rusty cellar

If you were intrigued by my previous post here is an article by Brad Kallenberg that explores the notion of Christian conversion in the Postmodern world. Have fun chewing on it!

The “P”-Word: Conversion in a Postmodern Environment

BY BRAD J. KALLENBERG

Allow me to write frankly about the “P”-word. There is great concern about the proliferation of the “P”-word. In the past decade, over 1,500 articles and 2,000 books have come into print bearing the “P”-word in their titles. Nearly 1,000 of these books are still in print. Everywhere we turn we find that we have been inundated with the “P”-word. And so we have come to fear for our culture. The “P”-word? “Postmodernism.”

Granted, postmodernism is a slippery concept; there are many versions, many postmodernisms. But should Christians fear postmodernism? To be sure, the modern era proved to be no particular friend of the faith. For whatever faults existed in medieval churches, at least they were well-attended. But since the seventeenth century, church attendance in the West has plummeted. In a good week, five percent of Western Europe attends church, while church attendance in the United States barely makes it into double digits.

So the ending of modernity may not be a bad thing. Yet what guarantee have we that the gospel will fare any better in these supposedly postmodern times?

None. Yet the gospel is a robust “virus,” one that is able to inhabit virtually any cultural host. As William James once quipped, “The philosophical climate of the times inevitably forces its clothing on us.” Just as there have been authentic Christians of Platonic, Aristotelian, existentialist, even Marxist stripe, so too, it may please God to raise up authentically postmodern Christians. Perhaps the missionary character of the gospel can inspire us to search out ways to employ insights of postmodern philosophy for the good of Jesus’ Kingdom. I maintain that these insights change the very questions in which the task of evangelism is cast. But I must be clear at the outset what I mean by this.

It is not surprising that in the mechanistic universe we inherited from Descartes and Newton, evangelists hankered after appropriate philosophical crowbars for levering people into Christian belief. “If only we could provide plausible warrant for Christian truth claims.” “If only we could verify in tangible ways the literal meaningfulness of spiritual terms such as ‘God’ and ’soul.’” “If only we could express the gospel in ways that resonate with the deepest longing of every human individual.”

Of course many attempts were made to provide just such levers. But now it is commonplace to think that the dawning of this new age, this Postmodern Age, brings with it the awareness that all such projects have been summarily debunked. Instead, it is hoped that postmodern philosophy offers new and improved methods by which individuals can be levered into the Kingdom, techniques that exceed the old ones in their effectiveness.

However, the change of conceptual schemes from modern to postmodern involves not simply retooling old crowbars into more effective ones; the mechanical view of evangelism is itself a modern metaphor that needs replacing. How now are we to think about evangelism? Perhaps postmodernism can school us away from the “how to” to the “to what.” In other words, the crucial question for the church to ask is not “How are we to convert the unsaved?” but “To what are we asking them to convert?”

As the token Protestant who teaches ethics in an all-Catholic Department of Religious Studies, it fell to my lot to teach Protestant Christianity to the graduate students this past fall term. Of course, the colossal changes in Catholicism since Vatican II (in the late 1960s) made my job easier than it used to be. In some ways, contemporary Catholics stand much closer to conservative Protestant theology and ethics than to prior Catholic theology. Consequently, Catholic students are much more likely to see their reflection in the four marks of Protestantism (by Scripture alone, by faith alone, by Christ alone, and by grace alone) than in the excesses that typified the medieval and early modern Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, since they lacked hands-on experience, I assigned each of them to visit Protestant churches and report on their experience to the rest of the class. The spectrum of churches they could choose to visit ranged from liberal to conservative, from Pentecostal to Anabaptist, from culturally homogenous to ethnically diverse, from the megachurch to the microchurch.

On the last day of the term, students were eager to tell what they had discovered. Thankfully, all the students reported very warm and positive experiences. However, I began to feel uneasy when, one-by-one, each student reported that the sermon he or she heard was not especially sound, exegetically speaking. In fact, many claimed that Bible verses were used sparingly, even haphazardly, as proof-texts for homilies about psychological wellness. (In one case, what mattered was not that Jesus calmed the storm but that he could sleep in the bow rather than succumb to the stress of a busy schedule!) The students asked, “I thought you Protestants were big on the Bible? But we read more Scripture in our services than these ministers preached about. What’s the deal?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I felt especially ashamed of the so-called evangelical churches for giving the Word such short shrift. One student confessed that he had always entertained a secret hope of finding “the noble Protestant savage” whose religion was pure and undefiled. His church visit convinced him that the Protestants had nothing of interest to offer.

When the Reformers first entered the pulpit, they made a point of trading in their priestly vestments for academic robes.1 The message was clear: Reformation faith was serious scholarly business, and following Jesus involved, among other things, diligent renewal of the mind. But somewhere along the way, evangelical churches (Luther’s preferred term for the Reform movement) went soft. In his own day, Luther bemoaned the fact that “the more certain we are about the freedom granted to us by Christ, the more unresponsive and slothful we are in presenting the Word, praying, doing good works, enduring evil, and the like.”2

While I hesitate to say we’ve grown slothful, I do think that churches may be losing their distinctiveness due to our inattention. In part, our problem can be traced to the fact that we have been bewitched by the myth that the best way to reach the unchurched is to translate the message into terms that anybody could understand. This is a particularly modern myth. In Hendrikus Berkhof’s apt illustration, the church since the nineteenth century can be likened to a boat traveling down the river of time that attempted to clear the shoals of modernity by lightening its load. One by one, the items of scandalous particularity (the deity of Christ, the resurrection, etc.) were emptied out of the cargo bay. But alas, now the boat is empty, evacuated of any distinctive content.

Of course evangelicals quickly point out that Berkhof’s analysis describes the history of Protestant liberalism and, after all, everyone knows that membership of liberal churches is on the wane. In contrast, effective evangelistic strategies must be found, or so it is claimed, by studying churches that are growing. But sadly, one finds among many megachurches the very same “user-friendly” strategy employed by liberal churches of the last century. What will be the fate of these churches?

Fortunately, there is more than one way to skin a cat. If there is a communication gap between the followers of Jesus and their secular counterparts, and this gap cannot be closed by translating the gospel into “secularese,” then perhaps the gap can be closed by raising the level of fluency of the secular hearers so that they can understand the gospel on its own terms.

Perhaps now we can see why some are downright cheerful about the end of the mechanical age. Postmodern philosophy may open up ways for us to see evangelism in more living and organic ways. Specifically, postmodern insights about the nature of language help us appreciate that genuine conversion is tantamount to learning the Christian language from a community that participates in the mind of Christ by co-participating in their form of life and practices.

First, conversion involves language acquisition. Here I do not mean that non-Christians become Christians by some petty game of phrase-by-phrase same-saying. That would be magic. But becoming a Christian does involve learning a new conceptual language from believers who speak it. I might be able to learn some Norwegian by reading books and memorizing vocabulary. But I will never learn to bicker with the natives like a brother unless I become immersed into a community of Norwegian speakers. In a similar fashion, how can nonbelievers learn that “forgiveness” is not synonymous with “conflict resolution” nor “grace” with “freebie” except by being immersed in a community that uses forgiveness and grace properly? When we invite others to follow Jesus, we are asking them to learn a language by immersion into a community of speakers. We speak our language with them, and slowly they begin to hear with understanding. Conversion, then, can be likened to language acquisition. Consequently, evangelism is akin to language instruction; it requires of us the same patience and good humor required of my relatives who want to teach me Norwegian.

Second, there is a noetic or intellective component of conversion. However, this turns out to be different than modern apologists imagine. David L. Schindler writes that nonbelievers are not hindered from conversion by faulty reasoning, but by an alternative logic. In other words, nonbelievers make “logical” mistakes about the true order of the cosmos (namely, they cannot see that the cosmos is ordered to the love of God) because this logic is “implicit in a way of life” that nonbelievers do not share. What Schindler urges, in response, is that attention be paid to the nurture of the believing community’s “entire way of life . . . one that essentially includes a new and distinct logic.”3 This distinctive mode of reasoning has been described as narrative because it amounts to learning to see the world through the story of Jesus.4 To once again illustrate a postmodern notion with a premodern source, Calvin saw the gospel record (and indeed the whole of Scripture) as the lens through which the world is brought into focus rather than the text over which our minds sit in judgment.5

Third, the invitation to conversation is simultaneously an invitation to participate with the community in a very particular form of life. This form of life is the basis for the sense of the language Christians speak. All language seems to work this way. To gain fluency in simple words such as “chair” means to become familiar with the vast number of things we do with chairs. We count them, stack them, fetch them, reserve them, reupholster them, stub our toes on them, and, sit on them (not to mention appointing, endowing, and resigning them!). All such activities are bound up in the meaning of the English word chair. The fact that language acquisition depends on regular participation in these very activities is why language is better learned by immersion into a community of native speakers than by rote memorization.

Now think of the word “God.” How do we gain fluency with this word? Isn’t it the same way? We pray to God, confess our sins to God, worship God, tell our neighbors about God, give offerings to God, and thank God. For Christ followers, there is a vast number of activities in which the word God is at home. Amazingly, participation in these activities is not only the means of knowing what Christians mean by the word God, it is the prescribed means for knowing God himself.

But consider the atheist. The atheist insists “God does not exist” and yet neither prays, confesses, thanks, witnesses, tithes, nor worships. What then is the meaning of the word God in the atheist’s denial? Who is to say? After all, to the atheist who neither prays, sings, worships, confesses, nor witnesses, the word God is an empty concept!

What hope has the atheist of understanding Christian speech? None, if we believe the philosophers of modernity. For on their account, if all meaningful language must pass the bar of publicly accessible criteria, then God is a “No-See-Um.” But postmodern insights about the internal relation between language and world6 enable us to appreciate the seriousness with which Luther saw the believing congregation as the Body of Christ: the one who encounters the singing, praying, confessing church meets God in action.7 Thus, in the final analysis, evangelism is seen to be a form of discipleship. For what is needed is precisely that community that robustly embodies in its practices this new and “foolish” (1 Cor. 1:23) mode of reasoning, this mind of Christ, to the end that the church becomes, once again, the anchor and showcase of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15).

Let me try to give these thoughts more concrete form by telling a story I’ve written about elsewhere.8 My former neighbor across the street—let’s call him “Bill”—has been converting to Christianity for the past three years. I met the “new-and-improved” Bill at the end of a period of great turmoil in his life. He and his common-law wife had been drug addicts. He had left his wife and gained custody of their son. He landed a job, but the physical demands of kicking mescaline had required him to sleep most of his off-hours during the first few months. The days crept by.

When I met Bill, he was sleeping better and had just decided to quit smoking and begin exercising. I figured “getting religion” was the logical next step on Bill’s self-help program. So I invited Bill to come to church. First, he attended a children’s musical (our kids play together). Then he began attending worship. Somewhere along the line I gave him a Bible, which he undertook to read from cover to cover. On Sundays, I watched in amazement as he learned to sing songs of worship. Now, it has been said that more lies are spoken over the cover of a hymnal than anywhere else on the planet. But Bill’s tuneful worship was not self-deceiving (as if he were assuring himself that things were on the level with God when, in fact, he was still far off) but rather a training to see life under the aspect of the gospel, a learning to see things as they really are.
In time, Bill was baptized and publicly gave as clear a presentation of his journey to Christ as he was able to muster at his level of understanding. He also began attending meetings with a small group in our church.

Somewhere in this process of conversion, Bill was no longer self-helping himself into religion. Rather, he learned to correctly see himself as the recipient of an undeserved and saving grace.

Bill’s process of conversion cannot be distilled into a linear cause-and-effect chain that could be programmatized for anyone. Rather, what took place in Bill’s life was the involvement in a conversation. Initially, Bill participated as a recipient; he heard the gospel embodied in the kids’ musical, in the preaching of sermons, in the prayers of others; he read the text as a recipient of a notable message. And yet he also shifted his stance to participate in the conversation as an advocate. He sang songs as unto God; he gave a personal testimony before his baptism; he incarnated the gospel in miniature in the enactment of his baptism; he co-participated with the rest of the Body of Christ in incarnating the story of remembrance we call Eucharist; and he participates even now in acts of charity and care for his fellow believers through the ministry of our small group.

ENDNOTES

1. Edward LeRoy Long, Jr., “Ministry and Scholarship in the Reformed Tradition,” in Scholarship, Sacraments and Service: Historical Studies in Protestant Tradition, ed. Daniel B. Clendenin and W. David Buschart (Edwin Mellen Press, 1990),
2. Cited in Mary Gaebler, “Luther on the Self,” in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2002), 126.
3. David L. Shindler, “Religion and Secularity in a Culture of Abstraction,” in The Strange New World of the Gospel: Re-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Eerdmans, 2002), 44.
4. Stanley Hauerwas, with David Burrell, “From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics,” in Truthfulness and Tragedy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 15-39. See also Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (Yale University Press, 1974).
5. “Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God.” John T. McNeill, ed., Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion in Two Volumes, The Library of Christian Classics Vol. XX (Westminster Press, 1960), I.6.1.
6. See Brad J. Kallenberg, Ethics as Grammar: Changing the Postmodern Subject (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
7. Reinhard Hütter, “The Church,” in Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago (Eerdmans, 2001), 23.
8. Brad J. Kallenberg, Live to Tell: Evangelism for a Postmodern Age (Brazos Press, 2002), 63-64.

In his book Live to Tell Brad Kallenberg offers a fresh look at conversion. He writes, “Simply put when viewed through a postcritical lens, conversion can be understood as entailing the change of one’s social identity, the acquisition of a new conceptual language, and the shifting of one’s paradigm.” (32).

While the first and third seem very obvious, I am very intrigued by Kallenberg’s second point. Seeing conversion as acquisition of a new conceptual language in my mind flies in the face of modern attempts of contextualization that shows up in various shapes, forms, and under different names.

Kallenberg relies on the writings of George Lindbeck in making this point. According to Lindbeck our religious world is constrained by the conceptual language we have at our disposal. Lindbeck states, “It is necessary to have the means for expressing an experience in order to have it…The richer our expressive or linguistic system, the more subtle, varied, and differentiated can be our experience.” (40). Kallenberg argues that Lindbeck’s thought here implies on more basic level that there are no parallels for notions such as sin or answered prayer in the secular conceptual language. He writes, “The only way one can conceive human depravity correctly is by being schooled in the use of the term sin within sentences spoken in the Christian language. And only those who are fluent in the use of terms and phrases such as grace and answer to prayer can see a set of circumstances as an answer to prayer rather than as a remarkable coincidence. If Lindbeck is correct about the significant role language plays in enabling religious experience, then it follows that religious conversion necessarily includes the acquisition of the appropriate conceptual language.” (41).

Over time Western civilization had acquired a common conceptual language based on the Judeo-Christian worldview. One could appeal to concepts like sin and answered prayer and assume that it would be properly understood. Walsh and Middleton in their book The Transforming Vision document the rise of the secular culture where the elements of supernatural, sacred, and spiritual have been excluded from the basic conceptual and linguistic paradigms. In Subversive Christianity Walsh levels this verdict, “We are coming to the end of the cultural epoch.” (44).

Many today have detected the truth of Walsh’s verdict. The blog-world as well bookstores are teeming with proposed solutions for evangelism in the age where old shared linguistic foundation is gone. The general trend seems to be going in the direction of the translation of the Christian faith into the language of the secular culture. For example, Brian McLaren in his The Secret Message of Jesus suggests rewording the Lord’s Prayer. “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” becomes “May your dreams for this world come true.” I also sense a general trend to replace the concept of sin with the concept of woundedness. Works for Larry Crabb could have indirectly led us here. I do believe that the psychological issue of wounderness plays a big role in the spiritual formation today. It is an area that has not been explored and addressed from a pastoral perspective before. We have made big strides, but it seems to have become a substitute for something else. A dichotomy has been created. We call wounded people to come to the Healer. We no longer call rebels to lay down their arms and surrender to the King whom they have offended.

My conclusion, sparked by Kallenberg’s book is that we have given up too much by moving to the foreign land and translating our faith into the vernacular of that culture. We have a work cut out for us in bringing the balance by teaching curious outsiders the new language. That is what the catechesis was for in the early church. Kallenberg points out that the baptism and first communion were delayed till the Easter after a person had completed catechesis. Ultimately our goal is the mastery of and fluency in the language of faith rather than a smooth translation work.

NOTE: Here is a great article that summarizes Kallenberg’s view

I just came across an interesting article by James K.A. Smith. In his review of Gregory Boyd’s “The Myth of a Christian Nation” Smith makes this challenging comment:

“If Wallis, Sider, and Mouw were trying to pull evangelicals away from their isolationism, they likely didn’t anticipate the way in which the pendulum would swing the other way. In fact, evangelicals today have became such zealous converts to the cultural mandate that one can argue it has nearly trumped the Great Commission. Christian leaders spend more time worrying about activist judges, Venezuelan dictators, and constitutional amendments than their forbears could ever have imagined. Devoting themselves to political strategizing and superintending the machinations of government, evangelicals have so embraced participation in the “earthly city” that one wonders whether they’ve lost their passport to the City of God. Or worse: Some suspect that evangelicals in America have collapsed the two, confusing the City of God with America as a city set on a hill.”

They lost their passport to the City of God. Ouch!!!

Back in 1984 Walsh and Middleton were writing about the need for a comprehensive vision that encompasses all of life. Two decades later we still persist in living the dreadful dualism, oscillating between saving souls and whales. How do we take steps towards forming a comprehensive framework that avoids current trends and seeks to be faithful to the heartbeat of our God reflected in Scriptures?

Yesterday I was faced with two radically different worlds. At 9 am Austin took me to the local hospital for some blood tests following my knee surgery. As we sat in the waiting room I felt my heart sink. Everyone around me was sick. Many wounded human bodies, some overweight, some disfigured, some unkempt. Silence. Waiting. Deep sighs. I felt like time had disappeared. Everything stood still…

An hour later we were on our way to the airport to exchange our tickets to Georgia. Austin was gracious and wheeled me around the airport in a wheel chair. I felt like I was in a different universe. Human bodies, fit and in rapid motion, glided by me with ease. Everyone was dressed up, cheery, healthy. Makeup and perfume, aftershave and freshly ironed suits, briefcases and daily newspapers- all added up to surging and cascading life.

I never realized how people in wheelchairs stand out at airports. My heart ached as I felt completely out of place in the airport and very much fit for the hospital world.

Two sets of questions cross my mind as I reflect on this experience of tasting two different worlds.

I wondered what would happen to my faith if God were to pitch my tent more permanently among the sick than among the healthy. Would I cling to him? Would I doubt his goodness? Would I be able to see his presence in the midst of ordinary human bodily existence?

I also wonder why I am so fearful of realities of human body dealing with disease, pain, and wear. Can I befriend an ordinary human body, embrace its limitations, and live with its mortality.

Do you believe in the free will? Wait to decide untill you watch this video.

As Christmas approaches, I have taken some time to sit back and reflect what God stepping into the flow of history evokes in my soul. Three main threads seem to emerge. First, in last few years I have been experiencing the deeper realization that God is at the center of my existence. He is the originator of my life, the author of my salvation and the recipient of my praise. Richard Foster writes, “God is truly among us in the warp and woof of our very earthy existence. God is not distant, nor is he disinterested. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins; “Christ plays in 10,000 places.” We, you understand, are not alone. God stoops to our need and allows himself to be glimpsed in the material world.” As I read this sudden peace invades my heart. My life is in God’s hands. Everything is connected, nothing is wasted. Every second has true meaning. Life is not purposeless. God is at work in his people. This moves me from a life on an anecdotal level of existence, where I am numb and addicted to self-preservation, to “earthy spirituality”, which simply means being alive and present to God in the dailyness of every moment.
Second thought deals with the metaphor of life as a pilgrimage to the God who is at the center of our existence. Foster is helpful again, “Our embodied self becomes a habitation of the Holy- a tabernacle- where we learn throughout our daily activities to function in cooperation with and in dependence upon God. Through time and experience we discover that everywhere we go is “holy ground” and everything we do is “sanctified action.” The jagged line dividing the sacred and the secular becomes very dim indeed, for we know that nothing is outside the realm of God’s purview and loving care.” It hit me recently that the world of revelation is large. There is room and freedom to move around. There are a lot of great people, dead and alive, to mingle with, to chat with, and to have theological sparring match with. There are plenty of religious artifacts to study, tremendous works of art to admire and tantalizing books to read. Yet as breathtaking as this world is, it is also dangerous. The crucified and risen Jesus, who is the gravitational center, that pulls it all together, can be easily eclipsed by all of the “spiritual cotton candy”. Yet if Rolheiser is correct that, “Jesus, and the discipleship he asks of us, can best be understood within a simple phrase: The word was made flesh and it dwells among us”, then it is clear why God is not content to stay as a celestial backdrop to our religious photo-shoot. He comes to the center stage and bids us to follow him. He wants to be the focal point of our journey. We are wise to heed words of John Shea who says that, “Jesus is not a law to be obeyed or a model to be imitated, but a presence to be seized and acted upon.”
Finally, I have been reflecting on my calling of being a teacher and mentor- someone who listens to the voice of God in other person’s life. When it comes to helping people live mature spiritual lives, I am learning to not hog the center stage. I don’t produce. I don’t make things happen. That is God’s job. I simply step in as a listener, who is present, awed and amazed at the work of the master. My job is to watch, to detect and to point out the work of Grace already in progress. This requires keeping my mouth shut, having my eyes open and my heart filled with love, mercy and compassion.

Words of James Houston have made me aware of the ache in my soul, “Heaven will be the sphere where we can all share each other’s inmost thoughts without hindrance. Privacy in the inner life is a mark of the Fall, of the presence of sin in our lives. Instead, we should be wholly transparent to each other, with no barriers to divide and separate us.” (39)

These words bring me face to face with the intensely relational nature of human existence. Life is a montage of relationships. Relationship with God. Relationships with people around me. Sin is the corruption of our relational existence. Every conflict I have recently experienced or witnessed stemmed from a relational disorder. Every glimpse of eternal shalom that I have tasted has come in the context of relationships. Is this a coincidence? Genesis 3, Israel’s history, Paul’s letters-all seem to be pointing in this direction.

What does this mean for my life? This is a question that would need much prayer and waiting on the Lord, but here is one thought that comes to my mind immediately. I need to ferociously pursue relationships that God brings in my path. Houston talks about the surreal nature of public Christian life. He also talks about our temptation to have our souls lead an underground existence. Both are a result of our refusal to enter deeply into relationships with God and others. Neither of these are an option for me. The only option: dying to self in sacrificial self-giving, as if this were my last day on this earth. In that I affirm Houston’s thought,

“We need to accept the inevitability and unpredictability of our own death as subjective truth.” (57)

“Only living within proximity to death allows a person to reflect on the truth of one’s finite humanity in utter dependance on God.” (59)

On the last day of my life I will not care about escaping life in my self-protective underground where I remain in control. There will be no time left for that. Life will be too precious to wear a mask. So the awareness of the my fragile mortality becomes a source of life. Real Life.

Yet even as I write I am very much aware of my lack of capacity to run down the path that I am so eloquently pontificating about here. I see the dream of what life could be, but my soul aches at inability to live that dream. My guiding thought and prayer today, “Father, grant me wisdom to discern what ultimate self-giving implies in this relationship and shower me with a capacity to love that will give me resolve to pursue this path.”

You Know You’re Drinking Too Much Coffee When…

* You answer the door before people knock.
* Juan Valdez named his donkey after you.
* You ski uphill.
* You get a speeding ticket even when you’re parked.
* You speed walk in your sleep.
* You haven’t blinked since the last lunar eclipse.
* You just completed another sweater and you don’t know how to knit.
* You grind your coffee beans in your mouth.
* You sleep with your eyes open.
* You have to watch videos in fast-forward.
* The only time you’re standing still is during an earthquake.
* You can take a picture of yourself from ten feet away without using the timer.
* You lick your coffeepot clean.
* You spend every vacation visiting “Maxwell House.”
* You’re the employee of the month at the local coffeehouse and you don’t even work there.
* Your eyes stay open when you sneeze.
* You chew on other people’s fingernails.
* The nurse needs a scientific calculator to take your pulse.
* Your T-shirt says, “Decaffeinated coffee is the devil’s blend.”
* You’re so jittery that people use your hands to blend their margaritas.
* You can type sixty words per minute… with your feet.
* You can jump-start your car without cables.
* All your kids are named “Joe.”
* You don’t need a hammer to pound nails.
* Your only source of nutrition comes from “Sweet & Low.”
* You don’t sweat, you percolate.
* You’ve worn out the handle on your favorite mug.
* You go to AA meetings just for the free coffee.
* You walk twenty miles on your treadmill before you realize it’s not plugged in.
* You forget to unwrap candy bars before eating them.
* You’ve built a miniature city out of little plastic stirrers.
* People get dizzy just watching you.
* You’ve worn the finish off your coffee table.
* Starbucks owns the mortgage on your house.
* Your taste buds are so numb you could drink your lava lamp.
* You’re so wired, you pick up AM radio.
* People can test their batteries in your ears.
* Your life’s goal is to amount to a hill of beans.
* Instant coffee takes too long.
* You channel surf faster without a remote.
* When someone says. “How are you?”, you say, “Good to the last drop.”
* You want to be cremated just so you can spend the rest of eternity in a coffee can.
* You want to come back as a coffee mug in your next life.
* Your birthday is a national holiday in Brazil.
* You’d be willing to spend time in a Turkish prison.
* You go to sleep just so you can wake up and smell the coffee.
* You’re offended when people use the word “brew” to mean beer.
* You name your cats “Cream” and “Sugar.”
* You speak perfect Arabic without ever taking a lesson.
* Your Thermos is on wheels.
* Your lips are permanently stuck in the sipping position.
* You have a picture of your coffee mug on your coffee mug.
* You can outlast the Energizer bunny.
* You short out motion detectors.
* You have a conniption over spilled milk.
* You don’t even wait for the water to boil anymore.
* Your nervous twitch registers on the Richter scale.
* You think being called a “drip” is a compliment.
* You don’t tan, you roast.
* You don’t get mad, you get steamed.
* You can’t even remember your second cup.
* You help your dog chase its tail.
* You soak your dentures in coffee overnight.
* Your coffee mug is insured by Lloyds of London.
* You introduce your spouse as your coffeemate.
* You think CPR stands for “Coffee Provides Resuscitation.”
* Your first-aid kit contains two pints of coffee with an I.V. hookup.

I just came across this article by James M. Houston. It is very challenging and thought-provoking. Though I would not fully embrace all of it, I still find it very significant read:

Principles to Live By

Prepared by: JAMES HOUSTON

My basic convictions as a Christian have remained the same all through my life, but the attentions that I have paid to certain issues have altered. Personal priority to the nurture of individuals has long been a basic concern. In this regard, the tutorial system at Oxford for twenty-five years was formative for me. Then the move to help found Regent College in 1970, was motivated by the desire to see that intelligent/professional lay Christians have an equally informed Christian faith, as they had in their professions. But a third perspective, since the student revolts of 1968 onwards, has opened my awareness to the relativism of Postmodernism which has occurred since then. Before that, modernism was about rationalism, and even our Evangelical heritage was friendly to the Enlightenment. “Your mind matters” was a bias that tended to overlook our emotional life and of the need of more personal nurture, which I have long sought to redress. Now the “Po-Mo” – as Postmodernism has been nicknamed – emphasizes relativism as a regulative principle, which denies the validity of truth claims. In place of ‘orthodoxy’, which implies truth claims, moral relativists now interpret any expression of absolutes as ‘fundamentalism’.

The Protestant world is poorly prepared to confront this “cultural tsunami” of subjectivism. But the election of Cardinal Karl Ratzinger as the new Pope highlights this crucial challenge to Christian orthodoxy. For since 1981, as head of the Congregation of Faith and Doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, he has been the world’s most respected voice against neo-pagan relativism. Since so much of our religious institutional life in the Protestant world is semi-secular and relativist, Evangelical Christianity itself is compromised. We may not even be aware how much departure we have made from early Christian orthodoxy, since the Protestant world has no “concilium” to act as a watchdog of our faith, such as Cardinal Ratzinger has controlled so effectively within his own church.

Even sixty years ago, C.S. Lewis was aware that the lapse of Western civilization into a post-Christian ethos, as we have just summarized, was a more traumatic cultural change than that from a Roman pagan society to early Christianity. “Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian”(C.S. Lewis). For one thing, the sense of the ‘self’ was much more porous then, in interdependence, in openness to the spirit world, and therefore of need of exorcism from ‘bad daimons’, or in contrast, of living so profoundly “in Christ”. Whereas the effect of the Renaissance, then of the Enlightenment, and now of our Technological society in Post-modernism, has been to increasingly close up the ‘self’, in alienated self-sufficiency. It is far less ‘open’ to any other ‘spirit’ than its own. The irony of a contemporary culture of ‘spirituality’ is that it has less ‘spirit’ than ever before, for it is all about ‘my spirit’. So again C.S. Lewis concludes, “It really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man”. For the dictatorial power of subjectivism refuses any truth claim, which is why liberal secularism is itself a power struggle as ‘fundamentalist’ as any other ideology.

The inter-penetration of the human and the divine, what is reasonable and yet also revelatory, implies a tension, or a dialectic/dialogue between God and human beings. So the book I have completed, Joyful Exiles, describes some of these dialectical principles of faith:

1. It a life “hid in Christ”, yet it is not “underground in pride”.

2. It a life “open to God”, and yet it is not credulous in superstitions.

3. It is public, yet this can be very surreal, unless it is deeply interior in its spirituality.

4. It is expressive of being a ‘person’, who is not merely and ‘individual’.

5. It is integrated in community, and yet is transmitted to future generations, because it is intrinsically sacrificial.

Such a synthesis is not Hegelian, of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, because “Jesus Christ” is “the true synthesis”, as the God-Man. So always our tensions of apparent contradictions are resolved “in Christ Jesus”. But when our religious institutions, which we now inherit, are compromised by Modern and Postmodernist influences, we find ourselves incapable of combating the relativism of our society. Cultural narcissism is a corollary of cultural relativism, so we need to affirm Christ-centeredness ends egocentricity. Re-living the Psalms with Christ changes our emotions, to focus upon worship of God. Walking through the Gospels with Christ, changes our behaviour, to virtue and service. Living in the Epistles, leads to relationships with Christ and his Church, that educate our enjoyment, and thus give joy to others. Hoping in the book of Revelation, leads to humility and peace, as one entrusts one’s future to God. Small communities such as the ‘Desert Fathers’, or the early monastic communities, brought reform to the Constantine Church in late Antiquity. Perhaps today, small study/retreat centers, personal nurture, network of friendships in Christ, will facilitate a ‘Relational reformation of the Church’, to live with a much more radical consciousness that truly is ‘Christ-like”.

Reading James M. Houston’s book Joyful Exiles I came across a few words by W.H. Auden. He wrote, “To a Christian the godlike man is not the hero who does extraordinary things, but the holy man who does good deeds. But the gospel defines a good deed as one done in secret, hidden, so far as it is possible, even from the doer, and forbids public prayer and fasting in public.” (34)

These words challenge my soul. In the age when the West experiences a complete collapse of standards and conventions, when fashion models replace moral models, when ethics becomes a dirty word that is seen as imposing and shackling, when celebrities shape our souls rather than sages- I sense the need for heroes. Heroes like Augustine, who would bare his soul in his writings, and live courageously in public. The whole notion of Christian Life as hidden from the world is very hard to swallow. The activist in me wants it to be out there for everyone to see, hear, and experience.

Houston’s words provoke me, “The Christian life has nothing to hide, yet its efficacy is bound up in being hidden from the world. The incarnation cannot be seen by the world, only by the eye of faith.” (34)

Again from Auden, “It is impossible to represent Christ on stage. If he is made dramatically interesting, he ceases to be Christ and turns into a Hercules.” (34) Maybe what I really long for is a Hercules? Am I any different from Jesus’ first disciples who longed for a Jewish Alexander who would come in might, blast the Romans, and restore the nation to its pristine glory? What else is all modern day ministry but an attempt to make Jesus dramatically interesting and palatable for the Western world? Are not all our new strategies and methodologies a response to the current spiritual fads and preferences?