I recently made a post about reading 1984  and suggested watching the 1984 adaptation starring John Hurt.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen the full release (i.e., unedited), having seen it recently on a cable network that edits for content; this means that I forgot that the film contains both male and female nudity.  I saw that a commenter noted that for those who might view the film and I appreciated the reminder.  Indeed, everyone has their own standards and considerations for viewing film, and I do not wish to be responsible for anyone’s stumbling. 

One of the things that I find troubling in my own experience is that I will mention a film or even show one in class that I haven’t seen in twenty years, back before I was a father of tweens and thought about content issues differently.  I know that this happens with faculty colleagues as well; we sometimes forget the full content of a film (or, in my case, slept through parts of the movie, especially those midnight movies that were so popular when I was in college).

At the risk of offending some folks’ artistic integrity or sensitivities, I thought I would post three helpful hints for viewing films. 

1. Check out http://www.dove.org/ for family friendly reviews.  This site is very helpful for those of us with children, especially older children where the ratings begin to get mushy.  They include evaluations of sex, language, nudity, drug use, and worldview issues.  My family checks this site routinely before heading to the theater or placing online orders.  I also recommend this site to faculty and student affairs folks to see if films being used in class or in sponsored activities might have material that will be troublesome.
2. Check out http://www.imdb.com/ for a secular take on things, but one that often includes ratings for sex, language, and so forth in the “parents guide” near the bottom of each film’s top page.  This site is particularly helpful in that it includes almost every film ever made, including foreign films.  It also contains an unbelievable amount of information that can identify other films on similar themes that might be helpful.
3. If you are concerned about some of the content identified above, for movies that have moved to cable, it is often possible to view edited versions that have deleted the more prurient sex / language content.   

We live in a post-literate society and film is one of our primary ways of employing narrative.  I hope that these tips will help folks to avoid the visual traps that can accompany this format; they aren’t perfect, of course, but I have found them helpful in my own life and work.

Lots of folks are talking about the current Vanity Fair story on the Creation Museum in KY.  I’ll let someone else start a chat about the story in particular or the museum (follow the Scott Lamb link below for one such discussion); I wish to deal with something more general and foundational.

Check out this quotation from the Vanity Fair story (heads up: if you follow the link, remember the nature of VF’s photography): 

“This place doesn’t just take on evolution—it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology.”

(h-tip: Scott Lamb , who notes that the VF story seems surprised by this wide-ranging engagement on the part of the museum.)

Now compare that with this quotation from Abraham Kuyper:

“In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, “That is mine.”

These two statements distill the essential difference between a secularist worldview and a Christian one.

A Christian worldview is relentlessly unified, viewing knowledge itself as pointing to an ultimate unity.  Christ is Lord over all (Acts 10:36 & Phil. 2:10-12).  He is reconciling all things (2 Cor. 5:19).  We are called to take captive every thought to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5).  Indeed, the hermeneutical key to the entire universe is God’s self-revelation of Himself.

A secularist worldview is hopelessly fractured.  Each academic discipline is a silo.  Each perspective on the world, no matter how contradictory, is equally valid; there are no “priorities.”  Each opinion is entitled to a seat at the table of ideas (except, of course, for any opinion that dares to point out the logical inconsistencies of the other opinions).  There can be no meaningful interpretive key for knowledge because there is only disintegration and brokenness among the various stakeholders.

Once we understand these radical differences, we can see how high the stakes of the conversation really are, and how far-reaching, whether in cultural issues or theological disputes.

Okay, can I admit that I have an utter fascination with Christopher Hitchens?  While I grieve for the state of his soul, I admire his intellect and his ability to cut to the heart of an issue.  Perhaps it’s because he’s an intellectual ninja who is, unlike of most public intellectuals, honest and straightforward.

I mention this because I ran across a recent interview with him by a Unitarian minister in Oregon (h-tip to Matt Friedeman).  When the interviewer says, “I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example),” Hitchens produces, completely off the cuff, an incredible defense of the necessity for Christians to believe in the resurrection.  The best line, perhaps, is when he taunts her: “If all Christians were like you, I wouldn’t have to write the book.”  Ouch!

Clearly Hitchens knows his Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles” (from The Art of War).  I wish all of my fellow believers understood the scale of the stakes the way that Hitchens does. 

The interview is here.

Before we move too far beyond the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I thought I’d post one more thought about the subject. After I’d had my moment when babies became real (see my last post), I had an overlapping experience that greatly shaped my understanding of literature.

While I teach English now, that was not my major in college, so when I decided to pursue graduate work in literature, I had to take some courses to demonstrate my analytical skills. In one class, our professor taught Ernest Hemingway’s brilliant short story, “Hills like White Elephant,” which is about a young couple contemplating the prospect of an abortion.

The story is intense. The man tries desperately to convince her that it’s no big deal. “It’s not really anything,” he says. “It’s just to let the air in.” He asserts, “We’ll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.”

Our professor used that “let the air in” line to talk about symbolism. “It’s not just letting ‘air’ into the woman’s uterus, it’s letting ‘air’ into their lives. The procedure will let their relationship continue to breathe. It’s symbolic air.”

Since I had developed my thoughts on abortion fairly recently, I read the story as a damning indictment of the man’s calloused failure to protect his romantic interest and their child. I thought it was a great illustration of the seriousness of the issue. To my utter disappointment, the professor never said a word about the ethics of the fictional discussion. The couple could have been buying a can of beans for all our in-class analysis indicated. There was no passion (in either direction of the issue) and no wrestling with the realities of the rhetoric. We learned about the facts and techniques of the story but we didn’t learn anything from it.

Since I knew that I wanted to teach English, I decided then and there that I would never teach students about literature without making sure that they learned from it. Sure, I would teach the technical characteristics and historical contexts, are incredibly powerful tools for analysis, but I thought there should be so much more: a look at how literature can inform our own thoughts in terms of ethics. I don’t mean that I was going to be an ideologue who used literature to make my point at the expense of serious discussion, but I wanted for my students to know that they could argue over the most important issues of the day based on their readings of important works of literature. I wanted them to know that literature is a living, breathing commentary on our lives and our world.

Ethical readings of literature ruled the pedagogical roost until the twentieth century. I personally think that one of the reasons for the decline of English as an undergraduate major is because students aren’t dull enough to sit through hours of professors telling them that words don’t mean anything. Such an approach has caused the study of literature to rise up like yet another intellectual white elephant.

January 22nd is the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. In anticipation of the events marking this date, I thought I’d tell the two-part story of when babies became real to me, whether in utero or in bassinets.

As a high school guy, my world rarely included babies. None of my friends had them, I never helped in the church nursery, and at that time, the early 1980s, pregnant classmates disappeared for visits to relatives in other states. I wasn’t pro-choice, which would have been the “cool” position, but I wasn’t pro-life either; I’d just never thought about it much. Babies were, well, an abstraction. They didn’t really exist in my world.

In college, I spent most of my time in the campus science building, which was crammed with carefully prepared specimens, charts, and cabinets. One particular cabinet, a tall glass case with four or five rows of shelves, caught my eye from the start. The case contained thirty-odd jars, each containing a human fetus at a different week’s gestational development. From the tiniest speck in the smallest jar to a nearly full-term specimen in the largest, the fetuses floated in a state of suspension, palish pink in the fluorescent lights. A small placard on one shelf noted that the contents had been collected from “spontaneously aborted pregnancies” at the local hospital.

One day a classmate showed me that if the cabinet were hit in a certain way, the jars would slosh slightly, causing the specimens to move slightly. We laughed at this, touched by the absurdity of so many fetuses wiggling in unison. It was surreal.

Sometime later, I repeated this move for a friend, bumping the cabinet with my hip sharply and saying, “Look at the babies waving!” On cue, the specimens shuddered, the more advanced ones moving their arms slightly.

I froze at the sight: I no longer saw fetuses. I saw babies. Jars of babies, from the tiniest, most fragile, to the largest, most viable-looking child. I was horrified that I had made a joke out of it. This was the start of my shift from neutrality to having a firm opinion that babies were babies, no matter their stage of development.

A few years later, a very good friend of mine, a high schooler, became pregnant. I watched her make the determination to carry the baby to term, eventually placing the child up for adoption. I heard about the callow comments their fellow church members made. I knew about the rumors she dealt with at school. I saw her transform into a godly woman who understood grace in a way that was real, as she restarted her life after her child was born. She is one of the people I most respect in this world.

One off-hand comment from that experience has rung in my ears for almost three decades now: “The people who are the most vocal opponents of abortion are sometimes the very ones who most make young women want to have one. It’s easier to have one and keep it secret than to deal with the tongue clucking.” I was horrified for a second time, realizing that my own snarky words had, at times, not treated those babies like real babies.

Revelation 13:8 reminds us that the names recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life were written “from the foundation of the world.” This verse underscores the longevity of our relationships with God: through His foreknowledge, He knew our names before He shaped the dust of the ground into Adam. Life does not begin at conception, then, but rather, in a very real way, with the asynchronous relationship that God has with us. As Psalm 139:16 notes, God planned our days “before a single one of them began.”

If a baby could be so real to God at the foundation of the world that He would peer into history and know that child, the least we can do is find ways to protect that child, in the womb, throughout her life, and at the eventual end of her days in this world. This means being pro-life at every stage, whether we are advocating for the unborn, working for justice for the poor and the oppressed, or protecting the elderly from so-called “pragmatic healthcare.” Babies, and people, are real.

Recently I opened a jury duty summons for one of our local courts. My report date hasn’t arrived quite yet, but I’m looking forward to the possibility of serving. I’ve only been empanelled once and it was a nightmare; I’m hoping for a better experience this time. The accused was clearly guilty; everyone identified him as the culprit (it was a robbery and stabbing), there were multiple witnesses, and the case was solid from start to finish. The accused even admitted that he had done it, but he claimed, with a straight face, to have stabbed the guy “accidentally” four, count ‘em, four times: once in the chest and three times in the back after he flipped the victim over. He threw the icepick (he claimed it was a meat thermometer) into a river, he said, while fleeing to another state because he was afraid that he would be charged with a crime.

Incredibly, we ended with a hung jury because one of my fellow jurors kept saying, “Who am I to judge this man?” It was a case of eleven angry men and women and one owner of a half-baked hermeneutical approach to Scripture, in this case Matthew 7:1-3, which she had denuded over and over in a refrain of its first two words: “Judge not.”

If we take that verse out of context, not only from Matthew 7 but from the broad panorama of Scripture, we then are left with a kind of soft anarchism that leaves all possibility of justice from the earth, expecting God to act as a legal deus ex machine whose failure to intervene in the smallest instances of justice leave us paralyzed to act. If there is no justice, no consistent, measured kind of justice, in this life, then how can we have any hope of knowing justice in this world? Instead of passing the buck to some sort of moral deism, the point of the passage is that justice begins in our relationship with God: we are called to judge ourselves first according to God’s standards, and to act on God’s behalf out of a sense of holy humility and righteous integrity that expresses itself in concern for the oppressed, no matter who they may be.

This is particularly important to the form of government that we enjoy in our nation. If I were on trial, I would find hope and comfort if I could be assured that the judge and jurors would base their deliberations out of a sense of prayer, fairness, and adherence to the highest standards of the law. If I were a victim, I would find the same kind of comfort in such knowledge. I hope that I can be that kind of juror when I am called upon.

I’m Sick and Tired of Lewis and Chesterton

Twice in the past week, I thought I’d said something relatively clever only to have someone say, “It’s funny that you say that: I was reading something that C. S. Lewis wrote about that very idea not long ago . . . .” If it’s not Lewis, it’s G. K. Chesterton: “Chesterton, of course, pointed out that . . . .” I swear, I am sick to death of pulling myself up onto a new limb of thinking only to find one of those two guys sitting there smiling smugly.

First, are those guys still writing books and essays from beyond the grave? I could swear that their “complete works” have not been completed. Every time I turn around, I find something else they wrote that I have somehow missed. I can only imagine what it would be like if they had blogged in addition to publishing their longer works.

Second, I am constantly reminded that the Preacher of Ecclesiastes was right when he reminded us, “Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us” (1:10). For some reason, most of us believe our thoughts to be immensely wiser or more innovative than those of past thinker. I suppose I could call this epiphany “chronological snobbery,” an arrogant belief that what we think now is far superior to what the ancients had thought.

No . . . wait a minute . . . blast that C. S. Lewis!

A secularist recently complained that Christians haven’t ended poverty after two thousand years and that maybe it’s time we give the federal government a crack at it. I think he’s forgotten about the inefficiency of the federal “War on Poverty” that LBJ established in 1964, but I also have to admit that the church at-large does a terrible job of helping the poor, apart from a bit of short-term assistance or symbolic sympathy.

This topic has been much on our lips in my household for the past few weeks. My wife has been reading Francis Chan’s Crazy Love, which calls for radical communalism in faith communities, and I heard David Platt’s series of Union University chapel messages (in a list at http://www.uu.edu/audio/ ) about the seductiveness of materialism. Chan and Platt are coming from two different hermeneutical models, but their common point is the same: the U. S. church isn’t doing as much as it should.

Through the centuries, some leaders have declared that all Christians should become poor themselves in order to best help those who are in poverty. As Dallas Willard has observed, however, in “The Spirit of the Disciplines,” “Being poor is one of the poorest ways to help the poor.” Willard seems to believe that most persons who have the ability to make money but who become willfully poor are, perhaps, sinning because they have rejected their God-given opportunity to help not once but rather in an on-going way. The clear message of the totality of Scripture (and not just a few cherry-picked passages) is that all Christians, especially those who have means, are to help poor persons for the sake of the Gospel. Making a choice to “become” poor is, in fact, a luxury; most poor persons do not have such a choice.

In some ways, I think that trying to solve “poverty” is the epitome of absurdity. Poverty is a byproduct of the Fall (whether it is related to drought, political turmoil, chemical dependency, or illness and bad luck). As such, no matter how hard we may work at ending it, it will persist on this side of heaven. Even Christ Himself said, “You will always have the poor among you” (John 12:8). Why, then, should we even try to do anything about it? Isn’t it absurd to try to fix what is irreparable?

As I’ve been pondering this issue, though, I keep coming back to a rather famous quotation from Elie Wiesel; lamenting the dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis, he implied that we do the same thing in our discussions of the Holocaust. Six million Jews were not killed by the Germans, Wiesel observed, rather “one Jew was killed by one German six million times.” I think that we could alter that with great effect in considering our calling to help poor persons: “Poverty will not be solved by Christians; rather, one poor person or family should be helped by one Christian or Christian fellowship at a time.”

What I mean is that we can have all of the grand visions for benevolence that we can conceive of, but until we stop seeing “poverty” or “the poor” as faceless nouns and begin seeing “poor” as an adjective applied to individual persons who bear the imago dei, we will never be effective in our outreach.

David Platt noted in one of his messages that we need to stop trying to help poor persons out of a sense of guilt but rather help them out of a sense of the Gospel. All of our efforts in this world are doomed to failure; only what is done for the glory of God will last. Like so many things, the wisdom of God is the foolishness of men. It is absurd, in human terms, to keep trying to eliminate poverty. It is wisdom and in fact true religion that honors Christ, to visit widows and orphans in their affliction and to serve poor persons in their time of need. It should be one of our primary endeavors as the people of God.

When I lived in New Orleans, I knew a retired advertising executive, Phil Preddy, who travelled the world volunteering to paint murals in church baptisteries. For those of you who aren’t low-church Baptists, it is common in churches that practice believer’s baptism to decorate the sanctuary’s baptismal pool with a mural depicting the Jordan River, evoking an image of Christ’s baptism. Mr. Preddy’s art was an outstanding example of a layman’s integration of a call to service with profession / talents.

Over the years, I’ve seen amazing folk-art baptistery murals. My favorite one has to be in a tiny country church in South Mississippi (the home turf of the inimitable Russ Moore and yours truly) where the Jordan River valley looked just like the creek meadow next to the church, right down to the twelve-point buck standing in the tall grass!

We evangelicals are notoriously iconoclastic and outside of the church nursery, paintings and other visual artwork are all but absent. Our churches are oddly industrial and non-descript, with blank walls aplenty and open spaces left empty of anything but the occasional gospel tract rack or a lost-Bible table or two.

As many have noted, though, our society is increasingly a post-literate society. We have widespread literacy, but most folks would rather gain their information from visual modes of communication. The ramifications for the church are manifold, as “word” is subverted by “image.”

As a literature professor, this troubles me, of course, as it smacks of an intentional kind of short-sighted ignorance. Mark Twain once noted that there is little difference between those cannot read and those who choose not to read. There is little difference, then, between a society that is pre-literate and one that is post-literate. I think that Christians should be at the forefront of efforts to retain a rightful emphasis on literacy and the primacy of the written word.

Having said that, though, the American church must also find innovative ways to communicate the Gospel to those who are post-literate; to do so, we need only to look back to pre-literate Christianity. As cultures have moved from orality to literacy and, now, to mediacracy (to coin a term), we need to remember the strong connections between “logos” and “eikon / imago” in the context of a Christ-centered Gospel: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col. 1:15). For two millennia the church has employed stories and visual images to communicate the Gospel. We must move beyond the murals of the baptistery and the nursery and rediscover the biblical power of imagery, including reclaiming the fecundity of the visual arts tradition that we have allowed to decline in the wake of the Enlightenment’s emphasis on rational, literate discourse.

Not long ago I was dealing with a particularly thorny issue at work (I’m an academic administrator), one that drained me of much mental and emotional energy. I had to negotiate a conflict between two persons (both of whom are godly) who had hurt each other’s feelings. These situations are the most difficult parts of my job.

The situation resolved itself well, but I was grieved at how commonly we find ourselves hurting others, especially Christian brothers and sisters. Our best intentions go awry, and we find ourselves wrecked on the shoals of broken hearts. In a flash, I realized that these situations are rooted in the Fall itself.

I’ve decided that we give short shrift to the Fall. We think about it abstractly most of the time, talking about “lostness” and “salvation” and other important theological terms, ones that bear importantly on eternity to be certain, but I suspect that we also forget about the everyday concrete realities of the Fall.

I re-read Genesis 3’s description of the Fall and the subsequent curses that fell on us all. Except for the few farmers among us, we read verse 19 (“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken”) and we think that it is a declaration that has long since lost its teeth in the real world. Most of us no longer till the soil, especially in the West.

The reality, though, is much of our time, energy, and resources are spent dealing with the effects of the Fall. The hardest part of our jobs, often, is that of dealing with interpersonal conflicts. The most draining elements of family life are those that involve the lasting echoes moral and spiritual failures. The largest portion of our taxes is spent trying to contain the wars, poverty, and lawlessness that fill the earth. At the conclusion of most days, we have indeed found our brows to be sweaty as we have taken our daily bread into our weary, dusty mouths.

In the end, when I ponder the utter sickness of the fallen world, I can’t help but breathe a longing plea: Even so, come, Lord Jesus. Come quickly.

In a previous post, I proposed that a portion of the schism between evangelicals and non-evangelicals may be found along the fault-line of local church / hierarchy: Does the hierarchy / denomination serve local churches or do local churches serve the hierarchy / denomination? I lamented the weakness of ecclesiology in our current theological climate.

Has anyone else noted the parallels between what’s happening with our ecclesiological issues and current questions about the role of the federal government: Does the federal government serve the people or do the people serve the federal government?

Is it possible that ecclesiological considerations might help us to navigate the issues related to the proper role of government? Or is that just more “evangelical idolatry of politics”?