Status Symbol Land

FEAR—especially the fear of losing control—serves as the impetus for an awful lot of art. It also, of course, serves as the catalyst for an unhealthy dose of insomnia, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and death (either of the silent or walking variety).

Motivated by Alan Noble's "Why Christians Should Read Disturbing, Dark, and Secular Fiction," I thought that since I have read and am now again reading a good bit of it that I'd do well to put some thoughts down on a piece that I've read recently. (This is a bit like pulling the winner out of a hat; I'm working through an anthology of American short stories and there are too many from which to choose. I decided against O'Connor's terrifyingly bizarre "Good Country People" because (1) she's not exactly "secular"; and (2) apparently she's now a Christian-hipster favorite, and I'm like light years ahead of those people.)

So, John Cheever's "The Swimmer" it is (originally published in The New Yorker on 18 July 1964). Summary of the plot:

“The Swimmer” begins with suburbanites gathered around a backyard pool, nursing their respective hangovers from the previous night's cocktail party. The hero of the tale is a youthfully middle-aged, athletic, and affluent denizen of suburbia. His desire to rise above complacently takes the form of an odd, comical quest: He decides to swim home, fifteen pools to the south. The narrative follows his journey from pool to pool, from his initial exhilaration to subsequent exhaustion, from bright and sunny to darker and colder, to unprepared and exposed. After crossing a highway, he descends into a public pool—hell to his social class. But even here he is excluded after failing to provide the proper identification. The journey is further corrupted when he finds his mistress has replaced him with a new lover, and a couple he has previously dismissed socially denies him. Finally, when he is alienated from what he knows to be true, and dispossessed of his comfortable reality, he arrives home to a dark, empty, and locked house.

Truly, I envied the swimmer Neddy Merrill's excursion. It sounded fun. Even in the rain. The absurdity part of it only becomes apparent during the last few dips, and especially when he arrives "home." The fun of swimming across several pools in a couple of neighborhoods looks pathetic indeed when Neddy reaches his now foreclosed destination. And the enthusiasm with which Neddy is greeted at first is subverted by the tale's end: all those drinks and smiles look more like pity than friendship. Status symbols are, we must admit, everything to this crowd (our collective crowd in these United States), and Neddy's loss of them feeds a fear that grips him to the point of extreme denial, acting out the absurd.

How poignant is the climax of the story today? Neddy swims "home" to an abandoned and decrepit structure. How many of those have we seen walking the neighborhood these past few years? Ah, home ownership, a grand American institution. It looks to be only a vestige of its former glory.

Speaking of American social institutions, what about the extramarital affair? Neddy’s inability to cope with his situation caused him to shut down and retreat from reality, ultimately hurting all the people in his life that he ever cared about. The same could be said about any one of the other poor choices he has apparently made (in response to a financial misfortune).

Neddy’s swimming pool journey effectively parallels our false lives, our swimming through life with eyes half closed, choosing not to acknowledge behaviors that are significant and detrimental to those we love the most. Extramarital affairs, alcoholism, gambling, and debt—all these activities gradually eat away at relationships every day. Of course, these are all symptoms of a much deeper problem: "Who can understand the human heart? There is nothing else so deceitful."

The mix of realism and surrealism, concrete rootedness and absurdity, the lack of a single vision holding reality together, the rusty linings of every cloud, are a few of the reasons I so enjoy this era of literature (roughly described as "postwar"). Yet in spite of all the aforementioned disturbing darkness, we still pine after love and understanding, and thus we must face the vertigo of absurdity with practical action—like Candide tending his garden forevermore.

So, then, "have reverence for God, and obey his commands, because this is all that we were created for." Or, put somewhat differently, love thy neighbor as thyself.


Listen to Cheever read "The Swimmer" here.

Read more »

Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

It’s easy to miss the fact that Isaac strove with God for twenty years over his wife’s infertility before seeing a positive answer. His son, Jacob, showed similar persistence when he wrestled with the angel at Peniel. This is not to be confused with stubbornness; rather, Jacob's striving is synonymous with brokenness. His long night of wrestling is described by the prophet Hosea as follows: “He strove with the angel and prevailed; he wept and sought his favor” (12:4). In other words, he threw himself upon the mercy and grace of the one, true God upon whom the blessing to Abraham rested in its entirety. It would have been the same for Isaac, which leads us to see his twenty-year prayer as an extraordinary act of faith during a time that is one of the most difficult trials a married couple will ever face. They had known the promise of God, and they, like Abraham and Sarah, were brushing up against old age without that promise fulfilled. So their challenge wasn’t solely infertility; it was: Will God be true to his word? Has it failed?

We know he was, and we know his word didn’t fail. But during those twenty years, their distress must have been great. No doctors, no advanced medicine, no other alternatives—only waiting. Yet just because there are so many more medical options today with respect to infertility doesn’t make facing infertility any easier for us. It may in fact make it harder, since the first assumption we moderns make is that we can fix any situation—given the proper treatment. But God’s arm is no more twisted now than it was back then. Isaac and Rebekah’s challenge was great, and their story, especially that of Isaac’s twenty-year prayer, serves to instruct us (see 1 Cor. 10:11). In what way? In faithfulness, particularly in prayer.

Not a few Christian couples, potentially great parents, ever experience the blessing of children. It is a sad reality in this fallen world. Faced with what feels like the inexplicable judgment of God, the infertile couple might move from anger to depression to practical atheism—just giving up, as if God won’t hear the plea because he doesn’t care; or worse, that he can’t, because he doesn’t seem to exist. What if Isaac had played the atheist during this trial? It is safe to assume that God’s plan would not be thwarted, but it is also safe to assume that Isaac would have grieved and displeased his covenant Lord. Some folks shy away from such talk, that one of God’s people might displease him. But Jude warns us clearly: “Keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life” (v. 21). Hard times are no excuse to play the atheist or to grumble against the living God.

Those who argue that God doesn’t get angry at his children might treat such portions of Scripture as purely hypothetical: “Keep yourselves in the love of God (you can’t help but do otherwise) . . . .” But this won’t do, for it not only ignores the plain sense of the many texts on this subject, it cheapens the grace of God to the point of making him unable to sanctify or chasten his people (Rom. 8:18–25; James 1:2–3; 1 Peter 4:12–13). It also may lead to a church’s exalting preference and lawlessness under the guise of “freedom in Christ.”

But that freedom has obligations. Consider: “Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love . . .” (John 15:9b–10a). Even the ancients were not unfamiliar with such conditions: “I the LORD your God am a jealous God . . . showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Ex. 20:5–6).The psalmist agrees: “But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments” (103:17–18). While we may understand the motivation behind easing these demands—eschewing anything that smacks of legalism—we ignore these Scriptures at our peril. Yet they can also be misused, and indeed they are.

If the love of God is tied entirely to our obedience, or to our faithfulness to the covenant, we will find ourselves in an anxious tailspin. It’s one thing to combat lawless “freedom” with these injunctions, it’s quite another to make God’s covenant love conditioned solely upon them. Such notions would drive us away from the gospel and back to the vicious angst that characterized us before the Spirit’s gracious call and the freeing forgiveness of the cross of Christ.

The answer to this is: the “love” that Jude wrote about, for example, is different from the efficacious, electing love of God; it is the love that distinguishes our every-day relationship with him. This we can mess up. Badly. But in no way can we remove ourselves from God’s foreordaining love.

In John 6:37–40 we see that if Jesus were to lose one whom the Father has given him, then he would either be deliberately disobeying his Father’s will or finding himself unable to enact it. Denying this, then, does real violence to the doctrine of God and the Trinity. In short, God’s electing love is unconditional, steadfast, and gripping.

Yet we may still find ourselves under the displeasure of God insofar as disobedience defines our faithfulness, much like my dog, which has a propensity to run from my side in fits of frenetic activity, receives the pinch collar. I love the thing, and don’t want it to get hit by a car. And I assure you, that pinch collar feels like anything but love.


{This originally appeared in Tabletalk 12.2 (Feb. 2007): 22–23}

Read more »

The Sordid Boon, part 3

** This is the final post of a three-part review of Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist.

In the second part of this review, I outlined Gay's approach to four American institutions that have been given a platform in the church. Many Christians, Gay argues, take these institutions for granted everyday; as such, they've been allowed the luxury of moving freely within the community of Christ (much to the detriment of the body).

I've also mentioned that this isn't a book of prescriptions; some readers might not like that—pointing out several problems without offering several solutions. But to do so would be improper anyway, for his project itself would potentially fall into the same trap he derides throughout—programmatic applications, which stifle creative responses to the various challenges we face by offering too many abstract prescriptions and, potentiallly, subsequent proscriptions (i.e., not thinking "outside the box"). He can (and does), however, provide tools with which we, the church, ought to use to combat the practical atheism among us. I alluded to one tool particularly in the first part of the review, namely, a theology of personhood. That is, to approach all of our relationships (with the world, people, and most importantly, God) in terms of “I–Thou” (as opposed to “I–it”). And, again, the only way there (Gay argues), is through the recapturing and reapplying of historic Trinitarian orthodoxy (see pp. 284–296).

So, what follows is an attempt to apply this theology of personhood, just for fun. I reiterate, this is my attempt. Disagree at your leisure.

If there is one thing that lends itself to promoting practical, or “functional,” atheism in our churches today, it is running a church like a business—with its (the administration’s) maintaining control the ultimate objective. This fails to treat people as real individuals, instead of members whose everyday needs are secondary to the status quo of the organization. This has the unintended consequence of relegating the living God to an afterthought, thus breeding a dead faith that shares no identity, no union with the person of Christ, and no reliance upon the empowering, and sometimes spontaneous, work of the Holy Spirit. Maybe this happens among classical Protestants because we have warped the doctrine of common grace so much so that it has become disassociated from the active, loving hand of God, and turned it into a wholly transcendent winding of the clock. When a church assumes control of its mission, and attempts to define itself in worldly terms (to get the ‘seekers’ there or whatever), it effectively eradicates the radical immanence of the Creator’s touch.

How can a church reverse or resist this plague? Churches need to revitalize the parish mentality, and that has ramifications as to how large it can become. If a good number of parishioners travel from the same area to a church many miles away, why not plant a fledgling congregation in their own neighborhood? Churches must recapture their confessions. It allows them to play within the grand playground of Christian orthodoxy, and confess as the bride of Christ that he is her head and that she serves him first in all things—and that means (among other things) loving neighbors unconditionally and actively outside of our cultic gatherings. Churches need to boldly proclaim the exclusivity of the gospel. Today, the self is worshiped coram Deo. But there is no other god before the Almighty. A much-needed re-assessment of natural human capabilities escapes the pulpit. Far too much trust is placed in our own work week after week in self-centered sermons. 

Toward the end of the book Gay provides four suggestions that provide a good starting point in resisting worldliness within the community (pp. 260ff): First, when the gospel falls on deaf ears, do not presumptuously think that the method of delivery should change. Rather, expect the challenge, since the modern world has become inoculated by the immanentization of Christian truth. Gay makes the important point that today does not parallel classical antiquity, and so we should not expect (or necessarily want!) to re-duplicate the church’s transformation of that particular culture (i.e., the holy Roman Empire). Second, we cannot and should not expect to resist the inherent atheism of modernity and culture through mere withdrawal. Third, our protests against modernity should be leveled against therapeutic sensibilities and the modern will-to-self definition (i.e., understood as Nietzsche's "will-to-power" in the worst sense). Fourth, our criticism and resistance to (post)modernity must be genuinely theological, quite possibly by returning again, as in those times throughout history when certain churchmen and women were set on reforming, to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical (Patristic) Christian exegesis. That is, we must make use of explicit Trinitarian theology.

For example, as I wrote in the comments section of the previous post, as Christians, we contemplate the biblical theology—not philosophy—of the Trinity and how the Three interact socially as the One and are informed, nay, enjoined to live a certain way on this earth—no matter what the personal cost. This reconciliatory way of life is itself a direct outflow of the reconciliation that God in Christ through his Spirit has affected for the entire cosmos—and we sinners who confess Jesus as the resurrected Lord along with it.

At the root of these suggestions comes a remedy that only arrives by the grace of God, the ultimate resistance fighter against functional atheism. In Gay’s own words, we “need a fundamentally new disposition of heart, a disposition able to direct our otherwise ‘natural’ abilities toward the works of love and holiness” (p. 270). But we cannot manage this renewal all by ourselves. “We must begin by confessing that we [are called] into a personal relation with each other and with God by God himself, and that our response to this call—which is itself a gift of grace—must be to surrender ourselves to God and to our neighbor in love” (p. 303). We further need to constantly remind ourselves that we need not look for more effective techniques, better education (though in some circles this might be an improvement), more information, or better theoretical constructions (p. 269). And finally, we must admit “that we are simply not able to work this change within our own hearts. …For our cultural prognosis to be truly Christian, then, top priority must always be given to the conversion of souls. There is simply no other way of overcoming our natural inabilities and of arriving at a true assessment of our situation before God” (p. 270). We have lost heart, no longer really believing that “God is willing, and perhaps even that he is able, to deliver us” (p. 313). Until we get our hearts back after thoughtlessly giving them away to the world, Christian hope is but an empty aspiration leaning on a lifeless arm.

Read more »

The Sordid Boon, part 2

** This is part two of three-part review of Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live as if God Doesn't Exist.

In the first four chapters, Gay outlines and analyzes a few modern American institutions that are, in the worst sense, worldly (i.e., that push us toward a practical atheism), and offers glimpses of a “theology of personhood” (mentioned in the first part of this review) at the end of each section before focusing on it directly in the last chapter of the book (he considers this theology, based as it is on social trinitarianism, to be a major antidote to the ills he describes throughout the book). Regarding these four American institutions, we must:

• place human aspirations (protecting and preserving lives) over and against those of immanent political-social change. Over the course of the last one hundred years, countless human lives have been sacrificed on the alter of abstract ideals (like “progress,” “social justice,” and “freedom”). In light of this, Christian hope ought to be a political virtue (pp. 73ff). Why? Such hope gives us a healthy skepticism toward an earthly kingdom when it grasps at lordship; it relativizes large-scale political-social aspirations and exposes their hollowness and precariousness. Christian hope frees Christians up to act hopefully in the world. “It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us” Gay writes, “without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether” (p. 77).

• with respect to technology and science, “give an account of nature that does not deny the validity of scientific inquiry, and yet does not so stress the autonomy of the created order that it tempts us to believe that science can reveal the meaning of nature and of our own lives” (p. 126). We Christians must neither wholly disdain rational and empirical inquiry, nor must we assume that science can be used in an unbiased way. The paradox of “contingency” must be affirmed and proudly maintained in the face of rational-technical determinism. Creation is both independent of (contra pantheism) and utterly dependent on God (pp. 124–129; see also pp. 272–281). God is sure; all else is subject to change.

• reject the logic of the modern economy, which reduces all things to objects of monetary value, and rediscover the Protestant work ethic of vocation as “calling.” That is, whatsoever we do, do heartily, as to the Lord and not to man (Col. 3:23). It means acting “ethically and substantively within the system no matter how impractical we may occasionally appear in doing so” (p. 175). This is, in a sense, an invitation to take seriously the vocation to suffer—theologia crucis in action.

• in combating narcissism, or the “worldly self” (p. 181), leave-off the notion of ever being fully satisfied with both consumption and therapy (or any earthly kingdom/institution for that matter), and be filled with a Christian self-consciousness in which “love for God and neighbor is progressively realized and deepened” (p. 232). The need to rediscover the self before God (coram Deo) as opposed to the self simply submerged in mass society and culture has never been greater. Therapeutic consumption, like any other drug, requires more of us every time we use it, until our ravenous gluttony results in self-satisfaction at any cost. Instead of finding our identity in the glory of the lordship of Christ (ironically, through the shame of the cross), we settle for defining the self in terms of individual rights and needs.
  

The hope in summarizing Gay’s book up to this point has been to help inform us where practical atheism threatens the church and what must be done to resist it. This is not a book of prescriptive solutions; it is a book that provides (I believe) explicitly Christian tools with which we can resist the inherent atheism of (post)modernity. In the next and final part of this review, I'll briefly attempt to apply these tools.

Read more »

The Sordid Boon

Today begins a three-part review on Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live as if God Doesn't Exist. I first read this book about eight years ago.

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.⎯Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

⎯William Wordsworth, 

The world is too much with us, ll. 4, 8–12.

Every four years, the American nation turns its deficient attention to presidential politics. The major news outlets, those purveyors of bite-sized and largely irrelevant bits of information, do of course turn their attention to such things at least one year earlier, while many, if not most, do everything possible to ignore it. Eventually, notice is taken sometime around the summer before election day, with hopes of getting it over quickly (we might as well sing along with Simon and Garfunkel, “Laugh about it; shout about it; when you’ve got to choose, any way you look at it you lose”).

But we the people, not least the church, must resist this temptation—not by succumbing to the droning slogans of political pundits and cable news networks but by becoming thoughtfully deliberate about our everyday, taken-for-granted actions (like paying attention—or not—to presidential politics). This principle holds true, of course, for all of life (worship, while quite distinct from life, maintains this principle too). The church ought to be a deliberate people—deliberate about what they read, what they watch, what they buy; in short, what they think, say and do.

The church’s history from the first century onward teems with stories of churchmen and women who have resisted the slithering wiles of the world to some degree. From Saint John’s opposition to the seceders, Justin Martyr’s defense against paganism’s pseudo-morality, Tertullian’s repudiation of Gnosticism, the seven great ecumenical councils’ affirmations of orthodox Christian doctrine, to Pope Gregory’s defense of a future, bodily resurrection, Aquinas’ opposition to Avveroist "relativists," the Reformation’s recovery of the graciously free gospel, and the modern-day struggle over the authority of both the Hebrew and apostolic canonical scriptures—all of these serve to remind us that the catholic church has never been afraid of a fight. Where, then, is the battle today? And once the battle lines are drawn, how ought the church resist the attack?

In 1951, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a haunting sentence: “How often Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism—by which cultural Protestantism is meant—is itself an expression of a cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate” (p. 102). In other words, (social) liberals and (social) conservatives, religiously speaking, are two sides of the same coin (that coin being the “Christ of Culture,” in his terms). It has always been the task of thinking Christians in America, not least since Niebuhr's project, to respond deliberately to this dilemma. It’s simply not enough to think we are avoiding both extremes, for the very actions we take for granted everyday are what is in question. What do our actions say about us? When we resist worldliness, what do our resisting actions say about the presuppositions that inform them? 

Craig M. Gay, in The Way of the (Modern) World, or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist, offers a thought-provoking analysis of this situation by focusing on what lay beneath the surface of modern American society. He uncovers something dreadful. Gay shows time and again how the unmitigated embracing of modern institutions by the church has rendered the gospel implausible to its hearers, as faith and prayer are constantly eclipsed by practical efficacy of expertise and technique (p. 3). By exposing the atheistic elements inherent within American institutions such as politics, science and technology, modern economy, and our own collective personality—rampant narcissism—Gay shows how each of these are worldly by definition, anti-teleological by nature. Our disdain of purpose then leads us to incessantly strive to create meaning for ourselves through political aspirations, through uncritical obeisance to science and the unthinking consumption of technology, through the dehumanization of others for financial gain, and so forth. Creation is thereby seen as an object for us to control, an object that we use solely to create our own purpose and meaning. The world is reduced to a human construction alone that attempts to blot-out the sovereignty and lordship of the risen Christ. In short, this “practical atheism” inherent within modern culture asserts that humans do not need God, that he is “largely irrelevant to the real business of life” (p. 2). However, this “practical atheism” does not preclude religious understanding: rather, “it simply requires that the object of religious understanding be subject to more or less ‘natural’ regularities” (p. 7). That is, we want a religion we can control. By maintaining this merely human construction over reality, we not only render the existence of a Creator irrelevant, we neutralize “the possibility of having any real encounter with the living God” (p. 7), and it is this deliberate constriction that prevents us from seeing the plausibility of the gospel (understood most simply as Rom. 10:9: “If you acknowledge with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be rescued.”).

Simply put, Craig Gay’s book is for those willing to take a critical look at their own actions, how they relate to the church, and whether they reinforce or combat practical atheism. While Gay’s frightening exposure of the church’s thoughtless consumption of modern remedies could send the reader into a seemingly irreparable quandary, he honestly wrestles with the problem in order to offer a valid solution: a theology of personhood. That is, to approach all of our relationships (with the world, people, and most importantly, God) in terms of “I–Thou” (as opposed to “I–it”). The only way there, Gay argues, is through the recapturing and reapplying of historic Trinitarian orthodoxy (see pp. 284–296).

* Update: See Part 2 and Part 3 of this book review.

Read more »