I’m grateful to Thomas Howard for Dove Descending, his commentary on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.” But why must Eliot be so pointedly obtuse as to need line-by-line decoding? (Though I suspect some of my students would think I find in Eliot a kindred spirit.) Having forced my way through “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” and “Wasteland” last week, I’m ready for some words of redemption. I’m just getting started on “Four Quartets” — I love the notion of there being “a way up that is at one and the same time a way down,” but this poetry is tough going. (I hope I can get some help from Charlie Kidd when he returns from abroad.)

Last week while grading exams (almost done), I listened several times (and am doing so even now) to Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. The Alpine Symphony, a tribute to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, makes Nietzsche’s atheism (or at least his quest for a “nobler god”) feel so, I dunno, so what? Brave?

Then again, if your best hope is to have your ashes parked on the top of the Himalayas in a Chock Full o’Nuts can (per The Bucket List, which movie Shari sat me down to watch this weekend, and which movie felt to me like an extended commentary on how to make Nietzsche work for you — even if the main characters do make non-Nietzschean moves toward relationships), you move past bravery into, well, again, what?

OK, I guess it makes a pretty big difference whether there’s a Redeemer or not. If not, The Bucket List is about as close to redemption as you’re going to get, I suppose. That said, I’m not sure a bucket list isn’t a bad idea even if (or since) there is a Redeemer.

What could be on mine? I’ve already killed a gator, hit a home run, played Bach & B.B. King, swung a samurai sword, driven (even briefly owned) a muscled up Mustang, kissed the most beautiful girl in the world, raised with her the three most vibrantly alive sons ever, written more than I have the right to expect anybody to read, spoken truth into the lives of half a generation of seminarians, seen tons of the majestic …

Before we leave Strauss, his Also Sprach Zarathustra (the whole tone poem) has inspired me to try to get the “Prelude” into my fingers on my Lucille and out through my Fender tube amps.

My head still hurts (that good hurt when your head feels like it’s taken in more than it’s able) from how rich the Institute for Worship Studies experience was this session. I’m grateful especially for bold prayers and wise counsel I received, and for the self-giving love I witnessed among strong-willed and talented worship leaders. It’s curious that my teaching partner and I are going through such parallel dysfunctions in church life. I love the church so — may all of us who love the Groom and his Bride help each other help Her not dress so ugly. I hold much promise of Her better adornment through my IWS friends.

Like I said, random thoughts … but, hey, it’s my blog.

Note to both devoted readers: I won’t forget about the other seven reasons for samurai sword training in Japan.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality. • T. S. Eliot

Reason No. 10: The ability finally to “get” Bill Murray’s movie Lost in Translation. Somebody had told us before the trip, “Don’t worry about English. So many people in Japan speak the language, you won’t have any problems.” A preposterous lie. Our travel agent booked us into a businessman’s hotel — a Japanese businessman’s hotel. It wasn’t easy … I couldn’t tell if I was being told, “Your bank card overpaid us by 200 yen,” or “You owe us 200 yen more.” By virtue of the fact that we were allowed out of the country at the end of the week, I infer the former. Nonetheless, even when language was a problem, we kept finding people who tried to help. And it so happens that body language is a pretty amazing dialect.

Reason No. 9: A chance to get a very quick take on an extraordinary people and land. Japan is about many people and much stuff in small spaces. Emblematic: in the little bit of soil around an electric pole on a city sidewalk somebody, I observed, was grooming a lovely rose plant (of course, I never got around to taking a picture). Tokyo and environs are filled with electrical wires, over which you can easily envision Godzilla tripping. Plumbing pipes are on the outside of buildings (all the better for servicing — brilliant!). Cars travel on the left side (note, I resist saying “wrong” side) of roads, and people walk on the left side of sidewalks. Every time I got in the front seat, passenger side of a car I’d reach for a nonexistent steering wheel and start to adjust the mirror. And, oh, the variety of vehicles! My favorite was the Nissan Cube (rival to my beloved Scion xB — which, over there is called the dB). People don’t jaywalk. Bicycles are everywhere — and whereas bicycles in the U.S. are normally recreational, bicycles in Japan are for basic transportation. Thus, they all have fenders and baskets, and are almost all “female” (which makes a lot of sense, once you think about how much easier it is to mount and dismount when there’s not this crazy bar you have to lift your leg over).

The little bit of sightseeing our schedule allowed took us to Mt. Fuji on one day (in the vicinity of which stands Odowara Castle) and to Kurakama on another (home of a famous Buddha statue, and historic shrines).

Reason No. 8: Intense training. In the U.S. it’s awfully hard to come by tatami mats (the slicing & dicing of which is the basic point in the art of batto jutsu). Not to mention they’re prohibitively expensive (sometimes as much as $6 per mat to cut). In Japan, tatami mats are in abundant supply, and they are quite cheap (about $2 per mat to cut). So, while in the U.S. we might get to cut two mats a week, during our week in Japan we cut every day but one. I figure we cut about forty tatami in that week. I went to Japan fairly confident in my basic 5-cut pattern (godan-giri), but scared to death of the next-step-up 6-cut pattern (rokudan-giri). I felt pretty good about both when I left. I hope it was a turning point. We’ll see. At any rate, it was training paradise!

In this regard as well, it was wonderful just to be in Hataya Mitsuo sensei’s sword shop and dojo. Watching him work on swords, you realized you were witnessing generations of artisans — his samurai family served the clan of the great samurai Date Masamune (1567-1636). Oh, and by the end of the week, I at least had a name, “Kidd San” as did my son, “Young Man.” It meant a lot that Hataya sensei gave “Young Man” so much encouragement, sparring with him (not with live blades, thank you very much!), and giving him the last double mat to cut on the last day of training.

Praise be to God for the fortitude and restraint Robinson displayed on and off the baseball field, deflecting hate with love, overcoming evil with good.

Praise be to God for Branch Rickey’s relentless pursuit of just the right man to rise to Jesus’ challenge to turn the other cheek.

Praise be to God for Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ, the book that gave Rickey the words with which to couch the challenge to Robinson.

This Thursday I’ll write in more detail for Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds community about this shining moment in the history of racial reconciliation. But I just had to put up this brief tribute today.

Well, how about some perspective?

OK, those little chores aren’t hanging over my head any more. That’s a pretty good thing. One less drain on the battery.

Plus, on reflection, it was great to be reminded that, recent setbacks notwithstanding, I am still able to afford a few simple pleasures, like the music of John Tavener and the prose of Wendell Berry. More, paying off reimbursements from preaching and worship leading at Lookout Mtn. Pres. two weekends ago brought refreshing memories of a healing time with old and new friends.

Reliving last weekend’s sword tournament gave me one more opportunity to give thanks that Randy has found something he does remarkably well … as well as one more opportunity to give thanks that, as event registrar, I’m learning to serve outside my area of gifting.

Recalling last weekend’s tournament also gave pause to consider what a “ruinous visitation” it was for my sensei’s sensei to expose a glaring flaw in my suihe (side to side cut) and to observe that I didn’t know yet how to aim the sword accurately. Change or die, for sure. (Learning how to accept “ruinous visitations” will have to become a chapter in the book: Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Coaching Little League, Training Dogs, or Submitting to a Samurai Sword Sensei.)

Moreover, I did get a couple of hours in Scripture yesterday … with no “preparation agenda” … just getting caught up in the flow of the narrative in Numbers and Mark. That was pretty cool.

I did get to talk with Bob and Charlie (yesterday was his 21st, and his first Newcastle), and wish them well on their spring break trek to MS to do Katrina relief work. That was pretty cool too.

Randy and I did get to cut some pool noodles. My new Hataya Wakizashi is absolutely amazing. Beyond cool.

And Shari and I did get to consider together that in a world that Ecclesiastes describes so keenly, nonetheless God is at work … and in his time and in his way, he will make all things right. Way beyond cool.

This Lenten season is providing a remarkable opportunity to rediscover the wonder of what was redeemed — from the brutally painful to the mind-numbingly mundane:

In a grave they laid you, O my Life and my Christ;
and the armies of the angels were sore amazed
as they sang the praise of your submissive love.

O Life, how can you die? Or abide in a grave?
For You destroy the Kingdom of death, O Lord,
and you raise up the dead of Hades’ realm.

John Tavener, Lamentations & Praises

First, believers like J.R.R. Tolkein, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Madeleine L’Engle, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and of course, C.S. Lewis have helped us imagine that what we see is not all there is, and that the Christian story makes all other stories make sense. Such verbal craftsmanship has helped us inhabit a reality in which, to elide Tolkein and Oliver Goldsmith, every fairy tale bears the trace of Grace stooping to conquer.

Walt Disney embodied a second approach to the imagination. Disney sought to fill a cultural mindscape with myth and story and legend, minus the specific content of any particular faith- or truth-claims. As Mark Pinsky (The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust) quips, Disney and his “Imagineers” have taught us to “wish upon a star, but not pray to a living God.”

A writer like Philip Pullman represents a third approach to the mind’s eye, one hostile to Christianity and aggressively promoting of an alternate vision of the divine.

When my kids were growing up, our family read through Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass). Precisely because Shari and I love the richness that writers like Lewis and Tolkein draw out of the Christian narrative, we wanted our sons to see — and have their faith hardened on the anvil of — a contrary vision. As I read the series, I kept thinking: “I’m reading anti-Narnia. Nietzsche’s quest for a ‘nobler god’ has found its end.”

I was not surprised later to find out that Pullman thought little of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. I was surprised only to find that he had the cheek to write them off as mere “religious propaganda.” If there’s ever been a case of “religious propaganda,” it’s Pullman’s trilogy. In volume one, we find that the fall of Genesis came through denial of one’s true self. In volume two, we encounter a reverse Garden of Eden scene, in which adolescents attain personal liberation through sexual exploration. And in volume three, Pullman updates Milton’s Paradise Lost (from which Pullman borrows the title of his trilogy). In Pullman’s inversion of Milton, cosmic liberation comes when angels justly rise against a senile and corrupt Ancient of Days.

Here’s the good news and the bad news about the movie The Golden Compass (Book One in the trilogy). The larger cosmic issues (which in the books are handled in a decidedly anti-Christian fashion) are treated — at least in this movie — as just so much Hollywood “good vs. evil.” Despite the fact that there is this overbearing Magisterium — a transparent foil for institutionalized religion — moviegoers are mercifully spared the mystifyingly bad theologizing and the stupefyingly ridiculous misquoting of the Bible that characterizes the book. This Magisterium is simply promoting itself and trying to control people so they won’t do “bad things” (as Nicole Kidman says, and that with a straight face, despite the fact that she is talking about surgery that separates a person from his or her soul). Sinister enough, but unlike the book, almost comically so. Further, it was a directorial kindness to condense the story to a manageable two hours, thus rescuing viewers from pages of Pullman’s pontifications.

The visual and conceptual universe the movie creates is stunning. The England of The Golden Compass exists in a universe that is parallel to ours. It has developed the way Jules Verne might have liked, with technology that looks more primitive, more innocent (especially when it comes to weaponry), more, well, Victorian. At the same time, the technology of The Golden Compass’s England surpasses ours. None of the motorized vehicles in Lyra’s England seems to pollute the environment. When did you last have a machine that reveals all truth? Or envision a mechanism that can separate a person from his or her soul (meaning this England’s technology is arguably even more morally ambiguous than ours)?

For all the remarkable digital enhancement, though, thanks to a line from Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review of the film, I couldn’t help but wait for the battle between the polar bears to end with an exchange of Coca-Colas.

Rather than concluding with the book’s rather grim story of the fate of the friend Lyra has been seeking to save, the movie ends with Lyra bravely setting out on the last leg of her journey to help her father, the mysterious Lord Asriel. We won’t know where Director Chris Weitz is taking us until the sequel — for which the ending of this movie is an even more unconcealed setup than the ending of the original Star Wars movie. In interviews, Weitz has stated he knows that in the movies about Books Two and Three he’ll have to deal more straightforwardly with the “angels and God” thing, so we’ll have to wait and see where this is all going.

But for now, the movie version of The Golden Compass is Pullman Lite.

•••••••

Al Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, has some trenchant thoughts on the books and the movie at his blog.

•••••••

Before the movie was released, I was asked to make some on air comments for Fox Network’s Local News 3, available here. Or simply go to http://www.myfoxorlando.com/myfox/ and search: New Movie Might Be Controversial

I’ve just been through one of the latter. I feel like I’ve lived ten years in the last month.

Inexplicably, I woke up the day after being wondrously delivered from a potentially eternity-ushering-in auto accident with a listlessness that went to the core of my being. The switch was “Off” and I didn’t know how to get it back “On.” Truth is, I didn’t want to get it back “On.”

I soon recognized mine to be a condition similar to one that had set in on my father when he was forced to retire from teaching before he was ready. Dad tried to write, but when he found publishers disinterested, he sank into his recliner, put the Braves on TV, and pretty much went away.

Likewise, and to my surprise, after the accident I discovered I too wanted just “to sit and watch a while.”

Mercifully, my life is too full of commitments, my wife too determined that I live, and my memory too full of what I’ve learned from Josef Pieper, Os Guinness, and Carla Waterman about the fourth of the seven deadly sins, sloth.

Often confused with mere laziness, sloth is more a shrinking of the spirit than an indulging of the flesh. What makes sloth sloth is not the nap, but the fact that the nap is the response to the report that there is a lion in the street (Prov 26:13-14). Sloth’s nap has been a constant temptation my entire conscious life, but at no time more oppressively so than in these past few weeks. I’ve come to understand acutely the majority report: “There are giants in the land — if we follow Caleb and Joshua’s counsel, we will perish.”

A month later, and I’m back — but not without an unlookedfor journey into a dark place. Others, too, I suppose, teeter on the balance point between “Further up and further in” and “Whatever … What’s on SportsCenter?” So I thought I would chronicle a few of the tipping points that seem to have brought me back from the edge of the abyss.

Getting Perspective on Greg Davis’s Death. The day before my accident, I had blogged the way the Newsboys’ Peter Furler’s line, “If indeed Christ rose from the dead, everything matters,” was helping me gain altitude on the death of my friend and co-worker Greg Davis. Little did I know how much those words would become my own do-or-die mantra: “Everything does matter. Everything does matter. Because of Christ, everything does matter.”

Ironically, the Greeks’ term for sloth was akeideia = “indifference.” We’re not the first to discover despair of the soul. Praise be, there was One who was not indifferent to our state.

The Sale of the Mustang. I knew the day after the accident that the biggest casualty of the event was going to be my beloved 1965 performance Mustang — I was going to need to sell it to help replace the totaled minivan. As fun as the ‘Stang was for me, she needed the kind of attention either an owner-mechanic or a wealthy dilettante could lavish on her. As much as I loved her, she wasn’t loving me back enough.

That’s what I knew on days when the switch was “On.” The other days, it was somebody else’s fault.

The day I resolved that it was my decision and not somebody else’s, and that the decision was going to be made out of gratitude for the joy the Mustang has brought instead of regret over the fun that was no longer to be, I called the friend from whom I had acquired her, and I offered her back. My friend had rebuilt the car with his father and had entrusted her to me only to raise money for a life-event that, well, eventually turned sour. The loss of the car was part of that pain. The Mustang’s return was as much a part of his healing as it was of mine.

Two Car Deals. I parse Greek verbs, but break lawn tools. I married a financial planner who carries household tools in her purse. I married amazingly smart. This week I got to watch Mrs. Kidd in full glory: walking us away from one car dealer over a $40 insult fee, and closing two car deals at another dealer. I’m sorry to see her give up the big family camping van that she’d grown about as affectionate of as I had the Mustang. But she’s right: we’ve got to be thinking about life-at-$5-per gallon. So, for now we’re driving his and hers Scion xBs: I’m in “Lucille,” she’s in the “Brave Little Toaster” (until our 16-year old learns to drive).

Speaking at Tullian’s Men’s Retreat & in Chapel. Larry Crabb once observed that sometimes all you can do is live as though you know truth is true, until you find yourself believing it. Sort of a sanctified “fake it till you make it” philosophy. Twice during the last month I’ve had speaking engagements in which I’ve simply had to articulate truth that I know to be true despite my internal disengagement from its reality. In the process, it has become more real. Thanks to the men of New City Church of Margate, FL, where my friends Tullian Tchvidjian and Paul Manuel minister, for bearing with me while I reminded myself as much as them that the apostle Paul calls us to “take hold of that for which I have been taken hold”: a life of faith, hope, love, godliness, justice, courage, and temperance. And thanks as well to the faculty, students, and staff at RTS/Orlando for letting me reflect with them on the way Jesus calls us “Out of Sloth and into Hungering and Thirsting for Righteousness.”

Toward Denominational Bonhomie. Right now, my denomination is characterized by some pretty strong distrust. The default drive, I suspect, is for all of us to surround ourselves with people who think just like we do. That’s its own form of sloth.

It has been heartening to hear, of late, how many and what range of folks are saying, “We can do this. It’ll be hard, but we can work at getting to know each other better so we can define better what’s essential and then trust each other on what’s negotiable.”

ALCS Game 5. OK, so how can I briefly say how great it was for ex-assistant Little League Coach Len Hardison to talk me into flying to Cleveland with him to take in Game 5 of the ALCS? I have to let pictures of the (less than prophetic) freebie Tribe towel, my scorebook, and Len & me tell it all.

Beckett was lights out. Otherwise of note: Youkilis’ home run & triple (but what was up with Sizemore’s bad angle on the triple?). And why didn’t Manny slide at home in the first inning or hustle out of the box in the third? Oh yeah, Manny being Manny. Pedroia’s double … I love that Little Leaguer. Even J.D. Drew got a double!?! Holy cow, this was the start of his ALCS & Series breakout! And you gotta love the sweet talk between Beckett & Cool Papa Lofton. How fun to be there for the ALCS turnaround game.

Sword Testing. My 16-year old takes to the samurai sword like a sandspur to socks. I’m still a klutz. It has taken me three years to learn how to do “seiza” — that’s basically a sitting position where your feet wind up under you pointing backwards with the top of the feet flat on the ground and the bottom of your feet up against your rear end. If you’re going, “Ouch!” then you’re probably imagining it about right.

At any rate, this past weekend (on my 38th spiritual birthday, it turns out), I tested for my second rank (“nidan”) in the U.S. federation of our organization — and I freakin’ passed. (Appropriately, I’m still “mudan,” i.e., unranked, in the Japanese association.) Randall didn’t test because they’ve decided they can’t have 16 year olds showing up 56 year olds. Oh, and about a month before the event, I found out I was in charge of registrations — I may ever get this paperwork sorted out!

So, I woke up this past Monday morning and said, “Wow, Lord, I’m back. Thanks.”

I’m OK. Beyond belief, I walked away from the accident. But I’m finding it takes a while to sweep up all the physical, financial, and emotional debris that comes with an event like this.

So now I’m driving my mother’s ‘92 Buick while I get insurance worked out — and (sigh) I’m selling my 1965 Mustang so I can replace the totaled minivan.

OK. Battery on the Buick goes out yesterday, and there’s something wrong with the hood, so I can’t get it open to jump the car. Reader beware — here comes a parable:

1st AAA vehicle is operated by a Christian (he volunteers this information when he notices we’re in a seminary parking lot) … he offers me a bottle of water ‘cause it’s low 90s and the sun is blazing. But when he can’t figure out how to get the hood up, he says he’s got too many calls waiting and he’s going to have to call a tow truck. Gone.

2nd AAA vehicle (the tow truck) is driven by a Harley t-shirt wearing, chain-smoking, good-ole-boy … it never occurs to me to ask about his worldview motivation (I know that makes me a slacker); still, he just exudes that religion-is-for-wusses ethos. At any rate, he sizes up the situation and says, “Dude, I’m going to get you out of here without a tow.” After some fiddling, he figures out he can unscrew the front grille and manually get the hood up … jumps the battery and he’s off. With what I hope he would consider a worthy tip.

There’s been much to ponder in the last two weeks: the promise that all our days are numbered (Ps 139:16), the reality of “ministering spirits” (Heb 1:14), the strength of Toyota safety-technology — and then yesterday’s little window into the parable of the Good Samaritan.

If Jesus died and rose again it means every one of us is heading for one of two destinations, according to C. S. Lewis: being “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

My friend Greg Davis lost his battle with esophageal cancer this week. But he won a more significant campaign. Greg loved Jesus. And Greg lived as though he weren’t just returning to dirt. He lived as though he were destined to become an everlasting splendour.

I’ve known few people as gifted in so many areas — and so unwilling to trumpet his abilities. Raised in Liberia by missionaries from the U.S. (his dad was a bush pilot), Greg responded to God’s call to the nations by equipping himself for ministry and going to Ireland as a missionary. When his marriage fell apart and he found himself a single dad, he took up counseling. His pastoring was characterized by an unusual capacity to care for the discarded and ignored — thus, I think, our mutual love for French artist Georges Rouault.

Along the way Greg found he had a knack for photography and for wordsmithing — so he published a book of his photos and poems, Windows of the Heart: Poetry & Photographs (Writers Press, 2002). Because nobody else around him seemed to understand how to make their computers work, he learned “information technology” (even figuring how PCs work — to Greg, that anybody would use anything but a Mac was proof of radical depravity). Though he felt his IT ability was as much a curse as a gift, he gave himself selflessly to helping others use digital technology (“Well, the basic reason your computer’s not working is that it’s not plugged in”).

A couple of months after I started leading worship at Orangewood, I felt it was time to bring a little art into our “sanctinasium” (sanctuary/gymnasium/school auditorium). It’s one thing for reformed people to have a lean aesthetic — but gym aesthetics are beyond lean. I’d say more like off-puttingly utilitarian — without even the hauntingly mysterious potential of catacombs. In support of lyrics that particular Sunday I projected some art I use in classroom teaching, and I did so with a singular set of fears: that the congregation would find the art helpful but me unable to find the time to provide the art from week to week. “Lord, I offer this to you — but if it’s going to be more than a one shot deal, you’re going to have to do something.”

No sooner did the service end than a short, bald, bearded guy walked up to me: “Hey, I just started working at the church part-time in IT … but my real interest is art … if you have any interest in doing more of what you did this morning, I think I might be able to help.”

Little in ministry has given me more pleasure over the last four years than brainstorming with a gifted and godly worship team about how readings, segues, songs, prayers, sacraments and sermons can complement each other — and then sitting back to watch Greg create slide backgrounds, videos, poetry, and handouts to make a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. See his corpus at writeclik.com. His visual point of departure might be a Vermeer or a Rembrandt or a Rouault or a cathedral or a train station or a worked-metal cross atop an Istanbul church or a neon-lit cross in front of an Orlando rescue mission. His imaginative capacity and theological depth and biblical breath were astonishing. And his friendship irreplaceable.

A week before his death we sang, “Be Still My Soul,” and I could barely get through it because I knew my friend would soon be departing:

Be still, my soul: the Lord is on your side.
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
leave to your God to order and provide;
in ev’ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul: your best, your heav’nly Friend
through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

Be still, my soul: your God will undertake
to guide the future as He has the past.
Your hope, your confidence let nothing shake;
all now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul: the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he dwelt below.

Be still, my soul: when dearest friends depart,
and all is darkened in the vale of tears.
Then shall you better know his love, his heart,
who comes to soothe your sorrow and your fears.
Be still, my soul: your Jesus can repay
from His own fullness all He takes away.

Be still, my soul: the hour is hast’ning on
when we shall be forever with the Lord.
when disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still, my soul: when change and tears are past,
all safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

The second most enjoyable thing I’ve done in the last two years (the first was gator hunting last year) was going to the U2 Vertigo concert in Miami as Greg’s guest (thus the “vintage” post elsewhere on this site, “BB&BB: The Beat Goes On”). So I know the sign-off Greg would prefer is from his favorite Irish theologian, Bono:

Grace
It’s a name for a girl
It’s also a thought that changed the world.
What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things.

I don’t know why I couldn’t have either just attributed to him better motives and intellectual integrity in the first place, or at least gone to him personally in the second. But I had to go and put my unworthy thoughts out for everybody to see. It took seeing Lane Keister’s rebuke on his website for me to see what I had done.

There may be “fluff” in the church, but it does not come from R. C. Sproul. Nobody’s worked harder in his generation to give a coherent account of the faith. I know that. I’ve benefited from it. When I was in college and seminary, his was one of the voices that helped me start thinking in Reformed categories. It was a delight to teach with him in the early days at RTS/O. No praise ever meant more to me than his approbation of my contribution to the New Geneva Study Bible. I was never more proud of a theologian than when he called Max King’s radical preterism the Gnosticism that it is.

I don’t know where I get off calling R. C. Sproul smug — I twisted his passion for the truth and his confidence in Christ into their opposite, and was wrong to do so. I had no business doing a mind and heart read on his “righteous applause” remark either.

Finally, whatever inclination PCA General Assembly members might have to assent to something that R. C. Sproul says just because R. C. Sproul says it does not deserve to be called sycophantic. Whatever moral capital he has with the Assembly, he has because he has earned it.

I’m so sorry. My heart is broken for the lack of peace in the Reformed world, and I’ve contributed to its fracturing.

I beg the Lord’s mercy and everybody else’s forbearance with my sin.

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

On another, Mormons, arguably the fastest growing religion on the planet, knock on our doors with their terminal niceness (with, as Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven chillingly recounts, notable exceptions) and their uber-Disney promise that not only can you wish upon a star but you can get your own star where you’ll be a god or goddess.

Then there are the angry atheists who grouch about the immorality and intellectual suicide of faith. And just wait until this Christmas season’s (how deliciously ironic) release of the movie based on Philip Pullman’s vision of anti-Narnia: The Golden Compass.

Meanwhile, mainline Western churches languor under the sway of pre-pagan eros and post-Christian heterodoxy, embodying in a way that couldn’t be more precise Jude’s prescient warning about “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

Meanwhile evangelicals headbutt each other … and do everything we can to our nearest neighbors to let them know we’re more against them than against what should be our common enemies.

Sisters raise voices of orthodoxy in pulpits long abandoned by theologically conservative men — and we have the temerity to tell them they have no business battling battles we’ve walked away from.

A minority of voices ask whether we in the Presbyterian Church of America (my denomination) ought to look more closely at whether our preaching adequately reflects the corporate nature of the apostle Paul’s vision — they suggest even that our view of the unity of the covenant implies that perhaps it’s worth considering whether our children belong with us at the Table (as Hebrew children did at Passover).

The answer: a study paper (passed — I note with chagrin — overwhelmingly) not on the biblical merits of the positions considered, but on whether they pass confessional standards (as interpreted by a tendentiously and carelessly written paper). When the point of the positions was never whether the standards were wrong, but whether more needed to be said than the standards say.

Suggest that we might do a better job representing Paul’s view that the Body and Bride are elect as a whole, and get accused of denying that Paul teaches individual election.

Suggest that more could be said about the way Jew and Gentile oneness in the gospel demonstrates the righteousness of God than the Westminster Standards say, and get accused of denying justification by faith.

Battle as relentlessly and courageously as the Church of England’s N.T. Wright does to champion the view that Paul’s theology is animated by a comprehensive and integrated story of promise and fulfillment — scoring points against both the postmodern deconstruction of the biblical meta-narrative and the dispensational fracturing of the singular story of “the Israel of God” into dichotomous stories of “Israel” versus the “church” — and what do you get from your potential allies in the conservative reformed world? How about getting dismissed as importing an alien biblical theology into the established categories of systematic theology, as being vague about the atonement, and as compromising biblical authority? While we build careers at our potential friends’ expense, the hostile armies and navies amass. Nice work.

Write courageously, as does Duke University’s Richard Hays, into a most liberal Methodist environment about Paul’s seeing in homosexuality the red light on the cultural dashboard, champion Paul’s theological method as building upon Old Testament themes and texts and Jesus’ ministry as being the embodiment of Israel’s story, and get accused of Nestorianism because you believe that complementary to Paul’s teaching that we are to believe “into Jesus” we are also supposed to have a faith that was like that of the incarnate Jesus? Puhleeze!

As the Scoutmaster once said to his troop of Boy Scouts who couldn’t do anything but bicker: “Boys, it’s time to start whizzing out of the campsite instead of into it.” (Apologies to my friend Wes Sumrall for the euphemism.)

Is it possible that Sparta and Athens understood better what was at stake in their time than we do in ours? Can we stop devouring our own? Can we make common cause against common enemies instead of against one another?

We’re better than this. We’re wiser than this. And the gospel deserves better than this, because more is at stake than when the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” took stock of the price that had been paid for them.