It's Hard to Love a Luddite

I have been wrestling with some uncomfortable questions about our faith and the quality of community life it produces. It disturbs me that the most reliably and vocally Christian parts of our country consistently rank at the bottom when it comes to education. Furthermore, the quality of life in these areas, as measured by any number of factors, does not seem affected by the presence of Christianity, or at least by the type of Christianity we have have embraced.

Although Christianity has made a huge difference in the lives of people around the world, this does not seem to be true for the poor people in Appalachia and the American South. I want to know why.

That question has led to others.

Is there (or should there be) a correlation between the percentage of devout Christians within a given area and the level of education, poverty, and crime – the quality of life, in other words – experienced by the general population in that same area?

Are the Evangelical regions of our nation safer?

Wealthier?

Healthier?

Better educated?

Does Evangelical influence make any difference at all in the quality of social life of a given community?

When I observe through history how Christian spirituality, service and education has lifted individuals and cultures, I marvel at the fruit of our faith. I can say the same about what occurs in many parts of the globe today. However, when I think about the Christian influence on American culture now, I am dismayed.

Something is wrong.

It is time to realize that much of American Evangelicalism lives and operates within a cultural and scientific perspective that has not been current for at least three generations. We don’t discuss continental drift. We are uneasy about the implications of the Genome project. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics seem to have no bearing upon our views of time and space. We do not intend to adjust our local churches to the realities of globalization. We have not noticed the downward spiral of poor believers in our inter-cities or rural counties.

We are, perhaps deliberately, stuck in a time warp and spending too much energy trying to pretend that the world has not changed.

This has happened before.

In 1811 a group of textile workers in Nottingham, England began destroying weaving machines with a large sledge hammer they called “the hammer of God.” These textile terrorists would soon be known as 'the Luddites.' They were on a crusade to destroy emerging technology because it was reshaping English culture.

It’s easy to make fun of the poor Luddites, because we are not impoverished nineteenth century textile workers. We are not wondering about how to feed our children after machines take over our jobs.  But it doesn’t take much imagination to understand their plight. If machines were taking food out of our childrens' mouths, then we might conclude that machines are evil.

To some English people those machines were a sign of progress. They realized that the factories were growing the nation’s industrial base because they were already profiting from the shift. Today, as we look back, most of us share the perspective of those progressives. However, it didn’t look like progress to those living beside streams of urine and feces in filthy shacks as they choked on the factory fumes. The textile workers remembered the agricultural life of their grandparents and the natural rhythms of work they had experienced in the pre-industrial age. It seemed as though someone was deliberately destroying their paradise and replacing it with these “dark satanic mills.”

The Luddites intended to fight this evil with the hammer of God.

Are American Evangelicals Luddites?

Oh, when it comes to technology, contemporary Christians are certainly not Luddites. We like our gadgets. As soon as we can imagine an application for them, we even use them in worship. However, if we are talking about our attitudes toward the sciences that create the technology, or toward the humanities that contemplate the values by which we live, many of us are very much like Luddites. We want the world to stop changing and we don’t want to consider what it will look like to live and work in a globalized society where our faith is one among many. We are not certain we have what it takes to survive in that sort of world.

Those who can, ignore the changing world. Those who can't are floundering without a map.

Upwardly mobile Evangelicals send their children to great universities. There, some of these children encounter contemporary issues for the first time. Hopefully, they also join a good campus ministry. If they are not terribly concerned with developing a coherent world view, they may earn the degree necessary for getting a good job without becoming overly concerned about the implications of globalization or the scientific conclusions of the last one hundred years.

The view from below is more dismal. Poor evangelicals do not have access to private religious education. The children of poor Evangelicals attend public schools and immediately encounter secular perspectives very different from what they have learned at home. Their alarmed parents often react by encouraging them to study for vocations that will not require them to face either disturbing scientific knowledge or the philosophical nuances of literary life.  This often leads poor evangelicals to choose either menial occupations, or perhaps more lucrative kinds of work that nonetheless do not involve facing the dangerous new ideas of contemporary life.

Whether wealthy or poor, many Evangelicals are constantly retreating from the realities of a globalized, postmodern and technologically sophisticated age.This has created an unsustainable situation. Either Christians must learn to make the sorts of contributions their ancestors once made to the culture or stop claiming to be anything more than a society built on nostalgia.



The place we can begin is in our own backyard: the hellholes of our inter cities and rural counties, which though filled with gospel music and Jesus billboards, produce a constant crop of misery. The hammer of God, which we often use to bash legitimate questions posed by contemporary life, could become a blessing were we to use it to batter away at the demonic structures of poverty, ignorance and despair.  We can recover the old weapon of exorcism and drive out the spirits of defeat, fear, anger and denial from ourselves.

Many say we need a national revival, but we have experienced a number of emotional updrafts we have called revival every decade or so for the last century. We need something else, something like the transformational power of a reformation, that will reorder our thoughts, our theological paradigm and our spiritual practices.

The Luddite path is a dead end.

How Good is 'The Good News'?

Today is Easter Monday. Yesterday I joyfully celebrated the resurrection of Christ and today I am enjoying the afterglow of the joyful worship I experienced yesterday with my fellow believers.

I believe in the resurrection – both in the literal, physical resurrection of Jesus and the coming resurrection of all the sainted dead. Easter is for me, as it is for multiplied millions, both a present and coming reality.

Nonetheless, today I have started writing a book that some will find disturbing. I have given it the working title: How Good is The Good News?

As I write, I plan to post pieces of my unedited draft, hoping to gain from my readers a deeper understanding of my subject.

What I have written has already disturbed me as it may disturb some of you. However, I must write it in order to deal with a question in my head that won’t go away:

Does civilization advance or retreat; and, is the quality of human existence facilitated or hindered among those who seriously believe and practice Christianity?

I wrote this question in my journal last week.

I had been driving through a number of rural counties in Tennessee and Kentucky and kept passing signs with crudely inscribed scripture verses, wooden crosses and churches of all sizes. My radio blared out songs about Heaven and getting saved, interspersed with preachers who huffed and puffed religious clichés that spewed out from their impassioned stream of consciousness.

These are “gospel-infested” places.

The names of our hills, valleys and streams link our geography to ancient Israel: Bethel, Mt. Nebo, Palestine, Canaan, Zion, Gilgal, and Shiloh are recycled labels for some piece of property or building in nearly every county.

It has been this way for three hundred years. The people of Appalachia and the rural American South (of which I am proudly numbered) think of themselves as perhaps the most loyal Christians on the planet.

And yet, our region is a greenhouse for poverty, drug abuse and ignorance.

Our European ancestors were among the first to arrive here. The land they settled is rich and fertile. Their descendants have lived in the world’s most prosperous nation. Nonetheless, huge percentages of them have floundered as wave after wave of other penniless immigrant families came to America and grew wealthy, educated their children and took advantage of all the blessings of Western Civilization.

Yes, I know. Some of the country’s wealthiest people live in our suburbs. Some of this region’s counties are among the nation’s richest. If you drive the interstate from Atlanta to Nashville and on to Louisville, you will experience a region that seems economically vibrant and which is attracting vast numbers of migrants and immigrants from around the world. Our interstates are national arteries and link our zones of health one to one another. Along their path, all is well. But outside this economic and cultural bubble is staggering decay.

Words like this are often a setup for some political discussion. Not these. My questions are spiritual.

Does Christianity posses a power capable of breaking through structures of poverty, ignorance, disease and violence? If it does, then why haven’t these two hundred years of gospel witness been enough to have made a difference? Are we forced to agree with Karl Marx’s famous observation that religion served Europe’s poor as a type of drug; making bearable their otherwise miserable lives? Is this what I am to make of our huffing radio preachers and the haunting songs about Heaven as I drive pass the rusted trailers and the dilapidated houses – that our religion is a form of emotional anesthesia which keeps us numb to the suffering around us? Is the balm of Gilead powerless against crystal meth? Is it just an old song?

Jesus said that a good tree bears good fruit and that a bad tree bears bad fruit. What am I to say then about the education levels in our gospel-soaked counties, which consistently rate among America’s lowest? Is our gospel-soaked culture a good tree or a bad tree?

An honest Christian must face these issues not primarily as a social or a political problem but as a spiritual one. We must conclude that either the gospel comforts but does not transform –as Marx believed – or that our beloved folk forms of the faith have proven inadequate for transforming individuals and cultures. The Balm of Gilead is a song, but perhaps not a real medicine.

In his second epistle, St. Peter says that we must “add to our faith knowledge.” Therefore, piety without the transforming teachings and practices of our faith is disobedience to the faith. In other words, a sentimental attachment to a familiar folk form of the faith is not necessarily the faith. Otherwise, the religion of Bach, Aquinas, Pascal, Dunn, Mendel, Milton, Wren, Wilberforce, Bonheoffer, and Jonathan Edwards would have made much more of an impact upon our region. After all, many contemporary Christians around here profess to believe a much purer form of Christianity than the people I have just named.

For two thousand years, Christians have been building Western Civilization. Our history has not been entirely pretty. Not all Christians have been faithful to Christ. Still, this civilization – with its art, science and social structures -- has been a product of the Christian beliefs and practices that molded their societies, minds and emotions. Furthermore, we must conclude that the faith that produced these people – and which inspired those people to produce our culture – involved much more than a Hallelujah, a song about Heaven and a prosperity plan.

Those who created our culture thought of Christianity as a profound way of thinking and living that one intentionally adopts (or intentionally rejects) in order to form his or her intellect and behavior.

The book goes on but this blog must end. So I conclude for now with this: not all forms of Christian faith represent it equally well. Some are enjoyable but not transformative. Some address individual change but profess no interest in making a cultural impact. Some talk about societal impact but expect little change in the disciple himself. Christian movements should be judged by how they impact the individuals and cultures they serve.

It was said of the wise men that traveled to see Christ, that “when they saw the light they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”

I have been looking for that light while I drive; looking at the failed schools, the broken health care system, the drug addiction and, most of all, at the nearly illiterate, broken and impoverished people who try to survive in Appalachia and the rural South.

There is no political solution for this misery because it is not a political problem. It is the problem of an inadequate folk religion that has encouraged believers to remain intellectually slothful, unaware of the great ideas of their Christian heritage. It has kept us detached from the societal ramifications of the power of Christ which exorcises evil and liberates humanity from sin, disease, violence and ignorance. We have failed to lead our flock toward transformational community that overturns the powers that hold families and fallen cultures in bondage and which facilitate human flourishing.

All our sentimental songs about saying goodbye to this cruel world would have provided an excellent illustration for Karl Marx.

The good news ought to have better fruit than this.

Perhaps we need a reformation.

He Doth Err - More on Rob Bell

I’m not sure I should write much more about Rob Bell’s book. I may offend those who dislike it as much as the ones who do. Nonetheless, I don’t like it. It contains a dangerous form of spiritual darkness called cynicism.

However, Cynicism never works alone. It works with a demonic cousin called Gullibility.
Gullibility swoops in first. He spreads stories people love to believe; conspiracy theories, half-baked urban myths and exaggerated tales of spiritual adventure. People who like these stories retell them in their sermons, drama and song. Finally, they get so wrapped up in the stories that they simply cannot bear even reasonable questions about their validity.

Once Gullibility does his work, sneering Cynicism moves in. He mocks the people who have fallen for the stories. It’s not long before some begin to realize that their beloved stories are full of holes. That’s when their naiveté turns to bitterness. Others, afraid their stories will unravel, just plug up their ears, entrenching their beliefs into a mindless denial that becomes conscious, deliberate and hateful.
This describes many American believers – either naïve or angry, but at any rate trying to resist, by whatever means, the post-modern world in which we live and work.

Too many of us have been trying to maintain the scientific worldview of the late 1880’s while taking advantage of all the marvels produced by modern science. Fleeing from legitimate questions posed by paleontology, neurology, relativity and quantum physics, we run into an intellectual cul-de-sac where we become terrified of intellectual life, even when it is trying to address theology and Holy Scripture. In far too many cases we have replaced a healthy, informed spirituality with a naive pietism. And, too many of us have replaced our intellectual heritage -- filled with the likes of Aquinas, Calvin, Augustine, Edwards, Lewis and McGrath --- with a form of knownothingism we sincerely believe will prove our fidelity to God.

All this has opened the door for Gullibility’s evil cousin, Cynicism.

That’s what I hear speaking through Rob Bell’s book.

However, we must also acknowledge that Rob Bell is one of our own children. And, it is our children who most believe that his message expresses something important. So, we must acknowledge that our attitudes and responses to the modern world have helped both produced him and sustain his success.

So, why don’t I like Rob Bell’s book?

Because its spirit reminds me of the taunts the Sadducees threw at Jesus, especially the time when they asked the Lord the woman who had married seven brothers after each of them had died, whose wife she would be after the resurrection.

Now, who can respond to such cynical, sarcastic mockery?

Jesus did. “You do err, not knowing the scriptures;” he said.

Chapter two of Bell’s book sounds like those sneering Sadducees, and deserves the same sort of response.

In that chapter, Bell remembers a picture that hung on his grandmother’s wall. I remember that picture. I agree with him. It was no Rembrandt! And I get the point that Bell is a lot more aesthetically sophisticated than his grandma. But should he scoff?

No, he shouldn’t. He doth err.

Neither the artist nor Bell’s grandmother believed that the painting depicted anything close to an actual thing someone might actually see, either in this life or the next.

A sign hanging over an exit that depicts a stickman sitting on a circle simply informs us that there is a wheelchair ramp beyond the exit. It doesn’t cause us to look at each other and laugh.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. What idiot painted that silly thing? Are there still people who believe that somewhere beyond the door little unseen stickmen ride around on wheels? Don’t the poor stick men fall off? Don’t we have better things to do right in this room other than worry about mythical stickmen rolling around outside – wherever ‘outside’ is!”

The trouble is, some Evangelicals seem to have a gullible attachment to the pictures we have created with our words, paintings and songs. So we feel a need to remind them that the pictures were only meant to describe, in the best way we knew how, what the Bible insists that “eye has not seen and ear has not heard.”

But the cynicism is uncharitable and ill founded.

After a day of backbreaking labor in the fields, slaves once sang:

"Deep river; my home is over Jordan.
Deep river; I just want to cross over into camp ground."

It was a beautiful, haunting song. It put into words a truth: that this life is not everything. The singers sang what they believed and believed what they sang. They transformed pain into art and their apparent meaninglessness dissolved into profound meaning as a result. It didn’t matter that there is no river. It didn’t matter that there is no camp ground. The truth they sang was greater than the apocalyptic metaphors they created to express the truth.

We get into trouble when we allow Gullibility to transform our metaphors into concrete things. When that happens, not even the silence of scripture can convince some of us that the Jordan River is actually a large but not really impressive creek. And, contrary to another old gospel song, Jordan’s waters are not so cold; as you must believe if you take the words too literally. None of this makes the songs “untrue,” however, or even simplistic. The songs are much more important than the daily news or the stock market report.

Our attempts over these last few centuries to squeeze our faith into the confines of European rationalism have been opening a huge door. The two evil twins – Gullibility and Cynicism -- have rushed through the opening. Because we think there is no alternative, we keep rushing from the arms of one into the arms of the other. It would be like getting into arguments every time someone remarks that the sun is about to set; causing some people to laugh and insist that everyone since Copernicus has known that the sun does not such thing while others shout “down with Copernicus!” We all know perfectly well what the sun does and doesn’t do. Copernicus doesn’t stop any of us from admiring the beautiful sunset; unless we are anxious to let everyone know how much more intelligent we are than the people we grew up with.

My grandmother had a picture on her wall too. That one was of a little boy and girl crossing a rickety old bridge. The children in the picture cross that bridge hand in hand across a fierce current. There are openings in that bridge and we are alarmed because one false move and they will plunge into certain death. However, a large angel with beautiful wings walks behind the children, her hand gently resting on their shoulder.

I hung that picture over my little girl’s bed because she had nightmares. I didn’t take the time to explain to her that the picture is a myth, an apocalyptic image, a poor representation of something we can’t really explain. I never told her such things even after she grew up. Why? Because the picture accurately describes something beyond that is more real than anything I can put into words.

So was the picture hanging on that wall at Rob Bell’s grandmother’s house.

He should not mock that picture. His grandmother was wiser than he. He is embarrassed because he believes there is no place in the world where a cross hangs over nothing and forms a bridge to a city that floats up in the air.

He doth err.

Bell’s claim that believing such things keeps people from trying to make a difference in this world is false. Then what are we to make of all the Christian soup kitchens, orphanages, hospitals, mercy ships, and well-digging missionaries?

While he is busy making a fortune sneering at believers he claims are too obsessed with artistic clichés, or too fearful about scientific or even theological questions; thousands of brilliant men and women leave their families and homes each year to live among the poorest of the poor. They learn new languages. They allow themselves to become increasingly out-of-place among their own countrymen. They do this in order to rescue individuals from conditions that the people at Princeton, Wall Street and Madison Avenue will never understand. They do it because they have crossed that bridge that delivers them from a world that the Bible says is perishing.

Like Bell, I don’t like the gullibility and anti-intellectual atmosphere that has become so prevalent among many Evangelicals. Like him, I often feel battered and squeezed by this state of affairs; so much that I have a good deal of sympathy for him.

But then I remember: Cynicism kills; just like Gullibility. That’s why I keep walking across that bridge, knowing that the way is perilous but that an unseen hand rests upon my shoulder, oblivious to my anxious aesthetics.

Is There Such a Thing as Heresy? (Thoughts on the Rob Bell Controversy)

Some words ignite fires.

Because they are so powerful, we often use them as weapons to discredit an adversary, especially when we lack a real rebuttal against his ideas. We often do this quite intentionally in politics, labeling our opponent with a word that evokes fear and loathing. If we are successful, it then becomes nearly impossible for the labeled person to explain himself because the label has closed the ears of the people; whether or not our label is justified.

Unfortunately, Christian leaders can use the same tactic. Through history, one of the most effective words to use this way has been the dreaded word “heresy.” Once attached to a teacher, it often leads to at least his loss of influence and sometimes even to his persecution and death. It is understandable then why many Christians dislike the word “heresy;” or why some unbelievers even tend to wear the label as a badge of honor.

However, heresy is an important concept because it describes the sort of ideas and systems of thought that erode the core of our faith. For example, to undermine confidence in the resurrection is to sever one of the central cords that hold Christian faith together. In fact, St. Paul claims that to discard one’s belief in the physical resurrection of the dead is to ultimately destroy his entire edifice of biblical faith. Therefore, for a professing Christian to disbelieve the Lord’s resurrection is to commit a heresy.

To define what constitutes heresy though, we first define what constitutes “orthodoxy.”  Orthodoxy is the common core of Christian beliefs that C. S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity” and which he and other great teachers taught that sum up the sort of things believers in all times and places -- despite their other historical differences --  have believed. Thus, the Churches of Christ believe that we should not use instrumental music in public worship. This is a difference surely, from other Christians, who use various kinds of musical instruments in worship. However, this difference does not constitute a heresy since it does not affect the core ideas of our faith. The Churches of Christ have a difference from other Christians but are not heretical. Most Christian differences are like that. A few are not.

So, who or what defines “orthodoxy?”

Most believers through the ages would say that the core ideas of our faith are the doctrines contained in the Apostles Creed. The creed is essentially a little poem that has been around since about 98 A.D. It was first used in the church of Antioch by Irenaeus, the bishop, to define the faith. Because of his close ties to the Apostle John, the poem came to be called The Apostle’s Creed (although we do not know if the Apostle John personally had anything to do with its composition.) At any rate, although we explain some of the points differently, the majority of Christians in the world today, as well as those of the past, have viewed the doctrines contained in this creed as defining the center of what we believe.

Now, as I understand him, Rob Bell has stepped over the line of what constitutes the center of our faith. He has embraced a form of theological liberalism (another one of those loaded words) that undermines – or at least weakens -- Christianity. His teaching leaves us wondering what Christ meant when he said that he was “the life, the truth and the way and that no one comes to the Father except through him.” Bell’s ideas (again as I understand them) lead us toward a relativism in which all belief systems held by sincere people lead to the same place –eternal life in God.

This, our faith denies.

Orthodox Christianity teaches that the life of Jesus alone is the medicine of immortality; without it the lethal effects of sin will keep working their poison until the disease concludes in our eternal separation from God.  As Evangelical believers within the orthodox stream of faith, we believe that the life of Jesus is transmitted through our faith in the risen Christ and through our open confession before human beings that God has raised Him from the dead.  We know of no other way that the life of Jesus flows into a person to produce eternal life.

So, it appears, Rob Bell is at least flirting with heresy, which can lead to apostasy: the complete denial of faith in Christ.

Still, our first response to heresy is never anger. It is rather an informed and loving pastoral appeal to those who we believe have crossed the boundaries of “that which has at all times and in all places been believed by the whole people of God.” After all, our desire is for their salvation and spiritual heath.

So why am I writing in such a gentle way about something that is so upsetting to so many?

Because, quite simply, we live in a time in which the fundamentals of our faith have not been taught nor valued as much as we should have. Therefore, these eruptions of heresy are the fruit of our preoccupation with lesser things. For a generation, we nearly abandoned our pastoral duty to teach the scripture and biblical doctrine, at least at any sort of depth. This left a generation without answers for some of the most pressing questions of our time. Therefore, people have been crossing the boundaries of orthodoxy because they had no idea that those boundaries even existed. Heresy had become a big joke. Orthodoxy had become thought of as a form of unimaginable intellectual oppression left over from the dark ages. So how can we react harshly if heresy is the unavoidable product of the theological vacuum American Evangelicals created (or at least tolerated)?

I am also careful about how I write about Rob Bell and his writings because once our heresy bomb is launched against a person, a type of Christian hysteria can easily erupt in which all sorts of beliefs not pertaining to the core of faith also become the object of people’s wrath. This can result in the needless wounding of faithful believers.

For example, take eschatology (the study of last things). The Apostle’s Creed requires us to confess that “from thence He shall return to judge the living and the dead.” Thus, all orthodox Christians believe in the literal, physical second coming of Christ. However, how this second coming will occur, or in what type of world conditions He will return, has been viewed in different ways since the time of the Apostles.  For well over a century, the most popular form of Evangelical eschatology in our country has been expressed in the various schools of “dispensationalism.” Before then, American Evangelicals held to another view, called “covenantal theology.” (The two viewpoints differ in how they define the relationship of the Old and New Covenants to one another, the relationship between Christianity and modern day Judaism, and a number of speculative ideas about how the end times will unfold --  or what the phrase ‘end times’ even means.)

Most of us will readily recognize that St. Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Graham and Jack Hayford are all men who have faithfully preached the gospel. That is why we quote from them and read their writings. And yet, they differed from one another about eschatology and other areas of the faith. Nonetheless, they have stood shoulder to shoulder to protect our common deposit of faith –that is to say, Christian orthodoxy.

In churches like Christ Church, where I am responsible to teach and maintain that “faith once and for all delivered to the saints,” people from all sorts of Christian backgrounds gather to worship and to form community together. We have learned to tolerate a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which may not be to the liking of all. This tolerance (yet another loaded word) is healthy. It makes us stronger because it makes us dig into scripture and examine it carefully.

Nonetheless, our tolerance has boundaries. Those boundaries are best expressed through the ancient creed we confess each time we receive communion. Inside those boundaries we can discuss and learn from one another the various ways in which our faith deals with the great issues of life. We must not tolerate a departure from those boundaries.

So yes, heresy does exist. It must be identified and it is a pastor’s duty to correct it. However, let us beware; lest in our haste to purify the flock, we ignite a fire that destroys our ability to demonstrate the love of God. Without love, doctrinal fidelity is vain and cold. With it, an appeal to fidelity and sound doctrine becomes a healing word that strengthens our journey thorough this word and into the next.