May 20, 2008
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This is too good not to pass on immediately—from the proleptic latest What in the World! :
Evangelical Christians have a “deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture,” says journalist Hanna Rosin in Slate.
Evangelicals in America are like the Old Testament Israelites, says Rosin: “They are blending into the surrounding heathen culture, and having ever more trouble figuring out where it ends and they begin.” They’ve even “created their own enormous ‘parallel universe.’” An evangelical “can now buy books, movies, music—and anything else lowbrow to middlebrow—tailor-made for his or her sensibilities. Worried that American popular culture leads people—and especially teenagers—astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form.”
Christians were known in the 1980s for boycotting offensive offerings from popular culture, says Rosin. But in the 1990s “the boycotters became coopters and embarked on the curious quest to enlist America’s crassest material culture in the service of spiritual growth,” she says. “Every American pop phenomenon has its Christian equivalent, no matter how improbable.” Rosin, a secular Jew, compares this phenomenon to “another planet hidden somewhere on Earth where everything is just exactly like it is here except blue or made out of plastic.”
“There is Christian Harlequin and Christian chick lit,” Rosin says. “There are Christian raves and Christian rappers and Christian techno, which is somehow more Christian even though there are no words.” Rosin’s favorite is “Christian professional wrestling.”
Rosin asks two penetrating questions of this parallel culture: “What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product?” She notes that “When you make loving Christ sound just like loving your boyfriend, you can do damage to both your faith and your ballad.” When you “sanitize” “Nirvana or…Jay-Z…You shoehorn a message that’s essentially about obeying authority into a genre that’s rebellious and nihilistic, and the result can be ugly, fake, or just limp.”
Those two questions in the last paragraph—excellent. Common grace embarrasses me; that was hyperbolically incisive insight.
May 19, 2008
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This is the section of the OED entry on “magic” relevant to the Prince Caspian discussion:
The ‘magic’ which made use of the invocation of evil or doubtful spirits was of course always regarded as sinful; but ‘natural magic,’ i.e. that which did not involve recourse to the agency of personal spirits, was in the Middle Ages usually recognized as a legitimate department of study and practice, so long as it was not employed for maleficent ends. Of examples are . . . the application of a medicament to a weapon in order to heal the wound made by it. These things, if now practiced, would still be called ‘magic’, thought the qualification ‘natural’ would seem quite inappropriate. On the other hand, the ‘natural magic’ of the Middle Ages included much that from the standpoint of modern science is ‘natural’, but not ‘magical’, the processes resorted to being really, according to the now known laws of physical causation, adapted to produce the intended effects.
May 19, 2008
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The release of Prince Caspian occasioned some discussion at my office recently. Some good Christians are—understandably, if they haven’t read the Narniad—wary of the magic in Lewis’s “supposal.”
Let me hasten to say that I do not want to push anyone past his conscience. But recriminations are coming back against Narnia lovers! And the reason I am a Narnia lover is that the series has helped me understand and love the God whose truth the Narniad pictures.
So let me offer some humble defenses of the “magic” in the Narniad (with some help from respected friends who discussed this with me recently).
In The Silver Chair, Jill, who’s never been to Narnia, suggests to the already-initiated Eustace various magical ways to get there:
“You mean we might draw a circle on the ground—and writer queer letters in it—and stand inside it—and recite charms and spells?”
“Well,” said Eustace after he had thought hard for a bit. “I believe that was the sort of thing I was thinking of, though I never did it. But now that it comes to the point, I’ve an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don’t think [Aslan would] like them. It would look as if we thought we could make him do things. But really, we can only ask him.”
In other words, the kind of magic that the critics are worried about is explicitly condemned in the series. The other time someone tries to draw a magic circle, that someone (Nikabrik) winds up dead.
As for what Lewis calls the “deep magic,” this seems to be nothing more than the laws the Emperor (God) has established in the Narnia universe. See the OED definition of “magic” for how the word was used in the Middle Ages, perhaps the major period of history from which Lewis drew for his masterpiece.
May 19, 2008
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In chapter 2 of Christ and Culture Revisited Carson offers some general critiques of Niebuhr which do not tie themselves to individual paradigms in Niebuhr’s five-fold taxonomy. Here’s one line of critique Carson gives:
- Niebuhr wants to see various biblical authors as advocates, wholly or in part, of individual paradigms (e.g., Galatians and 1 John advocate the “Christ against culture” position; John’s Gospel is more partial to “Christ transforming culture”). But he’s assuming the liberal view that the Bible is not consistent, that it only gives us the boundaries surrounding the allowable options (40-41).
- Individual Bible writers have individual personalities and emphases, and “exactly how the different parts of Scripture cohere has always been a matter of considerable dispute,” but “once such matters have been resolved, at least to the satisfaction of a particular Christian group, so that we see how the Bible hangs together, we may talk about what the Bible ‘says,’ not just about what one part of the biblical tradition says” (42). So we should speak not of individual, viable options for Christian interaction with culture but of the one holistic view which the Bible teaches. This one vision needs to be flexible enough to fit Washington, D.C., and Darfur, Sudan, but it is one vision.
May 12, 2008
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Os Guinness, Richard Mouw, Tim George, David Neff, and others have released “An Evangelical Manifesto: A Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment.” Justin Taylor has already provided a good summary (with little comment). I thought I would comment on just one salient features, the manifesto’s treatment of fundamentalists.
(North-American Protestant) Fundamentalism in the Evangelical Manifesto
As Alan Jacobs points out in the Wall Street Journal, it really seems as if the very purpose of this (rather weak, Jacobs says) manifesto is to say, “We’re not fundamentalists!” Os Guinness’ remarks about fundamentalism (and throughout I mean the North-American Protestant Christian variety) in the recent 9 Marks eJournal issue closely mirror the words of the Evangelical Manifesto: fundamentalism is “an essentially modern reaction to the modern world.” Fundamentalism, he says, “tends to romanticize the past, some now-lost moment in time, and to radicalize the present.”
So fundamentalism becomes little more than a “Christ of Culture” position—namely, Christ of 1952 American culture.
Are fundamentalists no better than Protestant liberals (who currently canonize, say, 2006)? Do fundamentalists truly fit in Niebuhr’s “Christ of Culture” paradigm?
No, I believe not. On a few accidentals many fundamentalists do fit that paradigm. I include among these accidentals no-pants-on-women, the King James Version, excessive patriotism… and perhaps fear of modern art?
But fundamentalism, in its essentials, is a… is a… Christ-against-in-paradox-transforming-culture position! What in each of these hyphenated positions resonates with fundamentalists?
- Christ against Culture: Yes, there’s a real us vs. them mentality in fundamentalism, especially in the U.S. culture wars—and that mentality can be problematic because it can lead to vitriol. But most of the same fundamentalists who will denounce secularism will gladly share Christ in love with the secularist in the next cubicle. That brings us to the next paradigm in which fundamentalists fit…
- Christ and Culture in Paradox: The fundamentalist knows both that this is his Father’s world and that he’s just-a-passin-through it. He’ll sing both with gusto.
- Christ the Transformer of Culture: A fundamentalist who knows his Bible knows that Christ will one day rule the whole world. No, fundamentalists are not typically optimistic about the progress of world history prior to the cataclysm that puts all things under Christ’s feet. But now on an individual level—and one day on a universal one—Christ will rule.
I offer this post as an exploratory discussion. I have to confess to only recently having begun to understand Niebuhr’s paradigms.
