Apologetics

For 2006: The Church’s Brave New Brain—Part 1

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This final post of 2005 begins a short series that examines what I believe to be a pressing issue that is flying under the radar of the American Church. If we do not address it humbly and prayerfully in the coming year, I believe we American Christians will preside over a Church (and societal) implosion of our own making.

The thought that I cannot escape is about just that: thought. Our brains consist of two hemispheres, each with a God-imparted function. The left hemisphere handles language and logic, the right, narrative and art. The left excels in processing the batting averages of the 1927 Yankees and understanding that pigs can't fly, while the right finds wisdom and beauty in a poem or painting.

If Christianity in 2005 can be examined in any light, I would offer that the battles we are now seeing for the heart, mind, and soul of our Faith are those of the right and left hemispheres.

Some reading this will view what I have to say as nothing more than the ongoing tussle between modernism and postmodernism, or the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment. On some levels, this would be true. However, I do not believe it is necessary outcome that one or the other of those labeled sides should win, but that God's mind about our minds holds the key to where His will for us as a Church dwells.

Talk to anyone who studies trends and you'll hear them proclaiming that we are moving from the Information Age into the Conceptual Age. Where the Information Age's hallmark is the processing of data, the sine qua non of the Conceptual Age is design. Now that even a six-old can jump on a computer and find out facts about dinosaurs that paleontologists of thirty years ago had to spend months unearthing, data is cheap. The Information Age's attempt to make it exclusive to drive profits failed. It is no longer enough to have data. The power center has moved away from data-crunching to creating what machines cannot: objects of beauty. The new ruling class has shifted from computer systems analysts to graphic designers.

What has been commodified in the process is the very heart of the last Age. There are dozens of MP3 players on the market, but despite the fact that each is a technological marvel undreamed of twenty years ago (and with a price point that is startling), only one of those players has captured the zeitgeist of the transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Why is Apple's iPod outselling all the other MP3 players combined? Design. There are more-powerful MP3 players on the market, some selling for less than the iPod, but Apple's MP3 player dominates all others because Apple understood that design matters. As a result, the iPod is now iconic.

Design has triumphed as a result of the wealth of our day. A hundred years ago, a toaster was remarkable. Just having one of those expensive devices put you in the swanky minority. Yep, it's a toasterToday, though, it is no longer enough to build a toaster that toasts bread. We've seen toasters. Virtually every Western home has a toaster. Because a $7 toaster is possible, the companies that make toasters can't operate on the hope that people want their bread toasty. Something as humble as a toaster has to make a design statement or it will not sell. That's a profound paradigm shift. (Take a few minutes to marvel at what toasters look like today if you don't believe me. Note also the price paid for cutting-edge toaster design.)

The fallout of the design explosion that heralds the Conceptual Age is the ascendancy of the design-rich right hemisphere of the brain over the left. This, too, marks a sea change. Most of us did not grow up in a time that placed right-brain thinking over left. Our heroes are thinkers, not artists. Our educators drilled into us the truth that facts won out over concepts, our elders belaboring the reality that diagnosticians were the cream of society, able to follow a well-memorized flowchart to whatever answer was desired. There was the future! We had the data to prove it.

But they were wrong.

What is most frightening about the audacity of our elders to so drastically miss the future is what that failure has meant for the Church. So stay tuned for the second part of this post—next year—to find out how Christians must live in our brave new Conceptual Age world.

Tags: Artists, Designers, Design, Thinking, Feeling, Brain, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God

Stupid Hymn Tricks

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Always on the lookout for God-centric music that is intelligent and beautiful, I encountered a song a few weeks back that reminded me of hymns gone by. The melody was easily sung and the lyrics that I caught on first hearing were great.

Or so I thought.

The song in question is Fernando Ortega's "Our Great God" as performed with Mac Powell off the City on a Hill—Alleluia CD. Beautiful song and very hymn-like. HymnalThe chord transitions from major to minor keys are lovely and the production on the CD is exquisite. Best of all, because the phrasing is simple and the meter consistent, it is easy to sing, unlike many of today's recent worship music offerings. And the tune is so adaptable that you could sing a thousand other old hymns to it, including "Amazing Grace."

Here's the first line:

Eternal God unchanging, mysterious and unknown

  • God is eternal—check
  • God is unchanging—check
  • God is mysterious— (to the extent that His thoughts are higher than ours and His ways are sometimes hard to understand) check
  • God is unknown—Uh oh

I guess no one checked with the Bible on that last one:

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for "'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, "'For we are indeed his offspring.' Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."
—Acts 17:22-31 ESV

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, "This was he of whom I said, 'He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.'") And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.
—John 1:9-18 ESV

But, as it is written, "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him"— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
—1 Corinthians 2:9-10 ESV

Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him." Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.
—John 14:5-10 ESV

God is NOT unknown. He has been revealed. This is one of the distinguishing marks of the Christian faith: God is knowable through the Person of Jesus Christ. What we have in this song is rank postmodernism raising its ugly head. It's that attempt to sound religious by saying God is lurking on the outskirts of the universe, inscrutably doing whatever it is an inscrutable god does.

Jesus said that God is knowable because He (Jesus) is knowable, having revealed God in His very Person. Paul clearly addresses the "unknown god" fallacy, though, saying that while some may worship unknown gods, Christians do not. John writes that Jesus Christ made God known.

Now I'm not so charged by this song. The "unknown" lyric also reveals that the intention of the "mysterious" is not so much to say that God is higher than us, but to shroud Him in fog. It sounds like a vain attempt to restore the veil in the temple.

I don't want anyone in my church singing that God is unknown, so I guess "Our Great God" is out. Too bad.

How's about it folks; what songs or hymns out there strike you as being doctrinally suspect? Your comments are most welcome!

That Other Standoff

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Is it almost Thanksgiving? You’d never know it from the various wars erupting all over the Christian blogosphere as one faction yells to the other faction,Standoff “Oh yeah, well what about this!”

Yes, I’ve participated, but I’ve tried to be as civil as possible. I’m not trying to establish a beachhead. I just desire that other people understand the faction I’m tenuously a part of, especially since mine seems to be on the small side as factions go.

The cessationist/charismatic debate on the surface has tended to be civil. I think that the default faction leaders, David and Adrian, have done well. There have been a few gashes, but I’m not seeing any severed limbs lying around.

But there’s another war out there and this one has turned grisly: Emerging Church vs. Traditional Church. The rhetoric on both sides is so dense that it’s approaching depleted uranium stage. This week brought out the mustard gas and biowarfare as Emerging Church proponent Justin Baeder attempted a domain rustling by securing “emergentno.com” in an effort to put the spoofing screws to Traditional Church proponent Carla Rolfe of Emergent No at “emergentno.blogspot.com.”

Two words: Truly Lame.

While the cessationists and charismatics appear to at least be listening to each other so far, the Emerging Church (EC) vs. Traditional Church (TC) battle has degenerated into a hatefest. I’m halfway tempted to pronounce a pox on both their houses. (I’ve previously blogged about this issue here, here, and here.) The sad part is that there are people on both sides of this EC/TC war whom I appreciate, and the truly thoughtful folks on both sides are not as heinous as they are portraying the other side to be. In many ways, both sides there are attacking the same fringe elements that are under assault in the charismatic/cessationist debate.

But assaulting the weirdos is easy. I’m a charismatic and I’m fed up with the fringe within the charismatic movement. (I’m even more fed up that the fringe may be taking over!) When examining the war going on between the EC and TC camps, each side has every right to be hacked at the lack of Christlikeness in the other side, but then we all know what Jesus said to the group ready to stone the woman caught in the midst of adultery.

I’ve got zero diplomatic skills, so if I tick someone off here in either the EC or the TC camps, I apologize in advance.

This is what the Bible says:

And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
—Mark 12:28-31 ESV

Earlier this week, Ingrid Schlueter of Slice of Laodicea, one of the TC blogs that is most fiercely battling the EC, had this to say about Traditional Churches:

There is, without doubt, a shortage of biblical love and concern on the part of church members in Bible preaching churches today. There is a reason that emergent churches and mega churches with small groups are attractive. There is no more empty feeling in all the world than having attended a church service as a visitor and leaving without a kind word being spoken. In my husband’s and my search for a church for our family in an area where good churches were in short supply, we found this again and again. At one point, after attending a church for almost a year, I said, “Tom, we could be in an advanced stage of rigor mortis in the back pew and I doubt seriously that anyone would notice.” … After moving to a new state, we visited one church where we needed directions. I went to the church office and said, “Excuse me, we’re just visiting and we need to find out where to put our children for Sunday School.” The woman looked me up and down rather cooly, and gestured vaguely down the hall. “Someone will help you down there.” She said. This, folks, was a small church. But I was new and uninteresting looking and that was that.

I don’t think I can add anything to her disappointment. Far too many Traditional Churches, filled with people who adore God and love the Scriptures, are getting the first part of Jesus’ two greatest commandments right, but are missing the second. Doctrine has no strength unless it’s put into practice. It’s not enough to be able to cut down every heretical anti-lapidarydipsydoodlearian out there with the Truth of the Scriptures. Yes, that has extreme value and must be guarded, but if we do not love the very people that the Lord Jesus died for, all the doctrine in the world will sit idle in our hearts, gone begging for someone, anyone to put it into practice for the disenfranchised of the world.

Ingrid’s lament is even more tragic, since it should be second nature for us to at least love the rest of the Body of Christ, even if we have difficulties with extending the love of Christ to the lost. Yet how can we do the latter, as the Lord Himself showed us, if we can’t even love our brothers and sisters in Christ?

Does the EC do this better than the TC? Probably. That need to be part of a loving community greater than oneself is one of the reasons that the EC is gaining adherents. The people who don’t normally get called to the wedding party are being handed an invitation. The Traditional Church needs to understand this and repent.

Now as open as Ingrid was about failures of the TC, I’ve searched high and low to find someone within EC ranks who was willing to take on the fact that the EC plays fast and loose with a lot of Scripture, muddying just about every doctrine it touches. With Open Theism increasingly discussed within the EC (but not in those exact terms, since the EC doesn’t desire to have exact terms about anything), one wonders if they’re doing the second commandment right, but are unraveling the tapestry that spells out that the first commandment clearly. What the TC does well—speaking to sin, holding up the cross, affirming the inerrancy of Scripture and its authority—the EC outright mangles, with many of the leading lights in the EC giving depositions on doctrine in the same manner that Clinton asked us to rethink what the definition of “is” is.

For this, the TC has every right to hold the EC’s feet to the fire, but the EC won’t stand for it. I won’t go into all the sites posting doctrinal fallacies attributed to the EC (and they are legion), but suffice it to say, it’s hard to think of the EC in any way other than a reactionary movement that can’t form a coherently Biblical reason for everything it supposedly believes. What other outcome, other than rank heresy, can be expected from the EC if it continues to deconstruct the Scriptural base on which it’s supposedly founded. The oldest lie in the Book is, “Did God really say…?” The Emerging Church needs to understand this and repent.

All this makes me tired.

Why is it incongruous to think that we can have solid doctrine that holds up the full revelation and personhood of the Triune God while ministering Christ to His Chosen and the lost around us? When those two are melded in purpose, isn’t that The True Church? Emphasizing any part of the whole revelation of the Gospel over any other part is a recipe for disaster, yet somehow Traditional Churches and Emerging Churches are doing their best to cook up such a mess.

And we wonder why the Church in the West is failing.