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Happy Birthday to the AG! (2015 edition)
Our middle daughter, Addison, enters her last single-digit year today. Hard to believe that nine years have flown by so quickly!
This young lady is a free spirit, a voracious reader, and a math whiz. Life is never dull with her around. She has a sense of style and funky attitude that set her apart from the crowd.
I love this young lady dearly and couldn’t be prouder to be her dad.
Can you name 5 ways the church differs from America?
There’s a challenging riff from pastor Brian Zahnd over on Missio Alliance today.
How, he asks, does the church differ from America?
The particular challenge for the American Christian is to distinguish the American way of being human from the church (the Jesus way of being human). If there is no essential difference between being Christian and being American (as a way of life), then what is the point of the church? This is a problem. Many American Christians would find it difficult to list five ways in which the Jesus way (the church) differs significantly from the American way. For them the church and the American way are essentially the same way of being human. Which in essence means this: The church does not actually exist. What exists is America. The church (and every other institution) exists only to support the supreme idea of America. Oh, boy.
He goes on to list 12. How many could you list? It’s worth considering.
Stopping ISIS
Pastor Rick Warren’s tweet echoes a sentiment that I’ve been hearing a lot lately around evangelical Christianity: that ISIS is an evil that must be stopped. Unsaid but clearly implied is that the USA should be stopping ISIS by “wielding the sword” - in other words, send in the military.
On one hand, I’m sympathetic. I’m a red-blooded male who gets motivated by the idea of going and fighting evil, and who today appears more evil than ISIS? I’m horrified (as nearly everyone is) by the videos of beheadings, and my heart is wrenched when I hear the accounts of children being kidnapped from families.
And yet… I get a little uneasy at the rhetoric I see going around, and believe that Christians should rethink that rhetoric, for at least a couple of reasons.
First, there’s a legitimate case to be made for Christian pacifism. I’m not sure at the moment quite where I fall along the just war - pacifism spectrum, but I respect those who believe that when Jesus said “love your enemies and do good to them that hate you”, it has a practical implication that means you won’t call for your enemies to be killed.
Yeah, the pacifism argument doesn’t work for me.
“And yet…” I hear some say, “…Paul says that the government has the responsibility to wield the sword, to reward those who do good and punish those who do evil”. True enough. But, even if you subscribe to that, I’ve got some more thoughts.
Second, I have serious reservations about whether or not sending the US military back in large numbers into the middle east to fight ISIS is a solution that will actually improve things. Unless you’ve been under a rock since 1990, you’re most likely aware that the US has had troops on the ground in the Middle East for the past 25 years, and that they don’t seem to have greatly stabilized the situation. It also looks a lot like ISIS is intentionally spoiling for a fight. How many more decades do we need to continue with this strategy before we start considering other approaches?
Third, while “you don’t negotiate with evil, good people stop evil” is great rhetoric and makes a punchy 140-character tweet, it doesn’t hold up as a consistent axiom even in a very brief reading of 20th century history. Sure, we went in to stop Hitler, and most would agree it was the right thing to do. But Stalin and those that followed him in Soviet Russia were at least as broadly evil as Hitler’s Germany, and what did the USA do? Well, we fought in a handful of proxy wars that were pretty much all disasters. And then finally Reagan negotiated and outmaneuvered them until their economic system imploded.
Would Rick Warren like to argue that Ronald Reagan was wrong in that course of action, and that he (or Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, or Truman before him) should’ve just nuked Moscow because they were EVIL? I’m guessing not.
Finally, I’m concerned when I hear appeals urging Christians to write our congressmen and demand action against ISIS because it comes with the strong implication that our leaders either (a) don’t understand that ISIS is bad; (b) don’t care enough to want to do anything about it; (c) are secretly radical Islamist sympathizers who hate America; or (d) All of the Above.
And maybe I’m just not cynical enough, but I think it’s quite likely that our President and congress DO understand that ISIS is bad, that they DO want to do something about it, that they’re NOT secretly radical Islamists, but that they’re people a lot like me who are trying to make very difficult decisions while getting counsel from the foremost experts in these areas that the country (and probably the world) has to offer.
So what SHOULD we do?
First and foremost, we can pray. Pray that the innocent would be protected. That Christians would be strong in their faith, even to the point of death.
Then pray for ISIS. Pray that they would be challenged by the faith of the Christians whom they are persecuting. Pray for their repentance and that they would come to know Jesus.
I love what Matt Chandler said back in a sermon in August:
I have been reading over and over the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (Acts 9). Murdering Christians. Well known terrorist among evangelical followers of Christ in the first century. Brutal. Powerfully converted and becomes one of the greatest missionaries of the Christian faith. I feel powerless about what’s happening in Iraq, but I’m also praying that God would raise up a Paul out of the leadership of the ISIS. Why not? God is God. He’s done it before. Why wouldn’t he do it today? Lets ask.
Now that’s something worth asking for.
A famous scene minus the dialogue
OK, I’m just shamelessly reposting something Jason Kottke dug up, but it’s fascinating - somebody took the courtroom scene from A Few Good Men and edited all the dialogue out. It holds up really well; a sign, I would imagine, of the quality of the filmmaking.
Worth reading: an interview with Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is an author many folks have never heard of, but boy, once you get into the right circles, you never hear the end of him. And while I haven’t read but a couple of his books, his fans’ high praise doesn’t seem unreasonable or hyperbolic. Berry is conservative when it comes to culture and community, but then holds positions on environmentalism and pacifism that are more aligned with the political left.
All the while, he’s a local Kentucky farmer who writes books, poetry, and has received significant awards for doing so. I have many friends today who approach Berry with the sort of awed respect that you can imagine them directing, in a previous era, to C. S. Lewis. (Don’t believe me? Just go read Andrew Peterson’s blog post from 2010 where he recounts a visit to meet Berry. It’s pretty great.)
My thoughts were directed back to Berry this week after reading a piece on Berry written by Gracy Olmstead on The American Conservative website. It’s a delightful interview in which Berry opines in his earthy, plainspoken way about the current state of politics, conservatism, community, and faith.
I love the humor that comes along with the critique, for instance, in his response to this question:
GO: You write a lot about the importance of conservation—which, really, conservatism is supposed to be about. How have conservatives lost an understanding of proper conservation?
> WB: For those who enjoy absurdities—as I do, up to a point—“conservatives” opposed to conservation are vibrantly absurd and worth at least a grin. But such conservatives have achieved this amusing absurdity by a radical and dangerous narrowing of purpose. They apparently wish to conserve only the power and wealth of the most powerful and the most wealthy. The conservation of wilderness and “the wild” seems now to be recognized as a project belonging exclusively to “liberals.” But that also is a dangerous narrowing of purpose. It is true that “liberal” conservationists also fairly dependably oppose the most excessive and sensational abuses of “the environment,” such as oil or slurry spills (in some places), surface mining (off and on, never enough), extreme pollution of air and water (mainly as it affects cities), and so on. But in fact most politicians, “conservative” and “liberal,” are the pets or juvenile dependents of the industrial corporations.
In Kentucky, for example, the Party of Coal has swallowed, digested, and shat nearly all politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike. Above all, it is still virtually impossible to interest any of the powers of politics in the economic landscapes of farming and forestry. In those landscapes the gravest and most extensive damages are being done: by soil erosion, by toxic pollution of soil and water, by impairment of the diversity and integrity of ecosystems, by drastic interruptions of the fertility cycle, by the devastation of rural communities and of our never adequately developed cultures of husbandry. There are reasons to hope for and even to foresee the coming of more honesty and better purposes—the need for a sustainable economy, the increasingly obvious failures of industrialism and corporate rule—but no extensive improvements can come easily or soon.
Or this rather pointed barb when asked about seemingly continuous wars:
I don’t believe we can hope to make sense of our modern wars until we have acknowledged that war is good for business.
On a Christian response to war and persecution of Christians:
Only a few marginal Christians have dared to think that Christianity calls for the radical neighborhood, servanthood, love, and forgiveness that Christ taught. I agree with them, and much against my nature I have tried to make my thoughts consent. I do not say this with confidence.
And this response when asked about his concerns with modern Christianity:
I don’t know when, why, or how it happened, but at some time the mainstream denominations put themselves in charge of the Sunday job of accrediting people for admission to Heaven, turning the workdays, the human economy, and the material creation over to the materialists. And so it became possible for people to commit their souls to God while participating in an economy dedicated to the swiftest possible extraction and consumption of everything it values in God’s world, with unlimited collateral damage to all creatures, humans included, that it does not value. Once this desecration of creation, of life itself, becomes conventional economic practice, then the submersion of the Gospel in nationalism and the waging of Christian warfare readily follows.
Love him or hate him, Berry is a fantastic writer, a thoughtful philosopher, a man whose thought we ignore at our own peril. I’d encourage you to go read the whole interview at The American Conservative. Me, I’m off to buy a copy of Jayber Crow.
HDHomeRun Extend noisy fan: fix it via OVERKILL!
A few months back I replaced my old (still working) HdHomeRun networked tuner with a newer model (recently rebranded the “HDHomeRun Extend” which provides H.264 transcoding. I was feeling cheap and so purchased a used model from Amazon for about half the price of new. It is functionally fine but has a small fan that went bad. (Nasty grindy noises from a fan: not good.)
From a bit of online investigation it sounds like SiliconDust (the makers of HDHomeRun) will repair/replace units with bad fans, but given that I got mine second hand that’s likely not an option. So, we go to idea #2: add a new fan myself.
A little online browsing pointed me to the Nexus 80mm Real Silent Case Fan and $13 and free two-day-shipping later I had one in my hot little hands. Then the fun ensued.
The case mod on the HDHR consisted primarily of cutting a hole in the top of the case to let air through. This was accomplished quite effectively with a little cutting wheel and a Dremel tool. Also used the Dremel to drill four holes for the rubber fan mounts.
You can sort of see the hole I cut in the top looking through the middle of it here.
The old fan came out easily - just three screws holding it in - and I left the old heatsink in place. I ran the fan wires out of a vent hole in the side of the case, and had to get the soldering iron out to tin the ends of the wires so that they had enough stiffness that I could push them in to the little clip in the fan power connector.
Wires are coming out the side and go up to the new fan…
It all went together quite smoothly and now instead of a noisy grinding fan I have one that runs almost silently to keep all that transcoding circuitry cool. A fun little project and a profitable end!
Jim Cantore, Minor Prophet
In former days the weather gods spake to us through almanacks and prognosticating rodents, but in these latter days they speak to us through television channels.
In the seventh year of President Obama’s reign, the word of the weather gods came to the prophet Cantore, saying:
“Behold, Midwesterners, though thine January hast been mild, and thy hopes look tomorrow toward a groundhog’s tidings of early spring, yet before the ground thaws and the streams murmur with hopes of warm weather, a storm shall come upon you the likes of which has not been seen in your environs for many months.
And woe unto you, who live near the Great Lakes, the mid-Atlantic, and the Northeast, for neither shall you be spared. Though your earlier drifts may be melting , yet these storms will restore them to their former height and even beyond, if it be possible.
Behold, Juno and Kari shall come from the north, and Linus from the northwest, and shall fall upon thee with cold and heavy snow. The sun will be blocked out, and in blizzard conditions the visibility shall be near to nothing.
The prophet Cantore’s message was briefly interrupted by Local on the 8’s.
For more than 24 hours this storm shall be upon you, leaving as many as twelve inches of snow behind. Once the clouds depart, yet shall the winds remain. And all the low places will be filled up, and the drifts shall rise as high as the horses’ bridles.
But this is not the end of sorrows.
For after Kari and Linus have left thee, behold, a clipper from Alberta will visit thee for a time, times, and half a time. It shall bring with it unbearable winds, and temperatures for which the zero on the thermometer is insufficient.
Woe to those who are traveling when these things occur! And pray that thy children have relief from school. We, the weather gods have spoken, who form the storms and call them each by name. Others may speak and promise warmth, but hearken not to them, for they promise falsely of warm-ups which shall disappoint. Maintain thine eyes rather upon the jet stream, for by the jet stream are thou chilled, and by the jet stream thou shalt be warmed in due time.
This cold shall not last forever. Stay tuned to my words, when after a brief message I shall speak of hopes that may bring ye warmth by next week.”
Bullet Points for a Wednesday Morning, 2015 edition
I’m in Florida for a work trip this week. It’s been a good time so far. Doesn’t hurt when the view out your conference room window looks like this:
But without further ado, the bullets:
- Rental car for this week: Chevy Camaro convertible with about 3000 miles on it. As usual with sports cars, it doesn’t have the visibility I’m used to in my old Saturn and my minivan.
- Amending the previous statement: if you put the top down, the visibility is pretty darn good.
- How can you tell the Midwestern boy visiting Florida: it’s the coldest week of the winter here (highs only in the low 60s!) and I’m driving around with the top down.
- I’ve been a long-time Tweetbot user but I’ve been fooling around with the official Twitter app on my phone the past few days. It’s interesting to evaluate the design choices. All the ads, sorry, “sponsored tweets” in the official app are sure annoying, though.
- Last year when I came to this committee meeting, Atlanta got their big ice storm and it took me three extra days to get home. Glad that this year the storm went much further north and won’t interfere with getting home.
- Watched Guardians of the Galaxy on the way down here. Not sure it was what I was expecting, but I enjoyed it a lot. The plot seemed far less important than the characters, and I really liked the characters. Merits a second watching.
- Then watched The Maze Runner the other night. That was 90 minutes I’ll never get back.
- I picked up a $199 Samsung Chromebook right before this trip. I’m reasonably impressed. Cheap hardware, but still functions pretty well. Will be curious to see how it holds up as I use it more.
Enough for now.
Worship develops feelings for God, not vice versa
This wonderful little bit of insight came across my Twitter feed this morning and I’ve been chewing on it all day. It strikes me that this is one key reason why the lyrical content of worship songs sung in church is so important to me.
The insipid worship music designed to inspire a feeling nearly always rubs me the wrong way. I’m painfully aware of when my emotions are being manipulated, and I recoil.
On the other hand, when I sing good content, powerful truths, they move me. They sink in and then engage my emotions in worship. But it’s the willingness to come to worship and the truth sinking in to my heart that brings the emotion, and not the reverse.
Thanks, Pastor Eugene.
Farewell, Episcopalians?
There have been some strong reactions across the internet the past couple days to some remarks that Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Dr. Albert Mohler made on his daily podcast The Briefing. The provocative headline: “Controversies involving Episcopal leaders affirms liberalism and Christianity two rival religions”.
A little ways down in the piece it’s clear he’s not talking about political liberalism, but rather Protestant liberalism. And he says that Protestant liberalism (he singles out the Episcopal Church) and Christianity are “two rival religions”.
Why does he make this audacious claim? He points first to a recent tragedy where a female Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts was driving drunk and hit and killed a bicyclist. Mohler theorizes that the woman was appointed a bishop, even after one prior drunk driving conviction, because “the diocese was in a rush to elect a woman as bishop”. Secondly Mohler notes that the dean of a leading Episcopal seminary (also in Massachusetts) is stridently lesbian and pro-choice, and is stepping down from her job, Mohler conjectures, not because of those views, but because of financial mismanagement at the school.
Mohler says that these two examples demonstrate that the Episcopal church has a different “moral code”. (This seems fairly self-evident, albeit with the caveat that not everyone in those denominations may agree with those value norms.)
But then he audaciously claims that because of this different “moral code”, Episcopalians (and apparently, by extension, the rest of ’liberal Protestantism’) are not actually Christians, but rather, “rival religions” to “orthodox Christianity” (by which, of course, Mohler doesn’t mean Orthodox orthodox, but rather those that agree more closely with his set of beliefs).
By their fruit you will recognize them
Now we shouldn’t be hasty to discount Mohler’s evaluation criteria. After all, in Matthew 7 Jesus says that we will know false teachers by their fruit. “A bad tree bears bad fruit.”
So, to summarize Mohler’s argument, these two Episcopal leaders are exemplars of a set of moral priorities that demonstrate that liberal Protestantism isn’t, in fact, Christian.
But is it really reasonable to go from observing two pieces of rotten fruit to concluding that the whole section of the orchard is bad?
Alrighty then…
First, I’m more than a little astounded that Mohler would suggest that a “moral code” is what delineates “real Christians” from “rival religions”. (Apparently we don’t need to worry about theology much? Odd coming from the head of a seminary…)
But if, from a couple highly-visible examples, it’s appropriate to conjecture the “moral code” and thus orthodoxy of an entire branch of Christianity, let’s use Mohler’s own Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism as an example.
Let’s consider the case of C. J. Mahaney, who while being fawned over at conferences for writing books on humility was also running roughshod over staff without any accountability, had a history that included blackmail of rival leaders in his denomination, and who was at the helm of a denomination that covered up multiple accounts of child abuse.
And then let’s consider the case of Mark Driscoll, who built a megachurch on his reputation as “the cussing pastor”, bought his way on to the NYT Bestseller list with church money, and finally resigned in disgrace and saw his church shut down after a plagiarism scandal was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
What should we conclude from the “moral code” demonstrated by these two leaders (certainly at least “bishops” if there were a formal hierarchy) in Mohler’s theological circles? Is it fair to suggest that Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism is some sort of rival religion to Christianity because Mohler and many with him embraced these men until their patterns of sin finally became too public to ignore?
Of course not.
Christians, of all people, and reformed, “total depravity”-believing Christians most of all, should be the first to line up to admit that we are all sinners, and that moral uprightness is (blessedly) not the criteria by which our faith is judged.
Yes, true faith will change how we live, how we calibrate our “moral codes”, how we allow God to make us more like Jesus every day of our lives. And by all means, let’s strive, vigorously, to champion righteousness within (and without!) the church.
But publicly dismissing an entire wing of Protestantism as a “rival religion” because their set of acceptable sins is different than your own is arrogant foolishness, and Albert Mohler’s listeners deserve better.
I have many friends and family in liberal Protestant denominations who I am happy to embrace as brothers and sisters in Christ, even when we disagree on moral priorities. I will continue to learn from them, and hopefully them from me. One day a perfect man will sort us out and open our eyes and show us how wrong we all were in various areas of belief and practice. Thank God that man’s name will be Jesus and not, well, anybody else.