Jameswmiller's Blog

I realize that a category that has been bandied about in American culture for a couple of decades is an impossibility.  A cross-section of Christians have been calling themselves “conservative-evangelicals.” I guess I’ve resolved to the fact that never the two shall meet.

Evangelical means desiring to bear good news to the world.  It’s the guy who understands his daily life as a mission to follow Jesus, and, specifically, to talk about him with people who don’t know him.  Paul was fundamentally evangelical.  It means being willing to adapt and experiment in order to get into the context of those who don’t know Jesus.  The evangelical will learn languages, change clothes, hang out where he’s never hung out before.

The conservative is just the opposite.  The conservative wants things the same.  The conservative is not going to learn a new language, he’s going to tell others that if they want in, they have to learn his language.  He’s not going to change clothes.  He doesn’t adapt, because adaptation is for the liberals.

I wonder how many once evangelical churches out there have eroded into conservativism.  I know we used to use the terms together, but they are as far apart as “passionate” and “cowardly.”

I watched Pastor Adam Donner of Glenkirk Church preach a homily this weekend at a memorial service that was one of the best of its genre.  Adam had a conversational, over-the-back-fence kind of tone.  If he had notes in front of him, I couldn’t see them.  Occasionally he would pause, make eye contact with someone in the audience, and then tell a story about that person in particular and that person’s relationship with the man whose life we were honoring.  It was uniquely personal and comfortable for what can be so painful for a family.  On top of that, he really told me about Jesus.  And not just about Jesus, but about what it’s like to kind of be unsure about who Jesus is and then to come close to Jesus for the first time.  It was a uniquely strong moment in preaching, but seemingly so casual and comfortable.

So here’s the grand generalization about preaching.  In this post-60’s hippie apocalypse we know as postmodernity, that’s exactly what preaching should be.  Doug Pagitt has written a singularly awful book about preaching, announcing simply that preaching doesn’t work.  I would say it doesn’t work if you don’t know why you’re doing it.  But Adam knew it this weekend.  In a world where children are not taught a

basic respect for authority, or worse, much the opposite, preaching still functions extremely well.  But only if you talk in a normal voice instead of the voice your seminary professors used, talk to the people you’re looking at, by name, instead of people in your blogosphere, wear jeans instead of a suit, lose the pulpit, speak from your own failures rather than know-it-all-ness, and hurt with people who hurt.

Preaching hasn’t gone anywhere.  I’ve seen it recently.  It just isn’t what your parents listened to anymore.

5 gizmos we’ll be playing with by Dec. 31 (that is, most people…or more people than now…someone at least).  We’ll be:

1.  Talking on our phones by video rather than just audio.  You’ll be popping open your phone and staring at a live streaming image of the person who is calling you, with them looking back.

2.  Watching TV in 3D.  This will be a bad bet on the part of the stations, because A) it gives me a headache and B) your friends are going to make fun of you for wearing those glasses while sitting on your couch.  These TV’s will be larger than ever, movie screen size.  And not long after that they will be voice operated rather than just remote.  Your coffee table with have a digital surface through which you operate the various electronics in the living room, and will eventually replace the remote, fixing the problem of you always losing your remote.  DVD’s will be phasing out and replaced with strictly online and digitally transfered videos.  There will be a defining moment in which the mp3 of the digital video world comes of age.

3.  Saving gas.  If you haven’t made the leap to hybrid, the Chevy Volt will push the market to the next step and the next price war over the next eco friendly model.  These will be increasingly keyless, opened with a chip in your pocket, as will your house.

4.  Writing on your clipboard computer.  Tablets will become a rage, even if Apple doesn’t drive them.  Although Apple will probably drive them.  We’ll be watching TV on them and reading the paper on them.  Newspapers don’t need to hang on in 2010: we’re going to have moving graphic news on our expanded-kindle tablets, Harry Potter style.

And I’m going to guess that not too long after that, you won’t be writing on them, you’ll be speaking to them through that little bluetooth headset you’re currently wearing in your car.  We’ll all be walking around, talking in headsets to a computer that’s in our backpacks, staring at someone on our phone, and running into poles, because no one is paying attention to where they’re going.  Auto accidents will increase, because people are going to be watching TV out of the corner of their eyes while they drive.

5.  Air travel will still be awful, and you will still avoid it.  Online access will not fix this problem.  The fact that everyone is staring at their tablets will not fix this.  We will much prefer running into poles and crashing our cars to flying on planes.  And when we run into poles we will mumble to ourselves, “At least I didn’t pay $15 for the luggage.”

I’ve read the systems of the great builders of human thought, and even the most complex of them are reductionistic.  Humanity is basically rationality, or basically a free laborer, or a libido.  In the sciences, there is a dream of one day creating a unified system that encompasses all the sciences.  I think it’s a horrible idea.  In the arts, there is an unspoken dream of creating a unified system that summarizes human nature.  One day, bragged a modern geneticist, we will be able to publish you on a disk.  Equally horrible.  And impossible.  Poetry doesn’t come in ones and zeros.

Fundamental to human nature is wonder, and wonder is unquantifiable.  It can’t be computerized.  It can’t be encompassed in a system that explains what we are, because wonder is a reaching at beyond what we are.

There has been a creative theological debate over what it means to be made in the image of God.  Some have said that the human animal can reason, to a greater degree than other animals, which makes us special, and thus in the image of God.  A few modern theologians have said that God is three in one, a being in community, and so the imago dei is our ability to live in community with one another.  I think that fundamentality, the place where we are most like God is in our ability to wonder.  If there’s one thing in us that bears resemblance to him, that’s it.  Stars…volcanoes…rainbows…birds, remember, were all made out of nothing but God’s imagination.

We’ve all had that experience where we see someone we haven’t seen in a long while and notice that they’ve changed.  If it’s a child, the change is all the more pronounced, and we’re all the more amazed.  But I kind of wonder why that is.  Human beings being amazed by time is kind of like fish being amazed by water.  We exist in time.  We’re in it all the time.  It should be pretty ordinary.  A fish doesn’t notice water, I suspect, because it was made for it.  We notice time, I think, because we weren’t made for it.  We were made for eternity, and everything temporal ultimately jumps out at us as surprising.  We have mid-life crises because all of a sudden we are forced to say, “Wait a minute!  None of this feels right!” And indeed, it isn’t.

I’m realizing that the Western culture has redefined some long-held concepts of the self in a way that I think is changing history.

Plato compared the person to a charioteer guiding two horses.  One horse is the passions, the other is the moral impulse, and the charioteer must guide them to work together.  Freud similarly divided the self into a trinity: id, ego, and superego, with the superego providing a similar guiding force that manipulates the others.  And of course, philosopher Bruce Lee: “the scholar keeps the warrior in check.”

Always the self has been seen consisting of divergent drives, with a moral conscience serving as the driver or parent or best part of the self.  Through most of history, reason was the defining factor of the imago dei.  But we have overturned the concept of the self, and the ramification have yet to play out.

Now the most valuable element of the self is the id, the impulsive self, the uninhibited drive.  We give praise for candor more than diplomacy, and ultimate value is placed on “authenticity,” or sincere exposure of one’s most primitive and unchecked drives.  Raw sexuality, in life and literature, is seen to be truthful, and inhibition is merely a repressive hangover.  The free in free speech means free from responsibility, whereas its originators meant free from tyranny.  Moral conscience or discretion is puritanical, left over adolescent phobia, repression, authoritarian.  The superego is unrealistic and judgmental and must be overcome.  It is the repressive, hypocritical, control freak of a teacher who simply doesn’t understand the nature of the teenager.

The whole move is founded on the assumption that humanity at its core is pretty good.  It’s the return to Rousseau.  It is worlds apart from the Pauline theology of the first three chapters of Romans, which asserts without caveat that humanity at its core can’t do good.  It exalts the original self and dismisses original sin.  The current perception of the self is, among other things, unchristian.  It is the ultimate patricide of the moral conscience.

Here are the consequences.  If the superego is removed, the self loses hope.  Always before the moral conscience gave the self direction, even if the direction was unreasonably idealistic.  Nonetheless, the self had something to work on and somewhere to go.  If the fundamental human drives are, because of their authenticity, baptized, then the self is complete.  It has been made pure.

All of our anxieties come from the fact that we proved ourselves too good for Eden and now want back in.  Liberal optimism is again extending to contemporary America the apple.

Abba, when converted to its verbal form in Aramaic, is the one who adopts us as a father, the one who becomes adoptive father to us.  God is not just a creator, a father who conceived us by accident and moved on, God is the one who chooses to become father to us when we are orphaned.  Abba can never be misconstrued as a deadbeat; he is Abba by virtue of his intentional choosing to be Father.

…yay!!!

The sad part of the many dying churches around the country is that they don’t seem bothered by the obvious trend.  The pain of change and innovation looked to be too much, so instead they have settled for the numbing morphine of familiarity.  Let’s keep doing things the same way…since it’s going to die anyway, let’s make them comfortable.

Perhaps the surest sign of life in the modern church is that the next generation of ministers is talking about innovation even more than the cutting edge boomers talked about seeker sensitivity.  The shift is from “let’s appeal” to “let’s invent,” which, though it’s still marketing, leans more towards creativity than catering.

There’s a story about a monk working at a monastery who didn’t like the abbott.  He wrote a letter to another monk and confessed that he was doubting whether or not God had called him to be a monk.  The other monk wrote back, “You know that you were called if your soul is growing through the trials that God sends you.”  The monk wrote again a few months later, frustrated, asking if he were still called.  The first wrote back saying, “You know you are called to go if it is damaging your soul.”

And therein lies the long lost element of true calling.  Who pays attention to the development of the soul anymore?  Do the job placement offices in seminaries take time to talk to people about the growth and development of their souls, or do they talk about resumes and references?  Would the average pastor have any sense at all of how to measure if his or her soul was growing or decaying?  My sense is that that is a meaningful vocabulary that has been wholly lost.