn to distinguish the various voices that speak into our minds constantly throughout our waking moments. That, of course, can take a lifetime of spiritual discipline and development.

In the meantime, what do we do? The old puritans had an answer: render to each the "judgement of charity". That is, deliberately seek out the alternate explanations for another's behaviour, and choose that explanation which casts the other the best possible light consistent with the facts. This is, it is suggested, what Paul may have had in mind when he says that "Love believes all things" — not that love is naive, but that love deliberately chooses to believe the best about the other, consistent with the facts.

I've seen in my own experience that the first explanation for someone's behaviour or comment — particularly a blog comment — is often much more critical of the other's character or motivation that is necessary. With considered thought, one can generally come up with several more charitable explanations. And with continued adherence to this discipline over time, the initial reactions tend to become more charitable than they once were.

What is particularly regretable, however, is how often we see the rule of offering the judgement of charity violated in Christian circles. So much so that instead of seeing Christians as a people whose default mode of operation is the judgement of charity, the world's accepted stereotype of Christians, particularly of evangelical Christians, is that of a people whose default mode of operation is precisely the opposite — the judgement of condemnation. The shame is that the stereotype is not entirely inaccurate.

God have mercy upon us, sinners!

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Participative Worship and Romans 8:28

Len Hjalmarson has a thought provoking post on the interpretation of Romans 8:28. You know the one. In the KJV it reads:

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

I think he makes a good case that this sentence really means something more like:

And we know that for the good of all things God works together with those who love Him, with those who are the called according to His purpose.

No wonder the whole of creation is groaning, waiting for the appearing of these children of God. From the beginning God designed creation to be nurtured and brought to its complete glory by the working of God together with His eikons.

Of course, no sooner do I read this post of Len's than I am listening to a talk from the Calvin Institute of Worship's 2006 Symposium on how worship is really about God working together with us — hence worship must needs be participative and not passive.

Maybe God is trying to tell me something.

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Cross-Gender Friendships

It's curious how some subjects just seem to keep popping up in clusters. Following hard on my thoughts on cross-gender friendships as stimulated by the movie Take the Lead, Scot McKnight has initiated a significant discussion on the same topic. The post itself is quite short, but the comments are extensive.

Two women in particular spoke rather eloquently, I thought, about the positive values of close cross-gender friendships: see comments by Jen O. and Jennifer (particularly the second paragraph of the linked comment).

I thought again about the premise set out early in the post, and seemingly accepted by most, if not all, commenters: "opposite sex friendships can lead to intimacies that destroy marriages". I began to wonder if perhaps we have not accepted a faulty premise that is in some way analogous to the faulty premise of the youth pastor that had sexually abused Jennifer some 20 years ago — to him, she was the problem, and he was simply the victim of her "dangerous" attractiveness.

Perhaps we ought to question the premise that it is the intimacies developed in opposite sex relationships that are the cause of the marital "train wrecks", rather than simply the place where some train wrecks happen. And is it only in cross gender relationships that emotional infidelity occurs? What of all the women (and men) who feel that the time their spouse spends with his buddies (or her girlfriends) is more important than time spent with them? What of all the pastors' wives who have felt that the church was the "other woman" in her husband's life — the one who got all the emotional energy and intimacy that belonged to her? And what about the hugely negative effects of the competitive husband (or wife) bashing games that go on in single gender gatherings?

Is not the real issue a failure to develop and maintain a relationship of love and intimacy with one's spouse, regardless of the presence or absence of other same or cross gender friendships? Is it not what is or is not happening within the marriage the principal determinant of success or failure? To see the external as the primary cause of the failure is as much a cop-out as the youth pastor blaming Jennifer for his abuse of her.

It seems to me that the expressed perception of close cross gender relationships as "dangerous" to marriage may be connected to a perception of love and intimacy as a "scarce" or "limited" resource, in which the more some one else gets of my wife's confidence, the less there must necessarily be for me. We recognize this idea as immature when expressed by children who fear that they will be loved less now that the new baby has arrived, but perhaps many of us never really lose that fear.

We have been made in the image of an intensely intimate God, whose triune loving relationships overflow with ever more love for all of creation. And we are the objects of Jesus' prayer that would we be one, even as He and the Father are one. Unless we believe Jesus' prayer to be in vain, it would seem we should expect to be made into people whose capacity for love and intimacy is no longer scarce but abundant!

Nevertheless, we live both in the "already" and in the "not yet". For some of us there is more of the "not yet" than for others. And so the ability to experience one's own and one's spouse's capacity for love and intimacy as abundant rather than scarce may well be vastly different from person to person and from couple to couple — and even from season to season for the same couple.

My suggestion for wise counsel is this: do whatever it takes to keep building intimacy of all kinds within your own marriage. If, because of your own history and formation and situation, that means severely limiting the degree of intimacy in other relationships, then do it. And conversely if close external relationships enhance the capacity of you and your spouse to engage more closely and intimately with each other, then nuture those relationships, be they same or cross gender, individual based or couple based. Just keep the primary focus on growing closer to your mate, by whatever means.

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Take the Lead

After we got home from delivering the youngest daughter to University, we decided to take it easy and watch a movie. Yvonne came home with Take the Lead, starring Antonio Banderas. It is based on the experience of Pierre Dulaine, an award winning ballroom dancer who has developed ballroom dancing classes in many schools around New York.

The DVD had a special feature about Dulaine and his work. It was particularly interesting to hear Dulaine speak about the many things his students learn about life from ballroom dancing — things like dignity, respect, communication and teamwork. I ended up feeling rather sad that I'd never really had the opportunity to engage in that pastime.

Of course, growing up in the church environment I did made that impossible. There is an old joke that begins with the question: Why are Baptists opposed to pre-marital sex? Answer: It might lead to dancing. Any sort of interaction between opposite genders that may have made some contribution to someone's downfall sometime seemed to become a proscribed activity for all — all in the name of guarding own's purity and chastity.

How ironic then was the comment made by Dr. Tim Keller the other morning when discussing the early christians, and the way they stood out from the rest of society in their approaches to money, sex and power. Chastity, he said, was really only a truly viable lifestyle if one was part of a broader community in which true intimacy and love could be experienced — and I would add in both same gender and opposite gender situations.

I suspect that the practice of proscribing anything that might be considered intimate in opposite gender interactions has not really promoted chastity, but rather made true non-erotic intimacy that much harder, and by extension made the lifestyle of chastity even more difficult.

A far cry from the lessons of respect and dignity for the other promoted by ballroom dancing — at least according to Pierre Dulaine.

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What's the Bible About?

This morning I was listening to Tim Keller speaking on preaching the gospel. One of the things that stood out for me was this: if you are going to preach, you have to decide whether the Bible is primarily about you, or primarily about Jesus.

I realized that much of what I have heard preached over the last many years has treated the Bible as if it were primarily about you and me — about what we must do to be good people, or to be accepted, or to inherit eternal life, or fulfill God's mission in the world, or be faithful witnesses, or even just manage stress.

But if the Bible is primarily about Jesus, and about what Jesus has done and is doing, and about how Jesus is the true fulfillment of all the stories and all the events, then preaching it faithfully would look very different.

I'm wondering if this observation doesn't tie into a question that has been rolling around in the back of my mind for sometime: What does it mean to read the Bible on its own terms rather than on our terms? And perhaps even more importantly: What does it mean for us — individually, but even more so communally — to treat the Bible as the prime authority, but to do so on its own terms?

I have a deep suspicion that it might look significantly different than what I have seen and been used to in my own church experience.

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