Relocating To Elfland

As if any of us needs further education on what a sham our current Congress is, this is a great piece of reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

As Mother State continues her firm efforts to make us all lifelong sucklings at her breasts, I offer this humble word of analysis:

American public discourse is plagued by an increasing inability to distinguish between the questions (a) whether there is a problem deserving of thoughtful and compassionate response and (b) who should solve it. To pause over the latter is now perceived as giving a negative answer to the former.

Thanks to my dear friend and ministerial colleague, Dr. David Innes (who blogs here), for bringing this article in Harper’s Magazine to my attention.

A teaser:

“Why is every Crisis in American Education cast as an economic threat and never a civic one? In part, because we don’t have the language for it. Our focus is on the usual economic indicators. There are no corresponding ‘civic indicators,’ no generally agreed-upon warning signs of political vulnerability, even though the inability of more than two thirds of our college graduates to read a text and draw rational inferences could be seen as the political equivalent of runaway inflation or soaring unemployment.

“If we lack the language, and therefore the awareness, to right the imbalance between the vocational and the civic, if education in America—despite the heroic efforts of individual teachers—is no longer in the business of producing the kinds of citizens necessary to the survival of a democratic society, it’s in large part because the time-honored civic function of our educational system has been ground up by the ideological mills of both the right and the left into a radioactive paste called values education and declared off-limits. Consider the irony. Worried about indoctrination, we’ve short-circuited argument. Fearful of propaganda, we’ve taken away the only tools that could detect and counter it.”

“Christianity regards sin not as ignorance, which can easily be overcome by some enlightenment, but as an appalling power, which produces its effects throughout the cosmos; and over against this power it brings reconciliation and redemption in the deepest and broadest sense of those terms. It brings redemption from the guilt and the stain, from all the consequences of sin, from the errors of the intellect and the impurity of the heart, from the death of soul and body. It brings that redemption not only to the individual but also, organically, to the family and generations of families, to people and society, to humanity and the world.” (Bavinck, p. 1.595)

Plug time. Those of you who don’t subscribe to the Mars Hill Audio Journal really ought to. And if you do not, you should at least download and listen to Volume 94. It’s outstanding even by the high standards of MHAJ.

A footnote or two from the interviews with Maggie Jackson: First, a question. Is “multitasking” an attempt (in many cases unconscious) to escape our embodied finitude, particularly the God-ordained limitations of time and space? We were made to do only so much at once, to bear only so many orientations at once, and our time/space limitations provide kindly boundaries against “disorientation” (Ken Myers’ word). Nowadays, however, we are trying to do so much so fast, enabled by the operation of multiple machines simultaneously, that one must ask if we are taking our God-created limitations seriously. We no longer concentrate on one thing, then the next, then the next; our minds and lives are crowded with a barrage of simultaneous stimuli, to any one of which we are incapable of giving isolated and sustained attention.

Now let me put this more positively. A well-cultivated life is one in which one pays attention to things. To this book one is reading (one cannot absorb a book’s richness while distracted). To this person one is talking to (meaningful relating does not occur beyond a certain speed). To this God one is praying to. To this sunset one has been privileged to view. To this meal at this table in the presence of these loved ones. To pay attention, I must inhabit a particular moment in a particular space. I must be all there, must draw near, must behold. I must give up omnipresence so as to be somewhere in particular, and to open myself to the thing at hand.

The problem with this, says Jackson, is that it is, well, boring. Real life occurs in real time – and real time is slow. Not everything happens at once. It’s not an omni-connected experience like the evening news (or the average surf on the Internet). I have to deal with this one conversation and make something of it. I have to keep reading this until I understand it. I have to engage with this thing until it begins to rub me; and when that happens, I desperately want to go check my email. We naturally love novelty, especially when we are young, and real life in real time offers only so much novelty. What it offers instead is rhythm, participation in rituals and habits (and other such predictables) that – for those truly engaged – become not old and wearisome but ever richer and deeper and fuller. It’s much more fun (perhaps) to be ever rushing on to the next thing, or to try to cram it all into one bloated moment. How many people can I “IM” at once? Quite a few, but how did we come to a place where we think of this as communication? It’s sitting at a command center (Mark Bauerlein’s metaphor), playing god. The moment a “conversation” gets old, I can just shut it down and move on to the next. Thank God real life doesn’t work that way . . . if we can figure out how to get back to the real thing.

It is important to love our children. But how does God love His creatures and His children? He enjoys them. He declares them good. He sings for joy over them. Do our children feel this kind of love from us?

Recent exploration of the “covenant of life” has got me thinking about how all of human thought (epistemology) and all of human life (ethics) are covenantally conditioned. Here is the proposed exegetical background, followed by a few ruminations:

Traditional Reformed theology has understood the covenant of life to arise in Genesis 2:16–17, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” I wonder, though, if the exegetical basis for the covenant should be broadened to include Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” If all this was part of the covenantal arrangement, then it looked something like this: Man was to act as Yahweh’s king-priest, working (cultivating) in His sanctuary and guarding it against defilement (v. 15). In this work, he was to be sustained from the fruit of his labor (v. 16); but his thinking and acting were at every point to be subject to Yahweh’s word. Verses 15–16 describe the covenantal task of man, and the blessedness of it. Verse 17 sets forth the qualification, i.e., absolute submission to Yahweh. Autonomous thought and life are comprehensively (and graciously) prohibited.

This means that from the very beginning man was either keeping covenant or breaking covenant, both in his epistemology (autonomous interpretation of any fact apart from Yahweh’s word was sin) and in his ethics (autonomous work, whether cultivating or guarding, was sin). And this, in turn, helps us see why unbelievers are properly regarded as ignorant and wicked even where they know a great deal and accomplish great good: not to know and do all things under the authority of (in creaturely submissiveness to) God’s revelation is simply not to know and do according to the covenant – meaning that great knowledge and great accomplishments may yet be great sin. Man was made to know and to cultivate. In a sense he cannot help these things – they are in his nature. Yet his knowledge and cultural activity are rebellious if he knows anything apart from its revealed relationship to the Creator, or builds culture without regard for the Creator’s mandate to do so. What makes the unbelieving geneticist’s research “wrong” or “bad” is not technical errors but his insistence that genomes have nothing to do with God. What makes the pagan musician’s compositions “wrong” or “bad” is not their technical deficiencies (they may, in fact, be brilliant) but his refusal to make music in joyful response to the invitation of his Maker. The geneticist is ignorant of what is most fundamental about genomes; the musician is robbing God of His glory with every note.

I think this notion of covenantal conditioning may enable us to appreciate rather than depreciate the insights and cultural accomplishments of unbelievers, without thereby “sanitizing” them of their moral evil and culpability.

“The Theologian is absolutely dependent upon the pleasure of God, either to impart or not to impart knowledge of Himself. Even verification is here absolutely excluded. When a man reveals something of himself to me, I can verify this, and if necessary pass criticism upon it. But when the Theologian stands in the presence of God, and God gives him some explanation of His existence as God, every idea of testing this self-communication of God by something else is absurd; hence, in the absence of such a touchstone, there can be no verification, and consequently no room for criticism.” (Abraham Kuyper, Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, p. 251)

If grace restores nature, then life under the dominion of grace does not become unnatural. One “under” grace does not breathe different air, walk on different concrete, wear different clothing, or ride a camel (unless, of course, that is the thing to do where he lives). He doesn’t need to buy a “Christian” iPod, a “Christian” house, a “Christian” lawnmower, or “Christian” beer. What makes him different is not that he sits in a closet and sings hymns for a living, but rather that his entire life is pervaded by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. All created things are, for him, gifts from above. All his work and play aim at showing off his God. The law of love binds his heart and conscience; the seed of his faith bears the fair fruit of holiness. He is at war with all that displeases and dishonors God, and rejoices in all truth, goodness, and beauty because he delights in God. To meet him is to meet a true human, not an alien. What is different about him is that sin is no longer natural.

Some months ago I read this remarkable passage in John Webster’s Confessing God:

“The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is to be the ‘head and pattern’ of theological thinking about space, above all because that doctrine articulates the utter gratuity and contingency of created being . . . . Space is therefore not absolute or unoriginate, some sort of pre-existent medium; nor is it simply a register of acts and attitudes on the part of creatures who make space for themselves by disposing of themselves in the world. In both cases . . . space has become detached from God’s acts of creating and maintaining the creaturely realm and reconciling it to himself. In effect, space is secularized . . . .” (pp. 104–105)

Subsequent dabbling in Oscar Cullman’s Christ and Time and in the work of Rosenstock-Huessy has convinced me something similar must be said of the time-dimension of creaturely existence. Space and time are not “simply there” any more than anything else in creation is “simply there.” The concept of “space” articulates God-ordained dimensions and relations; the concept of “time” articulates God-ordained dynamics and developments. To think or speak of time and space apart from God is secularism: it surrenders to pagan unbelief things over which He claims absolute ownership and authority.

So what? Well, to begin with, this means the sacredness of space is the result of creation, not the Mosaic Covenant; and so what I do with space God has entrusted to me matters. I may not have been given a specific plot of land in Canaan which I am not free to sell in perpetuity (as was the case for my Israelite fathers), but it is still the case that where God has placed any space under my jurisdiction, the call to holiness comes with it. No less in the New Covenant than in the Old, if “anyone comes . . . and does not bring [the teaching of Christ], do not receive him into your house” (3 Jn 10), because your house is holy space. Territory under the jurisdiction of a disciple of King Jesus is territory claimed by the King in His dominion-taking work in the earth, and the disciple stewarding it (we may call him a king-priest) will have an eye open for serpents. One must ask also if there is not something in the old epigram, “cleanliness is next to godliness.” The homemaker who keeps picking up toys and putting up curtains is obeying the gospel, because the Spirit doesn’t just order God’s space, He also beautifies it.

In the time-dimension, leaving aside the obvious significance of the centrality of Christ in history (powerfully expressed, among others, by Lesslie Newbigin in his Finality of Christ), we must look square in the face the sheer sinfulness of modern piety that is so unaware of the past and so unconcerned about the future. Not to know history is to ignore the glory of God and to deafen ourselves to what He has been teaching His church for generations. Not to prepare for the future (perhaps because we are hunkered down hoping He will return tomorrow, and can see little point in anything so this-worldly) is to come dangerously close to hiding His deposit in a napkin. Such chronological obliviousness extracts our lives from His lordship over all time, and in doing so secularizes (however unwittingly) the present. My present life is part of God’s working out His purposes in the earth; what possible hope do I have of doing His will now if I have no idea what He has been doing or plans to do? “Knowing the time,” says the apostle (Rom 13:11), we take up the mantle of our fathers, and give ourselves for things we will never live to see. If our sons and daughters are wise, they too will take up the deposit in time, and serve the Lord their God in their generation. And so on until He comes.

A lot more needs to be said about all of this . . . .