Belle in outdoor attire

Sullivan nailing DFW again...

'He's maybe the only notoriously "difficult" writer who almost never wrote a page that wasn't enjoyable, or at least diverting, to read.' - John Jeremiah Sullivan.

That's exactly how I felt about Infinite Jest: 'crap this is hard' and 'man this is fun' too.

DFW's Impact on Writing

Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow. - John Jeremiah Sullivan

Read More

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/books/201105/david-foster-wallace-the-pale-king-john-jeremiah-sullivan#ixzz1hI0Qoq5D

Great Christmas Read or Gift...

One of my favorite Christmas reads in the last few years has been The Narnian, Alan Jacob's brilliant literary-spiritual biography of C. S. Lewis. What makes the book so edifying are Jacob's expositions of the major themes in Lewis' writing. A great Christmas gift for the old or new fan.

Last Advent Sermon: On Feeling Forsaken During the Holidays

Here's the link. It's also podcast at iTunes ('Redeemer Memphis').

Looking at how Christ's cry from the cross ("my God, my God, why have your forsaken me?") is the answer to that very question we ask during our suffering. Christ's cry assures us that God is with us and for us during our darkest times.

Exchange on race

A Sr Editor of The Atlantic responds to a simplistic analysis of American racial inequality:http://bit.ly/tGRut5

(HT: Alan Jacobs at 'More than 95 Theses').

Dignan's 50 Year Plan

Here's a link to Dignan's 50 Year Plan, from the movie Bottle Rocket, that I mentioned in the sermon today (Advent 3: Why is it so Hard to Follow You?).

Advent Sermon (2), Post 1: Topic, Link, Anne Rice.

Advent Series 2: The Questions of God - 'Who are you?'

In this sermon we look at two of the points at which people get stuck in trying to deal with Jesus: the point of initial, casual interest and the point of final decision.

Here's the quote from Anne Rice about moving from mere interest in Jesus to investigation:

I had taken in a lot of fashionable notions about Jesus…that the Gospels were ‘late’ documents, that we really didn’t know anything about him…I’d acquired many books on Jesus…. But the true investigation began in 2002…I put aside everything else and…decided that I would give myself utterly to the task of trying to understand Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged.

Advent Sermon (1), Post 3: God Questions Us.

So, if we all struggle (because of sin) with such bias against God and his truth as seen in the previous post, how do we ever come to any knowledge of God?

Only through God.

The great theologians of the church have always taught this truth based on 1 Corinthians 2: “Only God can reveal God.” The God who reveals himself speaks personally to us, reaching out in love to his furious runaways, and exposing us to his grace and truth.

“We do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding.” – Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 90

“It is as the one who overcomes our alienation from the truth that God reveals the truth…It has become possible for us to know God and to speak confidently of God only because the beloved Son who knows the Father has taken our place in our estrangement from God and has made it possible to come to a true knowledge of God through him. So the revelation of God given to us in him is not a matter of coercive demonstration but of grace, of a love that forgives and invites.” – Ibid., 78.

“Because ultimate reality [God] is personal, God’s address to us is a word conveying his purpose and promise, a word which may be heard or ignored, obeyed or disobeyed. Faith comes by hearing, and unbelief is disobedience.” – Ibid., 14.

This whole sermon series is about us questioning God. But it’s really more about how God questions us; how he often responds to our questions with questions of his own that are his ‘answer’ to us.

God the Father addresses us through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, reforms us through his questions, and leads us to himself.

“That is the truth which we cannot tell ourselves. We can only let it question us and press itself upon us in its majesty and ultimateness for our recognition and worship. That is what takes place still when we are face to face with the Truth of God as it is in Jesus, for through its questioning of us in answer to our questions, it does not hold itself aloof from us, so throwing us back upon ourselves for the verification and the answer we need…” (Torrance, ‘Questioning in Christ,’122). Rather, God lays “hold of us in our blind hostile questioning in the dark to change it into something that brings light and truth.” (Ibid., 125).

“Genuine questioning here leads to the disclosure and recognition of the Truth in its own majesty and sanctity and authority, which cannot be dragged down in order to be controlled by us. It is the prerogative of the ultimate Truth, the Truth of God, that it reigns and is not at our disposal, that it is, and cannot be established by us, Truth that is ultimate in its identity with the Being and Activity of God and cannot be dominated by man, Truth that is known only by pure grace on God’s part and in thankful acknowledgement on our part. In the last resort it is we who are questioned by the Truth, and it is only as we allow ourselves to be questioned by it that it stands forth before us for our recognition and acknowledgement.” (Ibid., 121, slightly paraphrased).

Confessions of Spiritual Bias in the Search for Truth

The following are two examples of the spiritual bias that can distort our search for truth as we ask our questions of God. Remarkably, both come from intellectuals who are openly confessing this.

'I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.' - Thomas Nagle, from The Last Word.

'We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.’ -Richard Lewontin, ‘Billions and billions of demons’, The New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, p. 31

Just what you asked for: a catalogue of mustache names

"The Imperial, the Walrus, the Stromboli, the Handlebar, the Horseshoe, the Mustachio (also called the Nosebeard or the Fantastico), the Pencil, also called (by idiots) the Mouthbrow...the Fu Manchu...the long, droopy Pancho Villa...the Toothbrush." - Rich Cohen, 'Becoming Adolf' from Vanity Fair, November 2007.

“Are you still beating your dog?” Or why there is such a thing as a ‘bad question.’

[This is my first post on sermon 1 “Where are you?” from my Advent Series “The Questions of God.” You can find the mp3 of this sermon at the Redeemer Memphis website or as a podcast via iTunes.]

We’re taught from childhood that ‘there’s no such thing as a bad question.’

We hear it from teachers trying to coax shy students into revealing where they need help. More generally, our culture’s embrace of all questions and questioning stems in part from the triumph of the Enlightenment, which used 'rational' questions as a tool for subverting the authorities of tradition, religion, and oppressive political regimes.

To us, it’s unquestionable that all questions are good, and all questioning innocent.

But this is too simple.

Yes, questions are an indispensable tool for gaining knowledge. True - the Christian church had to learn the hard lesson of what happens when legitimate questions (particularly from its youth) are ignored, dismissed, or too hastily answered.

However, despite all this, there are such things as bad questions – questions based on false assumptions, questions that presuppose their own answer, questions asked out of false motives, questions that don’t fit their object, etc.

In the quote below, theologian Thomas F. Torrance helps us see the difference between good and bad questions:

What, then, is the nature of true questioning? A genuine question is one properly open to the object of inquiry, but a question cannot be open to the object of inquiry if it is foreclosed from behind [before-hand]. Hence to be genuine, a question must allow itself to be called in question; it must be ready for reconstruction in light of what the inquiry reveals.

What Torrance is saying is that when you ask a question, you do so because, presumably, you do not yet know the answer! And if that’s true, then authentic questions require 1) that we be truly open to receiving new information or knowledge, and 2) that we allow such new knowledge potentially to challenge or revise our original question and previous assumptions.

The open nature of a true question is especially important when the ‘object of inquiry’ is God. For “the more ultimate” the question, “the more completely” the questioner must let “himself and all his prior understanding be called into question.”

(Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Questioning in Christ,’ in Theology in Reconstruction, 123-124).

This is one of the points I was trying to make in the first Advent sermon yesterday in which we looked at the most fundamental question we can ask God - the question of his reality or existence.

Of course, it’s vitally important to call people to ask such questions when (not if) they have them. As Francis Schaeffer put it, the “donkey of devotion” can only bear so many unanswered questions before it lies down and dies. In Scripture, God’s people are always voicing their questions about God to God; just read Job or the Psalms. God’s people today must exercise the same freedom within their Christian communities.

But we also have to be aware of the opposite problem, of how our questioning of God can become unhelpful. That’s what I tried to address some yesterday.

We should ask our questions honestly; and with the kind of genuine openness and humility Torrance recommends above.

New Advent Sermon Series

I'm starting a new sermon series for Advent tomorrow at Redeemer called "The Questions of God." First one is on "Where are you?", dealing with our struggle to know God's reality, existence, presence.

Other three questions to come are:

2. Who are you? (Who is Jesus? 'Who do you say that I am?', Mk. 8).

3. Why is it so hard to follow you? ('Could you not watch with me one hour?', Mt. 26).

4. Why have you forsaken me? (Christ's cry and ours from Ps. 22/Mt. 26).

Each of these are questions we ask God and questions he (often Christ) asks us in return.

The mp3s are podcast at iTunes and will be posted also at the Redeemer website.

Because I usually have more material than I can ever use in my sermons, I hope to post additional thoughts, quotes, resources and references here during the week following each sermon. Redeemer folks are especially welcome to comment, ask questions, etc.

Fall Reading

For the last year or so I've tried to faithfully update my Good Reads page with what I'm reading but have fallen off this fall. Now that I'm restarting this blog, I plan to put those quick updates here (and do Good Reads if I have the time).

So...here's what I've read this fall:

The Rule of St. Benedict. Published in the Library of Christian classics along with Sayings of the Desert Fathers (that I scanned through) and the Conferences of Cassian. For all that's been made about Benedict's rule (and I've greatly benefited from its exposition by others), reading the actual document was somewhat disappointing. Maybe I'm missing something.

Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone. Franzen's partial memoir about growing up in Webster Groves in St. Louis. His writing about his relationship with his parents is especially insightful and moving. The chapter on his youth group experience in a liberal Protestant church is worth the price of the book.

T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction. As with other Torrance I've read in the past year, this book is a mixture of 1). some of the most profound theology I've ever read (on Trinitarian theology, Christology, analogy, the ministry of the Spirit), 2). the most impenetrable writing I've ever read, and 3). what seems to me pretty straightforward theological error (often because of the subtlety and far-reaching power of Torrance's overall 'system' that, to me, requires his doctrines of universal union with Christ in the Incarnation, Christ's assumption of fallen human nature, a Barthian-like view of election and Scripture, etc). Still, there are sections that are beautiful and deeply edifying. His chapter on 'Questioning Christ' is enormously helpful and helped inspire my upcoming sermon series for Advent at Redeemer.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Hadn't read this since high school; was one of my favorite books then that I re-read several times. Wasn't disappointed; so short and powerful.

Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That. This book and its author is discussed throughout Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and I ran across it at the local library book sale. Graves is one of the primary British literary figures to emerge out WWI and Goodbye to all That is his war memoir. A fascinating sketch of pre-War British society and its dying Victorianism. Graves' descriptions of trench warfare, the at-times absurd army culture, post-war Oxford capture a moment of cultural transition. And though hard to believe, the book is funny too.

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy & Franz Rosenzweig, Judaism Despite Christianity. In keeping with my recent and growing fascination with 'ERH' - who I'm convinced will be as important to future generations of academics as some of his more famous colleagues were to ours - I ordered this new version as soon as it was available. There are several essays of historical background and interpretation in the book, aside from the correspondence itself. A couple of these essays are by ERH and shed great light on the correspondence; there's also a letter from ERH to a student on Hitler and prayer (!) that's stunning. Then there's the correspondence itself, which is unlike anything I've ever read. Both men were deeply passionate, creative thinkers and actors, with ERH being the elder. They wrote the letters while each was deployed during WWI in the German army. As top-level scholars their level of casual erudition is daunting (lots of Greek, Latin, French, German phrases, quotes, references - thankfully translated in most cases) and the strength and candor of their debate thrilling. Of course, I resonated most with ERH's presentation and defense of Christianity, but Rosensweig's own thought emerges in the letters with real force. Reading these letters is like watching two giants do battle with all their heart and mind about the most central questions of life, religion, and philosophy. Ironically, their careers went in different directions after this exchange; Rosensweig's genius was recognized in his few works produced in the 20s and 30s (especially his The Star of Redemption, which was greatly influenced by ERH's thought) but he died early (by the late 30s). ERH lived another 50 years and produced dozens of volumes of work, but was mostly unrecognized by the the academic establishment.

Frederick Dale Bruner, The Christ Book (Commentary on Matthew). Read just parts of this for my Fall Adult Ed class at Redeemer, but have to say that it's probably my favorite commentary. Completely unlike anything else: unapologetically theological, filled with application to church life, creative, pastoral, and still excellent on exegesis and interpretive issues. If you're intrigued, just read his section on Matthew 1 and the geneology: beautiful. And his Sermon on the Mount material was, again, the best I've read on it. I look forward to using it in the future.

Good and evil

"..evil exists...and evil increases automatically. Inertia, laziness, cowardice, death, are self-multiplying...good 'is' not, except by propagation; it is not in any man, but originates only between teacher and student, between father and son...No man is good. But the word or act that links men may be good. And by link-work evil has to be constantly combatted...[but many] ignore this constant reproduction of the good, and leave the arousing, evoking and conveying of goodness to accident." - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, 'The Soul of William James,' in I Am An Impure Thinker, p. 27.