Christianity in North America

Speed Kills the Christian Soul–Part 1

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If you’ve been a longtime reader, you know that one of my pet peeves is the speed at which our lives today fly by us. Too many Christians are caught in a perpetual hamster wheel of activity. None of that benefits us, the Church, or the Lord.

But what to do about it?

Al Mohler asked the same question earlier this week, lamenting the “sound byte-ing” of classical music. Even on a classical music station, you can’t hear an entire symphony anymore, just its best passages. As a classical music fan myself, I know exactly what he means. Speed KillsStations have ratcheted up the speed to fit leisurely classical music pieces into hectic schedules. Next thing you know, they’ll be time compressing the “Moonlight Sonata.” You can read his post here.

I blow hot and cold with Mohler, though. While he’s a big name in the Reformed Baptist camp, his posts and writings usually tell people what they should be doing, but without the means or info needed to do those things. Again, consistent readers know that I loathe that kind of “do this, but don’t ask me to help you do it” mentality in so many parts of the church.

But Mohler, usually quick with an answer, has no response to fixing the blatant hurriedness quagmire we find ourselves in. That’s also pretty typical of large swaths of the Church in America—recognize the problem, but offer no way to deal with it other than to say that we need to slow down.

Part of the problem here is that the Church, at least in this country, may have created the problem—or at least abetted it.

I’ve long contended the way to fix our issues with time is to correct the way we work. Ten hour days with additional two hour commutes is a good place to start repairing. People can’t have normal lives devoting twelve hours a day to work far away from home. Sadly, the very Protestant work ethic this country was founded on powers our work ethic today.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the Protestant work ethic that arose from the Reformation’s freeing of workers to know that their work honors God. Where it goes astray is when it is removed from local economies and translated into the typical “drive downtown to the office” kind of work we grew used to working during the Industrial Revolution. If you’ve read my series on “The Christian & the Business World“, you’ve got the basis for understanding the depths of the problem. (Read the series—you won’t read anything like it anywhere else in the Godblogosphere.)

So here’s what I recommend to Al Mohler. He’s a big name and has a large readership, far larger than mine. The plea:

Dr. Mohler,

Please use your considerable base of readership to start challenging the entire concept of how Christians should work. Throw out every assumption about work that’s been foisted on us by “The System.” Start asking what a genuine expression of Christian work should look like in the 21st century. Start asking how we can revitalize local economies and restore the simpler joys of working cooperatively with our neighbors. Read a book by Wendell Berry and ask if even a single thing he says makes sense for Christians today. Take the “red pill” and help others break out of the Matrix.

Don’t just concede and say, “It’s a tough problem and I’ve got no answers.” Christians are supposed to have answers. You expect your readers to have answers to the questions you raise and to solve those issues you point out in their own lives. Why not expect it of yourself?

Help us to institute the kind of life God desires of His children from the very first day He placed them in the Garden and gave them the command to work and steward the Earth.

Thank you. May God give you and other Christian leaders the vision to help us break out of the rat race and live life like the human race, the life God intended.

Speed Kills the Christian Soul—Part 2.

Watching the Wicked Prosper

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Truly God is good to Israel,
to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled,
my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death;
their bodies are fat and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not stricken like the rest of mankind.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them as a garment.
Their eyes swell out through fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against the heavens,
and their tongue struts through the earth.
Therefore his people turn back to them,
and find no fault in them.
And they say, ‘How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?’
Behold, these are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain have I kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.
For all the day long I have been stricken
and rebuked every morning.
—Psalm 73:1-14 ESV

Last week was good. I commented to my wife that for the first time in an exceedingly long time, life felt normal. She smiled and the sky grew bluer. Today it was 73 degrees outside. The crocuses were shouting.

But a late afternoon bluster blew in gloom, and our souls were disquieted by more bad news. We’d had our week, however fleeting. Time for more tears.

Will it be another season of loss? One wet finger in the wind cannot tell me.

I don’t know why some prosper and some don’t. That person over there mints money with every breath, but that broken fellow propped up against a crumbling brownstone…wasn’t he there last year, too? His crime? He was a decent person who only tried to do what was right, but someone took advantage of his kindness. We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that at least he doesn’t have dogs licking his sores.

We in America love the rags to riches story. American Idol taps into this nation’s consciousness like an epidural. Celebrity is its own reward. We simply adore our celebrities. Look at how many were troubled by Brad and Jen’s split last year: All those homes! How will they ever divvy them up fairly?

On the other hand, the people who stay in rags or who find themselves moving in that direction, well, we don’t reserve as much affection for them. Houses on BoardwalkNone of them make it to the cover of the highest-circulating magazine in the country, People. Didn’t Jesus Himself say we would always have folks like that? They’re a dime a dozen, aren’t they?

A friend who was a missionary told of being dropped off in the middle of Africa, but his scheduled ride never materialized. After a day left stranded out in the bush, he started walking, only to eventually come to a village. In that village, he was welcomed by a Christian family. They put all the food they had in front of him, and even that wasn’t much. Just some goat intestines—not fully emptied. Those folks were destitute, but they welcomed this fellow believer with glad hearts. My friend said he was so blessed by that family that he would never forget them.

Here in America, though, we have a sense of entitlement that never quite goes away. We deserve to keep up with our neighbors, even if it’s killing us to do so. And when someone eventually tanks, when a family has their breadwinner taken out, we too often look the other way. It’s as if we’re watching a real-life monster movie. We’re at the head of the pack, but the crippled girl who prays for everyone nightly can’t keep up with the rest of the group. When a grue swallows her in the darkness, we dispel our own guilt with a simple “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It makes me wonder sometimes if we’re the wicked of Psalm 73. We don’t think about that enough here in this country. We don’t like to be distracted from the goal of a five bedroom home, a Hummer in the driveway, and a kid at Harvard.

Our not wanting the distraction doesn’t make the indigent go away, though.

When I hear Christians in this country talk about how easy it would be if they lost everything, I can’t help but wonder if they truly mean it. I’ve known godly friendships that have dissolved because one person was on the way up while the other was headed down. The tendency in a few churches is to assign blame to the downwardly mobile; those poor had their past sins come home to roost. Heads get shaken and words muttered—and then the room clears.

Misfortune seems to haunt some people. I’ve seen cases of families that kept on getting hit with one misery after another. One day they’re no longer in church. Perhaps their rusted-out hulk of a car didn’t fit in with the new SUVs in the church parking lot. Maybe one of the teens in the youth group made a disparaging remark one too many times about the out-of-fashion threads worn by the kids. Or a husband didn’t fit in with the men’s group consisting of CEOs, what with him being the night clerk at a convenience store and all. Not that any of those CEOs would offer him a job anyway.

So they slink away. Some drop out of church altogether. Others find a church parking lot filled with rusted-out cars just like theirs, and they’re happy—for a while.

We talk about being destitute for the Lord, but I don’t think we truly want to be. We hear some megachurch pastor give a sermon about how Mother Theresa died with only a pair of shoes and a couple habits to her name, and we may even get a tear or two welling in the old eyes, but we dab it away. Then we pack the family into our late model Toyota Sequoia and head out for an all-you-can-eat dinner and a movie—or two. We may aspire to be destitute, but only if we can look good and have fun doing it. Blessed are the poor in spirit. It’s the spirit of the thing, isn’t it?

Are we the wicked? All of us? Some of us?

I confess that I really don’t want to continue to be downwardly mobile. It’s more stressful than people imagine. I wonder why some people live a life of ease and luxury, while others work so hard and yet get so little for all their hard work. Doesn’t square with the American mantra, does it?

Yet here we are in America complaining. Downwardly mobile here beats a life of eating goat intestines, right?. Try to convince the rich of that, though. Actually, try to convince anyone here of that.

How can I say I know the Lord when I am so ungrateful?

When Christians Are Wrong

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A nun ready to slap your hand with a rulerI’ve been on the blogosphere since 2001 . My previous blog was called “The Boiled Frog Blog,” as in the old aphorism that you can kill a frog in a pot by turning up the heat in small degrees.

Matter of degree is something most Christians can’t handle. We have a tendency to make everything black and white and blame the Scriptures for the stark contrast. Few Christians would say that life works that way in practice, but we sure love it in theory.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about the basics here. Jesus Christ came in the flesh and was wholly Man and wholly God. This isn’t about Nicene Creed sort of stuff. It’s about the little things that keep us at each other’s throats.

C.S. Lewis talked about the increasing prevalence of “men without chests” in our society. Today, dad’s without chests have sons without chest in numbers rivaling the way rats breed. We’re awash in them.

We can all come up with a million faults that create men without chests, but one of the ones I never hear mentioned is an unwillingness to admit wrong. Those of us fed up with the culture of victimization will utter a hearty “Huzzah!” at the thought of making people live out the consequences of their own actions. But that’s a kid stuff kind of accountability.

You know what I would like to hear more often from individuals in our churches? I was wrong.

You know what I want to see written on a comment or post in the Godblogosphere, even once? I was wrong.

If we consider the Godblogosphere to contain some of the brighter people in the Western Church today—and I believe that may very well be true—shouldn’t we be seeing more admissions of wrongness? Smart people, by and large, should be acutely aware of when they’ve made an error. Or at least you would think they would be. So it’s curious to me to see all the pitched battles that occur every day in the Godblogosphere, missives filled with a massive numbers of characters typed onto a screen, yet the conversation eventually peters out with both sides claiming victory.

If the Bible is Absolute Truth, then it is True Absolutely. There’s only ONE WAY. As much as we say we’re for the inerrancy of the Bible, for most people it’s only as inerrant as it’s capable of being turned into a cunning argument that always wins. The problem is that the Bible doesn’t always work that way. The witness of a couple thousand years of wrangling over this doctrine and that should prove the truth of that statement. Has any Christian in the last two thousand years gotten the interpretation and praxis of ALL the Scriptures correct? Even Peter, one of the select apostles, was corrected by Paul on the matter of the Judaizers. Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not arguing for a lax view of interpretation! Quite the opposite; I contend that there is only one interpretation that is correct.

The problem is that we’re not at that place of perfect interpretation, though we act like we are. Pick a topic within the Faith and see how many different views there are on that one topic. I studied sixteen different interpretations of the Book of Revelation, all from fairly orthodox views. But someone’s wrong. In fact, if only one of those interpretations is wholly correct (or in truth, possibly none at all), then the majority of Christians in the world have the wrong interpretation.

Just how narrow does the narrow road get?

We say things like “We agree to disagree agreeably,” but that doesn’t change the fact that from the standpoint of pure unadulterated Truth, someone has the wrong view. Paedobaptist or credobaptist? Supernatural gifts of the Spirit today or not? Dispensational or ready to toss another Darbyite on the barbie? Or maybe a smidgeon of each—or possibly neither. What’s the topic today and who’s right on it?

I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if we were more willing to say we’re wrong. How much better could our Christian community be if more of us fessed up to faulty doctrine in a couple places within our personal systematic theologies? Another gospel? If we were honest we’d have to admit that almost everyone of us has personalized the one Absolute Truth to the point that it’s no longer Absolutely God’s, but absolutely our own. And that’s an absolute mess.

Don’t get me going on translating doctrine into practice, either.

I always wonder what happens to those few flawed exegetes and self-deluded practitioners who see the light, admit wrong, and are restored to fellowship. We don’t hear about them too often. Maybe few actually complete the one-eighty. If so, I suspect the reasons are fear of failure and a rejection of grace. How about simple pride? We’re masters of saving face, aren’t we?

For a Christian to publicly admit wrong takes a real work of the Spirit. It takes no effort to stay stuck in error, but a lot of work goes into convincing someone of his or her misguided thinking.

You’ll know when real revival comes to America when you hear “I was wrong” uttered from the lips of every person who calls on the name of the Lord. Because in some way, by the standard of Jesus, each of us is.

Tags: Right, Wrong, Pride, Conviction, Church, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, God