Actually Some Fit News to Print

I really shouldn't be that snarky,
but I had to take the joke. The
New York Times Magazine has done
an article on New Saint Andrews.
It is very interesting.

Out of the mouths of babes

After church Sunday we took a drive to
a local wetlands viewing area. On the
way out, we went past Behemoth Baptist.
My kids didn't know that it was a church.
They said, "Isn't that a mall? It can't
be a church; it doesn't even have a cross."
I pointed out that the panes in the giant
front window made a cross image. But,
they pointed out that it had a loading
dock on the side. I said, "That's just
the way they build churches now. See,
that new church they're building over
there looks similar." I was very
chagrined to find out that that new
building is the local hospital's
fitness center.

I'm reminded of an old _Mad Magazine_
cartoon where a church and a bank look
alike. "Well," one guy says, "they're
both houses of worship."

What happened to the day that the town's
churches dominated the skyline?

ofs

Feyngst

I'm Scots and German. So not only am I
doomed, but it's predestined. That's
why the best whuskey and the best bier
come from those two countries.

And, for some reason, the fall is the time
of year when the fey side of me overlays
the angst side. September has historically
been the Month of Bad Things Happening.
This year if feels like it may last into
October. If the other shoe is going to
drop, it's going to drop soon - duck.

ofs

Who's Emo Phillips?

I heard this in a sermon years and years ago:

-----------------------begin here------------------------

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a
man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I
ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why
shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's
so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I
said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you
christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you
episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!"
I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of
god or baptist church of the lord?" He said,
"Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are
you original baptist church of god, or are you
reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed
Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you
reformed baptist church of god, reformation of
1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation
of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god,
reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum",
and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips

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Strong Language

There is a time and a place for strong
language. Too often, it is the only
language that is spoken. Where we
hunt, the wildlife management area
check-in station is crowded in the
morning of hunt day with men who
seem incapable of communicating
without dropping the f-bomb every
other word. I think a lot of it
is because we've dropped "um"
out of our vocabularies as a
welcome pause for thought. I
know at work, strong language
is used by both men and women
to appear more manly. We had
one GM that I parodied thusly,
"Honey, I'm effing home from
work. What's for effing dinner?
I've had an effing hard day. You
looking effing great. And, so
effing on."

I tell my kids not to make it
part of their regular dialog,
but to save the tough words
for when it is appropriate.
If not, you don't have any
language reserves at hand.
When language reserves run out,
many folks choose to conclude
a discussion with their
fists. On the other hand,
if you don't commonly use
strong language, any special
use of it will stop people
dead in their tracks.

I've put a link in the title
to one of Peter Leithart's
blog articles on this topic.

ofs

Hate America First

Saw Bourne Ultimatum tonight. I'm really
getting sick of the constant barrage of
anti-USA kakos out of Hollywood. In BU,
the CIA is once again the locus of all
evil. That's the most original idea
they can come up with? It's getting
as ridiculous as all of the pro-war
super patriotic movies that came out
during WWII.

The action in the movie was passable,
but not believable. The technology
claims should be a source of chuckling
now, but will certainly be in the
future. It'll be like watching a
1950's era sci-fi movie.

Save your dough. It isn't worth it.

ofs

Mel Gibson, Islam, and Good Friday

As always, Rich Bledsoe has
things worth pondering. I've
been puzzling through his lectures
at the '97 and '04 Biblical
Horizons Conferences. They are
superb. They can be purchased
at http://www.wordmp3.com - in
fact, buy the Collected Works
of Everybody at wordmp3. I
haven't hit a clinker yet.

The below is used by permission
of Rich Bledsoe.

---------------------------------begin here-------------------------------------


Mel Gibson, Islam, and Good Friday
by Rich Bledsoe

Most of us are, since 9 / 11, playing catch-up on the meaning and content of Islam in the modern world. I am no authority on Islam, and I would greatly appreciate the feedback of some of you on this mailing list who in fact are recognized authorities. But here are a few ruminations that I think are relevant and I hope helpful in this Lenten Season.

Two years ago, Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ opened all across the country, and provided a world wide media version of a Lenten Meditation. To see the movie was a remarkably powerful and disturbing experience. Gibson was very keen to give us as graphic a depiction of the tortures and the death of our Savior as was possible. Both my wife and I went forearmed for what we had heard over and over was a very violent experience.

The autobiography of Gibson stands behind the movie. Gibson, who as much as anyone, has lived in the glitter and glory of all that Hollywood stardom means. He had become rich, famous, and lived at the center of about as much glamour as any human being in the modern world can experience. He did not find it a life giving experience. Rather, he found it to be a kind of pre-entry into what seemed a down payment on eternal death. He came near to losing his soul and person. In the midst of his own soul death, he returned to his Catholic roots, and rediscovered some traditional Catholic spiritual disciplines. At the heart of these disciplines was the Via Dolorosa, the meditation on the "way of sorrows or suffering" in the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The stations begin with the condemnation of Christ and end with His being laid in the tomb. He practiced these meditations for at least a decade, and rediscovered what Catholic and Christian mystics have all said: the sorrows of Christ, and finally
His death, are the pathway to our life. He existentially discovered this great divine paradox all over again for himself. It was a transforming experience. He wanted his own experience of rebirth, of newness of life, of supernatural renewal to be shared. So, he made the film.

A number of people have pointed out that the film was especially representative of what might be termed "Iberian Catholicism", that is the Catholicism that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, in the nations of Spain and Portugal . Behind this there is a very interesting story that is relevant to our own times.

My own understanding of this story goes back to a very special couple that was in the congregation that I pastored for many years. The couple were staff people for a para-church campus Christian group (Campus Crusade for Christ), and the husband was from Mexico , and the wife from Peru . The lady said to me on several occasions that there was a book that I should read because it explained the mysterious fact that Latin America is basically impervious to Islam. Mind you, this was many years before 9 / 11 and the west's renewed involvement and interest in Islam.

In the first place, it had never occurred to me that Latin America was impervious in this way, and secondly, if it was, I had not a clue as to why this would be so. The name of the book was The Other Spanish Christ: A Study in The Spiritual History of Spain and South America, by John A. Mackay. Mackay was a Scottish Presbyterian who studied in Spain under Miguel de Unamuno, and later went to Peru as both a missionary and professor, and in 1937 accepted the appointment as President of Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey . He had unique and remarkable insight into the Latin soul.

It is a well known aphorism that wherever Islam goes, the population that receives it is inoculated against Christianity. Indeed, the hardest mission fields in the world, and the very least receptive, are Islamic nations. But, part of Mackay's point is the inverse of this. Latin America is inoculated against Islam. Why would that be so?

Well, for a very obvious reason. The Iberian Peninsula, that part of Europe which is today occupied by the nations of Spain and Portugal, was for 800 years partially occupied by the Moors, who were an Islamic population. It was only in 1492 (the year that Columbus sailed for the New World) that Ferdinand and Isabel established their final unification of Spain and the final expulsion of the Moslems. In those 800 long years of struggle, the Iberian Catholics were inoculated. Ever after that, wherever Spanish or Portuguese Catholicism went (Latin America, and the Philippines ), it carried with it that same inoculation. But what exactly was it?

My parishioner from Peru gave me a clue, and she got it from Mackay. The whole of the ancient world was death obsessed, because death was the one final reality that it could not cope with or have an answer to. All of paganism is death obsessed. An appalling number of the gods of Hinduism, for example, are gods of death. Even the Old Testament is death centered. The whole of Mosaic Law surrounds the idea of uncleanness. Uncleanness is a ritual form of being infected and overcome by death. And, the presence of uncleanness is nearly ubiquitous in the Old Testament setting. Even to have an emission of semen for a man rendered him unclean, as did menstrual blood and the giving of birth for the woman. The point was not that sex was "dirty", but that even the "life force" that was represented by sex and reproduction carried death in the very middle of it. Death is the context of a fallen and sinful world, and is inescapable. And this is the great change brought by Christ and the resurrection.

Jesus in His own person was the reversal of Mosaic strictures concerning death. In Mosaic Law for example, if one touches a corpse, it is as if death spreads, and that person is made unclean. But when Jesus touches a corpse, the corpse is made alive. Everywhere in Mosaic Law where uncleanness spreads through touch, Jesus reverses this. If he touches the unclean (for example the woman who had a flow of blood, or a leper) they are healed and made clean, rather than He being made unclean. In paganism, death is supreme. In the Old Testament, death is powerful and spreads by mere touch. With Jesus, death is overcome and instead of death being spread by touch, all that He touches comes alive.

It is important to understand just how ubiquitous death obsession was in the ancient world. The great power behind everything in antiquity is the power of chaos, and chaos is informed by three elements. Those three elements are: chance, fate, and death. No matter what god was worshiped, that god was itself a product of fate and chance, and nearly always, if not always, represented the power of death as well. So for example, the naive modern mind is subverted in its expectations in a country like India where one would think that the worship of animal deities, female deities and nature deities would insure the good treatment of animals, women and the environment. But alas, there are few nations in the world that treat animals, women, and nature in a much worse way than that country. In each case, the gods represent death and their earthly representatives are feared and avoided rather than loved, cherished, and cared for.

Islam by reverting to an Old Covenant mode of being (being a people of circumcision) and by circumventing Jesus as the crucified Son of God (Islam believes that Judas, and not Jesus, was finally crucified on the Cross--and Jesus was not the divine Son of God, but only a prophet) have once again become death obsessed. Now, though I do not understand this with any completeness, it would appear that in the tribal context of the many Arab peoples in Mahomet's time, there was an effect of receiving a simple unitarian monotheism and moving beyond the many tribal gods. The tribes were united, and their religion was streamlined. But the effect of this streamlining was to jet stream and fuel inject the death impulse that is inherent in all of paganism. For they received a monotheism without an incarnation or any atonement for sin. Death was left in place, and as a result, the tomb became supreme, and even more powerful.

My Peruvian friend said that Spanish Catholicism vaccinated itself by exaggerating the crucifixion, and by becoming a people of the tomb. The tomb with the garish bleeding Christ, which is everywhere in Spanish Catholicism, is the vaccination. It was as if Iberian Catholicism said, "So you want to deal in death? Well, we can out-death you. We have the very death of the Son of God to trade in, and that is infinitely beyond any death dealings that you are even remotely capable of." So just as Islam seems to have vaccinated its populations against Christianity, Spain went one further and vaccinated its populations against Islam. Spanish culture built itself around this. The bullfight and the matador seem to be almost a liturgy and dance with death. But the center and source of all of this is the bleeding, dying, emaciated Christ of all Iberian cathedrals and churches and cemeteries. The effect of this is that death is not final, but is rather "absorbed" in Jesus Himself, and Islam has no appeal.

One of the great books of the 20th century was Earnest Becker's The Denial of Death. Becker was a psychiatrist who believed that Freud's concentration on sex as the primary source of neurosis was not tenable in the middle to late 20th century. Rather, he believed that the central source of neurosis now was the repressed and unrecognized reality of death.

Now it is surely the case that in many hidden and unrecognized ways, we are making covenants with death (Isaiah 28:15). This may be one of the outworkings of our extraordinary affluence. We have everything, and we are bored. We seek new stimulations and we seek a way out of what seems pointlessness. Surely, death can be played with. Surely it is not finally real. There is a deep and unacknowledged fascination with death. One understanding of addiction is that addiction is a kind of playing dice with death in an attempt to outwit and even use its power for ones own advantage and privilege. One flies as near the flame as one can. Finally, the thrill can only come by flying into the flame and destroying oneself.

Arnold Toynbee commented that most great civilizations that have come to demise have not been conquered from without. Most of them have committed suicide. A death wish or death obsession finally overcame them. The previous pope, John Paul II, very poignantly made reference to the renewed "culture of death" in Western Civilization. He believed he saw all of these signs. The most obvious and outward signs of our playing with death are those of very widespread abortion and the push for euthanasia. Catastrophically declining birthrates in European countries are a sign of decadence, of the decadence of no longer believing in a future to be created within our civilization.

Now, in the midst of our own subtle playing with death, our civilization is being attacked by a renewed militant Islam that almost openly worships death. Suicide bombings and a courting of the most open kind of martyrdom are now at the heart of the Jihad that is being waged against the West. It ought to awaken us to the subtle realities of "covenants with death" that now constitute so much of the heart of what is all around us. This makes Gibson and the lessons of Iberian Catholicism (which are just as accessible to Protestants) lessons of renewed interest. Death is a great power that is inherent within our culture, and we are now being attacked by the very naked power of Islam.

Very close to the truth is that Mel Gibson is now something like "Everyman" in our civilization. We may not have his wealth, fame, or live in the midst of his degree of glamour. But to anyone coming to America from the 3rd world, we all live in his kind of fairy tale land. Our average suburban house is a palace. Our annual living wage is a fortune. We are sated and bored and decadent as he was. We are being sated with the power of death. In the midst of this, we need the same cure that he found. Our "denial of death" is merely a repression, and the repressed is becoming a controlling but unrecognized power over us. As a civilization, we are depressed, neurotic, and purposeless.

We need the renewed understanding of the death of Christ all over again in order to move forward. Christ did not play with death. He engaged it in hand to hand combat, and he defeated it. Lent and finally Good Friday are the foundation of the only really good news that exists in this world. Jesus defeated death, and we participate in this defeat by being united with Him, by believing.

This is very Good News. Praise the God of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ this Lenten week, this Good Friday, and finally on the glorious day of Easter.