Author: D. G. Hart

Degrees of Pain

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Ligon Duncan links to a piece by Bryan Loritts on his reaction to the shooting of Michael Brown. Loritts explains why others need to hear him about his pain:

If you sense exasperation from we African-American’s over yet another news story of a black man slain at the hands of a white man, this is a wonderful opportunity to grab some coffee and seek to understand our hearts. I need my white brothers to know how I felt as I sat in the preaching classes in Bible college and seminary not once hearing examples of great African-American preachers. I need you to know how I felt when I was forced face down on the hard asphalt of Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, 1993 all because I was nineteen and driving my pastor’s Lexus, a year after the Rodney King riots. I need you to ask how I felt when I walked into a Target recently behind a white woman who took one look at me and pulled her purse tightly.

I wonder, though, if Mr. Loritts feels this death the way Michael Brown’s family and friends do. I understand that an African-American male may be able to imagine what Michael Brown experienced before being shot in ways that white Americans cannot. But I wonder if Mr. Loritts distracts us from a much deeper pain when he likens this news to his own experience. Not to sound disrespectful, but Michael Brown’s experience seems to me to be in a fundamentally different category from Mr. Loritts’. One man is dead, the other is alive. Recognizing that difference may help a lot of people on both sides of the racial divide remember the family and friends in this situation who lost a loved one. Heck, some of those family and friends may even be of European, Asian, or Latino descent.

Everything Is So White

Published on by D. G. Hart50 Comments

Kathy Khang reflects on the difficulty that Korean-Americans confront when attending a white church:

So it came as a bit of a shock to recognize that the churches we were visiting during our search had a different feel, a different sense of community and welcoming that we recognized as being part “Christian” and part “white” but did not fully resonate with us. The-“Where are you from? I’m from in town. Awkward pause.”-interactions. The times we would slowly walk out of a sanctuary waiting for someone, anyone to welcome us instead of just looking at us. The time-orientation of the service–in which emphasizing punctuality and ending “on time” seems more important than relational exchanges that might change the timing of the service– along with the tempo and phrasing of the worship songs. I think I had wanted to believe that a church could be racially white but not culturally white and unintentionally exclusive. I think I had wanted to believe what many of my white Christian sisters and brothers want to believe: there is no white church culture. It’s just church.

But rather than trying to be cultureless, which Khang believes is impossible, she wants white churches to acknowledge their whiteness:

Churches tend to take on the cultural influences and traditions of its members and community, but how many predominantly white churches own a white identity and name its culture as being white? The Korean immigrant church of my youth owned it in name (written in both Korean and English), language, and food but it often failed at reconciling the generational gap that grew between the Americanized youth and the Korean elders. More often than not, predominantly white churches won’t claim being culturally white but rather try to emphasize a Christian identity.

A couple of thoughts.

It is an intellectually challenging but perhaps worthwhile proposition to try to tell what parts of a worship service reflect a congregation’s cultural heritage. Language is one factor. Rule Britannia. Music is another. Most of our churches use the western musical scale and the harmonics that go with it. They may even rely upon European rhythms. Another part is sitting. Witold Rybczynski observed that human cultures are divided into the sitters and squatters. That means Americans generally falls into the white column because they with the rest of the West sit when not standing. From posture we might examine the liturgy or order of service. Some white churches will use the white evangelical service, the white P&W order, or a liturgical order from one of the European churches. All white but no one white size fits all.

Then we have what happens after the service. What kind of drink and fare do we have over fellowship? Sweets would likely put off Turks since desserts are not a specialty of Asia Minor. Coffee, as Khang shows, is not the favored drink of many in the East. And then we have the phenomenon of bad coffee that doesn’t suit either foodies or visitors from Seattle and Portland.

What about openness to outsiders? Can we chalk up friendliness to culture? We may associate the Dutch and the Scots with certain temperamental features. But once you’ve been in America for several generations, do you become as open and bubbly as Americans are supposed to be? Or is temperament a spiritual gift, or is niceness part of definitive sanctification? Churches should be friendly if only to recruit new giving units since congregations can’t rely on the state for patronage.

On the whole, Khang has a point. Our churches have a lot more culture than the vanilla places we think them to be. And much of it is decidedly of European descent. White doesn’t really do justice to this European heritage since color of skin (really pink) does not account for how important European Christianity was to the emergence of churches not only in North America but around the world. Of course, Europeans have a lot for which to ask forgiveness and European Americans should not be reticent about getting in line for that soul-searching. At the same time, without Christian Europe (Protestant and Roman Catholic) along with the colonialism and imperialism that attended the globalization that Europeans started in the fifteenth century, we wouldn’t have many churches (white, yellow, or brown) period.

Development of Doctrinal Dispute Stalled

Published on by D. G. Hart371 Comments

David Murray concludes his four-part series on Merit and Moses — the book that is anti-republication — by boiling it down to this:

. . . my own concerns about RP have grown as I’ve increasingly come into contact with people who are using the RP to argue against any place of the law in the Christian life. They hear RP teachers saying that Israel obeyed the law to merit the land, but the NT believer is no longer under that arrangement. Thus they conclude, we don’t need to obey God’s law any more. Again, I know that’s not what RP intends but it is such a complex and confusing system that even those who have heard it explained many times still struggle to understand and communicate it accurately. I remember the first time I heard the RP preached, I thought, “What on earth was that?” To some degree, I still feel that sense of bafflement. With theology, I’ve often noticed that the more complex a system, the more likely that it’s wrong.

What is striking about this conclusion is that Murray (David, that is) winds up basically where Norman Shepherd started — Christians in the 1970s believed they could dispense with the law (thanks either to D. James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion or Jack Miller’s Sonship Theology). Shepherd opposed such antinomianism and wasn’t even contending with republication or 2-kingdom theology. He was, of course, sorting covenant theology out to some degree with Meredith Kline, who turned out to be one of the leading opponents of Shepherd. And Kline, as David Murray points out, represents for the authors of Merit and Moses the overreaction against Shepherd.

Has anyone yet to show us what the right reaction against Shepherd is? The folks who have been most vigorous in opposing where Shepherd led (i.e. Federal Vision) were some of the people who wrote for The Law is Not of Faith. Do they get credit for that? Not much. And what about the Murrayites (not David) who didn’t go the way of Federal Vision? Were they critical of Shepherd or Federal Vision? Or did they sit on their hands? Or how about the Obedience Boys? Have they had their innings with Norman Shepherd who argued for an obedient faith?

My contention is still that the very small world of U.S. conservative Presbyterian and Reformed believers has not yet gotten over Shepherd.

Do Driscoll's Enablers Need to Take Some Blame?

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Of course, this post has the potential to sound like I told you so. I didn’t, actually. I never saw the appeal of Driscoll partly because celebrity pastors have never appeared to be serious. If you grow up with Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell on the airwaves, maybe you build up immunity. So I have not read or heard Driscoll. And I never issued warnings about his teachings (except for taking issue with the larger phenomenon of the hip church and pastor). Once news came out about his clairvoyance or plagiarism or off-color remarks (whether under pseudonym or not), it looked like Driscoll was mainly hype.

For that reason, his recent difficulties make nary a ripple among Old Calvinists.

What is intriguing is to see the way that Driscoll’s allies seem to be unwilling to own up to their own errors in judgment. Paul Tripp, for instance, wrote a letter of resignation to the Mars Hill board:

I love the gospel of Jesus Christ. I love the church of Jesus Christ. I love pastors. I love working with churches to help them form a leadership culture that is shaped by the same grace that is at the center of the message that they preach.

It’s because of this love that I accepted the position on Mars Hill Church’s BoAA. But it became clear to me that a distant, external accountability board can never work well because it isn’t a firsthand witness to the ongoing life and ministry of the church.

Such a board at best can provide financial accountability, but it will find it very difficult to provide the kind of hands-on spiritual direction and protection that every Christian pastor needs.

Is it really a problem of distance? What did it take not to see even from Philadelphia that Driscoll was an accident not waiting to happen but already an accident? I don’t write this necessarily to congratulate myself (only Jonathan Edwards’ powers of introspection can tell for sure). But why did folks like Tripp give Driscoll such a long leash for so long?

The same goes for someone equally geographically challenged:

Driscoll is a great communicator. He studied stand-up comedians in order to learn how to communicate to the modern generation and he succeeded. His performance is slick, passionate and entertaining. And he does communicate the Bible – it is not just the typical tele-evangelist styles of a few homespun stories, mixed in with some Bible verses and a bit of prophetic/pathetic shouting. I know many people who have been helped through his teaching of God’s Word – and I include myself in that number. For several years I subscribed to his podcast, although for the past three I have stopped listening, maybe because I felt I knew more about his family and church than I did my own! It also gets tiring to listen to someone who takes an hour and 15 minutes to say what could be said in 15. And what’s with the schoolboy obsession with sex? Anyone who preaches three lengthy series on the Song of Solomon as a sex manual for Christians has got things a wee bit out of sync! Most of us grow out of ‘the shock jock’ tactic of ‘Look how freely I can speak about sex’. Those of my female friends who complained about his misogyny were not being too ‘sensitive’ – they were right. I say that as someone who shares Driscoll’s complementarian theology but not his mistaken cultural application of that theology.

Driscoll was desperate to be an author. But he just isn’t. He can preach, inspire and motivate, but he is not a writer. He told me that a US Christian publishing company had offered him a seven-figure sum to have a series of books ghost-written in his name. He resisted that temptation then, although sadly he seems to have succumbed to something similar later. If what he told me about the Christian publishing company was true, then we need to repent at setting up a system that just apes the world – complete with our own charts, publicity machines and commercialised insanity.

Could Driscoll actually preach? Could Billy Sunday? Or was his appeal partly that of a performer, especially one who grew up like his audience listening to shock jocks?

The ordinary means of grace are truly ordinary and sometimes come administered by men who are not telegenic or charismatic or great orators. But that’s not the point. If they actually preach the word and keep themselves out of the way of Scripture, they do far more good than fellows like Driscoll even on his good days. As Calvin wrote:

God might have acted, in this respect, by himself, without any aid or instrument, or might even have done it by angels; but there are several reasons why he rather chooses to employ men. First, in this way he declares his condescension towards us, employing men to perform the function of his ambassadors in the world, to be the interpreters of his secret will; in short, to represent his own person. Thus he shows by experience that it is not to no purpose he calls us his temples, since by man’s mouth he gives responses to men as from a sanctuary. Secondly, it forms a most excellent and useful training to humility, when he accustoms us to obey his word though preached by men like ourselves, or, it may be, our inferiors in worth. Did he himself speak from heaven, it were no wonder if his sacred oracles were received by all ears and minds reverently and without delay. For who would not dread his present power? who would not fall prostrate at the first view of his great majesty? who would not be overpowered by that immeasurable splendour? But when a feeble man, sprung from the dust, speaks in the name of God, we give the best proof of our piety and obedience, by listening with docility to his servant, though not in any respect our superior. Accordingly, he hides the treasure of his heavenly wisdom in frail earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4:7), that he may have a more certain proof of the estimation in which it is held by us.

When Jamie is Good He is Very Good

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

From James K.A. Smith’s review of Pete Enns, The Evolution of Adam (thanks to our Florida co-editor):

The meaning of Scripture is not limited to what human authors intended—which is precisely why the meaning of prophetic texts outstrips what human authors might have had in mind. As Richard Hays puts it, in some ways Christians read the Bible back to front. But the dominant methodology that Enns reflects has no functional room for appreciating this point, which is why he seems to think that defining what the “authors of Genesis” had in mind settles the matter. It doesn’t.

This sort of a-canonical approach also explains why Enns sees such a strange relationship between Genesis and the apostle Paul as a reader of Genesis. “Paul’s reading of Genesis,” he comments, “is driven by factors external to Genesis. Paul’s use of the Old Testament, here or elsewhere, does not determine how that passage functions in its original setting” (87, emphasis added). Well, that might be true; and Enns is exactly right to offer a corrective to irresponsibile habits of Bible reading that are little more than baptized eisegesis, reading into the Scriptures what we want to find there. But is the “original meaning” the determinative factor for the meaning of Genesis for us? We receive a canon of Scripture that recontextualizes each book—situating every book in relation to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, which is why the “location” from which we read the Bible needs to be the practices of Christian worship. Worship is the primary “home” of the Bible and it is in worship that we cultivate those habits and virtues we need to read Scripture holistically.[8] That will certainly generate meanings of Old Testament books that could never have been intended by their human authors; but that doesn’t mean they were not intended as meanings to be unfolded “in front of the text” by the divine Author.

Enns’ approach leaves little room to recognize such recontextualization within the canon—nor does he accord any positive, constructive role to tradition (cf. 114). In fact, if it becomes a contest between “the authors of Genesis” and Paul, Enns sides with “the original meaning” of Genesis as the determinative meaning: “what Genesis says about Adam and the consequences of his actions does not seem to line up with the universal picture that Paul paints in Romans and 1 Corinthians […]. I do not think the gospel stands on whether we can read Paul’s Adam in the pages of Genesis” (92). To use Enns’ language, Paul attributes something to Genesis that the “authors of Genesis” are not trying to give us. Again, this account is entirely “from below,” as if it is Paul alone who “invests Adam with capital he does not have either in the Genesis story, the Old Testament as a whole, or the interpretations of his contemporary Jews” (135).

But now the problem above comes home to roost: what if there is an Author who is the author of both Genesis and 1 Corinthians? What did he intend? And could he intend meanings in Genesis that outstrip what the “authors of Genesis” intended? The church has always staked its reading of the Bible on the conviction that Scripture’s meaning exceeds what the original human authors could have intended. So we can’t neatly and tidily settle the cross-pressures we feel at the intersection of Genesis and contemporary science by simply limiting the meaning of Genesis to what was intended by its Ancient Near Eastern authors.

It seems to this average historian, this point is one that all of the discussion surrounding Christocentric vs. Christotelic readings misses. And Smith points to the importance of reading the Bible as a whole and as a book that may be best understood within the church rather than the Society of Biblical Literature.

Comments Are Open

Published on by D. G. Hart179 Comments

Leon Brown wants to have a conversation about race at a blog where comments are always closed. So let me help him out — servant serving servers I am — by opening up comments at a site where even spammers get through.

Brown’s post about the tragic death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and the subsequent interview with Scott Clark has me puzzled and that is why I would like to open the comments.

First, I’m not sure I recognize myself as an American of European descent in Brown’s post. On the one hand, he acknowledges whiteness and says that whites should not be ashamed:

Let’s be transparent: the majority of both readership and authorship on this blog are white. Do not be ashamed that you are white. I am unashamed of this visible difference. You should be unashamed, too, and take great pride in God’s creative genius to create us visually different. Yet, simply because we are in Christ does not flatten the beauty of ethnic and cultural distinctions that we maintain. Galatians 3:27-29 provides no grounds for such a conclusion.

That’s all well and good but then Leon goes on to mention white perceptions or treatment of blacks that should make every white American very ashamed:

With these ethnic and cultural distinctions, therefore, we may see the Mike Brown proceeding through a different lens. For some of us this simply highlights what we have always known, or at least believed, to be true: young black men are unsafe in this nation. For others, perhaps some of you, especially if you have been following this event, may wonder, “Why do they (i.e., African-Americans) have to make everything about race?” Based on your observations, you have concluded that blacks, and/or other minorities, unnecessarily pull the proverbial race card. Some African-Americans, or other sub-dominant cultures, might respond, “Why do whites always dismiss the possibility that race, or ethnicity, was a motivating factor in said event?” . . .

Consider the recent and ongoing immigration debate. How has it affected you? What do you think when you see a Spanish speaking image-bearer, one who knows, or at least it is assumed, very little English? What has caused your conclusions? Do you remain unaffected by the outcry of some in the media who thrust names on them, such as, “illegal,” “unwanted immigrant,” or “wetback”? The point of the news, while to inform, is also to sway opinion, and I think we may lack transparency if we claim we are not, at least in part, somehow affected by what some branches of the media portray about immigration.

The same can be stated about African-Americans. For years in this nation, African-Americans have been, and continue to be, portrayed in shrouds of untruth. “We are lazy, good-for-nothings,” some have and do say. “We are animals,” it has been said. Or in the words of PCUS minister, Benjamin Palmer (1818-1902), “The worst foes of the black race are those who have intermeddled on their behalf. We know better than others that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless.”

I don’t deny that these attitudes exist or that they are worthy of shame. But Leon doesn’t seem to understand that whenever he (and others) bring up race in ways that shame whites, he introduces a one-way street of discomfort. Whites do and should feel uncomfortable. But Leon doesn’t seem to show any awareness that such an uncomfortable subject may shut down conversation — sort of like a wife wanting to talk to her adulterous husband about his affair; what do you say, “honey, let’s talk more about how I betrayed you”? In which case, what kind of conversation does Leon want?

One way to facilitate conversation might be for Leon to notice at least two segments of his white audience — those who are racist and those who don’t think they are (though they may harbor some residue of prejudice), don’t generally make stupid comments to black pastors, and who empathize with black frustrations and resentment. If Leon wanted to have a conversation with the second of these groups, what good does it do to bring up insensitive remarks? Doesn’t this miss the target? But if the former group, doesn’t the introduction of matters that should cause embarrassment (or require explanation of why it’s embarrassing) — again — shut the conversation down?

Another question worthy of conversation, it seems to me, is whether Leon would be interested in discussing the black church and its own lack of integration. I don’t raise this as a tit for tat. I have great admiration for African-American Protestants. Here you have a group of Americans disproportionately Protestant compared to Americans of European descent. Here’s is what a Pew survey found:

The Landscape Survey also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56% among all U.S. adults. In fact, even a large majority (72%) of African-Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular faith say religion plays at least a somewhat important role in their lives; nearly half (45%) of unaffiliated African-Americans say religion is very important in their lives, roughly three times the percentage who says this among the religiously unaffiliated population overall (16%). Indeed, on this measure, unaffiliated African-Americans more closely resemble the overall population of Catholics (56% say religion is very important) and mainline Protestants (52%).

Additionally, several measures illustrate the distinctiveness of the black community when it comes to religious practices and beliefs. More than half of African-Americans (53%) report attending religious services at least once a week, more than three-in-four (76%) say they pray on at least a daily basis and nearly nine-in-ten (88%) indicate they are absolutely certain that God exists. On each of these measures, African-Americans stand out as the most religiously committed racial or ethnic group in the nation. Even those African-Americans who are unaffiliated with any religious group pray nearly as often as the overall population of mainline Protestants (48% of unaffiliated African-Americans pray daily vs. 53% of all mainline Protestants). And unaffiliated African-Americans are about as likely to believe in God with absolute certainty (70%) as are mainline Protestants (73%) and Catholics (72%) overall.

These same African-Americans profess the faith (though in separate communions) that their former masters and oppressors used against them. It would make more sense to me if I were African-American to be a Muslim than to be a Baptist, Methodist, or Pentecostal. Why have anything to do with the religion that white Protestants used to justify slavery and segregation? But for some reason, African-Americans remain a devout people.

The strength and institutional significance of the black church means that establishing mixed race churches as Leon wants to do may be akin to integrating Major League Baseball. With Jackie Robinson’s joining the Dodgers also came the beginning of the end of the Negro Leagues. No offense to Leon, but I doubt his efforts will bring an end to the black church. But the idea of attracting African-Americans to white churches does raise a few additional questions for the desired conversation.

Do the African-Americans who come to Presbyterians churches leave black churches or are they converts? In other words, how much sheep stealing may be involved in trying to integrate white churches? And if some respond that we want African-American Baptists and Holiness folks to leave the churches and come to the best expression of Christianity (Reformed Protestantism), then can we lay off the Machen’s-warrior-children put down of confessional Presbyterians who raise questions about whether Baptists or evangelicals are Reformed? I for one welcome support for the Reformed cause. But to be militant about Reformed Protestantism in discussions about race relations can raise another delicate subject — namely, whether the black church is good enough. It may not be (from the perspective of the Reformed confessions), but what white Protestant who does not want to insult fellow Americans or professing Christians wants to argue that black churches need to be more like white Reformed ones?

A final question that deserves comment is why Leon decided to make further remarks about race in the highly charged context of the Michael Brown slaying. Since his post was personal let me be as well. The news of apparent police brutality carried out again against a black young man was deeply discouraging. Leon uses the word, “unfortunate.” I’ll use “tragic.” I cannot imagine the grief to his parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and neighbors, nor the fear of living with police that appear to be capable of such actions, nor the resentment that a minority people that has taken lots of hits now having to endure another. But this incident also sent me looking for news about the St. Louis neighborhood, Mark Brown himself, and even church life in Ferguson. Well, aren’t I special. But why didn’t Leon try to present more information about the incident and aftermath? Why did this piece remind him to remind us that American Protestants are still divided by race?

For that reason the piece about Ferguson that American Conservative posted might have been more instructive and even hopeful than Leon’s post:

Adam Weinstein put it more bluntly at Gawker. “The U.S. armed forces exercise more discipline and compassion than these cops.” He cites the first page of the Army’s field manual on civil disturbances, which emphasizes proportional, nuanced responses. “Inciting a crowd to violence or a greater intensity of violence by using severe enforcement tactics must be avoided.” The manual also notes that “highly emotional social and economic issues” inform such disturbances, and that “it takes a small (seemingly minor) incident” to set off violence “if community relations with authorities are strained.”

Unlike the military, who are trained in nonviolent options for conflict resolution, the police often lack such knowledge. Bonnie Kristian expounded this failure and reasons behind systematic police brutality earlier this summer, noting also that cops are rarely held accountable for abuse. “Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide, while the conviction rate for civilians is literally double that.”

The entrenched racial injustice behind Michael Brown’s death will be difficult to root out, as it has been over centuries of American history. But the decades of policy that allowed for police abuse of Brown, and his town’s peaceful protesters, could be reversed—and if the public outcry over Ferguson is anything to judge by, Americans will be keeping a closer eye on the police in the coming years.

Let me be direct: Leon, some of us white American Presbyterians (vinegary though we be) want to know what to do. We want to be good neighbors and good fellow presbyters. As the American Conservative piece indicates, racial injustice and racial prejudice are hard to transform. But trying to curtail police abuse sure seems like a policy and social good. That might not help with planting mixed race churches. But churches may be beside the point in instances like this, or if they are part of the point, American Protestantism is a whole lot more complicated than churches separated along racial lines.

Will the Real Exilic Christians Stand Up?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

With all the discussion of Christians having the best chance to endure in the coming winter of dislocation, I was shocked SHOCKED to see no mention of the Amish. Say what you will about Anabaptists, but I don’t know how any respectable Christian — Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox — can think he is all that prepared for exilic conditions without at least contemplating the way the Amish have lived in exile.

If you are going to talk about Christian community, I don’t know how a set of people who gathers for one service on Sunday (okay, good Presbyterians gather twice), coming from sometimes as far away as a one-hour drive, and maybe for a mid-week Bible study or prayer meeting qualifies as anything more than the membership you experience at the local Moose Lodge. And if you’re going to talk about transformationalism, the Amish have a record of forming real culture according to a religious w-w that goes back farther than Kuyper or Edwards. (Of course, Benedict goes back farther, but given the matter of celibacy and procreation, the Benedictine model is hardly going to survive as a community-building practice.)

Sure, Anabaptist theology has problems. But when Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox can form communities with the kind of coherence that the Amish have, then we should all stop talking about exile and community. Instead, lets consider the benefits of spiritual disciplines that provide a welcome add-on to lives already well defined by economic, political, communication, education (the list goes on) systems well beyond the control of the faithful.

With that in mind, consider this excerpt from the New Republic:

Smucker then launched into a brief history of the Amish, explaining that what began three centuries ago as a handful of families escaping persecution in Europe by sailing for the nascent Pennsylvania colony is today 273,700 adults and children spread across 30 states and the Canadian province of Ontario. (Though two-thirds of them have remained in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana.)

Amish belief then as now is completely grounded in the New Testament, which they hold to be the sole and final authority on all things. From it, they take their impetus to remain separate (“and be not conformed to this world”—Romans 12:2), as well as their orders to renounce violence in all spheres of human life, to refuse to swear oaths, and to obey literally the teachings of Jesus Christ. Still, they shun their undisciplined and wayward, to make it a little easier to keep the community of faith intact.

And the Amish are a true community, in every sense of the word. They believe that what we call “individualism” is actually pride, or, more bluntly, selfishness, which opposes God’s will, which should be yielded to with a dedicated heart. This communal spirit is regulated by an unwritten code of conduct, the Ordnung, which prescribes clothing and grooming and language, and prohibits things like divorce, military service, owning or operating automobiles, taking electricity from public power lines, and installing wall-to-wall carpet.

Basically, the Amish way of living argues implicitly that tradition is sacred, that preservation is as important or perhaps more important than progress, that obeying and yielding are virtuous, that the personal reality might not be the supreme. And in this way, above all else, they take the integrity of individual choice really, really seriously.

Or, as Smucker summed it up: “The Amish are very intentional. Whereas we just take on everything we’re offered without even thinking about it.” . . .

Baseball, he went on, was forbidden by church elders around 1995. Baptized men had been wearing uniforms, and traveling to play league matches, and neglecting their duties at home. So, now, the game is strictly for the unbaptized. What I saw in the schoolyard was the noncompetitive stuff all kids play until the eighth grade, when their formal education ends. (“Knowledge puffeth up”—1 Corinthians). The only ones who can ball for real are the boys who have entered Rumspringa, the few free years of “running around” in the secular world that the Amish allow their youth (and about which we make feature-length documentaries and National Geographic Channel reality shows).

Rumspringa—ostensibly a time for finding a mate—is a kind of inoculation. A manageable dosage of culture is introduced to unbaptized Amish, the hope being that this exposure will keep them from succumbing to the whole pathology later on. From their sixteenth birthday ’til their mid-twenties, they sample what they’ve been missing—cars, hip-hop, food courts, double plays. Then they make the biggest decision of their lives: get baptized and get married, or forsake their world for ours.

“The unbaptized, if they play competitively in uniforms, that means they’re from a faster, more liberal district,” Smucker told me. “But you can still tell they’re Amish by how they carry themselves.”

Obsessed?

Published on by D. G. Hart86 Comments

Is masturbation okay?

It wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that masturbation became classified as a major evil, and in the event it was not because of its sexual nature but because it was treated as a disease. In a 1712 treatise Onania, a writer identified by Laqueur as John Marten “announced that he had providentially met a pious physician who had found remedies for this hitherto incurable disease. The remedies are expensive, but given the seriousness of the condition, they are worth every penny.” This was followed in 1760 by David Tissot’s L’Onanisme, which “became an instant European literary sensation.” After Tissot, doctors claimed that all sorts of medical complications followed from masturbation: “spinal tuberculosis, epilepsy, pimples, madness, general wasting, and an early death.” It was, for Tissot, more dangerous than smallpox.

Why should the liberated Enlightenment worry about a private pleasure like masturbation? Laqueur argues that there were three complaints: Masturbation is private, based on a fantasy, and creates an insatiable addiction. But he thinks something deeper was going on too. The liberation of the Enlightenment was massive and disorienting that the attack on masturbation was, Laqueur claims, the “centerpiece of a program for policing the imagination, desire, and the self that modernity itself had unleashed.”

Oral sex?

Number two, is it unnatural? This is a tricky one. The male and female genitals are so clearly made for each other that there is a natural fitness or beauty to it. What about oral sex? Now you might jump to the conclusion and say: Nope, that is not natural, but I am slow to go there because of what the Proverbs and the Song of Solomon say about a wife’s breasts. This is kind of an analogy. So consider this. It seems to me nothing is more natural than a baby snuggling in his mother’s arms drinking at her breast. That is what breasts are. They are designed to feed babies. So is there anything physically natural about a husband’s fascination with his wife’s breasts? Well, you might say no. That is not what breasts are for. But Proverbs 5:19 says: Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight. Be intoxicated always with her love. And Song of Solomon 7:7–8 are even more explicit, speaking of the woman: Your stature is like a palm tree and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit. Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine.

Well, even though there is very little anatomical correlation between a man’s hands or his lips and his wife’s breasts, it surely seems to be, quote, natural, in another way, namely built in delight and desire that God in his Word seems to commend for our marital enjoyment. So I ask: Well, might there be similar desires for oral sex or other kinds of sex? So I doubt that we should put a limit on a married couple based on the claim of it being unnatural. That is risky, but that is where I come down on the naturalness of it.

Hedonism anyone?

Making the World Safe for Mormonism

Published on by D. G. Hart46 Comments

(a line I borrow from Ken Myers)

“What we offer as Catholics is to strengthen the family as the basis of society. When there is a solid family life, there is less likelihood of crime, there is less likelihood of drug use. The children grow up with a solid foundation. And that is a foundation they can take all through their lives,” Rozanski said. “And, as a Church, what we are saying is that God made us male and female, and that the institution of marriage is so crucial. It is a sacrament of the Church, if the sacrament is well lived, then the children and future generations will benefit.”