Meditation on the Innovation of Boredom

In Boredom: the Literary History of a State of Mind, Patricia Meyer Spacks explains that boredom as such is a relatively recent invention, from the eighteenth century at the latest. Before that we had melancholy (which was a kind of affliction of the spirit) and, further back still, acedia (which was a sin). What’s distinctive about boredom is that we don’t see it as either a condition of our own selves or a sin, but rather something that just happens to us. When we’re bored, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with us: we think the world is at fault. Stupid old world — it doesn’t interest me. And interesting me is the world’s job.

(Alan Jacobs, quoted by Joe Carter, "Thirty-Three Things" on First Thoughts Blog, entry posted August 21, 2010, http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/08/21/thirty-three-things-v-11/ [accessed August 23, 2010])

What happened? If boredom is an innovation that roughly coincides with the enlightenment, it would seem that Descartes developing an epistemology in which everything but himself is doubted would lead to this very thing–– boredom. Ho-hum, clock-watching, face-heavy-in-the-hand, nose-picking, boredom. When everything– besides me– is made into an accessory, and when accessories gradually take on a disposable nature, and when everything disposable tarnishes and browns with age like a discarded issue of People magazine from 1994, what are we left with? Not much. Moreover, when God himself is deemed unnecessary, as Nietzsche lamented, we are in a doubly dire straight, because all transcendence becomes relegated to climbing the uselessly short ladder of our own mind. This is the post-modern milieu– boredom insulated by the earbuds of my I-Pod, noise bouncing off the interior walls of my skull with nowhere to go.

This innovation is more than incidental. When we consider that the medieval mind was everywhere haunted by the sacramental, boredom seems an impossibility. Seemingly everything was expressed in relational terms. Before an object falling was mere gravity, it was an object pursuing the ground with something like desire. The planets moved according to a kind of music, which suggests a scale that can be appreciated if not comprehended by the human mind. Christ was not absent at the communion, but was manifest in a "real presence." In a world like that, in which the eternal was constantly breaking into the temporal, who could be bored?

Here in Vancouver, during the long rainy months, I have found it fearsome to think that, as Christ walked among us with hard calloused feet, (to borrow from Gerard Manley Hopkins) the Spirit broods over this city in a low, heavy cloud, intermittently dunking and sprinkling us, and that the mountains surrounding it are somehow the cusp of the Father's palm, hovering somewhere between cradling and crushing this pile of glass, brick and mortar. It seems positively old-fashioned to imagine that mingling with the hydrogen and oxygen of the atmosphere, holding the space between atoms, is the same One who hovered over the waters in the beginning. As I sit on the bus, enduring the grind of my routine and trying not to make eye-contact with anybody in particular, I cannot think of a better way to remember God's immanence. It moves me to pray for the "timekept City," to remember that even in a country that claims something like 40% of the world's freshwater, "[Y]ou neglect and belittle the desert./ The desert is not remote in southern tropics,/ The desert is not only around the corner,/ The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,/ The desert is in the heart of your brother." In a world like this, who could be bored?

(Poetry quoted from Eliot, Thomas Sterns, "Choruses from 'The Rock'" in The Complete Poems and Plays. [New York; Harcourt Brace, 1967] 96, 98)

Builders

As a seasoned pioneer missionary with twenty five years of church planting and upwards of fifteen thousand ministry miles under his belt, the apostle Paul unveils his crowning strategy for Spain in his letter to the Romans. As far as first century Roman Empire dwellers were concerned, Spain was the western “ends of the earth” (India to the east), and therefore the eschatological fulfillment of God’s pursuit of his glory (Is 66.19).

He writes: “I no longer have any room for work in these regions...I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you” (Rom 15.23-24).

There is an explicit and implicit charge in these matter-of-fact logistical plans for the first century Roman church and twenty-first century American church. Paul betrays a twofold stratus of commission calling. Explicitly, Paul highlights the calling of “foundation layers” such as himself - men and women commissioned to preach the gospel where it has yet to be heard.

This is Paul’s calling. And as a man duly called he expects “help,” propempo, the NT technical term for missionary support - funding, lodging, travel, regional coworkers, etc. Its Paul’s calling but the church’s task. Spain is Rome’s opportunity.

But there’s also an implicit charge. There is work to be done by “builders,” those Christians left behind. By this point, Paul has scarcely sprinkled the eastern Mediterranean world with a handful of fledgling house churches in major metropolises.

Take the church in Corinth for example. As far as we can tell several house churches of fifty plus believers constituted Paul’s plan for Greece. After that he felt claustrophobic in the region to know that one solitary city had that many Christians. There was no room for him to work.

The implicit charge is that members of these house churches build. They take Paul’s meager eighteen months of planting (Corinth) and begin to water. They organize themselves into a healthy church; care for their members; preach the Word, disciple, serve the Supper, guard the gospel; reach out to neighbors and coworkers with the good news; and begin thinking about multiplication in Greece.

This is the builder’s call, no less than the pioneer foundation layer. I suspect for all his gifts, Paul would have made a lousy builder. That’s probably why far from disparaging Christian builders in Rome, he greets them with reverent admiration in the following chapter.

When the Christianity in the Fridge Goes Bad

Finally, somebody wrote this article (interesting that it's in the Wall Street Journal).

I've seen this guy's book in the bookstore and wondered what it was all about. I'm relieved that it's not another book that we'll come to lament like those photos of ourselves in middle school wearing really baggy pants.

Summer Reading: The (Very) Short List

Well friends, it's probably more summer where you are than where I am, but nonetheless let's don the sunglasses, let our whitened thighs distract a few satellites, and grab some reading to occupy us for a short spell. Here's two articles I have enjoyed recently:

"The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong"(Harper's, Aug. 2005) - Many of you won't need much convincing of Bill McKibben's basic premise– that American Christianity is probably on the whole more American than it is Christian– but McKibben offers some valuable statistics and analysis. When he observes that "America is the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behaviour," he holds a frightening mirror up to us that we ignore to our peril. I don't agree with all of his assumptions (namely that the issue of the death penalty is clearly prohibited in scripture), but that our culture is composed of a kind of uncritical pseudo-Christianity that has managed, in spite of its best intentions, to live out an increasingly ironic faith will surely drive us to examine this dangerous dualism in our midst. Reading this alongside Bonhoeffer's Cost of Discipleship has been scaring the (I hope) hell out of me.

Whither Wheaton? The evangelical flagship college charts a new course. (SoMa Review, January 13, 2010)-

Second up is an article well worth archiving. Andrew Chignell's account of the Wheaton presidential search is proof that Wheaton College is often a microcosm of young Evangelicalism. I personally have very little interest in the presidential search, but the issues surrounding it are in many ways bigger than that school. At more than one point I felt like his comparisons between the Wheaton of last decade and the Wheaton of today would have sufficed for my own experience at a small Bible college. Something is changing in Evangelicalism, and Chignell offers important insight as to what the nature of that change might be.

Some thoughts against Carlos Whitaker (A Review of Up In the Air)

I recently sat down to watch a movie that I had been anticipating for some time, Up in the Air.
The movie, shot almost exclusively in hotels, airports and corporate offices is a tremendous effort to capture what defines a relationship. The movie is a parable on communication, relationships and humanity.

For those that haven't seen the film a brief synopsis.
Ryan Bingham, the film's protagonist, (George Clooney) travels over 300 days out the year to various offices as a contracted employment terminator. He fires people. While out on the road, he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga). Alex, like Ryan is out on the road, or up in the air, just as much, going from Herzt to Hilton to O'Hare and back again. The two strike a relationship that is matches their non-committed worlds. Then enters Natalie Keener, the over ambitious recent grad with a new plan to save the company a fortune by carrying out these firing through an internet video chat system.

The film gets interesting as we see these three characters in a dance of mistrust and misunderstandings. Natalie's new plan to fire people via iChat lacks the experience that veteran Ryan has. She shadows Ryan on these visits to ease the transition of face-to-face to online. Ultimately the switch fails. This lost in communication is highlighted by the fact that halfway through the film, Natalie is dumped by her fiance via text. Alex and Ryan's no trust relationship suddenly gets complicated and comes in nothing less than a crash landing...

This is a shotgun summary of the plot. What the film demonstrates is the irreducible complexity of human communication. I could have said human relationships, but the plot is more pointed than that. What is irreducibly complex about communication? Since, it seems to be increasing in every direction possible (social media, hot spots, 4G). This is the question that Up in the Air asks. Is all this technology really making things any easier? Is communication merely being able to transfer a verbal message? Video? Audio? All together? Up in the Air offers the proposal that there is no substitute for human interaction.

I want to now direct my argument against a practice that I fear is only going to increase. Doing ministry online. There are many examples of this, but one of the worst is Carlos Whitaker. I am almost tempted to refer to him by his Twitter account name LosWhit, since that it is all I really know. Whitaker is a self proclaimed "artist, pastor, thinker, experience architect, and Web 2.0 junkie". He has worked at some churches doing interesting things usually involving hyphenated titles with words like "creativity". If you go to his website, you will find he offers "coaching" services. This coaching consists of him following you on all and any social media sites and offering suggestions via a video chat conference an hour once month for $200 a month. (I'm not concerned about whether this is a fair rate.) I want to ask the same question as Up in the Air, is this really communication? Is this ministry? Is this the best medium for communicating?

There is more than I am aware of that gets lost in a mediated communication. McLuhan's basic thesis in The Medium is Massage is that the technological means that humans use to communicate alters, shapes, reduces, reforms that message.

LosWhit is an example of a dangerous trend. Paul did send letters to churches, but it was obvious that he valued being there in person over a letter. He even sent someone to deliver the letter. I don't think these are merely technological constraints. I think Paul knew the importance of a human being in the presence of another. When a Christian is before another, Christ himself is before that brother. What is lost in video chats and online sermons is the body of Christ. Unfortunately much of the ministry being done this way will remain up in the air.

Abusing Jesus' Divinity

Looking back at the concerns surrounding the person of Christ in the third and fourth centuries, one notices that the debates are oddly slanted in one direction. Most career heretics, such as Nestorius and Apollinaris seem to be fine with the divinity of Christ, but his full humanity was questionable. For some reason spirituality was tenable, but physicality put real a burr in their saddle. How could God– omnipotent, sovereign, and holy– mingle with the messy materiality of stuff?

I am of course, being very simplistic. It wasn't that they hated the idea of the Incarnation, but that the Incarnation is by definition a very hard thing to get one's second-order skull around. But there is still this curious trend. The divinity of Christ was taken for granted seemingly by the majority, orthodox and unorthodox alike, while His humanity was the main point of contention.

Zoom ahead to the enlightenment and one notices that the trend is reversed. Suddenly the humanity of Christ is found to be very palatable while His divinity is untenable. It became easier to conceive of Jesus as a good moral teacher than it was to believe he was God. Without going into the reasons for why Schleiermacher's offspring have such a problem with this, I will merely suggest that the locus of contemporary theology is centered on this problem, and perhaps increasingly in Evangelical circles.

How? Let's take ecology for example. The lack of Christology has been my only beef with Wendell Berry. Don't get me wrong, I love Berry and will recommend him and his organic tobacco til' the unclouded Tennessee sun goes down, but Christ is all but absent in his ecology. It is for this reason that, in spite of all of his wonderful insight that his view ultimately appears unrealistic and untenable (and his fiction a bit soapy). It can contrast a redeemed world with the fallen one, but it cannot tell us how to get from one to the other. It is in the bridge of Christ that the fallen and the redeemed are linked and the fallen is given any real hope. Douglas Moo, however, even in spite of the relatively small writing he has produced so far, finds the locus for ecology more or less in the Shema of love for God ad love for neighbor, both of which draw in a robust Christology and consequently a realistic means of caring for the earth.

Ecology is just one example, but I have begun to notice this in Feminist Theology as well and I am sure that it would be easy to find other examples. All of this goes to show that Karl Rahner was right when he said that most Christians today live as functional monotheists to whom the Trinity in all of its distinctive unity is of no consequence. So much is at stake when we neglect the daunting task of developing our theology within the framework of the persons of the Godhead, and since Christ is the most visible member, he is the easiest place to see this happen. It is imperative to insist on a robust Christology.

VanDrunen's Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms Part 1

David VanDrunen's newest book Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms looks to be an impressive read. His project is to take on a subject that has been recklessly bandied about all over obscure Reformed blogs and journal articles. This subject is the two social/theological doctrines of the two kingdoms and natural law. VanDrunen limits the scope of his study to the way these doctrines have been espoused historically rather than defending them from an exegetical or biblical theological starting point. Therefore, he examines the way the doctrines have been either embraced or rejected throughout Reformed ecclesiastical history. Who is Reformed will be decided strictly on confessional grounds (those who affirm the Heidelberg or Westminster confessions according to "something like their original meaning").

VanDrunen does an excellent job at giving clear definitions for the two terms he is going to trace out. The two kingdoms doctrine asserts that, "God rules all human institutions and activities, but rules them in two fundamentally different ways. According to this doctrine, God rules the church (the spiritual kingdom) as redeemer in Jesus Christ and rules the state and all other social institutions (the civil kingdom) as creator and sustainer, and thus these two kingdoms have significantly different ends, functions, and modes of operation" (1). VanDrunen is aware that this is commonly thought of as a distinctively Lutheran doctrine, and posits this as a good enough reason for his study. Right off the bat he shows the vast throng of pastors and scholars who deny the two kingdoms in their work. This is demonstrated in anyone who seeks to critique secular culture from a Christian standpoint. In this view, God is redeeming all things. The Christian then ought to be looking for ways to advance this redemption by seeking to "transform all activities and institutions in ways that reflect the kingom of God and its final destiny" (4). "All activities and institutions" is taken in the plainest sense with these folks, apparently including forming goat-breeding societies on a 'Reformed basis' and developing football programs in accordance with a 'Reformed world and life view' (4). The list of shout-outs received in the one kingdom camp ranges from Herman Dooyeweerd to Richard Hays (also included are the likes of Alisdair MacIntyre and John Milbank). It is this take on Reformed social life that VanDrunen wants to show as ahistorical.

The doctrine of natural law gets a little less attention at the outset, but again VanDrunen gives a clear definition. Natural law concerns, "knowledge of God's moral requirements obtained through nature" (15). Interestingly, VanDrunen claims that Abraham Kuyper was one who maintained the original focus on natural law, and was later misinterpreted by some of his followers. The primary culprit for the reworking of natural law is, of course, Karl Barth. Barth abandoned the doctrine of natural law and sought to develop a worldview based on a Christological redemption of all things. Though many in the later Reformed (neo-calvinist) camps had other theological disagreements with Barth, they followed him closely in his transformationalism. While natural law doesn't get singled out in this first chapter much it is clear that VanDrunen sees it as intertwined with the two kingdoms doctrine.

There isn't much to say by way of review thus far. VanDrunen is clearly going against the grain here, though. If he makes his case there are going to be a lot of drywallers, painters, playwrites, and the rest trying to find new motivation.