A Time to Laugh

Dumb Things I Gotta Do Today (Part 3.5 of 4)

Jesus didn’t die for the stupid things we do. He died for our sins. If I just call my sin ’something stupid I did,’ I’m not truly repentant.

Jim Berg, BJU Dean of Students

In my perceiving and (over)reacting to other’s rules (both spoken and unspoken), I remember my own. I’ve got a ton of them. I tell myself that I’m a good mom today if I read to my kids, if we get our Green Hour in, if we eat enough (any!) fruits and veggies, and if I don’t yell. And I’m a good wife if I manage to feed my hubby a nice dinner, if I keep the house picked up — vacuumed, dishes away, laundry folded — and if I have sparkling conversation ready for dinner. I’m a good person if I exercise, if I lose some weight, and if I walk the dog.

Sometimes I do these things fairly faithfully. But I’m no SuperMom — even if Gavin bellows, “MOOOMMMMMYYYY” every time he sees a Wonder Woman toy. I goof. I fail. I can’t even keep up with my own rules.

During the corporate prayers of confession at church, you know what comes to my mind? Stupid things. And I mean, things that are more attributed to my normal human limits, not my sin. The smocking projects that I haven’t finished. The terrible state of the too-often-washed downstairs carpet. The cucumbers I forgot about and let rot in the veggie drawer. Knitting mistakes. The dishes I left in the sink. The emails I haven’t answered. The rust on my tomato plants. The fitness program that I’m avoiding.

Tim Keller cuts to the chase on this one often when he divides us all between moralists and secularists. Either you follow corporate rules religiously or you express yourself shamelessly. Either you’re a neo-nomian or an antinomian. Either you’re the Prodigal that stays or the Prodigal that leaves.

And neither works. Both are as Godless as the other.

Martin Luther talked about it too. He compared the theology of glory with the theology of the cross. Theologians of glory push a “proper righteousness” that appears good and attractive. They are very busy but are puffed up, blinded, and hardened in their activity. On the other hand, theologians of the Cross feature what Luther reasons seems like an “alien righteousness” that appears evil and ugly. Since they feature God’s sovereignty over salvation, they believe much (instead of doing much). Luther sums it all up by saying that “the law says ‘Do this’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this’ and everything is already done.”

Now I’ve been eating, sleeping, and breathing fundamentalism for 20+ years. I was an earnest follower, a committed apologist, and a firm ideologue. On top of that, I’ve devoted my professional life to trying to explain the way fundamentalists talk, and I don’t believe I should stop now that I’m just outside its walls.

In order for fundamentalism to work, you have to live it inside and outside and upside and downside. My brother’s prof at Ohio State, when he heard the salary rate at BJU, used to say “You can’t get bad people for that little. That salary guarantees a certain ideological devotion.” So the whole system supports a fervent loyalty. And if their ethic reads everything as a fight and then the fight turns internal and interpersonal, you end up scratching and clawing to prove that you’re loyal and to make sure you’re on the “right” (a.k.a. powerful) side.

Another way to say all that is to say that fundamentalists are expert moralists. Pros. Prodigals that hang around for years working to earn the Father’s love. Articulate theologians of glory. Their earnest sincerity only enhances their commitment. They believe in some sort of cosmic reciprocity for every deed. They see God as a taskmaster waiting to give bonuses to the good workers and charge fines to the lazy ones. I say this as a former fundamentalist myself. The moralistic side of Keller’s equation was my life.

And it still is. Don’t get me wrong. I still feel the Pharisee in me. I’m just fighting it now. There’s really not that big of a difference between me 10 years ago and me now. I know the Apostle Paul understood since he was a recovering Pharisee himself — the chief of sinners.

And so while the secularists overlook sin as merely normal expression, moralists hyper-focus on mistakes and call them sin.

What the moralistic theology of glory does is no different than noodling the rules for a card game or emotionally bludgeoning a playmate for not knowing an unspoken rule about which Barbie wears what. UGH! It’s such hypocrisy. I’ve erected this terrific set of rules (which looks an awful lot like a Dumb-Things-I-Gotta-Do-Today list), and I judge my cosmic worth on my accomplishing those things. It’s all part of those lies that we Christians tell ourselves in our scramble to live impeccably moral lives. We think if we can just do X-Y-Z we’re okay, and we judge everyone — or at least ourselves — by that standard.

My rules are not God’s rules. Plain and simple.

Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults— unless, of course, you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging. It’s easy to see a smudge on your neighbor’s face and be oblivious to the ugly sneer on your own. Do you have the nerve to say, ‘Let me wash your face for you,’ when your own face is distorted by contempt? It’s this whole traveling road-show mentality all over again, playing a holier-than-thou part instead of just living your part. Wipe that ugly sneer off your own face, and you might be fit to offer a washcloth to your neighbor.

Matthew 7

The One About the Rules (Part 3 of 4)

We make rules. We bend rules. Humanly speaking, there’s really no difference between ours and theirs except power. I know I sound like Nietzsche and Foucault. But those guys were right really. Without God, it’s all about power.

Recently I found a couple of ugly and public things said about me. Honestly, it hurt. I probably shouldn’t let it, but it did. In both cases, the commenters were imposing their rules of propriety on me. They were judge, jury, and executioner. In passing their judgment, they put me at arms length to improve their own standing with little empathy for me and mine.

And in my saying all that, I’m trying to understand how they came to those conclusions and to remember how often I do the same.

I’ve perceived a lot of rules lately. I’ve seen the irritation from people who were frustrated by my dear four-and-a-half-year-old when he dresses as Link and wears all his weapons at once. I’ve felt the disgust when I’ve taken my preschoolers for a walk where someone has deemed I shouldn’t. I’ve heard people complain about how ill-tempered those other children are. I’ve read Mommy bloggers who grouse about those horrible mothers who cut off the crusts from their PB&J sandwiches.

Even now, I’m sure some of you are constructing reasons I shouldn’t have a clip from Friends on my blog. “Dear me! Can you believe that? Doesn’t she know that that’s an anti-Christian show and that she’s promoting unholy living by posting it on her blog? ‘I will set no wicked thing before my eyes!’ I would never do that!”

Sigh. . . . We can so easily see the fleck of mascara on someone else’s face, but those rivers of black eye liner that are streaked down our cheeks? We’re oblivious to those. And I do the same thing.

Grant often repeats back to me, “S/he’s not evil, just mistaken.” When he does that, he’s reminding me of my own take on a Burkean principle and what I believe is a Christian ethic. He’s right — to nudge me and to bring me outside of myself. To steer me away from the fundamental attribution error. We all need that kind of help. That’s why God gave us each other because when one of us stumbles, we need our friends there to help us up.

Sanctification is a team sport after all.

The Fundamental(ist) Attribution Error (Part 2 of 4)

So a toddler’s-lifetime-ago, my parents gave us my old Fisher Price Little People toys. I played with these things for weeks at a time. I later graduated to Barbies, of course, and then the Sims. It’s especially hilarious to turn off the “free-will” setting on The Sims.

Now, let me tell you about my toy-friends. My Raggedy Ann met her alopeciac fate when she went crossways with the washing machine. My Barbies had similar trouble. Well, first of all, they weren’t actually Barbies per se. They were Barbie’s younger groupies, Francie and Skipper (all from Malibu). My mother believed that these models were more realistically shaped (I do agree with her there!). Now, Francie was known in my little world as “Francie the Handicapped Barbie.” Through some unfortunate accident that none of us remember, Francie lost an arm. Now, the other Barbies still loved her — Dorothy Hamill (whose Bicentennial Olympic duds were soooo cool), Quick Curl Skipper (whose hair I genuinely coveted), Growing Up Skipper (whose quick-change gifts were intriguing and quite disturbing), Ballerina (whose sparkly head gear wouldn’t. come. off!), Supersize (whose gigantic proportions frightened all humanoids — both petroleum- and carbon-based. Clearly my dear mother had given up her goals of realistic feminine models by 1978). You see, I had my own little rules I enforced in my created world of little people, and that included a sort of plastic kindness to the armless and balding.

I’m sure you played with your people similarly. You had rules — rules that made perfect sense to you. No, the Little People lady in blue is not the postal carrier. She’s the police woman!! Can’t you tell?? The African-American man is the dentist, not the barber. We’re trying to quash sexual and racial stereotypes in this town!! No, the bed in the castle doesn’t go there. The throne goes there. Can’t you see that you’re blocking the passage to the trap door if you put it there? No, no, no, Francie can’t wear that dress! It only embarrasses her because it highlights her handicap!!

So as Isaac and I sit down to play with my vintage Little People or with his cars or pirates or “red coats and blue coats,” the same thing happens. I sit there thinking, “NO! The teacher’s desk has to go here. It’s the only place it fits!” While Isaac says, “Mommy, you can’t park the green car here. It always goes here.” “Always?” I think. “ALWAYS?? Are you kidding me? I was playing with these toys before you were even born. I certainly know where everything goes!!”

Well, I don’t say that. I am 35 years older than he, so I can refrain.

But I remember the War card game we had played just a few hours before. He negotiates over seemingly arbitrary but actually objective rules while rigidly enforcing his own. Well, pardon me. . . . We negotiate over seemingly arbitrary but actually objective rules while rigidly enforcing our own. I do it as much as he does. I just have more rules and more “weight.” I’m the Supersize Barbie to his Little Person Mail Carrier. Life’s taught me subtlety not righteousness, and it’s given me a few-more-than-I-need extra pounds to enforce it.

We’re both playing, then, in our Mythic-Literal developmental stage. Isaac’s jumping ahead briefly, and I’m regressing. In Stages of Faith, James W. Fowler describes this usually school-age developmental stage as follows:

Stage 2 Mythic-Literal faith is the stage in which the person begins to take on for him- or herself the stories, beliefs, and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. Beliefs are appropriated with literal interpretations, as are moral rules and attitudes. Symbols are taken as one-dimensional and literal in meaning. In this stage the rise of concrete operations leads to the curbing and ordering of the previous stage’s imaginative composing of the world. . . . The limitations and literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result in either an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or “works righteousness” or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect, or the apparent disfavor of significant others (149-50).

A tad revealing, eh? Wiki puts it this way:

In psychology, hypocritical behavior is closely related to the fundamental attribution error: individuals are more likely to explain their own actions by their environment, yet they attribute the actions of others to ‘innate characteristics’, thus leading towards judging others while justifying ones’ own actions.

Also, some people genuinely fail to recognize that they have character faults which they condemn in others. This is called psychological projection. This is self-deception rather than deliberate deception of other people. In other words, “psychological hypocrisy” is usually interpreted by psychological theorists to be an unconscious defense mechanism rather than a conscious act of deception, as in the more classic connotation of hypocrisy. People understand vices which they are struggling to overcome or have overcome in the past. Efforts to get other people to overcome such vices may be sincere. There may be an element of hypocrisy as well if the actors do not readily admit to themselves or to others how far they are or have been subject to these vices.

In other words, each of us earnestly believes that our own rules are good and required and even biblical (or based on biblical principle). Others’ rules are arcane, irrelevant, illogical, juvenile, or just plain stupid. And we follow our own rules just perfectly while all those other scofflaws are dooming themselves to perdition. Sure, people call us hypocrites, but they just don’t know the Rules like we do! Tsk-tsk. Well, we all know that we will be rewarded, and they will be punished.

Right?

The Art of War (Part 1 of 4)

But the idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.

Augustine’s Confessions

I loved board games and card games as a kid, and I still do. I’m always willing to play Settlers or Dominoes or Rage (an acceptable-to-Baptists version of the old stand-by face card game “Oh Hell.” I didn’t name it, remember!). My older brother wasn’t always available to play games with me when I really started to understand them, but we did play more than our share of Battleship and PayDay. My mom was always willing to play Uno or Go to the Head of the Class or Chutes and Ladders, but she couldn’t stomach the Game of Life. “Too realistic!” she claimed. And I quickly found out that playing Clue with the cat just wasn’t going to work.

Isaac has just taken to games. He likes “Goggle,” “Hippos,” and, just recently, War. I think it’s as much the soldiers on the cards as anything. And you know, there are some big lessons there — turn-taking, counting, comparing numeral values, and following the rules.

It’s that last one that trips us up. Isaac, the just newly minted 4.5 year old, rewrites the rules as we play. I lay down a nine and he lays down a four. “Mommy, didn’t you want to trade that one with me first?” “Mommy, but this one has a sword, and I reeeeeally like swords.” I just stare and sigh and then grin and remember, shaking my head more at myself than anything.

I did the same thing. Maybe that’s why the cat was the most willing to play with me because she didn’t care if I took a peek at her next card or traded my Scrabble tray of vowels for some of her consonants.

And Augustine’s reminder plunks me between the eyes every time Isaac revises the game play. It’s not the kids are any different than adults. Adults bend or make up the rules as we go. It’s just kids aren’t as skilled at hiding it.

Life teaches us to be sneaky, not to be good.

Blogging Jeopardy

“I’ll take Quotable Quotes for a $1000, Alex.”

“I hope he never pretends to repent and asks forgiveness. I would then be compelled to forgive him, and I could never trust him. I would much rather things remain as they are so that I can continue to have nothing to do with him. . . . From my father I learned many important lessons in strategy which have stood me in good stead. One of them is, ‘Never retreat when you are under attack.’ I try to avoid any statement for which I might have to apologize. If my enemies try to use against me something I have said, I reply, ‘I said it, I meant it, and I will now reemphasize it.’”

“Who is _____?”

So you think you can dance?

When Mormons direct Vespers. . . .

“There is only One Whom we have to fear, that is God.”

More proof of the rhetorical dysfunction in fundamentalism. In commenting on a recent 9Marks interview with Mark Dever and Mark Minnick about separation, one listener noticed that:

Minnick seemed shackled by the expectations of political fundamentalism, being very cautious in answers, afraid of who he might offend. Dever even picked up on this, saying at one point that he didn’t want to get Minnick in trouble with his group. That was sad really and a testimony to one of the major ills in fundamentalism. Out of fear of getting branded, men often don’t say what they think. This environment emasculates many of the men of the movement. Some might contend that this is the graciousness of Minnick coming out. I hope so. I don’t think so. He’s a gracious man, but his lack of boldness was unsettling. Minnick was so ambiguous in his description of separation that I could not understand how to even practice it based on what he said.

Our True Identity in Christ

A sentimental trip to Missouri this month. The last trip we took a year ago was in the middle of document-writing and ominous email-receiving communicating “some concerns.”

We had no idea what was ahead for us back then. Something was looming, but we didn’t know enough for certain to burden our Missouri family with the details. On my sister-in-law’s fridge we found two lists that nailed it — the entire message of Grace and the Gospel. Grant took one list for his blog today, and the other one follows here. They were a comfort and an affirmation to find way back when, and they are still a sweet reminder to see how God has carried us through this remarkable and scary year.

My True Identity in Christ

• You are justified and redeemed (already)–Romans 3:24
• Your old self was killed (crucified)–Romans 6:6
• You are not condemned. (My performance is condemned when I don’t trust in His life through me, but God does not condemn the performer, just the performance.)–Romans 8:1
• You are free from the law of sin and death–Romans 8:2
• You are accepted. (All my life I’ve sought to be accepted. Now I am!)–Romans 15:7
• You are sanctified (holy, set apart)–I Corinthians 1:2
• You have wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, redemption. (I am ransomed–restored to favor)–I Corinthians 1:2
• You are always led in His triumph (whether it appears so or not)–II Corinthians 2:14
• Your hardened mind has been removed–II Corinthians 3:14
• You are a new creature. (Even though I don’t always feel or act like it.)–II Corinthians 5:17
• You are the righteousness of God. (You can’t get more righteous than this.)–II Corinthians 5:21
• You are liberated–Galatians 2:4
• You are joined with all believers (not inferior to anyone)–Galatians 3:28
• You are a child and an heir–Galatians 4:7
• You are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Heaven–Ephesians 1:3
• You are chosen, holy, and blameless before God–Ephesians 1:4
• You are redeemed, forgiven–Ephesians 1:7
• You have obtained an inheritance–Ephesians
• You are sealed with the Spirit. (Imagine the real you sealed up in the envelope of God Himself.)–Ephesians 1:13
• You are alive (formerly a dead spirit)–Ephesians 2:5
• You are seated in Heaven (already)–Ephesians 2:6
• You are created for good performance. (And I can let Christ live through me to perform it.)–Ephesians 2:10
• You have been brought near to God–Ephesians 2:13
• You are a partaker of the promise–Ephesians 3:6
• You have boldness and confident access to God (not slinking as a ‘whipped dog’)–Ephesians 3:12
• You were formerly darkness, but are now light–Ephesians 5:8
• You are a member of His body (not inferior to other members)–Ephesians 5:30
• Your heart and mind are guarded by the peace of God. (Peace is knowing something, not always feeling it.)–Philippians 4:7
• You have all your needs (not greeds) supplied–Philippians 4:19
• You are complete (perfect)–Colossians 2:10
• You are raised up with Him–Colossians 3:1
• Your life is hidden with Christ in God–Colossians 3:3

To a Neonomian, Everybody’s an Antinomian