Blacks and Whites

A front page article of the New York Times today reported "A Racial Divide is Bridged by Recession". Remarkably a suburb of Atlanta is experiencing the easing of once sharp racial tensions as whites and blacks mingle in welfare offices and food banks. The article contends, "nothing else has worked to remove barriers as quickly as economic hardship". Blessed be the tie that binds.

Christians take note - rubbing racial shoulders is still newsworthy! We're not even talking about whites and blacks liking each other. All they have to do is cordially share a waiting room and the Times will slot that phenomenon next to Obama's China tour as front page material. I guess those (white) people who think race doesn't matter in America probably aren't selling newspapers.

Ephesians 2 is vehemently pointed in its vision for race in religious life. On our best days, we as the church understand the first half of the chapter - Jesus' death and resurrection achieves vertical reconciliation. But we rarely venture into the latter half - Jesus' death and resurrection achieves horizontal reconciliation. In other words, 2.5% of American churches can be considered racially diverse.

In reality, a vision for blacks and whites outside the gospel can scarcely hope to achieve more than a waiting room reconciliation. Only the gospel grounds a fellow citizenship, a dwelling place for God made up of the awkward, uncomfortable, self-sacrificing joining of all races.

But I guess the Times makes much of racial hobnobbing in Henry County because they haven't found it anywhere else.

Flags and the Sanctuary

After Matthew Milner posted this on his blog recently, I felt my former patrio-iconoclasm decay a little.

The issue of flags in the sanctuary begs some interesting questions about how design influences worship. Millner's point is valid, that, perhaps, in placing our flag on the "altar" of our respective church we are not worshiping the flag, but creating a visible reminder that if we love our neighbor we ought to pray for our country. This helps me come to terms with my church praying for the queen and singing the Canadian national anthem (once).

But surely there are times when the flag does become an object of idolatry. Where is the line? Why is a little flag next to the cross a helpful reminder while a large American flag in many evangelical churches seems so different?

Soon I think I will argue that this is an issue of ecclesiology as much as aesthetics, but this is enough for now.

The Place of Tradition in Hermeneutics

Among all of the controversies surrounding the Protestant reformation, one of the primary concerns was the proper appropriation of tradition. In Cardinal Sadolet's letter to the people of Geneva, he argues that Calvin and his contemporaries did not have the support of Christian tradition on their side. The reformers had a mere 25 years of tradition to the Roman Church's prodigious 1500 years. Calvin's response is cunning. He writes, “…the ancient church is clearly on our side, and opposes you, not less than we ourselves do.” (Calvin, John. “Reply by John Calvin to Letter by Cardinal Sadolet to the Senate and People of Geneva.”49). In responding this way he turns Sadolet's logic around and claims that the reformers are actually being more faithful to the tradition than the Catholic Church was. Thus, the appeal of the Protestant reformation was not meant to dispense with tradition. Rather, it was an argument against the way in which the Catholic Church had appropriated it.

The question then is this: What is the role of tradition in interpreting Scripture? The Catholic position appears to be that Scripture and tradition are to be held on the same level. The mainline Protestant reformers clearly hold up Scripture as authoritative (sola scriptura) without dispensing with tradition, but (perhaps problematically) leave the question of its proper position unestablished. The radical reformers seem to completely disregard tradition as irrelevant, professing that one can really read Scripture unassisted by tradition. The result of this lack of articulation on the part of Protestantism seems to be partly responsible for the fractious milieu that has become one of its hallmarks.

At the risk of muddying the waters of discussion, I will go ahead and say that, on this point at least, I think the radical reformers were more than a little naive simply because nobody is able to completely divorce themselves from their own context (cultural, historical, denominational, etc). Thus, even in the most deconstructed traditions, such as the Quakers, you will find them to be just that–– a tradition. But how does one interpret Scripture in continuity with all of Christian (and Jewish!) history? Can we just appeal to the early church without looking at the less flattering parts that follow? Should we go so far as the Catholic Church and put the two on the same level?

Our Membership

"This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. Andy Catlett, remembering Burley, still calls it that. And I do. This membership had an economic purpose and it had an economic result, but the purpose and the result were a lot more than economic. Joe Banion grew a crop on Mr. Feltner, but also drew a daily wage. The Catlett boys too were working for wages, since they had no crop. The others of us received no pay. The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished. In his old age Burley liked to count up the number of farms he had worked on in his life 'and never took cent money'.

"...The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

Taken from Hannah Coulter this Wendell Berry quote might well be mistaken for the book of Acts, thick with covenantal, ecclesiological, familial language.

Somehow we've made mutual generosity an event. Appealing for help is the crescendo of maxing resources, dead ends, burgeoning shame and awkwardness. Its broaching the sentence, "I can't..." And God-forbid never twice in one month. Meanwhile, fervency, outdoing, contributing, and seeking are the verbs marking love of Christians in Romans 12.

I long to raise Judah and Amelie in this Membership. Being "born into it", as they grow to pray, worship, and trust Christ, they will learn there's more to our faith than family devotions. Our family is flanked by other families as one Family. "They stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it..."

On the Healthcare Question: A Rejoinder

I always apologize for doing this, but why? So here is another shameless link to another blog post written by a doctor– and not one of those doctors from the fifties who told us smoking is healthy for us (and who is apparently still telling John that snuff is good for him). Even if you won't agree with him, Eric Chevlen offers a good cross-section of the situation and some factors that may not be readily visible.

One word of warning: it's a bit on the long side, so you may want to pull up a rolling stool, don a hospital gown, grab a decanter of good 20 year old rubbing alcohol, and make yourself comfortable.

Confessions of a Health Care Rationer


My favorite line? "People love honesty, but they hate the truth," Ah, how deep our depravity runs!

Reading the Word with Liza Hamilton, Part 1

I love the Dickensian depiction of the "dour Presbyterian" Liza Hamilton in Steinbeck's East of Eden: "Her head was small and round and it held small round convictions...She had a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do".

Throughout the novel, Steinbeck is determined to bury her simple fundamentalism by the burgeoning free-spirited, individualism of her husband Samuel, his friend Lee, and their curious reading of Genesis 4. Samuel remarks, "Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers. Liza wears a Bible down evenly." This begs the question, Who's reading their Bible rightly? The seeking fingers or the even wearing?

Ultimately, there is room at the hermeneutical table for both readers. The Word is relevant and timely, answering burning questions of burdened fingers. If I cannot approach the Word with my aches and fears and joys to whom else may I go? It has the words of life.

Contra Steinbeck, however, it is not the only way or even the best way to read. To paraphrase Newbigin, the Bible does not have answers to all our inquiries because more often than not we are asking stupid questions. Our reading and preaching today has joyfully joined the ranks of Samuel and Lee, hungry for individualistic, therapeutic, myopic tidbits. This Sunday morning snackfood energizes us for another week of living within our own story, the one untarnished and uninterested by the one in Scripture.

Joining Liza in evenly wearing our Bibles is crucial. What breaks to the fore from Genesis to Revelation are not anecdotes for our ailments but the thundering story of God gaining glory for himself by redeeming a people and recreating a world. And we are guests on that sacred ground.

Oliver O'Donovan and Public Health Care

“It is a Western conceit,” O’Donovan writes, “to imagine that all political problems arise from the abuse or over-concentration of power; and that is why we are so bad at understanding political difficulties which have arisen from a lack of power, or from its excessive diffusion.” He cites the example of Somalia, admitting that “such power as there has been has, as a matter of course, been abused.” But a more crucial problem is that “political power was never strong enough to cope with the daunting natural obstacles.”

Disease and famine, he suggests, are as crucial “enemies” as tyrants and invaders, since they are “depoliticizing forces” that “prevent people from living in communities, from coordinating their efforts to the common good; from protecting one another against injury and maintaining just order; and from handing on their cultural legacy to their children.”

The above is a short blog post from Peter Leithart, where he is summarizing some of Oliver O'Donovan's thoughts from his 1996 book, "The Desire of the Nations." The skepticism of nation-state power that O'Donavan bemoans is relevant to the current debate over reforming health care. One of the main criticisms that is lodged against pursuing the option of a public health care plan is that health care is not a right, it is actually a commodity, or a privilege. Therefore, the American government, with a public health care plan, would be providing something that it does not have business or authority to provide. This has been shouted to the world via televised town-hall meetings with the threat that if we go this route we are wittingly lifting up the dust ruffle and inviting the boogy man with the S branded on his chest into our bedroom to have his way with us.

Beyond the obvious ridiculousness of such alarmism there is a more subtle problem with this warning. As O'Donovan is aptly pointing out, can it honestly be maintained that the tyrants that our military defends us from are more "depoliticizing" than the immobilization of our citizens from untreated disease? We have picked and chose randomly where we want government to interfere with our lives- a product of the post-enlightenment skepticism of everything authority. Yet, in the wake of increasing awareness of the things that threaten our health, and the technological wherewithall to combat them can these arbitrary distinctions be maintained? Why do we consider health care a commodity? Seriously, why? Why is this proposed plan any different from the preventative care I get from the United States Marine Corps? Why am I owed one (as a U.S. citizen) and not the other?