The Posture of Criticism - Discernment Vis a Vis Judgement

I got the cold/flu about five days ago so these posts are coming out more slowly than I'd hoped. I'll pick up on the critique of "How He Loves" soon. I know that taking a step back to cover a few topics like what follows below might not be as exciting of a read as if I were to keep chipping away, critiquing some more songs. I know this post may seem tedious in comparison, a kind of disclaimer, but I'm more concerned about how and why I'm being critical of contemporary worship music than just coming off as your dime a dozen cynic. I've spent years repenting of the sin of cynicism.

Life Lesson #101: Scoffing at what is wrong is easy. Loving the church and contending for it is hard.

With 100 some hits on the previous post (Critique of "Your Love Is Strong") in less than two days--for this little blog--I must have hit a nerve, especially at Hope College. I remember my freshman year at Wheaton was full of many late night debates in the dorm. I tried to avoid them or I mostly listened, but a few times I dove right in. We had disagreements about everything from the classic Protestant conundrum of the 'free will' versus 'predestination,' the naive dichotomy of  'secular music' versus Christian; we questioned whether speaking in tongues is for Christians today, and which was right independent or denominational churches? Baptists or Reformed? Dispensationalism versus covenant theology? It was a nerve wracking translation of ourselves from our safe, parochial home churches and youth groups to a comparatively more ecumenical academic community. Some conversations would go on for hours with new voices adding into a conversation throughout the night. So many strong, intelligent opinions and experiences held with Christian vigor. Freshman year could be painful and awkward at times.

My assumption is that there are more reading who disagree with me, and I want to encourage such disagreement. There is nothing wrong with having differences of opinion. After all, our differences will not matter too much if we actively remember how much more we have in agreement. Disagreement, doubt and questions are fine, good and healthy even. The greater concern is not so much about the convictions we arrive at, but the charitable, Christ-like way we engage one another in conversation. I'm not saying that our ultimate conclusions are not important or relative but that our convictions are shaped by the journey we make to identify and confirm those convictions. Our ideas and beliefs are for better or worse shaped by our context.

A disagreement can cut deep into the ego and threaten what each of us believe is real and true. To do theology, to be a part of the church, to be committed to the growth of our shared understanding of God and his purposes, we have to wear these things carefully with humility. I admit that I can be weak in the wrong moment. I know the temptation to strive to be right and to have control. A large obstacle is that we often approach God like we might math. We tend to believe that if each of us could just become objective and get outside the question at hand, then surely we could all come to perfect agreement. But our ideas are not so much shaped by our rational minds in a kind of objective, abstract bubble. A conviction is held in the heart as much if not more so than the mind. A conviction is shaped by our character, by our affections, insecurities and fears. It is a wonder God has revealed himself to us at all.

St. Augustine has been my favorite model of how I might posture myself when daring to use words to explain or understand the things of God:

The Confessions Book XI, Chapter I.  O Lord, since eternity is Yours, are You ignorant of the things which I say unto You? Or see Thou at the time that which comes to pass in time? Why, therefore, do I place before You so many relations of things? Not surely that You might know them through me, but that I may awaken my own love and that of my readers towards You, that we may all say, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. I have already said, and shall say, for the love of Your love do I this. For we also pray, and yet Truth says, Your Father knows what things you have need of before you ask Him. Matthew 6:8 Therefore do we make known unto You our love, in confessing unto You our own miseries and Your mercies upon us, that You may free us altogether, since You have begun, that we may cease to be wretched in ourselves, and that we may be blessed in You; since You have called us, that we may be poor in spirit, and meek, and mourners, and hungering and thirsty after righteousness, and merciful, and pure in heart, and peacemakers. Matthew 5:3-9 Behold, I have told unto You many things, which I could and which I would, for You first would have me confess unto You, the Lord my God, for You are good, since Your mercy endures for ever. 

Everything that Augustine 'confessed' (a double meaning of confession, both of his sin and his faith) was in accordance with the ordo amoris, the order of love. To paraphrase him, let all that this wretched person has to say about God lead to loving God and each other more abundantly. Our 'theologizing' should lead to doxology. Our talk about God should itself be a kind of worship. 

So while I am practicing critique, I do not believe that the primary role of the Church or a theologian or a pastor is to act as a watchdog. A Christian's primary posture is not critical but doxological. If we are to be critical, it is for the sake of discernment rather than judgement. Jesus' teaching as accounted in Matthew 7:16 and Luke 6:44 is often misquoted as "judge a tree by the fruit that it bears." The English translation is instead most commonly "know" or "recognize" not "judge." In fact, it is interesting that chapter seven opens with "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgement you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get." "Judge" here is closer to "condemn." It means to separate and divide in the way a court judge pronounces a sentence. To "know" a tree is to be close, to become acquainted with it, to discern its value.

Romans 12:2 contains a very helpful use of "discernment,"

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

This passage is often used to pit Christianity against so-called "worldliness." Such interpretations can lead to a sectarian or isolationist posture to encourage wary watchdogs, alert and on the ready to spot and root out sin. The fruit of such a critical posture is strife and  bitterness. Our hearts become constrained more by condemnation/judgement rather than discernment/judgement. This Romans 12 use of "discern" calls us to practice redemption. To discern is primarily about identifying what is right and good and true rather than pouncing on what is wrong. We discern for the sake of pleasing God and worshiping God. We go into the world, into the fray of confusion with love to dust off and prize the beautiful rather than obsess, control and despise what is broken. We are better as lovers--at least a concerned parent or the biblical caring shepherd rather than the police, the Inquisition or the Gestapo or the acidic talking head politico.

So let me be clear, when I identify what concerns me about the state of the church today, when I ask questions about contemporary worship music, when I write a film, TV or CD review or critique a worship song, I do these things because I want a better love life, I want to worship more freely. If anything, even if you don't agree with me, I pray my teaching, leadership and writings might stir up good conversation and prayer, as Augustine says, "that I may awaken my own love and that of my readers towards You...."

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing to you oh, God. Would you burn away any empty word or thought in the consuming fire of your love. If we have anything worth saying to each other, the those words be yours, eternal, unmovable and filled with your mercy.

Thanks for reading.

Upcoming Posts & A Critique of "Your Love Is Strong"

There are a handful of things I’d like to write about in the next week or so. I’m going to try and push out a few blog posts in the next few days. Thanks to those who read and keep me thinking of better ways to communicate ideas that matter greatly to me, and many thanks to my students for keeping me on my toes too.

Here are the topics I want to get at:

1.     I’d like to follow up on the comment I made in my last post about making too much of art but that rather we should instead focus on being better humans (which implies engagement of the arts). There is much to discuss here. I’m glad to get emails from people who appreciate this concern. Because it seems to others to be a poignant nuance of my way of prioritizing the arts, I’d like to flesh the idea out some more.

2.     Another friend asked me to recall for her some teaching I offered in the past on the distinction between capital “A” Artists and the rest of us who are all created as artists. The idea is that we are all artistic. To be human is to be creative. The question is which of us are called to practice a discipline of art making at more advanced levels with years of training for the sake of vocational, bi-vocational or a-vocational art making. Further thoughts on this will connect to what I want to write about for topic 1 above. Perhaps I can answer both of those in the same post. We’ll see.

*Topics 1 and 2 will need to wait a bit because I want to cover a few topics for my students. These are thoughts that have been growing in response to their questions and our discussions.  This is teaching at its best: when I feel stumped in class and need to step back and rediscover how to communicate what is most important.

3.     I need to more explicitly and unapologetically explain my concerns about some contemporary worship texts. Two songs came up in class this week, “Your Love is Strong” by Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman and “How He Loves Us,” by John Mark McMillan.

4.     Then in another post I need to do a better job of connecting the overarching creedal portions of our class to specific cultural examples—to demonstrate why an inquiry into the ontological framework of the sacrament and Trinity matter to regular worship leading.

CRITICAL THOUGHTS ON “Your Love Is Strong”

First, let me emphatically encourage readers to see this not so much of a bashing of Jon Foreman and more of a case study. I don’t own any Switchfoot records, but I’m a fan. I like “Your Love Is Strong.” I believe that Foreman’s four seasonal EP recordings are fantastic examples of good, thoughtful creativity. However, there is just so much worship music out there, so many great songs that I can afford to be picky.

Second, I don’t expect most readers to initially appreciate the kind of discernment I am modeling here. That is why I teach this class. We generally don’t critique our songs very well if at all. What I’m offering here could make me seem like a crotchety old man, harrumphing around with arms folded and a frown. I’d like to disagree, that loving worship, loving the church and even loving Jon Foreman requires us to be discerning. I wouldn’t go to such great lengths to think through this song if I didn’t like it.

Third, I’ll point out that this is only the second lyric that I have adjusted for pastoral concerns in the almost six years of my ministry at Hope College. I’d never messed with the lyrics in the roughly ten years of worship ministry previous either. The point is that I don’t have a heavy hand. Actually, I do in terms of picking songs in the first place, but that is a whole other discussion.

So, I did a poor job in class of explaining why we have decided to ditch the second verse of this song:

I look out the window.
The birds are composing.
Not a note is out of tune
Or out of place.
I look at the meadow
And stare at the flowers.
Better dressed than any girl
On her wedding day. 

First of all a confession: I can personally appreciate and worship with these words. I can navigate around the strengths and weaknesses of this verse and find meaning. I especially like the first half of the verse and am sad to say goodbye to it. However, the question is not what I personally can worship to. The question is what best serves the spiritual formation of the 1000 give or take a few hundred who join us for worship four times per week.

I think I overemphasized that our decision to nix the verse is squarely because of a response to some women who are frustrated with it. The initial concern begins with whether or not we would like to think that feminine beauty should be reduced to a woman on her wedding day. Is a woman in a wedding dress the definitive aesthetic achievement of a woman?

Arguments for keeping the Foreman lyric:

Argument one: we should not ditch worship songs or portions of a worship text because of a person’s personal quandaries. The worship text isn’t about an individual.  A worship text is about God and so we should all work to focus on the best in a song and not get hung up on a particular word choice, phrase or even a whole worship text.

Argument two: Further, there is no such thing as a perfect worship song, perfect worship service or worship leader. Coming to worship requires us to readily forgive each other when our worship words, leadership, expression and participation do not live up to our personal expectations.

In class I overemphasized that the concern was how this worship passage might elicit personal confusion from young women who join us in fellowship. Yes, it is true; each of us bring our own personal baggage into worship. Our own experience can skew our ability to interpret and appreciate various worship expressions. Yes we must be charitable and forgiving when we run into worship passages that confuse or distract us.

However, in choosing to nix this part of Foreman’s song I am acknowledging that there are certain lines for the sake of a corporate a worship service that I need to guard and watch with discernment.

Arguments for not using the Foreman lyric:

Argument one: I don’t believe that a woman on her wedding day is the proper defining moment of feminine beauty that can properly ‘contextualize’ or contemporize the original Biblical passage the Foreman worship verse is responding to:

Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

The trouble is that we don’t have royal splendor in North America and so Foreman turns to a wedding to attempt to evoke the same kind of meaning. Wedding day takes the place of King Solomon’s glory. This might seem acceptable especially when we consider that the New Testament uses marriage substantially to illustrate God’s relationship with the church, the bride of Christ.  However, the focus here is not on how the bride of Christ is beautiful now, but more about how the church is being made beautiful. The bride of Christ is making herself ready (Rev 19:7). So it turns out that using the concept of the bride of Christ to defend this lyric is somewhat of a hermeneutical leap.

The trouble is that we have nothing in our culture that can properly help us understand Jesus’ reference to Solomon’s glory. I would personally prefer that worship songwriters had the courage to make specific Biblical references instead of always trying to contemporize. Let’s dare to become biblically literate.

Argument two: Even if we can appreciate the artistic license of Foreman’s lyric and can understand the spirit of what he is trying to convey, consider the lyrics artistic integrity. Here is where subjective enters the discussion. So this is admittedly my weakest point. This lyric is largely sentimental. Read these words together: window, birds, composing, note, tune, meadow, dressed, girl, wedding day. These are the words of a hallmark card. Now this is my subjective reading of the lyrics, and I even think that the great hymn “For the Beauty of the Earth” is prone to such sentimentalism as well. However, I am more willing to sing the hymn because of the gravity of the years and generations who have sung it.

Remember the definition of sentimentalism: emotion for emotions sake. Personally, when I have sung the line I find that images of brides in wedding gowns take greater space in my head than the initial point of the lyric which is the splendor of God’s creation.

Argument three: This argument is contextual to our campus ministry and is my most important. The lyric can idealize marriage and wedding dresses. I am pulling the lyric not so much because of the girls who already are frustrated with it, but for those young ladies who aren’t frustrated with it. I’m pulling the lyric for the many young men who might also have romantic idealizations about a wedding day. I’m pulling the lyric because I know how powerful worship words are to form a persons imagination. I don’t want to pedestalize marriage or brides. As a pastor I don’t want to reinforce the notion that girls are mostly highly valued, most beautiful when they get married. No, a woman in a wedding dress is not the definitive aesthetic achievement of a woman.

Perhaps I wouldn’t be picky about this if I weren’t serving a campus ministry where there is so much pressure on relationships, the temptation to obsess in the search of the one, true love. I spend considerable amount of time and energy trying to help college students learn how to see the opposite sex as a human being first and a potential spouse much, much later.  We have so many layers of confusion that push and pull on our sexuality, it seems easier to avoid language in worship that might perpetuate that confusion. If the rest of this particular lyric had enough weight/value and wasn’t prone to sentimentalism, then perhaps I’d fight for it.

A Good Day: Seeing The Dogs is Like Living Well

Living a day well is akin to paying attention to our dogs. Little Ike and Coen, the last two of a litter of puppies left at the shelter when my wife rescued them. They were so helpless and loveable she couldn’t just pick one. She had to bring home two to surprise me for a Valentine’s Day present four year ago this next February. We figure Ike was picked over because he was the runt with a definitively oversized portion of the “little man syndrome,” meaning that if he isn’t being coddled he can be quite the grump. Coen was picked over because even though he is quite handsome and well proportioned, he is skittish and afraid of silly things like smooth floor tile, heat vents and gutters. We loved these two little fur balls for two years and then somehow in the third year we got distracted. Then we had a baby and now they are always here, ready and eager for our attention if only we had the patience and clarity of heart and mind to give it them. Now living a day well doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve given love to dogs, but it means that we are in a better posture to.

Prayer must certainly be like this and art and love too. How many gorgeous things surround me that I cannot attend to because I’m busy, self consumed, self important, blind dumb and numb? Again, Annie Dillard. I believe it’s chapter two of Pilgrim At a Tinker Creek. She begins, “I’ve been thinking about seeing.” She tells the story of hiding pennies in crevices and crooks of old trees and along sidewalks as a little girl. She drew arrows on the sidewalk with the words, “treasure this way!” Her point is that there are hidden pennies everywhere in life and creation with arrows and maps pointing the way to treasures but sadly, as she says in her essay “Total Eclipse” in Teaching Stones to Talk, “we are born and bored in a stroke.”

Somehow I got caught up in all this talk about the arts. Lets champion the artist, the misunderstood, the marginalized and fringe, the bohemian, the crafty creative person because (again Dillard) ours is a God who loves pizazz. Sure I love the arts. I just spent an hour reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna to my wife until she fell asleep. We’ve been into the latest season of the TV series Damages with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. It is exciting and somewhat redeemable, a titillating expose of white-collar crime and it’s no small feat to make white collar crime mysterious and riveting. Yet as Susanna began to yawn and apologize for having to ask me to stop reading we had a brief discussion about how much nicer it is to finish the evening with a book rather than a TV show. Definitely. We love the arts. We love Kingsolver’s prose. She makes me want to travel south of the border again soon for pollo frito fresh squeezed juice and la playa. Yet is this really all that much about art itself or it is about being a better human and living a day well?

I say its time we stop talking so much about the arts and begin talking about talking about how to live a day well, how to live better, how to be better humans, and yes this will require the arts but not art as an end in itself but as a means, a kind of training in how to see better. 

Kingsolver makes me want to travel south of the border for a proper margarita and carnitas and she makes me want to pay attention to my dogs more. How did they become so boring to me? If my dogs can become boring, then is it possible for me to let my work, my art, my marriage and even my beautiful son become boring too? Yes. Please God forgive us all our boredom. Oh ennui, the noonday demon.

Kate Kooyman gave a beautiful message tonight at the Gathering on sin and forgiveness. In the first third of her message, she unpacked the difference between sin and immorality and how we confuse the latter for the former. Being a sinner isn’t just about specific acts but about an overall dispassion of being turned inward toward self-worship. I’ll add that sin is fundamentally being cut off from the life of God. It is living without the right redemptive perspective of forgiveness and hope, of love and light. Sinfulness is living in the gutter of the darkness of the self.

So art plus redemption can lead us to seeing better? Yep. True, however art by itself will shape and change us but it cannot save us. Art by itself becomes its own idolatrous end; its own party; its own scene that alienates and separates those who get it and those who don’t. The in and the out. But redemptive human creativity is essential to becoming a Christian. My dogs are beautiful little guys. People stop me and remark when I’m with them on a walk. Wow, what beautiful or amazing or cute little dogs! And inside I’m hoping just to get them to poop so we can get back to the house and on to more important things, to my things, to my agenda. I’m a sinner self-consumed. I’m ignoring the blazing colors of the Fall leaves, the ones remaining on the branch and those scattered on the ground. I’m blind to the subtle changes in wind and temperature, the joy of pulling my scarf tighter. I don’t reflect on the month past, the summer past, the winter ahead. I walk a straight boring line from point A to point B to get the job done, to go back inside and be boring again.

This is not all true. I’m being a good Midwestern boy with a guilt complex. I can see. Yesterday I cut our the burning bushes that line the front of our house back so far that they are little bitty stumps of potentiality—that is if I didn’t kill them (they were getting so huge and everything I could find on the mighty internet said burning bushes are resilient). Behind the bushes was a large planters box eight feet long sitting underneath the front windows. Until yesterday you couldn’t see that its paint was peeling away or that the box itself was almost rotted out, a liability I could have left of the spring? The two hour job turned into six. I was forced outside a bit longer. The dogs tied to the railing on our front steps and wow was Ike grumpy with the cats and dogs and children running freely and flagrantly in front of his tied up self. I cut back the bushes. I raked leaves. I removed the flower box. I scraped the flaking paint behind it. I repainted the shake shingles. I raked some more and the sun set. It got colder. We went inside and made French toast with bananas and honey. Then I pet my dogs with Casper. He chased them around the kitchen island a bit. I could see it.

Oh please God, help me see tomorrow.

                                                                                      

A Good Day: Seeing The Dogs is Like Living Well

Living a day well is akin to paying attention to our dogs. Little Ike and Coen, the last two of a litter of puppies left at the shelter when my wife rescued them. They were so helpless and loveable she couldn’t just pick one. She had to bring home two to surprise me for a Valentine’s Day present four year ago this next February. We figure Ike was picked over because he was the runt with a definitively oversized portion of the “little man syndrome,” meaning that if he isn’t being coddled he can be quite the grump. Coen was picked over because even though he is quite handsome and well proportioned, he is skittish and afraid of silly things like smooth floor tile, heat vents and gutters. We loved these two little fur balls for two years and then somehow in the third year we got distracted. Then we had a baby and now they are always here, ready and eager for our attention if only we had the patience and clarity of heart and mind to give it them. Now living a day well doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve given love to dogs, but it means that we are in a better posture to.

Prayer must certainly be like this and art and love too. How many gorgeous things surround me that I cannot attend to because I’m busy, self consumed, self important, blind dumb and numb? Again, Annie Dillard. I believe it’s chapter two of Pilgrim At a Tinker Creek. She begins, “I’ve been thinking about seeing.” She tells the story of hiding pennies in crevices and crooks of old trees and along sidewalks as a little girl. She drew arrows on the sidewalk with the words, “treasure this way!” Her point is that there are hidden pennies everywhere in life and creation with arrows and maps pointing the way to treasures but sadly, as she says in her essay “Total Eclipse” in Teaching Stones to Talk, “we are born and bored in a stroke.”

Somehow I got caught up in all this talk about the arts. Lets champion the artist, the misunderstood, the marginalized and fringe, the bohemian, the crafty creative person because (again Dillard) ours is a God who loves pizazz. Sure I love the arts. I just spent an hour reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna to my wife until she fell asleep. We’ve been into the latest season of the TV series Damages with Glenn Close and Rose Byrne. It is exciting and somewhat redeemable, a titillating expose of white-collar crime and it’s no small feat to make white collar crime mysterious and riveting. Yet as Susanna began to yawn and apologize for having to ask me to stop reading we had a brief discussion about how much nicer it is to finish the evening with a book rather than a TV show. Definitely. We love the arts. We love Kingsolver’s prose. She makes me want to travel south of the border again soon for pollo frito fresh squeezed juice and la playa. Yet is this really all that much about art itself or it is about being a better human and living a day well?

I say its time we stop talking so much about the arts and begin talking about talking about how to live a day well, how to live better, how to be better humans, and yes this will require the arts but not art as an end in itself but as a means, a kind of training in how to see better.

Kingsolver makes me want to travel south of the border for a proper margarita and carnitas and she makes me want to pay attention to my dogs more. How did they become so boring to me? If my dogs can become boring, then is it possible for me to let my work, my art, my marriage and even my beautiful son become boring too? Yes. Please God forgive us all our boredom. Oh ennui, the noonday demon.

Kate Kooyman gave a beautiful message tonight at the Gathering on sin and forgiveness. In the first third of her message, she unpacked the difference between sin and immorality and how we confuse the latter for the former. Being a sinner isn’t just about specific acts but about an overall dispassion of being turned inward toward self-worship. I’ll add that sin is fundamentally being cut off from the life of God. It is living without the right redemptive perspective of forgiveness and hope, of love and light. Sinfulness is living in the gutter of the darkness of the self.

So art plus redemption can lead us to seeing better? Yep. True, however art by itself will shape and change us but it cannot save us. Art by itself becomes its own idolatrous end; its own party; its own scene that alienates and separates those who get it and those who don’t. The in and the out. But redemptive human creativity is essential to becoming a Christian. My dogs are beautiful little guys. People stop me and remark when I’m with them on a walk. Wow, what beautiful or amazing or cute little dogs! And inside I’m hoping just to get them to poop so we can get back to the house and on to more important things, to my things, to my agenda. I’m a sinner self-consumed. I’m ignoring the blazing colors of the Fall leaves, the ones remaining on the branch and those scattered on the ground. I’m blind to the subtle changes in wind and temperature, the joy of pulling my scarf tighter. I don’t reflect on the month past, the summer past, the winter ahead. I walk a straight boring line from point A to point B to get the job done, to go back inside and be boring again.

This is not all true. I’m being a good Midwestern boy with a guilt complex. I can see. Yesterday I cut our the burning bushes that line the front of our house back so far that they are little bitty stumps of potentiality—that is if I didn’t kill them (they were getting so huge and everything I could find on the mighty internet said burning bushes are resilient). Behind the bushes was a large planters box eight feet long sitting underneath the front windows. Until yesterday you couldn’t see that its paint was peeling away or that the box itself was almost rotted out, a liability I could have left of the spring? The two hour job turned into six. I was forced outside a bit longer. The dogs tied to the railing on our front steps and wow was Ike grumpy with the cats and dogs and children running freely and flagrantly in front of his tied up self. I cut back the bushes. I raked leaves. I removed the flower box. I scraped the flaking paint behind it. I repainted the shake shingles. I raked some more and the sun set. It got colder. We went inside and made French toast with bananas and honey. Then I pet my dogs with Casper. He chased them around the kitchen island a bit. I could see it.

Oh please God, help me see tomorrow.