Learning To Tell Time

On Sunday, churches celebrated Pentecost, commemorating the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church universal. At our small parish gathering, Father McMullen wore a red cope over his traditional white robe to memorialize the coming of the Holy Spirit through tongues of fire. In America, the Monday after Pentecost is Memorial Day, a holiday where patriots wear red, white, and blue to memorialize men and women killed in military service. This holiday weekend places in juxtaposition “American Time” and “Church Time”, two competing ways of offering rhythm, order, and meaning to life. My fear is that most evangelical churches spent for more time this Sunday talking about Memorial Day than Pentecost.

As followers of Christ, who also happen to be Americans, it is requisite of us to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that calibrating our lives around the biblical narrative and her way of telling time, instead of the empire, centers our life in Christ. 

For instance, Pentecost celebrates unity in the midst of diversity. The Holy Spirit weds believers worldwide to share in the one, living Body of Christ. Memorial Day on the other hand is a holy day within America’s civic religion consecrating men and women sacrificed on the alter of empire. It is fitting that we, Christian Americans, choose which holiday to observe. The first emphasizes our communal humanity as God “poured out His spirit on all people”, the second indoctrinates us to live in a story where war and violence are venerated, dividing the world into ‘us vs. them.’ Pentecost brings together a world replete with diversity, Memorial Day reminds us of the importance of defending our racial, linguistic, religious, and national distinctions.

The way we tell time, the rituals we keep, and the holidays we commemorate reinforce reality. The American calendar tells Caesar's story, and is filled with holy days remembering presidents, wars, military conquest, and nationalism. They act as sign posts, guiding us to what the empire believes really matters. The Christian calendar tells time radically different, and points to an alternative reality. First, the new year begins with Advent, not January 1. It then moves into the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Lent, Easter and ultimately culminates at Pentecost. These high holy days form the Christian community living in the midst of empire around a different set of values: community, dependence, sacrifice, repentance, and enemy love.

The marriage of church and state that discharged Christendom made this way of telling time difficult, especially in America where the Gospel has gotten all tangled up in the story of Western, white entitlement. Reorienting ourselves around God’s story, and His way of telling time frees us from the temptation to lump America’s story into God’s larger kingdom story.

As Christians, we are subjects in a Kingdom often at odds with the kingdoms of this world. By shaping life, and the way we tell time, around a different narrative, we experience a new world. A world not ruled by our manifest destiny, but by the patient hand of God that continues to slowly bring His kingdom to bear on earth as it now is in heaven. And as He quietly brings his reign to bear on the streets, in the courthouses, in the slums and nations of this world, we remember that we are citizens in a pluralistic, yet united kingdom transcending time, race, color, creed, and language.

What's Your Story?

Story is the currency of human contact, reminding us once again that life is a grand narrative. If you want to understand what someone values, listen to the stories they tell.  Without story, nothing has any meaning; life isn’t lived in the abstract. We long to know who we are, why we exist and what the purpose of life is, but we cannot locate those answers unless we first know our story and our place in that story.  The question ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered within the context of a larger inquiry which first and foremost asks ‘What is my story?’ [1] To indwell the story of God is to live with the answers to these questions.

Scripture places a tremendous stress on remembrance.  Israel is constantly challenged to remember the larger story of God:

“And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness.”[2]

We join Israel remembering the whole road we’ve come, from the Garden, down to Egypt, back up to Canaan, exiled in Babylon and scattered to the ends of the earth.  At the heart of this narrative is a God who takes the world by its corners and shakes us forward and shakes us free[3]; a God who is slowly and surely working in history to redeem all of creation.  And strangely, He has written us into the plot, giving us a place, a name, a job and a purpose. When we face the drama and dangers of life, we do so with an understanding that we are a people of the incarnation. We are a people who know what it is like to cross the Red sea on dry ground, to be fed with manna in the wilderness, to sing upon our return from exile, to meet Jesus on the road and to join Him in toiling for humanity.[4]  This is our story, a story of universal history that somehow has room enough in its final chapters for us.  

“Who am I?” can only be answered by asking “What is my story?” and that can only be answered by asking “What is the greater story of which my story is a part?”  My story, your story is one of cosmic history from the creation of the world to its consummation.  It is the spectacle of the human family, divided into kingdoms but united by one chosen nation whose own story is fulfilled in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, giving meaning and purpose not only to universal history, but to our smaller stories as well.[5]  Therefore, whatever our small story, we offer it to Him for whatever place it may have in His larger story of kingdom fulfillment.

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[1] MacIntyre, Alasdair.

[2] Deuteronomy 8:2.

[3] Mullins, Rich. Lyrics from “Calling Out Your Name.”

[4] Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel In A Pluralistic Society.

[5] Ibid.

Taking Scissors to the Bible

It isn’t often a boy of 12 gets to visit his hero’s house, but that is where we were headed and I couldn’t wait to get there. I distinctly remember crossing the Tennessee line into Virginia and immediately feeling at home. Strange, since this was the farthest from home that I had ever been. Rolling hills, rows of corn and fields full of yellow tobacco lead us to Charlottesville, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Sitting high on a ridge in Albemarle County, it is the only U.S. home recognized by the United Nations as a World Heritage Site. Originally begun around 1770, the home we know today was completed in 1809, the year Jefferson retired from the Presidency. 

Walking the grounds of this 5,000 acre plantation, one cannot miss Jefferson’s love of nature and order. Yet, it is within the house that the visitor gets a glimpse into the enlightened, rational mind of Thomas Jefferson. The entrance hall contains artifacts from Lewis and Clark’s expedition, as well as a home-made clock by Jefferson himself. Moving into the parlor one see’s portraits of ‘the three greatest men ever to live’, according to Jefferson: John Locke, Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. Turning left into his private bedchamber you immediately see a crimson covered bed, open on both sides, joining Jefferson’s private bedroom with his more public office. On the joinery side table in the cabinet room sat Jefferson’s Bible. Walking over to it I noticed that in several places, this Bible had holes in it, as if someone had literally cut out passage after passage of scripture. Seeing my rather inquisitive gaze, our tour guide came over and to me and said, “Notice how Mr. Jefferson cut out portions of his Bible that he did not believe in? He went through each of the four Gospels and removed not only mentions of miraculous events, but also those sayings of Jesus that he believed were falsely attributed to him.” Not stopping there, Jefferson then cut and pasted a new version of the gospels entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Of scripture, Jefferson says:

“The whole history of these books (the Gospels) is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it…In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”

My boyhood hero died that day. My naïve understanding of our Founding Fathers, as well as my naïve view of human nature, did not take into account this sort of worldview.

Jefferson, like a few intellectuals of his day, was a Deist. He believed in God, but not the God of scripture. His god created a rational world and then left the world to her own devices. This twisted version of Newtonian physics implies that god set the universe in motion and then left it to run by its own natural laws, never thinking to interfere or intercede within the space time universe. Jefferson’s god is a rational, intelligent and orderly being, but just not too terribly personal. The best analogy for the deistic god is a divine clockmaker. He creates the clock, puts the time piece together, winds her up, sets her in motion and then returns many years later to find the clock in complete disrepair, having stopped telling time several years earlier. This theory has several theological implications, not least of which reducing Jesus from role of savior to that of a good moral teacher. Secondarily, is the complete domestication of God and Gospel. We want a “reasonable Christianity” that conforms to our intellectual formation and desires, not a Christianity that places our entire intellectual formation and desires under a new and critical light. Reason alone isn’t enough to explain and understand a God that intervenes and intercedes on our behalf. As Lesslie Newbigin writes:

“It is obvious that the story of the empty tomb cannot be fitted into our contemporary worldview, or indeed into any worldview except one of which it is the starting point. That is, indeed, the whole point. What happened on that day is, according to the Christian tradition, only to be understood by analogy with what happened on the day the cosmos came into being. It is a boundary event, at the point where the laws of physics cease to apply. It is the beginning of a new creation-as mysterious to human reason as the creation itself. But, and this is the whole point, accepted in faith it becomes the starting point for a wholly new way of understanding our human experience, a way which-in the long run-makes more sense of human experience as a whole than does the reigning plausibility structure.”

Deism’s philosophical break from Christianity is another marker on the road toward secular modernism. Our shared journey has taken us from Abbot Suger to Botticelli and now to Jefferson. Along the way, humanity continues to place the created over and above his creator. This descent of God and the heralded dawn of modernity foretold an age of progress, reason and peace. The 20th century gave us something altogether different. Like Jefferson, we either want to mold God into our image, or get rid of him altogether.

Get Thee To a Nunnery, Or at Least An Abbey

Cruising up the Thames on a summer evening is a slice of heaven on earth. The cool twilight breeze over the water quickens the senses as we pass under London Bridge and catch a glimpse of the Tower of London, gleaming white with the final rays of dusk. Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral dominates the northern bank as the London Eye comes into focus far ahead in the distance. As darkness falls, the lights of this ancient city illuminate the river where Roman boats once sailed. At length, we dock just under Big Ben and walk around the corner to Westminster Abbey, my favorite man-made structure on earth.

The original abbey was built by King Edward the Confessor in 1065, one year prior to the Norman invasion. The edifice we enjoy today dates mainly from 1245 and the reign of King Henry III. Seventeen Royals make Westminster their final resting place, including Elizabeth I, Anne of Cleves, Edward V and Mary Queen of Scots. Adding to her imperial history, the abbey has witnessed 38 coronations including her first on Christmas Day 1066, when William the Conqueror marched directly from the Battle of Hastings to be crowned king. What makes the Abbey even more interesting is the vast number of playwrights and famous Brits who find in her their final earthly home. Among the most notable are:

Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Charles Dickens, George Frederick Handel, William Wilberforce, and my beloved novelist Thomas Hardy

But, beyond all these incredible human beings rests a building made to and for the glory of God. Westminster Abbey is one of the oldest Gothic Cathedrals in England and she differs from her Romanesque predecessors through invention and innovation. The very first Gothic architect was the Abbot Suger (pronounced Soo Zher) whose colossal handiwork was the remodeling of the Church of Saint Denis in France. His modern worldview decreed that men only come to understand the absolute beauty (God) through the affect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. When overcome with something true, beautiful, perfect or right we respond with worship. The abbot wrote, “the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material”. With this as his impetus, he went to work building a cathedral designed to bring heaven down to earth. He was aided by the invention of ribbed vaulting, flying buttresses and pointed arches allowing for much taller structures filled with glass instead of stone. He and his Gothic descendants ceased building small, dark churches made of thick stone walls and instead created enormous cathedrals full of height and light.

The very entrance into such a structure is an escape from temporal reality, and yet it is very much part and parcel of our actuality. Upon entering, you are overcome with a feeling of insignificance, suddenly overwhelmed by something much greater and larger than yourself. As one walks further into the central nave, the trajectory of your gaze turns skyward to the vast ceiling above. No-one can enter a Gothic cathedral without first looking towards heaven, it’s as natural as thunder following lightening. Suger and his 13th century craftsmen captured and expressed the very attributes of God. His architectural style echoes the words of Jesus when he said "if you know me, you know my father in heaven".  I can almost hear those great Gothic men of the past saying,

"come, enter this cathedral and look:  look at the grandeur, look at the height, experience the light, study the detail and symmetry, postulate on reason, engulf yourself in mystery, feel your own dependence and above all wonder; wonder at the majesty of it all because THIS IS WHAT GOD IS LIKE."  

From Westminster in England to Chartres in France, the Gothic style continues reminding us that God is near.

Oh the Humanities, Part 2

Where were we?  Ah yes, I was about to wet my pants…

I remember it like it was yesterday.  It was a warm, sunny spring morning in East Tennessee when redbuds, cherry blossom and pear trees burst forth in full bloom in defiance of their winter sojourn.  The day had all the makings of a Shelley poem, I think I even saw a cloud in the shape of Ozymandias.  My romantic interlude ended upon entering Hyder Auditorium.   175 of my classmates and I opened our blue books and gasped…

It was the final exam of our sophomore year of Humanities.  We explored the New World, Enlightened the West and brought the world into modernity.  There was only one thing left to do, pass the final exam.  I opened the exam and looked at the first essay question, it was 50% of the entire final.  The question, “What does it mean to be human”?

2,000 years and two years of study brought us to this one simple question.  Are you serious?  Suddenly, I was having a panic attack, I had to excuse myself.  The only place I could go was to the restroom. 

The question seemed simple and yet I had no idea how to answer it.  Being human, and the answer to what it means to be human, may be the second most important question anyone of us can ever ask.  It seems paramount that we actually have a viable answer for it.  So, what I’d like to do is to answer this question correctly this time.  Maybe once we’re done, I can turn this in and increase my Humanities grade. 

What Does it Mean to be Human?

Oh the Humanities, Part 1...

Today marks the end of Finals Week at Milligan College.  Students, at least those that survived, are headed home to enjoy a nice break from the academic grind.  I spoke with one young lady who mentioned scoring a whopping 41 on one exam.  Yikes!  I never did that poorly, though I do remember one specific exam that made me wet my pants…

 It was the end of my sophomore year at Milligan, our class was finally finishing the gauntlet of “Humanities”; a two-year, inter-disciplinary journey designed by Satan himself which studied western civilization from dawn until decadence.  Humanities combined the disciplines of history, art, literature, music, theology, philosophy and architecture into one gigantic tour de force of western culture.  It was both brutal and beautiful. 

We embarked as freshman from the cradle of civilization, Ancient Mesopotamia.  Here, we learned of Ziggurats, Cuneiform and the code of Hammurabi.  From the Tigris and Euphrates, we made our way down to Egypt and the Nile and then back up across the Mediterranean to meet our new friends the Minoans, Mycenaeans and Greeks.  Aristotle, Plato and Socrates taught us that reason and logic could supplant our ancient reliance on god while Protagoras announced that “man was the measure of all things”. 

Alexander and the Greeks paved our Hellenic way from Persia to Rome.  While in Rome, we did as the Romans by copying and stealing from our ancestors, via the Pardee Hall test bank.  And yet, there may not be a Milligan student alive today that cannot tell the difference between Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns.  Yes, we’re that disturbed.  We sailed through the Pax Romana and landed in Byzantium.   However, the sun soon set on humanity as the Dark Ages closed in with every onslaught of Hun and Ostrogoth.  Civilization hung in the balance as the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse spread famine, war, disease and death throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.  It was left to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire to set the world aright by bringing stability back to Europe.  The thousand year reign of terror came to a close.

As students, our first year of intellectual exploration was coming to an end, but not before Renaissance and rebirth.  Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli showed us through paint, oil, canvas and carvings that art expressed truth and beauty.  Our journey ended in Germany, where on the eve of All Saints’ Day in 1517, an Augustinian friar hammered the nail heard round the world on the door of the church at Wittenberg Castle. 

Oh, and the wetting of the pants part?  Well, we’ll leave that part of the story to next time…

Before going, it wouldn't be Humanities without Sir Kenneth Clarke, our old dear friend with the wonderful lisp and the amazing ties! Enjoy Milligan folk! 

A Beginning

Any attempt to write one's thoughts down on paper, or worse yet to publish such thoughts to the broader world is a fool's errand.  In this vain we begin, with great fear and trepidation.  Possibly because I might one day look back on the banality of these words and realize why I'd never attempted to journal before.  The proof will be in the pudding.

 I've titled this corner of the web "The Metanarrative".  Simply put, a metanarrative is any attempt to make sense of the world around us in terms of a larger story. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes.  This grand narrative prescribes to have a beginning, middle and an end.  The belief in a metanarrative provides a framework for understanding the human condition.  I believe there is a grand story taking place.  A story that has been taking place since the beginning of the universe, and one that will end with a new beginning.  It is within the larger story that each individual on the face of the earth finds context, meaning and significance. 

Seeing the world through the lense of a larger story destroys the self-aggrandizement of postmodernism, and in so doing provides freedom to each human actor in the play.  It is within the context of a larger story that this blog will attempt to make some sense of the world around us and to unpack some of the great questions of life.  Why am I here?  What is the meaning to life?  Is there really a standard for truth and beauty?  What's the solution to the mess that is life on planet earth?  Every person with a pulse wants the answers to these questions.  We may just find some of them as we begin to see life, the world and the cosmos within the context of a grand narrative.

Below is a video on the importance of History from my time with The Truth Project...

"Without History, Nothing has any Meaning." 
                                                                                                    Theodore Dalrymple