Christmas and Consumerism or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giving

It is pretty easy these days to mock the excesses of Christmas. The stores opening on Thanksgiving, five year-olds asking for iPhones, the Best Buy commercial where an aunt gives her nieces tablets (seriously? I am from a fairly wealthy family, but I don't recall ever getting anything from an aunt nor would I expect anything), and the way the birth of Jesus is tied into people going into debt. The critiques write themselves and are so, so boring. Yes, we get it anti-consumerists, you don't want to buy things for people. Could you please just quiet down about it? Left hand and right hand not knowing each other, Pharisees praying loudly and all that.

I used to fall into the critic crowd (though I always lustily accepted whatever my parents got for me) and then I had kids. Kids make you go bananas about giving. There is nothing better in the world than giving your kids a gift. I do it all of the time. I'll see some little knick-knack that no one alive really needs and get it for Owen because I love to give him stuff. We bought him a Strider bike for Christmas and I kept it at work so he wouldn't see it before the big day. For the past two weeks I have walked past that thing multiple times every day and broken out into a mile-wide grin. I can't wait to give it to him. This morning I was at the farm store getting some chicken feed for our girls and bought him four little animal toys because they had giraffes and he loves giraffes. And then I got him a horse, too, because he has a rocking horse upstairs that he likes to ride while I ride next to him on the rocking chair (we ride to the duck pond to feed the ducks and go fishing). His horse is named Lucky, and my rocking chair is named Lightning. He told me last night that instead of flying to Hawaii we should ride horses. "A fine, strong black horse," he told me. Who am I to disagree?

My parents get this better than anyone. They don't sit around fretting about the creeping consumerism of Christmas--they just give and give and give. If you want to break out of the secularizing impulse of our American incarnation of the holiday you don't do it by refraining  from giving. We are celebrating in this season the greatest gift of all time and all of our gifts are mere whispers, dull, petty imitations of that great gift God gave us in his Son, but we give them anyway to remind ourselves of that great gift. 

I am not trying to sanctify all giving that is done in the name of Christmas. Some is probably irresponsible. I don't advocate debt. Some is done with ulterior motives. But to me the extravagant giving is better than the self-righteous refraining that some seem to want to put in its place. Our Father has dealt with us extravagantly after all. And his generosity outstrips anything we could ever come close to matching. My answer to the consumerist conundrum, then, is to give more and give with a view to our profligately gifting God. 

Merry Christmas! Drink some eggnog.    

Violence and the Old Testament

As part of my Advent readings this year, I have read most of the Old Testament law. If Christ comes to enact a new covenant I want to better understand the old covenant. The Old Testament is such a strange--in the sense of foreign--set of documents to me that I often feel while reading that I am treading on ground best left undisturbed. There is so much of it I don't get, in the same way I don't get the Letter to the Hebrews--the culture is alien to me.

Given this cultural alienation it can be easy to condemn much of the book for its harshness. The violence in the Old Testament, God-endorsed and otherwise, is staggering. Along these lines Mark Twain once quipped that it was not the parts of the Bible he didn't understand that bothered him, but those parts that he did. Every time I read the Old Testament I become sympathetic to the Manichees and their dualism.

But the Manichees were heretics and the God who set Israel to clear the Holy Land of its inhabitants is the God who shows steadfast love to thousands and who sent Jesus to die on the cross to make atonement for our sins. If you lose the Old Testament, you lose Jesus. If God is not a God of wrath then there is nothing to be saved from. If God is not a God of grace than we are not saved. If God is not a covenantal God than we can have no assurance in our salvation. 

Anyway, I was reading one of those difficult passages in Deuteronomy this morning that makes our modern sensibilities shudder:

"If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve other gods,' which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all people." (13.6-9)

There are many such commandments in the Old Testament and in the historical books we see examples of people acting on these commands. It makes Jesus's famous words that whoever doesn't hate his mother or his father or his sister of his brother seem benign. It also makes the Bibles I had as a kid, with their cutesy pictures of serene animals and smiling Hebrews, seem far too saccharine for such R-rated material.* As I was puzzling over this issue over my morning orange juice I felt I must be missing something. And of course I was.

Right before chapter 13 begins with its kill all blasphemers commands, the Lord gives Moses a word about the people they are going to dispossess:

"When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods?--that I may also do the same.' You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods." (12.29-31)

There are certain sins the Lord detests more than others. I don't feel it is a stretch to say this. All sin is sin, but there is a qualitative difference between speaking a harsh word to your child and throwing your child into a fire. And in setting out a people peculiar to Himself, God could not allow that type of evil to remain in the land. How could you leave any remnant of that about? For if you don't destroy it utterly it will rear its head again.**

I think we have a tendency to sit at a distance from this culture and this time period and smooth over the differences between these competing faiths. We are not talking about the difference today between a practicing Jew and a practicing Hindu or a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Christian. We are talking about a people claimed by the Creator God, Yahweh, and people who sacrificed their children to Moloch. The differences are more than stark and the danger of returning to that type of brutalizing faith was an ever present reality for God's fledgling people. If he was to fulfill his purposes for Israel, that simply could not be allowed to happen.

In John Milton's stunningly weird and weirdly stunning Christmas poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," he pictures the infant Christ banishing the old gods of the world, ranging from the more benign (the nymphs and Thamuz) to the more insidious (Moloch, Dagon), from the new world he inaugurates. And in doing so, the infant Christ is bringing to completion the work began in the Promised Land by the people of God so long before him. But, as Christ inaugurates a new and better covenant, so the promise to worshipers of foreign gods is better. Now rather than dying for their gods, their gods have died, and the walls between them and the true God have been removed. So while I can appreciate what the old covenant was doing, I must say that I am immensely thankful to be living under the new. 

* In reading kids' Bibles to Owen I always am tempted to finish the story. For example, kids' Bibles seem to cut off the David and Goliath story after David flings the rock. Yea! He hit a guy in a head with a rock because he trusted God. The End. Violent, sure. But they leave out the part where David goes over to the not-yet-dead Philistine and picks up his giant sword and cuts his head off and holds it up for the armies of God to see. Master Caravaggio, take it away. I mean this with all reverence, that is a completely badass scene, but one I have yet to see depicted on felt-board or glistening card-stock pages.

** It should also be noted that it is not as if the Jews went on an unprecedented rampage through Palestine. It was not for nothing that the land of the Assyrians was called "The Land Bathed in Blood." Some cultures were spared, some individuals were converted to the faith. But there were certain peoples that could not be left to spread their disease to the people of God.

The Horrors of Homeschooling

I came across this lengthy article in Prospect by Kathryn Joyce profiling children who had been raised in fundamentalist home-schooling homes and escaped out of the miasma of Parental Control. I tend to chuckle, despite myself, when I read articles like this. Not that there aren't terrible homeschooling situations. Undoubtedly there are. And I feel real compassion for children who are raised to believe that any dissent from there parents is a sure route to hell. That is vicious and mean doctrine and should be spoken out against. In that sense, I have no problem with an article talking about some of these awful scenarios in which fundamentalist kids were raised. When this becomes problematic is when the anecdotal stories of abuse are slap-dashly used to represent the logical outcome of any homeschooling by Christians.

You can see this tendency in scare paragraphs ("scareagraphs"?) like the following: 

"What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstructionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA. Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry."

Now I have never heard of Rushdoony, and maybe he is the rat bastard he is made out to be in this clearly objective paragraph, but really all this paragraph seems to be saying is "one douchebag favored homeschooling." He was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he nonetheless "influenced" James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. How? you might ask. Doesn't matter. Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson! You just have to recite the names of conservative bogeymen and let that do the arguing for you.

I imagine most of you know that my wife was homeschooled through junior high and went to public high school. I don't know if her parents have ever heard of Rushdoony, and they would surely be surprised by the notion of democracy as "heresy" but none of that matters--they were Christians and homeschoolers, ergo bad people who suppressed their children.

The whole article is about as well-researched as a term paper one of my old freshman writing students turned into me at K-State. There are stats about how many people give money to the Homeschooling Defense fund, but none that might give any indication about the percentages of homeschooling students who are disgruntled and felt the need to escape the Fundamentalist Philistinism of their parents. Joyce relies on horrifying anecdotes. A homeschooled teen was killed by her parents and they had a popular homeschooling book on the shelf. Although the book does not explicitly tell parents to kill their kids it is clearly implied. Spanking is a gateway drug to murder, after all.  

But anecdotes don't prove much, really. My wife and her seven siblings seemed to enjoy the experience of being homeschooled and most will probably homeschool their own kids (as we might well do ourselves). My wife's dad is one of her heroes, and her mom her example of servanthood and love. Should I use their anecdotes to cancel out an opposing one?

You can feel Joyce's frustration when she writes things like this: "Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined." For shame, America! Letting parents teach their children and discipline them. Discipline is so medieval. Or this: "The amendment [in Pennsylvania] would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ 'fundamental right' to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference." I think we used to call this being a family. And I think that is Joyce's most elemental problem with homeschooling: the state does not have complete control, but parents. It is a short road from that belief to advocating for children to being taken out of their home because any conservative parenting constitutes abuse. 

There are problems aplenty with parenting in our nation, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the problems are not emanating from the occasional over-zealousness of Christian parents. Clara helps moms deliver babies nearly every day with stories that would put to shame the sob stories of kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons (incidentally, starting at an appropriate age, The Simpsons will form an integral part of our children's education; everything I needed to know about pop culture and America I learned from The Simpsons). She had a patient recently, eight months pregnant who is so addicted to alcohol that she drank hand-sanitizer while in the hospital to get a fix. How is life going to go for that kid? She has had numerous moms who were on meth and continued to use while pregnant. Others, less overtly extreme, just seem as if they do not care about their children at all. Often there is no father around. And I would imagine that these cases are relatively more common than an abusive homeschooling parent. But those cases don't rile up the target audience of Prospect to the same level of fear as that of the Christian Fundamentalist. Plus, they are only anecdotes as well. Most moms are drug-free, non-alcoholics, who will love their kids and try hard to raise them well. 

It is a complex world. Do abuses of homeschooling mean we should outlaw homeschooling? What about teachers who abuse children? Should we outlaw teachers? Does encouraging your daughter to value motherhood and children equate to naked patriarchal subjugation? What about just not giving a shit about your kids? Which is worse? Joyce doesn't want to answer complex questions. For her, it is not a complex issue. These disparate anecdotes are evidence enough, and her confirmation bias tells her everything she already knew.

Seven Days that Divide the World: Language, Scripture, and Science

This is the third post in a series. See the following links for parts one and two:

Introduction

Part One

In this post I will try to be a bit more charitable than I was in the last post on the subject. I understand what Lennox was doing in setting the stage for the debate at hand, but it seemed to insinuate a false equivalency between the two issues which I found misleading. And I overreacted, because I really don't like that sort of thing. Anyway, onto the next chapter.

Lennox begins chapter two with a brief section on language and how we ought to read all books, but especially the Bible. In short, the first question you ask is what the author was intending to communicate. Then, you ought to look to the most natural understanding of a passage. If something is poetry you ought to read the words poetically; if a work is historical then you should expect straightforward historical renderings. He also cautions us in reading texts from foreign cultures (such as the culture that produced Genesis), as if the natural meaning that we derive from a text is also the natural meaning that culture would derive. Sometimes there can be more than one natural meaning for a word. In Genesis, the word "earth" refers both to our planet as a whole and to the dry land mass, both of which are plenty accurate uses of the word earth. 

Also, literal understanding will not always work. Any person practicing common English today knows this one unassailable fact: whenever someone uses the word "literally" you can almost guarantee that whatever they say ought not to be taken literally. When I go for a fast run (in those halcyon days pre-Achilles injury) I would tell Owen I was flying, but of course I was only jumping from one foot to the other down a dirt road at a vigorous pace. Jesus tells us he is the door and the bread of life, but let us not attempt to walk through him or eat him. You get the point. We use metaphor all the time to convey a literal meaning. Language is confusing. But it makes sense to start with the most natural sense, and if that doesn't make sense then progress to the next level of meaning (metaphorical or otherwise). 

From this linguistic introduction, Lennox moves us into a discussion of how the Bible and science relate to one another. The Bible, obviously, does not speak to us in advanced scientific language. Calvin wrote in his commentary on Genesis: "Nothing is here treated but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere." And this is intentional on the part of God, Lennox argues. Scientific understanding is constantly changing. If God inspired Moses to write Genesis in twenty-second century scientific terms no one would understand it (and people in the twenty-fifth century would complain about all of the errors it contained). Calvin wrote that "the Holy Spirit would rather speak childishly than unintelligibly to the humble and unlearned."

Furthermore, Augusine warned against tying our doctrine too closely a scientific interpretation in his work On the Literal Meaning of Genesis:

"Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics [knowledge of the earth and heavens]; and we should all take means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and then laugh it to scorn. . . If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe these books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason."

Stone cold, Gus. But salient. I am all for fighting for the right interpretation of Scripture and willing to endure ridicule for defending clear Christian doctrine, but if something has been proven false and we cling to it for its own sake then we are going to look silly to a lot of people and dilute the gospel message.

Lennox here suggests separating the matters that are core to the Christian faith from those that are less central and allow for variation in opinion. Beyond that, we also need to be prepared, he suggests, to distinguish between what Scripture actually says and what we think it means. As it relates to his fixed earth example, once Christians made peace with a metaphorical interpretation of the pillars of the earth they were still able to take comfort in the metaphorical meaning. The earth might not be literally fixed in place, but it is fixed in God's affections and stable by his Son who upholds creation with his own power (metaphorically of course).

The incident of the fixed earth (and this I agree is a good principle) teaches us to be humble and be prepared to distinguish between what the Bible says and what we think it says (or wish it says). We shouldn't tie our interpretation of Scripture to the science du jour, but neither should we avoid science altogether and abdicate that ground. Finding a balance is difficult, but so, contra our Prosperity brethren, is everything else in the Christian life.

The Hammer of God

I just finished an extraordinary novel by Bo Giertz, a Swedish Lutheran pastor from the mid-twentieth century. The book is called The Hammer of God and is actually a collection of three novellas, all somewhat related to the other. Each short story is about young pastors recently entered into parish ministry and the challenges, revelations, temptations, and victories they experience. The first is set in 1820, the second in 1880, and the third in 1940-1. The pattern is fairly easy to discern, right around 60 years in between each story.

This is straight up theological fiction, much in the manner of Marilynne Robinson and her incredible Gilead novels (there is a third on the way!). It is difficult in these books to draw a line between story and theology, and it is clear that one was not intended.

The three stories are parallel in a number of ways. As I have said, each focuses on a young pastor freshly out of seminary in their first ministry assignment, and the challenges they face as they learn what it is to shepherd God's people. Each is something of a religious liberal, spouting the "new ideas" of their time. Each receives an awakening through witnessing the death of a traditional believer, or a conversation with an elder, or through reading the Word of God seriously for the first time. After the awakening each emphasizes strict obedience to Christ and is dismissive of their elder pastors as libertines (for having a bit of brandy at night, or some such minor infraction) and basically make the new believer error of imagining themselves to have discovered Christianity. Thus they fall into self-righteousness. They are then guided by these elder pastors into the grace of Jesus as superior to the works-based Christianity they preach. 

As I started the third novella earlier this week I was a little frustrated. Not this again, I thought. Liberal pastor, awakening, struggle with legalism, finding grace with the aid of a wiser older pastor. But then it occurred to me that Giertz's point in writing three such stories from contextually different vantage points is to emphasize the eternal nature of this battle and this progression for young, university-educated ministers. When new converts become really excited about Christianity they often become very legalistic. They judge everyone who has a drink or watches an R-rated movie (two pastimes I prefer to combine), and they mistake their ignorant zeal for true faith. What needs to happen is almost a second conversion. Away from works to the great grace of Jesus Christ. And from there you live righteously to glorify your savior, not to satisfy your own sense of religious duty. 

What is more, in a culture that deifies youth and youthful pursuits and zeal, it is these seasoned pastors who have often experienced the same cycle in their own faith who guide these young ministers into true, grace-based faith in Jesus. What young people need is not necessarily more zeal, but much, much more wisdom. And wisdom only comes with gray hairs. Giertz, a young man himself when he wrote this book, keeps this in view.

Though it is never explicitly mentioned, the title of the book comes from the prophet Jeremiah: "Is not my word like fire," declares the Lord, "and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?" (23.29). And indeed each pastor chronicled in this book must confront the Word of God, both what it says about salvation and how they will choose to read it. The last story focuses on a young pastor who had believed that Scripture must be read historically. What he meant by this was for himself unclear and it caused certain of his parishioners to chuck any doctrine they found unpalatable on the premise that it was merely historically arbitrary and no longer required of believers (sound familiar?). He is rebuked in this belief at a church service for "readers," congregants who read the Bible and take its commands seriously, after the man he has invited to speak, a new convert, talks about how everyone must be guided by the light of conscience rather than God's Word. After he speaks and they sing a hymn, an older pastor from a neighboring parish gets up to speak and these are his words. I found them wholly beautiful, and they make a fitting epitaph for my review of this book:

"The stone foundation of the human heart and the Rock of Atonement on Golgotha are the two mountains on which a man's destiny is determined. If he remains on the stone foundation of his natural state, he is lost. Only one way leads from the stony foundation to the Rock of Atonement, a firm stone bridge built once and for all. It is the Word. Just as only the divine word can convict man of sin and lay bare the soul to its rocky base, so nothing but the Word can reveal the truth about the Redeemer. The external Word is as inescapably necessary for the gospel as it is for the law. No one who is awakened in earnest would ever be able to believe in the forgiveness of his sins, if God had not built a bridge leading to the Rock of Atonement. The supports on which it rests are baptism, the Lord's Supper, and absolution; the arches are wrought by the Holy Word with its message of redemption. On that bridge a sinner can pass from the stony ground that condemns to the Rock of Salvation. But should a single one of the arches be allowed to fall, then is man condemned to remain eternally under the law's condemnation, either as a despairing sinner or as a self-righteous Pharisee."