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

On the Necessity of Sanity to Ministry (as explained by an orthodox rebel)

"It is not fitting that we should leave the Word of God to serve tables." Acts 6:2b

There is a certain balance and sanity to Christianity, mainly because there was a certain balance and sanity to Christ. He knew nothing of our frenzies and hysteria, where we are moved along by fashionable sentiments and good intentions. In recent years, we have seen such madness. An extra devious madness, because its good intentions make it seem so right. Certain individuals (with initial clean hearts and hands) have perceived in the Church an apparent inordinate focus on doctrine, a focus that has created a kind of doctrinal intellectualism: cold, passionless, compassionless, and dead. In short, the thinkers continue to think, the bible-thumpers continue to thump, and meanwhile the poor and needy and all-alone continue to suffer.

In response to this real (though not nearly as great as they supposed) crisis, the best efforts of those certain individuals have yielded opposite yet equal problems. The Church has turned from a cold-hearted academic hall to a vapid therapeutic hospital, where doctrinal clarity has been so far jettisoned out of all preaching and practice  that Christianity's very identity often dissolves into a vat of ambiguous religious goo. We provide medicine, education, and social justice for many, but the truth that Christ died to save sinners from the just wrath of God is lost in transmission, if it is in the transmission at all. In short, in attempting to fix a broken leg, they have shot themselves in the foot.

All these things (from cold-hearted dogmatism to bleeding-hearted secularism) are the direct result of our innate insanity, i.e., our constant, furious drives to make the whole of the Church about one thing, ministry, or virtue to the detriment of all else. We trumpet the primacy of urban areas, and thus the rural and suburban are forgotten. We cry for the oppression of the poor, and thus leave the rich and middle-classes to damnation. We merrily reupholster people's furniture and plant trees in their parks, and yet we leave their souls to die. In fleeing from a pit of vipers, we have fallen into a den of thieves.

In Acts 6, it is clear that the disciples knew nothing of our mass manias. When widows were truly being neglected, the disciples did not halt everything and make the whole of Christianity about them, but neither did they ignore them. Rather, they said it was "not fitting" for them to help them, because they already had a ministry: "the ministry of the Word" (vs. 4). Apparently, it was the duty and calling of others to serve the ministry of the tables, and these others were found and their ministry made a part of the whole.

That is the balance and subsequent sanity of Christianity, of Christ. Everyone and everything finds its place. The body is many members, with many different gifts meant for many different issues (Rom. 12:4-6a). As long as those members see Christ as the head (Eph. 4:15-16), then what does it matter what they have been given to do (John 21:21-22)? If they are preachers and the gospel is preached, then rejoice! If they are intellectuals and the gospel is preached, rejoice! If they are doctors or volunteers and the gospel is preached, rejoice! If they are artists and the gospel is preached, rejoice! The one needful thing is Christ, and as long as He is the one constant, everything else will find its place in Him.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

(Additional readings)

An Open Letter to the Emergent Church (as written by an orthodox rebel)

NOTE: Before reading this post, and especially before commenting on it, please read the following definition. Anyone commenting to the effect that I should have contacted someone directly with this letter will have their comment deleted. They obviously did not understand the nature or purpose of this medium of communication.

For the sake of hair-splitters, allow me to make a distinction: by "emergent church," I am not referring to the mere attempt by recent Christians to engage the post-modern culture. Rather, I am referring to the movement that, in trying to engage post-modernism, compromised with post-modernism and became its derivative religious wing.

Dear Emergent Church,

I'm sure that this letter is already obsolete, seeing as how I have heard multiple times that your "movement" is on its way out, revealing itself to be exactly what most sensible people figured it to be: a temporary, fleeting fad and fever, yet another awkward and shameful attempt by Christianity to ape the culture. Thus, as you are unceremoniously passed kicking and screaming out of our system, allow me to add my own voice to the congested and convoluted infinite regression that you call a "conversation". You may ignore my thoughts as you please, but at least your slobbering love-affair with pointless, aimless "dialogue" will guarantee me getting a hearing.

I just want to ask you one question. You believe in Jesus (of a sort). You call Him (on occasion) our "savior". Savior from what, exactly?

From white, European males? From fundamentalists and Republicans? From hellfire preachers and hateful cranks? From unfavorable environments of poverty, politics, and oppression? Is Jesus no more to you than another left-wing activist? Another guru Gandhi, lover of abstract humanity and hater of actual men and women? Teaching us a love with no logic? Revealing a mystery that conceals no truth?

Is this what He has come to save us from: half of all the good things in the world by a gluttonous bloating of the other half? Has he brought us a simpering morality and vacuous social activism in order to save us from honor? Valor? The fight and the battle? The glory and the pride? The beauty and the ecstasy and the unutterable violence of unshakable conviction and creed, definable and categorical to the last non-negotiable degree? Has he come to save us from fairy-tales? From the old stories that said that the princess didn't need a vote or voice but rather a rescue and the knight's armor soaked in the blood of the blatant beast? Is that what your so-called "savior" has come to save us from? From rescue? From riding on the thunderclouds of redemption? Or is it actually true that Jesus came to save us from Sin? Sin that eats at the soul like a cancer? Sin that kills absolutely? The bedrock of all bedlam and horror in the world? Of all tyranny and tragedy?

Why do you give us a God who loves without hate? Who forgives without precedent? Whose heart is made of candy? What pasty, vanilla dullness have you foisted upon us? What is this gross banality that you call divinity? Where is the jealous, wrathful lover? Where is the smitter of Canaan, the plunderer of the treasures of Jericho? Where is the warrior king who chases his ravished and ravishing beloved across a wilderness and wasteland of bones and blood, dragons and demons? Where is the winepress of the wrath of God? What is this God you have given me whose love is not strong enough to hate? True love hates: it must hate all that imperils and spoils the beloved. You have given me your God of sugar, and the slightest rain of horror and great darkness has washed him away. I ask you, where is the Rock of our salvation? The shelter in a time of storm and the great grinder upon which we all must be broken?

Understand this: I despise you as a philosophy and an idea and am absolutely against you for this very reason: you give us a pathetic God. A God without teeth, whose love is watered-down to mere pity, and whose truths wouldn't offend a fly. You remove His righteous and unmovable judgements and instead give Him a weak-kneed moralism born and bred of political manias and secular sentiments, an evangel contrived and constructed by white-guilt for the sole purpose of satiating that white-guilt. Tell me, you almighty doctrinaires and dogmatists of relevancy: is there no room in your narrow-minded and bigoted box of boiled-to-rags religion for God to be God? To be exactly who He, and He alone, said He was? Who Christ said He was? A God of mercy and justice? Grace and truth? Love and holiness? Love and wrath? Wrathful love and loving wrath?

No, there is no room. No room in your paltry little inn and shack for such a God. There never was. You are no better than the post-modern wasteland that you supposedly "engage". Like them, you have stolen God from us, replacing Him with a whitewashed picketer and hipster. A hollow substitute, like a rotted tree.

Take away from me your scarecrow deity. Repent and seek after the living God of Israel, whom you have forsaken for your vain delusions. You have abandoned God in order to have your aimless adventures. I say to you, Come, and find your adventures in God.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

Homily 27: How Jesus Trumps Social Justice and Religious Legalism (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"When the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying, 'Why this waste? For this could have been sold for a large sum and given to the poor.' But Jesus...said to them..., 'You always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.'" Matt. 26:6-13

The woman of Bethany comes to adore Jesus as best she knows how, sacrificing what was most likely her most prized possession. The disciples, being socially conscious religious types, rebuke her "waste" and lack of concern for those underprivileged few who lack a voice in the community. Jesus, the supposed radical reformer, rebukes the disciples instead. Coming off like a cranky fundamentalist, He points out that their pious social activism was missing one thing: Himself. He took priority, even over social justice.

Compare this story to the incident with Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42). Martha is busy fulfilling her duties and obligations as hostess, while Mary is lounging starry-eyed at the feet of Jesus. Martha asks that Jesus rebuke Mary for her inordinate abstractionism. Jesus, the supposed Rabbi and teacher of the Law, informs Martha that there is only one "needful thing," the thing that Mary has chosen: Himself. He took priority, even over duty-bound cultural obligations.

There is a certain balance, a certain sanity, to Jesus. We are so easily overcome by various extremities and ecstasies, falling from one miry pit of insanity to the next. We get caught up in global activism, striving by a great moral effort to end world suffering and satiate our white-guilt. And all the while we have forgotten Jesus. We get all tangled up in holiness living, taking great pains to make our attire and activities God-approved so that we won't "smoke or chew or run with girls who do." And all the while we have forgotten Jesus. On the one hand, we make Him into our great leader and radical example, but He ceases to be Lord and the only Salvation. On the other hand, He becomes our ever-disapproving taskmaster and all-seeing eye, but never our Friend and Savior. Jesus anticipates our insanities; He anticipates the heart of man (John 2:24-25). He offered only one corrective to our wild and weary exuberance: Himself. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" (Matt. 11:28). May we strive always and only for such rest.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011

Homily 25: Unnecessary Divorces: The Errors of both Fundamentalism and the Emergent Church (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"You are wrong because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God." Matt.22:29

"On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." Matt. 22:40

Christianity, in coming from and leading to God, is the holistic religion. Everything finds its place within its framework and context. Why, then, do we continually find the need to break it up and apart? Why do we always tear asunder what God has joined together? Many errors crop up in the Church, but what is worse than the errors themselves is the hysteria they create that drives people to opposite yet equal errors. Thinking we've found the center, we've merely found another extreme. Such a circus can be see even to this day.

In the second half of Matthew 22, Jesus is questioned first by the Sadducees. The Sadducees were the Jewish skeptics, the post-modernists of their day. Post-modernism, of course, is nothing new. It is merely the old skepticism rehashed, recycled, repackaged, and regurgitated. The Sadducees were ancient pomos. If you don't believe it, then just look at the question that they posed to Jesus (Matt. 22:24-28). It is philosophically tangled. It is ironic. It is subversive. The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection, and thus their question is deconstructive: it is trying to expose tensions in the resurrection narrative that will reveal it to be artificial. Jesus responds by throwing down a radical notion of his own (Matt. 22:30) that effectively subverts their subversion, and then He quotes the Pentateuch at them (Matt. 22:31-32), the only part of the Old Testament that they liked (similar to how modern day pomos like the gospels but not the rest of the New Testament).

Before Jesus answered the Sadducees, however, his initial response laid down His primary position, His starting place for the whole issue. He exalted both the principles of God ("the Scriptures") and the practices of God ("power of God"). He starts his response by asserting that He holds these two things together. There are many people today (both skeptical and credulous) who will not abide such a union. Some want the principles only, becoming scrupulous scholars and dogmatic doctrinaires. They have systematized the whole with impeccable perfection. God, however, is merely an abstract concept to them, as remote as the furthest star. Despite their tremendous elucidation, one wonders if they truly believe all of their humbug. Meanwhile, others want only the practices, to see angels and demons behind every bush, and fire fall from heaven everyday. They dismiss doctrine as mere shackles, and thus confuse every odd occurrence as having massive spiritual import. Despite their fiery credulousness, one wonders if they even know what they're talking about. The resulting spirituality of the former is a stifling deadness and petrification. The resulting spirituality of the latter is religious insanity and chaos. Both have divorced what Jesus never divorced.

The Pharisees catch wind of the unholy smackdown that Jesus laid upon the Sadducees, and they decide to throw their own hat into the ring. Of course, the Pharisees were the stuffy fundamentalists of their day, again a very old and very common occurrence. The stagnant conservative and the anarchistic progressive are as old as the hills. The Pharisees, being good solid fundamentalists, asked Jesus a very straightforward, simple, yet profoundly doctrinal question (Matt. 22:36). Jesus, in return, provided a very straightforward, simple, yet profoundly doctrinal response (Matt. 22:37-40). Per His usual tactic when dealing with the Pharisees, He attacks their brand of religionism by stating what they already know (vs. 37-38) but then tacking on what they have missed (vs. 39). The Pharisees had "loving God" down pat (or so they thought), but as Jesus pointed out many times before and after this incident, their love towards people was non-existent. Like the Sadducees, in answering their question He also rebuked them.

Also like the Sadducees, Jesus lays down in His answer a twin set of ideas that He holds together in tandem that the Pharisees wanted to separate. He summarized the entirety of their precious "Law and the Prophets" under two commands: love God and then love people. Again, there are many (both credulous and skeptical) who will not abide such a union. For some, the only true command is to love God, to develop the private spirituality of the devotional and the closet. Other people are merely distractions, having no real value in and of themselves other than being teaching tools to learn more about God. They become means to an individual end, no more and no less. Meanwhile, for others, the only true command is to love people, to develop the public spirituality of missional friendship. "Quiet Time" and other devotional trappings are merely stumblingblocks to religious work and activity in the community. Even church becomes a distraction, having no real value in and of itself other than being a convention center to gather more people. The resulting spirituality of the former is an isolated occultism that grows weary of others. The resulting spirituality of the latter is an endless guilt-induced sense of doing that also grows weary of others. Again, they have divorced what Jesus never divorced.

All of these silly, unnecessary divorces that we see back then and still today are fundamentally anti-incarnational. In some way or another, they deny "the Word made flesh". For some, "the Word" in its uncreated exaltation is everything: doctrinal discovery followed by a spiritual introspection that never learns to work itself out "through the fingertips." For others, "the flesh" in its rugged reality is everything: continual immersion and outward activity that has no greater foundation than our own emotional sentimentalism. Both ways are incomplete, and thus are wrong. Both ways have partial truth, and thus are dangerous. Each can bash the others weakness from their own strong point. The former can bash the latter for their "worldliness" and scriptural compromise, while the latter can bash the former for their "insensitivity" and lack of concern for the Kingdom of God. Both positions are right in pointing out the others error. In other words, both positions are right, thus both positions are wrong.

Those who claim to be Christians and those who claim to be "Christ-followers" or "emerging" (or whatever) both need to reexamine what their Master taught. It is not a choice between God's principles or God's practices, not love God or love people, neither is it half and half. The true "Christ-like" life knows the principles of God and thus believes in the practices of God. The true "Christ-like" life passionately and unapologetically loves God and thus passionately and unapologetically loves people. There is no severance or neglect. Both sides of the coin are intimately connected and burning at full capacity. It is the true incarnational life, "the Word" made "flesh". May we from henceforth strive to cease from divorcing the two.

-Jon Vowell (c) 2011