Jesus Freaks and CCM

This Slate article examines the connections between the at times far out lives and music of the 60s “Jesus People” and contemporary Christian Rock.

The Christian embrace of hip youth scenes can be traced, like so much, to the cultural ferment of the 1960s. Given that we are all weathering a Summer of Love flashback, it might spice up the tired images of the Haight Ashbury rebels to realize that a few of them were Christians. These mystic hippies sparked the mass Jesus People movement, which injected a distinctly Christian feeling for love and apocalypse into a counterculture already up to its mala beads in love and apocalypse. By the early 1970s, a new Jesus had hit the American mind—communal, earthy, spontaneous, anti-establishment. And this Jesus continued to transform American worship long after the patchouli wore off, inspiring a more informal and contemporary style of communion and celebration that, while holding true to core principles, unbuckled the Bible Belt from American Christian life.

It goes on to discuss some of the figures in the Jesus People music scene, including some truly bizarre ones.

Also see this recent First Things article on the Jesus Movement.

Transhumanism

The fact that some people’s idea of utopia involves “uploading” your personality into a computer and living forever frankly gives me the creeps. (I also am not sure it’s even a coherent idea. In what sense would that be me rather than just a Max Headroom-style copy of me?)

I have no idea how many people actually adhere to this “transhumanist” ideal. I’ve never met any in real life. But the fact that they can put on conferences suggests there are a few.

The transhumanist idea of the “Singularity” has been called “the Rapture for nerds,” but it’s really gnosticism for nerds. It’s the idea that material things like our bodies and the Earth are icky death-traps that need to be left behind.

Evangelicals for Palestine

This seems like a heartening sign: Coalition of Evangelicals Voices Support for Palestinian State. Of course, most of the signatories to the letter to the President mentioned in the article are the usual suspects of the evangelical left (Tony Campolo, Ron Sider), but others like Richard Mouw and David Neff of Christianity Today seem indicitave of a broader spectrum of support.

On a side note, I caught a few minutes of a broadcast of some far-out Christian Zionist guy the other day and he referred to God “smiting the Muslim hordes” in Ezekiel! Now I’m no biblical scholar, but I think his chronology’s off by a thousand years or so, give or take a few centuries.

Lord, teach us to pray

This weekend we were visiting my family in my ancestral homeland of Western Pennsylvania. As is our habit, we attended the early service at the ELCA congregation in my hometown. This is a gem of a church and we always receive a warm welcome when we worship there, even though we don’t have a particular connection to the parish.

Anyway, the pastor was on vacation but in his stead the ELCA bishop of the Northwestern Pennsylvania Synod, Ralph E. Jones, presided and preached. The Gospel lession was the story from Luke 11 where the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray and he responds by giving them the Lord’s Prayer as well as by telling them that their Heavenly Father is always ready to give them the gift of the Spirit.

Bishop Jones’ sermon began with recounting a message he’d heard on a Christian radio station against the practice of “rote” pre-written prayers. God, the speaker suggested, wants prayers that come spontaneously “from our hearts.”

However, Bp. Jones, good Lutheran that he apparently is, suggested, the problem with prayer “from the heart” is that our heart’s desires are often self-centered and misaligned with God’s will. What prayers like the Lord’s Prayer do through repeated use, he said, is form us in such a way that our thoughts and desires gradually come to be aligned with God’s will.

As he put it, if I pray from my heart, I’ll spend a lot more time asking for things than praying for others or offering praise or thanksgiving. But the prayers of the Bible (and the tradition of the church) help us to readjust our vision and our priorities in line with God’s kingdom. C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that pre-written prayers keep us in touch with “sound doctrine” and prevent our religion from becoming wholly privatized. I’m also reminded of Bonhoeffer’s dictum that our prayer should be rooted in God’s word, not in the poverty of our hearts.

He also pointed out that, according to the Gospel text, the gift that God is always ready to give us when we ask in prayer is the Holy Spirit. Some Christians have been misled into the view that God will literally give us whatever we ask for if we have sufficient faith (this seems to be the root of some “prosperity gospel” preaching). But in this story at least, the gift of the Spirit seems to be chiefly what is promised. And the role of the Spirit is to form us into new people who love God and our neighbor.

I don’t think this should be taken as an argument against “spontaneous” prayer or to say that we should only use pre-writter prayer forms. Personally most, though not the entirety, of my prayer life (pitiful as it is) consists of traditional prayers. I tend to think of prayers as tools for helping me to focus on God, and the great prayers of our tradition seem to me to do this best. This isn’t to say that Christians shouldn’t have recourse to spontaneous prayer, but I do think that Bp. Jones is right that those prayers need to be formed and directed by God as we believe he has revealed himself to us.

July reading notes

I recently finished a book called Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine by Vincent Brummer. Brummer is a Dutch philosopher of religion in the Reformed tradition and this book is an attempt to give an account of these central doctrines of Christian belief. Brummer starts from the premise that loving fellowship with God is our greatest possible good and that we have nevertheless become estranged from God. He then analyzes the Atonement as the way God effects reconciliation. The subsequent chapters on Christology and the Trinity tease out the implications of this view.

Brummer heavily emphasizes the existential, personal, and relational aspects of Christianity, such that certain accounts of the Atonement (such as penal substitution) are ruled out as inadequate. This is because they don’t show how genuine reconciliation and restoration of fellowship is made possible by the Cross, but focus on things like paying off debts or removing guilt. It relies on a model of relationships couched in terms of rights and obligations rather than one of loving fellowship.

In Brummer’s view, the Atonement is God’s act to remove obstacles that prevent us from being reconciled to Him. These obstacles include our ignorance of our own predicament, our ignorance of the divine love and will, our impotance to align our will with God’s will, and our lack of love and delight in the divine will. Brummer relates his discussion of soteriology to all three persons of the Trinity, arguing that they work to restore our lost fellowship with God.

There’s also an interesting discussion of “social” vs. “Latin” models of the Trinity. Brummer critiques recent social trinitarians for lapsing into de facto tri-theism and says that any form of social trinitarianism that abandons the Platonic assumptions of, e.g. the Cappadocians is prone to this error. He then attempts to defend “Latin” trinitarianism against charges of modalism. My takeaway was that neither of these models is fully satisfactory.

Currently I’m in the middle of Ronald Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, a little paperback I picked up at a used bookstore in Georgetown. This is a series of biographical studies from the Reformation and early modern periods of persecutors, heretics, and those who remonstrated for religious liberty, essentially tracing the period from the Spanish Inquisition to the British Act of Toleration. Bainton is probably better known for his book on Luther and his study of Christian attitudes toward war. But this is a little gem, full of fascinating historical detail and theological insights.

On deck is Keith Ward’s new book Re-Thinking Christianity. This is billed as a sequel of sorts to his Pascal’s Fire (see here for more) and promises to examine the way that Christian theology has changed in significant ways over the centuries in response to different contexts. Part of his agenda, I think, is to construct what you might call a “liberal orthodox” theology, or a theology that is faithful to the central claims of Christianity while being open to insights from secular learning and culture as well as other faiths.

Friday metal - Pantera, “Domination” (live in Moscow)

(n.b. some bad language and major shredding)

I’m surprised no one thought of this sooner…

Beatallica - a band devoted exclusively to doing Beatles covers in the style of Metallica. The album is St. Hetfield’s Motorbreath Pub Band. Tracks include “..And Justice for All My Lovin,’” “Blackened in the USSR,” and “Leper Madonna.”

Slightly reminiscient of Dread Zeppelin, the original mash-up band.

“A Garage Dayz Nite”

More Kinkery

“Victoria” (live in Providence, RI in 1979)

The conservatism of Ray Davies

Apropos of yesterday’s post, the lyrics from The Kinks’ “God’s Children”:

Man made the buildings that reach for the sky
And man made the motorcar and learned how to fly
But he didn’t make the flowers and he didn’t make the trees
And he didn’t make you and he didn’t make me
And he got no right to turn us into machines
He’s got no right at all
‘Cause we are all God’s children
And he got no right to change us
Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

Don’t want this world to change me
I wanna go back the way the Good Lord made me
Same lungs that he gave me to breath with
Same eyes he gave me to see with

Oh, the rich man, the poor man, the saint and the sinner
The wise man, the simpleton, the loser and the winner
We are all the same to Him
Stripped of our clothes and all the things we own
The day that we are born
We are all God’s children
And they got no right to change us
Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made
Oh, the Good Lord made us all
And we are all his children
And they got no right to change us
Oh, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all
Yeah, we gotta go back the way the Good Lord made us all

The Kinks are probably the only great reactionary rock band. Not reactionary in some kind of mean-spirited sense, mind you. But in the sense of writing wistful songs about the English countryside getting chewed up by sprawl and the drab conformity engendered by the welfare state. And in this case a quasi-Luddite opposition to the mechanization of modern society. The albums Muswell Hillbillies and The Village Green Preservation Society are the loci classici here.

Michael Vick, Gregory of Nyssa, and our duties to animals

In light of the allegations of animal cruelty being brought against pro football player Michael Vick, Diana Butler Bass looks to the writings of the 4th century church father for some hints about how Christians might think about our connections to other creatures and the duties we have toward them.