Babel

Hemingway would end his writing for one day by writing the first sentence for the next day, knowing how hard it is to start up. That's why I am writing short post ideas to build on.

Anyways, truth cannot contradict itself. If languages evolve, and they do--Ask any linguist or philologist--then we obviously didn't get all the languages at the tower of Babel no matter what the preacher at the revival said.

Ability to separate Content from Style

Artists have definite philosophies or worldviews that affect their art. But, Zhang proposes, be fair and do not dismiss them based only on their the content (unless you are a weak-minded hyper-impressionable follower). I am thinking of the great poet Wallace Stevens, that devout atheist and superb stylist. This post will evolve.

A Random Memory Deconstructed

Deconstructionism: A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: "In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, 'virtual texts' constructed by readers in their search for meaning" (Rebecca Goldstein).

A Random Memory:
I was the only kid in my family who actually liked going to Bible Memory Camp every summer. It was worth enduring the long sermons and the smell of pinesol overpowering the scent of pines, for the berry picking, paddle boats, and the possibility of a horse ride, if you were lucky. Picture a small-group Bible study outdoors about forty years ago...
A teacher, call him "Joe" tells his pre-adolescent students, "the 'mark of Cain' is the Negro color." One of my brothers counters, "No, it isn't."

Teacher then asks that brother,"How would you feel if your sister (me) married a Negro (word drawn out)?

Brother, "I wouldn't care."

Teacher, "I'll pray for you, brother!!"

Okay,now I'll illustrate deconstructionism: On the obvious level, the deconstructionist would say Teacher Joe brought his own interpretation to the Biblical test based on his own cultural racial prejudices. Right. So far so good. But then maybe the deconstructer speculates that my brother with his young, fantasy-inclined mind was really thinking about me being married to a negro in a symbolic way, say like a virgin being sacrificed to a dragon to appease the gods. In this scenario, my brother says, "I wouldn't mind" only because he wouldn't have cared about me being fed to the dragon, sheerly for its entertainment value. Or, maybe, he just didn't care at all about much at all and that's what he really meant. But since Teacher Joe didn't know my sibling was just contrary and primitive, he didn't think of that. (Nor did he think of anything else except for apple pie and pork rinds.) But further speculation yields the dark possibility that Teacher Joe interpreted was actually subconsciously thinking how interesting it would be for me to be with a black man! In this scenario, I am the white (innocent) virgin marrying Joe's own dark id/shadow side. Mmmm-mm. Shudder. Shudder. (Scarier than being sacrificed to a dragon to appease non-existent gods.) So in these interpretations, did my brother stand up for me or did he give me away to the dragon or did he give me away to Joe or to a real negro man or was he just weird? And was I still a girl or was I grown up when married off to the dragon, dark side or black man? And speaking of Cain to get back to the original text, Cain wasn't much of a "brother's keeper" and neither was Teacher Joe so Teacher Joe was a Cain-type, killing innocents while sounding pious, with a fake offering. See how I subverted the text in no time? That's deconstructionism. The only part that makes sense to me is that Joe Blow was pre-biased by his racist subculture to distort the Biblical text and pass on the prejudice. But hopefully you can see that after awhile everybody's so confused, in the deconstuctionist process, that they throw up their hands in despair yelling, "Anything can mean anything you want it to mean!" And that, my friend, is exactly what has happened in our culture. Freud should have stuck with his first love of literature, especially Shakespeare, and not married his views to literary criticism (crit. lit. sh#@). F Y I, If I really thought a negro spouse could symbolize a dragon or a shadow side, (I don't) then in deconstructionist land, I would be the racist bigot, which I'm not.

Breathe.
But, really, racism is serious issue. So why did I marry deconstructionism with racism? "To kill two birds with one stone." Now who came up with that metaphor and why did they? Was it Audubon who actully killed birds to sketch them? What kind of cultural prejudices could have influenced such an idiom? (Ad infinitum.)

A happy ending is coming so will this random memory be interpreted as comedy or tragedy? I guess it depends on how you choose to interprete it.

Need I mention the camp was segregated, that blacks attended a separate week? (Why would they bother?) Anyways, I was one of the only two who would memorize my whole book of verses to receive a gift Bible as the token black cook sang, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot..." (Bet that negro was ready to go home when her shift ended.) Anyways, the happy ending is that I thought for myself, read the Bible, found that it endorses love and equality, not racism. All this is the gospel truth, though what Bible memory camp endorsed wasn't.

Why I Hate the Bible commentary "The Message"

I have good reasons for hating The Message but I don't have time write them now. By coming up with the title of this post and the first sentences, I have committed myself to this future task. More coming. Later, tell me if you disagree.

Reasons not to be anti-science (i.e., "plain ol'" science without all the modern philosophical underpinnings of Science as Modern Religion)

This posting is going to get longer and evolve. For now, I refer you to the worthy blog, http://www.reasons.org, Reasons to Believe, Bridging the Gap between Science and Faith.

To jump in somewhere in the middle of a really old debate, I'll say first that in my formative years my parents told me that scientists made up the evidence for the earlier existence of dinosaurs…that they never existed. What do you think? More later.

The Emerging Church is the Merging Church

“The emerging church” should be called “the merging church.” While they pride themselves on their tolerance of all who are so tolerant, they allow anything whatever into the mix of their creed-less creed. And, of course, if you keep combining color upon color, you will only get a bathroom brown.

Plus, (sudden metaphor switch coming) while trying to make a stew of religion, they forget flavor-enhancing salt. Though their soup has many mild herbs of pop psychology thrown in, it remains bland and worthless.

From a typical Emerging Church website (emergingchurch.info.): “Whilst the traditional church continues to battle between the conservatives and the liberals, and between the Catholics and the evangelicals, the emerging church has been emphasizing the need for right engagement in context – or what has been called orthopraxis" (sounds like something old people wear!) rather than orthodoxy (right thinking)." Does this mean they are for Wrong thinking?! "It has avoided getting involved in this tennis match over orthodoxy. The emerging church has been focusing on ‘doing’ church in a post modern context, which is all about being and doing church in our liquid modern times" (veggie stew with nasty stuff thrown in) "which has created a new context of a culture of the spiritually restless and spiritual searching, or the openness of many to be spiritual tourists "(in other words, questions are "good" but answers are "bad," very bad). "Many emerging churches, have sought to draw on the best of the old and reframe it for our current post-modern context, in what has been called ‘ancient-future’". Now there's an oxymoron! Apparently merging churcers are supposed to be tourists instead of tennis players (tennis can be strenuous and there might be a winner and a loser. But Reality Check, Emerger Mergers, everyone is in the game. There are no neutral spectator tourists. And whatever happened to being in but not of the world? And what’s wrong with a tennis match? …Anyways, please accept the editorializing along with everything else if you are an emergent churcher, "the emerging church tries to hold to the tension of having a high regard towards God and the scriptures…” Is that so?! Okay, that’s enough already. What about that glaring, "I am the way, the truth, the life" verse about how "no one gets to the Father except through Me (Christ)" ? Countless such verses contradict the merging church’s orthodoxy that everyone’s going to heaven or no one. More later.

Rescuing Evangelicalism from Fundamentalism, but even more from the Lies and Fear-Mongering of Radical, Religious Liberals Like Spong and Bawer

In the last few blogs I was warming up to say that although I believe there are problems in Evangelicalism and many more in Fundamentalism, they have often been unfairly slandered.

I will critique "Stealing Jesus, How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity" by Bruce Bawer, friend of The Right Reverend John Spong author of "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." The Bible needs to be rescued from the likes of Bawer and the Right Reverend Spong!

The worst you can say about select groups of Fundamentalists is that (mostly in the South) they have at certain times condoned racism; as a generality, they have tended toward being anti-science, anti-intellectual, separatist, legalistic, sometimes unskilled in Biblical hermeneutics--going beyond the Bible, and unskilled with language, misunderstanding the word "literal," for instance. I am not minimizing those problems, which are serious. I'm just saying, "Let's be honest."

The Fundamentals that Define Fundamentalists (among other things):
Inerrancy of the Scriptures. I agree, but this does not mean fundamentalists must inflate what is to be taken “literally” (to use a fundamentalist buzzword).
The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus (Isaiah 7:14) I agree. Why don’t we use the Apostle’s Creed anymore, except, ironically, at Episcopal churches in America that have given up their basis for reading it?
The doctrine of substitutionary atonement by God's grace and through human faith (Hebrews 9)This is essential for salvation.•
The bodily resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28)Yes--this is essential.
The authenticity of Christ's miracles e.g. healing,[6] deliverance,[7] and second coming[8]I agree.

(I hope to back all this up in subsequent posts, not wanting to spout unfounded opinions like a know-it-all; and I hope if you think I am mistaken, you'll investigate further and decide for yourself.)These five fundamentals define a fundamentalist. I don’t have any problem with them but fundamentalists tend to go way beyond them.[5]

Francis Schaeffer, Thieme and I Ching

I'm an evangelical intellectual but not a fundamentalist. Being an intellectual doesn't mean I think I'm so smart. (I know better than to think that because I read mostly the truly brilliant.) It simply means that I'm continuously learning from intellectuals like Peter Kreeft, N.T. Wright, Edward Feser, Mortimer Adler, Alistair McGrath, C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, Aquinas, Augustine, Ravi Zacharia, Tom Wolfe and Walker Percy, and in comparison to these I pale. I am smart enough to question and look at issues from many angles when I don't understand, which is often. I believe asking questions leads to answers. (And just because I admire those guys and learn from them doesn't mean I agree with everything they believe. I examine them, too.)

Biographical background about the religio-cultural atmosphere of my formative years (fundamentalist), but not in words like that, which would be boring...

Beginning with my dad because he will serve, usually, as a negative illustration: Dad was ga-ga over Francis Schaeffer who was a new phenomenom back then(1960s-80s). I didn't know what to do with Francis Schaeffer books at the time. I certainly couldn't really read them. My dad, an inconsistent romantic, yet cynical fundamentalist academician gave all Schaeffer's books to each of his four children like they were great gifts. And Schaeffer's high-pitched voice from the tapes Dad would play at family Bible studies is an indelible memory for me. But it was a good time for family rest. (My mom hardly ever rested except at Bible studies, because she was trying to be like the Proverbs 31 "virtuous woman," sans servants like that wealthy Hebrew. Dad read Proverbs 31 at Mom's memorial service.)

Anyways, Schaeffer and Co. were the Protestant evangelical intellectual, culture dabblers who made forays into culture via the L'Abri seekers and hippies who plied Schaeffer, Rookmaker, Os Guinness...with questions in the Swiss chalet. Schaeffer was and is an intellectual giant in the evangelical community simply because they haven't many to brag about. Even Chuck Colson in his new worldviews book, "The Good Life", cites great early Catholic thinkers for his basic arguments about reality, not Protestant thinkers. After all, Christians were mostly Catholics before the Protestant reformation. (Martin Luther remained Catholic.) Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are foundational to a Judeo-Christian worldview based on moral absolutes, with Thomas Aquinas explicating. Why haven't we had many Protestant intellectual giants like C. S. Lewis and Ravi Zacharias? (Though Zacharias is in the Reformed camp and staunchly evangelical, some debate whether Lewis is an evangelical but since most evangelicals claim him, he's included.) That's for another blog posting though the short answer is that I believe many Protestants have been anti-intellectual (so naturally Schaeffer made a big splash in the evangelical community).

Anyways, although I got more out of Os Guinness than Schaeffer and was awakened to art through Rookmaker while stumbling over Schaeffer's philosophical jargon...and although I think C. S. Lewis (borderline evangelical), Peter Kreeft, Edward Feser, N. T. Wright, Alistair McGrath--all Catholic intellectual Christians are deeper thinkers and better writers, I still think Schaeffer and his group woke up the evangelical community to the culture. And I was impressed by certain sermons like "Ash-Heap Lives" (which was one you could totally understand)about the dangers of our consummerist society.

But while Schaeffer thought most hippies were sincere seekers, another guy Dad had us listen to on tapes, R.B. Thieme, thought hippies should be punched out (if he could have gotten away with it)--or at least kicked out of church: In one R.B. Thieme sermon my dad played for us, all long-haired guys were actually escorted from the service as unAmerican. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't but it occurred to me this was unchristian. Wikipedia quoting Thieme: "1. No believer can attain spiritual maturity and become an invisible hero or glorify God apart from postsalvation epistemological rehabilitation." (hmmm-mm...somebody should have reminded him to "eschew obfuscation and espouse elucidation"--he could have related to the pretentiousness of those words!)(back to Thieme)"a. This means that no believer can read the Bible and attain spiritual maturity. The Bible is our textbook, but the gift of pastor teacher is designed to communicate the specifics of the mystery doctrine that cause spiritual growth. Doctrine must be learned under authority, and that authority is vested in the spiritual gift of pastor teacher, b. No believer can read the Bible daily for himself and discover and learn the mystery doctrine for the Church Age, and understand the mechanics of the protocol plan of God. It must be taught through authority. Authority is always the key to teaching..." (On top of all that authority stuff and being a narcissistic bigot, Thieme was not even pro-life on the abortion issue because he knew that the soul entered the body at the moment of birth.)

Nonetheless, anyone labeled a Protestant fundamentalist or evangelical was embraced in our home. Dad, however, wasn't necessarily a bigot and he did try to think for himself occasionlly; but he didn't question a bigot if he was a fundamentalist or an evangelical. For instance, Dad thought David Duke was probably getting unfair press regarding his racist views just because he was conservative and that Bob Jones University with it's segregationalist policies is just fine. Also, I remember going door to door helping him campaign for Nixon, seeing Nixon and Agnew close up on at beach rally in California, and look where Nixon got us.

Schaeffer was cool to me compared to R. B. Thieme but Schaeffer and Co. was still way over my head at the time I was encouraged to read them, in junior high and high school. When I actually started taking religion and philosophy courses in college, I realized Schaeffer could have expressed the same content with some clarity. I realized I was not the dense one. Too bad Schaeffer and Company's answers were usually obfuscated by abstract philosophical jargon, because he made some accurate cultural observations. But Schaeffer was such a hero to my dad that I used to think L'Abri was Mecca and wondered if I should become a hippie seeker just so I could hang out there and ask questions (plus the Alps would be great to climb). Schaeffer did broaden the narrow evangelical horizon, even if he dictated how to think about more subjective areas, like art. (Many evangelicals, just like today, hadn't evolved into thinking for themselves, but at least Schaeffer permitted them to know something about the culture.) Schaeffer said, "brains are good. You can ask questions. Art is good except modern art, which is very, very bad indeed. Jesus was the real flesh-and-blood incarnated God, not some mystical religious figure; God existed and communicated ("He is there and He is not Silent" --a title of one of his books); religion is not 'an upper story experience'--Schaeffer's words so you can see the difference, (Bible stories really happened. Love is the mark of the Christian." I mostly paraphrased him out of respect for any possible reader of this blog. (Someone should rewrite him like it was just stated for you, so he would be understood, but now you have all his arguments and don't have to read the books like I did. Again, somebody might have reminded him to "eschew obfuscation, espouse elucidation"--he would have liked the hundred dollar words!

But Schaeffer like so many others who still believed in the concept of truth went too far and decided to interpret everything for you. (In his case truth was "true Truth"--redundancy never getting in the way of making a point.)

So I was fed a steady diet of evangelical Christian writers, some weirdly fundamentalist, to the exclusion of all others Christian thinkers. My point here is that if your going to encourage your kids to think, get them books they can enjoy and let them actually think for themselves. My point is also that if you're going to be a dad who extols a Schaeffer who exonerates thinker-seekers, don't castigate your child and burn I Ching, for instance, if that child brings a book with a contrary viewpoint into the house to read. (Yes, this really happened to my little brother. I don't know if Dad did actually burn the book but it certainly disappeared fast after a lecture on appropriate reading material whereas it could have led to an edifying discussion.)

What I learned was that Schaeffer can entertain seekers but they were not welcome in our chalet. The way "Modern Art and the Death of a Culture" (hmm-mm. I wonder how we are supposed to think about modern art!) reminded me of a book we used in a Bible class I once took entitled "Decide for Yourself" which more aptly could have been titled, "We Decide for yourself." "Decide for Yourself" had divergent doctrinal issues but the one with the most words was always the one you were supposed to pick as correct. (For instance, a Neo-orthodox like Karl Barth was given two sentences while an evangelical was given ten.) Although I saw the value of such a book, I thought they could have at least pretended to be fair. They could have pretended that we had brains and heart enough to have picked the right answers for ourselves based on fairly-presented information.

Presuppositions in the Stew

The givens, a.k.a. the cultural presuppositions, the air you breathe/the water you swim in must be examined. We must examine them or become mindless zombies. We must examine them on t.v. and in the pulpit. We must think for ourselves. Or we are the frogs that will boil in the getting-hotter water unless we jump out. We don't know we're heating up in the stew because we're IN it.... Getting our brains and consciences fried even as we glibly watch t.v., work, and shop. Frogs in our hot water sauna whirlpool poured for us by our predesesors.

The stew we're in, which is new to modernity, is relativism but that's a tired over-used word that needs freshening. We're now living in the time that is so enlightened that whatever you want to believe is cool and whatever works for you will supposedly make you happy. We're living in the second Dark Ages. (The first "Dark Ages" a.k.a. the "Middle Ages" was named Dark after the so-called "Enlightenment.") At least the Middle Ages had Augustine and Acquinas!

How did some of us become bed-fellows with relativism in matters of morality and truth? Some Christian writers blame the philosopher Kant for reason's demise. Others start with Descartes or the like. Whoever and however, now most of us distrust our own brains(especially Protestants as opposed to Catholics); we distrust commonsense and even our senses, thanks to Kant. Today we leave opinions to the experts in every field. Religion is personal so keep it to yourself, out of schools, out of politics, out of anything that could make a difference. Religion is a private matter relagated to your own relativistic opinions. It doesn't have meaning for life because religion is supposedly irrational. (Well, that's just crazy if you ask me.)

The metaphysical remains. The ontological, the real behind the word, stumps. Reality abides. Trip over that! One religion can be more true than another, having correspondence to reality. (Hope I don't now go to liberal hell for saying that, which would be like pantheonic, mystical energy radiating pure tolerance for everybody that agrees on everything and nothing--which would be boring as well as stupid and impossible. But a real God who has certain attributes and not others is the ground of all being, the Creator, who has a vested interest in our redemption.

All that said, I still wish certain fundamentalists wouldn't go beyond truth. They have confused the existence of absolute truth with their ability to always know it and preach it, their own biases left unacknowledged.

Real Wine at Communion--real spiritual, too.

I'm still a Christian for good reasons. If you want to know why, keep reading. Though this may at times be a story about me, it's supposed to be something you can relate to. Just bear with the early biographical posts. "Dimensions" is my safe place to express what I can't say elsewhere and what you maybe couldn't say elsewhere, if you do care to comment.

Dad makes a handy negative example with whom I will illustrate many points, but he's a good guy. So if you know me personally, please keep it to yourself in cyberspace. I want this to stay semi-private. Dad is the type of fundamentalist Christian who can turn you off because he's black/white. Sermons must be "expository" which, in his definition, means verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book, and not topical because you might be tempted to editorialize or miss something; you might not go "in-depth" enough. Dad is the type of fundy fundamentalist who can't see the forest for the trees, including himself as one tree in God's vast forest. He likes James Sire's Worldview book, "The Universe Next Door" being acquinted with Mr. Sire. I had the luxury of asking Sire some questions over dinner once. Sire was refreshingly honest. But although Dad thought The Universe Next Door was a worthy book, Dad wouldn't look at another worldview to try to really understand it if it was the only reading material and he was stranded on a desert island. I mean that Sire has a reading list in his books and I imagine Dad would only use the fiction for kindling on that deserted island. I told Sire over dinner once (emboldened by being an enlightened college student) that I thought his associate Schaeffer wasn't such a great writer. Mr. Sire said, "Yep. And you should have read him BEFORE I edited him!" I believe it. Thanks, Sire that it wasn't worse.

Read the book, Growing up Born Again for details on how I was raised. Don't envy all the church potlucks. I never want to see pound cake or macaroni delight again. Maybe it was a Baptist thing that I have switched denominations. Not because of the generic food but because of the social club the last Baptist church I really tried, turned out to be.

To be fair, I know that just because I hit a few not-so-great Baptist churches in the potluck surprise of church noshing, it doesn't mean good Baptist churches don't exist. I like the leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, Mohler, anyway. He is culturally relevant, to use a cliche. Anyhow, now I'm supposedly LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) but I'm not really one cut and dried, even though I joined an LCMS church. I disagree with three major LCMS doctrines, which I'll get to later, maybe. But nonetheless, they believe the Bible for all it's worth and it doesn't feel like a social club. They're not that friendly but at least it's not a social club. And I can drink whatever I want without being a Baptist heathen. I can even drink real wine at communion just like Jesus did (think What would Jesus do...He wouldn't have worn the bracelet, for one, and he would and did drink wine, using that as a prop for his first miracle) And, no, you are not more spiritual than I am because you don't drink alcohol except in cough syrup. You may be more spiritual for a different reason but not for that. So can't we just agree to forget the spiritual pride bit even though it's a comfortable place to hide?