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Nate Wilson is tagging along as his father, Douglas Wilson, and Christopher Hitchens go on a debate tour, discussing whether or not Christianity is good for the world (thereby reprising their online debate from last year).
...to be honest, the most interesting moments have all been outside the formal events—discussions over meals, in cabs and elevators. Both men share a love of poetry (over lunch, they gave an antiphonal recitation of “Jabberwocky”), a love of the English language and the well-turned phrase, and have spent a good ten minutes spouting favorite lines from the British writer P. G. Wodehouse to mutual laughter. And both men have a respect for each other—though clearly not for their conflicting opinions of God and the nature of the world.
Douglas Wilson is also blogging about the tour, which is being filmed by a documentary crew.
Which, on a sidenote, reminds me of a comment I made a few weeks ago to Aaron, that in this day and age of films like Religulous and Expelled, what I’d really like to see is a film where experts, intellectuals, and authors from all sides—atheists, agnostics, and believers—just sit down and have a good, old-fashioned, passionate, and respectful debate. Sounds like I may have just found my film.
...my point is that despite all this, no actor—comic or dramatic, in my estimation—carries within him the power to convey hope, aspiration, faith, and human vulnerability like Ricky Gervais can. To hell with what he personally believes; when you see the things he makes—The Office, Extras, and even the recent, mawkish but charming film, Ghost Town—you witness a talent that radiates the cardinal virtues, disarming all claims of a disinterested universe peopled with fools that function under the pretense that “truth” and “love” have value outside an objective source. What Gervais the writer/actor does artistically belies what Gervais the man believes privately. On a vastly different but still comparable plane, he can do the kind of thing Yeats can: make you understand your own view of nature—your own belief even—while not sharing it.
When people think of religion on YouTube, most probably flash to “gotcha” videos of Sarah Palin’s old church or Barack Obama’s old pastor. But the video-sharing site is also being used by a wildly diverse collection of pastors, rabbis, imams, gurus, and pious laypeople… to celebrate and explain their creeds. These aren’t glitzy televangelists. In keeping with the YouTube ethos, many simply fire up camcorder and go. But low cost and infinite range, plus the mini-video’s ascent as one of the culture’s preferred ways of imbibing information, means vastly increased exposure for clerics who would otherwise have tiny flocks.
Bonus points for including “Baby Got Book”.
Michael Spencer (aka “Internet Monk”) strikes again:
My students will hear hundreds of moralistic, pietistic and privatistic applications of the Gospel for every time they see or hear the Gospel lived out in Jesus shaped ways. If evangelical sermons and publishing is our measurement, then economic, missional, socially redemptive discipleship is far less interesting than end times scenarios and diets.
My students will be encouraged to accept the evils of society as the unfolding of the end times plan a dozen times for every time anyone tells them to go out and personally do something to make a difference in that world. After abortion and homosexual activism, the average evangelical’s engagement with social issues goes off the radar.
My students will be told that church should be fun, entertaining, cool and better than a mall a thousand times for every time they see a church embodying the suffering, justice, poverty, prophetic truth and radical love of Jesus for the poor and the sinful.
My students will hear the siren songs of evangelicalism endless times for every time they hear about a truly prophetic, counter-cultural, compassion-passionate Jesus shaped spirituality.
I’m waiting for the birth of truly counter-cultural Christian voices; voices as arresting in these times as Guthrie, Dylan, Ochs and Seeger were in theirs. Christian voices that don’t require us to go to non-believers to hear the authentic message of the compassion and present power of the teachings of scripture on justice and mercy.
I’ve been making my way through some of the Slacktivist’s massive Left Behind project, and came across this link to Loren L. Johns’ (much shorter) analysis of the series. This quote, in particular, jumped out at me; while he finds some positive things in the series, Johns ultimately concludes (emphasis mine):
At the end of the day, this series is ultimately a rejection of the good news of Jesus Christ. I say this because it rejects the way of the cross and Jesus’ call to obedient discipleship and a new way of life. It celebrates the human will to power, putting Evangelical Christians in the heroic role of God’s Green Berets. In this story, premillennialist dispensationalism meets American survivalism. This is a story about so-called Christian men who never really grew up, who still love to play with toys and dominate others, and whose passions are still largely unredeemed. Love of enemies is treated as a misguided strategy associated not with the gospel, but with the Antichrist. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have the right to offer any kind of interpretation of Christianity and of the end times that they wish. Ultimately, it is not their interpretation of the end times that troubles me so much as their interpretation of Christianity. It is devoid of any real theology, or substantial Christology, or any ethics that are recognizably Christian. This is a vision of unredeemed Christianity.
For the past five years, Fred “Slacktivist” Clark has been analyzing the Left Behind novel, page by page. His conclusion?
[Left Behind] set out to be a work of propaganda, a teaching tool meant to demonstrate—the authors would say to prove—that the events it describes could and indeed will really happen. Yet their attempt to present a narrative of such events instead demonstrates—I would say proves—that these events could not and indeed will not ever happen. It proves that the weird and contradictory events of their check list could never happen in a world anything like the world we live in, or in any other imaginable world. It proves that their supposed prophecies will never, and can never, be fulfilled.
Left Behind fails as a novel for many, many reasons, but all of its other faults—the odious lack of empathy it holds up as a moral example, its blasphemous celebration of self-centeredness masquerading as Christianity, its perverse misogyny, its plodding pace, its wooden dialogue, it fetishistic obsession with telephones, its nonexistent characterization, its use and misuse of cliches, its irrelevant tangents, deplorable politics, confused theology, unintentional hilarities, hideous sentences, contempt for craft, factual mistakes, continuity errors ... its squandering of every interesting premise and its overwhelming, relentless and mind-numbing dullness—all of these seem to be failures of the sort that one might encounter in any other Very, Very Bad book hastily foisted off onto the public without a second glance.**
Any one of those faults, on its own, would have been enough to earn Left Behind a place on the Worst Books of 1995 list. The presence of all of those faults—in a single book and in such concentrated form—is more than enough to secure its place on a list of the Worst Books of All Time.
His next project is a similar analysis of the Left Behind movie; then it’s on to the series’ second novel, Tribulation Force.
Christ and Pop Culture reviews Stephen Mansfield’s The Faith of Barack Obama:
Barack’s story of faith isn’t typical of the American experience. For instance, if Barack ascends to the presidency he will be the first American president to do so having not been raised in a Christian home. Instead, he spent his early years under the influence of an atheist mother, a step-father’s folk Islam, praying at the feet of a Catholic Jesus, and influenced with a humanist’s understanding of the world that sees religion merely as a man-made thing.
In Barack’s adult life, his spiritual journey toward Christianity also defies pattern and refuses to fit in a clean theological box, although his coming to faith typifies the pattern and process that many Americans have journeyed. He came to faith not so much to join a religious tradition, but rather to find belonging among a people.
Also, the book’s conclusion is that Obama is not a secret Muslim, so can we please stop with the paranoid e-mails?
No Theocracy Here: Saddleback Does What American Christians Have Always Done:
Some of the commentary on the Saddleback event misunderstands the role of buildings and the pastor in much of Evangelical Christianity. These easily worried commentators also act shocked and feign fright that pastors would be heavily involved in American politics when there is nothing new about it.
We have never been a theocracy, Saddleback is no sign we are becoming one, and Senator Obama and Senator McCain are behaving no differently than Abraham Lincoln in seeking the support of prominent pastors.
Brett McCracken weighs of pros and cons of Rick Warren being “the new James Dobson”: CON: Warren is a little boring. It takes him actually getting Obama and McCain to come to his church and share the stage in order to grab headlines. Dobson can do it by taking a sneeze. But maybe this is a PRO.
As I stated early on in this post, I think it is beyond our rational capabilities to truly understand the mysteries of free will and determinism. And honestly, does it really affect your day-to-day life? Even if I think that God has ordained my every action, I still must make choices to either sin or strive for righteousness, and those are real choices (in a sense we can’t fully understand). And while I agree that grace is given solely by God and salvation is his work 100%, I still must actively engage people in conversations about the gospel, presenting it to them as a conduit of God’s grace, just as I must help the poor and the sick even while understanding that God controls all of it. Calvinists who shrug off these responsibilities are erring on the side of fatalism. It’s one thing to completely ignore the repeated commands of Christ (the great commission, etc), but it is also just nonsensical to assume that God disseminates his grace outside of the work of human agents. This isn’t the same as saying he needs us; just that we are his, bound up with his grand purposes on earth. Such are the awesome mysteries of being captured by God’s grace.
PZ Myers’ “Great Desecration”:
I know some of you have proposed intricate plans for how to do horrible things to these crackers, but I repeat…it’s just a cracker. I wasn’t going to make any major investment of time, money, or effort in treating these dabs of unpleasantness as they deserve, because all they deserve is casual disposal. However, inspired by an old woodcut of Jews stabbing the host, I thought of a simple, quick thing to do: I pierced it with a rusty nail (I hope Jesus’s tetanus shots are up to date). And then I simply threw it in the trash, followed by the classic, decorative items of trash cans everywhere, old coffeegrounds and a banana peel. My apologies to those who hoped for more, but the worst I can do is show my unconcerned contempt.
In addition to the Eucharist, Myers also desecrated pages from the Qur’an and—in an attempt to show that nothing should be held sacred—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.
Leaving the Faith Undefended: “Let us therefore put down our arms; in our words and attitudes particularly. Leave the faith undefended. Trust in the sovereignty of God… or don’t. But don’t engage in the hypocrisy that claims trust and draws the sword.“ FWIW, the discussion in the comments makes a distinction between “defending the faith” and “apologetics”.
Jimmy Akin on the “science” of PZ Myers’ “cracker” plan (aka Myers’ proposed plan to procure some communion wafers, desecrate them, and post the results online):
...let’s suppose that [a dispassionate scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist] was his aim. He’s a scientist. How good would the science of the proposed experiment be?
Rotten.
In order to have a scientific demonstration of the falsity of Catholic belief regarding the Eucharist, you would need to have a proposition of Catholic theology regarding the Eucharist that could be falsified by his experiment.
But the Catholic Church does not claim that anything special will happen in the empirical realm if you desecrate a host. Lots of hosts have been desecrated in history, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, nothing special happens in the empirical realm.
Catholics would say that this is because Christ has chosen to make himself vulnerable in body to such disrespect, just as he made himself vulnerable to death on the Cross, though he informed his disciples that all he needed to do was ask and his Father would put twelve legions of angels at his disposal to defend him. The voluntary vulnerability of Christ as the Lamb of God is a central theme in Christian theology.
Whatever the Christian explanation for the fact that nothing unusual normally happens in the empirical realm when a host is desecrated, the fact is that the Church does not maintain that anything is supposed to happen.
Akin has also posted an MP3 from his radio show with a response to Myers’ actions. You can read Myers’ post that started the hullabaloo here. Note: Myers has since stated that his post was intended more as “satire and protest” than anything else.
The latest from the “Are you sure this isn’t from Lark News?“ department: An Oklahoma church cancels the giveaway of a semiautomatic assault rifle at one of their youth events. From the church’s youth pastor:
I don’t want people thinking ‘My goodness, we’re putting a weapon in the hand of somebody that doesn’t respect it who are then going to go out and kill… That’s not at all what we’re trying to do.
You won’t find the gospel in the Hellboy movies. But what you may find is signs of a world that has been touched by the gospel—a world that retains some awareness of sinister forces to be avoided or resisted, of evil that cannot be overcome by therapy or education or communication, that calls for a response from another realm entirely.
Douglas Wilson: “Deep Affection for America”:
The intellectual and historical dishonesty that undergirds our public self-understanding is breathtaking in its scope and ambition, and is hollow as a jug. Virtually everywhere I look, somebody is talking nonsense. Time to despair, right?
Actually, no. In the long run, stupidity never works. Social critics like me tend to think that everything is measured in terms of the problems they see, but they often miss—not surprisingly—the things they don’t see. God knows what He is doing, and God is in control of human history. A corollary of this is that we are not in control of human history; we are merely instruments in His hands. And if we are instruments in His hands, we need to learn to think of ourselves that way, and seek to cultivate the demeanor that is appropriate to that role.
Critics of all things American from the “left” are scolds. They are shrill, boney, humorless prudes. They are fussers, handwringers, and wowsers. They are pencil-necked, parsimonious, and poisonous. They like to call themselves liberals, but the only thing they are liberal with is criticism of what somebody else might be doing with his own time and money.
Critics of all things American from the “right” are paranoid and fearful. They are shifty and conspiratorial, and attribute that same sneakiness to their adversaries. They believe that the rampant sin in our nation is all imported from somewhere else. Their eyes are too close together, and they tend to be monomanaical cranks. Sin is not something Americans can do, but rather is the word they use to describe people becoming un-American.
The Evangelical Outpost wonders, “Do Tummy Aches Disprove God?“
Let’s imagine that all suffering could be converted to a single unit of measurement, say Tummy Aches (TA). Let’s also say that the range of suffering goes from .001 TA to 100 billion TA. At what level does suffering become “intense”? 10 TA? 100 TA? It would depend on the context. In the life of a single human, 100 TA of suffering might be considered intense. But what if we are talking about an amount that would disprove God shouldn’t we consider the entire universe? Would 100 TA be a lot then? Would even 100 billion TA be a considerable amount within the vast expanse of the cosmos?
In the scriptures, I’m commanded to love a lot of things: my God, my neighbor, my wife, my enemy… I’m never commanded to love my country. In fact, if “loving my country” means that I demonstrate preference to someone based on their ethnicity, their nationality or, for instance, their loyalty to America’s foreign policies, I think I’ve pretty much undermined a very important aspect of Jesus’ mission on this earth—to make his temple a “house of prayer for all nations” and ours, to “make disciples of all nations.“ And when I’m willing to value American lives over, say, Iranian lives or when I’m willing to promote America’s economic interests over the interests of the world’s poor simply because I’m American I may actually demonstrate my infidelity to the only Kingdom worthy of my allegiance.
From Christ and Pop Culture:
God has given us clear commands in scripture on a number of issues in the Christian life. We know that we are not to commit adultery, steal, get drunk, forsake the church, or oppress the poor. But what are we to do when the Bible does not give an explicit command on a certain issue? Can we watch Sex and the City, listen to Kanye West, or get tattoos?
This may sound so frivolous, cheesy, or obvious, but I can’t tell you how many times I get into discussions about this matter, or hear about others having similar discussions. I think the key point to keep in mind is this:
On issues where the Bible has given no clear direct or implied moral command we are free to make our own decision. But, as Paul tells us [in Romans 14:22-23], that decision must be Biblically informed and you must be convinced in your conscience that you are in no way sinning against God.
Word.
Boundless—a publication of Focus on the Family—has posted an open letter to Christianity Today lambasting it for giving Sex And The City a positive review. While I absolutely disagree with this assessment of CT—which I find to be an incredibly well-done and thoughtful publication, especially in their movie reviews—and find the letter’s tone a little sanctimonious, it does raise some interesting questions: is it possible to give a film a positive review without promoting or endorsing its content? Or are they really one in the same?
Related Links: Plugged In’s review of Sex And The City (Plugged In is another publication of Focus on the Family); CT’s Mark Moring responds to the negative Sex And The City feedback