PunkIsrael

Trombones

When a young parishioner showed up to music practice with a trombone last night, it fell to me, as the de facto music guy, to figure out what to do with him. For want of staff paper and a better idea, I taught him to follow root chords and promised to have parts written for him next week. 

Trombones in worship! Apparently not uncommon for the Moravians, but not so common in Presbyterian churches, even progressive ones like ours. 

And as I think about why I bothered to write about this, the metaphor that keeps forcing itself on me is that we all come to the gathering with our odd instruments, bell-open and hopeful, often off-key, and somehow the church finds a place for us. The cynic in me sneers even as I write it, but the image persists. We are an odd orchestra.

T-Shirt Theology

Stolen from White Horse Inn blog:

 

 I would add "with the help of the Spirit" right after "platform." 

My Love/Hate Relationship with Bookstores

Just last night, I strolled around a bookstore for a few minutes, and remembered why I love bookstores and detest them at the same time. Maybe a timeline would explain it best:

6:00 PM: I enter the bookstore, inhale the rich scent of paper and coffee, and survey the landscape. All these books! I start with the magazines. 

6:05 PM: I carefully walk past the men's magazines sporting models with unlikely cleavage, successfully make it to the design section, and pick up a computer design mag. I remember that I really need to learn more about CSS, so I put the mag down and head for the computer section.

6:07 PM: Thumbing through a CSS book, I see the word "language" and remember that I wanted to learn Mandarin. I put the book down and head to the languages section.

6:08 PM: I pass the writing section and feel disgusted with myself that I haven't published more.

6:08 PM: I pass the fitness section, glance at my gut, and remember that I need to take better care of myself.

6:09 PM: I pick up a book on Mandarin and remember why I despaired of learning it when I was in Beijing: it's impossible. I put the book down and head to the front of the store.

6:09 PM: I walk by books with titles like, "Make Your Fortune Now in Social Media" and "Your Destiny Starts Now" and want to shoot myself. The world feels hostile and futile and filled with elusive dreams.

6:10 PM: I walk out the front door. The air is cold and bright, and I try to remember to breathe.

 

Things May be Mended

Last week our electric stove failed; the oven began cooking everything at an even temperature of 475 degrees. We could have had the stove fixed, but it's an ugly 1980s model, and we would rather have a gas stove anyway. So yesterday we had a gas line run to our kitchen. We are ready to cook with gas! But we have no gas stove, and little money to buy one. So we'll limp the electric stove along for a couple of months, using only the cooktop, until we can buy a gas stove. 

What's interesting is that in the process of thinking through the kind of stove I want, I no longer find myself drawn to sleek, stainless steel commercial stoves. What I really want is a vintage 1930's or 1940's stove that's from the same era as our house. They built things to last back them, and even though things break, things may be mended.

I think if I compile a book of poetry, the title will be that. 

Maybe we'll find someone who loves 1980's stoves, and they'll mend that one, too.

This Impossible Stone

"And no one can move this impossible stone..." --a Southern gospel song I heard this afternoon

Jesus rolled a giant stone away, walked out of the tomb, and walked again among the living: the hope of mankind.

I am the impossible stone that Jesus moved.

A Punk Preaches

I had the privilege to preach at Christ Community (PCA) in Johnson City this morning.

Here is the link to the mp3.

Why Theology Matters

As I have stated before, when I left seminary I went through a period of deep disenchantment with theology. In retrospect I believe I was reacting more against the "cemetery" years of seminary. I was tired of proof-texts and semantic ranges and expositional rain, but that doesn't mean that any of these things were bad in themselves. I was just tired. I wanted God, unmediated by theology. But I had been surrounded by good theology. It wasn't until I had a chance to hear some really bad theology that I began to understand how important it is.

What is theology?

Theology is the study of God. Christian theology is the study of the Christian God, primarily made available through His word, the Bible. Good theologians carefully search the scriptures and support their views with exegetical evidence. Theology is an academic discipline, not a guessing game. I make this point because these days, it is increasingly hip to make outlandish assertions about God, Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity based on nothing more than hunches or a desire to subvert the status quo. And while I've never thought of myself as the resident crank (I have, after all told my share of tall tales), when it comes to the Triune God, I've come to expect more than cute ideas. I'll discuss some of these cute ideas later.

Why does it matter?

It matters because truth matters. I prefer a well-read atheist to a indifferent Christian most days. Atheists, while occasionally very thick, at least (typically) argue well. They expect and provide evidence. They recognize logical fallacies. And, in their own way, they are interested in the truth of the matter, even if their truth (in my mind) is pretty bankrupt.

I used to think non-denominational churches were noble, trying to erase differences between Christians. Nowadays, when I see one, I think, "they either have very little theological structure and will probably degenerate into socio-political liberalism or collapse, or they actually are a particular kind of church, like an Arminian Dispensational Baptist one, in disguise." We cannot help but adopt a theology when we are talking about God and the church.

The question is: upon what will it rely?

Doubting my Motives

First time I've had five minutes to post in...well, weeks.

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I just got finished reading a short book called A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning by James V. Schall, SJ. It's an excellent little book, full of short, digestible insights like these:

• Just because someone is smart does not mean he is wise. Much of the serious disorder in the world can usually be traced back to some intellectual...
• Reasons for the difficulty of learning (include) the baffling multiplicity of useless questions and arguments...
• Thus, practically speaking, we encounter the greatest minds among those no longer alive, and the way we encounter such minds is to read their books carefully--which today often means taking a commonsense approach on those contemporary theories that tell us we can find no truth in a text.

Schall quotes the philosopher Etienne Gilson in the preface: there are things and I can know them. Schall's weighty project in this short essay is to re-establish a commonsense link between theory and the world of things. He argues against reading all of the great books (this is a recipe for confusion), but passionately for finding the great books that make sense of our human experience, and reading them over and over again.

Learning is valuable only insofar as it helps us to function more fully in the world. By this I do not mean (nor, I hazard, does Schall) that everything should be weighed on the scales of production and instrumental rationality. What I mean is that theorists and intellectuals who seek only to disassemble what is known and to unshackle our beliefs from our actions are not to be trusted.

Schall's most fascinating paraphrase is that of Chesterton: humility is displaced; it is thought to be located in the intellect where it does not belong, whereas it is a virtue of the will, an awareness of our own tendencies to pride. We should not doubt our minds but our motives. The condition of not knowing should not lead us to a further skepticism but a more intense search for truth.

The Occamist in me likes this, but the Calvinist is wary. Francis Schaeffer argued that the beginning of the end for Western Rationalism was Aquinas, someone Schall (a Roman Catholic) affectionately references in the book. Aquinas believed very much in the continued rationality of man, even after the Fall. His moral compass failed, but not his mind. But for Schaeffer and many others, this is insufficient to explain the pervasive nature of sin.

Even Solomon seemed to agree that sin affects the mind: see my post Insane Hearts.

What then? Do we doubt our minds? Our motives? Perhaps both?