Relocating To Elfland

Nihilism as a state of soul is revealed not so much in the lack of firm beliefs but in a chaos of the instincts or passions. People no longer believe in a natural hierarchy of the soul’s varied and conflicting inclinations, and the traditions that provided a substitute for nature have crumbled. The soul becomes a stage for a repertory company that changes plays regularly – sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy; one day love, another day politics, and finally religion; now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loyalty; the city or the country; individualism or community; sentimentality or brutality. And there is neither principle nor will to impose a rank order on all of these. All ages and places, all races and all cultures can play on this stage. Nietzsche believed that the wild costume ball of the passions was both the disadvantage and the advantage of late modernity. The evident disadvantage is the decomposition of unity or “personality,” which in the long run will lead to psychic entropy. The advantage hoped for is that the richness and tension present in the modern soul might be the basis for comprehensive new worldviews that would take seriously what had previously been consigned to a spiritual ashcan. This richness, according to Nietzsche, consisted largely in thousands of years of inherited and now unsatisfied religious longing. But this possible advantage does not exist for young Americans, because their poor education has impoverished their longings, and they are hardly aware of the great pasts that Nietzsche was thinking of and had within himself. What they do have now is an unordered tangle of rather ordinary passions, running through their consciousnesses like a monochrome kaleidoscope. They are egotists, not in a vicious way, not in the way of those who know the good, just or noble, and selfishly reject them, but because the ego is all there is in present theory, in what they are taught. (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, pp. 155–56)

A few years ago I chatted with a taxi driver in Atlanta who told me he had just gotten out of prison, where he served time for peddling dope. Happily he had undergone “therapy.” I asked him what kind. He responded, “All kinds – depth-psychology, transactional analysis, but what I liked best was Gestalt.” Some of the German ideas did not even require English words to become the language of the people. What an extraordinary thing it is that high-class talk from what was the peak of Western intellectual life, in Germany, has become as natural as chewing gum on American streets. It indeed had its effect on this taxi driver. He said that he had found his identity and learned to like himself. A generation earlier he would have found God and learned to despise himself as a sinner. The problem lay with his sense of self, not with any original sin or devils in him. We have here the peculiarly American way digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending. (Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, p. 147)

Woody Allen’s comedy is nothing but a set of variations on the theme of the man who does not have a real “self” or “identity,” and feels superior to the inauthentically self-satisfied people because he is conscious of his situation and at the same time inferior to them because they are “adjusted.” . . .

Woody Allen helps to make us feel comfortable with nihilism, to Americanize it. I‘m O.K., thou art O.K. too, if we agree to be a bit haunted together.

(Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, pp. 144, 146)

Dear married friend,

I’m writing this, as you know, after years of counseling you and your spouse. I’m very tired as I write. You’re not the only couple I’m counseling, and sometimes after yet another hour-long talk with someone drowning in a horrific marriage, I sit dazed in my chair, wishing my pastoral days could be full of prayer, silence, and study rather than the noise and churning emotions of conflict resolution. I wish I could come to the end of the day and see my wife and children without lines of care scarring my face. I wish being a peacemaker didn’t require me to see so much of the evil of the world.

But that’s not why I’m writing. My hope isn’t that the conflict in your marriage will stop so I can enjoy more quiet. I want the conflict in your marriage to stop for you. I want peace for you and your spouse. I lie awake for long hours in the night, yearning for this for you before the Lord.

What breaks my heart is that it’s not difficult. You think your marriage is such a mess, and all I can see is how easy it would be for the conflict to stop and for you to live together in peace. All it would require is for you to stop playing God. I know you’re not willing to stop. But I haven’t given up on you, so let me tell you (again) what it would look like for you to stop playing God.

First, it would require you to admit that the war between you and your spouse is still going on because you’re in it. If you weren’t in it, it would stop, because it takes two to fight. What this means is: you’re sinning a lot, God hates your sin, and you need to stop. I’m not talking to your spouse, I’m talking to you – this needs to be said, because all you’re thinking about right now is how much your spouse needs to hear what I’m saying. Which brings me to a second point.

You need to put down your weapons. You need to drop your sense of entitlement, your feeling of being victimized, your checklist of demands, and your filing cabinet full of resentments. You need to shut your mouth and stop sniping; you need to admit to yourself that you enjoy spitting out those zingers that make you feel so powerful and right. You need to look at the walls you’ve built around your heart, your dramatic withdrawals from your spouse, your various schemes of emotional blackmail, and your ever-present jabbing finger of blame – you need to know that this stuff is antichrist, and any attempt to put it in a better light is sheer pride. How dare you hold this garbage up as somehow defensible in the light of the cross of God’s Son?

Third, you need to listen. You don’t listen. You may think you do, but you don’t. You’ve already sized up your spouse and rendered judgment. You don’t really care what’s going on in his heart; you don’t really care about all the hurt and need that lies beneath her sin. You don’t want to touch those needs or heal those hurts. All you see – all you want to see – is the sin; and your way of fighting sin is to sin. That’s insane. You’ve tried a thousand times to fight your spouse’s evil with evil, you’ve seen the devastation it brings to everyone involved, and you still go right back to it like a dog to vomit. I wonder sometimes if you’ll ever shut your mouth and really, really listen with your whole heart. But no, you already know everything you need to know: you’re an expert on your spouse’s motives, intentions, thoughts, and feelings. The gavel has banged, sentence has been rendered, and you’re kind of looking forward to carrying it out.

Fourth, if you would ever really listen, you would see a way to serve. Of course, you’ll have to get over the notion that when you serve, your spouse will suddenly morph into an angel. You don’t want to hear it, but being a servant means you often get treated like one; and it may take a long time, great sacrifice, and great pain to overcome evil with good. You’re afraid of pain; in fact, you’re controlled by your fear of pain more than you’re controlled by the love of God; and so you walk right past opportunities to serve your spouse, opportunities that are cryingly obvious to anyone who’s not as self-protective as you are. Actually – which is far worse – you often do see the opportunities but choose to ignore them. You might stop to ponder what Jesus thinks of this.

The reason for all of this is that you don’t trust God – and that, fifth and fundamentally, is your single biggest need if you’re going to stop playing God. You keep waiting for your spouse to change so you can love without having to leave your comfort zones. Your comfort zones may be the single biggest rivals to God in your life. You need to repent of your comfort zones. They are the enemy of love in your heart. It’s not safe to love. It got Jesus killed. It will get you killed. Then you’ll experience the resurrection life of Christ. God promises it. The question is whether you believe it. Don’t be too quick to think you do. If you did, you would start loving your spouse (the perfect love of God would cast out fear), and the fighting in your marriage would stop.

You know I’ll never stop praying for you, and I’ll never stop making myself available to you when you’re really in need. But I’ll tell you this straight up: Counseling doesn’t heal marriages. Repentance heals marriages. When you repent, things will heal. Dig in, and the war will drag on interminably. How I pray your war will not last much longer, for your sake, and for the sake of Jesus’ name.

I remain your affectionate pastor, etc.

Back in January, I posted a synopsis of responses to Patrick Deneen’s 2012 article, “Unsustainable Liberalism.” The discussion has continued apace, but the recent contribution by J. L. Liedl is one of the best. Thanks to the fellows over at The Calvinist International for bringing it to my attention.

Like the rest of my generation, I like talking about love. I think love is supremely important. I think love is basic to life. I think love is the answer to most of the world’s problems. And I’m often embarrassingly fuzzy on just what this thing is we’re always talking about.

When my generation talks about love, we seem to have one of two things in mind: for a lot of us, love boils down to self-gratification (“I love X” really just means “X gratifies me”); among more religious types, love tends to be defined in terms of stoical self-sacrifice (“I love you” means “I would do anything for you, and I don’t care if I get anything back”). Does either of these, though, really capture the complexities of love?

Take Jesus, for example. In fact, take Him as more than an example: take Him as the Lord who said, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” What does it look like to love like Jesus?

There’s no question that Jesus loved self-sacrificially. He didn’t demand anything from us as the condition of His love, nor does He demand anything from us as some sort of reimbursement for His love. He’s never embittered by our lack of response. His love and grace are free. They come without an invoice.

That’s not the total picture, though. Jesus is the sovereign Lord who loves unconditionally, but He’s also the Bridegroom who seeks, desires, invites, and calls for a response. I can see no other way to make sense of the term “jealous God” than to acknowledge that – in an entirely divine, self-sufficient, non-needy way – our Lord wants something out of His relationship with us.

It would appear, then, that loving like Jesus means bringing a robust desire into our relationships, and sustaining that desire in the face of many disappointments, without ever sliding away into self-gratifying lust (“my needs and desires are first priority”), controlling demand (“you will give me what I need and desire”), or resentful self-protection (“you haven’t given me what I need and desire, so I’m done with you”). The heart must be full of unquenchable desire for the good of the beloved and the response of the beloved, and precisely this desire must fuel the motions of love when no response is forthcoming – and indeed may never come.

The way this works depends a lot on the kind of human relationship involved. I think we can place human relations in two categories, which aren’t mutually exclusive: we have companion relations (marriage being the best example), and we have service relations (parent and child, for instance). In companion relations, the expectation of mutuality is quite high, and rightly so. One expects and desires reciprocal benefit. In service relations, there’s a higher expectation of self-sacrifice, the denial of one’s own desires and needs to meet those of the one being served.

The lover’s joy in a companion relationship lies both in blessing the beloved (there is definitely a service component in such relations) and in being blessed by the beloved. The lover desires good for the beloved and desires good from the beloved. This is not wicked selfishness; it is love. No spouse wants to be simply an object of dutiful service; he or she wants to be desired as well for what he or she can give.

In service relations, it’s a bit different. While there’s always some level of reciprocity in these relations, the server’s joy comes predominantly in seeing the other blessed. What thrills the soul of a nursing mother (I speak not from experience) is simply seeing the contentedness of her little one. In C. S. Lewis’ terminology, this is pure Gift Love.

Now to some painful realities. What happens in a companion relationship (say, a marriage) if one’s partner (husband, wife, friend, etc.) doesn’t give back? What happens if it’s not mutual, the way it’s supposed to be? What to do with one’s desires then?

Or what happens in a service relationship (say, that of a parent to a child, a counselor to a counselee, a pastor to congregants, or a king to his subjects) when those being served don’t feel blessed; or don’t acknowledge that they feel blessed; or do feel and acknowledge that they’re blessed, but not that blessed? Children grow up, move away, and give their lives to others with only a cursory appreciation of all their parents have given to make their lives possible. Is it back to stoical self-sacrifice, then, for the poor servant?

It seems to me, again, that following Jesus means free-flowing desire without selfish demand or self-protective bitterness. Love desires the good of the beloved and its own joy in the good of the beloved; and in this desire it serves. Love desires that the beloved may know the goodness of loving, and it desires the fruit of that goodness for the beloved’s and for its own sake; and in this desire it seeks, calls, and invites without retreat. Sometimes a companion relationship must for a long while become a service relationship; and many a service relationship is transformed into beautiful companionship (think of the friendship between adult children and their aging parents); but in every case desire is sustained. Following Jesus is anything but a stoical death to desire.

There’s a poignant application here for those who serve Christ’s church as under-shepherds. A true shepherd desires nothing more than that the sheep committed to him be blessed. This is a pure and Christlike desire. But how quickly and subtly it is soured by selfishness! One moment a pastor desires to be a shepherd through whom the sheep are blessed; the next moment, he desires to be a shepherd without whom they simply can’t imagine living. One moment he wants to build a church where people are refreshed, healed, cleansed, strengthened, and mobilized; the next, he wants a church where people are attached by an umbilical cord. One desire draws with the open hand of true friendship, of true love; the other clutches with a desperate need to feel its own importance.

To desire with no pretensions of sovereignty; to affirm otherness with active desire that the other not only be, but also become, for the benefit of the other and oneself; to nourish desire and hope for fruit when the tree appears barren; to value another enough to maintain what seems a doomed invitation to reciprocity; to be “naïve” enough to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things without fear – this is the love of Christ. It never leaves an invoice, but it always wants all of the beloved. And my generation badly needs to be talking about it.

The blogosphere is a noisy place, filled with clamoring voices who believe they deserve an audience. A few voices (usually the quieter ones) are consistently worth hearing;  one such voice belongs to my friend Alastair Roberts. He blogs at http://alastairadversaria.wordpress.com, and I urge you to read anything he writes. He is a rarity: careful, judicious, precise, thorough, and (perhaps most remarkable in the modern climate) courteous.

For a sample of his work, start with “The New Purity Ethic” posted recently.

It is the demand of nature itself, “What shall we do to have eternal life?” The desire of immortality and of the knowledge of that whereby it may be attained, is so natural unto all men, that even they which are not persuaded that they shall, do notwithstanding wish that they might, know a way how to see no end of life. And because natural means are not able still to resist the force of death, there is no people in the earth so savage, which hath not devised some supernatural help or other, to fly unto for aid and succour in extremities, against the enemies of their lives. A longing therefore to be saved, without understanding the true way how, hath been the cause of all the superstitions in the world. O that the miserable state of others, which wander in darkness, and wot not whither they go, could give us understanding hearts, worthily to esteem the riches of the mercies of God towards us, before whose eyes the doors of the kingdom of heaven are set wide open! Should we not offer violence unto it? It offereth violence to us, and we gather strength to withstand it. (Richard Hooker,  A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown)

The danger of pastoral counseling is that it can become a way for people to feel better without actually obeying Jesus.

Previous installments here, here, and here.

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Ephesians 2:20

Paul’s answer to that question in Ephesians 2 is wonderfully simple and profound. He says in this passage that the apostolic (firsthand) and prophetic witness to Jesus Christ in the period after Christ’s ascension is the foundation of the church. Jesus, and God’s revelation through Him, are the “cornerstone” of the church, and around this cornerstone was laid the foundation of divine revelation through those who heard Him (the apostles), and the accompanying authenticating witness of the New Testament prophets (to this might be added the authenticating witness of all the signs, wonders, miracles, and gifts distributed by the Holy Spirit during the days of Jesus’ eyewitnesses).

The foundation, once laid, is not laid again. The laying of the foundation does not continue. But clearly, it wasn’t only in this early period of the church’s history that she needed to be strengthened in receiving and confessing the apostolic salvation-message. Has God provided any continuing means for her to be “built up” in her most holy faith?

Ephesians 4:11–16

The answer to this is an emphatic yes! Later in the same epistle, Paul teaches that the work formerly done by Jesus’ apostles and their accompanying prophets is now being done by what he calls “evangelists” and “pastors and teachers” (v. 11). Unlike prophets who spoke in the days of Jesus’ eyewitnesses, these officers work from a completed foundation of revelation, from a completed apostolic gospel. They do not (nor do others) exercise sign-gifts, because the firsthand witness that was to be authenticated by those gifts has now been finished and set forth in its fullness. Not to put it too crassly, the firsthand witness (regulated by the apostles of Christ) had a natural “expiration date,” namely, the death of those witnesses; and so the work of God corroborating their witness was subject to natural expiration as well.

But this doesn’t mean that the Lord’s purpose to strengthen the faith of His church won’t be accomplished by other means! What we need now is not the authentication of firsthand witnesses, but the preaching and teaching of evangelists, pastors, and teachers. Through their labors the completed “deposit of the faith” (the completed apostolic salvation-message) is passed down from generation to generation in the church (see, e.g., 2 Tm 2:2). The Holy Spirit will not cease to illuminate that deposit as it is expounded and handed down, and so the church will stand and be saved until the return of her Lord.