Sorry (again) for the long silence around here. I am writing a weekly blog for my church which you can find here. This post just did not have much of a place there, but I felt like I needed to share it anyway. So, it goes here.
I was pointed to this post by one of my favorite liberal bloggers, Andrew Sullivan. He posted it as what he imagined a laudable testament to my generation. I must say I disagree. This was a post written by a man named Ray Downs, criticizing some new television show for having the temerity to represent uncommitted, hookup sex as problematic and awkward. Downs disagrees thus:
I am concerned that Hollywood’s depiction of sex is going from unrealistic romance and passion to exaggerated awkwardness. And this can have a similar, if not more damaging effect on the image of sex. While the over-romanticized sex of Hollywood’s past probably gave many young people unreasonable expectations of what to expect, this new “sex is awkward” theme that they’re projecting seems just as disingenuous. Just because sex might have been awkward for a few people who have been lucky enough to pen their own TV series, does that mean we should be marked as a sexually awkward generation?
Look, I have a lot of problems with my generation: we’re selfish, pretentious, and superficial. But one thing I like about us is that we’re the coolest sexual generation there has ever been in quite a while.
Think about it: interracial sex is totally cool, homosexual sex hasn’t been as publicly accepted since probably Greek times, and premarital sex is pretty much obligatory. All the boundaries that were set in stone merely a few decades ago are gone and we’re a lot freer than we were. And it’s my belief that we’re better at sex — not more awkward. How do I know we’re better at it? Because there are cool sex toy stores like Babeland that have helped make it acceptable and even praiseworthy to make sex better for you and your partner with the help of fun-colored inanimate objects. That’s progress!
Here is the thing that got me in this post, which is an otherwise unspectacular defense of a sexual milieu which seems to be churning up an entire generation: Downs wants to praise our generation for our freewheeling sexual ethic, but he also criticizes us for our selfishness, our pretension, and our superficiality. Perhaps it does not occur to Mr. Downs that perhaps those things are inextricably linked. In other words, perhaps part of why our generation is so selfish, pretentious, and superficial is precisely because, or at least of a piece with our progressive sexual ethic.
As it is, Downs seems to advocate some sort of Platonic body/soul divide so that whatever we do with our bodies does not touch our immaterial souls. If only it were so simple.
I am not really what you would call a genre fiction type of guy. In school I specialize in the Renaissance period (currently referred to as the early modern period by other people who specialize in the period and almost no one else at all), which is the era of dead white guys who wrote books with titles longer than a Wikipedia article and actually had meaningful scholarly debate on whether fiction writing was a sin. Moreover, the author I focus on in this period is the captain of the literary dead white guy team as far as I am concerned, the one-time Puritan, all-the-time intellectual snob John Milton.
There was no genre fiction in the early modern period. There were no novels in the early modern period. And my appetite for fiction has largely consisted of the type of material one would find Mortimer Adler giving his grave and dignified seal of approval to in the back of his nearly joyless tome on how to read like an intellectual snob, entitled How to Read a Book. So I have read my Dostoevsky and enjoyed it; read my George Eliot and been transported; read my Dickens and laughed and cried; read my Melville and endured it.
Genre fiction was no doubt a delightful pastime for the rubes of the hinterland to enjoy in between episodes of NCIS, but it was not to be indulged in by serious minds such as mine. And then two things happened, serendipitously connected to one another: the first, I read Alan Jacobs’s excellent book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction; secondly, I bought a Kindle.
I had read Dr. Jacobs’s work before, his biography of C.S. Lewis is one of the best books I have ever read about anything, but it came as a revelation. I plan to interact with it more on this here old blog throughout this semester, but one of his main points that is germane to the current post was his idea of Whim being the guiding principle for leisure reading. Too many readers who want to think of themselves as serious readers get trapped into thinking that if a book is not on some distinguished publications Top 100 List of Books to Read If You Want to Feel Better Than Others then it is not worth their time. More than that, perhaps, to read the book is shameful. Jacobs, a professor of English himself and no stranger to the Top 100 lists, will have no truck with this mentality. Life is too short to read books merely because you are supposed to; you should also read what you want to. And there should be flexibility with your reading list. Don’t make long and complicated risks—be willing to let one book lead to the next.
Armed with this new found insight, a couple of days after finishing Jacobs’s work, I received my Kindle in the mail. The great thing about old books is that they are free; out of copyright works can be downloaded for free and read on this remarkable little device. And among the first two that I downloaded were Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly’s Frankenstein. Fiction is perfect for the Kindle, or, more aptly, the Kindle is perfect for fiction. I have tried reading nonfiction on it, but I still need a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other when I am reading nonfiction. And since it is silly to read fiction with a pencil in one hand and a highlighter in the other, the Kindle is perfectly equipped for this type of reading. And so I read these two books while I was splitting time between Colorado and Arizona for the holidays.
Also while on vacation I had read an article in The Atlantic Monthly, one of those old and venerated magazines, about the emerging genre of literary science-fiction. Two of the books they discussed were Justin Cronin’s The Passage, a science fiction book with the novel plot construction of a government experiment gone terribly wrong, and Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. So when I got back to Manhattan I went to the public library and picked them both up. Cronin’s book was nearly 800 pages long and I read it in a few days. I read Whitehead’s (significantly shorter) work in a few sittings.
In my next post I will reflect on what I learned from reading a month of horror fiction, but this post, if you will recall the title, was merely the how. And that is how. I read on the principle of Whim, and I was not disappointed.
After much radio silence, here is my return to blogging. I have actually been blogging for the past several months for my church's website. This is cross-posted to that site and I will cross-post most of my posts from there for the course of this spring. You can check either site.
There is a certain spoken word poem that made the rounds on that little social networking site called Facebook (oh my gosh, Facebook doesn’t get the red squiggly line from Microsoft Word… it is now a real word!) last week that sets forth the message that Jesus simply hates religion and that if we follow Jesus we should hate religion too. First of all, let me say that I liked most of the poem, and think that this fellow believer’s focus on Jesus and the cross was really exemplary. Furthermore, poetry is an interesting medium, given often I believe to overstatement. One of my favorite religious poems of all time, if I hazard to use the word religious in a non-pejorative sense, a Holy Sonnet by the great English metaphysicist/pastor/poet John Donne ends: “For I/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” And those are some strong words. Given that, I am ready to forgive a bit of hyperbole in poetry.
So, I don’t really want to address or critique this poem directly. If I did I am afraid it would come off as mere jealousy. After all, in my wildest dreams nothing that I ever write will be read by almost 13,000,000 people, the current total for viewers of the video. Also, I believe this video to be an overwhelmingly positive thing. But I do want to address and critique the easy disassociation of Jesus and religion, and this poem and its rapid ascent to coveted viral video status provides a convenient platform for this. Also, I believe this critique will ring true to many readers of this blog and am not trying to be controversial here.
A good portion of this issue surrounds our definition of religion. If, as this video suggests, religion is nothing more than a manmade effort to appease the god(s) then I agree that Jesus is against that. There are many different definitions of religion typically given by a dictionary, though, and none of them have this narrow conception. I don’t want to sound like the third grade book report that begins, “According to Webster’s…”, but according to Webster’s religion can mean “service or worship of God or the supernatural,” “a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices,” or “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith.” To define religious, for good measure: “relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity” and “scrupulously and conscientiously faithful.” And I think that most people who reject the manmade effort to appease the gods version of religion would gladly support these definitions of religion and claim that the faith they have in Christ resembles something along these lines.
Now that we have a working definition in place—to systematize it, let’s say that religion is a system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith and that a religious person is a faithful and conscientious adherer to this system—let’s briefly examine the life of Jesus and see if he was against religion.
It becomes clear that Jesus was against outright excesses of religiosity. He calls the Pharisees “whitewashed tombs” (Matthew 23:27, etc.) and berates them for adding to the standards prescribed by God in the Mosaic law (let us not forget in our fervor over religion that it was God, after all, who established the law in the Old Testament), and for neglecting the weightier matters of justice and mercy and the love of God (Luke 11, Matthew 23). And these are all valid critiques of religion (as if Jesus needed my nodding approval). But this is not all that Jesus had to say about religion.
In the Sermon on the Mount, that wonderful collection of the teachings of our Lord, Jesus denies coming to abolish the Law and the Prophets and condemns those who relax even the least of these commandments of God (Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus established the Church, that erstwhile factory of religion. He goes one up from there and established church discipline in Matthew 18. He instituted communion at the Last Supper. And, finally, in his last words to us, the calling from which our movement of churches has received its name, he commands his followers to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” (Matthew 28:19-20a). He does not want a group of converts, who are “into grace” (I will deal with grace shortly), but a group of disciples who obey what he has commanded. Rituals, obedience, adherence to the law, and discipline. That sounds a lot like religion to me.
The more that I read the Gospels the more it becomes clear to me that Jesus was reacting against what ailed the people of God at his time. The normal faithful Jew was snowed under by the excesses of the law foisted upon them by the religious leaders of their day. And it grieved the heart of Jesus (and angered him immensely). Just as I believe Jesus was angered and grieved for the Catholic Church doing the same thing to the average believer in the pre-Reformation era. But the question that I ask myself is if this is the real problem with religion or Christianity in America today? An excess of religious devotion. Doing too much to try and please God. In some quarters no doubt the answer to that question is yes. I have felt the pull of legalism, as most believers have at one time or another. But overwhelmingly in our nation I do not feel this to be the case. The problem with Christianity in America is not excess of the law, but a general lack of obedience and discipleship. And I think that this is generally the case throughout history. It takes a pretty strong theocratic state to make legalism compulsory and the Church simply does not possess that power in most of our country today (this is a good thing). The problem with our generation, in my admittedly anecdotal experience of it, is that we don’t want to do anything very demanding. And grace, God’s wonderful, redeeming, bountiful grace, is demanding.
Charlie Meyers, one of the pastors in our association of churches, gave a sermon this year at our annual conference on these matters called “Blessed Through the Power of His Grace.” And I believe that Mr. Meyers is spot on in his treatment of grace. Too often we tend to define grace down to forgiveness. But the reality of grace is that it is so much more. The grace that provides us forgiveness and redemption is the same grace that seeks to bring us into conformity with Christ. This is what the saying in the poem sort of glosses over with its line about how the church is not a “museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken.” I understand what he is saying, but the point of any hospital, as my wife the nurse confirmed for me, is to make people better. The goal is not to make someone feel OK with their broken leg but to heal it. The Church should offer understanding, compassion, and a spirit of non-judgmentalism to those who walk through her doors, but the goal of course is that they walk out changed. A significant piece of the hope of the Church is that, by the grace of God, grace in its fullest sense, people can change. And the hope is not that they change into people obsessed with rules and who seek to add to what God already did, but people who steadily become more like Jesus into whose image we are destined to conform.
And often the way that we do that is through rituals, customs, and other measures of obedience. I really did like most of this poem. And I believe the man who wrote it probably has some sort of system for reading his Bible, regularly partakes in the Lord’s Supper, was baptized to signify the death of his old self and his union with Christ, and wishes that he prayed more. Just as I do. Just as most faithful followers of Jesus do. And that is religion. Good religion. Religion given to us by God and God-in-the-flesh. Religion that remembers the weightier matters of justice and mercy and love of God. Religion that gets grace and knows that we are worthless sinners apart from God and that it is only by his mercy and for his glory that we have any hope in this world, and that our loving and faithful response to this scandalous grace is to want to be more like him day by day. And that this end, frankly, does not come easily.
Every evangelical is familiar with the pillar verses of grace found in Ephesians 2:8-9. They are majestic and worthy of praise for the truth they teach: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (ESV). This is beautiful and incredibly freeing. But, of course, the apostle didn’t stop writing there. He continues: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (2:10, ESV).
Though we are not saved by good works, the command to do good works nonetheless is as consistent of a message as the entire Bible provides. I have been studying the great pastoral epistle Paul wrote to his good friend and mentee, Titus, and this phrase (“good works”) pops up everywhere. Here is an exhaustive list for a very short book:
“They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work” (1:16).
“Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works...” (2:7).
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works” (2:11-14).
“Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to avoid quarreling, to be gentle, and to show perfect courtesy to all people” (3:1-2).
“This saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works” (3:8).
“And let our people learn to devote themselves to good works, so as to help cases of urgent need, and not be unfruitful” (3:14).
Paul takes care to distinguish the work done by God through the Holy Spirit that saves us from works-righteousness in this letter, but the call to live a life of good works is inescapable. Which naturally begs the question, what exactly are good works?
Sometimes I feel that we have a tendency to define good works too narrowly. What qualify are the overtly “spiritual” acts: sharing the gospel with an unbeliever, inviting someone to church, going to a Bible study, etc. But the way that I understand the Biblical imperative to be devoted to good works is that good works are anything we do that show us to be followers of God in a fallen world. And really, this leaves the door wide open.
Paul tells the Ephesians that God has prepared works for us already; our only job is to walk into these good works. Put more bluntly, as believers in Christ, saved by grace through faith, we can’t help but walk into this new batch of good works for which God has saved us. The glorious truth of our redemption is not only that our sins have been forgiven, but that we have been commissioned and freed to live an entirely new life, one that gives God glory instead of seeking our own temporary gain. This is an incredibly positive thing. We are emptied so that we may be filled again.
This is why Paul tells his friend Titus that Christ has redeemed us and purified us for the purpose of good works. It is Titus’s job as the pastor of this bunch to remind them of what God has already done for them through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and that this type of transformation will bear fruit in the form of works that glorify God and help those around us. When we limit “good works” to only the explicitly spiritual works—evangelism, helping the poor, going to church—we limit our ability to perform good works. To meet the other requirements of life, we just don’t have time to do a ton of evangelism (especially effective evangelism) and go to a dozen church meetings every week. But if good works is broad enough to include everything we do in this life that we do differently because we have been saved by the grace of a great God and Savior than we can serve God with our whole hearts and without guilt in the everyday mundaneness of this life, knowing that we are giving him honor and glory.
This, as the writers of the Westminster Confession knew, is our chief end.
I am writing now from the living room of my house, absolutely distracted by the beautiful child laying on the floor wrapped in the blanket his great-grandmother made for him. I am a father now, weird as that is to write out. Last Friday morning, July 15th, we welcomed our first son, Owen Hugh Coffman, into the world at 9:08 a.m. He weighed 8 pounds, 3 ounces and was 21.25 inches long. He just might be the most precious thing in the entire world.
I am not really sure what to write. The reality of being a dad, of the fact that this kid will live with Clara and me for the next 18 years (at least), sometimes loving us, sometimes despising us simply has not set in yet. I don’t know that it ever will, explicitly. Eventually it will just be the way it is. This is how marriage worked. It felt weird until it didn’t. Nothing happened. Life just kept rumbling on. As it will surely happen in this case.
These are days to be treasured, though. Held close. I am jealous over my time with my son which has absolutely destroyed my productivity. There is a stack now of half-read books about John Milton and the relationship between Christianity and culture that seemed so important a week ago but have not been touched since Owen’s birth. They will seem important again. I am already feeling the pull back to the other things of this world that occupy my time. But what a gift to have nothing better to do now than stare at this beautiful and precious child.
I have an incredible wife. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a great transition into this paragraph. She woke me up at 4 a.m. Friday. We had gone to bed at one and she hadn’t slept a wink. She let me sleep for a little bit, though, and woke me up to tell me it was time. We threw everything into the car and I drove like hell to Topeka. I topped out at 95 mph but backed off a bit when a coyote crossed the road just in front of me. I figured the last thing we needed would be a deer splattered across the windshield.
We got settled in to the birthing center by five and Owen came out at nine. I cannot even begin to describe the toughness I saw from my wife. This was an all-natural birth—no medication, no doctors—just a midwife and a husband’s hand to squeeze. But she gritted it out. What’s more, she remained sweet and good-natured. The night before my calf cramped at an ultimate Frisbee game due to dehydration and I loosed a string of profanity under my breath that would make an inmate blush, and here was my wife giving birth and remaining nice and even. I feel like I have learned more about her in the past few days than I have in previous entire years of our marriage. I have fallen in love with her all over again. She is simply out of my comprehension. Sometimes I wonder if my one great virtue in this life is that I have married well.
I imagine she would not say this, but for me it went fast. All of a sudden instead of enduring contractions, the midwife was telling her to push. I asked her if she was serious, if our son was really coming. You see, part of me was beginning to believe that it might never happen. That the pregnancy was some sort of elaborate ruse and Clara had really just been eating a lot of chocolate or something. Or that our son was going to age for years in his mother’s womb. After months of anticipation and questions, imagining holding him and kissing his face and sleeping with him on my chest, I couldn’t really imagine actually doing these things. They had been abstractions before.
I lay beside her as she pushed. She squeezed my hand to the point that I am still grateful feeling returned. I watched the whole thing. It was unreal. Beautiful. The most amazing thing I have ever seen. And, frankly, it scared the hell out of me.
I am not sure entirely what I was expecting him to look like, but whatever mental picture I had, I was picturing something slightly other than human. I guess I expected him to come out coated with a bunch of gunk and be indiscernible. Imagine my surprise when I saw a head of blond hair and then a face and then the midwives helping his torso and then legs come through and then they put him up next to Clara’s chest and she welcomed him into the world. He started to cry and so did I so he wouldn’t be lonely. Clara held him close and said his name over and over again. I held her close and put my hands on him. And we were a family. We drove to Topeka as two and came home as three.
I wrote this letter by hand to my son the other day and left it on the table for his mother to read to him out loud when she got home from work (he is, alas, still in the womb). Today is our due date. Pray for us.
Dear Owen ____ Coffman,
Listen here, little man, I don’t intend to make cutting deals a central part of my parenting strategy with you. Most of the time I will tell you what to do and expect you to do it fairly well in accordance with my prescriptions. Moreover, I imagine that I am already offering you the best deal that you will ever receive apart from grace when I promise to provide at least 18 years of three meals per day (that’s close to 20,000 free meals), 18 years of free clothing and free vacations and even free life advice. This last offer will last forever. But I feel compelled to sweeten the deal. You see, your mother is in a hellatious work situation right now and your father is something of a deadbeat this summer. I could say that I am pursuing the scholarly life (there is a sizeable stack of books beside me right now with highly intellectual subject matter), but that is only partially accurate. In any event, your arrival will hasten your mother’s retreat from this awful job, plus, we are rather excited to meet you simply for the sake of meeting you, so how about this: if you come sometime on your due date or before, I will take you on the trip of your choice when you graduate high school (within reason: for example, I don’t know what space travel will look like by that point, and within the family budget: your father will probably never be a wealthy man). So there it is. In ink. I love you and can’t wait to meet you. Now that you are fully incentivized, get out here.
Your father,
Toby Alan
DON’T READ THIS PART OUT LOUD!!!
P.S. Mom, I will probably make him this deal in any event. But that’s just between us.
In this series on the fear of the Lord, I began by giving a working/fluid definition of how the fear of the Lord looks for a Christ follower. In the second post, I looked at a brief passage in Luke 12 where Jesus zeroes in on the functionality of the fear of the Lord in the life of a believer—it frees us from the fear of anything else. In this post, I will look at a secondary function of the fear of the Lord and how, building off of our freedom from fear of the world, we are now able to act boldly and somewhat foolishly as we live our lives seeking to give God glory.
Once again, I am drawing from the words of Jesus in Luke’s gospel as the basis for my hermeneutic of fear. These are the words of Jesus after the famous passage about not being anxious about our lives and considering the lilies of the field as an example, which though neither toiling nor spinning are clothed in more grandeur than the finest ensemble in which man has ever arranged his body. After giving these poignant examples, Jesus seeks to encourage his followers with these words:
Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Luke 12:32-34
Because fearing God frees us from the fears of this world, and the fears of this world are not only the more pernicious fears of persecution or martyrdom but the more pressing and mundane concerns over worldly riches and possessions, we are free to live completely counterculturally from the world. We do not have to fear the consequences of making a decision based on serving the kingdom for our God will meet all of our needs. And he is a rich God.
I do not take this to mean that all Christians as our entry fee into the club need to get rid of everything we possess and live off the largess of the government or wealthy and more prudent relatives. Some of the Thessalonian Christians made this mistake and Paul had to correct them a couple of times. It is good to work hard and save some money and manage well what the Lord gives us. But we are also free. The freest of all people. And we exercise that freedom by standing confidently in reverent fear of our God who is love and also a consuming fire. And that God, when he walked around this planet as a man, told us that if we seek first the kingdom of God everything else that we need will be given to us as well. Amen.
