Piety and Learning, Gentleness and Conviction

The last several years were difficult for my friend Knox Chamblin.  He seemed to have one health trial after another.  His anemia gave way to an aggressive leukemia.  He suffered well.  He suffered as a Christian.  He asked God for healing.  He came to the elders to be anointed with oil.  Last week, the Lord took him home.  His prayer for healing was answered and we will see the result at the resurrection of the just.

I loved Knox Chamblin as a professor.  I had him for Pauline Epistles and C. S. Lewis.  I did not know him well as a student.  I remember, as a brash Yankee, first hearing his gentle Southern accent.  I remember being moved as he wept at the lectern.  I loved his classes, his unique take on the text of Paul, his Calvinist's love for C. S. Lewis.

What a privilege it has been to be his pastor and his friend for these past five years.  I have yet to come to terms with the fact that he is gone.  The other delight of these past five years is coming to know and to love his dear wife, Ginger.  I have never known two people like them.  Words fail me to describe them and their relationship, and their ministry both individually and together.  They were some of my inner ring --those people to whom a pastor can go on a dark day, and confide in, and know that he was being lifted up by them in prayer.  Scripture tells us (Hebrews 13:17) that some people will be hard to pastor, and tells us not to be those people.  Knox and Ginger are the exact opposite --they have always been more of a blessing to me than I could ever be to them.)  During Knox's long hospitalization, the Lord gave me some wonderful times of prayer and reflection with him.  Many people make small talk.  Knox was not unusual in that regard.  Yet, inevitably, the conversation naturally turned to the preciousness of Christ and his word.  It was not forced, it was not artificial, it was part of the warp and woof of this man's being.

Knox Chamblin was a unique man.  He was a Biblical scholar with a poetic soul.  He was an irenic and peaceable soul of unshakable conviction.  He was a seminary professor who went to prisons to visit.  He was a minister in the PCUSA to the end of his life,  yet devoted his life for the last thirty years to a PCA congregation.  Christ has his warriors and his polemicists, and they are necessary.  But, Christ also has his gentle giants and his peacemakers, and Knox was one.

Knox was not named for the great Scottish reformer.  If memory serves, one parent was a Baptist, the other a Methodist, and, in true twentieth century fashion, they settled in their married life on being Presbyterian.  What a providential happening!  What a blessing that this singular soul was entrusted by God to perhaps the most cantankerous part of his fractious family.  For Knox there was no separation between scholarship and doxology and piety, between heart and head and hand.  So many of us have such a hard time holding those things together.  Whether it was effortless for Knox, he and the Lord know.  It certainly looked seamless to me.

Knox was brilliant beyond reckoning, certainly.  His work Paul and the Self, a masterpiece of Christian psychology (in the theological, not technical sense of that word), is no easy read.  His commentary on Matthew is as devotionally rich as any Ryle ever wrote, and far more scholarly.  God, in his grace, allowed Knox to finish that work, and I am grateful.

Knox's memorial service was the most moving service I have ever been party to in our church.  Throngs of people, "It Is Well" and "How Firm a Foundation," reading Psalms especially dear to him in his affliction, reflecting on his life and how it reflected Christ, Ralph Davis reminding us that Christ is sympathetic to us in our losses, but violently angry at death itself, and alone has the power to overcome death  --a beautiful, wonderful and awful thing all wrapped up into one.

I am thoroughly dissatisfied with what I have written.  My words fail this good man.  My grief today feels different than that of last week, or of his service.  Today it is the dreary dull reality of loss and emotional weariness.  I am grateful to God that he gave us Knox for 76 years.  I am so grateful for these last 5 years.  Yet, how I wish they could have been many more.

A Life Stranger than Fiction

I have long been taken with Walker Percy.  I am fascinated more by his life than by his novels.  I am not much of a fiction reader, to be honest, but I have learned from his profound essays.  Much of what I write below is drawn from the moving PBS special on his life.

If it were not biography, Tennessee Williams could have written the life of Walker Percy.  He was born into a prominent and tragic Southern family.  His grandfather had committed suicide.  His father was a prominent Birmingham attorney, with wealth and privilege.  He, too, ended his life.  Suicide felt like the family curse to Walker, and he wondered if he were destined to walk that same road.

Walker, his brothers and his mother went to live with his cousin, "Uncle" Will Percy, himself the author of a haunting memoir Lanterns on the Levee (a very worthwhile read).  Will was a Southern gentleman, never married, and a leading citizen of Greenville, MS.  His father LeRoy, whom he lionized, was a United States Senator who stood down the Klan.  Will himself had rather liberal sympathies.  Greenville was anything but a stereotypical Southern town.  It produced a progressive newspaper, edited by Hodding Carter.  It had a prominent synagogue.  It was wealthy beyond imagining and a cosmopolitan oasis in the Mississippi Delta.  Will entertained luminaries of every sort in his capacious estate and Walker was the beneficiary of it.  His childhood friend included another man who would become an equally prominent Southern author --Shelby Foote.

While still a young man, Walker's mother drowned.  She was driving on a treacherous road, her car came around a sharp corner and missed the entrance to a bridge.  She drowned with her younger son in the car.  He lived, but she died.  Walker was soon at the scene --he did not know it was his mother's car until he arrived.

One can understand why a young man might want to leave much of this behind.  The settled philosophy of his early life was agnosticism --he was to be a man of science.  He went to study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He settled on becoming a doctor, and studied pathology at Columbia University.  While there, working on cadavers, he contracted tuburculosis, and was forced to lie flat on his back for months in a sanitorium.

At some point, Walker began to realize that science could not account for the deeper, richer things in life --beauty, love, nor could it grapple with man's plight, blindly trying to make his way in the silent universe, sensing there is meaning, but not being able to read what that meaning was.  He awakened to the reality of God, yet not without profound and burning questions.  He had been profoundly influenced by existentialism.  He became a Christian Existential Catholic.  Existentialism prizes the individual acting decisively.  While in the sanitorium, he resolved to marry his long-time fiancee, become a Catholic and move to New Orleans.

Only he didn't quite move to New Orleans.  He settled in the nearby town of Covington, and writes movingly of why he did so.  Though becoming a literary giant through his novel, The Moviegoer, he was a regular citizen, in his later days, found at the waffle house and driving a beat-up Toyota.

He and his wife, Mary Bernice ("Bunt"), had two daughters.  They would take walks down by the river.  Because snakes abounded, Walker carried a rifle.  Once, when the younger daughter was a baby, he shot a snake.  Bernice and the older daughter winced.  The younger daughter didn't make a sound --they had just discovered she was deaf.

Percy's life was marked by tragic and difficult circumstances.  Many people's are.  Is it right to draw lessons from a person's life?  Was it Percy's circumstances that gave him so many things to say?

I wanted to introduce you to Walker Percy because he has some wonderful things to say --perhaps I'll chronicle some of those in a later post.  I am not commending him religiously or philosophically.  I am commending him because he makes me think.  Maybe he will make you think, too.

Some Random Thoughts about Doing Good while Doing Minimal Harm

There has been a lot of healthy talk in Christian circles lately about how best to go about doing good in the name of Christ.  Both Fikkert and Corbett's When Helping Hurts and Tim Keller's Generous Justice contribute much to this discussion.  Some of this is distilled from them, and some from my own experiences.  Some of it may not even be right!  Just some thoughts.

1.) You have to be willing to be "taken," up to a point, without getting jaded.  This is really difficult.  The Christian should be wise --we don't want to help in a way that winds up hurting, but neither do we want to deny aid just because a person might be playing us.

2.)  Sometimes, the best thing to offer is comfort, support and companionship.  Some financial holes are simply too deep for most individuals (or even congregations) to fill.  The apostles once said to a beggar, "Silver and gold have I none."  Of course, they promptly offered healing that is beyond most of our spiritual gifting, but we can offer the same Jesus.

3.)  When in doubt, ask for counsel.  If you are faced with a decision as to how to help, or whether to help, get some quick counsel from like-minded brothers and sisters.  They will help you avoid purely emotional or reactionary decisions.

4.) Don't be too cautious.  God is with you and you have the Holy Spirit.  Not all doing good is safe.  Don't be foolish (I was once, and am glad I escaped), but don't be reticent.  Don't let the possible worst case scenario, or all the potential contingencies, keep you from helping someone.

5.) Doing real and lasting good is very hard to do.  Many people's problems are the result of factors far out of your control (relationship issues, health difficulties, lifestyle choices).  You can often alleviate immediate needs, but more needs will present themselves because of poor choices or just the size of the predicament the person is in.  Do what you can, but realize you can't do everything.

6.)  If you don't know how to help a person in a particular situation, get to know some people who do.

7.) Be willing to say "no," while still offering support.  Sometimes people will ask you to do things that are dangerous for them (like collecting an outstanding debt).  Politely refuse and tell them why.

8.) Be careful what you pray for.  Sunday night we had a prayer service.  Since we are an urban church, I told the congregation we needed to ask God to bring us all sorts of people, and help us welcome them and meet whatever needs we can.  Immediately afterwards (actually before!) an acute need became available.

9.)  Expect unexpected blessings.  Getting involved in peoples' messy lives is hard.  You will probably get hurt and taken advantage of.  But, you will also get some really awesome unexpected blessings, too.  I've seen it --tangibly and really.  I don't want to share details because of the potential for embarrassing some involved, but let's just say it can be spectacular to help people.

10.) Build relationships, don't just write checks.  We are good at alleviating guilt by giving money.  Money is necessary, to be sure.  Look to build friendships.  Ask for God to bring you friends who present particular challenges --who aren't from your walk of life, your race, your education level, your economic class.  Take them out, invite them over (Jesus said to!).  People are people.  You will be surprised at the deep bonds that can be forged.

11.)  It's not wrong to feel good about doing good.  Kant told us that if a virtuous act made us feel good, it wasn't virtuous (or something like that).  Nonsense.  It's okay to feel satisfaction when you help somebody.  It's part of the reward.  You won't always feel it, and not feeling it is not a reason for not doing it, but when you do, enjoy it.  "I did somebody some good today" is not a bad thing.

Some Thoughts on Christopher Hitchens

I understand the truth of what the Scripture says, "The fool says in his heart 'there is no God.'"  Yet, smart atheists  serve a purpose in the life of the thinking believer, and Christopher Hitchens was a smart atheist.  Doug Wilson, his sometime sparring partner has written a fitting tribute to him over at Christianity Today.  Christians do themselves a disservice when they assume that the atheist (or any opponent of evangelical Christianity) is the product of some personality disorder or traumatic experience.  It is true that some very smart people go stark raving mad when it comes to their opposition to the Christian faith (Richard Dawkins comes to mind).  Even Hitchens went off the rails sometimes, but generally he presented smart, credible challenges to the too-easy answers with which we comfort ourselves.  I find few people on the "other side" of whom this is true (Camille Paglia would be another, but she has largely and lamentably fallen silent of late).

Many people in my circles (and I chide myself here) are satisfied with very pat answers, and are unwilling to allow their faith to be challenged by the good arguments of the other side --this is true in terms of every aspect of the Christian world-view --politics as well as religion.  So, we end up repeating mantras instead of thinking deeply.  Scripture is altogether different.  Ecclesiastes stares into the abyss and finds some discomforting things there.  Job wrangles with pain and evil and finds his ultimate answer is no answer at all --simply a call to leave it to God, and a confident resolution that God will triumph in the end.  That is faith --but we need to understand why it is not always intellectually satisfying.

The larger point is to find the best opponents of what you believe and read them or, if you have the chance, wrangle with them in person.  If your faith is too brittle to withstand those sorts of onslaughts, it needs to be strengthened.

One of my mentors in the ministry is an incredibly smart man, intellectually curious across the field of human endeavor.  A conversation with him is at once fascinating and intellectually daunting, as topics fly by in a flurry.  During his ministry in one place, a mutual friend introduced him to the notable, vociferous atheist forty-year pastor of the downtown liberal church.  Yes, I said atheist.  This man was not a "pat answers" universalist liberal --he denied the existence of God, and told his free-thinking congregation as much.  This group would meet regularly at the same spot, in an inklings-like friendship:  my friend (pastor of a large, staunchly orthodox and Calvinistic church), the acquaintance (a notable Christian Reformed intellectual), the atheist pastor, and another liberal pastor (best described as a Calvinist turned Unitarian).  I once had the temerity to ask my mentor why he did this.  His answer was simple, "He keeps me honest."

I think the confessional Reformed tradition suffers today from an insularity --the same people saying the same things to friendly audiences, and it can create a stifling atmosphere.  My answer is not, of course, that we become liberal --it's that we develop stronger answers for why we're not, and cordial relationships with those that are.  We need to have our iron sharpened, and we can only do this as we learn to intersect with those with whom we disagree.  Their arguments are stronger than we think, and sometimes ours are weaker than we think.  We can only change that by interacting with them.

A Brief Quote on the Reformed Faith and Our Mission

W. Robertson Nicoll was a well-regarded British pastor, Bible scholar and journalist in the nineteenth century. Throughout the years, he wrote a series of obituaries and brief tributes to British church notables that he had known. These are collected in the volume entitled Princes of the Church. Some were doubtless famous in their own day and are now forgotten. Some are remembered for their scholarly accomplishments (Lightfoot and Westcott). Some are remembered by their theological heirs (A. Maclaren, Alexander Whyte, Andrew Bonar). A few stand out as titans in their respective traditions: Cardinal John Henry Newman and the great Baptist Charles H. Spurgeon.

What Nicoll says about Spurgeon flies in the face of the popular myth that Calvinism can only flourish among educated, elite people (in fact the whole history of Dutch Calvinism flies in the face of that too --google Petronella Baltus, but I digress).

Nicoll writes: It may seem a hard saying, but it cannot be doubted that his theology was a main element in his lasting attraction. Why has Calvinism flourished exceedingly in the damp, low-lying, thickly peopled, struggling regions of South London(?)...Mr. Spurgeon's hearers had many of them missed all the prizes of life; but God did not choose them for the reasons that move man's preference, else their case were hopeless. Their election was of grace. And as He chose them, He would keep them. The perseverance of the saints is a doctrine witout meaning to the majority of Christians. But many a poor girl with the love of Christ and goodness in her heart, working her fingers to the bone for a pittance that just keeps her alive, with the temptations of the streets around her and the river beside her, listened with all her soul when she heard that Christ's sheep could never perish.

The very poor...are beginning to hope that councils and parliaments will do much for them. They may find it so, but Mr. Spurgeon made little of such things. He taught them...that now in the living communion of the soul with Christ, they might have all the joy they needed. A man too wise, too experienced, not to know how slowly the battles of the poor are won and how little their victories often yield --he insisted on the joy and peace in believing, which the world could neither give nor take away. Life might pursue its hard, monotonous way of obscure toil, scanty wages and a great weight of care, but over it all there might rest a soft and sacred light. The common people heard this gladly, and well they might, for it is so. Perhaps when they have had a little more experience of the politician they will hear it more gladly than ever.

I think sometimes we have a Reformed brain, but not Reformed hearts. Calvinism and affluence are strange bedfellows, sometimes, Max Weber notwithstanding. Calvinistic commitment, historically, has seemed to wane with increased prosperity (Religion begat prosperity, Mather said, and the daughter devoured the mother).

Do we, in the new Reformed movement, really believe we are the lowest of the low, and that God can reach other lowest of the low with his sovereign grace? Or, do we assume that the elect must have a certain educational level and financial means? Are we really in this for "whosoever will" or only for people like us? May God build his people from all races and income levels and walks of life!

Glory and Grit

Psalm 96:9 Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth!

Matthew 11:19 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!' Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds."

Our church culture tends towards extremes and absolute divides. Perhaps that is just a characteristic of the American temperament. We have a hard time with "both/ands," and usually opt for the "either/or". An example: either a church is concerned about teaching the Word and doctrine, or it is concerned about the poor. The word and doctrine crowd think the poverty crowd are simpering social-gospelers. The poverty crowd thinks the word and doctrine crowd are the dead orthodox. Well, why not orthodox people who care about the poor? Why is it so hard for us to avoid what smart people call neo-Platonic dualism? Why can't we love doctrine and those for whom life is very hard?

I find the same thing true in terms of worship and ministry model. Churches tend either toward grit or glory. The gritty church assumes that everything has to be raw to be authentic. It is like NYPD Blue, a show of unparalleled brilliance in terms of grit. The police were as flawed and volatile as the perps. The lives of the heroes were as tragic as those of the villains. The camera took it all in with unblinking eye. The gritty church assumes that worship should be as raw (and sometimes as vulgar) as life itself can be. There is little beauty, and a lot of very straight talk. I am not offering a blanket condemnation of that --I think straight, pointed sermons that are as explicit as Scripture itself can be when circumstances warrant are part of real preaching.

The good of the gritty church (and Mars Hill Seattle would be a classic example, I think) is the sorts of people they are reaching --the great unwashed multitudes that would feel very uncomfortable in a church that operated on the "glory" model (more about which below). They see prostitutes and sinners come to Christ and be forever changed. Their pews are filled with the lost who are being saved.

The glory model is different. It isn't about a particular worship style (it could be contemporary or traditional) but about attracting a particular type of person --generally affluent suburbanites. Like Ravenhill (if memory serves) said, "Churches used to be about rescuing the perishing, now they are about recruiting the promising." We need great programs and great buildings in great locations. We need to be shiny and impressive. Production values are the name of the game in worship. We want to recruit people like us --people who are smart enough to get it, and successful enough to pay for it. The church locates where life is easy (at least on the surface), and aims all it does on serving the people. Though the church (like all churches) engages in service, the ethos is more about catering to the people, rather than pressing them into the gritty areas of life. The service core of such churches, one might suspect, is rather small.

The glory church is good in that it seems to recognize that God is pleased when we do what we do as well as we can, when we are dissatisfied with shabbiness or shoddiness in music, in preaching, in teaching, in our buildings, etc. Churches do not have to be dank, ugly and serve industrial grade coffee. We can put out nice brochures and have great instrumentalists and erudite and compelling messages. All this is good.

My argument is simple: we should have both. The church should be excellent, have great worship, do all that it does with an eye towards its Master, and it should be in the prisons, on the streets, in the undesirable neighborhoods, with the addicts and the refugees and the homeless.

Can a church do both of those things? I think it must. It is not optional. A church cannot be a church and fail to seek to serve the needs of the community around it as well as the world. In many ways, it is easier to reach the world than the community. The "undesirables" across the sea are far more palatable than the ones sitting in the pew next to you --this recalls a classic scene in "The Help" where the same ladies who won't let their domestic employees use their restrooms are collecting funds for the starving children of Africa. This does not mean worship should or must become gritty. We need glory too. We need to have our eyes lifted, if only for a few moments, off what is ugly in the world and focused on what is beautiful about God in Christ.

May the church not shun the grit even as it embraces the glory.

Update: A Prison Visit, at Last

Yesterday, God granted me success in seeing my imprisoned friend.

He is doing well, away from the issues that claw at his heart and destroy his body. He looks good. He is his "old self," which is his new self in Christ.

He hopes to get out. I don't see that happening. He has not quite come to terms with the magnitude of what is facing him.

In the meanwhile, he has joy in Christ and is ministering to others, studying the Word with them and encouraging them. I have no doubt he will do this even if he never again sees the light of day.

Visiting the prison is interesting. As I was leaving, they were pulling a sad man out of the detox/holding room not 3 feet away. A foreboding deputy had found some sort of drug in the parking lot outside the prison. An older white biker-type was being frisked and his worldly possessions cataloged. I stood there with my friend, unacknowledged, waiting for him to be taken back, watching the sad panorama of lives unfold around me. There are stone-faced prison personnel who visages bereft of human kindness --perhaps the defense mechanism that comes from any small show of compassion being exploited, there are those still in the thrall of addiction, whose minds have been forever altered by the damage of drugs. It all looks like the sad wreckage of humanity.

Perhaps saddest of all is that, due to overcrowding, all Christian services have ceased, at least for now. I pray that won't continue. There are men and women in our prisons who are ripe for Christ. Pray that we can bring him to them.