I finished preaching the book of Galatians once for a bunch of college students. 6 hours in 2 days. Exhausting stuff. A smartass comes up at the end and says, “That was great Kevin. It’s really cool to hear Tim Keller sermons in a Dublin accent”.

Keller is the founding pastor of the hugely influential Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and that is fine and dandy and he used to lead the Presbyterian Church of America’s justice ministry and before that he used to teach theology at a seminary and before that he was the pastor of a little rural church but the reason I write this morning is his writing. In the last three years he has written three books: The Reason for God, The Prodigal God and now Counterfeit Gods.

In Counterfeit Gods he writes about how the human heart is at base an idol factory. An idol after all is not simply some large phallused statue that Amazonian tribes dance ecstatically around in some hi-larious Hollywood comedy. It is a good thing in our life that we elevate to become an ultimate thing. Keller, like Marilynne Robinson, is one of those current crop of Presbyterians that seem to get to the heart of what our tradition is about without being distracted by the debris of free-will/Calvinistic arguments.

Early in the book he tells the story of Jacob and his pursuit of the beautiful Rachel. He works 7 years for Laban to earn the right to wed his stunning daughter and then that cunning old fox switches Rachel for Leah, the ugly sister. In his drunken state, Jacob marries the minger and wakes up the next morning furious, still dedicated to paying any price (another 7 years labour) to get Rachel and utterly uninterested in Leah. It is a tragic tale. Each character has idols at play motivating their behaviour. And so Keller writes:

At this point in the story, many contemporary readers will be wondering: “Where are all the spiritual heroes in this story? Whom am I supposed to be emulating? What is the moral of the story?”

The reason for our confusion is that we usually read the Bible as a series of disconnected stories, each with a “moral” for how we should live our lives. It is not. Rather, it comprises a single story, telling us how the human race got into its present condition, and how God through Jesus Christ has come and will come to put things right. In other words, the Bible doesn’t give us a god at the top of a moral ladder saying, “If you try hard to summon up your strength and live right, you can make it up!” Instead, the Bible repeatedly shows us weak people who don’t deserve God’s grace, don’t seek it, and don’t appreciate it even after they have received it. If that is the great Biblical story arc into which every individual scriptural narrative fits, then what do we learn from this story?

We learn that through all of life runs a ground note of cosmic disappointment. You are never going to lead a wise life until you understand that…

- Tim Keller, Counterfeit Gods, p. 36-37

This superb book is finished with a killer final chapter where he argues with aplomb that the only way to rid our lives of an idol is by replacing it with something more beautiful and worthy of our love. Sheer effort will result suppression at best abject failure at worst. Or in other words, the way to get free of the things that enslave you is to fall in love with the one who is most worthy of your love.

I wonder who that might be.

No! It’s not me! Silly.

Your Correspondent, Never refuses food from strangers

We could see if we can get IRCHSS funding to find Absolute Boring without the need for Hadron Colliders or cricket playing professionals.

One comment will be considered a quorum.

Your Correspondent, Master of all he surveys

If that analogy has any merit, surely it’s the most depressing ever conceived?

Your Correspondent, Wound up on the wrong end of a gun

Marilynne Robinson’s quest to wake us up to the fact that Jean Cauvin is the lost prophet civilization needs to listen to continues in Christianity Today. Because even evangelical Christians have colluded in the cover-up on the father of Presbyterianism:

Perception is at the center of Calvin’s theology… It is as if we were to find a tender solicitude toward us in the fact that the great energy that rips galaxies apart also animates our slightest thoughts.

Your Correspondent, The saints dub us divine in ancient fading lines

Now I realise an even worse tragedy would be to wake up and realise I do believe in Jesus but am trapped in a job out of pragmatic concerns.

Your Correspondent, Caught comfort eating the communion wafers

Para-church organizations are Christian organizations (commonly Protestant) which work outside of and across denominations to engage in mission.

In 1914, Henry Ford was able to produce a Model T in 93 minutes. That year, his company made more automobiles than every other manufacturer in America combined. The Age of the Assembly Line had begun.

Everyone born after 1908, the year the Model T went into production grew up in a mental universe categorically different from their forefathers. Efficiency had become a concept as natural to us as colour or space. It was simply self evident: the grain of the universe ran smoothly.

By the time that generation had come of age, through two world wars, (one certainly won by the superior means of production) they were ready to apply the assembly line idea they inherited to all of life. In 1940, two brothers founded the restaurant chain that would in the 1950s define the culture of the 20th Century: McDonalds. The application of principles learned the hard way by staff in Ford’s Illinois plants would now be extended to the serving of beef sandwiches and partially hydrogenated liquid drinks (milkshakes).

The 20th Century was the age of production and we are its children, living in the age of consumption. The middle 20th Century saw economies driven forward by the twin engines of assembly line efficency and franchised homogeneity. It was also the last age of the church and Christendom. Across the western world, the church was considered terminal without a diagnosis. It may have taken John Lennon to tell us all that pop bands were now bigger than Jesus, but in the aftermath of the holocaust and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings, the church was biding time, enjoying the last glow of being central in culture, vital to society, a hallmark of civilization.

In a Christendom culture, there is prestige involved in being a church. Politicians court your support. Parents ask you to educate their children. Artists seek your patronage. There is a lot of money and power and fame to be had. So there is also a lot of competition. Denominations vie for the prime spots on the stage when the President is inaugurated and bishops compete to be drawn onto the consultative panel on public morality. The competition can be unseemly. It can be vicious. I am sure there is a psychology or economics experiment that describes the phenomenon, but when everyone competes in a non-zero sum game as if only monopoly is success, everyone can be left empty handed.

So we have the mechanisation of the assembly line, the homogeneity of the franchise and the competitiveness of the churches in the twilight of Christendom. The parachurch emerged as the intersection point between these three circles. They created a “demilitarised” zone in which Christian mission could be engaged in without denominational infighting. They created discipleship and evangelism “programmes” that served as the theological equivalent of the assembly line.?And they promised that wherever you are, your parachurch would be the same: YoungLife would be YoungLife in Michigan and in Delaware. Christian Union would be Christian Union in Leeds and in Dublin. Assembly line. Franchise. Christendom. The ingredients for a para-church emergence.

Undoubtedly, the para-churches served an important function and continue to do. I dedicated five years of my life to IFES Ireland and still support them in their work. I am not some kneejerk reactionary who is against any para-church movement. But setting aside any issue of the para-church effectiveness and legacy, if my basic contention about the sociological factors in their emergence holds true, then para-churches face a difficult future.

90 years after Ford, two geeks made their college project public. It was called google, and it represented a new way to make the data stored on the world wide web available to searching by the average person. Everyone born after this date would have their world view utterly altered by this technology. If the Model T made the locations of the world accessible, google has made the data of the world accessible. It will take decades for the generation who have inherited this shift in the way of thinking to come of age and take the reins of power. When they do, most certainly, the approach to power will be crucially changed. Decentralisation will take precedence over hierarchy. The internet is a technology almost explicitly opposed to franchised homogeneity and to assembly line production. And in the intervening decades between these two epochal shifts of technology, Christendom has died and the ghost of the church left behind is going to have to notice eventually.

In a post-Christendom world, the church will have little or no social capital (or actual capital) left to spend. Politicians will not ask my opinion on legislation. Parents will not want you to educate their children. And society doesn’t give a crap what we think about moral values. I think this is fantastically good news.

One of the things that will happen is that competitiveness and insecurity between churches can reduce because none of us are going to get rich or powerful off this game.

But if I have read the zeitgeist right, then the world we are growing into will also suspect homogeneity as a mask for power plays. The global nature of the internet actually encourages and invests local particularity with new found significance. The internet age will also be a do-it-yourself age, or less anachronistically, a creative commons age. Open source discipleship is already a metaphor my generation finds much more natural than programming. At a global summit on Christian leadership last Autumn, one speaker proposed the idea of open source sermons, crowd sourced in consultation with the preacher. The epistemology of our world has shifted. The church will eventually catch up. But when it does, the para-church may no longer have a space to store its considerable baggage.

So the question is not so much is there a case for the para-church as will there be a case for the para-church?

Your Correspondent, Doesn’t want to disappoint his Japanese public, especially Godzilla

In the book he describes his broken engagement. Like the time he shattered his arm, pain came well after the initial break. When it did, he describes it with reference to that first time, the metaphorical blood and guts of the wreckage of his hopes and his relationship spilling out weeks and months later in a hotel room:

… But all that ended at a conference in Los Angele where I was scheduled to give a speech. I was only there for a few hours, but I asked for a hotel room to shower and go over my notes. I had a yellow pad in front of me and scribbling an outline and the television was on a football game when it occurred to me I was thirty-six and unable to navigate a serious relationship. I knew then the shock was wearing off. A certain fear grew. They don’t have an emergency room for the kind of pain that is about to happen me, I thought.

I put my pen down on the bed and waited. Then another thought came that said I would be living the rest of my life alone because I was unlovable. The thought I could no longer eat or drink would have been less devastating. I sat in a haze for a minute and was startled when the yellow pad slipped off my knee onto the floor. The bones in my chest turned their sharp ends outward and made a tent of the skin over my heart. I told myself it wasn’t true, that I was a perfectly good person and God could change whatever it was that made me contemptible. I told myself there was still time. But counselors from hell spoke to me from under the pillows and behind the chairs until they had the big voice.

Before this, I couldn’t understand why a person would commit suicide. And while I now have the perspective that only comes from distance, and the perspective always comes, I know the power a lie has to shrink time into what seems the eternal end of things. It is a true miracle I survived that hour. I wasn’t numb anymore. I was allowed to feel the brunt of it. The bones penetrated my chest in a sudden rip, emptying a body of blood down my shirt and into my lap. The blood pooled in the lap of my pants and seeped into the carpet in my hotel room. I clasped my hand over my heart and knelt between the bed and the television and rolled onto the floor and cried out to God a lamenting demand that he would come and save me from the sorrow that, for the immensity of it, I could only attribute to him in the first place. I didn’t want to learn whatever it was he wanted to teach me. I cried out to him an angry petition for rescue. I doubted him and needed him at the same time. God seemed to me, in that moment, a cruel father burning a scar into my sin with his cigarette. And yet I knew he was the only one with the power to make the pain go away.

This book is a memoir of the time when Miller was charged with the task of his adapting his hugely successful memoir Blue Like Jazz for the screen. His life didn’t translate well onto cinefilm. Sitting on couches and thinking about insecurity and doubt and God doesn’t drive a plot forward. But in the process of trying to adapt that book to make a movie people would feel grateful for having seen, Miller expands the most beautiful idea that he shared in that earlier book: the idea that God is a grand storyteller and he has written each of us into his narrative because we really do have a part to play. When I first encountered it I called it “the argument from story” and it remains a favourite of mine to today. Why do humans love stories so much? Because we reflect the image of our storytelling Creator. In A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, we get to cycle along with Miller as he slowly explores just how far this idea can go in making a life worth living.

So I can heartily recommend it. It is not annoying and preachy and nor is it over-long, which is a classic problem with Christian books of all kinds. But I call Shenanigans! on it nonetheless. Pretend I am not just ripping off Stanley Hauerwas here and be prepared to stroke your chin and say, “Mhmm!” but as followers of Jesus is the church not the story machine of our lives? Or rather, ought that not be what the church is about? We are condemned in the late Western Empire to believe that we have no story, and that is our story. But in the church we are different. In the church we have a story beginning with Abram and running right up through Maximilian Kolbe and Martin Luther King through to today: to you and me. And if I had written Miller’s book it would be much worser written and less vulnerable and amusing and another section longer. In that closing section I’d say the church is the parade Jesus is throwing where there are no observers. You can’t stand on the kerb and look in. You can’t pull up a chair and think that is a good day well spent. You have to participate.

But to understand that you’ll have to read the book.

Your Correspondent, Loves when she gets excited

Well wish harder! Wayne Grudem, the American Baptist theologian who is famous for writing a lovely and suitably shallow systematic theology for beginners and for conflating conservative American politics with evangelical faith, (who thinks it is a theologian’s job to publicly endorse a Presidential candidate?) is publishing a book called, wait for it, Politics – According to the Bible. The Bible, written across a couple of military empires and the royal monarchy of Israel doesn’t seem like a book that could directly inform the peculiar democracies of the western world but it seems like that won’t stop Grudem. According to the publisher his “comprehensive” text will cover issues like “protection of life, marriage, family, economics, environment, national defense, internationalism, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and special interest groups.” The front cover, carrying an American flag flapping in the wind by the US parliament (can’t be the White House since that godless black man occupies it with his crazy commie ideas of health reform) should be saved by all preachers, teachers and theology lecturers onto their harddrives and backed up onto usb sticks, paper and freaking ogham stones for use in future presentations on syncretism.

Your Correspondent, A little known fact is that he invented boats

A friend in Cork asked me about an aspect of civil union that she felt had not been addressed in my posts made back in December.

She writes:

A homosexual couple in Ireland currently have legislative rights to foster children but not to adopt. This is because they are not recognised as a family unit. Under a civil partnership bill this would open up the definition of what a family unit constitutes of and i dont think it would be long before the boundries of adoption would be open to same sex couples too.

My wife has left me alone with my bourbon this evening and so she isn’t on hand to give me an exact figure but there are currently hundreds of children in state care in Ireland. Just today, John Waters has published an obviously very personal piece in the Irish Times on proposed legislation that may well see that number increased. Now without needing to agree with everything John has to say, most can agree with his closing sentiment:

Yes, Irish children need to be protected, but history tells us that mainly they need to be protected from the State.

I think sex outside of marriage is sinful. I think homosexuality is sinful. But if you give me a choice between children brought up in state run homes or children raised in families, however flawed, give me foster care and especially adoption every time. The only good thing about one of the crappier Douglas Coupland novels was its title: All Families Are Psychotic. Maybe it is more true to say dysfunctional but to answer Dr. Suess, I am not too perturbed by the idea of gay adoption, accepting of course that it is still someway off, not implied in any way by the proposed legislation and not likely to be approached on a gay-same-as-straight moral equivalence since sociological research clearly supports monogamous male-female relationships for child rearing.

She also shares that she finds it hard to “explain God’s design of sexuality to a gay friend who sees it as restrictive and oppressive.” My question to her is: do you not feel it restrictive and oppressive? I have a naked lady fetish. Left to my own lights, I’d have sex with pretty much every girl who would jump in the sack with me. I helpfully lay this out in Venn diagram here:

You can read that two ways. One way is that I just want to have sex with my wife and there are a few other girls who wouldn’t throw me out of the bed for quoting Karl Barth. The right other way is that even with my magnetic attraction to women, I just mention that I keep a blog where I quote bits of theology books and the ladies just melt.

Jesus dares to restrict both my appetite and my natural urges when he makes the almost absurd demand that I either stay faithful to the wife-unit or never have sex at all. Jesus says hard things that go against our nature. But the realm of sexuality is just like the realm of finances and even social life: Jesus lays out boundaries that feel restrictive but that set me free. His yoke is easy, or something.

The reality of my friends who are gay causes me no more theological anguish than the reality of my straight friends who live with their partners. And I understand both in the light of the continued existence of sexual sin in my own life. I am happier knowing that my agnostic and atheist friends will be able to shack up together and not face trauma about visiting rights if one gets sick or inheritance if one dies. (Plus, I won’t have to marry them in my church building and preach a sermon that is nothing but hypocrisy) And I am praying that in my life and in the lives of my friends who are Christians, that those of us who are married can live that calling out with a style and joy that testifies to the fact that is actually more the way we are meant to be.

(But I’ll leave it to another day to ask someone to explain why celibate singleness isn’t actually the norm laid out in the New Testament… !)

Your Correspondent, Unable to pulverize his own kidney stones.

Your Correspondent, Instead of building houses, he plans to build land, on the ocean. There’s no land on the ocean.