Well, that is true; but sometimes our entities make the deviation that is apparent through the entire culture to be more apparent. Growing up in West Africa, as I matured, I realized that even my neighbors that I idolized were not perfect. Certainly, tribalism occurs all over the world. It’s when we encounter it in a case of “man bites dog” that it makes more of an impression.
About 18 years ago, I encountered a very humble Roman Catholic priest who did everything he could to nearly obsessively avoid any appearance of abuse. It struck me how much the ill use of the relative few can horribly affect the many who really try to do well.
So having awakened this morning a little down, regretting having started an involved repair project over a month ago that will not necessarily be successful without further work and disassembly (again! )…
Maybe what the church is most called to do in this moment is not first to preach repentance, but to embody what repentance looks like, so that a culture seeking forgiveness will know what the words even mean. That’s a matter of our moral credibility and of our gospel clarity too. That can’t happen if our standard of reality is this twisted. That can’t happen if we are the moral relativists we warned about. If morality means everything, no gospel is necessary. But if morality means nothing, no gospel is true.
During the last year or so I’ve come to know and understand more and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The Christian is not ahomo religiosus , but simply a man, as Jesus was a man…I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world—watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia ; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian.”
The following paragraphs we read together tonight are not so much pithy as beautiful. As in much of his writing, George Macdonald incorporates faith into ordinary life.
As the eight year old Gibbie Galbraith, a homeless orphan, approaches a poor, elderly woman in her cottage for friendship, she responds.
“Eh, ye poor outcast!” she said in the pitying voice of a mother. “How did ye get up here? And what do you want here? I have nothing”
Receiving no answer but one of the child’s bewitching smiles, she stood for a moment regarding him, not in mere silence but with a look of dumbness. She was a mother and, more, one of God’s mothers.
Now the very moment before Gibbie entered, she had been reading the words of the Lord, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me”; and with her heart full of them, she had lifted her eyes and seen Gibbie. For one moment, with the quick flashing response of the childlike imagination of the Celt, she fancied she saw the Lord himself. Often had Janet pondered, as she sat alone on the great mountain while Robert was with the sheep or as she lay awake y his side at night with the wind howling about the cottage, whether the Lord might not sometimes take a lonely walk to look after such solitary sheep of His flock as they to let them know He had not lost sight of them. There stood the child, and whether he was the Lord or not, he was evidently hungry.
This made me think of what a friend from university did some years back. We were in the same co-op and I watched him grow from a rather directionless freshman to someone ready to tackle missions in former communist countries. This was some time after he got back from that:
One last bit from “No One Can Serve Two Masters” in Kierkegaard’s “The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air.” This is part of the conclusion of the sermon:
What, then, does the gospel do? The gospel, which is the wisdom of upbringing, does not get involved in an intellectual or verbal quarrel with a person in order to prove to him that it is so; … it becomes gentler, so that it might be capable of moving even the hardest heart; it takes you by the hand, as it were—and does just as the loving father does with his child … Out there, it continues by saying: “Consider the lilies of the field; abandon yourself to them, lose yourself in them—does not this sight move you?” Then, when the solemn silence out there with the lily and the bird moves you deeply, the gospel explains further, saying: “But why is this silence so solemn? Because it expresses the unconditional obedience with which everything serves only one master, turns in service only toward one, joined in complete unity, in one great divine service…learn from the lily and the bird.” But do not forget, you shall learn from the lily and the bird; you shall become unconditionally obedient like the lily and the bird. Consider that it was the sin of a human being that—by being unwilling to serve one master…—disturbed the beauty of the whole world where previously everything had been so very good; it was his sin that introduced discord into a world of unity; and consider that every sin is disobedience and every disobedience is sin.
For those interested in getting started with Kierkegaard, I think this is a good place. It’s short, fairly readable, in his own voice, lacking the ambiguity of irony, and incredibly tender. For Christians these three pieces are practical and spiritually “upbuilding.” They’re worth rereading.
From Russell Moore’s book “Losing Our Religion” (from Chapter 1 - Losing Our Credibility)
Here is an excerpt from ch.1 which starts from Moore quoting Lewis’ 1939 Wartime speech to a bunch of young men facing bleak prospects of a looming WW2.
“All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered on this world, were always doomed to a final frustration,” he said. “In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.” How do you come to terms with it? You don’t do so by normalizing the rot, nor by denying that it exists, much less by sanctifying it as though it were holy. You allow the realization that something is wrong to quite literally dis-illusion you—to remove the illusions you once had.
…continuing the Lewis quote…
“If we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon.”
…and a mere page later, Moore uses Kierkegaard to help drive home the point.
And as Søren Kierkegaard wrote in the context of a lifeless but “established” Danish church, the most dangerous illusion of all is a paganism that thinks it is Christian. That illusion, he wrote, must be debunked before the gospel can be heard. The difficulty is that, from the standpoint of the illusion, “it looks indeed as if introducing Christianity amounts to taking Christianity away.” Nevertheless, he concluded, “this is precisely what must be done, for the illusion must go.”[*] When our illusions start to fall, and our idols disappoint us, this is a moment not of abandonment but of grace.
Moore, Russell. Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (p. 53). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Merv, thanks for bringing Moore’s book to the forefront. Somehow I need to cram it into my reading. But before that, I wanted to track down more of the Kierkegaard piece Moore was quoting from here:
It took some time, because Moore was quoting from a topical anthology, Provocations, of mostly brief quotes, which I didn’t find right away. However finally…In good, old Internet Archive. The complete article is in Walter Lowrie’s translation and collection of Kierkegaard’s later pieces that seem widely to be referred to as his Attack on Christendom. It is comprised largely of brief newspaper articles that SK published near the end of his life, in which he blasted the Danish state church for its corruption of Christianity, the clergy and the laity. If you are interested in a clearly delineated grasp of Two Kingdoms, SK delivers it with flaming arrows in these articles. There are other articles in this collection that I like better but Moore may be unaware of them. Here is most of the article:
That the task has a double direction
[May 17]
Søren Kierkegaard
When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity.
In “Christendom” the situation is a different one. What we have before us is not Christianity but a prodigious illusion, and the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be disposed of. But since this vain conceit, this illusion, is to the effect that they are Christians, it looks indeed as if introducing Christianity were taking Christianity away from men. Nevertheless this is the first thing to do, the illusion must go.
This is the task; but the task has a double direction.
It is in the direction of seeing what can be done by way of clarifying men’s concepts, teaching them, moving them by means of the ideals, bringing them by pathos into a state of suffering, stirring them up by the gadfly-sting of irony, derision, sarcasm, etc., etc.
There would be no further task, were it not that this illusion, the fact that men imagine they are Christians, is connected with an enormously big illusion which has a purely external side, the illusion that Christianity and State have been amalgamated, in the fact that the State introduces 1000 functionaries who by the instinct of self-preservation have an interest in not letting men learn to know what Christianity is and that they in fact are not Christians. For the very existence of these priests is an untruth. Being completely secularized and in the service of the State (royal functionaries, persons of social position, making a career), they obviously could not very well tell the congregation what Christianity is, for to say this would mean resigning their posts.
Now this illusion is of a different sort from the first one mentioned, which had to do with men’s conceptions, the ensnarement of the individuals in the conceit that they were Christians. In the case of this latter illusion one must go to work in another fashion, for the State has the power to do away with it. This then is the other side of the task: to labor in the direction of getting the State to do away with it.
If I were to liken this task to anything, I would say that it resembles the therapeutic treatment of a psychic patient. One must work on psychic lines, says the physician; but it does not follow from this that there may be nothing to do physically."
[Emphasis added.]
Kierkegaard, Søren. Attack Upon Christendom, 1854-1855. Trans. Walter Lowrie, (Princeton University Press) 1944, p. 97. (Internet Archive edition used. Accessed 8/14/2023.)
Wow! Thanks for your research and bringing more of SK to light there. And I apologize for not having at first also reproduced Moore’s own footnote citation for his SK quotation:
Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, ed. Charles E. Moore (Walden, NY: Plaough, 2002), 396.
So … you were exactly right!
Indeed SK seems to drive home the same points so much harder yet!
I have been so intrigued by all you and Randy have been quoting from Moore, I downloaded it from Bookshare. No problem. The trickier part was finding an accessible copy of Lowrie’s anthology. I followed some dumb, time-consuming rabbit trails that were fruitless. IOW: Operator error.
I highly recommend Kierkegaard’s “Attack.” It is as timely today, even without an official state church in the U.S. as it was then. Be careful what you wish for. Beware of power granted by the state or its representatives.
" To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power . There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing. It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down."
George MacDonald
A remnant is usually the way that God brings about revival. He usually pares a people down, clears away the field, prunes the branches, and then starts again. But a remnant without revival is just a demographic in decline. The pattern is order, disorder, reorder. Like in Ezekiel’s vision, dry bones can live. But sometimes a field of skeletons is just a field of skeletons. For all the flaws of the evangelical emphasis on revival, the beauty of it is that it, first of all, doesn’t give up on the possibility of God acting. God can do a new thing. But also the revival emphasis, while corporate, retains the sense of the personal. “Lord, send a revival,” the old song goes, “and let it begin with me.” For a cynical people in a cynical time, what seems possible is simply the continuation of whatever trends we see in front of us right now. Revival reminds us that this is not always so. What if the current tumult all around us at this moment is not the evangelical movement imploding? What if it’s instead God tearing the evangelical movement down? If so, perhaps we should ask why before we ask what’s next. For those of you who are committed to staying with Jesus, and with his bride the church, you can see something of the why already. What’s next? I don’t mean what’s next for the church, much less what’s next for American Christianity. You can hardly, on your own, do anything about that. So what can you do?
Embrace New Communities and Friendships. …
From Moore, Russell, “Losing Our Religion” Chapter 5.
Quotes from George MacDonald, “The Baronet’s Song”:
Thoroughly respectable and a little devout, Mr Galbraith was a good deal more of a Scotsman than a Christian. Growth was a doctrine unembodied in his creed; he turned from everything new.
“She’ll be sorry for it some day,” said Janet with a quiet smile, “and what someone’s sure to be sorry for, you might as well forgive them at once.”
)…
