God and the Hurricane

Immediately following every natural disaster people begin to ask, "Where was God in all of this?" Atheists immediately jump in and say that this is simply more proof that the Almighty is a figment of our imaginations. In response, some tepid theologians will say that God's power and omniscience are limited, and that Sandy wasn't under the purview of divine providence. As a Christian holds to the Westminster Confession of Faith, I not only believe in God but believe that , "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass" (WCF, III, 1). In other words I, like the authors of the Westminster Confession  of Faith, believe that God was in the hurricane.

Before we scoff at what the divines had to say about God's providence, let's keep two things in mind. First, they wrote during a time in which there was vastly more "natural evil" than our own. They had to deal with horrendous infant mortality rates and plagues that could claim millions of lives. Moreover, they could not predict phenomena like hurricanes. As Sandy slammed onto the Jersey Shore about a hundred miles from where I live, I imagined what it must have been like for the first settlers of the New World, where hurricanes appeared randomly offshore without warning, leaving settlers with little time to find safety. So, let's remember that the authors of the Confession probably suffered far more horrendous instances of "natural evil "than us. We can't really say that they were naïve, middle-class Westerners who don't mean the true meaning of suffering when they penned that bit about God's sovereignty.

Secondly, let's bear in mind that denying God's total sovereignty really isn't helpful. If God does not exist, then Sandy was just something the universe does. There's no meaning or comfort in the midst of it. We just live in the middle of a really bad world where scores of people's lives are extinguished into annihilation without purpose. A god who isn't all-powerful or all-knowing, and thus could not have foreknown and controlled Sandy, is no less disconcerting. Is it really a comfortable thought to think that the entire universe - which is vastly more complicated than a hurricane - is run by a being who is really just a bigger version of ourselves? If God can't control a hurricane, what hope do we have that he can control the complex web of human relations in the world, which are often more unpredictable than a storm front? A god who is not totally sovereign over a hurricane makes for an incompetent manager universe in all its vast complexity. That is hardly a consoling thought.

So how do I reconcile my belief in a completely sovereign God with the terrors of Hurricane Sandy? First, I bear in mind something that isn't PC enough to usually enter into these kinds of discussions; the human condition. I don't just accept theism, I accept Christian theism and all that entails. I believe that humans, to a man, have chosen to pursue their own autonomy instead of God. Mankind has said to God, "We'll order our own lives thank-you very much! Please leave us alone!" And often God allows just that to happen. The Bible constantly speaks of God maintaining order over chaos, which, incidentally, is often typified as "the sea" or "the flood." In Genesis 1 God's Spirit brings order to the primeval, chaotic waters that, according to the narrative, comprised the world at creation. I believe that what happens in moments like a hurricane is that God gives us a glimpse of a what the world would be like if we really had our way and we could banish God from the world, or at least make him stand aloof above it. God unleashes chaos on us so that our ingratitude towards his ordering power is revealed. We cannot, on the one hand, demand that God relinquish his sovereignty over how we use money, sex, power, or even our own God-given abilities, and on the other hand demand to know why he hasn't been sovereign over the storm. Either we invite God to be our Lord or we don't, but in the latter case we best be prepared to accept the consequences.

Now, someone might interject here and say that God is Love, and if God were Love, then wouldn't he shower blessings on us despite the fact that we scorn him? But I think this would be the very opposite of love. If a parent spoils a disobedient child we don't think of that parent as loving. We'd hardly commend someone for good parenting who allows their five year old to throw tantrums and lob its toys at people. Similarly, God does not make a world that is not right a nice place to live in. God permits the chaos in the world to persist in order to give us a sense that a world full of people who pursue their own self-interest is horribly broken. Yet, in that instance of judgment, there is also grace. In times of disaster God gives us an opportunity to renounce our selfish, autonomous ways and help others in love. Ultimately, natural disasters cast a light onto the character of our own souls rather than the character of God.

Four Kinds of American Christianity

I have noticed four common strains of Christianity in America, each of which are defined by a particular emphasis. Interestingly, these strains cut across confessional and denominational boundaries. In my denomination (the PCA), all except the first are present, though in some corners there are moralizing tendencies due to the broadly Evangelical character of some PCA churches. This is because these four dispositions arise out of a uniquely modern experience (if not a uniquely American experience!) and are not fully addressed by any creedal or confessional statement. All could point to portions of creedal and confessional statements that support their disposition. Hence, it is important to understand that these are not doctrinal  differences but cultural differences.

Moral - This kind of Christianity emphasizes rectitude of living. It views the essence of Christianity as the creation of a people who conform to a certain moral standard, specifically the one given in the Bible.  It is not necessarily moralistic (at least in theory), but it does tend to be intolerant of moral mediocrity. It is morally rigorous - it views things like alcohol, smoking, dancing (except square-dancing), and non-Christian movies and TV as morally questionable if not immoral. High on its agenda is the purity of the Church and national moral renewal. Thus, it is a vocal opponent of things such as homosexuality, abortion, feminism, secularism, pluralism, and public displays of sexuality.

Doctrinal - Doctrinalists emphasize rectitude of doctrine. It views the essence of Christianity as believing and trusting in the right teachings. It is typically less stringent on some moral issues (such as drinking, smoking, and media), but does not tolerate doctrinal impurity. This rigor extends beyond essential , catholic doctrines to debates over egalitarianism vs. complementarianism, infralapsarianism vs. supralapsarianism, transformationalist  vs. two kingdom. The end of the Christian faith is to create a people who have a biblical worldview. Therefore, they tend to emphasize the intellectual and the didactic. Rectitude of doctrine is believed to show rectitude of heart; those who are doctrinally faulty are believed to be rebellious against God's word.

Emotional - Emotional Christianity emphasizes emotional experience. It views the essence of Christianity as the experience of spiritual highs that are therapeutic and calming. These spiritual experiences are gained through worship, prayer, Bible reading, and small groups. They heal a broken person that is suffering from low self-esteem, anxiety, sinful habits, and suffering. It is not rigorous on doctrine or moral behavior, but rather emphasizes sincerity of heart. What matters is whether or not a person is authentic. The end of the Christian faith is to put Christians in a personal relationship with their Friend, Jesus, who heals their woes.

Aesthetic  - Aesthetic Christians emphasize the vision of Christianity. The essence of Christianity is its narrative which gives meaning, hope, and spiritual transformation to the Church and the world. It focuses on the affections of a person. Christianity is about desiring the right thing (God) which is achieved through spiritual discipline and the means of grace. Since they emphasize the aesthetic and the beautiful, they tend have liturgical services and tend to be culturally sophisticated. Aesthetic Christians disavow the kitsch, the sterile, and the superficial. They tend to The end of the Christian faith is to make a people who desire God to participate in his vision for the world.

Use and Enjoyment

            In the beginning of his book De Doctrina Christiana St. Augustine relates a principle which is foundational for his entire system of theology: the distinction between use and enjoyment. First, Augustine says that there are signs of things and things in themselves; that is, there are some things (e.g. words) which are only used to signify something else. These things are signifiers which point beyond themselves to something that is greater than them and is represented by them. Secondly, he distinguishes between things which are to be used and those which are to be enjoyed. The things that we use are simply signs which point towards something which is to be used. It is this which ought to be the object of our ultimate love and desire. Hence the usable signs are meant to assist us and support us in our pursuit of that which we ought to truly enjoy, so it is wrong to take ultimate enjoyment in such things. When we do so we divert our attention away from the object which ought to be the proper focus of our enjoyment and settle for a lesser and finite joy. Augustine identifies the proper object of enjoyment as the Holy Trinity. For this reason he concludes that, 

. . .this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made – that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.¹

            Now Augustine does not mean that we should never enjoy or take pleasure in the things of this world. Augustine found great in joy of human love, especially as it was embodied in his mother, Monica, and in his circle of close friends. However, he also understood that while this love is good and should give us a degree of happiness it cannot be treated as ultimate. If we treat human love as ultimate we make it into an idol that competes with God. Love is only an analogy of the One who is Love. Human love is an image of or participant in the divine love, through which the divine love is mirrored. All of creation is an ectype of the divine Archetype and gives Him glory by displaying his perfections in created and finite form. Hence, loving our neighbor is the second greatest commandment and it is subordinated to the greatest commandment which is to love God. We are called to love our neighbor because our neighbor is made after the image of God and therefore by loving our neighbor we love God indirectly. 

            Hence, all things that God has created are goods, but they are not the ultimate Good. So to Augustine it is no sin to love a friend or take a measure of happiness in the beauty of creation insofar as our love of a friend draws us into contemplation of God’s love and our admiration of created beauty points us towards the majesty of the God who is the Creator. For Augustine the problem comes when our loves are disordered and we enjoy ectypal good instead of the archetypal Good. What Augustine means by enjoyment of something “is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake.”² It is to treat it as the telos of human existence. Neither human love nor any other finite good is the telos of human existence and we are not to rest in them. God alone is to be our chief love and supreme object of desire: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds its rest in you.”³ All other loves must be properly ordered beneath Him and directed towards our ultimate end of enjoying Him. Sin – and restlessness – results when we exalt a lesser good to the status of ultimate enjoyment. 

The Old Testament prophets use the imagery of adultery to describe what happens when we make some finite thing the primary object of our affections. Indeed, in idolatry we turn away from our true bride, Christ, and commit spiritual fornication in our fleeting romance with our temporal lovers. Like an adulterer who loses interested in their good and loving spouse and pursues a destructive and mutually hurtful affair with someone else, so we are wont to lose interest in the ultimate good and settle for lesser goods. We settle for these lesser goods because, unlike the infinite God, they are finite and we think that we can exercise power over them and bend them to our will. By doing so we hope to gain ultimate joy without submitting to God and therefore retain our autonomy. We cannot control God so we turn to idols that we can control. Ultimately, we all have a god complex; we want to have all joy in ourselves without recourse to a higher a good, just as it is with God. When he analyzed his own sin, Augustine recognized this defining characteristic of sin:

Thus the soul is unfaithful to you when it turns away from you and seeks outside of you the things it cannot find in pure and unmixed form until it returns to you. All who forsake you and set themselves up against you are acting in perverse imitation of you.⁴

Augustine placed this discussion of use and enjoyment at the beginning of his manual for Christian teaching in order to ensure that those who would do theology would remember that the enjoyment of God is always the proper end of theology. Whenever our hearts and our energies are directed towards the ultimate enjoyment of something other than God we find ourselves in idolatry. God is the highest good; he alone is worthy to be enjoyed in and of Himself. Everything else is to be enjoyed only to the degree that it reflects Him. To settle for less than God is to settle for less than the best and to put our hope in something finite and unworthy of the weight we place on it. And like anything which has excessive weight placed on it the finite things we substitute for God will fail. Human love is imperfect and will often disappoint us. Our relationships with others will always be marked with difficulties. Our material possession will be corrupted by rust and moth, beauty will fade, progress will negated by regress, riches will relapse into poverty, and all earthly glory is fleeting. God alone is infinitely beautiful, infinitely good, and infinitely loving and he alone is unchanging and incorruptible. 

            The contemporary Church has forgotten the Augustinian distinction between use and enjoyment. It has charged headlong into adultery with lesser goods, enjoying them instead of using them for the enjoyment of the One who is Good. We Christians are guilty of enjoying many things which ought to be used and putting many loves before God. There are idols on the “Left” and on the “Right,” so to speak. We are wont to make social justice, a better self, high self-esteem, national greatness, a moral society, and immaculate systematic theologies the chief end of man instead of the enjoyment of God. In all cases we settle for a loves which are less than the glory of God because we deem them safer. We think that we have greater control over them since they do not have the same piercing and unbearable glory that God has. Before the majesty of God we are horribly exposed and the extent of our filthiness and unrighteousness is laid bare. So instead of placing ourselves in the presence of God we worship things that we can better measure up to and which we fancy we can manipulate. Ultimately, we are seeking righteousness apart from God so that our autonomy can be preserved. We want a religion of therapeutic theism or civil religion because being true to oneself or being a good conservative American is easier for broken creatures like ourselves to swallow than to have our nakedness exposed before God. 

C. S. Lewis aptly summarized our situation: 

Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.⁵

Lewis could just as easily have said we are creatures fooling about with authenticity, social justice, patriotism, the Law, doctrine for doctrine’s sake, and human love. All of these things are good, but they are good only insofar as they are directed towards God and made subservient to His glory. When we make these things the ends of our religion, rather than the means by which we glorify and enjoy God, we are far too easily pleased with lesser goods.

            Often our unfaithfulness is easy to miss because we invoke God in our pseudo-Christianities, by we try make God the means rather than the end. We pretend that God is a pagan god who can be bought and manipulation with praise and sacrifices so that He can be bribed into giving us the object that we really want to enjoy. How we try to use God rather than enjoy Him is powerfully displayed in the movie Amadeus, a film adaption of Peter Shaffer’s play of the same name. The plot revolves around the highly fictionalized lives of composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. From an early age Salieri dreams of becoming a great composer and prays to God that he will give his life to God and remain celibate if only God would bless him with musical genius, ostensibly so he glorify God with beautiful music. Salieri becomes the court composer for the emperor of Austria and comes to believe that God has accepted his offer, until he meets Mozart. He is absolutely repulsed by Mozart since Mozart is obscene, crude, and licentious. Salieri simply cannot believe that God would choose to give such great gifts to such an impious little man. After Mozart proves to possess vastly superior musical genius to him, Salieri renounces God and commits himself to a life of vengeance against Mozart. He chooses to believe that God has viciously decided to mock him rather than allow him to glorify Him through music. Thus, it quickly becomes apparent in the movie that the glory Salieri really had in mind all along rather was his own. The fictionalized composer believed that he could bribe God into doing Salieri’s will. He was using God for the purpose of enjoying something else, namely the glory of Salieri. As a result, he is eventually driven to madness. 

            Like Salieri we often try to sound pious by adorning our practices and our theology with righteous-sounding words. Phrases such as “transforming the cultural for Christ” and “spreading the gospel” can often be euphemisms for thinly sanctified versions of the political Left or Right. “Personal renewal” can be used in lieu of “therapeutic deism.” As Christians, we must remember to always keep God at the center of our faith. Only when we recognize Him as the One who is eminently worth being enjoyed above all other gods and Him alone will we become a mature Church.

1.     Augustine, De Doct. Christ. I. 4.

2.    Ibid.

3.    Augustine, Conf. I. 1. 1.

4.    Ibid., II. 6. 14.

5.     C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” Theology, Nov. 1941, 1.

What is Love?

If you were to ask ten people of my generation what the highest good is, my guess nine of them would say love. My generation, raised on a steady diet of Disney, has grown up with the belief that love is the highest good. But do we really comprehend what love is? I am of the opinion that we don't. Most people around my age confuse love with tolerance. But tolerance is largely a passive disposition – especially since my generation tends to confuse tolerance with apathy – whereas love is active. By and large my generation thinks that love means that we should “live and let live.” We don’t care who you sleep with, what your religion is, or what kind of background you come from because we are apathetic about these things. We simply don’t have any capital invested in them. It is hypocritical when, in the name of love, we self-righteously demand those who do have capital invested in these things to change. Our notion of "love" doesn't require anything on our part, other than labeling anyone who disagrees with us as “intolerant” (an ironically moralistic phenomenon).

The problem is that our love tends to be therapeutic. We don't want to give up anything out of love, but we like to feel like we are people who practice love towards others. Kindly apathy or half-baked  slacktivism are cheap ways to make us all come away feeling good about ourselves and morally righteous. Our notion of love is not self-giving and for that reason it is not love at all. It doesn't give up anything, except for the pittance of our parents' money we spent on the "Free Tibet" or the "Save Darfur" t-shirts we bought. In reality, we have no right to demand that homophobes bigots, or religious dogmatists learn to self-sacrificially love when we don't do the same. If we did, we would learn what love really is. It isn't apathy, thinly disguised as tolerance. It is something far richer. Real love is unconditional and self-sacrificial. It means counting others more significant than ourselves.

My understanding of love is unapologetically religious. Though non-religious people, and people who do not share my specific religion (Christianity) should be able to appreciate and practice this conception of love, I believe that it is ultimately only justified by the Christian religion. This is because God is at the center of the Christian religion and God is love (1 John 4:8). And God can be love because of the uniquely Trinitarian character of the Christian God. The being of God eternally unfolds into threefold personality of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God, therefore, is essentially tri-personal. His being overflows with life and personality. The Father is the fountain of the Godhead. He eternally generates the Son, and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from both of them. However, each of these persons are consubstantial with each other, meaning that the three persons are one divine being. As a result, there is something like a community within God because each of the persons have eternally related to each other and eternally inhered within each other in what is called perichoresis - or the divine dance. The three persons within God have eternally loved another in self-giving love.  Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, expressed this when he said, "I am in the Father and the Father is in me" (John 14:10).Therefore it is possible to say that God from all eternity is love. The Trinity is inherently mysterious, but it is also inherently wonderful since only a Triune God can eternally be love. Any other god could not be loving until he created someone to love.

God did not simply exist as self-enclosed love for all eternity, but decided to create other beings whom he could love and who in return could also love (him as well as each other). This is partially what Christians mean when they say that God created man after his image; we are meant to love and be loved in return just as, internally, God loves and is loved. Specifically, God has created a covenant - a mutually and permanently binding relationship - with man, where if man loves God with all his heart as his chief end, God will not withhold himself from man. And this highlights the defining characteristic of love; it is giving yourself up to another. God has given himself to man by condescending to us. God did not have to make us; he was perfectly happy with the eternal love of his Trinitarian nature. Yet he decided to create us and bind himself in a covenantal relationship with us. In return we are to give ourselves up to God by desiring him with all our heart, soul, and strength. Hence, all love is covenantal in nature; it involves a mutual self-surrender to another. Of course, God's covenant with man differs from Trinitarian love in several ways. Primarily, it is unequal. This unequal love is very difficult for us to understand because we are so egalitarian. Yet if one thing it is certain, God is a entirely different species from us; he is divine, we are not. God does not need us, but we need him. Our relationship with God is always one of a king with his subject; God stoops down to us, whereas we lift our arms up to him. Yet there are analogies of inequality in human relationships. For example, the love of a parent and a child is quite unequal. The parent, though truly giving herself up in the love of a child, is in a position of authority over the child. Thus in covenantal relationships unconditional self-giving does not conflict with inequality. And, contrary to what our culture thinks, it is the former rather than the latter which is the true hallmark of love.

Perhaps a covenantal relationship - which is simply saying true love - can be better understood when it is contrasted with another kind of relationship: a consumer relationship.1 A consumer relationship is not binding or unconditional. It exists so long as both sides are getting what they want out of it. The two parties do not irrevocably give themselves up to each other. Yet, this is precisely what happens in a covenantal relationship. We no do not remain in our friendships and familial relationships only until they inconvenience us. Rather, we are permanently bound to our friends and brothers and sisters. When we enter into a consumer relationship with someone the end is not that person but whatever we get from them. We use them rather than love them. But in a covenantal relationship, the person is the end in itself.

The nature of love is further displayed through God's grace towards us. God entered into a covenant with us, which we broke by loving ourselves rather than him. Our relationships are now tend to be directed solely toward our own gratification and glorification.  Yet God is faithful to the covenant he made with those whom he called to himself from all eternity. Taking on the form of a servant he humbled himself by becoming a man. In the Incarnation God shows his love for us by making the ultimate self-sacrifice in an act of unconditional love. He suffered death so that our debt to God might be paid and our sins cancelled. God, in the Person of the Son, made himself the sacrifice that restored us to a relationship with him.  As Paul put it, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:2).  And Jesus himself said that "greater love has no one that this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (Jn. 15:13). He said this with regard to himself who had just said, "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you." Thus we see that God loves us with the same love that abides within the Trinity. It is a love that "does not insist on its own way" and which "bears all things" (1 Corinth. 13: 5, 7). It is a love that does not insist on its rights but gives them up for the benefit of another, for the Son of God did not retain his rightful place at the glorious right hand of the Father but came down to our broken world and partook in our sufferings for our sake. Love fundamentally must involve grace.

Therefore, Christ is to be the model of love that we look to. God is Love and Christ, as Incarnate God, is Love made flesh. If we are to truly know what it means to love, we are to be imitators of Christ. We are to account one another more significant than ourselves, just as Christ accounted his own life nothing and gave it up for our own sake. If we are to truly love, we must give up our rights and bind ourselves in a covenant with our beloved. We must give up a part of ourselves to another. Any love worthy of the name must be unconditional. Hence, we see that real love is the furthest thing from apathy. Love is not content to live and let live, but strives to enter into the complicated and often messy tangled web of human relationships. We pay people an intolerable compliment when we love them, since love squashes all pretense to autonomy when it binds two souls together. Love argues, chides, and even disapproves because love is not satisfied with politeness but pushes on to speak the truth even when it is hard. Real love is not "romantic" either. Love does not always involve feeling loving or loving someone who is lovable. In fact, it may rarely involve these things. Love is an action undertaken by the heart in spite of how we feel about other people. When we love, disagreements and differences are not dissolved, but rather love proceeds despite of these things. "Love endures all things" (1 Corinth. 13:7). When we love, we do not forget our zeal for our religious creeds, our realization that others are imperfect sinners, or our partisan politics. Instead, we imitate Christ's love by retaining our zeal all the while having compassion and loving our very enemies. When we do so we pass beyond the shallow realm of tolerance and arrive at nothing less than pure agape.

1. What follows is an adaption of a part of a sermon I heard Tim Keller preach on May 6, 2012 entitled "Love and Lust."

The Incomprehensibility of God and Worship

One day I was having a kindly conversation with an elderly church lady. This particular woman went to a rather large suburban church which placed on emphasis on evangelism and on attracting a large number of people to the church. Our conversation turned to worship; she said she said her church decided to opt for a more informal worship style with praise songs because it made worship easier for those who were new to the church. "People who come in off the street simply don't understand the old hymns that churches are used to singing," she said. "They have words and ideas that are difficult for new Christians or non-Christians to understand, and their tone is so serious." Her sentiment is shared by many American Christians. Many Evangelicals, especially those who were raised according to the ethos of mass evangelism (which has become very popular since the 1950s), express a desire to be "seeker sensitive." Thus worship is dumbed down (I have honestly heard proponents of this view express it just like this) so that worship is "easier" for non or new Christians. Hence praise songs are substituted for theologically rich hymns (whether old or new), the sermon is exchanged for a message (which is made to be more "practical"), and the sanctuary is traded for a auditorium.

While the motivations of seeker-sensitive churches may be sincere, and their efforts on behalf of nonbelievers laudable, their understanding of what underpins worship is inherently flawed. The chief end of worship is never man but God. How we shape our worship services is dictated primarily by our understanding of who God is and how He wishes to be worshiped. Dialectically, how we worship God influences how we understand Him. Thus worship begins and ends with God. The desires of man concerning worship must never be allowed to trump those of God. If our worship is not guided by and aimed at the majestic and incomprehensible essence of God, it is not God we worship at all.

When considering who God is, we must always start with His incomprehensibility. God is infinitely more than we can ever grasp. We say that God is beautiful, and by seeing His beauty reflected in His creation we understand what God's attribute of beauty must be, but in all of our reflections on the beauty of nature we never fully comprehend God's beauty exhaustively. Beauty, as we understand it is only a glimpse of who God is. This is because God is an infinite being. Indeed, the concept of numerical infinity may be a useful analogy. No person (since we are all finite) at possibly grasp the idea of infinity. No doubt when we think of infinity we form analogies in our head; we may, for instance, think of double-arrowed line endlessly extending in both directions, such as we learned in geometry. Or we may think of an infinite set: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5…]. But no picture that we form in our head, though helpful and true, fully comprehends infinity. So it is with God. Another way of expressing this is by saying that God is transcendent and He is holy. He is perfection.

Our worship must reflect this. Worship, while using elements of the created world, such as sound waves, paper and ink, bread, and wine must point beyond those things. Worship lifts our minds to God and induces us to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Many people are under the impression that the elements of worship are neutral, and that it does not matter much how we worship God so long as we are sincere. This is an unfortunate misunderstanding. One of the  Greek philosopher who knew better famously said that if children could only be instructed in two courses, they should be gymnastics and music. He understood that music can have a profound affect on people. Some music can bring people to tears, while other music can drive people at a rock concert into a frenzy. In other words, music is formative. It determines the affective and pre-intellectual realm of dispositions, desires, and attitudes. The same is true of other forms of art and media of communication; everything communicates something to us, even if it does so subconsciously for the most part. Thus some forms of worship will communicate the idea of the majesty and transcendence of God and form within us a disposition of reverence towards God's transcendence and majesty. Other forms will not. It is important to remember here that those outside of the church do not love God. They come to church in order to learn to love God. Hence, it follows that since the heart of a non-Christian is set against God and the point of worship is to confront the non-Christian with the reality of the glory of the  God he is fleeing from, the non-Christian should not be the one influencing the form of worship. This is giving the fox the key to the hen house, so to speak.

True worship then is worship that confronts us with the reality of God's transcendence and holiness as communicated through various different elements. A good (yet controversial!) case study is music. It should go without saying that certain kinds music produce certain kind of effects within us. The music of Romanticist composers (e.g. Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner) produce an "epic" feeling within us. This is why this kind of music is often played during battle scenes or other climatic moments in movies and operas (for instance, think of how many movies you have watched where Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyrie s" is play during a dramatic scene ). Similarly, certain kinds of music convey a sense of transcendence, such as the Classical music of Bach or Mozart. This is why I tend to favor traditional hymns in worship; I believe that they convey the holiness of God more effectively than other forms (though I should stress "traditional" hymnody is not the only kind of music that communicates God's holiness; I do not want to enter into the debate between praise choruses and traditional hymns here). Likewise, the words in our music ought to do the incomprehensible majesty of God justice. Language that is poetic, thoughtful, and rich does this better than language that is shallow, relatively thoughtless, and cliché-ridden. If even our best language concerning God fails to due God's majesty justice, how much less does that which is poor and generally thoughtless? God's revelation of himself to us is a great gift and we must possess it with care. We must truthfully and faithfully represent the majesty of God.

Why I Don't Want a Christian America (and Neither Should You)

One of the greatest things about my seminary is the diversity. Having grown up and attended college up in homogeneous Western PA, I have a chance to finally meet people from an array of different cultures, nationalities, and ethnicities. Over the course of the year I have become quite good friends with a British student named Philip. We enjoy talking about theology, culture, and politics (usually over a beer), as well as occasionally and playfully mocking each others nationality.

One evening I brought up the recent retirement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. I asked him who he thought his replacement would be. He informed me that typically the Church of England alternates between a theological conservative and a theological liberal. Rowans (at least from an Evangelical perspective) was liberal, so a conservative ought to take his place. Yet there is a complication: the Church of England is a state church, which means that the Archbishop of Canterbury is chosen by Parliament. The problem is that British Prime Minister David Cameron, as part of an effort to modernize the Tories by dropping the party's historical social conservatism, is a strong advocate of gay marriage. Whereas gay marriage is largely a social issue in the US, it is a messy political-ecclesial issue in Britain because the Church of England baptizes, marries, and buries British subjects. In other words, the legalization of gay marriage in Britain means that the Church of England would have to marry homosexual couples. However, while the Church has a broad social function, its primary religious functions are increasingly dominated by theological conservatives, whether Evangelicals or Anglo-Catholics, because these are the only people who still regularly attend church in Britain. Hence, against the wishes (and conscience) of the greater portion of its active members, the Church of England may soon be required to wed homosexuals. No doubt these Anglican parishioners will be quite upset. Social conservatism largely dead in Britain (hence, Cameron's decision to ditch this platform) so lobbying against gay marriage would probably only cause resentment. Philip told me that what this means is that the messy disestablishment of the Church sometime down the road is probably inevitable.

Thus, the irony is this: whereas American Evangelicals want to preserve a Christian America, British Evangelicals wish to hasten the end of Christian Britain.

Though American Evangelicals do not want to officially bind church and state together in America, they do tend to yearn for the days when Protestantism was unofficially established in American culture. Up until the twentieth century Protestants, or at least a Protestant ethos, wielded tremendous influence over public schools, colleges and universities, local governments, and local communities. The presence of a chapel on the campuses of many public universities is a testament to this fact. But as American high culture became increasingly secular, this cultural hegemony was challenged. Ugly culture wars were fought, and are still fought, between those who want to see a strong Christian presence in American culture, and those want Christianity banished from it altogether.

Christianity in America has been historically tied so close to American culture that many Christians don't know how to get along without being culturally established. Many Christians push for a Christianized America because their very identities are tied up with the national culture. As a result, the religious nature of American Christianity gets sidetracked by the nasty arena of politics. Three decades of lobbying by the religious right has done little more than cause deep-seated bitterness towards Christianity from non-Christians. Hence, Christians have allowed themselves to caught up in the messiness of identity politics, uncivil discourse, and resentment that dominates most of the public square.

Another one of the ill-effects of this cultural secularization was Protestant liberalism. Virtually all of the mainline churches were so inextricably tied to American culture as established institutions within that culture that they found it impossible to resist the rising tide of modernism. As a result the mainline denominations, just like the Church England, had to compromise their values due to a messy alliance with an increasingly secular culture. This compromise involved a nasty divorce proceeding, just as the Church of England may soon also face. The plethora of splinter Presbyterian denominations is a testament to the bitter separation that occurred between Evangelicals and the mainline cultural establishment.

The lesson to be learned is that a "Christian America" is a double edged sword. Culture can transform Christianity instead of Christianity transforming culture. For many Christians the line between Christianity and Americanism became so blurred that when the latter exerted pressure on the former to compromise their values, they had little ability to resist. Liberal Christians have largely given orthodox values in order to become "modern" or "progressive." Evangelical circles have compromised as well. The profusion of consumerist, therapeutic, and nationalist Christianity in American churches, particularly in the mega-church churches, is a witness to the fact that Christianity often prostitutes itself out when seeks cultural establishment.

If we are unable to learn from our own past, let us at least learn from what is going on in Britain right now. The Church must ultimately stand with one foot in the world and with the other in the City of God. We must strive for the difficult paradox of antithesis to and contextualization within our culture. Only then will the integrity of the body of Christ be kept.

A Cautionary Warning Concerning the "Relevance" Ethos

The decline of regular church attendance over the past two to three decades has spurred several recent surveys of American Christianity which pay special attention to why Christians leave the Church. Many Christians are understandably concerned by the exodus of people from the pews, particularly young people. Hence, there have been recent campaigns to make the church "relevant." The Emergent Church is an outstanding example of this.

First, let me say that I am an outstanding supporter of theological contextualization. There is a definite need for the Church to constantly contextualize itself in whatever cultural situation(s) it finds itself in and to make use of the "gold of the Egyptians" - a la Origen and St. Augustine. The reactionary and fundamentalist attitude that orthodox American Christianity has had over the last century is lamentable. I by no means desire a Christianity that is hostile to outsiders and adopts Bob Jones University's attitude toward to culture. The Church has been too cold, too political, and too legalistic and a prudent movement away from these things is most welcome.

Yet at the same time a word of caution is in order. Though many Christians are understandably upset by Christianity's bizarre and at times un-Christlike sub-culture, they can often be far too naïve self-depreciating. First, it must be recognized that there is more to the numbers than what meets the eye. The fact that people are leaving the Church doesn't imply the Church in America is declining. For most of America's history regular church attendance was considered to be a sign of upstanding citizenship and morality. Hence, many people attended church for formal or social reasons rather than from true piety. Similarly, many Catholics have historically attended Mass (during Christmas and Easter at least!) and engaged the rituals of the Catholic Church because it is part of their ethnic heritage. So as social approval for regular church attendance wanes and the importance of ethnic identity for Irish, Poles, and Italians lessens, it is likely that those who were once regular attendees for reasons other than true piety will cease to be so. To a great extent our society is polarizing over religion and the middle ground of vague, ethnic or formal Christianity is disappearing.

Secondly, it is naïve to take many of the reasons people give for leaving the church at face value. I know many people who claim to have left the church because Christians are "hypocritical" or "uncaring", when in reality they left the church because they disliked the strong claims Christianity made on their individualism. My generation's distaste for anything that gets in the way of our claim to individual autonomy is, I suspect, one of the reasons why so many twenty-somethings stop attending church regularly. For instance, a sermon that faithfully and pastorally preaches the Christian sexual ethic can easily evoke cries of "moralism" or "hypocrisy," despite the fact the pastor preached in a loving and Christ-like manner. Often it is simply the case that essential tenets or values of Christianity are at variance with the worldly values of a erstwhile church-goers. People say that Christianity is too homophobic, sexist, prudish, or authoritarian, when what they really mean is that they dislike the church's unalterable teaching on homosexuality, gender roles, chastity, and obedience in contrast to individual autonomy. These are Christian teachings and we cannot change them. We cannot reject the commands of Christ and adopt the ethos of the world without damaging the integrity of our faith.

Moreover, it is naïve to think that if the church simply became more "seeker friendly" and more flexible that unbelievers would be pouring in. We must remember that there is a sharp distinction to be drawn between a sincere seeker of spiritual experiences and a sincere seeker of the Triune God. In a secular society, we often forget that a mere desire for the spiritual does not equal a desire to be formed by God's will. People will charge the church with hypocrisy or moralism or exclusivity simply because they cannot and will not surrender themselves to God. If you pander to these people, you will find yourself adapting Christianity until there is little true Christianity left. The problem that such people have with Christianity is simply that it is Christianity. We must understand that the there is always the offense of the cross. It is foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block for the Jews. So while it is wise to take a healthy dose of criticism in order to grow in sanctification, we must avoid self-flagellation over those who won't accept Christianity no matter how appetizing we make it.