Tag: Jason Peters

Not Flourishing, Enduring

Published on by D. G. Hart47 Comments

The Bar Jester keeps it real about human existence:

I don’t want an early spring. I don’t want the buds to get duped. I don’t want the fruit trees to flower and then get stung. I just want the trouble—the full brunt of the trouble until it’s time, really time, for the darling buds of May at last to come out. And I say this, of course, as an avowed lover of winter—as someone whose favorite seasons are, in this order, winter, fall, spring, and summer. At winter’s end I’m ready for my third favorite season. I’ll not deny that. But I can’t get excited about hot days and high humidity. Life isn’t like a hot sticky day that air conditioning mitigates the misery of. Life is like a hard wind in temperatures below zero. Life isn’t like salubrious days in fall and spring. It’s like unseasonable days in winter and summer. Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure.

Or, to put it another way, you might sink the forty-foot putt (because you might misread the thing so badly that dumb luck actually has a chance to kick in), but you also might three-putt as well—and probably will. Life isn’t like a birdie; it’s like a double-bogey. Life isn’t like a gentle draw; it’s like a snap-hook. Life isn’t sun-bathing on Daytona Beach in the afternoon with your sorority sisters from I Felta Guy; it’s milking a cow on a cold January morning in a dark barn by yourself while college boys earning their degrees in business are still hard at work playing poker in the frat house (I Felta Thigh, Tappa Kegga Beer), drinking Captain Morgan and stupidly counting on luck when only trouble’s sure.

Why would you as a Christian who takes sinfulness seriously, so serious that the Son of God had to die for your sins, ever talk about human flourishing or cultural transformation the way that Homer talked about the Land of Chocolate?

If You Don't Go to Church, What Do You Do with A Coalition?

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

The Bar Jester, previously Calvinist now Eastern Orthodox, explains why going to church is not the way to think or even be (hence all that ontological language):

It’s not quite right because “go” and “going” are words wholly inadequate to the reality of membership. It may be that in “going” to a building you enact one aspect of your membership, but membership no more ceases to characterize your condition outside the building than in it. Unless you’re Prosthesis Man, you don’t just pull off an arm or leg and lay it by until it’s time to shovel snow. You are always a member, whether in or out of the building, whether coming or going. Your ontological status is what it is quite apart from what you may or may not want to think about it, just as surely as your ontological status is what it is quite apart from what you think about baptism. Baptism, a thing done to you by divine act, changes you whether you like it or not. Martin Thornton has lucidly laid this out in Christian Proficiency: if you are baptized and yet fail to participate in the membership into which you are baptized (and thereby fail to enact the requirements of baptism), if you are baptized but spend your time cursing and gaming and whoring, all you really are is a hypocrite. You’re simply failing to act in accordance with who you are by dint of an ontological change that took place during the sacrament. Or, as I like to say, the waters of baptism don’t give a damn what your think.

Say what you will about baptism and whether it changes you (not even spiritually or mystically, and what of the whammy that attends the baptized who don’t profess faith?), Jester’s point does raise considerations that lead to the recognition of how far removed endeavors like the Gospel Coalition are from the institution of the church. Could a website and bloggers be partly responsible for the Coalition’s undoing?