Captain Thin

Just in case you haven’t noticed all the attack ads, lawn signs, and the last two days of televised debates, we’re in the middle of a federal election in Canada. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was all a case of déjà vu. This is, after all, our fourth election in seven years. To many Canadians, it all seems like a bad dream: one that we’re apparently getting tired of. In the 2004 election, only 60.9% of eligible voters cast ballots. And while that number rose to 64.7% in 2006, the general tendency has been downward (2006 excepted, voter turnout has dropped every election since 1984). In 2008, voter turnout plummeted to 58.8% – the lowest turnout in a Canadian federal election ever. If the trend continues, even less Canadians will be bothering to vote this time around.

That growing political apathy has no doubt infected Christians as well. But unlike the populace at large, voting is less of a right for Christians than it is, properly understood, a God-given responsibility. You see, as Luther reminds us, every Christian is a citizen of two kingdoms: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. Both are ruled by God, but he exercises his authority over each realm in different ways. The first is the invisible, spiritual realm we inhabit as people redeemed by God. This is the realm of faith, which God governs directly. The second (or left-handed) kingdom is the visible world, in which God exercises his power through human agents. Here, in daily life, he rules through civil governments.

That’s the gist behind Paul’s words in the thirteenth chapter of Romans: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment… [The governing authority] is God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:1-2,4). All people in positions of authority are placed there by God; we are to obey them because God uses them to serve us in our earthly needs (even if they do not recognize that God is working through them).¹

Many Christians interpret the Scriptural account of our civic responsibility solely as an obligation to obey the law: to pay taxes and the like. At best, they may take time to pray for those “in high positions” (1 Tim 2:2). But if someone should suggest our responsibilities go further, that we are in fact to actively participate in the political process, that failure to do so is itself a sin – well, that’s just a step too far.

And yet, why should it be? Few of us seem to realize that democracy has startling implications for our interpretation of being “subject to the governing authorities.” You see, democracy comes from the Greek for “rule of the people.” And we – you and I – are “the people.” Therefore, we are among the rulers of this nation. And if it is God who appoints rulers in this world, then it stands to reason that God has appointed us to be rulers in Canada.

That position comes with responsibilities. As the Scriptures make clear, rulers are not appointed to serve their own ends; they are instead to be God’s instruments to work for the good of the nation. That means we must, as rulers appointed by God to serve the nation in which live, work diligently for the good of Canada.

Perhaps the most obvious way in which average Christians are called to exercise their authority is through the voting process. Through elections, we have the opportunity to help ensure the government will be “a servant for good” in our nation. Christians cannot therefore be apathetic about politics. They cannot simply ignore their responsibilities as co-rulers in Canada’s democratic system. We have been appointed by God to be citizens; failure to execute the duties that position entails is itself sin. If we do not vote, we become complicit in any evil perpetrated by our government, for we could have done something and yet did nothing. Nor can we vote hastily, without first examining all of the issues carefully and weighing the various parties’ platforms. We are to be wise rulers, lest we contribute to oppression and injustice by the thoughtless election of corrupt officials.

Of course, our position as “rulers” in Canada is limited. Elected representatives, premiers, the prime minister, the members of our justice system, and various others hold authority over us. But we have been given some small measure of authority in this nation: authority to vote, to make ourselves aware of the issues, and to hold our leaders to account. That’s the calling God places on each of us as “rulers” in a democratic system. May we constantly seek God’s help to exercise that authority as we ought.

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An eclectic collection of news and views from the past week on faith, language, and literature, as well as other topics of interest.

It looks like a new Narnia film is waiting in the wings. Walden Media president Micheal Flaherty says The Magician’s Nephew is the preferred choice for a fourth film in an interview with Christianity Today.

This one’s a little late, but the March edition of The Lutheran Witness contains an article on Natural Law from a Lutheran perspective. Our civil engagement, writes Korey D. Maas, must appeal to the law as written on the hearts of men rather than to the Scriptures per se. You can read it in “Natural Law, Lutheranism and the Public Good.”

BBC News Magazine reports on the latest additions to the Oxford English Dictionary include “LOL” and “OMG,” to the shock of language prescriptivists and general unsurprise of descriptivists everywhere. As OED editor Graeme Diamond explains, the purpose of the dictionary is to record words as they are used; not to prescribe which words should be used: “The word is common, widespread, and people understand it.” And so it makes it in.

Jessa Crispin has a thoughtful take on the glut of bad books published these days. A selection: “The difference is that now whatever you can scribble on paper or type on your computer, you might as well publish as a book. What was once fantasy — becoming a published writer — now can be reality. Sorta. You and your book have to face that din and most likely will get lost in it.” It’s all in an article entitled “A Sea of Words” over at The Smart Set.

Self-described churchgoing nonbeliever Martin Rees has won the Templeton prize. The million pound prize is awarded annually to an individual who, according to the official website, “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.” The Guardian has a good story on Reese’s award, with links to an interview and the text of his acceptance speech.

And finally in other news, it was revealed this past Wednesday that a 75 year-old Georgian woman disabled internet access to all of of Armenia back in March. But this isn’t a case of high-tech electronic terrorism. The elderly woman was simply scavenging for copper when she accidentally cut though a very important fiber optic cable. Read all about it at The Guardian.

I say the following at the risk of sounding offensive: Lutheran churches today are, generally speaking, terrible at encouraging Christians to live lives of faith. Utterly and incontrovertibly terrible. There’s no doubt about it in my mind. How else do we explain the baptisms in our churches which are not eventually followed by confirmations? For those who make it to confirmation, how we account for the subsequent and seemingly inevitable evaporation immediately following? How too do we justify the biblical illiteracy of so many of our members, and the lives they lead which seem visibly no different from those of the world around us? We have failed to do the things Christ has entrusted to his church: “to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” We may have baptized them; but we definitely have not taught them to observe all the commandments of Christ.

The Lutheran church has a great tradition in its focus on justification: how God has saved us from our sin, freely and through no virtue of our own; how He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die for us, to take our sin upon Himself and to bear the punishment we deserved; how His resurrection promises life and forgiveness to any who believe in Him; and how that faith itself comes as a a gift from God, not by works, so that none should boast. As Luther writes in The Heidelberg Disputation, “The cross alone is our theology.” This is the center, the very substance of what we believe, teach and confess.

But – and it is a tragedy that I should even have to say this – justification is not the only part of the Christian faith. It is the focal point, the thing that informs everything else, to be sure, but it is not the only thing. There is such a thing as sanctification – though, regrettably, too many Lutherans seem to have forgotten it. It has been quipped (by whom, I am unsure) that “if you have not been accused of antinomianism, you are not preaching the Gospel.” No doubt there is some truth to that: teaching justification by grace apart from works can offend those who want to make salvation into a work. But on the other hand, “Antinomian” is not a term a Lutheran minister should willingly embrace either. We would do well to remember it was Luther himself who first named the heresy and rightly condemned it. The Christian is truly freed from the “curse of the Law”, but not from the need to follow it. Indeed, because we have been justified, we earnestly desire to follow the Law – not out of compulsion or fear, but out of thanksgiving. Those who believe “should daily exercise themselves in the Law of the Lord,” our confessions write (SD 6:4). Learning to live according to God’s will is what sanctification is all about.

Now obviously the process of sanctification is itself a work of the Holy Spirit, not the result of human efforts or endeavors. We do not make ourselves holy; God makes us holy. But while a Christian’s growth is accomplished by God, that does not mean our actions are somehow inconsequential. We can resist the transforming work of the Holy Spirit; Paul knew that well when he spoke of the “wretched man” syndrome we all experience. But alternately, when we follow Paul’s advice – keeping our focus on Christ and his sacrifice rather than on our own sins and failures – when we, in effect, stop resisting, God does indeed change us. We begin to be transformed, broken out of the mold of this world, as we begin to understand and live out the good, acceptable, perfect work of God.

The ways in which we resist sanctification are many and varied, but they are hardly worth listing; we all know how we defy God and his transformative work in us. The more difficult question, I think, is this: what does it look like when we stop resisting? In other words, what does a Christian do to more fully allow the Spirit to reign in his or her life?

I can hear the protests already. After all, any Lutheran who suggests that there are specific disciplines Christians ought to undertake runs the risk of being labeled a pietist. “How dare you,” the cry rises up, “suggest that Christians accomplish their own sanctification? How dare you turn the grace of God into a work?” Clearly this is not what I mean. The work of sanctification is God’s. But what I am suggesting is that sanctification is a transitive verb – God sanctifies something. If God is truly at work in us, then the evidence of that work will be made manifest – as he gives us the ability and desire to “do God’s will from a free spirit” (SD 6:2). But we nevertheless remain sinful beings in this world so that we can also resist the Spirit’s work in us. So, from our limited human perspective, we face every moment as a choice: shall we do God’s will freely, or shall we resist?

If that strikes you as verging on works-righteousness, consider this: why do Christians attend worship? “Ah ha!” the critics exclaim gleefully, “He has condemned himself! We attend worship not so much to serve God but rather to to be served by Him – to receive grace from Him in word and sacrament.” Quite. So do I. But I must ask how these critics got to church. I strongly suspect that they enacted a number of choices before they received that grace in word and sacrament: they chose to set the alarm clock; they chose to actually get out of bed when the alarm rang; they chose to dress; to drive to church; to go up for communion; to lift the bread and wine to their lips. Someone who truly believed their own actions had no part in their spiritual growth would have just stayed at home; God could infuse holiness into him there just as well as He could at church.

Of course, the reason why Christians want to go hear the Word proclaimed and receive the Sacrament of the Altar is because God has first incited them to do His will. “They act not by coercion of the Law, but by the renewing of the Holy Spirit, voluntarily and spontaneously from their hearts” (SD 6:23).  Because they have been justified, the Spirit lives in them and gives them the desire to adopt those practices which will help them to grow spiritually. That’s why they go to church: God sends them.

But because “they still have a constant struggle against the Old Adam” (SD 6:23), these things forever appear as choices: shall I go to church or shall I sleep in? We must daily learn to willingly and cheerfully follow the Spirit’s leading. For as He leads us into all good things, he uses the good things themselves to further His work of sanctificationin us. The sanctification of God is both realized in human actions and developed through human actions. If we in the Lutheran church truly believed this, we would more vocally and more earnestly call upon our congregants to embrace spiritual disciplines. We would emphasize prayer and Scripture reading as essential to the Christian’s daily life, of attending bible studies and theological instruction regularly, of the importance of good works and personal evangelism, because through these things God works in us to accomplish our sanctification.

We ought to teach these things, but the decay in our church suggests we have not – namely, because we are afraid. When so many in the church have downplayed the role of sanctification in the believer’s life, anyone who reminds them of it lays himself open to the charge of pietism. And we fear that. Or rather, I hope our inaction has been because we are afraid of being labeled pietists. The other alternative is far too dreadful: that we simply do not care about the day-to-day spiritual growth of our congregants, so long as our Sunday morning services continue to run smoothly. And if that is the case, we have even bigger problems to worry about.

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Image: africa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image: graur razvan /FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a post last year, I noted that the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod was putting on a contemporary music songwriters conference. Frequenters of this site know that I occasionally bemoan the shallowness of much of contemporary worship music, but that I do so with a caveat: I don’t think that the style of music is in itself necessarily bad; but I do think that the lyrics too often reveal a minimal (and, in some cases, downright errant) understand of theology. What’s wrong isn’t musical style, it’s the lack of theological rigor.

That’s part of the reason why I was so eager to see the results of the LCMS Songwriters Initiative. I wanted to see contemporary music paired with strong confessional theology. I wanted to see what this genre in Lutheran hands could do.

It looks like I’ll have a chance to see just that. I’m glad to say that Concordia Publishing House has posted the songs from the Songwriters Initiative on their website. There you can download both audio files and lead sheets. Best of all, LCMS churches can use the songs for free in their congregations. (No word on whether Lutheran Church-Canada churches are given similar permission).

I haven’t had a chance to do an in-depth review of the songs myself yet, but I will say, based on a first listen, that it’s wonderful to hear such a focus on the Sacrament of the Altar in this music. Concordia Publishing House notes that all the songs on the site have been “thoroughly considered for their doctrinal content and have been approved through the LCMS doctrinal review process.” Theological rigor? Check. Contemporary music? Check. Here’s hoping this is only the first step of many towards finding a peaceful solution (without compromising confessional integrity) to the Worship Wars.

An eclectic collection of news and views from the past week on faith, language, and literature, as well as other topics of interest.

A recent study has predicted that the extinction of religion in Canada is drawing near. Canadian scholar Reginald W. Bibby has an excellent response in the Holy Post, calling the study’s conclusions “way off the mark.”

It’s April, and that of course means it’s National Poetry Month for book Canada and the United States. This one is more of a public service announcement than a link to an interesting article per se. If you’re in Saskatchewan, you might want to consider attending this event with readings by our newest poet laureate Don Kerr.  If you’re elsewhere in Canada and looking for a way to celebrate, you can check out The League of Canadian Poets’ reading calendar (it’s by no means comprehensive, but you might find a worthwhile event to attend).

Josh Cacopardo has an entertaining take on the benefits of e-readers (which include, he assures us, the ability to trick children into reading books: “Kids – let’s be honest – are not very smart,” he writes. “How hard can it be to trick them into reading a book just because it’s on a battery-operated screen?”). The article appears at The Curator and is entitled “The Willful Death of a Luddite”.

In honour of the 400th anniversary of its publication, The Globe Theatre in London has announced it will be reciting the King James Version of the bible in its entirety from Palm Sunday through Easter Monday. It’d be an excellent opportunity to experience the Scripture as most people originally experienced it: by hearing it read aloud.

BBC News reports the alleged discovery of what might be the oldest Christian texts in the world – possibly dating within decades of Christ himself. Whether the find turns out to be authentic – and whether the lead-plate books actually turn out to be Christian in origin – remains to be seen, as the texts, while Hebrew, are apparently written primarily in code.

Finally, the Associated Baptist Press reports that Westboro Baptist’s infamous “God hates fags” signs are actually the result of typographical errors; that they were instead intended to read “God hates flags” as a criticism of overseas sweatshops where many flags are made. “Phelps said protestors didn’t notice the error,” the article explains, “because they only see the back of the signs while they are holding them.” I’ll admit this one threw me for a loop (halfway through reading it I had to double-check that I was really on the Associated Baptist Press’ website and not a fake-news site), but then I got to the end which read: “Happy April Fools’ Day from your friends at Associated Baptist Press.” Ah, if only it were all true…

Much of my previous literary theory discussion has operated in the realm of the ideal. For example, my discussions of the Experience (judging the “message(s)” or Logos of a literary work) have assumed two things: first, that authors are capable of encoding the (unconscious or intended) message; and second, that readers are capable of decoding it. Likewise, my post on Beauty implies that authors are able, in essence, to first, encapsulate in text the (unconscious or intended) encounter of the mysterious; and second, that the reader is equally capable of entering into that same encounter, feeling the same awe, or pleasure, or disgust that went into its construction. Both of these assertions have one fundamental underlying assumption: namely, that language is capable of accurately transmitting information between speaker and hearer without any loss of that information.

Having taken degrees in both English and Linguistics, I have been exposed to rather contrary views of the nature of language. As a linguist, I want to say that language functions as a science: it follows very specific (if unconscious) rules. From the most basic levels (eg, phonetics and phonemics) to the more complex (eg, morphology and syntax) to the most complex (eg, semantics, pragmatics and speech acts), language can be broken down into its constituent parts; it can be analysed, and the laws governing its construction can be identified. And these laws help us to explain how utterances carry meaning.

But on the other hand, I also hold a degree in English. In that capacity, I saw (and, indeed, contributed to ) the broader activity of interpretation – of drawing meaning from a text, often arguing that the meaning you are identifying has gone unobserved by prior readers. And as any student of literature (or Scripture for that matter) knows, different people often come to different interpretations of the same text. The question one must ask is obvious: if language operates on a system of basic laws (as linguists assert), why do such differences in interpretation occur?

Much of late twentieth century critical theory capitalized on this seeming inability to arrive at definitive interpretations. Indeed, Derrida argued that language is always self-deconstructing; one cannot say anything without using words which simultaneously say the opposite of what one means. In purely biblical terms, one might summarize Derrida by quoting Ecclesiastes 6:11: “The more words, the less the meaning.” For Derrida, the issue of language is a simple dichotomy: either language can convey meaning or it cannot. And if it can be shown to fail in one instance, despite the intention of the author, than the entire structure collapses; we can never again trust with any certainty that our language will accurately convey the meaning we intend. It’s Babel all over again.

David Lyle Jeffrey does a good job of breaking down this dichotomy in his 1996 work People of the Book: Christian Identify and Literary Culture.¹ Jeffrey asserts that Christians need not make a choice between the two poles; sometimes language carries meaning effectively and sometimes it does not. “Christian literary theories are generally affirmative of an ultimate Truth or Logos,” he writes, “but also firm in their insistence on the limitations of human language more than dimly to refract that Logos.” In other words, language is related to meaning but it seldom has a one-to-one correlation. Because language is imperfect, it often fails to convey intended meaning in its totality. As such, Jeffrey says, it leads sometimes to “endless frustration” and sometimes to “momentary joy.”

It is this simultaneously-good-and-bad nature of language Christians ought to recall when they approach literature. Like all of creation, human language was “subjected to frustration” in the Fall. But it was originally created good. And just as humanity retains some semblance of “the image of God” after the fall, so too human language retains some of its original goodness. We may find that the meaning in literature is often obscured, but there is still some meaning to be found. It’s beauty may be marred, but there is still fragments of beauty. And this is all, as I reflected in my first post on Christianity and literature, because God is still at work in creation – the hidden God working through the vocations of man for the good of the world. When the meaning of a story is successfully experienced via language, it is because God is good. When beauty is successfully crafted by an author and appreciated by the reader, it is because God is good. In the end, that is the most important argument why Christians ought to read literary works: because God is amazingly and undeservedly good. Despite the brokenness of language and literature, he works though them to reveal beauty and truth and goodness. It’s the promise of Pentecost. In good literature, we are the recipients of God’s grace. And so we read, trusting that the “Giver of all good things” will, indeed, give us something good.

[This is the fifth and final article in a series exploring why and how Christians ought to engage in literary studies. You can see all the essays in the series here.]

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1I will say, however, that his tendency to prolixity in the text manifests, if unintentionally so, an occasional impenetrability which has the effect of obfuscating his general purposes. In other words, he uses too many big words. I’m not against flexing your lexical abilities in general, but his sentences are often far heavier than they need to be – perhaps reflecting, in some small way, the very limitations of language he is discussing.

Image credits: (1) Open book image: vichie81 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net. (2) Tower of Babel illustration from Gustave Doré.