A Really, Really Important Book

A few years ago while browsing at Borders, a large book caught my eye. It  wouldn’t let go after that. It was called The Beginning of Wisdom, by Leon Kass. I glanced through it and put it back on the shelf.

The next time I was at Borders, the book called to me again. I gave it another look. once more I put it back on the shelf.

One can only read a few large books like this.  They require too much time and too much focused energy. I was not ready to make that investment.

But every time I went to Borders, The Beginning of Wisdom whispered so no one else could hear: “give me a chance. You need me. Take me home.”

That's why that day, at a time my sales resistance was a bit low,  I took the book to the counter, paid for it and then took it into my life.

Leon Kass wore me out for the first hundred pages. 

“Man is not woman. Man is not God. God is not nature. Difference and distinction is the foundational pillar of Biblical thought.” 

He said something like that that many different ways, again and again, until I was ready to put the book out of its misery. And Kass's vocabulary -- what in the name of common sense did he expect from his readers? 

And then, slowly, I was gripped by the power of this truly remarkable work. I began to see that The Beginning of Wisdom was not only the best commentary on the Book of Genesis I had read; it was not only the best commentary on the Bible in my entire (and extensive) library; it was, outside of the Bible, the best book I had ever read on any subject. 

It was like a buried treasure. One digs and digs because the map claims the treasure is there. And one is exhausted by the time he finally sees the ancient chest. But when he does …

The Beginning of Wisdom teaches one how to read literature. It teaches one how to compare and contrast Biblical thought with other philosophical systems. It does not scold. It does not assume one believes in God. It just describes what the Bible claims about reality, the implications of what the Bible claims to be true, and what one does with the conclusions he reaches about those things.

The book invites liberal, orthodox and fundamentalist Jews and Christians, believers of any other religion, and nonbelievers alike, to sit down and discuss this book that has probably influenced more people in history than any other, the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings.

It took Kass twenty-five years to write his book. He must have known that relatively few people would ever read it. Surely he understood that he wouldn’t make a lot of money writing it. He would have certainly made a lot more money writing YOU TOO CAN BECOME SUCCESSFUL! Even more believers would have read a book like that than will ever read The Beginning of Wisdom. So he was writing a book that believers would be too bored and unbelievers too scandalized to ever read. Who the heck did he think would read this book?

But he wrote it anyway. And by God's grace, Borders stocked it. And by God’s grace I kept passing it on the shelf at Borders until I was compelled to buy it. And by God’s grace I kept on reading even after those first laborious hundred pages. And by God’s grace I allowed the book to capture my attention and keep it for several months.

After reading The Beginning of Wisdom, I went on to read The Great Code by Northrop Free, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy by Thomas Oden and then, praise God, on to the Brazos Commentary series. Little by little, I reentered the world of biblical studies in a way that has lifted my heart and energized my intellect. I have been wrestling with what it means to be a biblical Christian in a postmodern world without becoming either theological liberal or a fundamentalist.

The world is full of books, some of them good. Few of them are great.  Some of these offer a healthy vacation from day to day reality.   Some entertain as they seduce the reader into a new way of thinking. Some offer little entertainment but nonetheless awaken the reader from the contented stupor into which small minds keep drifting through an unreflected life all the way to a meaningless death.

Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl

God in Search of Man, by Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Weight of Glory, by C. S. Lewis

A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

The Seven Story Mountain, by Thomas Merton

Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton

The Story of Civilization, by Will and Arial Durant

When one enters books like these, he is one sort of person. When he gets to the last page, he has become someone else. 

So here is my acknowledgment of debt to the secular Jewish scholar, unsure when he began of the origins or the meaning of this sacred book I had been reading all my life. Here is my gratitude for his twenty-five years of research, his unimaginable laborious hours of labor, his unavoidable doubts about whether what he was doing would do any practical good in the world. I give witness that his work found me one day in a bookstore and that I casually and flippantly opened his book as I have thousands of others, with little respect or appreciation that I had just been handed an opportunity to become wise.

May the Lord remember this testimony on the day of judgment. May the Righteous Judge recall that this writer was faithful to perform what providence had called him to do: write a life changing book at such great cost and which has brought him such little public acclaim. And may what has been done in secret be made known to all. 

Take Time to Be Holy

When I was a little boy in Southern West Virginia, my mom sometimes listened to religious programs on the radio as she ironed and cooked. I forgot most of them. however, there is still one of them stuck in my head:  Brother Earl Hissom. I don't know what he preached. I just remember he was old and that his voice shook when he sang the program's theme song.  

Take time to be holy, speak oft with thy Lord;

Abide in Him always, and feed on His Word.

Make friends of God's children, help those who are weak,

Forgetting in nothing His blessing to seek.

His song was haunting, maybe just because his voice shook. 

I still hear it as I write,  and I'm asking myself, "what does it mean, take time to be holy?” For that matter, what does it mean to be holy?” And if one takes the time to be whatever being holy means, with what does one fill that time set apart to cultivate holiness?

Questions like this, about holiness, go to the core of Christianity’s claim to speak  on God’s behalf. I don’t think we have been answering those questions lately. I think we have just been yelling louder.

The most challenging question an unbeliever can ask about our faith isn’t connected to the challenges of science, political life or moral values. We have responses for those kinds of questions. They are not always good responses, often they are not much more than cliches; but they impress us enough to keep us from questioning our own faith.

No, the question that really stumps Christians is one few people ever think to ask: if Jesus rose from the dead and is now at work in us, why are we not transformed?

Why are so many Christians still addicted, gossipy, lustful, greedy, and vindictive? Even more to the point, why do so few of us seem to change if indeed the Holy Spirit has come to live in our hearts?

The cute bumper sticker, “I’m not perfect; just forgiven,” deflects the heat of this question. What it  really means is, “I am not going to answer. I don’t have to be changed. I just profess Christianity and then get on with the enjoyable work of straightening out your sorry behind.”

It’s not an answer at all. It is an admission: that Christian life does not change us. If that is the case, then our moralism, political fervor and religious zeal flows from a passionate conviction based upon nothing. We offer no evidence that our faith is anything more than a fervent insistence that what we wish to be true, actually is true. We are using faith to get our way, in other words, particularly when it comes to our politics and moral convictions.

The Apostle James said this a long time ago, in his short contribution to the New Testament. He claimed that demons believe in Christ.  So he was not impressed with fervent confusions of faith. He said that if our life never gets transformed by grace, it is unlikely that grace is even present. He doesn’t just say this about individuals; he says it about churches. Congregations that cater to the wealthy and ignore, or esteem less, those who are poor, are devoid of grace, he says.

Those are difficult words, but James isn't yelling at us. He is instructing us about how to walk toward transformation in grace.

He said that works and faith are synergistic components of grace that transforms one’s life. English translators usually render his word synergistic as “working together.” The Greek text however, uses that one word, synergia. The Latin text uses cooperateur. You can draw your own conclusions from those words. They’re close enough to English to leave as they are, untranslated. 

The Protestant Reformers, reacting against the abuses of religious legalism, were uncomfortable with the idea of cooperating with grace.  They pushed the idea of faith alone, which ought to result in good works. But the apostle James pushes back. “No,” he says, “wishing someone well when they are hungry does not feed them and simply claiming to be saved doesn’t save. Real faith results in transformation of character that becomes visible in the way a believer talks, acts and walks through life.” One who believes acts differently. One who, in obedience, acts differently, discovers that his obedience leads to dependence upon God who alone gives the ability to act differently, which increases our faith. 

That's what James means by synergy. 

James does not ask us to pretend we are holy. That is the way of religious legalism. It results in sickening hypocrisy. The world understandably mocks it. Indeed, if we are to believe the Old Testament prophets, God mocks it too.

John Wesley worked to recover the concept of cooperation with grace as a means of transformation. And who can argue with his results? The Wesleyan streams of Christian faith converted our continent and propelled Christianity into every corner of the globe. Universities, hospitals, inner city missions and churches around the world are testimonies of nearly two centuries of fruit from Wesley’s insight.

The problem is, the holiness movement he birthed became increasingly concerned with trivialities. Instead of teaching people to cooperate with grace and grow into virtue, its leaders began to define what sorts of dress and behavior constituted holiness. As a result, some of the meanest people I have met on this planet have been preachers who chatter incessantly about holiness. I would rather spend the day with an honest atheist than with such bags of wind. They have done more to discredit the appeal to holy living than any Voltaire.

The question of holiness remains though, despite the repulsive fruit of those who highjacked the word.  Do people whose lives are not noticeably different from their neighbors have anything significant to say? And I don’t mean to imply that people who shave their heads and wear white gowns earn the right to say much. Weird is not holy.

And how does a Christian fundamentalist, raging on the television at socialists and homosexuals, differ from an Islamic jihadist? The Christian claims to speak for God. I get that. So does the jihadist. The jihadist threatens to blow up my house if I don’t get right with Allah. Some Christians tells me that God will destroy my country if I don’t force unbelievers to live by our rules. Forgive me if the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us ‘doesn’t seem that clear sometimes.

But OK, we good Christians aren’t like those raging crazies. We are polished and urbane. We insist that God doesn’t punish anyone. He is up there cheering us on to the finish line. God is your greatest fan! He doesn’t demand anything. He doesn’t care much if we keep his suggestions about morality or piety. In the end, God will receive us all into his kingdom whether or not we ever change our lives.

That’s a really cool religion. I like it! Don’t you?

It is certainly not offensive. How can it be? It doesn’t say much of anything about anything. It’s a smiley face some child has drawn upon a large stage. It makes us smile. After we look at it, we can go on with the rest of our day. It’s a heck of a lot happier symbol than the cross, which is why so many of us have removed that old offensive symbol from our churches.

So is that it? Do we choose between some raging hate-monger, who seems to want nothing less than a full blown war with secularism and other world religions, and the religious equivalent of a multilevel marketing convention? Is it the raised fist VS the smiley face? Does our history, full of the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Brother Lawrence, Thomas a Kempis, the Wesleys, and C. S. Lewis end up like this, without a choice that leads to transformation in God?

The apostle James seems to say that real faith results in lives that exude a unique quality called holiness. These lives become compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of God in the world.  Although there are worship spaces that seem to radiate a sense of God’s presence, pieces of music that seem to open the soul to eternity, and works of literature that grab a person’s heart and drags them Godward – these are not the main ways in which God is known in the world. The main way God is known in the world is by experiencing His presence through the lives of believers.

An unbeliever ought to be saying something like, “I don’t get the whole resurrection / miracle / supernatural thing, but I have to admit that Christians seem to exhibit a superior way of living. They are honest, kind, intellectually curious, hard working, and help everyone they meet. I don’t have an answer for the fascinating quality of life they seem to develop.”

Instead, unbelievers hear Christians telling them how to vote, yelling at them for not living up to convictions we voluntarily assumed because of our faith, and dismissing their honest questions that they believe science poses to any literate person living in the twenty-first century.

There is so much in the Christian world to deplore. Many of our well-known spokespeople make a very good living avoiding most of the crucial questions of life. Some of our churches have built religious empires based on strategies to attract good looking and well put together people. Our sermons rarely demonstrate a sincere openness to honest questions. Church squabbles routinely emerge from individuals who enjoy drama and seem not to care about the collateral damage they inflict upon the young and the vulnerable.

We don’t need intelligent unbelievers to dismantle our faith. We can do it by ourselves.

I have sometimes looked at this stuff and been tempted to just walk away from it all. But we are like the disciples who said to Jesus, “where would we go? Only you have the words of eternal life?”

So I turn off the television, open my Bible to the Book of James, and learn how to get on with being transformed. As I read, I hear a voice in the back of my mind, croaking about how to find my way home:

Take time to be holy, the world rushes on;

Spend much time in secret, with Jesus alone.

By looking to Jesus, like Him thou shalt be;

Thy friends in thy conduct His likeness shall see.

A Holy Ghost Girl?

One always wants to make sense of his world and Pentecostalism is as much my world as water is to a fish. So I have read countless books about the movement and have enjoyed most of them.

There are two books about Pentecostalism however, that disturbed me. One was Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington. The other was Holy Ghost Girl by Donna Johnson. Both of them are about the movement’s fringes. However, the people who wrote them actually experienced what they wrote. That’s what makes them interesting. Too many books about Pentecostalism, while helpful sociologically or theologically, are tame reflections by outsiders, people who have never been smitten and overcome by the power and the glory of Pentecostal experience. They don’t understand how such an experience can reset one’s sense of “normal.”

I read Salvation on Sand Mountain nearly twenty years ago. A respectable journalist leaves the safety of his sanitized culture and takes too close a look at mountain religion. Before he knows it, he is sticking his hand in a box filled with copperheads and water moccasins. When he does, glory hits him in a spot he didn’t even know he had; it floods him with ecstasy like he had never experienced.

There are not many snake handlers in the world and never have been. There’s not a Pentecostal in ten thousand who thinks it’s a good idea to stick one’s hand into a bunch of twisted, writhing serpents. So, in one sense, snake handling is just an overblown, bizarre and rare practice unworthy of a lot of attention.

What makes Salvation on Sand Mountain so compelling (and unsettling) is that the emotional and psychological experiences the author relates are things any Pentecostal will immediately understand. Snake handlers don’t risk their lives to impress people. Until the advent of YouTube, few people outside the movement had ever witnessed what they do. They certainly don’t pick up reptiles for money. That is what impressed Covington; people who dance with a rattlesnake are serious. And he was ready for serious. Pentecostals get that.

Covington’s Methodist Church just couldn’t compete. It’s like a teenage boy at the circus getting invited into the backroom by the nice lady who wants to show off her tattoos for a dollar and a half. The boy knows he shouldn’t go but his thinker just doesn’t seem to work very well in her environment. So he follows her into the backroom and sees things there he can’t get out of his head afterward. The next day after math class, when he talks to his girlfriend, he discovers that her pretty little hair do just doesn’t do for him what it did the week before. His normal has been reset.

That happens in religion too.

How can studying the Book of Romans compare to prancing around a room with a copperhead? A room full of worshippers losing their inhibition and plunging into communal bliss will win out every time over struggling with the meaning of justification and sanctification. Every Pentecostal that reads Covington’s book will know that he is describing the holy grail of worship experience, except, of course, for the snakes.

When adrenaline gets into a contest with responsibility, adrenaline wins every time.

That is why the snakes ran over Covington’s graduate degree like a train over a possum.

I just finished Donna Johnson’s Holy Ghost Girl today. I had already read most of it in a bookstore, over a year ago. For some reason I didn’t buy it then. However, after my daughter and son-in-law read it, I wanted to set down to read it in its entirety and face the emotions I knew it would provoke.

Donna Johnson grew up traveling the country with David Terrell, the famous tent revivalist. She tells us about miracle healings and sacrificial people trying to do God’s work. She describes the incomparable sound of a Hammond Organ with a Leslie speaker, pouring out its audible incense. She recounts how the worshippers sway and sang, and how the sick filed by one by one to be touched by the prophet. When she tells how a little deaf boy received his healing in that line and how the people swooned and wept, it’s hard to suppress the tears.

Meanwhile, the prophet sleeps with the author’s mother, his organist. And with the office girl. And with the lady preacher. And keeps fathering children with his legal wife as he visits all the other women on the crusade team.

He begats, as Ahimilail begat Metabasheth who begat Azat and his brethren in the valley of Bezail-Mephromashiph in the days when there were giants.

And verily the prophet’s offspring grow up. And they know not what their last name should be. And they know not how to relate to their brothers and sisters, or why they come from the wombs of different mothers. And how they will relate to a world of sinners, all ready at any moment to persecute the righteous? And how they will explain why holiness girls must wear long dresses, even in the hotel swimming pool? And how they will explain why education is not important because the tribulation is coming and the world will soon end and it doesn’t make sense to worry about such things? And what they can do as they realize children aren’t that important anyway, or that the call of God always comes first and that it is at any rate a sin to question the man of God, and that if the children of the righteous don’t pay the price, millions of little heathen children will all fall into hell?

And so it comes to pass that the prophet goes to jail, for tax evasion as it turns out. And the children become young men and woman. And the adults keep shouting every night in the tent about the end of the world. And keep on fornicating while not ever talking about it.  

It would be a story about a con and a sham, but what do we do with the weeping mother who carries her little boy out of the tent who came into that tent deaf but is now leaving it holding his hands over his ears because he can’t stand the sound of the traffic?

One can dismiss neither the insanity nor the sanctity of this mess. That is what makes these kinds of religious backgrounds so confusing to the people who grow up in them.

None of this is unique to Pentecostalism, by the way.

Father Gregory Rasputin could stop a hemophiliac from bleeding simply by holding his hand over the afflicted person. He did it again and again. He prophesied and healed. He astounded the doctors and scientists. And yet, he was a wretch. He may have been more responsible than any other single person for the triumph of communism over Czarist Russia. The reaction against religion that followed after the revolution may have been more difficult to defend had it not been for the public’s disgust at the miracle worker who had once taken over St. Petersburg.

These kinds of charlatans have always been with us. And how much more interesting they are than people who merely run food pantries or teach courses at a local college. How can a nurse emptying a bedpan measure up against a mesmerizing preacher in a white suit, taking up yet another offering to pay for his private jet?

And, it’s not just the miracle workers. It’s every kind of religious leader that justifies and defends ignorance; superstition; the lack of financial accountability; hateful attacks against those who differ over some shibboleth of dress, behavior or ideology; the suppression of reasonable questions; vitriol aimed at science while effectively using every product science makes possible; and most of all, worshiping Jesus while ignoring everything he said. Some religious leaders are just good at making a great living at the expense of naive people. Not unlike the circus tattoo lady who invites the young man into the backroom, they know how to touch our most vulnerable places and turn our irrational curiosity into a source of wealth and power. Some are Pentecostals, some are anti Pentecostals; some are fundamentalists and some are liberals. It’s not about any of that. Its about crazy.

Everything that turns mystery into manipulation harms the human family. Who doesn’t want a deaf kid to get healed? If it is a crazy, promiscuous, circus tent preacher who finds the trigger that causes that to happen, who will not be glad about it? Who can fault Czar Nicholas for weeping when Father Gregory heals his suffering son? These things happen sometimes. We are all happy when they do.  We write books and make movies to tell the stories. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What we should not do is believe that mysterious moments, or mysterious people, are the rule rather than the exception. We certainly should not ask a Father Gregory or a David Terrell to instruct us about foreign policy or paleontology. We should not ask them to govern communities or allow them to avoid paying taxes on grocery stores or a fourth lake house just because they are men of God. They are just interesting. That’s the end of it. Interesting like snake handling and fire walking. Interesting like jugglers and water witchers.

The Bible lists healing and miracles as gifts that some believers manifest. But such people are expected to be disciples, just like any other kind of believer. They, like the rest of us, are just people. They need accountability, instruction and governance.  When they don’t get those things, they create havoc and unbelief.

The circus-tattooed lady is undeniably fascinating. But the kid is already on the right track with his high school girl friend. His girl friend is reality; the circus lady is a fantasy. He needs to finish school. He needs to choose a vocation. He needs to learn how to love. He needs to discover sex at the right time with a girl as curious about him as he is about her. Real life is about things his high school girl friend has to offer. The circus girl is just about his dollar and a half.

I am sad for Donna Johnson. She has become an agnostic, trying to make sense of her glory filled, but hopelessly bewildering, childhood.

I wonder if God’s prophet, David Terrell, ever gave her a moment’s thought as he went from city to city setting up his tent, preaching sermons that shook people's souls as it numbed their minds.