A Time to Laugh

A busy kitchen remodel and a frenetic Disney vacation have given me time to digest some of the more subtle but still dramatically different ideas I’m hearing outside of fundamentalism.

In fundamentalism, appeals to humility are a persistent trope. Keswick author Andrew Murray’s little book Humility is a regular assignment to BJU undergraduates, and so it both describes and prescribes fundamentalist preaching on the subject. You can read the text for yourself. In essence, Murray laments that humility should be the chief virtue we pursue. Which is like saying that we have to work hard at relaxing or we need to wash ON some dirt. That just doesn’t make sense.

It’s as (oxy)moronic as saying that we have to earn grace.

So I sat with my mouth hanging open this past Sunday during the sermon about “Putting off Pride.” Pastor DuBose described pride initially with Edgar Allen Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado.” The antagonist Fortunato falls into a drunken state and is immured — goaded by his destructive arrogance in his own prowess.

The definition of pride in this sermon?

Pride leads to isolation. Moral self-righteousness, correct doctrine, or elaborate formulas all let the walls build up and destroy community. They are all prideful.

What? I have never heard that one before. Never. Never, ever.

I know that my rank introversion makes isolation an easy habit. Being social or part of a large group is not my bent. And that natural and God-given personality quirk can be good. But it can also be insulating and dysfunctional.

Even (dare I say it) . . . separating.

Fundamentalism got it all backwards. In that ethic, humility is putting yourself down to put God up. It’s binary. It’s either-or. It’s individualistic. It’s something to strive for.

In this new world, humility is being with. It’s being with God and with your brothers and sisters and with your neighbors and with your “enemies.”

And because this is so new and so against my personality, I’m really out of practice.

Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve. It’s not a matter of being circumcised or keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in—insiders—not through some secretive initiation rite but rather through what Christ has already gone through for you, destroying the power of sin. If it’s an initiation ritual you’re after, you’ve already been through it by submitting to baptism. Going under the water was a burial of your old life; coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as he did Christ. When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s cross.

Colossians 2:11-15

Today our precious boys were baptized into God’s Family. While I would probably say that Isaac’s baptism was a credo-baptism (he tells me often that the Holy Spirit is prompting him to do the right thing), it’s no matter. It is God Who baptizes us into His Family.

After it was all over, Gavin said, “That fun, Daddy!!” :)

So I do know this — that the grace that justifies is the same grace that sanctifies. I know that much in my head.

But understanding what that really means takes me a lot longer. I need to hear it over and over and over. In different ways. Lots of different ways.

And it still surprises me.

So that’s what our pastor brought to a fine point when he said:

We didn’t merit salvation at the beginning, so we can’t keep it through our merit either.

Oooooh! Yeah!! You’re right!!!! Then what’s with the guilt trip I’ve been on for a couple of decades?

What they say in fundamentalism is that if they don’t preach “standards” or “rules” or “responsibilities” or “duty,” there’ll be chaos. That we’re all bent toward lawlessness, right? It’s the natural course of events. So we must fight lawlessness! We need rules! We need authority!!

But in the spectrum between hypernomianism (legalism) and antinomianism (lawlessness), true Christianity lies closer to the antinomian side than its opposite (because we have a natural bent toward legalism too!!). We’re supposed to be more Anne Hutchinson than John Winthrop. More hippie than Hitler. More play-at-home-mommy than prison matron.

But don’t take my word for it. Take Martyn Lloyd-Jones‘:

There is a sense in which the doctrine of justification by faith only is a very dangerous doctrine; dangerous, I mean, in the sense that it can be misunderstood. It exposes a man to this particular charge. People listening to it may say, “Ah, there is a man who does not encourage us to live a good life, he seems to say that there is no value in our works, he says that ‘all our righteousness are as filthy rags.’ Therefore what he is saying is that it does not matter what you do, sin as much as you like.” . . . There is thus clearly a sense in which the message of “justification by faith only” can be dangerous, and likewise with the message that salvation is entirely of grace. . . . I say therefore that if our preaching does not expose us to that charge and to that misunderstanding, it is because we are not really preaching the gospel.

Steve Brown teases us toward understanding the same sanctifying grace by giving away “3 free sins” and by talking about our scandalous freedom in Christ. He states it like this:

Now hear something very important: while the apostle Paul was not antinomian, he was very close to it. Just so, while the Reformation leaders were not antinomian, they were very close to it. Also, while the Christian faith is by no means antinomian, it is very close to it.

What’s the point? Paul would never have had to write a defense of his teaching on freedom if he had not been very close to heresy. Martin Luther would never have had to come back from Wartburg (where he was in hiding) to straighten out the libertarians in Wittenberg if his teaching had not at least implied something close to what they were doing. The Christian faith would not have had to deal with the heresy of antinomianism unless there was something in it which seemed to imply that particular heresy.

That brings me to a syllogism with two premises and a conclusion. Premise: The real Christian faith is close to antinomianism. Premise: A lot of modern day Christianity is not at all close to antinomianism. Conclusion: A lot of modern day Christianity is not real Christianity.

And I never heard that in fundamentalism. Not anywhere. Not ever.

From the moment we stepped into other-than-fundamental churches, we’ve heard about grace. Not just grace at justification that saves us from hell fire, but grace at sanctification that keeps us close to God and growing in Him. A grace that is not earned — like a boss who passes out merit badges for my meeting quotas — but is lavishly and consistently given. It’s part of the all-things-new atmosphere — life-sustaining, nurturing, and satisfying. It’s that God-as-Loving-Father metaphor that dominates a grace-focused soteriology. But I’ve talked about all that before.

So it was in that spirit that our pastor quoted Steve Brown:

The greatest cause for our not getting better is our obsession with not getting better. There is a better way of getting better than trying harder. Sanctification becomes a reality in those believers who don’t obsess over their own sanctification. Holiness hardly ever becomes a reality until we care more about Jesus than about holiness (53).

Brown channels Luther when he defines sanctification as “getting used to being forgiven” since “people who are forgiven, generally get better . . . but they never get better enough to earn God’s love and grace.”

There’s more, of course. Lots more. And it’s so different. Before I heard sermons on “How to Get God’s Grace:”

Stubborn people have no grace. . . . God says, “if you wanna go down My path, I will give you all the grace you need. But if you wanna go down your path, I’ll let you go down that path. I will take away all the desire to do My will. I will take away all the power to do my will. And furthermore, while you’re going down that path, I’m gonna shoot at you! I will give grace only to the humble.”

Which, I’m discovering, is a page taken right out of Bill Gothard’s playbook (i.e. “The Umbrella of Protection,” “Circle of Blessing.”). Almost word-for-word. And from other moralistic legalists throughout the centuries. It’s our natural bent to think we can do this on our own and that God’s evil and tyrannical and vicious and limited by some arbitrary “umbrella” or “circle.”

But God’s not shooting at us. He’s carrying us. He’s not a mob boss or a prison guard. He’s our Daddy.

It was our first elder ordination. I knew the man being ordained. His little girl. And his wife. I don’t want to gush too much because I might embarrass her (she reads here occasionally), but she is the “salt of the Earth” kind of person. The kind of friend you hope to find in a new church. I’ve only known her for a few months, but I’m really thankful for her. She’s a gem.

So I felt invested in this ordination. I listened closer. And the pastor explained:

The elders are here to protect you from me.

Excuse me? Did he just say that himself or was I thinking it that loudly?

I mean, I know that in my head. But I’ve never heard any pastor admit it plainly and from the pulpit.

There are no more tired people than the regular lay people in independent fundamental Baptist(ic) churches. Tired of the sham leadership, tired of not being heard, tired of the flat-out abuse. It’s a total mess. It’s intended to be congregational polity — that’s the heart of the American Baptist tradition — but it’s developed into a rank feudalism. American Baptists used to be the stinkers who challenged corruption, but that’s pretty rare today. So that instead of hearing about an ecclesiastical checks and balances, all Baptists might hear from the pulpit, “Submit to your pastor! He’s your authority!”

Then I read about Presbyterian polity. That it’s not congregational or episcopal. It’s not a group of people leading like a democracy or a single leader like a monarchy or patriarchy. It’s a representative democracy.

Yeah, you read that right. Our founders modeled the American government after the Scottish Presbyterians.

Now I know enough about the American representative democracy to know that it’s pretty resilient. Randy Balmer argues that the first amendment’s “separation” clause puts James Madison’s “faction” fears to rest by containing zealotry within the (private) religious sphere. Now, if that’s true, could the same be argued for the Presbies? Is their ecclesiology more robust because it contains enthusiasm in another sphere? The political sphere perhaps? Do we end up with a dueling spheres? Both strong, both weathered, both fairly resistant to change?

Maybe. I don’t know. But I like being in a church body that’s built with some seismic resistance. It’s good for the laypeople. It’s good for the elders. It’s good for the Faith.

Maybe you know the story of Scotland’s most famous hero of the Faith, John Knox. I didn’t. All I know about Scotland came from Lucy Ricardo’s visit in 1956 and our West Highland Terrier.

The guy was a stinker! He was a Catholic priest, a lawyer, a teacher, and George Wishart’s body guard who led Knox to convert to Protestantism. He spoke out against all things Catholic — Mass, Purgatory, Mary. You name it, he ranted against it. He got into such trouble that he was exiled to the galley of a French ship, hopped to Frankfurt, and eventually fled to Geneva with Calvin himself.

Mind you — Knox made Calvin look like a diplomat. Knox’s pamphlet against female sovereigns — The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women — was too extreme for Calvin’s taste and was, in the end, even according to sympathetic historians, a “tactical error.” He was too bifurcated in his thinking, aligning all things Catholic with all things feminine and all things Protestant with all things masculine. He got too caught up in his own argumentation.

Knox ended up being one of the few countryman who wasn’t charmed by Mary Queen of Scots’ feminine wiles. When he spoke out against her betrothal to Don Carlos, she called him to Holyrood to essentially ask him: “Who do you think you are?” His response, in sum, was: “Nobody but a guy who must warn about dangers ahead.” Some contend that modern democracy was born right then and there when an ordinary stinker stood up to the seductive Sovereign! When she started to cry, he responded: “Madam, in God’s presence I speak: I never delighted in the weeping of any of God’s creatures; yea I can scarcely well abide the tears of my own boys whom my own hand corrects, much less can I rejoice in your Majesty’s weeping.”

He was a plain-spoken dissident. A bigger rabblerouser than Calvin, and the grandfather to all of Machen’s Warrior Children. And while fundamentalism might claim this Scottish stinker as its own, in reality it replicates more Samuel Rutherford and his intolerance than Knox and his fire. Being a stinker without tolerating opposing stinkers ends up being nothing more than narcissism.

So these Presbyterians don’t fear disagreement. When we were taking the “New Members Class,” for instance, the pastoral staff member explained:

You don’t have to agree with Calvinism here. Not at all. But you should know what our perspective is and what you’ll hear from the pulpit and in the Sunday School classes.

And Grant and I did another double-take. What? We can disagree? In fundamentalism when dissent is even suggested, the passive-aggressive  and dysfunctional answer is “Why would you want to be here if you don’t agree with us?” Or “Sure you can disagree, but just don’t mention it.” Some covert fundies even insist that all members agree with bylaws and doctrinal statements before joining and label dissidents as “sinning through questioning.” But outside fundamentalism, it’s a big tent with dispensationalists and postmills and amills all worshipping together. There are Democrats and Republicans. Pedobaptists and credobaptists. Homeschoolers and public schoolers and private schoolers. American-born and foreign-born. Upper- and working-class. We’re all there.

So with John Knox as the founder of our polity, dissent isn’t just patriotic. It’s positively Presbyterian!

Let kings fear, let them tremble, because there is judgment coming if they do not do what is right.

John Knox

When we left our previous life, two arbitrary things got quilted together:  (1) my blogging and (2) Grant’s singing. Because of my activity online (pre-October 16, 2007), Grant was no longer allowed to sing solos at our church. This was simply punitive — one unwarranted, unprovoked, painful action against Grant that was virtually unrelated to my “sin” of blogging. It would be like taking away a teenager’s car keys because her sister wrote a “Letter to the Editor” which her parents disagreed with.

This drove me deep underground emotionally. Think Anorexic Spirituality again. My spiritual neediness, I concluded, was sinful and, thus, shameful.

We had started to look for a new church by then, and we had whittled it down to two choices: our present one and another brand-new PCA church just up the road here, Blue Ridge Presbyterian. This newer church was precious and homey. The people were so kind. Their gentle spirit made our eventual decision very difficult.

The elder in charge of music at Blue Ridge was a dear old friend from BJU, Steve Griner. He often accompanied Grant back in the day. It was nice to hear him play hymns in his characteristically masculine style (male pianists play with such vigor). And he had asked Grant to sing a solo one Sunday.

We were both so touched. We weren’t even members! Here we were broken and bruised — kicked in the spiritual kidneys while we were already curled up on the ground. I had really, seriously wondered if we were good enough for any church since we were clearly not good enough for our last one where we had pretty deep roots. And still Steve asked Grant to sing. Grant chose the song that Steve had arranged for Grant’s BJU ministry team years before, “Take the World but Give me Jesus.” Look at the last verse:

Take the world, but give me Jesus.
In His cross my trust shall be,
Till, with clearer, brighter vision,
Face to face my Lord I see.

Early that same Sunday, while Grant rehearsed with Steve, I sat in the nursery with our boys. And Pastor Griffith came in. Apparently, he had been looking for me. He had sought me out. He said, “Camille! I read your blog this week. And I just had to find you and give you a hug. . . . I’m so sorry!”

And there in his Geneva robe, that dear Christian undershepherd gave me a great big bear hug.

So . . . on the same day that Grant sang again was the same day that a Pastor empathized with and accepted me.

I still tear up thinking about it all. I hadn’t been hugged by a pastor since I was six and getting ready for my baptism. And to get hugged after all that and even because of all that. . . . well, God’s got a good sense of drama.

Now I must admit, I still duck and hide when I see our current pastor or any ecclesiastical leader for that matter. But I do see what he’s after every Sunday and its contrast to what I got even very recently though perhaps unintentionally in fundamentalism. When Pastor Lewis (no relation) preaches about our humanity, he says:

Take off the fig leaf.

In fundamentalism, it was “Shut up or else!” But outside of fundamentalism it’s okay to admit your flaws and struggles. In fact, it’s a sign of spiritual health. Because we’re safe in God’s love, we can admit our frailty and even our not-so-popular and still-forming opinions. We can let our “sins be strong, but let [our] trust in Christ be stronger,” like Luther told his buddy Melancthon.

It’s really just another way of singing “In His cross my trust will be.”

I’ve been keeping a running tally over the last several months because it’s usually the case that Grant and I sit agape during church. Our collective jaws drop, we nudge each other, point and nod and giggle, and then I scribble and he iPhone-taps it all down so that we can remember.

This Message outside of fundamentalism is so different. So very different.

The first time I started recording these epiphanies was last December before Communion. Our pastor said:

You sin. You go to God. You ask forgiveness. He forgives you. You leave.

You sin again. You go to God. You ask forgiveness. He forgives you. You leave.

You sin again. You go to God. You ask forgiveness. He forgives you. You leave.

You sin again. . . .

I literally held my breath and stiffened my back. I was braced. I knew what was next, right? You do too. Said in a loud, scolding, harsh voice (summoning the spirit of the great revivalists): “When are you going to get your act together and stop sinning!? How can you even call yourself a Christian when you keep sinning like that??!”

But that’s not what he said. Instead:

The problem comes when you stop going back to God — either because of your moralism or secularism.

Huh? . . . Wait a second. Say what?

It went by so fast. Grant and I were blinking at the pastor and then whispering to each other. We were sure we misunderstood something. What did he say?

He was right, of course. It’s not about me being perfect because Christ did that. If it were about me doing all the right things, then I wouldn’t have a very clear sense of my full-of-sin status. It’s not about me getting all my ducks in a row before I go to God. The church is a hospital, not a pageant.

How wrong I heard it for all those years.

But this? This really is Sola Gratia.

The Book of Remembrance

Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before him of those who feared the LORD and esteemed his name. “They shall be mine, says the LORD of hosts, in the day when I make up my treasured possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his son who serves him. Then once more you shall see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve him.

“For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

Malachi 3:16-4:3

If you’ve spent any time talking with me over the last 5 years, you know that I am a big Jeff VanVonderen fan. And I’ve never even seen his TV show! It was VanVonderen that began to clear out the legalistic cobwebs in my own head. But I’ve said that before.

I know now why VanVonderen’s books were so offensive in my previous life — why my having that big stack of his books on my desk and giving them away as gifts was such a problem. He’s an integrationist. ::gasp:: You know, that tainted sort of person who would dare mix psychology with theology.

As if psychology were some sort of devil chord that would taint our singing praises to a supreme Being. Whatever.

Anyway, he’s got a new book out — Soul Repair — and I “just happened” to be reading it while I was working through these last few posts. And I landed on this chapter, “Anorexic Spirituality.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. This is it. This is what I got. Not in my undergraduate years at BJU, mind you, but following that. This is the most lucid description of the problem, and I can’t help but wonder if some of my other (physical) “habits” were compensating for this (spiritual) dysfunction.

I can’t even “digest” it all now. But I had to share.

On this Holy Saturday, when we all remember the Pharisees’ unbelieving conspiring to keep Christ’s body in the tomb (because those sneaky disciples might steal It), I thought it would help me to see one way we stand-off from God’s love. We think they are right. That Christ won’t come back. That He’s not the Victor. That their power overwhelms the real Power. That our needs are too cumbersome or too weak or too silly. That we don’t need nurturing. That we would be better off if we just disappeared.

But they are wrong. Their god is not-God.