Eternal Perspectives

After reading this, I asked a question about this matter on a discussion I began, realizing even as I asked the question that I was not being nearly specific enough to limit the exchanges to the rather narrow corridor of thought I was going down myself. And while this post won’t answer my question definitively, hopefully they will be more helpful than my random, disjointed articulations of thoughts I attempted there.

If I were going to choose one verse that enjoins us to pursue spiritual growth and Christlikeness, I might go with Heb 6:1:

Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God . . .

It is clear from this verse that maturity, growing in Christ, or sanctification is something we have a role in. Whether that role is active or passive, direct or indirect, contributory or facilitation is part of the question about the question. What is our responsibility? How do we participate in this process of becoming Christlike?

There are activities that are necessary but not sufficient for sanctification: prayer, Bible study, fellowship, exercise of spiritual gifts, and many others. There are attitudes that facilitate the process: humility, dependence, patience, faithfulness, discipline, and others; these, too, are necessary but not sufficient.

What is to be our experience of the dynamic of sanctification? I’ve written elsewhere about my understanding of how spirituality and brain science find expression in an integrated way in a believer, but I’ve not said anything about how – or whether – I know I am allowing the process to proceed.

The only way I can effectively explain my thinking at its present stage of development is through analogy. Like all analogies, the few I’m about to offer break down and lose correspondence at some point. But hopefully the gist of my thoughts will be clear enough.

I’ll begin with the analogy of playing golf. I choose golf because it is complex, difficult, and takes time to master. And while Christian maturity definitely takes time, I don’t know that I would call it particularly difficult – although it is invariably painful. But all that goes into playing golf well parallels all that goes into spiritual maturity.

To play golf well, it is necessary to know and become proficient in the fundamentals of the swing: stance, grip, shoulder turn, weight shift, head stability, follow through, and at least one thousand other things that will go wrong from time to time. Each facet of the swing needs to be understood and practiced repeatedly in order to mature as a golfer. This takes years on the driving range and various courses to accomplish.

Spiritual maturity in Christ is no different in this regard. There are things we need to understand, prioritize, reorient, and accept; there are activities – such as prayer, serving, teaching, witnessing – that we need to become more proficient in. Knowing the Scriptures – all the Scriptures – and how they reveal the eternal purposes of God is critical, as is an intimate familiarity with the truths and teachings (i.e., doctrines). We need to be able to think globally, synthesizing the entire corpus of books in the Bible; we need the big picture. But we also need to analyze things in depth, pushing ourselves to comprehend things we can never fully comprehend.

But, whether we’re talking about golf or sanctification, these things aren’t enough; they are, as I’ve said, necessary but not sufficient.

In golf, people say incredibly stupid and infuriating things to you. For example, as you’re getting ready to swing, trying to remember the 1001 things you have to do correctly to produce a well-struck shot, they’ll say, “Relax” or “Trust your swing” or “Don’t think about it, just do it” or something else that is impossible to do when you’re first learning the game.

So, too, in spiritual growth, we’re told to “abide in Christ” or “Walk in the Spirit” or – and this one triggers homicidal urges – “Let go and let God.”

But in a way, they’re right. In golf you have to relax and trust your swing (even though you know the likelihood of betrayal is pretty high!). And in the Christian life it is much the same.

To change the analogy, think about riding a bicycle. Now here’s an interesting fact: if you think about riding a bicycle while you’re trying to ride a bicycle, you’ll probably fall. If you’re preoccupied with the rhythm of your legs, the force on the handlebars, or continually shifting your weight to maintain balance, you’ll fail. Riding a bicycle well means not thinking about it: you just do it. It’s the same with swimming, snow skiing, tennis, or most activities we participate in. We know, we practice, but then we do them without thinking.

Our experience of sanctification, I think, is not conscious. It is something that the Spirit within us accomplishes as we take the swing, peddle the bike, make strokes in the water, or turn gracefully on a downhill run. We are conscious of what is going on around us more than what is going on within us, but we do not have to be conscious of the Spirit’s activity for sanctification to take place. It’s about living in the moment, not trying to force anything or consciously do the right thing to produce a certain outcome.

It doesn’t help to be thinking about sanctification when we’re trying to live the Christian life. Neither does it help to focus on our shortcomings, mistakes, limitations, or immaturity. Thinking to much about what one is doing right or what one is doing wrong grinds the process to a halt. We cannot be deliberately trying to be spiritual; we cannot be deliberately trying to not be spiritual. Either way, it won’t work.

God says, for example, to share the gospel with the lost, not to make sure we’re doing it exactly right as though the outcome somehow depends on our proficiency. But as we share the gospel more and more – or pray, teach, serve, or whatever – two things happen: we get better at it without conscious effort and our understanding of God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – deepens.

It happens when we’re not even trying or thinking about it. It is as we reflect on our personal history that the growth becomes evident. Many times it’s brought to awareness by someone else who makes a comment to us.

There is obviously more to say but perhaps this is enough for now. To summarize one last time, though, I’m saying that maturity is something that is accomplished as we simply live our lives without conscious effort within the boundaries God has ordained. Our maturity is not our responsibility: it is God’s. Our responsibility is to be involved in activities, to place ourselves in proper environments, and trust God to do what God has promised to do. And to enjoy the experience as it unfolds.

In response to a comment at the aforementioned forum, I wrote:

What that component is that you mention, or at least what I would call it rather than “synergism” (which is not a bad term but not as close), is that there is a zen-like quality to Christian maturity, sanctification, being conformed, etc. Not to the extent of the dissolution of self-object awareness or oneness with the universe – and certainly not the divine within us – but in the sense of it being indirect, non-linear at times, and a non-rational process. Not irrational, but non-rational: it is not logical although there is a logic to it, if that’s not a contradiction. There is an existential element to it, too, i.e., the living-in-the-moment approach to life that is not without boundaries or purpose but is not completely premeditated, either.

It’s a slippery thing, at least to me right now, and almost resists definition or explanation. It’s not a “doing” kind of thing or even a “thinking” kind of thing: it’s a non-self-conscious way of being. But there is a conscious aspect to it, but it is a Christ-consciousness. Even this is not direct; it is more out of the corner of one’s eye, something that happens when we’re looking for it in one place only to catch a glimpse that it is happening or has happened some place else.

Perhaps this is how it has to be. If it were doable by us, we’d surely foul it up. This way, we know in the core of our beings that it is not we who have created this godliness or maturity, but Christ. It is a work of the Holy Spirit working out God’s will in our lives and in our selves. We cannot do it. We can only allow it to happen, but only then by not trying.

The following sermon was sent to me by a client. Listen to it, please, and if you’d like to know who preached it, I’ll be happy to pass it on.

It’s the best sermon I think I’ve heard (other than my own, of course) in 21+ years of living here. That’s not meant to disparage other preachers but only to highlight how good this is.

Hope it is meaningful for you. If not, well, it’s only 21 minutes long. (A 21-minute sermon? Are you kidding me?)

Sermon on Jn 14.6

Back in The Day, when shoulder-length hair on young men wasn’t a fashion but a declaration, people who were not Freaks would come up to us with a genuinely bewildered look on their faces. An exchange similar to the following would take place:

Them: “What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”‘

Us: “Whadda ya got?”

So it went and so it was. There was a lot of anger in the air in The Day, although few of us really had an idea of why. We just knew something was wrong and we were angry about it.

In Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend, Geoffrey Guiliano writes, “In ‘My Generation’ Townshend first released the anger and frustration he would never outgrow.

I think Guiliano is right about Townshend and about many of us who grew up in the Sixties. We were and are angry; we’ve never outgrown it. A lot of us have, maybe even most of us, seduced by the comforts of capitalism and having made an unholy tryst with an ugly culture and mentality. But not all of us, even though we may have tried to do so.

I’m still angry.

“What are you so angry about?”

Well, I’m angry about Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister.

I don’t really know how old I was. I was old enough to remember the fire clearly and have vivid images in my mind’s eye, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I’ll guess that it was 1959, give or take a year.

One of my sisters woke me up in what seemed to my boyish clock to be the middle of the night. All she said was something to the effect that the Moore’s house was on fire.

The Moore family lived almost directly behind us, just across a one-lane dirt alley that separated the two sides of my supersized block in Terre Haute, Indiana. I don’t remember how many children they had: they didn’t have any boys my age so I didn’t pay much attention to them. Patricia and Anna, though, went to school with my sisters and were kinda friends. I knew them and thought they were cool.

When I got to the fire the two-story, wooden house was totally engulfed in flames. I remember the brightness and the heat given off, and a few mothers in the neighborhood who were holding their small children in their arms. It was probably winter but not very cold. Plus the fire was very hot.

I remember seeing Anna and maybe Patricia crying. I remember feeling bad for them: I sure didn’t want to think about my own house burning to the ground.

We didn’t stay long. We’d seen a lot of fires here and there in the neighborhood and the novelty of one so close to home wore off quickly.

I learned the next day that Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister died in the fire. I don’t think I ever knew her name. A little while later I learned that it had taken the fire department forty-five minutes to respond to the first call. The fire station was one street over and one street down. Two blocks. Forty-five minutes.

A little girl died because the fire department didn’t come when they were first called. They waited.

Did I mention that this was around 1959?

Did I mention that the Moore family was black?

My town was racist back then; it may still be so. But that was one of the first things I remember that contributed to the anger and frustration I’ve pretty much always felt. The THFD took their time because they didn’t feel any sense of urgency to respond to a house fire two blocks away but across U.S. 41, the dividing line between blacks and whites in our town. I lived in a ghetto. I didn’t know it but I did.

It still makes me angry now, almost fifty years later. I recognize that the death of a nameless black girl has become a symbol of sorts for me, and that my anger is not just about her death. It’s about all the mind-numbing horror that has been dumped on people for years and years by people who ought to have known better. People who grew up when the U.S. was more Christian than now.

And I’m still angry because it’s still happening. The groups have changed, perhaps, but the inhumanity and hatred continue. Maybe we call them “illegal aliens” now and think of them as illegal but treat them as though they’re aliens. Non-human. Not capable of love or deep feelings or saving faith or devotion to Christ or any other thing that makes us human but not them.

The churches in my town were silent about the whole thing. Nobody thought it was usual. And what really gets to me even now, what almost brings me to tears as I write this and think about it, is that the black people in my neighborhood weren’t surprised either. They had come to expect it. It had been going on for years and years and years.

And I hated it and I still hate it and I’ll rage against it until the day I die. Or, I hope I die before I stop hating what happened. I’m angry.

“What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”

“Whadda ya got?”

(The narrator and his 11-year-old son, Chris, are traveling via motorcycle across the northern tier of states with John and Sylvia Sutherland, longtime friends of the family. Chris has just asked his father if he believes in ghosts and, hearing a negative reply, pursues the matter.)

“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”

He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”

Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.

“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”

John nods affirmatively and I continue.

“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”

“What?”

“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.

“They seem real to me,” John says.

“I don’t get it,” says Chris.

So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”

“Of course.”

“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”

John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.

“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”

“Sure.”

“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”

Now John seems not so sure.

“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”

“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.

“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”

. . .

John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”

I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.

“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.

“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”

They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”

John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.

I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.

After a while John says, “It’ll be good to see the mountains again.”

“Yes, it will,” I agree. “one last drink to that!”

Whenever I picked up Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I kept seeing applications of the author’s arguments to my own Christian life. And perhaps your Christian life, too. In order for anyone interested to be able to understand what I’m talking about, it’s necessary to work through the development of narrator’s thought as well as my own.

Early in the motorcycle journey from Minnesota to Montana, the speaker (for the book is written in first-person limited) takes time to explain his understanding of understanding. He says,

“But right now I just want to use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding into two kinds – classical understanding and romantic understanding. . . .

“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance. . . .

“The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. . . .

“The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws – which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior . . .”

The narration goes on but I want to interrupt for a moment. When I read “romantic” and “classic” I think “Praxis” and “Theology.” And by “Praxis” I mean the living out of the Christian life, not something divorced from reason or knowledge but instead something growing out of it and also informing it. I could call it Peripateo, the word for “walk” but Praxis, “practice,” is perhaps more familiar and thus preferable.

I am not saying that experience or Praxis should determine doctrine or Theology. I am saying that Praxis should illuminate Theology. And illuminate it by both demonstrating the truth of the doctrine and deepening or even modifying our understanding of knowledge and doctrine.

Then narrator says, “Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classical.” My application is this: “Although Praxis is romantic (as defined here), Theology is purely classical (as defined here).”

He adds,

“The classic style [Theology] is straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthetically free and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under control.”

And then he adds this important observation:

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one more or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.”

If this doesn’t describe most of the division in evangelical Christianity, I don’t know what does. It is not only in the “world” that reason is elevated and affect marginalized: it is certainly true any many segments of evangelicalism, too.

Having been spiritually raised in a Bible Church environment, I have looked disdainfully in the past at those who seemed to draw their knowledge of God almost exclusively from their experiences. And their experiences, it seemed to me, tended to dictate their doctrine and beliefs.

I no longer look at such people with disdain but I still think the generalization is largely true. Such people are the romantics of Christendom, enthralled by the beauty and grandeur of Christianity but negligent or ignorant of the structure and foundation necessary to support it.

But the knife cuts another way, too. My own experience has been largely, if not exclusively, in classical or Theological understanding. It has been cerebral and reasonable, clinical and sterile. Feelings, emotions, experience have been relegated to a lower status, as though they were creations of a lessor god.

The merging of these two ways of understanding lie down the path of Christian maturity. I have only begun trying figure out how to think about these things and how to live them out. I’ll talk later about what constitutes excellence or genuine maturity, but for now I’ll only say that it requires both of these modes in proper relationship to one another.

Important and significant as this has been for me, it is not what caused the seismic paradigm shift for me. That lies elsewhere, but much needs to be explained before I can get there.

I suppose I should start by saying a few words about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its author, Robert Pirsig. This book, as I mentioned previously, was an important catalyst in some changes that have occurred in me recently. But, whether you’ve read the book or not, I need to explain what I swallowed as meat and what I spit out as bones. Because there are some bones in the book and we should be careful not to choke on them.

First, the meat. Pirsig mentions early on that he was clocked at 170 on the Stanford-Binet measurement of intelligence, a score that puts him in the rarefied air of genius. Nowhere is his intellect more in evidence or more scathing than when he turns it on the sacred cows of our culture. His analysis of the educational system, for example, is a penetrating and refreshingly honest expose of what is wrong with undergraduate and graduate programs in America. This is not central to my own present writing, however, and I’ll let it go for now – but, since I am also in no hurry, will pick it up later: it’s just too good to be missed.

As a philosopher, Pirsig leaves much to be desired, but as a teacher of philosophy and a critic thereof, he has few peers. His treatment of Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle made me stop and reconsider some of the long-held presuppositions and assumptions I have had – and not really been aware of. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either.

It is often said that a fish does not see water or that a fish does not know that it is wet, either of which is meant to be an analogy for the difficulty of we have in seeing the metaphysical underpinnings or presuppositions of our own culture or subculture. Pirsig shows us both the water and that we are all wet. What he has to say about Aristotle and his effect on western culture has implications for western Christianity, too.

Pirsig is in fine form when he discusses, in addition to the educational system, such things as the nature of excellence, the limits of intelligence, insanity, conformity, and spirituality. I hope to write about each of these things in posts to come.

But there are bones to be careful of, and these are pretty much all found in his attempts to come up with his own philosophical system, something he will later call the Metaphysics of Quality. As I said before, he is at his best as a critic and teacher but at his worst as a philosopher seeking his own system. Well, no one is perfect.

I need to review ZMM to refresh my memory on some of the details of Pirsig’s writings. This means I may not post for a week or so. Or, it could mean that I’ll post a whole lot real soon. I don’t know.

Thanks for reading this, and thanks for tagging along.

In the Nov 17, 2008, edition of Insight for Today, Charles Swindoll discusses Romans 6. His thoughts are summarized in one of the paragraphs:

In order for us to live free from sin’s control, free from the old master, with the power to walk a new kind of life, we have to know something, we have to consider something, and we have to present something.”

The emphases are mine but they are also the three major points of his brief article: know, consider, present. These three words are vital, Swindoll maintains, if a Christian is to live “by grace, above sin’s domination.”

I’m using his article merely as a springboard for something else, not at all assuming that this is all Swindoll believes about living out the Christian life. He has written numerous books – The Grace Awakening being foremost – that go into more detail about other aspects of the Christian life.

Swindoll’s emphasis in this particular article, however, represents a basic, halfway approach to the Christian life. In fact, a great number of conservative, evangelical churches never seem to go much further than the approach put forth in the article.

The words know, consider, present have at least this much in common: they are all mental or cerebral activities, as though the cognitive apprehension of these truths was sufficient to engender spiritual growth.

The words are absolutely necessary for growth but they are not sufficient.

It was Aristotle, I think, who elevated the rational parts of our being to supremacy in life, relegating the affective and behavioral dimensions to subordinate status. Perhaps he misunderstood Socrates (which is pretty arrogant for me to say, as though I understand Socrates better than Aristotle) and his comment about knowing good.

Socrates had stated that if one knew the good then he would never do evil, which could be construed to mean that knowledge alone is sufficient for growing and achieving excellence in life. But Socrates was not talking about mere knowing: he was talking about a knowing that is founded upon and dependent upon a preceding commitment to the doing of truth and the pursuit of excellence.

Clearly Aristotle, if he did believe that knowledge was sufficient, was wrong. We see the disproof not only in our over-educated society in general but in our fact-saturated subculture of Christendom specifically. Knowing, considering, and presenting are never enough, not even when – and I say this advisedly- we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us.

It is to these kinds of things that I now find myself drawn. There is something – or Someone – towards which knowledge points us but which knowledge alone is unable to apprehend.

Certainly that Someone is God – Jesus – Yahweh – Paraclete, but such a statement is too general to be of much value. There is something more, some unknown (to me, anyway) attribute or facet of God that is missing in so much of conservative Christianity.

That’s what I’m trying to figure out these days. I don’t know that I’ll actually figure it out but I’ll try to keep you abreast of where I’ve been and where I’m heading.

I do not presume to know all the ways God works in a person’s life. What that means practically is that I am often not sure if God is doing something in my life or if my flesh – egged on by Satan in the blender of the world – is simply doing what it wants to do. If I am considering some ungodly pursuit, then it is clear; when I am reflecting on esoteric and ethereal things, trying to see behind the wizard’s curtain, it is not always so obvious.

I do know what God is doing – conforming me to the image of Christ (to the extent I will allow it) and bringing glory to himself. I know, too, that it is the Holy Spirit who accomplishes these things. It’s the how that I am unsure of: Is this a rabbit hole God wants me to follow? Or is this a bad rabbit hole I need to get out of? I don’t know.

Such is the quandary in which I have found myself recently, shoved toward the rabbit hole by the debacle at a church with which I was involved. What precipitated the present dilemma was the – timely? untimely? – reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM henceforth) by Robert Pirsig.

N.B. – If you are of the sect that avoids secular stuff or anything that flirts with false religion, consider the author’s note at the beginning of the book:

What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.”

I’m pretty sure God prevented me from reading the book when it first came out for either one or two reasons: if one reason only, then it was because it was a book that would not have been good for me; if two reasons, then it was because God knew it would not have been good at that time but it would be good for me at a later time. So, if it’s one reason, then God didn’t want me to read ZAMM at all. But if it’s two reasons, then God didn’t want me to read it before he had first prepared me.

ZAMM came out in 1974; I became a Christian late in 1974. It could be that if I had read it then, in my B.C. days, it would have interfered with conversations I had with Christians and might have postponed my conversion for some time (I do believe in election, but not so much an appointment that I will meet God at such and so time).

More likely, though, is the very strong likelihood that had I read it 34 years ago much of it would have been lost on me. For one thing, I wasn’t so intellectually curious back then. For another, there was too much smoke in my neurovascular system, i.e., marijuana smoke. I might have been inoculated (following Bem’s theory) and the significance of the book lost on me permanently.

But now I have read it and I cannot undo the impressions or effects that it has had. So I have to figure out if the book’s impact is a good thing God brought into my life or some insidious evil that God allowed to come into my life. As of this writing, I think it was a very good thing for me to have read the book, although I cannot tell you why. And I can see how the book’s effect could be dangerous for me, too, and must admit that I would be sad if that proved to be the case.

Some of the effects I can describe and some I cannot. Some I understand and some I do not. And some I can attribute to God’s work in my life and others – well, I don’t know. Hence, the problem of rabbit holes.

Here’s one effect:

Pirsig says a lot in the book about people, psychology, philosophy, society, education, father-son relationships, and our relationship with ourselves. Describing one of the characters, he says:

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions. He came to see his early failure as a lucky break, an accidental escape from a trap that had been set for him, and he was very trap-wary about institutional truths for the remainder of his time . . .

The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.” – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

There is a phenomenon that psychologists, not knowing how else to describe it, call “personality integration,” an Ah! Ha! moment wherein the psychic pieces come together to make a coherent whole. To anyone aware of my long history of, in Tom Petty’s words, “runnin’ down a dream that never would come to me,” it should come as no surprise that Pirsig’s words were remarkably healing. Suddenly almost all of my experiences of the past 34-plus years tumbled into a new category which was immediately understandable, recognizable, and (in many ways) vindicating.

Yes, but about that rabbit hole . . .

Is this a good thing or not? Is it merely a rationalization I can employ to justify or comprehend more than three decades of frustration with Institutions that (in my mind) ought to know better? Or is this a snare of the enemy into which I have fallen? Is it a subtle means of conforming me to the world?

There are no definitive answers. There are, however, hints and kindred spirits – hinting spirits like Harry Blamires, a great Christian thinker (so say some) who, in 1963, wrote:

The [Christian] thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundations of all about him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those who are running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance. He is a luxury that modern society cannot afford. It will therefore naturally, and on its own terms justifiably, strive to keep him quiet, to restrict his influence, to ignore him. It will try to pretend that he does not exist. . . .

But the Church is false to itself when it rejects the thinker. And therefore, in so far as it adopts the fashion of the secular world and tries to submerge thought under learning, prophecy under scholarship, wisdom under know-how, it strives to secularize itself; in other words to destroy itself . . . Thus our complaint against the education through which our [pastors] are prepared for their duties might justly be widened into a complaint against the bias of our educational system in general. It is not geared to the production of thinkers. It is geared to their obliteration.” – The Christian Mind

But the fallacy is blatant, is it not? Blamires is a “kindred spirit” or “great thinker” because I agree with him. If I did not, I would hardly regard him a “great thinker” and certainly not a “kindred spirit.”

Perhaps (although this too may be nothing more than a rationalization) it comes down to this: do I have the courage or faith to follow and live out that which I believe to be true? Will I walk the path which is opening before me? And do this regardless of what others think of or say about me? Perhaps this is part of living by faith, something that devotion to Christ demands: a commitment to follow the path – down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass – wherever it leads as long as it does not depart from Scripture. And to do this regardless of whatever anyone else might think.

Perhaps. Who can say?

Each morning I make myself coffee and spend some time with Diane at her blog. I discovered her writings only recently and have learned considerably from her, especially with regards to postmodernism and the emerging/emergent/progressive church.

She wrote a post the other day that she thought to be important and, as a result, has kept at the top of the page. It is an important post, in some ways, but not as important as it could be.

In her post Diane takes Donald Miller to task, he being the author of Blue Like Jazz as well as the designated spiritual guy who offered the opening prayer at the interminable Democratic National Convention (which will happily end soon, only to be followed by the equally embarrassing and insipid Republican National Convention).

Diane filleted Donald because someone in a Sunday school class agreed with her on the importance of the gospel but also liked BLJ. Based on her previously detailed logic, Diane argues that this cannot be. She writes:

Ok, I think you get the gist. Here is what I want to point out. This young man in my church basically said,

[A] I agree wholeheartedly that it’s important we stress what Jesus did at the cross for us and orthodox Christianity (Note from me: with what I assume would be its attendant morals and ethics)

and

[B] Blue Like Jazz really spoke to me.

That is a classic case of A AND B, where most of us (at least those of us over 35) couldn’t fathom how anybody could put those two things together. But young postmoderns can….and do.

I am not sure I agree with or follow her argument as developed but that is tangential to my purpose here. What I would argue contra Diane is this: Emergent churches (EC) are off-track but only in a different manner as biblical (traditional or contemporary) churches (BC), albeit more dangerously so.

The problem with the EC is alluded to in Paul’s letter to Timothy. He wrote,

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.

For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy,

unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good,

treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,

holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; avoid such men as these. – 2 Tim 3.1-5 (emphasis obviously mine)

Simply put, the problem with the EC is that they often have form but almost never have substance. The power and substance of Christianity is the truth of the gospel to save and continue saving mankind. Without the gospel, Christianity is little more than a poorly developed philosophy filled with empty sentimentality.

On the other hand, the BC has retained the substance but by-and-large relinquished the form, replacing it with a Christianity wherein faith and truth can exist without duty and obedience. Substance but no form. It is to this, I think, that many are reacting and subsequently rejecting the BC.

Perhaps I have misread Diane but it seems that she is arguing for substance (which is certainly laudable) without stressing the equally critical form (which is an error as well). Surely Sire was correct when he observed that

if we do not behave as we say we believe, or do not do as we say we know, we neither know nor believe. (in Habits of the Mind, p 102)

Diane is correct in her criticism of the approach and un-anchored practices of the EC, but it does little to fix what is wrong on our side of the street that facilitated the emergence of the EC to begin with. But more on that another day.

In my daily “roaming about on the blogosphere and walking around on it,” I came upon a post by Bird entitled “The Heresy of Gulley and Mulholland.” These two men have written a book, If Grace is True: Why God Will Save Every Person, that is little more than a repackaging of an idea that has been around seemingly forever, i.e., universalism: the teaching that all people will be saved.

Bird, who may have been so unfortunate as to have purchased the book, quotes the authors:

If you are unwilling to question the Bible, neither my experiences nor my arguments will carry much weight. (Pg. 49)

Weighing Scripture allows for the possibility that some descriptions of God and his behavior are inaccurate. (Pg. 52)

Their presuppositions in hand – i.e., that some parts of the Bible are truer and thus more authoritative than others, I decided to conduct my own study and came up with a conclusion that I don’t believe has been reached before. Here it is:

Those passages teaching the judgment, guilt, and condemnation are true or, at the very least, less erroneous than passages that seem to teach that salvation is possible.

This is not difficult to substantiate. One need look no further than the Book of Romans, Paul’s heretofore badly misunderstood treatise, to clearly see the fate of all mankind. Consider, for example, the following:

Therefore you have no excuse, everyone of you who passes judgment, for in that which you judge another, you condemn yourself; for you who judge practice the same things.

And we know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who practice such things.

But do you suppose this, O man, when you pass judgment on those who practice such things and do the same yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? – Rom 2.1-3

If we are willing to challenge our beliefs and allow true Scriptures to speak truth to us, it is difficult to miss the essence of Paul’s words here. If we have been guilty of judging another person, even just once, we can trust that the judgment of God will fall upon us. There is, Paul says, no escape, no way out, no final deliverance; the writer of Hebrews adds that there is only “a terrifying expectation of judgment and THE FURY OF A FIRE WHICH WILL CONSUME THE ADVERSARIES.”

In case we missed it in the above, Paul reiterates his point again:

But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,

who WILL RENDER TO EACH PERSON ACCORDING TO HIS DEEDS: – Rom 2.5-6

At first this might seem to offer some hope, but Paul is once again quick to squelch the foolish hopes and longings of mankind, adding,

as it is written, “THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE;

THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD;

ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.” – Rom 3.10-12

No one is righteous. No one. All of us have sinned and, as Ezekiel made so clear a few millennia ago, “the soul who sins will die.” Everyone is sinful, Paul says; all sinners die, says Zeke. Case closed.

Of course, you might appeal to those passages in Romans and elsewhere that seem to indicate that there is salvation available through faith in Jesus Christ as our atonement. But this is where the genius of the Gulley-Mulholland hermeneutic must be employed. Consider:

if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved;
for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.

It is imperative at this point to recall the principle: Weighing Scripture allows for the possibility that some descriptions of God and his behavior are inaccurate.

This passage (Rom 10.9-10) is without question one of those instances where the understandable yet desperate desire of Paul to avoid the fires of hell for all eternity has caused him to write something inaccurate. Who can blame him? Who wants to look forward to such a fate?

But such is the fate of Paul, and not only him, but the fates of Gulley and Mulholland, Scully and Mulder, Frodo and Sam, Jack Sparrow and Keith Richards, you and me. It is obvious and easy to understand once the principle of interpretation as developed by the aforementioned authors is adduced.

I can’t imagine why no one has realized this before. It’s just so clear.