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Totally Like Whatever, You Know

In case you hadn’t noticed,
it has somehow become uncool
to sound like you know what you’re talking about?
Or believe strongly in what you’re saying?
Invisible question marks and parenthetical (you know?)’s
have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences?
Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? You know?

Declarative sentences - so-called
because they used to, like, DECLARE things to be true
as opposed to other things which were, like, not -
have been infected by a totally hip
and tragically cool interrogative tone? You know?
Like, don’t think I’m uncool just because I’ve noticed this;
this is just like the word on the street, you know?
It’s like what I’ve heard?
I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions, okay?
I’m just inviting you to join me in my uncertainty?

What has happened to our conviction?
Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?
Have they been, like, chopped down
with the rest of the rain forest?
Or do we have, like, nothing to say?
Has society become so, like, totally . . .
I mean absolutely . . . You know?
That we’ve just gotten to the point where it’s just, like . . .
whatever!

And so actually our disarticulation . . . ness
is just a clever sort of . . . thing
to disguise the fact that we’ve become
the most aggressively inarticulate generation
to come along since . . .
you know, a long, long time ago!

I entreat you, I implore you, I exhort you,
I challenge you: To speak with conviction.
To say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks
the determination with which you believe it.
Because contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker,
it is not enough these days to simply QUESTION AUTHORITY.
You have to speak with it, too.

May is quickly drawing to a close and I’m trying to start gearing up to work on my PhD. It seems a bit daunting as my brain hasn’t been in high gear for the last few weeks as I’ve been grading and getting my courses more in order for the fall. I hope to get one chapter revised and another written before Baby Hales makes his appearance towards the end of August.

In other news, life continues on quite normally. We still seem to be a bit amazed at the pace of southern California life. It’s somehow “cool” to be super busy, I guess. I miss the opportunities we had for casual get-togethers, dinners with friends, going to the pub on a whim, and probably most of all, the chance to think and reflect while walking the thirty minutes to Uni each day. I’m not sure if the busyness is some sort of prerequisite to life here or if it has more to do with living in LA versus living in a city center. LA is so spread out and there are millions of people living here that it takes so long to get anywhere. Plus we’re all holed up in our cars (of course only one person in each of them) with our air conditioning and our music and we’re so far away from creating community.

I guess that’s my vent for today. We’re trying to integrate many things we liked about living overseas and living in a city with our life here, but it needs to be a corporate effort. And that’s the hard part, I think. If there aren’t a few people who are willing to shirk busyness expectations, actual, open and authentic relationships really have little chance of growing. I realize that people around us are in different stages of life — getting married, having kids, working 80 hours a week, and so these make it difficult to even meet with one another. But c’mon, if life is more than work or family, more than the isolated houses we like to separate off from our neighbors, than surely we could give up some of our “responsibilities” that we so cling to in order to really grow a community?

I’m fascinated by the way popular culture has become aware of Christianity in the last few years, so yesterday, when I heard the words “Holy Week”, I turned the radio up.

The story began with the reporter noting that this is the holiest week of the year for Christians, as we look forward to celebrating Easter this coming Sunday. “But,” the reporter continued, “Christians are making news for another reason this week as well…” The story then proceeded to focus on the release of the 18th and final installment in the Left Behind series, which will be released this week. And just like that, the Resurrection was eclipsed by a fictitious (and, in my my view fallacious) account of the end times.

I’m not really sure what this means. Perhaps it means that, in the eyes of our culture, biblical fiction is more interesting than fact. Perhaps it means that as Christians we have put more emphasis on speculation about the future than the central facts of our faith. Perhaps it just means that there is a better news story in Left Behind than in the resurrection (though I’m not sure how that could be).

Whatever the case, here’s another story to file in my “Media-becomes-aware-of-Christians” folder. I’m glad that I’ve spent this week preparing to preach on the resurrection, rather than that glorious event when cars driven by Christians will be miraculously unoccupied. The facts of history are far more enthralling than fictitious views of the future.

A week or so ago a friend sent me an email about Best Buy’s decision to refrain from using the words “Merry Christmas” this year, preferring instead the apparently less-offensive “Happy Holidays” greeting. As Christians, my friend wondered, how should we respond? Send letters expressing our dissatisfaction to Best Buy, and send our shopping dollars elsewhere? Or do we simply need to learn to put up with such things in a post-Christian America? It’s a good question, but I think the answer is deeper than either of these alternatives.

As America moves away from its allegedly Christian roots, Christians must learn to separate the truth we profess from the cultural trappings that have been associated with this truth. In the case of the “Merry Christmas” vs. “Happy Holidays” debate, we need to take a step back and consider what we are actually celebrating as we approach December 25th.

The clear and simple response here is that at Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. The Westminster Confession summarizes the Incarnation thus:

The Son of God, the second Person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof; yet without sin: being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man.

In these succinct, yet densely packed words, the message of Christmas is summarized: in Jesus, God become truly man, without ceasing to be God, in order to be the mediator between God and man. While this is true all year, around Christmas time we tend to focus our thoughts on the story of a particular baby born in Bethlehem about 2000 years ago. The Incarnation, however, is really only one chapter in a larger story; a story which climaxes several years later as this same baby, now a grown man, is executed for crimes he did not commit, and is raised from the dead three days later. In other words, our celebration of Christmas points us toward Easter, and is not really complete without this perspective. In any event, a Christian celebration of what we call “Christmas” entails the retelling of this great story in songs, sermons, and other liturgical acts, and encourages us to worship God in response.

Additionally, it has become traditional to gather with family and friends to rekindle emotional ties through eating, exchanging time-honored greetings and, in particular, the exchanging of gifts. And this, of course, is where Best Buy comes in.

Now, there is no obviously biblical reason to oppose the Best Buy part of Christmas, but it does seem abundantly clear that the Best Buy part of Christmas is not an integral part of the Christian celebration, and this should be born in mind as we consider the Christian response. Best Buy’s actions do not prevent, or in any way hinder, our worship of God this Incarnation season, so it would seem to me to be a bit shortsighted to withhold from them our dollars for this reason alone.

There is another angle to this issue, however. The decision of Best Buy and others to wish people “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” is seen by many Christians as the very sort of activity that is contributing to Christianity’s decreasing influence in society. Thus many Christians seem to take it as their duty to combat this trend by smugly responding to each “Happy Holidays” from a retail employee with an unequivocal “Merry Christmas!”

The logic of this behavior disappears almost as soon as it is articulated. The job of Christians is to bear witness to the gospel—at Christmas, and throughout the rest of the year. It is difficult to see how the cause of the gospel and the truth of the Incarnation is advanced by getting secular people to utter the sounds “mer-ee kris-muhs”. Would the country really be any different if retailers punctuated the exchange of goods with these words? Obviously not. And we do little to ingratiate ourselves to an unbelieving public by publicly complaining about their refusal to hold on to cultural expressions that we happen to like.

As I mentioned above, we celebrate Christmas in the shadow of Easter, an event that tells the story of strength through weakness and influence through self-sacrifice. With this in mind, I think it would be prudent to put thoughts of writing letters and organizing boycotts out of our minds, and focus our energy on how we have confused our culture’s Christmas traditions with the wonderful mystery of the Incarnation, when the Lord of the cosmos was born in poverty and obscurity in order to redeem his creation.

[cross-posted from Intellectuelle]

In an interesting review essay called, ‘God of the Latte’, Lauren Winner looks at two books which:

ask what a spirituality of suburbia, a spirituality for people who drive mini-vans and tend manicured lawns (or pay someone else to tend them), might look like.

.

I found such an idea fascinating and am looking forward to getting to read these books. In another review article, Jason Biersma writes about Eric Jacobsen’s Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith, thus:

He delicately but firmly makes the case that the New Urbanism movement, with its advocacy of public spaces and variety in neighborhoods, is of urgent importance to the Church and needs its support.

Biersma continues:

Jacobsen anticipates the question of why Christians should care about sidewalks when we’re supposed to worry about salvation. To begin with, the characteristics of our urban environments determine how we are able to spread the gospel; it’s easier to reach out to pedestrians in public places than to car-bound citizens cruising from their gated community to a Costco.

The ministry of Christ thrived, Jacobsen says, on “incidental contact”—such as the healing of the woman who bumped into Christ in a crowd and touched his robe. Today Christ couldn’t stride alongside the two men on the road to Emmaus—he would have to materialize in the backseat of their SUV while they sped along the interstate. More subtly, shared public space shapes how we learn the virtues of civility, hospitality, and authenticity—and lack of the former tends to translate into a lack of the latter.

However, it isn’t as if the city provides the answers while the suburbs are looked down upon as Biersma personally reflects:

The city can, in fact, be a lonely place, as my wife and I have discovered upon moving to our downtown Chicago high-rise. We were eager to leave behind the provincialism of our hometown and gratify the kind of cosmopolitanism Isaiah’s urban vision arouses. But we underestimated the anonymity of the city—the fact that people come here to mind their own business and hope others follow suit. It’s not just SUVs and strip malls that keep people from interacting.

In short, I’m wondering if what our readers think of the city mouse versus the country mouse; what Christianity looks like in the suburbs and in the cities and how the gospel is applicable to both.

Does living out the gospel in each place look different? How do we go about being counter-cultural wherever we are placed?

I posit a sort of question over at Intellectuelle. Feel free to jump on in to the discussion.

As “The Da Vinci Code” comes out Friday here in the UK, here are a few excerpts from an article that engages with the book and the movie from a Christian perspective.

First reasons why DVC has taken on the status of truth:

The Church has done a poor job of equipping its people for the work of debunking silly stories like this one, but all the blame cannot be laid at the feet of the Church. I know many churches where Sunday school classes in church history or the background of the Bible are readily available, and yet people stay away in droves. Our penchant for self-help classes, counseling seminars, and books on anything but the stuff of Scripture has left us thoroughly unable to respond when arguments contradictory to the faith and claiming to be based on history are put forward as truth.

On theological questions to consider after viewing the film and how it illustrates worldview issues:

The Da Vinci Code, unless it takes the extraordinary step of departing significantly from the book, will certainly have much to say about God, about the supernatural, and about sources of moral authority. It will have some notion, both in the form of assumptions and direct statements, about where evil is to be found in the world, and it will promote some idea of how that evil can be defeated. The way the characters are presented will say something about the filmmaker’s view of human beings and their relationships. Christian should have a clear, biblical understanding of all these topics; they are theological issues that form the core of one’s belief system.

Here’s the rest of the article.

Update: Bryce also pointed out a great site about DVC here.

An interesting excerpt from an article called, ‘The Evangelical Mind Revisted’:

Wheaton, Baylor, and Calvin are all institutions featured in “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” a 2001 cover story I wrote for The Atlantic Monthly. In that essay, I tried to show that many liberal stereotypes about faith-based colleges were wildly out of date. Fed a steady diet of Elmer Gantry and Inherit the Wind, cosmopolitan inhabitants of places such as New York and Boston are likely to treat evangelicals as hopelessly backward clingers to creationism and scriptural literalism. They believe that if conservative Christians go to college at all, the institutions they attend are little better than degree mills flavored with faith—places where dogma and revealed truth replace logic and open-minded discussion.

Such stereotypes might once have been true, I argued, but conservative Christians today are not like they were yesterday. No longer confined to the rural regions of the country, evangelicals attend megachurches in exurban America, work as mid-level professionals in large corporations, and have upwardly mobile aspirations for their children. For them, college is an opportunity to be welcomed rather than an iniquity to be denounced. The published faculty at Calvin and Wheaton are as distinguished as the prospective students who clamor to get in; the SAT scores among Wheaton’s entering classes rival those at some of America’s most prestigious secular institutions. You do not attend Calvin or Wheaton—or, for that matter, other first-rate schools such as Westmont in California, Gordon in Massachusetts, or Seattle Pacific University—to imbibe intelligent design or to read the Bible rather than Emily Dickinson. I contend that the protests at Calvin and the refusal to condemn once frowned-upon behavior at Baylor and Wheaton as sinful suggest just how far these institutions have moved away from fundamentalist pieties.

Will conservative Christian colleges and universities continue to move toward the mainstream of American life? Should they? And what will happen to their institutions of higher learning if they do? Colleges exist as the pivotal point between youth and adulthood. Given how many believers there are in this country, the ways conservative Christian colleges respond to the world around them will tell us a great deal about the kind of country America is likely to be 30 or even 20 years from now.

The full text of the article can be found here. Anyone know how to get a copy of his 2001 Atlantic Montly article he mentions?

So what does everyone think of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”? I had tears streaming down my face for most of the movie …

Kathy Keller is on Nightline being interviewed about the movie and C S Lewis that you can view here.

There’s also a great quote from a review on Reformation 21:

However, we must realize that a movie has never converted anyone, and films do not change culture. Only the Spirit of God is capable of such actions. One of my fears with this movie is that the evangelical Church might rush in to force the Christian message of the film upon a populace who is simply enjoying a good story told well. The power of Lewis’s work is not preaching, but pointing people towards an imaginative picture of love and goodness that captures the mind and heart. Attraction to true beauty and goodness–of which God is the author and ultimate embodiment–naturally leads to a desire to explore the longing these create which, indeed, can only find their rest and fulfillment in Him. That is my great hope for this film.

*UPDATE*: Amy of Amy Loves Books has a spot-on review about the movie not being about Aslan at all; check it out here.

In the name of “postmodernism” triumphalism often comes disguised as humility - after all, as David Wells points out, that’s what “post-whatever” always means. The posties (whether post-liberal, post-conservative, post-evangelical, post-modern - the important thing is the post), say they, have transcended the false polarities of modernity and our enlightenment past, but in claiming so have unwittingly embraced the quintessential idea of modernity - progress. And so they don’t turn out to be post-modern at all, but are in fact just the next version of modernity. They are not radical enough.

From Reformation 21.