"It is not the one thing...." (The Perilous Balance)

Christianity is not love. It is not peace, nor justice, nor joy, nor goodness, nor beauty, nor moderation, nor wisdom. It is not about compassion to the oppressed or violence to the oppressor, neither the defense of the weak nor the defiance of the strong. It is not about truth. It is not about experience. It is not any one of these things. Rather, it is every one of these things all working in tandem to create a whole that is not reducible to its parts. To reduce it is to lose it; it is a perilous balance.

Orthodoxy is not any one thing. It is all ideals and virtues and good things working together in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness, for it is the very truth of God, who is the summation of all ideals and virtues and good things in a tight, unbreakable, irreducible oneness. As our God is all good things working together in one person, and as the fruits of His Spirit are all good things working in our person, and as the Body of His Christ are many members with many gifts spread out across nations, tribes, and tongues all working together whether they realize it or not, so too Orthodoxy is an ingenious collaboration of all truth working together into a singular creed.

In our Father's house are many rooms, rooms for many and all shades of His glory, all facets of His beauty. The pacifists are there as well as the militant, the Franciscans as well as the Dominicans. The apologist and the artist and the social worker are there. The high church and the low are there, the traditional and the contemporary. All good things, all things true and honorable and just and pure and lovely and commendable and excellent and praiseworthy, all these things are ours for the taking, the thinking, the doing. All are acceptable to God. Let no mouth open to gainsay any of them. Let no brother gainsay his sister, and let no sister gainsay her brother. Let no pacifist gainsay the militant, and let no militant gainsay the pacifist. All belong in the balance; the absurdity called pacifism will balance the insanity called militancy.

Let all things be done in the image of our God, who is peaceful and wrathful, true and beautiful, compassionate and holy, human and divine. Let no heresy rise to reduce Him; let no ignorance rise to diminish Him. Not because He can be reduced or diminished, but because the reduction and the diminishment does damage to the heretic and ignorant (those terrible simplifiers), causing them to lose the whole that is God, for God is a whole. A single, simple whole who is irreducible and indiminishable. He is an infinitely faceted jewel, a stained-glass window whose design and beauty knows no end or paraphrasing, and is large enough to hold all good and true and beautiful things in His hands.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

Unnecessary Divorces (an orthodox rebel responds to Frank Schaeffer)

I've mentioned before how there is a great swath of young Christians who feel the need to rebel against the perceived dead formalism of past generations and subsequently create a more vibrate, living Christian Faith. As I've listened to the "conversation" of these well-intended souls, I stumbled across this article by Frank Schaeffer (the son of Christian luminary Francis Schaeffer). I suggest you read it carefully, because he says some interesting things.

Now, I am glad that Mr. Schaeffer feels the loss of connection between modern Christianity and its ancient Faith and practice. I too think that a return to the liturgy, and the fundamental communion that it brings, would do a great amount of good in every Christian circle. It is a great shame that most modern, American Christians have been severed from their past, which (as I've demonstrated elsewhere) is full of a much wisdom and beauty.

However, just like every other so-called "progressive" Christian, Mr. Schaeffer can't seem to shake off one misguided mantra: solid theological content is ultimately irrelevant (because it is divisive); what really matters is just the ceremony itself and a sense of "[m]ystery and open-mindedness when it comes to theological content: uncertainty is good" (emphasis mine). The substance is unimportant. What is important is the show: grasp the rites and rituals with an iron grasp, but let things like doctrine and truth be fluid and in flux. This is the same old foolish idea that monkey-wrenches the whole operation.

As I've said before, I'm all for a return to humility in our doctrine. We need to recognize that God is so much bigger than our systems that we make for Him. It is a dangerous mistake to put God in a box, but it is an equally dangerous mistake to think that He has no sharp, distinct lines at all, lines that He Himself laid down for us, revealed to us in Scripture. True, He does not reveal all (for there are not enough books in the world to capture it all), but He has revealed some, and that some is fixed and immoveable. It cannot be erased without disastrous consequence.

Think about it: what is the liturgy without doctrine? What is all our Christian ceremony without those nasty creeds codified from the Scriptures (that nasty closed canon)? What does the Eucharist even mean without the hard doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, without the fixed, substantive idea that Christ was "conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," etc.? What does worship mean without the hard doctrines of God's Holiness and Incomprehensible nature, without the idea of "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth"? What does community and communion mean without the hard doctrine of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, without the idea that we "believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints," etc.?

I will tell you what they all mean: nothing. They mean absolutely nothing anymore, because they have no substance. The beliefs, the hard, doctrinal truths that we believe, are the substance. Lose them, and the whole thing evaporates, leaving behind the husk of dead formalism, the very thing that many in Mr. Schaeffer's camp are trying to escape. What they need to realize is that there is nothing without belief in solid, revealed truth, the truth of God's word, simultaneously simplified and expounded in creeds and dogmas and doctrines. There is no liturgy or community or worship or even Christianity itself without the certainty that certain things are true.

I will never understand the unnecessary divorces that we commit in the name of Christ. The old fundamentalists and evangelicals divorced Truth and Life, fell on the side of Truth, and received an impotent religiosity. But "progressive" Christians (from emergents to anarchists) are no better, for they too have divorced Truth from Life, but instead fell on the side of Life, and what have they gotten for it? An anti-formalism and fundamental skepticism that can find no place to rest, no identity to call its own, and not even the Faith they love so dearly can survive the corrosive chaos. The saddest thing about modern, American Christianity is how from generation to generation we always take a part of the picture rather than the whole, and the result is always worse than where we began.

Here is one true dogma, and I state it defiantly in the face of all modern Christian simplifiers, from radical fundys to radical pomos: it is not Truth or Life but rather Truth and Life: Certainty and Beauty, Light and Love, infinite solid ground beneath our feet and an infinite sky over our heads. They hold each other in a fierce and fiery paradox, and by their presence the whole edifice of the Christian Faith rises and rest stable and secure. But lose either of those elements, and you don't have Christianity anymore. In fact, you have nothing at all.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

"The more things change...." (an observation and plea by an orthodox rebel)

"If any man does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be accursed." I Cor. 16:22

First Corinthians is about ending divisions within the church. The theme of the whole book (stated in many different passages throughout it) is that all things must be done out of love in order to edify the brethren and save the lost. All prideful desires that tear the Body of Christ into sectarian pieces must be done away with, and the diversified unity of the Body must remain intact. Paul gives the Corinthians (and us) no grounds for division except for one: if Christ is not the center of someone's life, then that person is not a Christian (no matter what other qualities they possess). For Paul, Christ was everything: the foundation (I Cor. 3:11) and direction (Col. 2:6-7) of every believer's life. If one did not love Christ, to the extent that He is the absolute center of every facet of their existence (their hopes and dreams and actions and opinions), then they have no fellowship with Christ. That is how serious the matter was and is.

On the whole, we don't take that matter as seriously anymore. We think we do, but we don't. Jesus is not the center of our lives. Perhaps He is a part; some vital, peripheral element, but not the center. Regardless of our talk or walk, Christ is always subjugated to some whim or passion of our own, a consistent phenomenon that seems to be the one true plague of Christianity. In our parent's generation, Christ was equated with holy living (a true if incomplete notion), and soon He became subjugated to pious-sounding, man-made moralisms. To the broken and lost, He became a menace rather than a strongtower of safety, and the effects of this linger to this day.

Our generation has done no better, however. We equate Christ with loving service (another true yet incomplete notion), and soon He becomes subjugated to pious-sounding, man-made movements. And what, exactly, have we gained by this change? To the lost and broken, Jesus is little more than a handout or a bumper-sticker slogan and not Savior or Lord. It is a supreme tragic irony that we have two different generations with two different sets of ideas and activities and yet they commit the same fundamental error: Jesus is not the center. He is an assistant or homeboy or example or taskmaster or poster-child or convenient bludgeon, but never the center. With our own hands we drown Him in the midst of our own manias.

You who boast of living lives of morality and purity, abiding solidly in dogmatic perfectionism: do you pursue such a life out of pride and the gratification of your own ego? To save face before the eyes of others? Or do you pursue it because you love Jesus? And you who live to help the poor and oppressed, standing on the frontlines with pickets and posters in hand: do you rage against the machine because you hate your parent's generation? Because you have a political ax to grind? Or do you do it because you love Jesus? In spite of whatever good intentions we have, anything done for any reason other than a true, deep love for Jesus is dead wrong, a reaping of the wind. May God have mercy on us all and cleanse us of the motives that come in such clever disguises to supplant our Lord in our hearts.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

Boil to Rags, Part 1: Ultimate Reality (a devotional series by an orthodox rebel)

"Christianity, even watered down, is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags." -G.K. Chesterton

"For God...." John 3:16

Here is the grand assumption, the presupposition supreme. Here is the first cause and mystery, reality resplendent at the back of all appearances. A fountain of ever-flowing Fact and ever-vibrant Life, a Life strong and taut like a bow string set for firing shafts of splendor into the outer dark, or set for playing symphonic sights and sounds that break against all weeping and gnashing like infinite waves against a dead shore. Nothing is barren in that Almighty core, a holy seed ever-germinating newer life, newer still with every harvest. All things new with every reaping. There is no stopping this Life, this Three-Person Life. He is the only power remaining, the only that ever was. All others are derivative from Him and dependent on Him. All strength is weakness beside Him, all truth lies, all beauty corruption, all goodness filthy rags. He is the paragon par excellence, and without Him all is No-thing.

He speaks his Word against our lies, against our raging, simplistic notions, against our mania for fads and fashions and all things temporal and fading away. He is the rock smashing our feet of clay, the immovable mountain which no man can ascend. He breathes His Beauty across our ashes, stirring dead, dull things to life more abundant and free, inspiring despair to come out of its self-inflicted desolation, and bringing us to the threshold and consummation of all desire and pain. He is the fire that consumes our filthy rags into glory unimagined. He lives His Goodness amongst our diseases, our diseased minds and hearts. Our diseased souls that want no good and find no rest. We all are cripples before His ecstasy, and His dance sends we lame leaping. He is the unhidden origin of all our health and happiness and being. He is Being sui generis, and outside or beyond Him there is No-thing.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2012

The Bare-Knuckled Gospel (a book review by an orthodox rebel)

Book: The World-Tilting Gospel: Embracing a Biblical Worldview & Hanging on Tight, by Dan Phillips. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Kregel Publications, 2011. 315 pgs. (including notes, prefaces, introductions, afterwords, and indexes)

Introduction: There is a grave inconsistency marking the western Christian church. It is not (as some would muse) an inconsistency between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, between what we believe and what we do (though that does touch upon it). Nor is it (as others sagaciously theorize) an inconsistency between our overblown shadows and underwhelming substance (though that is addressed within it). The true grave inconsistency of the western church is historical, viz., between the church of the 1st century and the church of the 21st century. What did the world say about the 1st century church? According to scripture, we were the ones who had "turned the world upside down" (Acts 17:6). What does the world say about the 21st century church? According to author and pastor Dan Phillips, nothing good (if it says anything at all). The world may compliment us and occasionally grant us an approving nod, but never that we are the ones who are turning the world "upside down"; and for Mr. Phillips, that's a problem. A problem that has a very simple cause: we no longer view all things through the gospel, the whole gospel, and nothing but the gospel. It is that lack of a gospel-centric vision that Mr. Phillips seeks to address and amend in The World-Tilting Gospel.

Summary: Overall, this book is similar in scope (and even structure) to John Calvin's Institutes, viz., it unpacks Christian orthodoxy and explains (1) what it means and (2) why it matters, i.e., why it is "world-tilting". As such, it makes writing a summary of the book paradoxically both impossible and simple. "Impossible," because there is so much packed into such a relatively tiny space. "Simple," because all that it is is the Christian Faith unpacked, analyzed, and illuminated (and backed by tons of scripture references). In short, not only is its like Calvin's Institutes, it is also like Lewis' Mere Christianity. It is just the facts, though it is in no way either derivative or boring and unengaging (as you shall see below).

Review: Dan Phillips is angry. Very angry. He is angry at the church. Angry at its pathetically weak-kneed and limp-wristed approach to the world. Angry at all the slipshod shenanigans that have been dumped on top of the gospel. Angry at the protestant pseudocelebrites that perpetrate and bulwark those shenanigans. Angry at the fads and fashions that attempt to shanghai the gospel to their fading lunacies. And angry at the evangelical culture that unquestioningly absorbs all of this and proceeds to saturate you and me with it. Therefore, Dan Phillips is an angry man. But it's a righteous anger.

Every since I began reading his blog posts a couple of years ago (at both his blog and Pyromaniacs), I became quickly aware that Dan was a fighting blogger. Not mean or brutish, just a fighter. "Bare-knuckle," as he put it once. He is (as he himself admits) the least nuanced of the contributors to Pyromaniacs, and I mean that in a good way. He's the one with the sleeveless, hairy arms and grim expression with a sledgehammer slung over his shoulder. When he steps up to the mike, his voice is a chainsaw, making postmodernists raw. Whether that is a proper rhetorical strategy or not, one thing is crystal clear, and that is him: you always know exactly where he is coming from and what he is after. No doubts. No questions. No way to effectively obfuscate. You have been punched squarely in the jaw, and you know exactly from who and why; and just like "the most interesting man in the world," when he punches you, you have to fight the urge to thank him.

The book is the same. It is a fighting book. From page one onwards, it comes out swinging and doesn't relent. This can make for exhausting reading, and yet you will never find yourself moved to put the book down. Even during parts that you already know backwards and forwards (thanks to prehistoric Sunday School lectures), you will find yourself engaged and engrossed. Often his tone and candor will irritate you, but then he will smack you with a truth you were unaware of or refresh you with a truth you had forgotten. It's like being constantly doused by oscillating bursts of hot and cold water: an annoyance, sprinkled with the threat of drowning, and yet you are more awake and alive than you have ever been.

It's that oscillation that makes the book great. You will find yourself equally astounded and aggravated from part to part, chapter to chapter. Your results will vary on which parts/chapters astound/aggravate you, but one constant theme will garner the most responses (whether positive or negative), and that is the theme of the entire book. The World-Tilting Gospel is not simply a primer on Christian belief (though it could serve as that). It is a primer on why Christian belief (as a whole: from Genesis to Revelation) is necessarily counter-cultural on an ultimate level. It is by its very nature and creed not an accommodater or compromiser; rather, it is the straight shot to the jaw of the world, meant to leave it dazed and amazed.

Make no mistake: you will disagree with Dan at times. I did (and still do), especially in regard to his Calvinism (e.g., his incorrect view that regeneration precedes faith), a theology that I find as equally "close-but-no-cigar" as Arminianism. To that virile declaration of mine, I add this: So what? Dan may not be nuanced, but he is wise; wise enough to know that no-one is 100% right except for God, and that is his point: God is right. We are wrong. Jesus saves. That is world-tilting. That is the gospel, given once for all time. I will proudly and staunchly disagree with Dan all day, everyday as long as we are both standing on that firm foundation.

Recommendation: Get this book. It will stir you, inspire you, aggravate and offend you. Like all good books ought to. The only truly bad review that a book can receive is that it is too uninteresting to take seriously. This is not that book. At some point (perhaps multiple times), it will hit you hard. You may even feel the urge to thank it (or hit it back); but whatever you do, you won't say that you can't take it seriously.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011