This as part of the follow up–or clean-up, depending on how you think it went down–to the piece that dropped at Relevant earlier this week.

At any rate, don’t read “answering for” there in that title too rigorously.   I’m not in the box, giving a defense.   My goal is simply to provide take on things, to call  them as the intellectual eye sees ‘em.

My hope and goal in all of this is simply that which I had when we set out on Mere-O:  to test out the waters and see whether a conservative, Chestertonian and Lewis style of engagement could be repackaged and to have a lot of good conversations with folks smarter than I along the way.

So go on over, like one of the questions, and then come on back next week for my attempt at an answer.  

The benefits of social networking are many but require judicious and responsible use to be enjoyed. When done well, social networking can enhance the fellowship of the church by providing congregants a window into each other’s lives. It can mobilize congregants to serve their neighbors and enhance the church’s mission by embedding the community of church relationships in the broader community.

But social media can merely offer a short-term, technological solution to deeper, more fundamental problems. Social networking can give the appearance of intimacy and community without enabling the substance of embodied friendship.

The more we wed ourselves to social networking as a strategy for building community, the more we risk forgetting that the problems in our communities do not hinge upon lack of access to shared information about each other’s lives. They result from our own reluctance to share space and meals together, and to enter into environments and social situations that require our embodied presence. The comforting arm around a shoulder that comes when we “weep with those who weep” will never have an equal virtual substitute.

1. Mark Driscoll wrote a book on sex.  And then Matt wrote a book review in two parts.
2. Philosopher Jerry Walls wrote a guest post on Newt Gingrich, John Newton, and why evangelicals shouldn’t support him.
3. Speaking of Gingrich, Matt argued that supporting him would end evangelicals’ moral witness on marriage.
4. And then defended and clarified that claim anddefended it again.
5. Matt also wrote a threepartreview of Jared Wilson’s Gospel Wakefulness.
6. Ryan Dobson has a radio show.  And Matt spent two hours on it, talking about everything from his upbringing and Mere-O to Earthen Vessels.
7. You may have heard of a little video about how Jesus > Religion.  We offered six points in reply. 
8. Folks offered their predictions for new evangelicals for the new year.
9. Speaking of evangelicals and sex, Matt wrote over at the Washington Post and Christianity Today about the topic.  And then followed up on singleness at Mere-O.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.  It makes it all worthwhile.

But first, two news stories to keep an eye on.  First, even Chris Matthews has come out against the HHS on religious liberty grounds.  Which means it’s not just conservatives who are concerned here.

Second, the White House is floating language about a compromise because of the backlash.  That’s good news.

For the backstory, read Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has brought the A-game to this issue.  This question seems exactly right:

Isn’t this a case of conflicting rights? 

Yes, basically. Proponents of the regulation say that women of all faiths have a right to health-care and the way we provide health-care in this country is through employer-based health insurance. If contraception and sterilization and all these other things are health-care, then employers have to provide it. To them this is a simple uncontroversial idea, hindered only by the dogmas of a medieval Church.

The discussion last week centered on the question of whether it is an infringement of religious liberty to require religious institutions to pay for things they are morally opposed to.  One of my favorite commenters, “Christian Lawyer,” suggested that it was not on grounds that such institutions won’t actually be paying for contraception:

When paying salary, the funds flow from the university to the employee, who then chooses how to spend the money. Thus, no one argues that a Catholic university is being required to “fund” or “pay for” contraception when one of its employees uses their salary from the University to make such a purchase. The university’s religious liberty does not extend to dictating how funds are used once they are provided to a non-ministerial employee as salary because the funds go out of the control of the employer and into the control of the employee.

Health insurance is another form of compensation provided to an employee. Employer-sponsored or -provided insurance policies are a form of non-monetary compensation in which the employer contracts with an insurance company and pays a portion of the premiums to the insurer, which holds the money to be paid out only as directed by the employee. We know that this non-monetary form of compensation is substantively and legally no different from monetary compensation (salary) because, without the specific exemption in the IRS Code, the employer-paid cost of the health insurance policy would be taxed as ordinary income to the employee even though the employee receives it in the form of non-monetary insurance benefits.

Even if the government requires the employer to make arrangements for an insurance plan that covers contraception, there is no funding that ever flows from the employer to the actual provider of the contraceptives or abortion. The insurance company is not “providing” contraception. It merely holds the funds (or benefits) controlled by the employee. Thus, funds only go from the insurer to the actual provider of contraception if the employee so directs.

This is about as good an argument as you’re going to see on this, quite frankly.  Solid work, of the sort that makes me love Mere-O that much more.

But–and you certainly knew this was coming, didn’t you?–I don’t think it’s successful.   It’s absolutely true that Catholic employees can take their salary and do whatever they want with it (within the bounds of the law) without their employers saying, well, anything.

But the question of insurance funding is different:  while the decision to activate that particular part of the insurance plan might lie with the employee, the funds come directly from the employer.  The insurance company is simply a mediator, and as such has no moral significance (it seems to me).  It is the employer who presents the plan to the employee and outlines the benefits, the employer who has (or had, anyway) final say over what benefits get covered, and the employer whose money goes into the account to pay for it.  The actual insurance company serves at the will of the employer, which is why employers are frequently shopping companies trying to get better rates and packages for their employees.

Consider the parallel case of 401ks.  Employers are the “plan trustees,” but they are almost universally run and sourced by third parties.  But as the trustees, the employer funds them, approves the fund choices, etc. and so is materially responsible for their operation.   If, for instance, employers do not provide sufficient education for employees around investment options, the employer can be subject to lawsuit.

Insurance benefits function very similarly.  As such, it is absolutely the case that the regulation is forcing Catholic employers to pay for contraceptives–even if such contraceptives have to be requested by employees.

Let’s go at it this way, in case the argument hasn’t taken hold yet:  when an employees insurance covers something, who pays for it?  The insurance company or the employer?   The fact that insurance counts as non-monetary compensation within the tax code doesn’t much matter, as when such compensation is delivered in the form of contraceptives (or insurance checks paying for contraceptives) it’s still the employer writing the check.  To put it differently, the non-monetary compensation is compensation from the employer, not the insurance company who is managing the plan.

The money might end up in contraception one way or the other, if employees go spend their monetary compensation on it in the open market.  But when it comes to how it’s being paid for and who is footing the bill, the  difference in agency makes all the difference in the world.

Christopher Benson is responding to John Stackhouse’s generic evangelicalism. Albert Lee (Technical Assistant, Mars Hill Audio in Charlottesville, VA) will respond to Kevin Bauder’s fundamentalism. Dave Strunk (Pastor, Cherry Creek Presbyterian Church in Denver, CO) will respond to Albert Mohler’s confessional evangelicalism. Jake Meador is responding to Roger Olson’s post-conservative evangelicalism. I think this is a very important conversation to have as younger generations of Christians set to inherit the differing evangelicalisms that have gone before us.

Here’s an excerpt of Christopher’s essay:

Earlier I said I embrace Stackhouse’s criteria of generic evangelicalism “as far as it goes.” I qualified my praise because, however much the definition contains an inner logic, I am still restless with “evangelical” (uppercase, in my reading) as a descriptor of my own religious identity. That restlessness owes to what I perceive as the cultural captivity and politicization of the movement during my lifetime. Add to this “the anointed” authority structure, pointless heresy hunting, institutional weakness, ad hoc liturgy, anti-intellectualism, middlebrow aesthetics, and flaccid theology (“moralistic, therapeutic deism”)—and you will begin to understand the winter of my discontent. (There are exceptions to the above generalizations, but apologists often make too much of those exceptions.) Some of my evangelical contemporaries have found vernal promise in Catholicism or Orthodoxy. I investigated both traditions and could not be at home there for theological reasons.

So, where shall a person like myself go? The answer, I believe, is toward post-evangelicalism—not to be confused with ex-evangelicalism or anti-evangelicalism. A post-evangelical can retain the ethos (lowercase) while leaving behind the movement (uppercase). C. S. Lewis famously exhorted such a move. Using a decidedly Protestant metaphor for Christianity, he compared the religion to a house: “mere Christianity,” which might as well be evangelical Christianity due to its ecumenical reach, is the hall—”a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in”—while the confessional traditions are rooms off the hall. Post-evangelicalism is a return to confessional Protestantism—or what Robert Webber calls “ancient-future faith.” For too long I have tarried in the hall, reluctant to enter a room where “there are fires and chairs and meals.” Lewis distinguished between waiting in the hall, which God uses for our own good, and camping, which is a refusal to commit because of pride, taste, or prejudice.

A species of pride may account for my reluctance to knock on the door—pride that expects perfection where none can be found this side of heaven. If the true church is “a congregation of faithful men [and women], in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance” (Article 19 of The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion), then I have not found that church in a single room because, in my estimation, the Reformed room succeeds in its ministry of the Word and its correlate of theology, whereas the Anglican room succeeds in its ministry of the Sacraments and its correlate of liturgy. Lewis furnishes sound advice to hallway-campers like myself: continue to pray for the light and ask: “Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this?” At bottom, my restlessness with evangelicalism is sensible because a protest movement should never be “put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions.” Lewis goes so far as to say “the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable” to living in the hall. Generic evangelicalism is just too damn generic for deep discipleship. Whatever my ecclesial future holds, this much is certain: “evangelical” will only be the adjective to the noun of “Christian.”

You should read the whole thing.  But to whet your appetite, here’s a teaser that didn’t make the cut because I had gone on too long already:

In its pursuit of justice, then, the government’s primary responsibility is to judge against wrongs and protect against threats to society’s welfare–rather than to provide goods directly. Given the diversity and complexity of society, we ought to retain a robust and healthy modesty about our government’s (or our own!) ability to determine “the common good,” and an even stronger skepticism about the government’s ability to promote it. Best to let it simply emerge from each sphere working at its best in its own area, and allow a nimble but strong government to judge the wrongs it uncovers accordingly.

But go on now.  Read the whole thing.  And then let me know what you make of it all in the comments.

Russell Moore‘s and Mollie Hemingway’s are, I think, especially worth your time.

I chimed in with a few hasty thoughts of my own, which are admittedly underdeveloped:

But such an environment, the language of “health care” and “public health” stands in danger of being reduced to a Trojan horse for competing social visions. Consider smoking restrictions, for instance, which have become increasingly popular in cities in recent years. The question pits smokers and whatever rights they might have against the concerns and cries of “public health.” And when the debate is framed in such terms, it is clear which one will come out ahead.

The problem, of course, with such comprehensive visions is that it can be difficult–if not impossible–to find common ground. Either the smokers get their way, or the public health does. And that is the crossfire that Komen has found itself in, which is why their insistence that politics should not enter into it has been resoundingly and universally ignored.

We should and ought work together to eliminate breast cancer. But the idea of a non-political body is a chimera. The culture wars are still upon us–they have never left us, though they may have gone into hibernation. And beneath them stands the body, with all its needs and failings and dependencies on resources that wrap us in the relationships with our neighbor and with the world beyond.

Rowe’s speech impressed me because it isn’t, at it’s core, about policy, but about values. At the heart of his talk is a fundamental economic problem facing the United States, “We talk about creating millions of shovel ready jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.” I couldn’t help but think that most of the girls I know wouldn’t ever consider dating a plumber–myself included. My hunch is that this prejudice has developed because we’ve become so used to specialization and outsourcing that we figure someone who has chosen a certain job is no good for anything else; therefore a professor must be smart and interesting, but a plumber is merely someone who messes around with pipes; boring and probably a bit dim.

But since when did the life of our minds have to dictate how we made our living? Have we become so poor at being self-taught or multi-faceted that we assume we are our jobs? Or, perhaps worse yet, has valuing strong minds made us too proud to work with our hands, so that we struggle through part time teaching jobs or terrible freelancing gigs rather than just get dirty and make a good living, helping to build our country while we’re at it.

Perhaps it seems odd (or even hypocritical) that this is what I’m writing about on a blog published by a lot of highly educated white kids, all of whom use their brains more than their hands to support themselves financially. But in the last couple of years, I’ve found myself one of several communities of friends who have all earned Master’s degrees, been granted fellowships, achieved 4.0s and honors distinctions, and are now unable to make a living.

This same theme has come up in some of the conversation surrounding Apple’s manufacturing processes. Last week the New York Times reported that the fact that foreign labor is cheaper is now not the primary reason that American manufactures are employing them; it’s because they’re better. “It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

My dad’s a salesman by trade but an engineer at heart; he owns a company that sells a lot of things made of metal that make machines turn and move and stop and start. His industry keeps him right in the thick of manufacturing, building, mining, and generally, people who do stuff that make our world work. He’s been telling me for a while that all any of my friends need to do to get a job that will support them for life is learn to weld. The problem is, no one knows how.

You won’t want to miss this one, particularly if you were one of those folks who thought that the book felt like a rambling set of blog posts.

I’m tempted to simply quote favorite lines from Fred’s piece, but I’ll simply offer a few broader thoughts instead, and trust that you’ll do yourself a favor and go read his.  I endorse it unequivocally, unhesitatingly, and vigorously.

First off, Fred writes: “Evangelical spirituality, which is shaped in response to the good news that our salvation has been purchased for us, is inescapably mundane,” he says, playing off of the word mundus, earth. “It takes our position in the world seriously, and the body as our connection with it.”

This connection, of course, runs throughout the whole book in various ways.  The fourth and fifth chapters, for instance, find me rambling on about consumerism, the relationship between humans and the rest of creation and the ways in which architecture, technology, and the media shape our perception of our own bodies.  I have sometimes been fascinated by the question of how the death of one man made possible the renewal of the whole cosmos.  While that man was Lord of the cosmos, the conformity of our bodies to his death and resurrection will invariably result in the transformation of the social space that our lives inhabit.

Think through the logic this way:  Paul suggests that we are to “present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.”  There’s an attentiveness that’s built into that idea of “presentation,” a way of being in our hands and feet that impels them from within to go about things very differently.

Yet to choose a slightly different example, presenting the instruments of our eyebrows to God as “instruments for righteousness” will lead to subtle shifts in our daily relationships.  My example is one of stress and concern:  some of us simply look it, and look it without realizing it.  And our friends and neighbors, bashful as they are, will usually detect it but very rarely point it out.  Faithful, local transformation can start at home, in the reframing of our bodies through the presenting of our members to God.

Of course, that all raises the question about what the pattern is for the presentation of our bodies to God.  And here, I was reluctant to move too far away from the pattern we see in the person of Jesus.  Which is why when I get to yoga, well, I’ll let Fred summarize:

And with language about “holy attentiveness” to the parts of the body, Anderson knows he’s saying things that you hear in your local evangelical-populated yoga studio. Anderson flirts with recent yoga controversy, but eventually says that yoga’s no big deal if it’s just exercise. Go ahead, get in touch with your toes. Literally. But the more theologically meaningful your yoga is, the worse it is.

I couldn’t have put it better, and it nails the concerns I have for those approaches to embodied spirituality where the Spirit ends up bleeding all over the place into everything.  The end result is a badly charismatic neo-Kuyperian transformationalism that loses any distinctiveness or hard edge to which we can say “no” to things.  What starts with yoga ends up somewhere around Pole Dancing for Jesus.

So, I hang about the sorts of spiritual disciplines that are easily discernible in the life of Jesus;  prayer, fasting, silence and solitude, and reading the Bible.  But I’ll give the last word to Fred, who nails what I’m after in each of them:

But don’t miss the fact that these disciplines are introduced here for one specific purpose: to portray a pattern of Christian existence that follows the death-and-resurrection pattern of salvation. In a theme that runs through the whole book, Anderson warns that “our transformation is not a technique. We do not sculpt ourselves into the image of Christ.”

The doctrine of election is a matter that raises more passionate controversy than, well, political elections. Plenty of people hate to ascribe particularity to God’s saving plan. Others simply hate the thought of it being discussed openly. And it’s more than just Calvinists that affirm this doctrine. (I myself was first persuaded of the doctrine by Aquinas before I had any regard for Calvin or the rest.) This is not a post about Calvinism, but a plea for common ground in our disputes about predestination.  Because, you see, there is more than one election.

The most familiar locus of election is the unconditional election of some to salvation. Yet there is another locus of election mentioned in Scripture, another scandal of God’s particularity. I wonder if we can’t clear the way for more open, productive debate on election within evangelicalism if we take one step back. In the order of Creation, that is.

Let’s remember that humans are not the only form of intelligent created beings mentioned in the Bible, not even the only kind said to have committed sin. The angels play a big role in Scripture, and Angelology—the doctrine of angels—mustn’t be neglected. Granted, it can be hard to carve out the biblical doctrine of creatures associated with Della Reese, naked wingéd babies, and sappy superstition. Or to see how to conceptualize the angels’ ministrations without downplaying the un-mediated work of the Spirit or the visible ministrations of the Church. And Angelology is a doctrinal locus that is a notorious breeding-ground for metaphysical speculation, drawing entire rival hierarchies of choirs, and the more unrooted forms of scholastic nitpicking. And if anything, demonology fares even worse, both in pop culture cheapening and in theological speculation.

But it is precisely concerning the angels that we are told one of the most stirring examples of God’s purpose of election, and how He chose to extend it. “For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment…” (2 Peter 2:4) Some of the angels sinned, and God did not decree a means of salvation for them. Some, like Origen in his more creative moods, tried to concoct a doctrine of angelic salvation anyways. But that seems to be the minority report in the tradition, and to cut against the grain of what little God saw fit to reveal on the matter.

But it means that, before God chose Israel from among the nations, before He called out His Church from all nations, before He called individual souls to effectual repentance, God had ruled against the fallen angels and in favor of fallen humanity. Adam He loved, Beelzebub He hated. Indeed, we even get hints that the fallen angels have a kind of priority in judgment: “… The eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

And so even at this basic level of created order, God made a choice of who to show mercy. He passed over His more glorious creatures and elevated those formed from the common clay. Even at that level, God is the God who humbles the great and exalts the lowly. The election of man over the angels is one that should rather humble us than puff us up. He passed over the glorious ones and seems poised to glorify us over them.

We can try to speculate as to why God chose to become man and not to be the Savior of angels. Any metaphysical reason we supply to say that God could not have saved the angels is rationalization after the fact. And still raises the question of why God chose to create a class of creature, some of whom would sin beyond categorical hope of salvation. But fundamentally, God’s will remains free. We can do nothing but thank Him, and praise Him for this unmerited favor.

So perhaps Calvinists and Arminians can agree on this point. Before we differ on God’s selective election within humanity, let us together marvel at God’s selective election of humanity!

(Mere Orthodoxy, your election headquarters! )

(Matt’s going to kill me for that pun…)