“Be careful to note that there is more than one way for you to secularize, and in one of those ways your atheism can make you feel even more Christian than you did before; all it takes is substituting adrenaline for the Holy Spirit, political “awakening” for rebirth, quarrelsomeness for sanctification, and a visible tribal identity for the kingdom of God.”
— Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore
Well, I didn’t expect to be visiting the clinic for the whole afternoon, but this is certainly appropriate for an old man in his mid-geezerhood:
It is also extremely relevant for old men (and others) who should be better at comprehending what they read in the Bible, especially those who deny that God can indeed send suffering. For some not so strange reason, your name occurs to me, @RichardG. Imagine that. Some minds need better arming, to cite something attributed to Peter (Peter the first? ; - ).
Been painfully working my way through Russell Moore’s book Losing Our Religion. Heard this section on my Kindle in the car today. Seemed fitting in all sorts of ways:
Pay Attention to Means, Not Just to Ends. As you think through your own witness, consider what’s really going on when a great deal of what now passes for evangelical Christianity says that “turn the other cheek” and “winsomeness” won’t work. The argument is often that such things are fine for a “neutral culture,” but not in this, a “hostile culture.” Never mind that the Sermon on the Mount was not delivered in Mayberry, but in Roman-occupied territory. Crucifixion seems hostile. When the centurions of the biblical story start to look more valiant to us than the crucified, then maybe our culture wars have taken us away from the cross and toward something else. If the American church thinks “turn the other cheek” is surrender and weakness, then wait until they hear “take up your cross and follow me.”
…
In recent years, it has become popular—especially among a certain kind of fundamentalist Calvinist on social media—to mock the idea of “winsomeness” in Christian witness. As I was writing this page, one figure did so, attacking a revered elder evangelical, as he was in the hospital being treated for terminal cancer. The point was that “winsomeness” doesn’t work in these times. Now, the argument goes, the only effective measure is a gloves-off “fighting” evangelicalism, of the sarcastic and condemnatory sort. The idea is that this figure—and those who similarly seek to treat outsiders with respect and gentleness—does so because it “works.” Almost no consideration is given to the fact that perhaps what is being sought is not “winsomeness” as a strategy but the following of Christ . The commands to “gentleness” and “reasonableness” as well as that a person crucify “quarrelsomeness” and a “craving for controversy” are on almost every page of the New Testament.
…Sometimes we must be ready to “speak a word” into a controversy, but often what is called for is for someone to model the different way of valuing his or her own soul over having something to say. When it comes to those for whom quarreling is a way of life, the way to win is not to win at their game but to play a different game altogether. If you conform to Christ only when the culture is “neutral” enough to allow you to win on their terms, then Jesus is not Lord and you are not his disciple. You are Lord and he is your disciple. Just as culture-warring is easier than conversion, influence is easier than integrity.
(Bookshare edition in Calibre: 74%)
I have been musing over a poignant passage from “The Lord of the Rings,” which reminds me that “[God has] no pleasure in the death of the wicked.”
'But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’
‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’
‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.
‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’
‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
Tags: fellowship-of-the-ring, frodo-baggins, gandalf, lord-of-the-rings
What a great quote, @Kendel . Thank you. To focus on integrity rather than power, it seems, is a struggle for me.
All of us, I think.
I wish I could give multiple likes - Kendel. There is so much in his book that gets right to the heart - but the passages you picked up there are giants among them.
Inspired by that - I wrote this quote on the top of my classroom board this morning (to be followed I think by the centurion quote above which I can then directly attribute to Moore.)
Domination by power is the last refuge of the weak-minded and spiritually destitute, after their efforts at persuasion have been found wanting.
[Rewriting the above to say instead: “Domination by power is the last refuge of those who’ve grown impatient with God’s way of doing things.” Softened or not, this still leaves me with the uneasiness of how context-dependent this observation may prove to be. The last chapter of Joel has the unusual reversal - will probably not be preached on in any Anabaptist churches - that they were to beat their plowshares into swords and pruning hooks into spears! … certainly, Jews around 1945 or Israelites escaping slavery are also likely to share in this different perspective.]
What a great quote. One wonders how much the horrors of WWI and the monsters it made of men contributed to his words.
And Internet “discussions.”
A little Bono/Johnny Cash:
“The Wanderer”
I went out walking through streets paved with gold
Lifted some stones, saw the skin and bones
Of a city without a soul
I went out walking under an atomic sky
Where the ground won’t turn and the rain it burns
Like the tears when I said goodbye
Yeah, I went with nothing
Nothing but the thought of you
I went wandering
I went drifting through the capitals of tin
Where men can’t walk or freely talk
And sons turn their fathers in
I stopped outside a church house
Where the citizens like to sit
They say they want the kingdom
But they don’t want God in it
I went out riding down that old eight-lane
I passed by a thousand signs looking for my own name
I went with nothing but the thought you’d be there too
Looking for you
I went out there in search of experience
To taste and to touch and to feel as much
As a man can before he repents
I went out searching, looking for one good man
A spirit who would not bend or break
Who would sit at his father’s right hand
I went out walking with a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one
Now Jesus, don’t you wait up, Jesus I’ll be home soon
Yeah, I went out for the papers, told her I’d be back by noon
Yeah, I left with nothing but the thought you’d be there too
Looking for you
Yeah, I left with nothing, nothing but the thought of you
I went wandering
In the same vein as Moore’s writing about character and kindness as being more than accomplishment, I just received a note from him (not personally! It is his weekly newsletter, “Moore To the Point.”) about how the funeral for Tim Keller went.
Sam Allberry made this point well in his eulogy. Of all the tributes and eulogies to Tim, he said, almost none of them had to do with anything Tim did . Almost all of them had to do with his character —how he loved his family, how he showed kindness to people, how he encouraged his friends, how he didn’t give up on people who disagreed with him.
What a great example.
I thought of Tim Keller while reading the final chapters of Moore’s book, where he discusses how we got in the mess we are in both in church and country by honoring and following those who wield power aggressively and ruthlessly, and largely ignore those like Keller who led with kindness and love.
And to tie the wandering theme of Bono’s song with Moore’s book, here is another quote that touched me:
“As Frodo Baggins said, “I feel as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.”[*] Much of what they assumed turned out to be, just what I feared, a mixture of southern honor culture, American patriotism, Republican politics, white racial backlash, and on and on. If I don’t face that squarely, I cannot be honest with myself or with you. But everything they told me about Jesus was true.”
— Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore
This is appropriate in light of some recent local events:
Drive out a scoffer, and strife will go out,
and quarreling and abuse will cease.
(From Proverbs 22:10-12,
https://oneyearbibleonline.com/august-oyb/?version=47&startmmdd=0101)
One of my favorite passages on courtship and politics, ever, from “Anne of Green Gables,” one of our (my wife’s and my) favorite series. @Christy enjoys her, too , I think.
"Mrs. Lynde says Canada is going to the dogs the way things are being run at Ottawa and that it’s an awful warning to the electors. She says if women were allowed to vote we would soon see a blessed change. What way do you vote, Matthew?”
“Conservative,” said Matthew promptly. To vote Conservative was part of Matthew’s religion.
“Then I’m Conservative too,” said Anne decidedly. “I’m glad because Gil—because some of the boys in school are Grits. I guess Mr. Phillips is a Grit too because Prissy Andrews’s father is one, and Ruby Gillis says that when a man is courting he always has to agree with the girl’s mother in religion and her father in politics. Is that true, Matthew?”
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Did you ever go courting, Matthew?”
“Well now, no, I dunno’s I ever did,” said Matthew, who had certainly never thought of such a thing in his whole existence.
I’ve been enjoying Kaitlyn Schiess’ “The Ballot and the Bible”. Here is a quote from Ch.3 where she speaks of not using the Bible as some sort of answer book to decode.
This is not about stripping off the outer garments of culture and particularity and finding the kernel of universal truth underneath but about seeking to grow in love and understanding of the God who has graciously reveald himself in human culture and particularity.
I’ve been wanting to start pulling together quotes from Russell Moore’s Losing our Religion to share, but there has not been time. I think I got a few rounded up from Chapter 1, “Losing our Credibility,” that I can put up this evening.
In speaking of shock radio hosts (and a particular type of (para)church “leader”):
Crazy wins—in the short run. To gain attention, spectacle is the way to be noticed, which is why ambitious but hollow young men on social media often are looking to be denounced, so that they can gain a niche audience. No one will book a congressman on cable television for negotiating a compromise on an infrastructure bill, but everyone will talk to the politician who says that Jewish space lasers are causing wildfires. And one can certainly raise wheelbarrows full of cash by saying extreme things in extreme ways. Television evangelists have known this for years. When this kind of craziness becomes a church growth strategy, we abandon speaking to a mission field with, as the apostle Peter put it, “a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) and embrace instead the goal of a kind of cave of Adullam for “everyone who was in distress, and everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was bitter in soul” to be gathered together (1 Sam. 22:2). The people who leave the “ordinary” worship of Word and discipleship to find places that “tell it like it is” often define that as whoever can provoke the most outrage. The gospel is a sign of contradiction, not a sign of insanity.
(16% )
And later in the chapter, discussing a chapter from Lewis’s book, The Weight of Glory:
Instead, Lewis argued, that frustration and feeling of helplessness should lead us somewhere else—to the right kind of disillusionment. …
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. Only then can you cry out for an alternative, or even start to long for one. The death of your illusions, then, is not meant to paralyze you, but to reshape you into the kind of person who can weep and groan at the wreckage around you, which is the first step, of course, to seeking a different sort of kingdom. Your idols failing you is not bad news for you; that you can see that they are failing is, in fact, grace. …Disillusionment can lead to awful places—to cynicism, to laziness, to inaction, to despair. Or it can lead one to let go of every other stable place, and retrace one’s steps to the bush aflame with the weight of glory, a bush that does not tell us why things are the way they are, but tells us only “I Am That Which I Am.” Sometimes becoming accidental exiles is itself a grace. It can give us the distance to see what matters, and what doesn’t.
(21 %)
I’m listening to “The Inklings,” by Humphrey Carpenter, recently. He quoted C S Lewis, who used to re enjoy re reading all books, even those like “Wind in the Willows,” and books by Beatrix Potter and H Rider Haggard, and reportedly said, 'An unliterary man be defined as one who reads books only once."
I don’t know–most books I could read again. I especially get more from children’s books as I’m older. However, I really don’t want to re read some painful books. It’s an interesting perspective, though.
The problem is that there are too many books still unread I would like to read. Tough to get back to the others.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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