When I look back on this past year in the future, I am not sure what will stand out to me the most. It has been, without a doubt, the most incredible year of my life so far. If I think back for a moment to how circumstantially different my life was a year ago today I am overwhelmed.
Here is a brief timeline: When the year began I was still a full-time employee at Ferguson Enterprises in El Paso, Texas. On the fourth of January I gave my two weeks notice. In mid-January I started taking undergraduate literature courses from UTEP. I went to New York City to visit my friend Casey and we talked for hours and hours about the future (of which I had at the time no idea). In February we went to Chadron, Nebraska to watch my brother, Tyler, complete his odyssey as a DII basketball player. The first weekend of March Clara and I ran a 50 mile race in the mountains of Southern Arizona, though somehow I ended up running 52 miles. I learned very many things about my wife that day, namely how little I deserve her. That same March, the Kansas State men’s basketball team went to the Elite Eight. (This has little to do with me, but made for quite the March.) In May we ran a 50k race in Colorado. In May we also decided to move to Kansas over the summer. In early July I moved all of our stuff to a storage unit in Manhattan, Kansas and flew back to El Paso for a painful goodbye with many dear friends. The next day Clara and I drove up to Colorado to begin our own odyssey: the 500 mile coterminous Colorado Trail. Upon finishing we spent a few days in Colorado before moving to where our stuff was in Manhattan. Unable to sell our house in El Paso we moved into an upstairs apartment in our pastor’s house, complete with sloped floor, no air-conditioning/poor heating, and no electric in the bathroom (though we can’t beat the price: free). I started my graduate studies at K-State, Clara got a job in a very interesting home health care situation, and we planted ourselves in the church here. In November we found out we are expecting our first child. This was one of the more shocking moments of my life and gave us one of the biggest pleasures any child can have (especially this one): telling your parents they are going to be grandparents. December gave us a return trip to El Paso for the wedding of two dear friends and the Faithwalkers conference, where I am now.
It looks odd to condense a year in such a way. As I look back on the list I am at turns impressed with myself, and then I consider the way I limped through those races, the way we almost quit fifty miles from the finish of the Colorado Trail, the many times I have failed in the past few months to make the move to Kansas “worth it.” In many ways it was just another year of fighting my flesh, trying to let the Spirit in me have more sway, trying to learn how to give God glory from the paltry sacrifices I seem willing to offer. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. This life, for all of its beauty, grace, and depth of experience, is, for the most part, a battle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a struggle. A struggle to become the person you want to be, and then realizing that is insufficient. A struggle to kill sin, fight laziness and apathy, to resist the inertia this world promotes and be a worker, to be diligent and disciplined when bombarded with tools for being sedentary and idle. As amazing experientially as the year has been I have started to learn that this life is not merely about collecting experiences. You can travel, run long distances, hike longer distances, move all over the country, read all of the great books and still miss out on the most important parts of this life. And, to me, the most important parts are honoring God and bringing him glory, loving other people as I have been loved, and becoming more fully human, which practically speaking means becoming more like Jesus was when he lived as a human. In that sense, then, 2010 was a success. As every year is where you survive the battle and maintain the focus on those proper ends.
Also, I cannot wait to be a father.
31 December 2010
23 December 2010
"The Dreaded Infant's Hand"
The title of this post probably doesn’t strike you as the typical title for a Christmas post written by a devout believer. It is a line from John Milton’s poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Milton wrote the poem in the advent season of 1629, when he was just 21 years old. Perhaps more than any text than the Bible it captures for me the essence of what happened on that hallowed night in the hill country of Judea 2,000 years ago.
It is a phenomenally weird poem, as befitting a phenomenally weird event. Milton begins by invoking the “Heav’nly Muse” to offer a verse to the newly born Messiah, imagining the writing of the poem as co-temporal with the physical birth. He then offers a hymn in which he expresses many of the traditional Christmasy themes-- “No War, or Battle’s sound/ Was heard the world around” (53-54); “But peaceful was the night/ Wherein the Prince of light/ His reign of peace upon the earth began” (61-63); the shepherds in the fields are greeted with “such music sweet/ Their hearts and ears did greet/ As never was by mortal finger struck” (93-95). Christ’s eventual death is even prefigured: “The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy/ That on the bitter cross/ Must redeem our loss/ So both himself and us to glorify” (151-154). The world is hushed and calm, the silence only broken by an angelic chorus making such gratifying noise that it almost has the power to make time “run back” (135). Milton presents a beautiful description of the night.
However, the poem takes an odd turn in the nineteenth stanza, a move hinted at in the preceding two stanzas. Through the end of the poem (excluding the final stanza) Milton imagines the mythological gods of history as real and banishes them by the birth of the Son. Apollo is no longer able to “divine” from his “shrine”, Baal and Dagon are booted from their respective temples, Adonis is wounded, Moloch flees, Osiris has likewise gone missing, the tree nymphs mourn in their “tangled thickets”, even the pagan household gods moan in agony. In other words, while the night is silent in the world of men, the world of the gods is being usurped, “naught but profoundest Hell” to be their abode from now on (218). They feel from “Judah’s Land/ The dreaded Infant’s hand” (221-222). And, finally, “Our babe to show his Godhead true/ Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew” (227-228).
Needless to say, this is an interesting place for a Christmas poem to end up. Milton would use this convention again in his famous epic, Paradise Lost. In the newly created hell alongside Satan, we find Moloch and other pagan gods. I don’t know that Milton is acknowledging their actual existence or merely using the familiar names for purposes of argumentation, though I recall with unease imagining in my first reading through the Old Testament that Moloch and Baal actually existed-- impotent, of course, compared to God, but nevertheless real. But that is neither here nor there. But he is illustrating a larger point here, a point that I think makes this Nativity ode so powerful: it is not merely in Christ’s death and resurrection that the forces of sin and death were defeated, but the amazing fact of the Incarnation accounts for this victory as well. Without Incarnation there is no salvation. Without God taking our place on the eventual cross, there is no reason to think we can be freed finally from sin and death. Everything wrought on the cross was precipitated and, in a sense, guaranteed by the birth of the Messiah. The birth of the Son was the down payment on the impending overthrow of Satan’s reign on earth. Of course there was more required than the Incarnation, but in that moment an intense battle was being fought (and won). The tiny babe, meek and mild in the swaddling bands, lying in a manger, with tiny pink fingers was a dreaded hand to the powers of darkness in the heavenly realms. They were conquered in that moment, banished. And the reign of God began with an invasion.
It is a phenomenally weird poem, as befitting a phenomenally weird event. Milton begins by invoking the “Heav’nly Muse” to offer a verse to the newly born Messiah, imagining the writing of the poem as co-temporal with the physical birth. He then offers a hymn in which he expresses many of the traditional Christmasy themes-- “No War, or Battle’s sound/ Was heard the world around” (53-54); “But peaceful was the night/ Wherein the Prince of light/ His reign of peace upon the earth began” (61-63); the shepherds in the fields are greeted with “such music sweet/ Their hearts and ears did greet/ As never was by mortal finger struck” (93-95). Christ’s eventual death is even prefigured: “The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy/ That on the bitter cross/ Must redeem our loss/ So both himself and us to glorify” (151-154). The world is hushed and calm, the silence only broken by an angelic chorus making such gratifying noise that it almost has the power to make time “run back” (135). Milton presents a beautiful description of the night.
However, the poem takes an odd turn in the nineteenth stanza, a move hinted at in the preceding two stanzas. Through the end of the poem (excluding the final stanza) Milton imagines the mythological gods of history as real and banishes them by the birth of the Son. Apollo is no longer able to “divine” from his “shrine”, Baal and Dagon are booted from their respective temples, Adonis is wounded, Moloch flees, Osiris has likewise gone missing, the tree nymphs mourn in their “tangled thickets”, even the pagan household gods moan in agony. In other words, while the night is silent in the world of men, the world of the gods is being usurped, “naught but profoundest Hell” to be their abode from now on (218). They feel from “Judah’s Land/ The dreaded Infant’s hand” (221-222). And, finally, “Our babe to show his Godhead true/ Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew” (227-228).
Needless to say, this is an interesting place for a Christmas poem to end up. Milton would use this convention again in his famous epic, Paradise Lost. In the newly created hell alongside Satan, we find Moloch and other pagan gods. I don’t know that Milton is acknowledging their actual existence or merely using the familiar names for purposes of argumentation, though I recall with unease imagining in my first reading through the Old Testament that Moloch and Baal actually existed-- impotent, of course, compared to God, but nevertheless real. But that is neither here nor there. But he is illustrating a larger point here, a point that I think makes this Nativity ode so powerful: it is not merely in Christ’s death and resurrection that the forces of sin and death were defeated, but the amazing fact of the Incarnation accounts for this victory as well. Without Incarnation there is no salvation. Without God taking our place on the eventual cross, there is no reason to think we can be freed finally from sin and death. Everything wrought on the cross was precipitated and, in a sense, guaranteed by the birth of the Messiah. The birth of the Son was the down payment on the impending overthrow of Satan’s reign on earth. Of course there was more required than the Incarnation, but in that moment an intense battle was being fought (and won). The tiny babe, meek and mild in the swaddling bands, lying in a manger, with tiny pink fingers was a dreaded hand to the powers of darkness in the heavenly realms. They were conquered in that moment, banished. And the reign of God began with an invasion.
21 December 2010
El Paso Revisited
My wife and I spent the past several days driving back and forth to El Paso, Texas, our old home, to be in a wedding. Two of our dear friends were getting hitched which provided a nice excuse to get back and see all of our old people (or most, I should say).
I had an odd relationship with El Paso. When we first moved there from Colorado I pined away for my beloved former state. Our return visits were fraught with emotion at having to return to El Paso. There were a few times my sullenness almost got the best of me at about Raton Pass, New Mexico. I longed for Colorado because I wanted to be back in Colorado. I considered it my true home and in El Paso I always felt like a usurper, a foreigner.
But slowly, and almost imperceptibly, it became home. We bought a house, started running the local mountain-biking trails, I joined an Ultimate Frisbee group; we had come down with a church and those people became like family. Everyone from our church unable to travel to be with family for Thanksgiving spent last Thanksgiving together. We had a huge meal and played football in a park and watched a Harry Potter movie. We all slept on the floor together in our host’s living room. It was one of the best Thanksgivings I have ever had.
When I quit my job in early January of this year and started taking classes in the spring everything in El Paso started to line-up. I remember going for runs thinking I would probably live here for the next 10 or 15 years. And, remarkably, I was OK with that. But that wasn’t to be the case. A few months later the moving truck was packed and we were headed to Kansas. It hurt to do that. It didn’t hurt because I loved the desert weather and was looking with grave anticipation to enduring an indefinite number of Midwest winters. It wasn’t because I was going to miss having mountains in my backyard and rocky trails to run on. It wasn’t even that I was no longer going to be able to play Frisbee three times a week. What hurt was leaving the people who had become my family.
The older I get the more I realize how much more important the people around you are than the physical location around you. The great blessing of my life is Christian fellowship. I have been held up by this force when everything around me is crumbling. I have been borne aloft to heights of community, love, and compassion that I never imagined possible. In many ways El Paso is a transient city. And I was easily a pilgrim there. But I wasn’t going alone.
Therefore, the best part of returning was returning to people. It was wonderful to go to Carlsbad Caverns, wonderful to camp out in the desert on a warm December night, wonderful to hike the old mountains and jog the old trails, but the best part was seeing the people we love so much. The first people to know us as Toby and Clara Coffman. Our fellow travelers.
Everything about physical El Paso was familiar yet foreign. I knew the streets by heart and didn’t have to think about where I was going while I drove, but it felt strange in its familiarity. It was no longer home. I was only visiting. But the people were not foreign or strange. They were the ones I loved, the ones I had been at the hospital with the day their children were born, the ones I had sweated out three years of life with. People are my home, my only home on this earth. And though time destroys everything temporal in its path, my relationships with these people are eternal and untouchable.
I had an odd relationship with El Paso. When we first moved there from Colorado I pined away for my beloved former state. Our return visits were fraught with emotion at having to return to El Paso. There were a few times my sullenness almost got the best of me at about Raton Pass, New Mexico. I longed for Colorado because I wanted to be back in Colorado. I considered it my true home and in El Paso I always felt like a usurper, a foreigner.
But slowly, and almost imperceptibly, it became home. We bought a house, started running the local mountain-biking trails, I joined an Ultimate Frisbee group; we had come down with a church and those people became like family. Everyone from our church unable to travel to be with family for Thanksgiving spent last Thanksgiving together. We had a huge meal and played football in a park and watched a Harry Potter movie. We all slept on the floor together in our host’s living room. It was one of the best Thanksgivings I have ever had.
When I quit my job in early January of this year and started taking classes in the spring everything in El Paso started to line-up. I remember going for runs thinking I would probably live here for the next 10 or 15 years. And, remarkably, I was OK with that. But that wasn’t to be the case. A few months later the moving truck was packed and we were headed to Kansas. It hurt to do that. It didn’t hurt because I loved the desert weather and was looking with grave anticipation to enduring an indefinite number of Midwest winters. It wasn’t because I was going to miss having mountains in my backyard and rocky trails to run on. It wasn’t even that I was no longer going to be able to play Frisbee three times a week. What hurt was leaving the people who had become my family.
The older I get the more I realize how much more important the people around you are than the physical location around you. The great blessing of my life is Christian fellowship. I have been held up by this force when everything around me is crumbling. I have been borne aloft to heights of community, love, and compassion that I never imagined possible. In many ways El Paso is a transient city. And I was easily a pilgrim there. But I wasn’t going alone.
Therefore, the best part of returning was returning to people. It was wonderful to go to Carlsbad Caverns, wonderful to camp out in the desert on a warm December night, wonderful to hike the old mountains and jog the old trails, but the best part was seeing the people we love so much. The first people to know us as Toby and Clara Coffman. Our fellow travelers.
Everything about physical El Paso was familiar yet foreign. I knew the streets by heart and didn’t have to think about where I was going while I drove, but it felt strange in its familiarity. It was no longer home. I was only visiting. But the people were not foreign or strange. They were the ones I loved, the ones I had been at the hospital with the day their children were born, the ones I had sweated out three years of life with. People are my home, my only home on this earth. And though time destroys everything temporal in its path, my relationships with these people are eternal and untouchable.
14 December 2010
First Semester Reflections
I apologize in advance: this is a rather lengthy post which is generally a sure indication that it contains a rant. This is, in fact, the case.
The future of the liberal arts is, to say the least, tenuous. There are many folks out there with many different theories as to why this is and what has caused the current state of fragility. Most people say some valuable things, but no one really presents a comprehensive solution. There are the tenured dinosaurs in English, foreign language, and History departments who, secure in their positions, feel free to pontificate about the liberal arts having no need to justify their existence. There are the fresh PhDs being pumped out of our nation’s universities at an astounding rate who run smack dab into a job market more crowded than a Mexican soccer game, with most grateful to find low-paying adjunct teaching jobs which pay roughly the equivalent of janitorial work minus the health benefits. And there are students like me, who enter graduate programs in liberal arts by the drove every year, who are compelled to face rather bleak post-graduation employment prospects. Most of us will turn to law school or teach high school, if we can find a job in that other overcrowded market.
I am not going to answer here the question as to why the liberal arts exist. That is outside the scope of a blog post. I have sympathies on both sides: I think the liberal arts are essential to an understanding of humanity, but I also sympathize with the state legislatures forced to decide where to cut money and who naturally turn their eyes to a budget-sucker in the state colleges that has largely forsaken the teaching of undergraduates and are, for the most part, more concerned with the publishing requirements for tenure than inspiring the next generation of men and women to be more fully human. In other words, the liberal arts are quite necessary, but are terrible at arguing for (and showing) their functional value in society.
Perhaps I will get a chance to talk about all of this in greater length at a further time, but I have just completed my first semester of graduate school and am here to render my highly biased verdict on the past four months. Most of you know that I came into a graduate program in English in a non-traditional manner, having received my Bachelor degree in Finance. Therefore, I always imagined I would start at a disadvantage. Many of my fellow students not only majored in English as undergraduates but have spent time teaching since. They are more broadly read than I am, have written more papers, and, in general, have spent more time thinking, talking, and writing about literature. However, I never really felt ill-prepared once the semester progressed. This is not to say there are not people smarter than me in the program; there most certainly are talented folks around, but, on the whole, I am not the class idiot, which is nice.
I took one class where all we did was read and study Charles Dickens. This was wonderful. I do not imagine I would ever choose to read six of Dickens’ novels in any other context, so it was nice to have compulsion in that direction. My professor loved Dickens and wasn’t afraid to confront his prejudices and faults, though she was never unfair and snobbish (as we tend to be when looking back on our forebears).
Another class I took was an undergraduate level class that was intended to fill in some gaps in my reading (mercifully I only had to take one of these classes. Others I know of have had to take three or four.). This class was easy and enjoyable; I was graded like an undergraduate, which was nice, and my professor is the graduate advisor and a ridiculously intelligent man. I am taking another class with him next semester and am very much looking forward to it.
My third class was the Introduction to Graduate Studies course that is mandatory for every student in the graduate program. After taking this class I have decided that in order to be compelled to pursue a doctoral program in Literature God would have to rend the clouds and speak to me out of them, commanding me to go for the PhD. In other words, this class persuaded me that the liberal arts are surely on shaky ground and, furthermore, that I would rather manage accounts at a plumbing wholesaler than try to survive in this world as it currently exists.
The crowning assignment for this course was a 10-12 page paper on any piece of literature we chose (sounds alright at this point). However, this isn’t your undergraduate research paper (which is fine and expected in a graduate program), and the scope of the assignment was to find a critical conversation (scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals) and engage in, and further, this conversation. So, to put this in non-academic terms: I, a first semester graduate student, was supposed to pick a work of literature most likely combed over by academics who had completed PhD dissertational work on this specific author, find a flaw in their argument, exploit that flaw, and thereby contribute something “new” to the “conversation.” I will be the first to admit my arrogance, but this even smacked me as presumptuous.
And this is the future of the English field. Everything worthwhile that can be said about Shakespeare has been said in the previous 400 years, but you have to find something new to say so it can get published in a journal and you can keep your job. This has led to so much grasping for the new thing in scholarship that academics have ghettoized themselves into a world where the only people who are qualified to read the articles written are other people with PhDs in the same narrow field or people in a related field with a high tolerance for boredom and an abounding love for contrived five-syllable words.
This rant began well-intentioned and with a narrow enough scope, though I have gotten way off topic. I chose a poem for my paper called “Goblin Market” by a Victorian-era female poet, Christina Rossetti. I will attach a link to the paper in case anyone is interested, but I continually found myself being forced not to say something really good, but only something new.
I am glad it was a hard paper to write. Indeed, I anticipated that graduate school would be hard and looked forward to the challenge. The difficulty is not what bothered me this semester. The narrowness is what bothered me. In a field as broad and important to humanity as Literature, I am forced to focus on minutiae rather than anything broadly humanistic (and I haven’t even touched on the abundance of critical theories stacking up on top of each other and clamoring for control). To me this is tragic. It is such a miniscule percentage of the population that has the luxury of participating in what I am so fortunate to have a crack at and it feels like we have to waste a good chunk of it on ephemeral matters. I engage with Literature at all for what it says about the eternal. But in today’s academy there is no place for such broad thinking. Until you get tenure, anyways.
Update: Here is the link to my term paper, if anyone is interested. Still no grade so I can't really tell you how good it may be (or not, for that matter).
Update: Here is the link to my term paper, if anyone is interested. Still no grade so I can't really tell you how good it may be (or not, for that matter).
11 December 2010
Propositions vs Relationship
I was watching a video recently on the Internet that was a round table discussion of the British scholar, author, and Cambridge professor C.S. Lewis and his intellectual life. Lewis is a hero to many in my generation and had a towering intellect. Perhaps his most prominent scholarly work was the sixteenth-century prose and poetry book for the Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL) series. For the project he read every book from the sixteenth-century that was in his university library. And, I imagine Cambridge had a pretty extensive collection.
One of the men in the discussion I watched is a Lewis scholar named Alan Jacobs who wrote the best biography of Lewis I have ever read, The Narnian. In the video he says that when Lewis came to put his faith into Christianity it was not a matter of an intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather something larger, something almost undefinable--faith. In other words, becoming a Christian is not exactly like filling out a checklist, finding that you agree with everything on it, and then checking the box at the bottom that says you would like to become a Christian now. There was something else necessary, for everyone from one of the intellectual giants of his age to every believer in my small church in the middle of Kansas.
Truth (with a capital-T), therefore, is not only a matter of intellectual assent to propositions, but something else. This may sound confusing and is in many ways. Truth is not something neat and tidy and easy to express. Jesus told Thomas in the Gospel of John that he is truth (14:6). Certainly Jesus is not here saying that he is a proposition or even a combination of propositions. Again, James tells the early Christians that mere belief in God, intellectual assent to the question of his existence, is insufficient and, indeed, signifies nothing since even the demons believe in the existence of God (2:19).
My point is not to say that propositions are of no value. The Christian faith through the Bible makes many propositional claims that the faith hinges on-- the virgin birth of Jesus, his sinless life, death and resurrection, to name a few of the major ones. My point is only to say that faith is more than propositional assent. This is why a popular term for Biblical truth-- inerrant-- is insufficient. An author I am reading on scriptural interpretation, Dan McCartney, says rather humorously that “a telephone directory might be inerrant, but its ‘truth’ is not likely to set anyone free” (Understand 38).
Doctrine is important but insufficient. Truth contains doctrine, but overwhelms it as well. Christian Truth has as much to do with relationship as it does with proposition and doctrine. We cannot neglect this fact both in our own spiritual lives and as we reach out to the people God has placed in our lives. If our faith is resting on intellectual assent to a handful of religious propositions and has nothing to do with a relationship with God then there is something missing. Likewise, our mission to our friends is not merely to get them to acknowledge doctrinal truth, but inspire them to a relationship with the God of the universe who made them and loves them and died for them. Propositions without relationship is meaningless.
One of the men in the discussion I watched is a Lewis scholar named Alan Jacobs who wrote the best biography of Lewis I have ever read, The Narnian. In the video he says that when Lewis came to put his faith into Christianity it was not a matter of an intellectual assent to a series of propositions, but rather something larger, something almost undefinable--faith. In other words, becoming a Christian is not exactly like filling out a checklist, finding that you agree with everything on it, and then checking the box at the bottom that says you would like to become a Christian now. There was something else necessary, for everyone from one of the intellectual giants of his age to every believer in my small church in the middle of Kansas.
Truth (with a capital-T), therefore, is not only a matter of intellectual assent to propositions, but something else. This may sound confusing and is in many ways. Truth is not something neat and tidy and easy to express. Jesus told Thomas in the Gospel of John that he is truth (14:6). Certainly Jesus is not here saying that he is a proposition or even a combination of propositions. Again, James tells the early Christians that mere belief in God, intellectual assent to the question of his existence, is insufficient and, indeed, signifies nothing since even the demons believe in the existence of God (2:19).
My point is not to say that propositions are of no value. The Christian faith through the Bible makes many propositional claims that the faith hinges on-- the virgin birth of Jesus, his sinless life, death and resurrection, to name a few of the major ones. My point is only to say that faith is more than propositional assent. This is why a popular term for Biblical truth-- inerrant-- is insufficient. An author I am reading on scriptural interpretation, Dan McCartney, says rather humorously that “a telephone directory might be inerrant, but its ‘truth’ is not likely to set anyone free” (Understand 38).
Doctrine is important but insufficient. Truth contains doctrine, but overwhelms it as well. Christian Truth has as much to do with relationship as it does with proposition and doctrine. We cannot neglect this fact both in our own spiritual lives and as we reach out to the people God has placed in our lives. If our faith is resting on intellectual assent to a handful of religious propositions and has nothing to do with a relationship with God then there is something missing. Likewise, our mission to our friends is not merely to get them to acknowledge doctrinal truth, but inspire them to a relationship with the God of the universe who made them and loves them and died for them. Propositions without relationship is meaningless.
08 December 2010
The Insufficiency of Bible-based Morality
The pastor of my church recently shared a statistic about the percentage of people in the preceding four generations who have claimed a Bible-based framework for their morality. Though the dates of a given generation seem to differ from source to source, here are the numbers he gave: the Builders (1927-1945), 65%; the Boomers (1946-1964), 35%; the Busters (1965-1983), 16%; the Millennials (1984-2000), 4%. Other than showing me that Clara and I happen to belong to a different generation (my wife, the Buster), I wanted to take a minute to speak about this statistic and how it can be misleading.
Every culture organizes itself around what is often called a social contract. These are not literal contracts we sign when we reach maturity, but they are the implicit structures our society has constructed which we transgress at the risk of being ostracized, outcast, or imprisoned. These are the basic dos and don’ts that we hold everyone to equally. These change along different cultures and different periods. Most cultures hold to some of the basics—don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t act so as to put others at risk of harm, etc. Some exist only uniquely—for a few hundred years of English history attendance at the local Anglican parish was compulsory. And, for most of our nation’s history, the governing social contract was derived from the morality of the Bible. And, as a Bible-believing, faithful Christian I believe this to have been a pretty good thing. I like the system of morality within the Bible and think it sets up a culture for a lot of benefits. Indeed, think what you like about America, but we enjoy unique liberties, privileges, and prosperities that are largely derived from holding to this social contract for as long as we did. We are all, like it or not, the product of this system of morality and our country would be unrecognizable were it not for this framework that, until recently, seemed to hold sway.
However, there is a world of difference between adhering to a Bible-based system of morality with a view to constructing a prosperous, diligent, and innovative culture behind this system, and people being saved by the grace of God offered to us through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, a Bible-based moral system is not indicative of a culture that has accepted the Lordship of God. There are many reasons for adapting a particular social contract that have nothing to do with seeking salvation only through the mercy of a beneficent God.
I fear that as Christians we sometimes conflate these two things; we imagine that if people are adhering to the moral system our work as Christians is accomplished. This is a grievous error and causes the church to fall into all manner of wrong-thinking about this world. The following scriptural passage from the apostle Paul to the Corinthians is clarifying:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
What the apostle Paul is saying in this passage is that people outside of the church do not understand the same things about truth, wisdom, and morality as “spiritual” people, those who have received the grace of God, are able to freely discern. Too often I feel as if we try and legislate and institute our morality as if this were the chief mission of God’s people on this planet. But, for the large part, our morality is incoherent to people who do not know God and have not been given faith to believe the gospel. This is not to say that all people are not born with a moral compass—everyone certainly is born with the capacity to discern moral truths—but our specifically Christian, “spiritually discerned” truths are folly to people who do not have the Spirit of God.
While some would look at the statistic I gave in the first paragraph and despair, I see reason for hope. As our pastor pointed out when he shared this statistic, this puts the church right back into the place it was in when the New Testament was being written. There are, of course, some downfalls to rejecting the Bible-based system of morality and these losses are to be lamented, but my hope for our nation is not a system of morality, but for the church to hold forth the Jesus of the gospels and for him to seek and save that which is lost.
This is every Christian’s greater hope. We do not seek for vindication on this earth; we do not feel like we have to fight all of our own battles; we can trust and hope in a God who we believe is eternal and not far from each of us, a God who thunders in the heavens and will one day make all things new.
Every culture organizes itself around what is often called a social contract. These are not literal contracts we sign when we reach maturity, but they are the implicit structures our society has constructed which we transgress at the risk of being ostracized, outcast, or imprisoned. These are the basic dos and don’ts that we hold everyone to equally. These change along different cultures and different periods. Most cultures hold to some of the basics—don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t act so as to put others at risk of harm, etc. Some exist only uniquely—for a few hundred years of English history attendance at the local Anglican parish was compulsory. And, for most of our nation’s history, the governing social contract was derived from the morality of the Bible. And, as a Bible-believing, faithful Christian I believe this to have been a pretty good thing. I like the system of morality within the Bible and think it sets up a culture for a lot of benefits. Indeed, think what you like about America, but we enjoy unique liberties, privileges, and prosperities that are largely derived from holding to this social contract for as long as we did. We are all, like it or not, the product of this system of morality and our country would be unrecognizable were it not for this framework that, until recently, seemed to hold sway.
However, there is a world of difference between adhering to a Bible-based system of morality with a view to constructing a prosperous, diligent, and innovative culture behind this system, and people being saved by the grace of God offered to us through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. In other words, a Bible-based moral system is not indicative of a culture that has accepted the Lordship of God. There are many reasons for adapting a particular social contract that have nothing to do with seeking salvation only through the mercy of a beneficent God.
I fear that as Christians we sometimes conflate these two things; we imagine that if people are adhering to the moral system our work as Christians is accomplished. This is a grievous error and causes the church to fall into all manner of wrong-thinking about this world. The following scriptural passage from the apostle Paul to the Corinthians is clarifying:
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
1 Corinthians 2:14 (ESV)
What the apostle Paul is saying in this passage is that people outside of the church do not understand the same things about truth, wisdom, and morality as “spiritual” people, those who have received the grace of God, are able to freely discern. Too often I feel as if we try and legislate and institute our morality as if this were the chief mission of God’s people on this planet. But, for the large part, our morality is incoherent to people who do not know God and have not been given faith to believe the gospel. This is not to say that all people are not born with a moral compass—everyone certainly is born with the capacity to discern moral truths—but our specifically Christian, “spiritually discerned” truths are folly to people who do not have the Spirit of God.
While some would look at the statistic I gave in the first paragraph and despair, I see reason for hope. As our pastor pointed out when he shared this statistic, this puts the church right back into the place it was in when the New Testament was being written. There are, of course, some downfalls to rejecting the Bible-based system of morality and these losses are to be lamented, but my hope for our nation is not a system of morality, but for the church to hold forth the Jesus of the gospels and for him to seek and save that which is lost.
This is every Christian’s greater hope. We do not seek for vindication on this earth; we do not feel like we have to fight all of our own battles; we can trust and hope in a God who we believe is eternal and not far from each of us, a God who thunders in the heavens and will one day make all things new.
05 December 2010
Post, the first
Mostly, I am starting this blog because I don’t like the service that was hosting the old one. I was getting spammed with comments and the features weren’t that great. Sometimes the website would load, but it often would not and if it did it took too long. However, this is a consumer culture and if I don’t like something I can just go get a new and better one. This works with vehicles, televisions, churches, and spouses. I guess it works here, too. So, this is where you will find me on the inter-webs from here on out. I will not erase the old blog, so if there is something on there that you particularly enjoyed it will be there until the computers take over the world, Terminator style.
The name of this blog is taken from a set of companion poems written by John Milton called “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro,” respectively. ‘Penseroso’ contains hints of our English word ‘pensive’, and means about that, though within the context of the poem, melancholy is a more accurate translation. The closest English word to ‘allegro’ in common usage that I can think of is, unfortunately, the prescription medication Allegra, whose job, fittingly, is to keep the user happy despite seasonal allergies. ‘Allegro’ is best translated as happiness, joy, or, as Milton specifically uses within the poem, mirth.
Though these are two distinct poems, they serve a complementary role to one another. The first in order is L’Allegro which begins with Milton banishing melancholy from his life and vowing to live a life devoted to mirth (joy). The poem begins at dawn on a picturesque morning and Milton imagines the beauty of a pastoral setting. He speaks also of the joy of a crowded city and the company of men and women, wishes for frequent weddings, and praises the poetry of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. He ends by telling mirth, “These delights if thou canst give/ Mirth, with thee I mean to live.”
Il Penseroso begins, similarly, by banishing mirth (“vain deluding joys”). Here he invokes the benefits of solitude, sobriety, steadfastness; the poem begins at dusk and pictures a night alone in the dark. He longs for peace and quiet, imagining himself secluded in a lonely tower watching the patterns of the stars and being alone with his books. He wants to be hidden from day and the tedium of real life. In other words, he wishes to sit in the presence of God forever. He ends the poem, once again, “These pleasures melancholy give/ And I with thee will choose to live.”
So, for which of these positions was Milton advocating? Both. He wanted us to be both. The full life is not one filled only with partying and people; if you cannot imagine spending time alone there is something missing in your life. On the other hand if you can only imagine monkish solitude and separation and see no joy in a wedding ceremony or a few drinks with friends there is likewise something amiss.
I have sensed this tension in my own life for some time. Clara says that I am constantly being pulled by my desire to be social and my desire to be alone with books. There have been periods in my life where I have been given over to either mirth or melancholy; periods marked by constantly surrounding myself with people to the detriment of spiritual formation and diligence, as well as periods where I have been so cloistered in a room with books that I forget there are people out there I am to love and be involved with.
And it is easy to get either on the cheap. Milton is not advocating cheap joy or cheap melancholy. Cheap joy is the joy of drinking too much and forgetting your inhibitions, or spending all day watching The Office on Netflix, or any pursuit of joy that functions as a balm against thought. Cheap melancholy is also possible, though infinitely more subtle. I really like sad songs, and this is mostly because they provide this sort of easy thoughtfulness. You can listen to a song about death or breakup or some other lamentable tragedy and you are instantly transported into a world of reflection and that sometime sweet feeling of melancholy and you don’t have to do anything. Four minutes, the proper voice inflection, and guitar strumming and you are there. This is not what Milton was after in pursuing melancholy. He was after genuine love of solitude, genuine desire to sit at God’s feet, genuine wonder at the way the world works and the myriad experiences of our lives. Neither joy nor melancholy comes easily in this scheme. Both are to be worked for, thought about, in order to be attained.
I believe that in every human heart there is a desire for this pursuit, a hope to achieve this balance and live within this tension. A fully human person is one who lives within both other-seeking daytime joy and solitary nighttime thoughtfulness. We don’t envy the life of the constant party animal any more than we envy the life of the medieval monk. In these poems Milton recognizes this. He tells us that joy can go wrong, pleasure can be taken too far and lead to transgression. He also tells us that melancholy left unchecked can lead to despair. We must be warned against both excesses. We were made to live with mirth and melancholy harmoniously, and as we pursue that end we will find ourselves able to achieve great things in the context of a truly satisfied life.
That’s why I named this blog what I have named it; hopefully there will be instances of both mirth and melancholy on this page.
The name of this blog is taken from a set of companion poems written by John Milton called “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro,” respectively. ‘Penseroso’ contains hints of our English word ‘pensive’, and means about that, though within the context of the poem, melancholy is a more accurate translation. The closest English word to ‘allegro’ in common usage that I can think of is, unfortunately, the prescription medication Allegra, whose job, fittingly, is to keep the user happy despite seasonal allergies. ‘Allegro’ is best translated as happiness, joy, or, as Milton specifically uses within the poem, mirth.
Though these are two distinct poems, they serve a complementary role to one another. The first in order is L’Allegro which begins with Milton banishing melancholy from his life and vowing to live a life devoted to mirth (joy). The poem begins at dawn on a picturesque morning and Milton imagines the beauty of a pastoral setting. He speaks also of the joy of a crowded city and the company of men and women, wishes for frequent weddings, and praises the poetry of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. He ends by telling mirth, “These delights if thou canst give/ Mirth, with thee I mean to live.”
Il Penseroso begins, similarly, by banishing mirth (“vain deluding joys”). Here he invokes the benefits of solitude, sobriety, steadfastness; the poem begins at dusk and pictures a night alone in the dark. He longs for peace and quiet, imagining himself secluded in a lonely tower watching the patterns of the stars and being alone with his books. He wants to be hidden from day and the tedium of real life. In other words, he wishes to sit in the presence of God forever. He ends the poem, once again, “These pleasures melancholy give/ And I with thee will choose to live.”
So, for which of these positions was Milton advocating? Both. He wanted us to be both. The full life is not one filled only with partying and people; if you cannot imagine spending time alone there is something missing in your life. On the other hand if you can only imagine monkish solitude and separation and see no joy in a wedding ceremony or a few drinks with friends there is likewise something amiss.
I have sensed this tension in my own life for some time. Clara says that I am constantly being pulled by my desire to be social and my desire to be alone with books. There have been periods in my life where I have been given over to either mirth or melancholy; periods marked by constantly surrounding myself with people to the detriment of spiritual formation and diligence, as well as periods where I have been so cloistered in a room with books that I forget there are people out there I am to love and be involved with.
And it is easy to get either on the cheap. Milton is not advocating cheap joy or cheap melancholy. Cheap joy is the joy of drinking too much and forgetting your inhibitions, or spending all day watching The Office on Netflix, or any pursuit of joy that functions as a balm against thought. Cheap melancholy is also possible, though infinitely more subtle. I really like sad songs, and this is mostly because they provide this sort of easy thoughtfulness. You can listen to a song about death or breakup or some other lamentable tragedy and you are instantly transported into a world of reflection and that sometime sweet feeling of melancholy and you don’t have to do anything. Four minutes, the proper voice inflection, and guitar strumming and you are there. This is not what Milton was after in pursuing melancholy. He was after genuine love of solitude, genuine desire to sit at God’s feet, genuine wonder at the way the world works and the myriad experiences of our lives. Neither joy nor melancholy comes easily in this scheme. Both are to be worked for, thought about, in order to be attained.
I believe that in every human heart there is a desire for this pursuit, a hope to achieve this balance and live within this tension. A fully human person is one who lives within both other-seeking daytime joy and solitary nighttime thoughtfulness. We don’t envy the life of the constant party animal any more than we envy the life of the medieval monk. In these poems Milton recognizes this. He tells us that joy can go wrong, pleasure can be taken too far and lead to transgression. He also tells us that melancholy left unchecked can lead to despair. We must be warned against both excesses. We were made to live with mirth and melancholy harmoniously, and as we pursue that end we will find ourselves able to achieve great things in the context of a truly satisfied life.
That’s why I named this blog what I have named it; hopefully there will be instances of both mirth and melancholy on this page.
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