Love

Tougher People

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Migrant Mother by Dorothea LangeI don't usually blog about my emotional well-being, but it's been a rough week. Monday I got bad news about a serious dental problem I have that can only be resolved by drastic, painful surgery to the tune of a year's tuition (or more) at Harvard. With both of us deflated by this news, my wife asked me what people with my condition did before this kind of surgery was available. The only answer? They lived with it.

So I've been thinking since then about folks who lived long before any of the amenities we take for granted today. Amy Carmichael, missionary to India, never took a COX-2 inhibitor in her life, bedridden with constant pain for twenty years before she met her Maker. Yet her poetry and wisdom live on long after she succumbed to the affliction of living on this planet. Millions of women somehow got through childbirth without an epidural. And after suffering through the mind-numbing agony of a kidney stone late last year, I don't understand how anyone could have existed without opiates to dull the shrieking nerves.

Dentistry back in the old days consisted of a pair of pliers and a bottle of rotgut. There were no bionic limbs two hundred years ago for the soldier maimed in war; a hook or crutch would have to do. Infection took its toll on many body parts and no plastic surgery plied his trade in making torn bodies whole again. Deformity was life and you went on living it no matter how much you wanted the mirror to lie, if only for a moment.

Couples buried their children by the dozen. Mothers often accompanied their mis-born children to the grave. Life was often brutish, nasty, and short. Ask Hudson Taylor, the great Asian missionary, who returned to England—his own health shattered—after leaving his wife and several children in the cold Chinese soil. Many could tell you that living seemed much more about avoiding being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A simple handshake with the wrong person could leave a deposit of microbes for which there was no known cure, diseases like diptheria or pertussis that are rarely spoken of today.

You can't dismiss that people were tougher then. No one thought himself a victim of fate, either. One simply pressed on and that was it. There weren't scores of therapists to hear Abraham Lincoln talk about his sadness over the deaths of his children and the increasing mental instability of his wife at a time when the nation he presided over was torn in two, brother set against brother. More pressing needs begged for his allegiance, so he soldiered on.

I can't see myself crowded around Jesus, trying to clutch at His robe saying, "If only…." Instead, I would be marveling at the truly shattered people who flung themselves at him, people so broken that some of them weren't recognized as human any longer, except by the Lord Himself. I think I would have to give up whatever place I had in line if I'd seen someone like that. Those were hard days and it's a miracle to this child of the 1960s that anyone could live at all.

There aren't too many tough people in the West anymore. Perhaps this is why we are so willing to forget about the Lord; we have other answers for our problems, even the tiniest ones. A balm exists for whatever ails us as long as the price is right. And even when it isn't, the lengths we'll go to in making it right shows how easily we are bought, sold, and traded on the open market.

It's sobering to know I would've been one of those casualties a hundred years ago. I was hospitalized for two weeks at two years of age for pneumonia, a dreaded killer in the time of my great-grandfather, but not for someone born in the Camelot of Kennedy's era. Should my recovery have been only partial (and partial was what many hoped for in the fin de siecle), I would've been known as a "sickly child," a terminology we don't toss around today simply because we don't see it too often.

Jesus wants tough people who rely on Him for everything, particularly when everything is not provided without fail. If that's my prayer for myself right now, then it's my prayer for you, too. We can't live on "what if?" or "if only…." Faith demands more and asks for tougher people. On that Day, the Bride of Christ will be radiant in her beauty, but She will have gotten there bloodied and beaten—yet not defeated.

Be tougher.

{Image: Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" (1936)}

Witch Hunt

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Joan's pyreI’m getting really fatigued. Mad, too. If this is all the Church is in this country, then we’ve lost the whole point.

What I am referring to is the increase in witch hunts that are breaking out in the Christian blogosphere. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t tolerate horrid doctrine. But neither do I tolerate people with perfect doctrine who can merely point fingers and do little else. Anyone (and I’m including myself here) can be a critic, but very few people can be a means of grace that helps people dying for help.

So here’s what I’m saying in a nutshell:

  • If you insist that people must be exactly {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, but you are doing nothing concrete to help them achieve {miscellaneous Christian necessity}, then SHUT UP.
  • If you believe that {miscellaneous Christian ministry/teacher/author/pastor} is doctrinally wrong in some area, take a moment to ask if what he/she/it is saying in another area is something you need to hear before you call him/her/it heretical, or else SHUT UP.

I’m not willing to do the millstone thing. Have I done it in the past? Even on this blog? Probably. But folks, if we are truly going to be the Church, then we have got to start burying the hatchet in something besides each other, especially if we can only point out problems, but have no solutions. That kind of hypocrisy gets us nowhere.

Here’s a case of what I am talking about.

I am no fan of the Emerging Church or Postmodern Christianity, or whatever you want to call it. It’s got profound flaws. But I am not going to rip them up one side and down the other just for existing because they have several points of contention that we should hear. You can point out every single lousy doctrine in the Emerging Church, but what about some of the issues they are raising in areas like Christian stewardship of God’s Creation, justice for the poor, simple living, making people a priority, or making choices to live in places that are not upscale or safe because they would have no Christian presence otherwise? Honestly, has anyone in the Evangelical, Reformed, Mainline, or Whatever Church who has ripped the Emerging Church lately taken one second to say, “You know, they do that a lot better than we do. Perhaps we need to improve in that area,” or is it just one tirade after another, with closed ears and a heart unwilling to take the correction God may be doling out through the equivalent of Balaam’s ass?

A simple pass through the Lord’s chastising of the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 shows that He rewarded both good doctrine and good works. He chastised those churches that lacked in either of those two. The lesson is clear: You have to have both good doctrine and good works. I see no lack of good doctrine in the Christian blogosphere, but many of us may be lacking in the works department. Like I’ve said before, Jesus does not call us to be a good apologist or a good servant of others, He calls us to be both. You may be the greatest Web apologist out there, but if you don’t clothed the naked, what good are you? Likewise, you may be out on the street every day doing good works, but if the Christ you’re sharing with someone else isn’t the Christ of the Bible, what good are you?

As for witch hunts, everyone reading this now is a (figurative) witch. Why? Because some Christian out there is going to find something wrong with your Christianity if he or she looks hard enough. Now how many of us want to be under that withering, soul-killing magnifying glass day in and day out? I don’t. I can’t possibly please every single faction or fraction of Christianity out there no matter how bullet-proof my doctrine or actions are.

Can we ease up on the witch hunts for a while? Can we start finding out what is good, perfect, noble, and pure and start emphasizing those things, making them happen in the lives of people who truly need them? Too often we come to those blessed things not for what they are, but for what they are not. If we can only think of “good” as being “not bad” or “pure” as being “not corrupted,” then we have lost the mind of the Lord.

Let’s Play “Spot the Heretic!”

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Balaam's Ass by RembrandtThis is the post wherein I make my secret confession before you all.

I've been a Christian for nearly thirty years. I've read a lot of books by a whole host of authors. And despite the fact that I'm fairly intelligent, graduated with high honors from probably the toughest Christian college in the country, and can use seven-syllable words with abandon, I don't read today's Christian writers much anymore.

Now I'm not speaking of Christian novels about young, chaste teachers coming of age on the Kansas prairie of 1880—aren't all Christian novels about that?—I'm talking about the non-fiction works of everyone from N.T. Wright to Brian McLaren.

If I were a proud man, I would attribute this to the lofty theological edifice I have constructed from bare rubble through my hard-won Christian discipleship. But I'm not a proud man; I'm simply a person like you who finds himself progressively confused by what passes for Biblical scholarship and discipleship lately.

Now with the Christian blogosphere filled from one end to the other with wild-eyed apologists, "remnant watchers," bell-ringers, deconstructionists, and self-christened "apostles for a time such as this," I've come to the conclusion that I simply can't parse it all. Yeah, this guy may be right and then he might not. She's got a good point, but arrived at it through a highly tortuous route that deviated through "Suspect City" to get there. And that guy in the corner always cries "Heretic!" over any idea that isn't his.

Sadly, there just isn't enough time in the day, so my only recourse is to ignore the vast majority of it. If it comes down to a case of discernment, perhaps the best discernment that a Christian in the 21st century can achieve is to always assume something's wrong unless it's been tested by time.

So that's my stance.

I used to help manage a Christian bookstore. I was the Bible and book buyer. Once you're in a position like that, you quickly attune your sense of smell to the stench of one lousy book after another grappling for bestseller status. I got adept at finding the stinkers before they found us. I attribute this to the Holy Spirit and to the spirit of our age.

The "spirit of our age" as I use it here is the quality of a book or set of thoughts that smacks of everything that is trending one way or another at this moment in time. Doesn't matter if it's right or wrong; in the end it simply won't last. Twenty years from now, no one will be referencing it for anything. It was dead on arrival, but the readers simply couldn't tell because the hype machine and word of mouth drowned out the naysayers.

Honestly, I think the Lord understands the dilemma of most earnest Christians today as they attempt to trudge through the mountains of half-baked theology and pseudo-spiritual tripe that get served to us on a sizzling hot platter—every single day. I believe that He knows it is far worse than in His own day when He battled the superstitions and mindless obeisance to the prevailing ethic of the land that relentlessly fought for the minds of His own disciples.

What is my out? Well, I'm hopelessly behind the times. I've said here before that most of the authors I read are dead. And that's my out. They're dead, no one is making big bucks off 'em, and yet their words last from one generation to the next. One set of Christians a hundred years ago read this stuff and found it spoke to the soul. And now another set today is reading it still because someone continues to be blessed. It won't crack the top ten on the bestseller list, or even the top ten thousand, but the words on those pages live. They give life and will do so until the day the Lord comes back—if, on that glorious and awful Day, He still manages to find enough people who take those old words to heart.

So I don't keep up with "New Think" for the most part. If I do mention a new book from time to time here, or mention a new blog that seems to have "it," then it's only because every reference in it goes back to someone from fifty years ago who could be trusted. I can tell you right now that Tozer, Ravenhill, Schaeffer, and a few like them can be trusted. Time's imprimatur has shown they can stand up and still speak the truth to a day and age where truth is so easily warped to be untruth that even the best of us can't always spot the mistakes.

I just can't filter it all; too much comes in. And while ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths pure is good enough for soap, it's not good enough for the Gospel. As for me, I'm simply not smart enough or spiritually adept enough to mercilessly spot the 0.56% impurity that exists in today's writings.

Are you?

{Image: Detail of Rembrandt van Rijn's "Balaam's Ass" (1626)}