Captain Thin

As a Christian linguist*, one of the things that particularly irks me is the failure of the Church (myself included) to be vigilant in ensuring that our witness to the world is an intelligible one. In our desire to preach the Gospel, we’re not always careful to make sure the language we’re speaking is a language our non-Christian neighbours can understand. In other words, sometimes we need to use “other words”.

That concern lies behind my latest article for The Canadian Lutheran.  In addressing the problem, I explore the story of Pentecost, Luther’s theology of translation, and the historical move from German to English in North American Lutheran churches.  At the same time, I can only hope that my exploration of the subject speaks to readers where they are – that it speaks their language, as it were. (I’m sure someone in my congregation will be sure to let me know if I’ve failed on this point).

To read the article, visit The Canadian Lutheran website and select the article entitled “Can you hear me now?: Evangelism for the 21st century.” While you’re at it, check out the rest of the July-August issue. In addition to my article, there’s some insightful thoughts on engaging youth in the life of the Church now (as opposed to at some ill-defined point in the future), a story on the 2010 LCC National Youth Gathering, a discussion of C.F.W. Walther’s take on the Confessions, and other news and views of interest.

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* I use the term somewhat loosely. While I’m not employed as a linguist, I do have a linguistics degree.

In the days leading up to the birth of the North American Lutheran Church, Lutheran CORE sponsored a theological conference entitled “Seeking New Directions for Lutheranism.” To that end, a number of high-profile Lutheran scholars (Robert Benne, Robert Jenson, etc.)  were on hand to present papers on a number of subjects including the authority of Scripture, the name of God, and missions.

David Neff has an excellent synopsis of the papers in an article with Christianity Today entitled “Facing Lutheranism’s Crisis of Authority”. You can also listen to the presentations in mp3 format at Lutheran CORE’s website here. The American Lutheran Publicity Bureau will shortly be publishing a book containing an extended version of each of the papers (the presentations at the theological conference were condensed versions of longer papers).

A friend of mine linked this on Facebook earlier today. Basically, it’s one man’s rant about worship music. Among the things he criticizes are simplistic, repetitive, I-focused lyrics. But visit the site. The songs he’s “criticizing” might not be what you’d expect.

Link:  “Rant about Worship Songs”

CNN has a good article on Kenda Creasy Dean’s new book Almost Christian where she argues that many religious teens are Christian in name only.  “Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Translation: It’s a watered-down faith that portrays God as a “divine therapist” whose chief goal is to boost people’s self-esteem.”

Once again, however, we read that the Christians doing the best job of passing on real faith are evangelicals (Lutherans are generally considered members of “mainline denominations” rather than evangelical). There’s a lot of talk out there among Lutherans about how shallow a lot of evangelical youth ministry is (see, for example, Gene Veith’s blog post “Youth group madness” from a couple of days ago). To some extent, some of that talk is justified. But when it comes down to brass tacks, evangelicals are succeeding in passing on the faith where the vast majority of Lutherans are not. They’re doing something right, and it’s clearly a something that most Lutherans just don’t seem to get.

We discussed elements of this topic on my site back in 2009 in an entry entitled “Stemming the Tide of Church Youth Dropouts”. I’m curious to hear what new ideas people have on what we Lutherans can do to more seriously engage young people in their faith. Brainstorm people.

There’s a perception still common in Western Society that Christianity is a “white religion.” It’s old. It’s patriarchal. And it’s imperialistic. Case settled, right? Well, it might be except for the awkward fact that the the average Christian these days is unlikely to be any of those things. North American and European Christians today account for only 38% of the global population of Christians. As noted in Philip Jenkins’ 2002 (revised 2007) book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, the “average Christian” is a citizen of the Global South – Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Christianity is not only alive and well in these areas; it’s growing at a phenomenal rate.

Images from The Thinking Christian, based on Jenkins’ numbers.

I was reminded of this fact while listening to a White Horse Inn podcast of the recent “Conversation on Global Evangelism” held at Saddleback Church (sponsored by the Lausanne Movement for World Evangelism, and featuring such thinkers as Skye Jethani, Michael Horton, Jim Belcher, Kay Warren, Jena Lee Nardella, Miles McPherson and Soong Chan Rah). One of the thing these western theological leaders comment at length on is just that – the disproportionate number of western theological leaders in the world.

As time goes on, the centre of Christian thought will eventually shift to reflect the new reality. And personally, I think that’s just fine. Christians in the Global South, living as they do with affliction in the forms of poverty, AIDS, famine, civil unrest, religious persecution, and so much more, have a vibrancy in their faith lacking in much of the West. In the midst of actual suffering, these Christians’ adherence to Scripture is something we in the West must admire.

Already we’re seeing elements of the leadership-shift as African bishops in Anglicanism and Lutheranism call on increasingly liberal counterparts in North America and Europe to return to historical orthodoxy. Think back to GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference) held in Jerusalem 2008. Anglican leaders, primarily from the Global South but also including conservative leaders from the West, gathered to chart an orthodox course for world Anglicanism in opposition to the liberal agenda of the North American and European churches. Many of the same bishops in attendance would refuse to attend the Lambeth Conference (the traditional world conference of the Anglican Communion) a month later – a visible sign of the theological tensions between West and the Rest.

Likewise, leading up to the Lutheran World Federation Assembly in Stuttgart this year, African leaders representing 18.5 million Lutherans displayed their anger over the West’s recent moves to affirm alternate sexualities in a tersely worded statement. “The majority of African member churches say ‘NO’ to homosexual acts and regard it to be sinful.” The message was clear: Western churches were not going to be allowed to hijack the Assembly’s agenda to push ideas which the African church had already determined were unbiblical.

Christians in the Global South are beginning to make their voices heard. Let us pray that the West will sit up and listen.

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If you’d like to read a bit more about the shift underway in World Christianity, check out Philip Jenkins’ article “Liberating Word: The Power of the Bible in the Global South”.

I’m just filling out my registration information for the University of Regina’s Literary Eclectic conference in September (a task delayed a bit by my not having a very new word processor on my desktop computer. Curse you, .docx files!). I’m presenting a paper entitled “Despair in The Pilgrim’s Progress: Universal Allegory Founded on Individual Experience” which – as might be obvious, considering it’s on John Bunyan – marries my twin passions for theology and literature. Put very basically, I’m exploring the relationship between the popular theology of despair (see my 2009 post “On Despair”) which was sweeping across England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Bunyan’s own personal bout of despair as recorded in his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. [In layman's terms, "despair" is the condition of those who desire earnestly to be saved by God but believe themselves already condemned or otherwise unforgivable.] In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan depicts what he believes to be the universal Christian’s experience of despair (in the characters of the Man of Despair and Giant Despair); but this universal depiction’s account of the nature, causes, and cure for despair are fundamentally drawn from Bunyan’s own struggle with despair. While I’m not arguing that the account in Pilgrim’s Progress is therefore autobiographical, I am highlighting how Bunyan’s theology on the subject is drawn from conclusions he made while a sufferer of the condition. In other words, it’s not mere academic theology for Bunyan; it’s theology learned painfully through real-life experience.

Incidentally, the slate I’m on includes presentations on Milton’s Comus and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It promises to be an entertaining (and enlightening) conference.

Yesterday CTV News reported the somewhat sensational headline “NASA discovers hundreds of new Earth-like planets”. Reading through the article (and similar ones from other news sites), the intensity of the claim is somewhat diminished. These new planets (if they are planets – apparently the scientists aren’t sure about all of them) appear as if they might be of similar size and composition as Earth. But the announcement of the discovery of “Earth-like planets” comes with a caveat; in the words of Dr. Paul Delaney, professor of Astronomy at York University, “It doesn’t mean that there’s life on them, it doesn’t mean that there’s atmosphere and water.” Moreover, we’re not nearly close enough to actually visit them in our search for extraterrestrial life. “You can’t get to these objects with spacecrafts,” Delaney says. “The closest ones are tens of light-years away and some are literally a few thousands light-years away. They are well and truly beyond our technological capability to visit personally.”

Still, the topic is an interesting one, and one that Christians shouldn’t avoid talking about. Should we stand on the assumption that God hasn’t created life on other planets? And if he has, what theological implications would that hold for us? When “creation was subjected to frustration” because of the Fall, did mankind drag down non-sentient life in other parts of the galaxy? Of deeper import, I think, would be the discovery of other sentient life in the universe. Did death enter their worlds because of sin in ours?

I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. In that series, Lewis imagines a universe where life exists on other planets (including the planets in our solar system), but suggests they have not been affected by the sin committed on Earth; God had sealed it off from the rest of the system. This isolation of our planet leads the inhabitants of Mars to refer to Earth as “the Silent Planet.”

Today we know that the worlds outside our world are filled with what we might call “natural evil”. Stars die out, asteroids crash into planets, and so on and so forth. It would be difficult to believe in Lewis’ “Silent Planet” in any literal sense of the expression (though perhaps we could imagine L’Engle’s spreading “darkness”). But the question really becomes whether evil (natural or otherwise) in the universe can be blamed solely on humanity; it would certainly seem unfair if other sentient, sinless beings were made to suffer for mankind’s sin.

In any event, I’d love to hear some Protestant/Evangelical takes on whether other life might exist, and what implications that would hold for Christianity. I just hope the theology involved might be a little more fully developed than in Larry Norman’s song “U.F.O.” with its final verse: “And if there’s life on other planets / Then I’m sure that He must know / And He’s been there once already / And has died to save their souls.” [For an interesting Catholic response to the question, check out Director of the Vatican Observatory Fr. Jose Funes' take on the subject. The full interview is here in Italian. If, as with me, Italian is not your strongest language, you can check out two English articles on the interview here and here.]