Last week a controversial book of theology was condemned by well-established critics who cautioned the public that the book did not present Christian doctrine in an accurate, biblical, or traditional way. As news of the book’s official condemnation spread, book sales spiked.

This has nothing to do with Rob Bell or Love Wins; that’s old news. This week’s controversy is deep inside Roman Catholic territory, as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine issued a twenty-page statement detailing how Elizabeth Johnson’s 2007 book Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God fails to line up with Roman Catholic teaching. The best early coverage of the story is in the National Catholic Reporter, and the boost to Amazon sales is reported by Commonweal. Neither of these magazines, to put it delicately, was likely to have taken the bishops’ side against any theologian, but their reports are the best place to pick up the story.

In a one-page letter, the chair of the committee (Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington) explained why it took four years for this investigation and warning to appear:

The book in question, published some time ago, is not directed to professional theologians for theological speculation, but rather is used as a teaching instrument for undergraduate students, many of whom are looking for grounding in their Catholic faith. The Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine is first and foremost concerned about the spiritual welfare of those students using this book who may be led to assume that its content is authentic Catholic teaching.

It seems quaint now, but it used to be common for Roman Catholic books to be published with a Nihil Obstat or Imprimatur, certifying that the contents were in agreement with received Catholic doctrine. Readers could then be confident that they were getting the real thing. As the letter from the chair makes clear, what is being applied after the fact to Johnson’s book is the opposite of that: A definite statement from a committee of bishops saying that some of the contents of Johnson’s book certifiably do not accord with the teaching of the Roman Catholic church.

And the letter from Cardinal Wuerl implies that if Quest for the Living God were a book designed only for professional theologians to discuss amongst themselves, no official statement would have been necessary. Their stated concern is that the book is being used in college classes, as a text for Roman Catholic college students to learn about what the church teaches. It is not appropriate for that use, they say.

The bishops’ statement, with its focus on this one book, does not explicitly address Johnson’s overall theology as represented by her other books, or remark on her general activities as a teaching theologian. Elizabeth Johnson has been publishing for a long time, after all. She has a half-dozen influential books, is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham, serves on the editorial board of many important journals, has been president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, and has many other recognitions, distinctions, and honors. And her doctrinal position has been fairly consistent throughout her published works. So why intervene with this one book, four years after its publication? Because of its use in college classes, apparently.

But it’s no wonder that the figurative warning label on the book seems ominous for liberal Roman Catholic theologians more broadly. In the past decade, American Jesuit Roger Haight, a theologian no less prominent than Johnson, was officially silenced by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The CDF’s investigation focused on one late book (Haight’s Jesus: Symbol of God), but called into question his theological method altogether.

And in her 2007 book Quest for the Living God, Johnson is consistent with what she has taught elsewhere. The main difference identified by the committee is the audience: previous books were used by theologians and seminarians, whereas Quest has been used for college students.

As an evangelical Protestant, it’s interesting to watch the dynamics of this controversy playing out inside the Roman Catholic theological scene. The similarities and differences between it and the Rob Bell kerfluffle are equally instructive. On the Roman Catholic side, the provocateur is an accomplished theologian, re-stating for the third or fourth time in book form her basic teaching, through an academic publisher without sensational publicity or a reach that aspires far beyond the textbook market. The critics are recognized teaching authorities (bishops) in the theologian’s own church, they didn’t act until four years after publication, and they scarcely seem aware that there is an internet (releasing pdfs of statements on letterhead). The differences from the Bell case are striking. But the similarity is also striking: unstoppable polarization, as if there are two churches struggling with each other inside the institutional unity of the Roman Catholic church, as much as within the movement known as evangelicalism.

Theological conservatives like me think that both Bell and Johnson have crossed some lines and published books that do not state the Christian message accurately. Bell’s critics were shunted aside with the rhetorical question, “Who made you the judge of what’s orthodox?” But in the case of Johnson’s critics, it’s not a rhetorical question: the Roman Catholic magisterium is who made the council of bishops the judge of what’s orthodox. An evangelical onlooker might understandably think that that will make all the difference between the two cases. But it won’t. Two kinds of Roman Catholic theologians disagree about this book, and the gulf between them is as big as the gulf between Rob Bell and Al Mohler.

(Cross-posted from my home blog, Scriptorium Daily.)

There’s an exciting new project called Theological Engagement with California Culture that is taking its first steps toward coming to terms with the entity that is California.

Of course I think it’s exciting; it’s partly my idea to get this thing going. I’ve lived in California a long time now, and am a native (though I spent some formative years “back East,” as we say “out here”). But the project has finally gone from being a mental hobby to being an interdisciplinary collaborative project that is getting traction.

TECC has a website, a steering committee, a call for papers to gather submissions for a proposed session at the national ETS meeting in San Francisco in November 2011 (Richard Mouw is already committed to present at it), and initial plans for a series of conferences and consultations.

This week, Joe Gorra at the Evangelical Philosophical Society’s blog interviewed 2/3 of the steering committee (Jason Sexton and me) about the status of the project. Here’s a key quote from the interview:

It would probably be in bad taste to belabor a Gold Rush analogy, but I think that California as a theological subject is resource-rich and under-explored. I just started poking around a little bit in the area of California literary regionalism as an amateur investigator, trying to solve the small-scale problem of “what are the California great books I should assign?” What I discovered is that there’s been some really good work done on that subject by real literary scholars. But when it comes to theologians, we just haven’t done enough with California. As soon as I started using the tools of my own trade and asking theological questions, I found vast stretches of unexplored intellectual territory. I may not have cried “Eureka,” but I am sending out the word that there’s work to be done here for many hands.

Click on through to read the whole thing, and if you know somebody interested in theology and California, or somebody who ought to be, please forward this information to them.

In 1864, Scottish theologian Robert Candlish gave a series of lectures in Edinburgh on the theology of the Fatherhood of God. As he ended those lectures, he said “I do so with the feeling that, however inadequately I have handled my great theme, I have at least thrown out some suggestive thoughts, and in the hope that more competent workmen may enter into my labour and rear a better structure. For I cannot divest myself of the impression that the subject has not hitherto been adequately treated in the Church.”

Candlish knew his church history well, but it seemed to him that the church fathers had not adequately described the adoption of believers into God’s family, because their best energies had (rightly) gone toward establishing the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. And the reformers, in (rightly) securing the believer’s justification by faith, had not allowed “the subject of adoption or the sonship of Christ’s disciples… to occupy the place and receive the prominence to which it is on scriptural grounds entitled.” Candlish intended no insult to the fathers or the reformers: “Their hands were full.” And until the Trinity and salvation by faith were in place, the theology of adoption didn’t have a chance.

But now, Candlish argued that the time had come to investigate the theology of adoption by the Father more fully:

I have long had the impression that in the region of that great truth there lies a rich field of precious ore yet to be surveyed and explored, and that, somewhere in that direction, theology has fresh work to do, and fresh treasures to bring out of the storehouse of the Divine Word.

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I know the Chronicles of Narnia are not straightforward allegory, but I also know that the stone table of Aslan is the cross of Christ (depending on what the meaning of “is” is).

And without any cramming or reductionism, astute readers can follow the imagination of C.S. Lewis as it maps out the coordinates of theological truth and reality in his fairy-tale land of remythologization: Creation and eschatology, objective redemption and individual salvation, the role of the law in the Christian life and obedience to the words of a written revelation are all expounded in Narnian idiom. In none of these cases could we simply have predicted how Aslan would act out the part of Christ in the land of talking animals. But he does it. There are even complex combinations of the major Christian ideas in Narnia, like the way Lewis puts the epic battle of the church militant into the space between the death and resurrection of Aslan.

But what I wonder about lately is, why didn’t Lewis provide a Narnian placeholder for “The Grand Miracle,” the incarnation? Maybe I’m only wondering because the Narnia movies have now become a Christmas event. But doctrinally and spiritually speaking, isn’t it interesting that Lewis didn’t provide an Aslan-Becomes-Talking-Animal storyline? What we get instead is the rumor that “Aslan is on the move” in fulfillment of the prophecies. Father Christmas even shows up, which (as Tolkien pointed out) makes no sense whatsoever. But no nativity!

In one sense, how beautiful the elements of the nativity story could have been, transmuted into fairy tale and populated with Narnians. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine where Lewis could have stopped if he had taken the first step down that road: At the first mention of baby Aslan as a divine-feline lion cub, you’d have to provide a mother, and soon you’d have the whole lineage of feline David scratching at the stable door. It just wouldn’t work. The fantasy world would collapse under the pressure of parallelism.

But Lewis was clever, and his baptized imagination would probably have found a way around that mythopoeic challenge. I think there is a properly theological reason for the lack of a Narnian nativity. The real impossibility is a Narnian incarnation (try saying that three times fast). Aslan may be how Christ appears in a world of talking animals, but at those key points where Lewis has to indicate how Narnia is related to the real world (England = “the real world”), he gives priority to the real world precisely because Christ is actually incarnate in this world. Lewis’ mind seems to have repelled the idea of multiple incarnations of the one Son of God all over the multiverse. In the Space Trilogy, for example, younger planets are populated by humanoids instead of walking celery sticks, because it just wouldn’t be appropriate for intelligent life to be brought into being in vegetable form once the incarnation happened on that one silent planet. And in Narnia, Aslan is on the move, conducting business with the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, but not becoming Lion to save Lionkind. The word did not become Lion. He was already Lion. And he was already something else, which he had already taken on in our world: human. But in the fullness of Narnian time, he was on the move.

I was driving cross-country in the summer of 1995, at a time when the music of Hootie and the Blowfish was inescapable. My wife and I listened to the radio from Kentucky to California, and the soundtrack assigned to us by American pop music was song after song from the multiplatinum album Cracked Rear View. Now, I happened to like the band’s acoustic-stadium sound, and Darius Rucker’s über-masculine vocals. But it didn’t matter whether I liked it or not, I was getting it from both speakers no matter what. Hootie’s dominance was unquestioned: At best, DJs could manage to alternate one song by somebody else in between songs from Hootie. Change the channel, more Hootie. At one point (somewhere in New Mexico?), a DJ shouted, “This is Hootie’s world, and the rest of us are just livin’ in it!”

The theological Hootie of our age is NT Wright. He’s everywhere. Multiplatinum, hit singles, the whole package. I happen to like his work, but it doesn’t matter if you like it; you’re getting it from both speakers anyway. This is NT Wright’s world, and the rest of us are just livin’ in it.

I skipped last year’s Wheaton Theology Conference (probably the best annual theology conference anywhere in the US) because it was all about NT Wright. But then the main program of the national ETS conference was also all about Wright, so there was no avoiding it. Change the channel, more NT Wright. The ETS event was exquisitely well planned, with dueling plenaries and an extended panel discussion. Look elsewhere for commentary on the event: Summaries of what went on in Atlanta are available at reputable places, including here at Evangel.

Here in Hootie’s world, I’ve had to develop a few rules for how to keep livin’ in it. I want to make a few brief, impressionistic remarks about Wright’s work, and I want to have the freedom to speak irresponsibly –in a certain sense which I will now define. By “irresponsibly” I don’t mean gossipy or overblown or inflammatory comments. I would prefer to avoid both sin and boorishness. But I want permission to speak irresponsibly in the sense that I haven’t read most of Wright’s work, and haven’t paid close attention to most of the controversy surrounding his views. I didn’t even attend all the ETS sessions where he and his interlocutors mixed it up.
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Seems like there’s a whole lot of Newman talk going on around here lately. It’s like he’s been beatified or something! I can’t exactly get behind that, but I can add my admiration of Newman’s Christian intellect to the chorus.

There’s something I read in Newman some time ago, early in seminary I think, that has stuck with me ever since. I know it’s important to me because I’ve mentally cataloged it with some mnemonic shorthand. As it turns out, I’ve mis-remembered it slightly, but here it is.

I recall Newman talking about the Trinity, and saying that the doctrine had to be presented in such a way that it wasn’t just a set of notions gathered together in the mind, but a real, living idea embraceable by the imagination.

It’s not just for students, he said: It’s for the young, the unlearned, the busy, and the afflicted. The main truths of Christianity, not least the Trinity, are for these people: Not just students, but also for the Young, the Unlearned, the Busy, and the Afflicted. That struck me. I took the first letters of the nouns and put them in my mind: YUBA. Young, unlearned, busy, afflicted.

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I wasn’t able to follow all the news, never mind all the news-analysis and pundit chatter, about the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the UK this past week. I knew it was happening, and had a sense of its historic character. I saw some headlines about the major events and reactions.

Rolling around in the back of my mind has been that constant blogger’s question, “Do I have anything worth saying about that?”

I never gave it my full attention, but the possible-blog ideas that came into mind were all pretty Protestant. No fan of the Oxford Movement or its effects, I felt a little irked about the symbolic date chosen for the Newman Beatification. All the ceremony and pageantry of papal visits leaves me cold. I have a lot of sympathy for Roman Catholic culture at the popular level, but the official stuff makes me feel belligerently low-churchy. The tension surrounding a face-to-face meeting between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury made me think of about fifty punch-lines for fifty snotty jokes. In general, as a deeply satisfied free church evangelical Protestant, a lot of funny quips have flashed through my mind. Hate to waste funny quips.

But then I couldn’t ignore the “protest the pope” invective, which got louder and more insistent. Protesters making up nasty slogans, holding up signs with “messiah” mis-spelled, voicing their outrage that things like Popes are permitted on their British soil. I don’t even want to describe the scope of these things. It has been extremely ugly.

And through all this, Benedict’s leading message has been a high-level critique of the aggressive secularism that has such a death-grip on the British mind. It’s a powerful argument, and he’s honed it very well over the years. I’ve been reading Benedict since he was Ratzinger; since he was just a theologian. Of course he’s said lots of other, capital-R capital-C Roman Catholic stuff, but the main point he’s been driving home has been his sustained, principled critique of the secular ideology of the contemporary world.

It seems to me that my interests are being represented by the Pope. What I mean is, the reproaches that fall on him are also directed at me and mine. When the tribes of village atheists come out to the streets with their postmodern versions of “écrasez l’infâme,” they are not upset about the things that divide my Protestant principles from his Catholic commitments. These semi-literate stepchildren of Voltaire simply hate religion, period, and want it all to go away. They lash out at the Pope because he’s famous, he’s said Christian things in public, and now has dared to come near enough to yell at. That’s mere Christian hate there.

So here’s what I learned from the public reaction to the Papal visit. I have a lot of objections to the distinctive elements of Roman Catholic theology. It occurs to me to blog them, or say them, or bring them up on this occasion. But that would be stupid. The Pope protesters are protesting me and my church as well. He’s using his platform to deliver my message to that hostile crowd, and I’m grateful for that.

Besides, when the last king is hung with the entrails of the last priest, I would rather be found among the blessed dead than in the howling crowd trying to shout “sola scriptura” over the deafening roar of “to hell with religion.”

This is an attempt to revisit the terms of a contemporary theological cliché.

I don’t know who invented the argument that anybody lower than you on the sacramental realism scale is supposed to be called gnostic, but it’s an argument that has caught on. Any defection from high sacramentalism is gleefully identified as matter-hating, body-denying, salvation-by-cognition, capital G, gnosticism.

Once people glimpse the connection, they tend to be hooked. They see ironies everywhere in low-church observances. The charge of gnosticism has never made much sense to me, because it explains too much and seems to offer a glimpse into the secret motivations of the opponent. Plenty of people claim their opponents are gnostic, but nobody ever claims for themselves the badge or category of gnosticism.

Except Farrer.

The great, quirky, brilliant, and flawed Anglican theologian Austin Farrer set out to be gnostic, and on his own terms, he succeeded. But his terms were the opposite of the gnosticism we hear noised abroad in our day.
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(Apologies for cross-posting from my home blog, Scriptorium Daily. I thought the passing of Bloesch ought to be noted over here for the audience at First Things’ Evangel blog as well.)

Donald Bloesch, evangelical theologian, died this week. He was a unique figure in twentieth-century theology, and now that he has passed from the scene, what strikes me about his work is his noble isolation. I don’t mean that he was personally lonely: by all reports he sustained many close friendships, and inspired long-term loyalty and affection in those who knew him. But Bloesch ran several paces ahead of the pack, and had to make his own way.

Bloesch (whose oddly-spelled name is easy to pronounce: just remember that it rhymes with “keepin’ it fresh,” “nativity creche,” and “the word became flesh”) made his most influential contribution to theology by publishing the two-volume Essentials of Evangelical Theology in the late 1970s. Essentials stood alone for a long time in the evangelical field: where else could you find a comprehensive overview of all the major doctrines, written from an evangelical point of view, in dialogue with the great tradition and with recent mainline theology, and put forth in an active voice by a living theologian putting his own name on the line? Essentials may not have been perfect, but it became an inescapable reference point for serious evangelical theology for years to come. It was as if he wrote for an audience that didn’t exist yet, and when that audience came of age and started looking around for books of doctrine, there was Bloesch waiting for them.
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Last week, pastor Trevin Wax posted an interesting blog entry about the way serious preaching demands serious presentation. Specifically, Wax is watching a trend of churches “focusing on the centrality of the Word in worship,” and noting that it clashes with the contemporary “chatty, street-level style of worship” marked by “casualness and novelty.” “Form and content mirror one another,” notes Wax, and when they clash, “something’s got to give.”

When the people of God are gathered to hear the word of God, the informal, “Hi there folks!” is not the right way to start a service. Wax uses the memorable analogy, “It’s like eating steak on a paper plate.”

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These top ten lists are so fascinating to read, especially the lists that mingle great books with those admittedly not-so-great books that made a big dent on the list-maker at a certain age. Those lists are such quirky autobiographical documents.  They require an uncommon degree of self knowledge, and an unfalsified memory of early life, to compile. C.S. Lewis’ wonderful list was that sort. I think most of us would be surprised to see the list of the books that really did the most to make us who we are.  Perhaps that reckoning will be part of the opening of the books on judgment day?  Such a list, for me, would include a lot of Marvel comics, science fiction, Mad magazine, and whatever happened to be on the shelf of the library at the public school. For most of us it would include a large number of books we could no longer recommend as worthwhile, even books which in retrospect we can see as having more dangerous toxin than nutritious ideas. I can’t imagine making such a list without thinking through my autobiography, perhaps with some professional help!

Instead, what I’ve got is a list of favorites, inevitably emphasizing theology and unfortunately ignoring fiction. It’s basically the same list as the one on my home page, but with new commentary to incite you to read them.

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Love is patient and kind;

Love does not envy or boast;

It is not arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way;

It is not irritable or resentful;

It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Jesus is patient and kind;

Jesus does not envy or boast;

He is not arrogant or rude.

He does not insist on his own way;

He is not irritable or resentful;

He does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

_______ is patient and kind;

______ does not envy or boast;

__ is not arrogant or rude.

__ does not insist on ___ own way;

__ is not irritable or resentful;

__ does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

______ bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

What Christians usually do is, they read the Bible out loud and then preach a sermon about it.  That’s the normal, all-but-universal pattern around the world and back through Christian history. If you had to leave out one or the other,  I suppose you would keep the Bible reading and leave out the sermon, since the sermon depends on the Bible, not vice versa. If you had to choose between the perfect word of God, and the confessedly fallible words of human exposition in the words of man, it’s obvious which is the better part. But the church has never felt a need to choose: We read aloud the word of God, and we also preach a human explanation and application of it.

In fact, there’s great Old Testament precedent for the recognition that both are necessary: In that great, book-centered worship service reported in Nehemiah 8, the priests “read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” (verse 8). You’ve got to give the people the sense of it. And in the New Testament churches, Paul exhorts Timothy to devote himself “to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching (I  Tim 4:13).”

I belong to a nearby Evangelical Free church whose worship calendar is shaped by a commitment to preach through entire books of the Bible. For several years, our practice has been to kick off the sermon series with a special service in which we read the book itself aloud, with no sermon. Before we preached through I John, our Sunday morning service was a public reading of the text of the epistle. Back when we preached through Acts, we did a unique marathon reading service that took up most of the day and included breaks for fellowship meals.

Right now we’re engaging the book of Isaiah, whose 66-chapter length makes a single reading service impractical if not impossible. So the elders chose to break the book down into meaningful sub-sections, and launch each sub-section with its own reading service. This past Sunday was our second such reading service, covering Isaiah 7-12, and it was a powerful confrontation with the word of God in all its wildness and weirdness.

Isaiah is one tough book. When Augustine of Hippo became a Christian, he asked bishop Ambrose for book recommendations. Ambrose recommended Isaiah, and Augustine failed pretty seriously in his attempt to read it profitably. A modern congregation isn’t likely to do much better: while the good stuff in Isaiah is dazzlingly good and wonderfully clear, those bits are scattered across a terrain that is both dark and difficult.  Chapter after chapter of Isaiah is devoted to God’s wrath and judgement, for one thing. And then there’s the difficulty of the language and the poetic forms.

There’s a basic reading comprehension challenge here: When the prophet demands, “Is not Calno like Carchemish? Is not Hamath like Arpad?,” it would take a pretty accomplished Old Testament professor to know immediately what point was being made.  And when he says that the Lord will make you like a hut in a cucumber field, is that a promise or a threat? (Sometimes I think it sounds idyllic to be a hut in a cucumber field… ). Speaking of promise or threat, how am I to take “In that day a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep, and… he will eat curds, for everyone who is left in the land will eat curds and honey?” That sounds good, but in context it’s mostly bad.

Most of these comprehension questions can be cleared up fairly easily; in fact most of them are clarified by the notes in the ESV Study Bible. But when you’re experiencing the public reading of the book of Isaiah, such questions come at you too fast to sort out. The public reading of a section of Isaiah is a pretty blunt instrument: the details wash over the audience, but certain key points stand  out, and the overall tone is powerfully communicated powerfully.

And of course the explanation is not lacking. We have not in fact decided to scrap the sermon and just read the Bible. First, the reading service is one part of an entire season of preaching, and the pastors will be “giving the sense” of these words in the coming weeks, passage by passage. And second, the reading service itself was not just somebody standing up and reading impromptu from an opened Bible. It was carefully planned and structured, with a variety of readers’ voices, some silence, some prayers, a few visual clues (the stump, the shoot, and the leveled forest are recurring images), and plenty of congregational sung responses. A seasoned pastor of worship guided our understanding of the text as it went along, arranging all the components of the service to bring out certain points for emphasis. The readers knew their passages well, and read with understanding and feeling.

So the safety rails are necessary, and they were well placed. Used prudently, those guidelines do not tame the word of God; they open up a space where God’s word through Isaiah can be itself. All the strange figures of speech, artifacts of a culture that is not mine, are right there. And all the ancient bizarre names are spoken aloud. The numinous, suggestive power of these strange, foreign sounds has some kind of incantatory power to transport the hearers out of their own situations and into the meeting with God’s ancient word.  Think of all the bogus religions that had to invent weird old names and difficult faux-ancient texts, just so they could feel like real religions. We’ve got the real thing, oddities and all, and though it takes care and wisdom to deploy it properly for a congregation, the word of God proves itself to be living and active, going out from the mouth of God and not returning without having accomplished its goal.

The news today is that Pope Benedict XVI is calling on priests to enter the blogosphere and upload their ministry. The official statement is “The Priest and Pastoral Ministry in a Digital World: New Media at the Service of the Word.”

Evangel readers probably don’t need much persuasion that the internet can be an effective tool for ministry. Just off the top of my head, I remember Abraham Piper (though not speaking ex cathedra) offering a pretty convincing Six Reasons Pastors Should Blog back in 2008, and Ted Bolsinger pleading “Blog, for Christ’s Sake” in 2005.

The Pope’s arguments and encouragements come in a different register, though. For one thing, he’s the Pope, so when he says it, it’s in the headlines. Every news writer is trying to figure out a clever way to say “what’s Latin for blog?” or “Thus saith the Lord: Tweet,” or “www.GollyWowTheChurchGetsModern” or something equally stimulating.

Also, Benedict’s writing style is, you know, Benedictine: erudite, allusive, intense, orotund even in print. His characteristic range of biblical and classical allusion inform everything he writes.  Who else makes a case for blogging by alluding to Paul’s “how can they hear without someone to preach?” and ““Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (Insert the verb “to blog” in there and your irreverent headlines write themselves!)

Other pull quotes of note:

Gathered and called by the Word, the Church is the sign and instrument of the communion that God creates with all people, and every priest is called to build up this communion, in Christ and with Christ.

Priests present in the world of digital communications should be less notable for their media savvy than for their priestly heart, their closeness to Christ. This will not only enliven their pastoral outreach, but also will give a “soul” to the fabric of communications that makes up the “Web”.

…I encouraged leaders in the world of communications to promote a culture of respect for the dignity and value of the human person. This is one of the ways in which the Church is called to exercise a “diaconia of culture” on today’s “digital continent”.

Just as the prophet Isaiah envisioned a house of prayer for all peoples (cf. Is 56:7), can we not see the web as also offering a space – like the “Court of the Gentiles” of the Temple of Jerusalem – for those who have not yet come to know God?

May the Lord make all of you enthusiastic heralds of the Gospel in the new “agorà” which the current media are opening up.

I was going to make a list of pastors who make good use of new media (blogs, facebook, and twitter in particular) for ministry purposes, but, gripped with the fear of leaving somebody out, I’ll ask for good recommendations in the comments. I’m especially interested in specifically pastoral and church-based examples, rather than all the other kinds of swell Christian internet usage.

Well, anyway, Darwinism gets a rap. I’m not enough of a hip hop connoisseur to declare with any authority which rap is good and which is bad. But if you were thinking, “What I’d really like is to listen to the Origin of Species in rap format,” then Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman has delivered the goods for you.

The Rap Guide to Evolution, Baba’s treatment of Darwinism, is a manifesto in which he not only summarizes the doctrine (in what he boasts is “the only peer-reviewed rap show”) but also takes a stand, since he feels a fierce urgency to “bear witness” to the truth of evolution.

Be warned: this is EXTREMELY white rap. A Canadian who is perennially popular at the Edinburgh Fringe, Baba has no choice but to make the most of his certified Pasty Gangster variety of street cred. Knowing that he can’t represent as urban, he mostly avoids Ali G levels of embarrassment.  I say mostly, because these things are pretty subjective.

When Baba boasts “I am a African,” he’s not over-reaching. He explains that he’s “talkin’ primeval.” “No I wasn’t born in Ghana but Africa is my mama / ‘Cause that’s where my mama got her mitochondria.”  Ah, of course. “The DNA in my veins / Tells a story that reasonable people find believable.” And they find it reasonable because, Baba assures his audience, “The fossil record has gaps but no contradictions.” That last line, by the way, doesn’t seem to have a rhyme or much rhythmic scansion; it’s one of the many places where the project crosses the line into In Your Face didacticism.

Baba rapping Darwin hits all the bases:  Quotations from the Origin of Species, vocal samples from Richard Dawkins, audience participation (“I say Creationism is, you say Dead Wrong!”), and dexterous wordplay. Hip hop has always excelled at making use of long, Latinate words that other poetic forms can’t digest, so Baba gets to deploy plenty of scientific terminology.

And when it’s time to talk smack and boast that he’s doper than those other MCs, as they say, his chosen foe is creationism:

If you have an explanation in mind, then you’re /Wastin’ your time, ‘cause the best watchmaker is blind /It takes a certain base kind of impatient mind /To explain away nature with “intelligent design” / But the truth shall set you free / From those useless superstitious beliefs /In a literal Adam and Eve, and that Edenic myth / ‘Cause their family tree is showin’ some genetic drift / Take it from this bald-headed non-celibate monk / With the lyrical equivalent of an elephant’s trunk…

The inevitable question is, is this the right medium for this message? Mostly not, so the high entertainment value of evolution rap comes from its status as a self-aware, comically incongruous novelty. But there are some points where the Darwinist message and the hip hop form come together fittingly. Baba doesn’t just rap about evolution, but also believes in the evolution of rap, and in rap as a product of bio-cultural evolution. That is, he is proud of the fact that rapping, as a conspicuous display of wit and rhythm, is all about attracting mates and increasing the odds on spreading the rapper’s selfish genes.  This leads him to his “grand unified theory of rhyme,” which is sadly reductionist but finds the courage to sin boldly:

The grand unified theory of rhyme / The mating mind uses lyrical signs, combined with wit / And wordplay, conversation, humour and different narrative styles … We’re all just Shakespearean primates verbalizing our cherry behinds…

Baba’s previous forays into Great Books Rap include The Rap Canterbury Tales.  Not to be missed, if what you’re in the market for is Chaucer rockin the mic with the mad lyrical flow.

The Evangelicals & Catholics Together gang have worked their way through a number of key doctrinal areas in recent years: salvation, Scripture, pro-life issues, Mary, etc.  Their thoughtful interactions have consistently shed light on the areas of agreement and disagreement between evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.

I don’t think ECT is scheduled to consider kitsch any time soon, but it has always struck me as a point of great convergence and conflict between these two communities.

Both groups generate distinctive material cultures of devotion, or to use the title from Colleen McDannell’s book,we exist in popular culture by generating different forms of “Material Christianity” (I took the image in this post from one page of her book).

Both groups are prolific in producing terrible, terrible religious artifacts for popular consumption. As an evangelical with an art major, I came of age with an acute sensitivity to the ghastly tackiness of evangelical religious paraphernalia. The wall plaques, the T-shirts, the bumper stickers, the knick-knacks and night-lights and whatnots: they were all sources of embarrassment for the artsy young men and women of the subculture.

The first time I heard somebody (I think it was Keith Green) call those mall bookstores “Jesus Junk Shops,” I felt an unaccountable wave of relief. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I was allowed to dislike things with Biblical content slapped on them. My secret shame absolved, I catapulted to the other extreme, casting thunderbolts of disdain on the benighted masses from my Olympian height of aesthetic superiority.

But one glimpse over the fence at the Roman Catholic side of things is also sobering. Roman Catholics have a schlock-generating capacity that far outstrips anything I ever encountered in the tschotschke pages of the CBD catalog.  Any page of the Leaflet Missal Company’s catalog trumps any page of the CBD trinkets mart. I don’t want to confess anybody else’s transgressions; I speak from sympathy with what I’ve heard Catholic friends lament over. Because of the Roman Catholic church’s official endorsement of a range of visual and physical expressions of the faith, their devotional-industrial complex is far vaster than anything I’ve seen even at the Christian Bookseller’s Association annual meeting.

Of course the two visual cultures are radically different from each other, with only a little bit of overlap around images of Jesus and that “footprints” poem (which we should probably just re-open the canon to make room for, since it’s already in everybody’s Bibles on laminated bookmarks with braided strings attached).

Last week I spent a few minutes in a Roman Catholic religious paraphernalia mart, and had that uncanny feeling that I was in a parallel universe where all the Christian knick-knacks are the same but different. Like Bizarro Family Bookstore. There’s a different aesthetic, a different visual culture, more crucifixes, fewer quilted Bible covers. But it felt like home, in the pejorative sense of the term “home” that teenagers use.

Two corollaries: First, aesthetically sensitive souls in either tradition share a highly developed sense of irony, and they employ it skilfully in navigating the visual cultures of their churches and subcultures. Kitsch, camp, and nine kinds of understated eye-rolling are their second language. These “way too cool for grandma’s sentimental picture of Jesus” people are certainly annoying as they contort their faces and postures to transmit their signals of disapproval and superiority. But they are not entirely motivated by pridefulness. Their ability to generate layers of ironic distance from sentimental religious kitsch is a survival mechanism they developed as they struggled to maintain some scraps of aesthetic integrity.

Second, those same aesthetically sensitive souls are also subject to devotional guilty pleasures. That is, they have plenty of testimonies about standing in front of a terrible piece of art, whether an evangelical billboard or a Catholic lawn statue, and feeling a pang of spiritual force that the art itself is not worthy of having provoked. If you’ve caught yourself crying over a sentimental portrait, or choking back a lump in your throat over a cheesy scene, or remembering that God is merciful to you while trying not to sing along with a song you love to hate, you know the devotional guilty pleasure. Nobody is safe from them. At least not the evangelicals and Catholics together in kitsch.

Grace, they say, is God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense. I don’t remember when I first heard that nifty mnemonic acrostic, but I know it was at a young age, and I don’t think I’ve outgrown it. It’s just a hook to hang some teaching on, and it’s a fine, sturdy hook.

But I have studied some more theology since then, and have learned that we can argue about anything, including definitions of grace. So here are some alternative acrostics; something for everybody.

Sorry if I left you out; or if I didn’t leave you out.

Victor Davis Hanson’s confession that he doesn’t even try to keep up with culture anymore (“Confessions of a Cultural Drop Out“) made for a funny column.  It’s full of grumpy, old-guy lines like “I was supposed to listen to Dan Rather because Murrow once worked for CBS?”  That’s a nice, long memory.

He’s not looking down on pop culture from above: he’s a farmer-professor who hates the country club even more than he hates the trailer park.  He’s not  William Buckley, who once boasted,  ”"I have never seen a professional baseball game, an episode of Dallas, or of Roseanne, or of Geraldo, or of the black lady who is alternately fat and thin, I forget her name. So? So I waste my time and take my pleasures in other ways.”

The old-guy lament (from Horace’s laudator temporis acti) is a great genre.  The best recent example from a Christian is Carl Trueman’s instant classic, Why Are There Never Enough Parking Spaces at the Prostate Clinic?

The big question here is not, “Should Christians strive to stay current with culture?” The big question seems to be, “When is it okay for old Christians to quit keeping up with all the latest schlock?”  I’m just a half-plug of Star chewing tobacco bit past twoscore, but I’m already logey and reeling under all the mediocre culture I consumed in the dreadful eighties.  It was mostly forgettable, but I didn’t succeed in forgetting it. I can already recite the first eight seasons of the Simpsons (when it was still good); do I need to make room and lower my shock-standards for The Family Guy?  I can pontificate on the emceeing styles of three different Family Feud hosts; do I need to make it a priority to see who the stars are dancing with? Don’t get me started on comic books: Having survived the zine revolution, the Secret Wars, and the Crisis on Infinite Earths, what’s a fanboy approaching middle age supposed to read? And where do they even sell comics these days, because I’m sure not going into that spooky store.

I speak not as a Christian, but as an up-and-coming fogey. I rarely meet the young Christian who needs to be exhorted to engage their culture. They seem to consume what everybody consumes, and are in general agreement with the zeitgeist that a steady stream of entertainment is the Fifth Freedom that our forefathers fought for. What I need is a reliable guide to the four good movies that come out every year, so I can see those and ignore the rest.

If there’s some gospel reason why I should scour through this and this and this to find something worth paying attention to, I’m ready to hear and obey. I’m even trying to keep the channel relatively clear so I can get the message when it arrives.

A theologian friend of mine starts his definition of “church” with this simple requirement: a group of believers can’t qualify as a church until they raise their hand and say “we are the church.” You have to be willingly identified with that organization that Jesus was talking about when he described how he was going to be working in the world. Until then, you’re a Bible study, or a fan club, or a fellowship circle, or a cadre of messianic activists, or whatever it is you’re calling yourself.  But whatever else it takes to be church (and it does take more, even for congregationalists), it doesn’t start until you raise your hand and say you’re doing that church thing.

It seems to me that there’s a parallel starting point for being evangelical. It’s clear enough that a lot of the cleverest people are too clever to call themselves evangelical, and that the best way to avoid the label is to feign absolute confusion about what it might possibly signify. No doubt it’s dull to spend time working out a definition, a sociological description, or a standard. But when I see the word, I see the good news in it, the evangel. And I want to raise my hand and identify myself with that movement which has the guts to name itself after that good word.

I know lots of other groups in history have also pledged allegiance to the word evangel or gospel.  But nobody thinks we’re talking about the “evangelical counsels” of monasticism, or the “evangelische kirche” of the Reformation, or the anti-Tractarian wing of Victorian Anglicanism (though that’s getting closer). I suppose it must be necessary to draw the boundary lines and tell a few people that whatever they are, they’re not evangelical in the sense under consideration here. That would mean spelling out the details of what it takes to be committed to the gospel: “fidelity to the doctrinal content of Scripture” (J.I.  Packer’s phrase) is, again, a starting point. Good fences make good neighbors, and all that. But when I look around, I see a lot of work to be done in there at the center, where a generation of young evangelicals are picking up a cynical tone about whether they should accept a label that identifies them with the gospel.

That’s why I raise my hand and say, here’s an evangelical. I don’t relish fighting for labels, especially labels that I’m not in charge of the quality control for. And it’s more important to join a local church than to affiliate with a movement.  But why let a good word go down? Especially when aggressively dis-associating from it sends equally uncontrollable signals to the kids.

“The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which have died from lack of care –they stand as close in it as do the graves today in the flats of Flanders or among the hills of northern France. And those good words are still dying all around us. There is that good word ‘Evangelical.’ It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means. Even our Dictionaries no longer know.”

–B. B. Warfield, “Redeemer and Redemption,” 1916