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The potential offensiveness of 'come unto me' is nullified if we imagine the one speaking is obviously God. Christendom looks to the great number of years that have passed, people who call themselves Christian, or nations that are founded on Christian morality and concludes Jesus was God as a matter of common sense. The only reason someone does not believe in Jesus is because they do not know enough information about him and the history of the culture of his followers. Yet, Anti-Climacus is keen to remind us, this is not the person who the disciples first met. The 'obviousness' of Jesus' divinity is not apparent if one is standing directly before him. Thus, to have the faith of the disciples Jesus demanded cannot be to assent to the historical and intellectual data that comprises the Christian religion. Even the miracles recorded in the New Testament are not presented as proof of Jesus' status. They are instead crisis points at which the people around him are brought up short before someone who looks and sounds and smells like a finite person and yet who talks and acts like an infinite one.

“Kierkegaard: A Single Life” by Stephen Backhouse, page 253.

We need to take up an ancient lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is the conviction that 'less is more.' A constant flood of new consumer goods can baffle the heart and prevent us from cherishing each thing and each moment. To be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfillment. Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack. This implies avoiding the dynamic of dominion and the mere accumulation of pleasures.

Pope Francis, Praise Be to You, 222

True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today's media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us form direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also rise.

Pope Francis, Praise Be to You

5.1 For Christians, neither by country or language or customs, are distinguished from the rest of humanity. 2 For they do not dwell somewhere in their own cities, nor do they use some strange language, nor do they practice a peculiar way of life. 3 This teaching of theirs has not been found by any thought or reflection of inquisitive people, nor do they advocate human doctrine, as some do. 4 But while living in both Greek and barbarian cities, as each have obtained by lot, and while following the local customs both in clothing and in diet and in the rest of life, they demonstrate the wonderful and most certainly strange character of their own citizenship. 5 They live in their own countries, but as aliens. They share in everything as citizens and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign country is ⌊their country⌋, and every country is foreign.

Letter to Diognetus

Brannan, R. (Trans.). (2012). The Apostolic Fathers in English. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.

Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it.

The Vacation, by Wendell Berry

#poetry #wendell berry

The voluntary consent of the individual citizen, it was now clear, was the elemental principle and political power source. Jefferson's level of mistrust toward the different branches of the federal government had followed naturally from this principle: The federal courts were the furthest removed from popular consent, and he hated them the most; the Senate came next, followed closely by the president, then the House of Representatives; the state legislatures were then closer to the popular will; county representatives were closer still, and town or what he called ward officials stood face-to-face with the elemental source itself, the semisacred 'will of the people.'

Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphynx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, page 312.

The diagnostic tests that we should run — and should continually be running — ought to be informed by a clearer concept of what our freedom is for and the sorts of shapes that it takes. The bigger questions that we need to address are as follows: Do our particular uses of our smartphones, and our use of a smartphone more generally, have the actual effect — not just hold the theoretical possibility — of making us better servants of God and of our neighbors? Are our smartphones tools that facilitate our commitment to the central purposes and values of our lives, or are they — and our habitual modes of using them — constantly distracting, diverting, or obstructing us from them? More specific diagnostic questions could include such as the following: 1. Is my smartphone making it difficult for me to give the activities and persons in my life the full and undivided attention and self-presence that they require and deserve? 2. Do I habitually use my smartphone as an easy escape and distraction from the difficult task of wrestling through the experience of lack of stimulation and boredom to the rewarding reality of true engagement? 3. Is my smartphone use squeezing out my inner life, encroaching upon time that would otherwise be given to private contemplation, reflection, and meditation? Do I use it as a way to distract myself from unsettling truths and realities that can slowly come into focus in moments of silence and solitude? 4. Am I using hyper-connectedness to substitute a self unthinkingly immersed in a shallow and amniotic communal consciousness and its emotions, for the difficult task of developing my own judgment, character, disciplines, resolve, and identity? 5. Are my uses of my smartphone arresting and hampering my processes of deliberation and reflection, encouraging reactive judgments and premature decisions? 6. Is my use of my smartphone mediating my relationship with and understanding of myself in unhealthy ways? 7. Is my smartphone a tool that I use, or has it fettered my attention and time to other persons and activities that are wasteful and overly demanding of them? 8. Are my uses of my smartphone preventing me from developing and maintaining healthy patterns and routines in my life, disrupting my sleeping patterns, interrupting my concentration upon my work, habituating me to the fragmentation of my time and attention? 9. Is my smartphone usage consuming time that I used to or could potentially devote to worthier activities? Do I use my smartphone to “kill time” that I could otherwise fill with prayer, reading, writing, edifying conversation, face-to-face interactions, and more? 10. Are my uses of my smartphone conducive to the faithfulness and freedom of others? Am I using my smartphone in ways that create unhealthy demands and pressures upon them?

Part of a longer and very thoughtful interaction about mobile devices: Going Deep on Our Smartphone and Social Media HabitsAn Interview with Alastair Roberts

Major universities, having set aside most of their residual links to Protestantism, effectively adopted privatization as their default position regarding religious belief. Speaking from a religious perspective was not banned, but it was an uncommon and often unwelcomed exception to the assumed norms. Yet privatization left an unaddressed problem. Vast numbers of Americans are seriously religious, and there is no way to build a “wall of separation” between their private beliefs and their public activities. This is especially true in education, where beliefs are formed, challenged, and refined. Despite growing emphasis on the value of recognizing diversity in American public life in the decades following the 1960s, few applied that principle to religion. In fact, the contrary was more often the case. People with religious beliefs were expected to act as though their faith was irrelevant to their identity in the academic sphere.

George Marsden, “A More Inclusive Pluralism”

A good and long essay, with a constructive proposal based on Kuyper.

The second problem for much of conservative Protestantism is a related one, highlighted by Roger Scruton. Scruton has rightfully stated that it is “surely impossible to flee from kitsch by taking refuge in religion, when religion itself is kitsch.” (The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, p. 92). There is indeed an unbearable, kitschy lightness to so much that passes for conservative Protestant life and thought. The theology that sells is by and large a cheap, rootless imitation of the real thing. Year after year, the same brand names churn out bland, lightweight books on whatever is the topic of the moment, with no regard to authorial competence. It is the names that sell, after all. And thus the same speakers fill the same conference rosters time after time, with the supercharged aesthetics of the platforms distracting the audience from the insipid content of the performances. So much sound and fury. So much signifying nothing. I suspect this cannot be sustained, or at least cannot be sustained with the same audience, over an extended period of time. It is kitsch and therefore ephemeral. If we imitate the shallowness of pop culture, we can expect to replicate the life expectancy of the same. Boy bands come and boy bands go, after all. Popular fashion is indeed a cruel mistress, and a faith whose practices and idioms are really anchored in the tastes of the moment is inextricably tied to that moment. ...The big money parachurch ministries depend upon constant recreation of a market for theological kitsch, and theological kitsch drives out the kind of deep thought which really does need to be the focus of the church’s efforts and resources at this point. Therein, I suspect, lies the coming crisis of conservative Protestantism.

Carl Trueman in First Things: https://t.co/78N1YStrfU?ssr=true

Election years tend to incite fevered reactions because it seems as though everything is at stake. There’s much at stake, to be sure, but we should put it in a trillion-year perspective that can allow us not to panic. No one and nothing will take our country away from us—if we define correctly what we mean ultimately when we say “country” and what we mean when we say “us.” Our temptation to fear and rage should remind us that we should be seeking to cultivate the sort of love that binds us to our ultimate tribe and calls us to our ultimate home.

Russell Moore, “Reading Augustine in an Election Year”

The living can't quit living because the world has turned terrible and people they love and need are killed. They can't because they don't. The light that shines in darkness and never goes out calls them on into life. It calls them back again into the great room. It calls them into their bodies and into the world, into whatever the world will require. It calls them into work and pleasure, goodness and beauty, and the company of other loved ones.

“Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry

One of the great tragedies of the church in America is how many of our most creative leaders poured their energies into creating forms of church life that served just a single generation. Even when these efforts were built around something larger than a single personality, they were doomed to seem dated and 'irrelevant' even to the children of their founders. Perhaps a new generation of leaders will arise who want to build for posterity, to plant seeds that will take generations to bear fruit, to nurture forms of culture that will be seen as blessings by our children's children. If we are serious about flourishing, across space and through time, we will be serious about institutions.

Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power (pg. 188)

The ethical issues that confront Christians who try to discern the will of God in Scripture are, as I shall try to show in this book, far more nuanced than a simple conservative/liberal polarity would suggest. One reason that the church has become so bitterly divided over moral issues is that the community of faith has uncritically accepted the categories of popular U.S. discourse about these topics, without subjecting them to sustained critical scrutiny in light of a close reading of the Bible.

Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament

ayjay-deactivated20161206

An Unprofessional Review

Ashley Null’s review of my biography of the Book of Common Prayer is really irresponsible work. Let me briefly explain.

Null writes that Jacobs “welcomes the rise of the Oxford Movement, since the “flamboyantly emotional and wholly word-based” approach to spirituality which preceded it could only be “effective in the short term” but in the long run was “disastrous” (127) — a conclusion so many evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail have reached in our own day.” He describes this as my “having happily nailed [my] colors to the mast” — my Anglo-Catholic colors.

But here’s what I actually wrote:

The Tractarians believed that the evangelicals pursued this goal [of the spiritual renewal of the English people] by wholly inadequate means, and that the evident waning of evangelical energy and influence in the first decades of the nineteenth century demonstrated this inadequacy. For Newman and his confederates, Whitefield’s neglect of the traditional formal worship of the church in favor of a flamboyantly emotional and wholly word-based model of spirituality may have been effective in the short term, but in the long had been disastrous. Even Wesley’s attachment to formal worship had been deficient; his followers were far more neglectful. The evangelicals, like some of the seeds in Jesus’s parable of the sower, had sprung up quickly, but “when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away” (Matthew 13:6).

Quite obviously, then, I have not nailed my colors to the Anglo-Catholic mast: I am describing the Anglo-Catholics’ own view of things (“the Tractarians believed” … “For Newman and his confederates”). How Null came to the conclusion that views I so clearly mark as belonging to others are my own, I cannot imagine.

In fact, while I strive throughout the book not to take sides in the various Anglican controversies but to represent everyone as even-handedly as possible, at the end of that same chapter I couldn’t refrain from expressing some concern about the Anglo-Catholic way:

All this was done in professed and usually genuine obedience to the Ornaments Rubric, but the practices nevertheless can feel quite distant from Cranmer’s belief in the power of words to convey theological truth, and his consequent insistence that priests should enunciate their prayers clearly and “in a loud voice.” The auditory churches of the Restoration era did much to capture this impulse, even as they neglected much of the ceremonial power of the pre-Reformation church, but in justifiably seeking to restore those ceremonies, the Ritualists may have erred in the opposite direction. They transformed Cranmer’s powerful words into a kind of ambient music, often heard without acknowledgment, received aesthetically but not necessarily with the ear of understanding.

Like C. S. Lewis, I prefer to think of myself as “a very ordinary layman … not especially ‘high,’ nor especially ‘low,’ nor especially anything else,” but if I were forced to describe myself as belonging to some wing of Anglicanism, I’d call myself a high-church evangelical — an echo of John Wesley’s self-description. I am certainly not an Anglo-Catholic.

Yet Null, whom I have never met and who clearly knows nothing about me, confidently states that “Jacobs considers Anglo-Catholics to be the true guardians of the Anglican prayer book tradition. He’s a member of their tribe.” And then he reads my entire book in light of that assumption.

Criticize my scholarship or thought, by all means! This is what scholars do. But to claim to divine the inner lives and unexpressed beliefs of writers is unprofessional in the extreme.

Jesus’s aphorism may be taken to mean simply that those who deal in violence are especially liable to suffer violence. True enough. But death is no simple thing when Jesus speaks of it. His thoughts are not our thoughts, the limits of our perceptions are not limits he shares. We must imagine him seeing the whole of our existence, our being beyond mortality, beyond time. There is that other death he can foresee, the one that really matters. When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”

Fear by Marilynne Robinson

Questioning the “50% of the world is urban” statistic

Among evangelicals, “urbanization” is a key theme being picked up on for missions and ministry strategy. One of my favorite pastor/authors and the missions agency I financially and personally support have focused on it recently in tweets:

Over half of the world's population lives in global urban centers. #WhyWeGo http://t.co/v6WwjC6nAF

— IMB (@IMB_SBC)

August 10, 2015

We need churches everywhere there are people but the people of the world are moving into cities much faster than the church is statistically

— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc)

June 21, 2015

Cities will contain 75% of the world’s population by 2050.

— Timothy Keller (@timkellernyc)

July 12, 2015

My point in this post is not to argue with the “go where most people are” strategy. For a missions agency or a church trying to do their best to share the gospel and use their resources well, I can understand that.

My problem is with using words inaccurately to motivate people to go serve in specific locations, mainly with the unclear use of the world “urban” or “city”. The United Nations study that the IMB cites does say, “ More than one half of the world population lives now in urban areas.” But it also says.

“There is no common global definition of what constitutes an urban settlement”

“ No attempt is made to impose consistency in definitions across countries. “

“The criteria for classifying an area as urban may be based on one or a combination of characteristics, such as: a minimum population threshold; population density; proportion employed in non-agricultural sectors; the presence of infrastructure such as paved roads, electricity, piped water or sewers; and the presence of education or health services.” [That’s right, some countries classify areas as urban because they have roads or running water. And the minimum population for an “urban cluster” in the U.S. census in 2010 was 2500]

The only two categories to define any area of population in the study is rural or urban. Urban essentially means “not rural” in the report.

" Close to half of the world’s urban dwellers reside in relatively small settlements of less than 500,000 inhabitants, while only around one in eight live in the 28 mega-cities with more than 10 million inhabitants.” (emphasis mine)

“The most urbanized regions include Northern America (82 per cent living in urban areas in 2014).”

In addition to the UN report, the U.S. Census of 2010 classifies the following areas in my home state as urban (part of that 82% above):

My home town of Arkadelphia (population 10,491 people)

Hot Springs Village--a retirement community with about 9 golf courses

Bald Knob, population 2517

My problem is not the missions strategy. It’s how we use words to motivate. When the word “urban” gets used, most people I know think of something like New York City. No one I know things of Hot Springs Village, even though the U.N. technically says it is.

My problem is when we shift meanings of words to suit our arguments. When someone says, “Everyone is going urban, so the church must go urban,” they use the UN’s definition the first time and usually something like a “mega-city” definition for the second instance. They switch from apples to oranges in the same sentence.

(A related downside is that, if we’re not careful, in our promotion of mega-city ministry, we can diminish the good ministry of people working anywhere but those 28 cities. I don’t think that’s anyone’s intention, but sometimes it feels that way.)

If the call was “1/8th of the urbanized world lives in 28 cities, let’s focus on those,” I could at least get behind that as more semantically consistent.

But if you hear someone say “go to the cities because 50% of the world is urban and almost 66% will be by 2050″, then your first question should be, “What do you mean by urban?” If they cite the UN study, then about 80% of Americans are already there.

A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

CS Lewis, Learning in Wartime

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