A second look at Owl City

Almost 7 years ago, on my first blog, I wrote about why Owl City is my favorite music artist. (I won’t be providing a link, because that blog is cringy.)  One of the main reasons I gave was the relentless positivity and general happiness of nearly all Owl City songs. As an optimist, who believed that being a happy and optimistic person was more Christian than not, this sat very well with me.

I repent.

I don’t look at happiness and optimism the same way anymore. Happiness is good, and it’s a large part of what we’re after, but that doesn’t make it always the best mood in this sinful age. And optimism, well, I think it’s a bit misguided. The more biblical option, I think, is stark realism shot through with faith and hope. But this change of mind doesn’t dampen my love for Owl City.

Owl City is even better than I thought.

I made the mistake of looking at Owl City through my own rose-colored glasses and missed the realistic richness in its music. Since then, I’ve come to better appreciate what makes Owl City special. The uniqueness is not that it’s just happy and optimistic all the time, because it’s not. Several songs released since my old post prove as much. Sometimes Owl City seems downright black.

But what makes Owl City unique is the way it handles all of these moods and emotions. It surpasses most other pop music, Christian or secular, with an impossible balancing act. Christian music seems to be plagued with naivete, sentimentality, and mere optimism, and a decent chunk of secular pop tends either to play to these as well (for the PG stuff) or to do hedonism, nihilism, cynicism, or the like.

Owl City avoids both of these pitfalls. It expresses joy without platitude, hardship without nihilism, wonder without nativete, heartbreak without cynicism, and the full range of light without denying the full range of darkness. The dark songs never completely omit a glimmer of hope, and bright songs are never without a tinge of sadness or a sharp edge of reality.  Indeed, sometimes the most interesting and creative aspects of any given Owl City song is the ironic way they combine light and dark. “Hot Air Balloon” sounds like a happy memory of childhood at first listen, but then you notice the subtle negativity playing hide-and-seek in the lyrics. “Bird with a Broken Wing,” about as bleak as Owl City can get (’cause it was inspired by The Walking Dead), sets its dark lyrics to an upbeat and even bubbly tune that feels as though it carries you forward into hope even as you feel the weight of sorrow.

The brilliance of it all is that we live in a culture where the default modes are either a cynical nihilism–life sucks, then you die–or a whitewashed, hedonistic approach combining egoism, denial, and sentimentality. Owl City celebrates as much as this second mode without its vices, and it mourns more faithfully than the first approach is even capable of. Where pop culture tells us that everything is hunky dory and you just have to believe in yourself, Owl City reminds us that sometimes it’s a bitter world where we’d rather dream. Where pop culture tells us that everything is stupid and life is joke, Owl City chimes in that there is hope from above which brings courage. It is the paradox of life that I love in this music. Owl City presents us with a dark and deadly world where dreams don’t turn to dust, a life of beautiful times punctuated by cold nostalgia that chills to the bone. And most importantly, in the midst of all the howling wind and starry serenades, the Saving Grace of the galaxies is there to make us new, to smile and hear our prayers, and to take us home when death is near.

Coffee and Communion

A week or two ago I went to a larger church than I am used to for a special event they were having. It was good and all, and the event itself took place in the lobby where they served coffee. The cafe area was pretty nice and well designed, and it (as always) got me thinking.

Churches offering a coffee bar is pretty normal these days, especially for churches started in the last few decades. Some high church people scoff, some fundamentalists scoff, and some normal people scoff, too. Some people take issue with the idea that we could just be trying to market people in with the unspiritual means of tasty coffee. But for the most part, people like it. And it seems to have some beneficial effects. It makes a place and time where people can come, share drinks, and enjoy each other’s company. It forges a little patch of unity, a small table of community.

This is very similar to what Communion does, or at least is meant to do. Paul says that Communion makes us one body: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, since all of us share the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17). The same can be applied to the cup: we all drink the same cup of the blood of Christ, and the washing of His blood makes us all one body.

Now, there are probably many layers to answering the question, “How does Communion make us one body?” But at least one part of it has to do with the fact that Communion is a meal, and meals bind people together socially. I’m sure you can imagine what I mean. People bond over shared food and drink all the time. You go out to eat on a date to get to know each other. You celebrate Thanksgiving together by sharing a turkey and some potatoes and cranberry sauce. Family memories and routines often center around a dinner or breakfast table. You could almost say that family is simply who you eat supper with.

Part of the “power” of the Lord’s Supper to make us into one body is just that: the power of a supper. (This is why, by the way, it should really be celebrated more like a meal whenever the group size makes it possible.) And this power is something it has in common with coffee.

Drinking coffee together is a lot like sharing a meal. And, socially, it works mostly the same way. Coffee dates are as much a thing as dinner dates. Office workers talk as much by the coffee maker as at the lunch table. People make and meet their friends at coffee shops. As we share a drink in common, we share our thoughts, our news, our loves, or even our faith.

A coffee bar in the church foyer, then, can be kind of sacramental. It can be a way that Christ works to create love and unity among the members of His body. An outsider, walking into a church for the first time, might catch a glimpse of the fellowship which we share in our Savior who brought us together in the first place. For those looking for community (and who isn’t?), the coffee bar can be a sign that God has provided just that in His Church.

Easter Fools

It is a two weeks until Easter. This year Easter falls on April Fools’ Day, and all of the atheists and skeptics fall on the ground laughing. Rightly they should. Indeed, more Christians ought to do the same. There is something supremely absurd about Easter. It is the absurdity of saying that the world was created twice, exactly what Christians say that Easter is about. We are fools to believe it. And yet, God’s absurdity beats all of our reasonableness, and “the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom.”

In a real sense, Easter is God’s greatest joke. The resurrection of Jesus is the uproarious laughter of God that rolls away stones and knocks guards to the ground. In folk religions devils are tricksters, but in Christianity God one-upped them all. For there is something incredibly amusing about the way the resurrection played out. It was a joke at Satan’s expense, for one. The hosts of hell were undoubtedly thrilled at their major victory. The Messiah, God’s Son, was dead. Israel was doomed to curse and and endless spiritual exile. The Gentiles would never even hear of hope. No doubt that, as dawn approached that Sunday morning, demons danced and leprechauns laughed.

It was also a joke at the Jewish leaders’ expense. The smug compromisers were undoubtedly relieved when they awoke. The rabble-rousing Rabbi was defeated. They no longer had anything to fear from a heretical, imposter Messiah. Things could go back to the way they were, the same people in charge with the same old dreams for Israel’s future.

Even the disciples were ready to become a joke. Their situation is more ironic than anyone else’s because they had been told that Jesus was to return. Yet instead they were in shock, thinking about how to return to a previous life, dealing with the collective disappointment that either God had abandoned His Chosen or that they had been wrong all along.

Meanwhile, God was snickering from His throne. The time had come to raise Jesus from the dead. So He did. Satan’s hordes were in a nightmare as dark as their souls, the Jewish leaders found their wrongful victory righted, and the disciples all became fools for their obtuseness. But out of them all, only the disciples could laugh at the joke. They were fools, but they were happy fools, fooled by God with the miracle of a new creation and a new covenant. The most impossible absurdity had happened—the great resurrection began early with a crucified Messiah!—but it was the absurdity of God. So they spent the rest of their lives retelling the divine joke, sharing it with everyone who would listen. They didn’t expect everyone to believe it, foolishness as it is, but they loved it.

Even today, with Jesus’ resurrection being 2000 years old, the Good News still sounds foolish. In our scientific age, we are supposed to know that people don’t come back from the dead (the joke’s on us: the ancients knew that, too, probably better than we do). In our postmodern pessimism, no one really believes that there can be a new creation which actually rescues everything good from the old. In our modern optimism, it seems ridiculous that we even need a new creation to save us when progress is always on the march. For both the alt-right and the social justice left, the idea that all kinds of people could find new life in the resurrection of one particular man of one particular gender from one particular race and be formed into His one body is a fool’s fantasy.

But if the Gospel is foolishness, it is foolishness to those who are perishing. For we fools who believe, it is true wisdom. If the world laughs at us, God laughs first and last. So we revel in the life-giving laughter of God. And this means that we, too, can laugh this Easter.

Defending discrimination

“Give therefore your servant an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discriminate between good and bad: for who is able to judge so great a people as yours?”

1 Kings 3:9

 

The word “discrimination” is kind of like a briefcase. It carries a meaning inside, as all words do. But it’s one of those words that we carry around with us often enough and rarely both to open. Instead, whenever the word might come up, we’re more likely to beat people over the head with it, never once considering that we could open unlatch the briefcase and think about what we’re actually talking about.

If you have ever been online before (as I will assume you have if you’re reading this), I’m rather confident that you have seen this actually happen. People accuse other people of discrimination, other people defends themselves from the charges, and within moments someone has a bruise on his skull that looks an awful lot like the corner of a briefcase. To whomever the charge of discrimination sticks comes defeat and shame.

But this way of things is itself quite a shame. For, if we unpack the suitcase, we’ll find ourselves reminded that discrimination is not all bad. Discrimination can be and usually is good. It is only our modern politics which has kept us from recalling this rather obvious fact.

Perhaps you don’t get what I mean. To explain, I’ll point out that the dominant usage of the word discrimination today is quite different than it has been in the past. The top two definitions which appear on Google are as follows:

1. The unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex
2. Recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another

The first definition is obviously what most people mean today, but the second used to be far more common. And in today’s mad blindness to plain realities, the second is often mistaken for the first. If you don’t recognize the real differences between two things, you’re likely to consider any way that you treat them differently as unjust or prejudicial. This is what we love to do today.

The difference between these two definitions of discrimination—between good and bad discrimination—is determined by what you are doing and whether the different treatments you give are reasonable for that purpose. Let’s take an example. If you are trying to draw a realistic castle, you would probably discriminate against your bright purple colored pencils in favor of grey ones. This would make sense and be very right, because the color of the pencil is very important to what you’re trying to do. On the other hand, it would make no sense to discriminate against a pencil simply because it had been touched by the truck driver who delivered it to the Walmart you bought it from is a Trump supporter. Even if you dislike Trump supporters, the fact has nothing to do at all with your project to draw a castle.

This extends every bit as well to people. If you are in charge of hiring an engineer for a nuclear plant, you will discriminate against a 17-year-old kid who dropped out of high school and knows basically nothing but how to play World of Warcraft. You will instead prefer someone who has training and knowledge that will help him be a nuclear engineer. This is discrimination, but it is good discrimination. The reason for picking one kind of person over the other is a based very directly and reasonably on what you’re trying to accomplish. On the other hand, if you were to favor a white Alabamian over a Rwandan man, despite equal credentials in nuclear engineering, you are probably discriminating badly, which means injustice. Or, speaking of race, it is perfectly legitimate to discriminate against white women in favor of black ones if you are casting the lead for a movie about Rosa Parks.

The problem for us is that, in an era absolutely obsessed with equality, we can lose sight of real differences between people and things. So people can be accused of unfair and unjust discrimination even when their reasons for discriminating are very right. A major example of this is marriage. Up until recently, society discriminated against gay couples in favor of straight couples. Then, in the blindness of modern society, we forgot the real reasons for this discrimination, and people started to believe that it is wrong. Soon enough, we stopped discriminating and gave gay and straight couples equal access to the institution of marriage.

This was a big mistake. Like I said before, whether a certain kind of discrimination is right or wrong depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. So what is marriage for? Why did humanity originally choose only straight couples for marriage? The answer would have been easy to most of the world for most of history: babies. The most important kind of sex, when it comes to broader society, is the heterosexual, because it is the kind that actually creates new human beings, which is what society is made of in the first place. Society in general, and its institutional form called the “government,” has little reason to care about what goes on in the bedroom between gay people, because it won’t make new human life. But if straight couples can create people, then it’s hugely important. That’s the biggest reason why marriage had to be made an official, recognized part of society and government. Marriage discrimination against gay couples was never arbitrary or unjustified, because the key point of marriage as a formal part of society was that it was meant to protect the place where humans come from. Babies and their parents need special privileges and protections, thus we have heterosexual marriage. To extend it to gay couples is an example of a failure to discriminate when it is needed, kind of like putting a white Neo-Nazi in charge of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration out of “fairness.” It’s not right. It’s forgetting that discrimination is sometimes good and necessary.

So I propose that we end the pointless stigmatizing of discrimination in general. Let that first definition become second, and make the second one first. Discrimination is an essential part of human life. The only question is whether we will discriminate with wisdom and justice or foolishness and injustice. If we forget all of this, we are sure to do the latter.

God actually does want you to be happy

The only worse teaching than “God just wants you to be happy” is “God doesn’t want you to be happy.” Of course, not that many people teach this specifically, but a number of people come close. Some of them do this by hammering in a more spiritual sounding point, something along the lines of “God is more interested in you being holy than being happy.” And, technically speaking, they’re right. If God had to pick between giving you a holiness boost and a happiness boost, I’m sure He’d pick holiness.

But the problem lies in the question itself, not so much in the answer. Or, to be clearer, asking whether God prefers your happiness or holiness more is already a bad way of putting things. It’s kind of like asking if my I would rather my son be happy or healthy. If I love him, I want both very much and would not wish to choose between them. But at the same time, a large part of the reason I want him healthy is because it will make him happy. A basic problem with unhealthiness is that is leads to unhappiness, or at least makes happiness all the more difficult. While I definitely wouldn’t mind making Nathan temporarily unhappy to make him healthy (I’ll get him his shots and medicine as needed), the point of that temporary unhappiness is so he can play happily later instead of being miserably ill. If the cure were worse than the disease in the long run, I’d probably pass it up.

What we tend to miss, then, is that holiness is a lot like health. In fact, holiness could be considered spiritual health. Health, after all, is when the various parts of our body work together in the right order and harmony. Holiness is when the various parts of our lives—thoughts, feelings, and actions—work together in the right order and harmony as defined by how God has made us to live.

This is why, for all our disagreements, I think John Piper is really getting at something important with his so-called “Christian Hedonism.” Piper is very right to say that there is nothing wrong with wanting or trying to be happy. Instead, what makes trying to be happy right or wrong is the way in which we do it. Sin may make us happy in the short term, but it causes misery in the end. Living by faith in Christ, on the other hand, may make us unhappy today as we take up our crosses, but it will turn out far for the best. And while Piper usually focuses on the eternal payoff, holy living pays off in the “short-long term” as well. Sexual restraint protects us from broken homes, broken hearts, and often broken bodies. Generosity and mercy build meaningful relationships and improve mental health. Getting wasted every weekend may be fun, but all too often leads to regrettable choices and mistakes that can never be undone. And this list can go on. Virtue is hard work and can involve suffering, but it makes a brighter life. Vice can be thrilling, but it quickly drags us into the lonely dark.

All of this comes back around to creation, to the subject of my last post. God made life to be lived and enjoyed. He smiles to see His children playing on the playground of the world. But He won’t—He can’t—tolerate sinful play. However much fun it may seem in the moment, it will ruin everyone’s day. This is the great sin. What God wants is to call His children in as the night falls to feast on bread and wine, with joy and laughter bought at the steep price of His true Son’s blood.

So, why make this point? Am I picking on words and phrases to be a pain or know-it-all? By no means! This is something that I believe causes serious trouble when forgotten. This is because everyone wants to be happy, and they feel that, in some way, it is right for them to look for happiness. And it is God who crafted their hearts with this desire. So when they hear it preached that God’s not concerned with their happiness, or if they only hear rules and “don’t’s” without a clear explanation of how God gives these commands because He truly does want their smile, it is far too easy to conclude that God is simply against joy and fun. They start to view God as a grumpy old man aggravated by seeing young people enjoy themselves. And I’m not talking hypothetically. This is something I have seen and heard myself.

Once this mistake is made, their God-given desire for happiness leads them away from the very unhappy picture of God they have developed. And while sinful pleasures aren’t as good for joy long-term as God is, they’re way better on any time scale than the Curmudgeon God who they have come to believe gave us Christianity. This becomes their excuse for sin. And sin will ruin their happiness, which God will not take lightly. God will not, of course, let them get away with their excuses, but we should be taking those away first with good theology. If we don’t, they won’t be the only ones having to give an account.

What we should be teaching, then, is not the technically correct answer to the misguided question of whether God prefers happiness or holiness. Instead, we ought to say, “Of course God wants you to be happy. But He knows better than you do what makes us happy. After all, He designed up. So let’s crack open the Bible and see what God has to say about what makes a happy life. You ask if partying will be involved? Let’s turn to Revelation 19:6-9…”

God wants you filled with jam

G. K. Chesterton had a way with words, a way with humor, and a way with Christian thinking. These qualities are what make the inspiration for the title of this post. It comes from his book, What’s Wrong with the World (a book which, according to Chesterton, is what’s wrong with literature). It opens with a partial answer: what is wrong is that we don’t know, care, or agree about what it would look like for things to be right. This leads to brief discussion about how efficiency, so prized in his day, for its own sake is meaningless. Doing things efficiently is only valuable inasmuch as what you are doing itself is valuable. Almost everything you can do will be efficient toward one goal but inefficient toward another. This brings him to the following:

Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling a man with strange spiritual tremors as Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with jam. But it all depends on what you want to be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being a modern skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors. I, being an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.

If this doesn’t crack you up, my condolences. But while it’s obvious what makes the quote funny, it’s less obvious what he means. Why exactly would a Christian prefer jam to spiritual tremors? To put the question a different way, what’s so Christan about being filled with jam?

The connection between Jesus and jam may not be obvious, but it’s important. It goes all the way back to creation. It goes back to God’s choice to make our world, not just a world of ghostly spirit beings, but a world of real, tangible, images of God in fatty, bloody flesh.

When we think about creation, there are a lot of ways to talk about its point. What is the point of created life? We could say that it is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever, but that’s not very specific. What does glorifying God mean and look like, anyway? Does that mean the point of life is an endless church service, praying and singing and doing sacraments? I’m sure that sounds right to someone, but why did God make such a big world if that was all that mattered? Some people accuse God of being boring because of church, but they forget that it was His idea to send us there only once a week. So what are the other six days for?

Maybe the other six days are for glorifying God, too. But again, what does that look like, if not church? It can’t simply mean reading our Bibles and praying, otherwise even (or especially?) the most spiritual people will struggle not to have a life of mostly filler.

So maybe the point of life means giving God thanks and praise in everything we do. This seems more likely, but more questions arise. Does this mean we’re missing the point whenever we do, well, anything without before and after offering a special prayer of thanksgiving and praise? I realize we’re all sinners, but… Is living life how God intended actually quite that, dare I say, tedious?

Chesterton recognized that it is not. He saw the secret to created life: God made it for living. He understood the old quote from Irenaeus, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” God is happy and glorified in all of our enjoyment of His creation, including the whole of our lives. God made this world and every part of our existence, and just like a father who builds a playground, He laughs to see His children playing. This doesn’t mean, of course, that He tolerates misbehavior or ingratitude, which unfortunately color so much of our lives. But even when we enjoy creation without gratitude, or when we live a happy life riddled with sin, the living and the enjoying are still good in themselves, just compromised and corrupted.

Right at the heart of Chesterton’s philosophy was this simple truth. God made life to be lived, lived in joy and gratitude rather than endless dour introspection or sanctimonious blessings on every last thing. We should always remember the Source of life, but the best way to honor Him to precisely to live the life He provides. So be filled with jam, do the work God has set out for you, love the people He has put in your life, and trust in Christ to sanctify the whole thing. We don’t go wrong by enjoying life too much, but by cutting our enjoyment short by poisoning pleasures with sin or ingratitude. So kill the sin, thank God, and live.

The God who retcons

If you’re a Millennial, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard the term “retcon” before. If you’re not a Millennial, or if you are for any other reason unacquainted with the word, it is short for “retroactive continuity.” What’s that? I could give a definition, but examples are easier. Probably one of the craziest examples is from last year. Captain America (in the comics) was revealed to be secretly on the side of the evil organization HYDRA which he had ostensibly spent years fighting. Obviously, for the first several decades of Cap’s existence, no one thought of him like that. The character wasn’t invented to be that. But suddenly, his backstory was drastically rewritten with a single comic. The old, settled meaning of hundreds of comics was transformed by this new declaration. They changed the past. Thus “retroactive continuity,” or “retcon.”

The cool thing about God is that He invented retconning, at least if you believe the Bible. This probably sounds strange, so you may want proof. Very well; I can provide it. I think we all remember Hagar, but if not, try reading this passage from ye Old Testament:

Abram’s wife Sarai had not borne any children for him, but she owned an Egyptian slave named Hagar. Sarai said to Abram, “Since the Lord has prevented me from bearing children, go to my slave; perhaps through her I can build a family.” And Abram agreed to what Sarai said. So Abram’s wife Sarai took Hagar, her Egyptian slave, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife for him. This happened after Abram had lived in the land of Canaan 10 years. He slept with Hagar, and she became pregnant. When she realized that she was pregnant, she treated her mistress with contempt.

Genesis 16:1-4

Pretty good move on Abraham’s part, right? He’s waiting for God to give him a son, as promised, and so when his wife (for whatever reason) suggests he use her slave for that purpose, he jumps on it. As we find later, the son he has through Hagar, Ishmael, ridicules Sarai’s son, Isaac, who was the true promised child, and Hagar’s life is ruined, and in the end Ishmael’s descendants hate Israel. The story reaches into the present day as the source of modern Israeli/Arab conflict. So, this little debacle is pretty much responsible for 9/11 and modern Middle Eastern terrorism more generally. Thanks, Father Abraham!

From our perspective, this looks like a catastrophic failure. Abraham was given a promise and told to wait, but he ran out of patience and faith. So he created chaos for everyone. Not quite the most honorable legacy.

Except that’s not how God remembers it. Let us turn to Romans 4, where Paul recalls Abraham’s story as the background for his teaching about justification by faith. Here’s how he describes Abraham’s faith:

He is the father of us all in God’s sight. As it is written: I have made you the father of many nations. He believed in God, who gives life to the dead and calls things into existence that do not exist. He believed, hoping against hope, so that he became the father of many nations according to what had been spoken: So will your descendants be. He considered his own body to be already dead (since he was about 100 years old) and also considered the deadness of Sarah’s womb, without weakening in the faith. He did not waver in unbelief at God’s promise but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, because he was fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform. Therefore, it was credited to him for righteousness.

Romans 4:16b-22 (emphasis mine)

See, when Abraham is remembered in the New Testament, nothing is said about him letting his faith or his patience slip up with Hagar. Instead, Paul says under inspiration that Abraham did not waver but was strengthened in faith. He was fully convinced of God’s promise. That seems strange to us, but it’s how the Bible sees it.

How do we understand this? Is there some kind of contradiction? Does Romans 4 pretend that Genesis 16 never happened? To steal a phrase from Paul, by no means! See, we don’t know Abraham’s psychology. We don’t know what made him think it was actually a good idea to impregnate his wife’s slave instead of waiting for Sarai to conceive. But we do know one thing: God remembered him as righteous, not unfaithful. Whatever this little episode was, it somehow fell into a story of Abraham as a hero of faith.

The same goes for other Bible characters with massive flaws and failures. David had Bathsheba, but he was gladly upheld as the ideal king who points to the Messiah. Moses was, for sin’s sake, barred from the Promised Land, but good luck finding a negative word about him in the New Testament. He’s called instead “faithful as a servant in all God’s household” (Heb. 3:5).

This isn’t just exaggerated hagiography, as though the later Bible writers felt embarrassed and wanted to brush over the flaws of their favorite forefathers. This is the divine retcon: when God takes the mixed and cracked lives of His saints and reworks them into something beautiful, something, well, righteous. God justifies us, declares us righteous, by faith, and in declaring us righteous, He makes our whole story a story of righteousness, even the gross parts. It is just another aspect of how God works all things for good.

So for us, even in our worst moments, we can know this: if we continue in faith, our story ends with “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” We may not feel good or faithful now, but God is writing the story, and He has given us a glorious sneak peek into the ending. Whatever happens in the meantime, He will fit it all into that ending. For the God who justifies the ungodly is the God who retcons.

The key to understanding the Bible is reading it

“You need to become a first century Jew.”

Oh, how many times I have heard this kind of thing from people discussing the New Testament. And it’s not, of course, entirely incorrect. The Bible was written for all of God’s people in every time and place, but it was not written to all of us. Each book was written to a particular ancient audience very different from us today. So, often enough, we can understand a book of the Bible better if we learn to put ourselves in the original audience’s place, to think and feel like they did.

My problem is with what people who say these kinds of things tend to mean. They don’t just mean we need to learn the perspective of the people the Bible was written to. They often mean we need to learn this perspective by studying a bunch of technical background stuff about history, anthropology, archeology, and everything else. And this is where I start feeling a bit uncomfortable.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying these studies are bad or useless. No, they are great and very useful. I think the work done in these fields is invaluable. And they work: the findings of historians and others actually do make tons of things in the Bible clearer. But do we really need them to get the majority of the Bible? Can we never know the real, original meaning of it all without the help of our scholarly magisterium? To put it another way, is the average Martin doomed to get everything wrong without top-notch commentaries to hold his hand? I can’t help but suspect the answer is “no.”

See, the key to understanding any text is to think the way that the author expected the reader to think. That’s the whole point of studying the historical and cultural context of the Bible. We can use what we learn to shift mental gears into the same configuration as that of ancient Israelites. But there’s more than one way to neutralize a Dalek, so to speak, and I think Martin Luther had the right idea.

Sola Scriptura, “Scripture alone,” is the Protestant belief that, ultimately, everything we really need to know about God can be found in the Bible. We don’t need a magisterium, Holy Tradition, or N. T. Wright’s marvelous book The New Testament and the People of God, however helpful they might sometimes be. Cue the ironically-named doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, or the clarity of the Bible. Not everything in the Bible is equally clear, but the good stuff we most need to know can be easily found and proved.

I think this extends further than some people give it credit for, and not as far as others do. I don’t think this means that any Martin can just crack open a Bible and get any particular thing, even the Gospel itself, right at first glance. But on the second, or the third, or even the fourth time… Scholars put a lot of historical work into finding the worldview of the Bible’s first readers, but we can’t forget that the Bible contains its own worldview, at least implicitly. And the Bible is big. There is enough stuff in there to actually build an entire way of thinking, feeling, and doing. This is stuff that we absorb without even realizing it as we read. So if we absorb more as we read more, then our hearts will be filled more and more with the real Bible.

My point, then, is that this rare and mythical process—you know, reading—can actually give us the perspective we need. The more we consume the Bible, the more it becomes a part of us. “You are what you eat,” it is said, and this applies mentally as much as physically. Just like we digest food and use its parts to build our bodies, so we digest books and use their parts to build our minds. So if you read enough Bible, you will, perhaps slowly, begin to understand it more accurately.

Still, consistency, willingness to learn, and comprehensiveness are vital. Many people read the Bible their whole lives without learning to read it well. There are plenty of reasons for this, of course. But, for many of these people, their reading has often been scattered, blocked by presuppositions they couldn’t give up, or neglectful of certain parts. This last one is a biggie. I would say without hesitation that many Christians get a lot of the Bible wrong because they don’t pay enough attention to most of what’s in Genesis 4 to Matthew 1, or don’t read/skim over books like Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, Chronicles, Lamentations, or the Minor Prophets. Few Christians really get to know the Psalms, except for a few of their favorites, or the ins and outs of Jude. They’re scared of Revelation (except when they’re not and run over it like a toddler on a bulldozer) and Ezekiel. They’ve only read 3 chapters of Job, the first two and the last one. Yet we need all of these parts in order to learn to think like the Bible thinks, and so even get our favorite parts right.

So, in the end, my proposal is simple. If you read the Bible enough—and I mean seriously, not just like daily devotional material—you’ll learn it deeply. It will enter the crevices of your heart. Doing this over a long enough period of time can, when done well, truly make you a competent reader, up there with the scholars. You’ll be that first century Jew, just by a different route.

(P.S. I’m not claiming to have scaled these heights yet. I’ve cheated by reading excellent Bible-readers like N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart, James Jordan, and Alastair Roberts, among others.)

Yay for Backups!

Good news! I have found sitting somewhere on one of my computers a backup of most of my posts from Being in Christ. I don’t remember exactly why I had made it or saved it there, but I’m very happy that I did. I am restoring them to this blog now, so feel free to peruse the salvaged material.

A Blogging Saga Continues

So, a grave misfortune has fallen upon me. In the process of switching web hosts, I lost my blog. The Nicene Nerd, of course, is still up and running, but you will find that Being in Christ is gone. I had probably not even hit 20 posts yet, but it is still disappointing. Having a blog set apart specifically to be a little more personal and accessible is valuable to me and (I think?) at least some of my readers.

So, to deal with this tragedy, I start another blog. In Whom Christ Plays will be basically the same kind of thing as Being in Christ, but hopefully this one will stick around. The title, if you are wondering, comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ short but delightful poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” I will quote it here in full for your enjoyment:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Being in Christ means Christ is in me. He is the image into which I am being molded, the pattern into which God is weaving my life, the music which plays on the instrument of my flesh. Thus this blog reflects my thoughts and experiences as I try to be one in whom Christ plays, or, as Paul put it, to live so that “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I am now living in the flesh, I live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”