A Waste of Time

Life | Bad Ideas

Evidently there exists a site called Conservapedia. As of this moment the site appears to be down, probably because some leading bloggers linked to it. To mock it. Which it so richly deserves. Language Log has a post fisking some language-related entries, which are appallingly

The about page begins with the phrase, “Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!” This is bizarre. First, I’ve never detected any liberal bias on Wikipedia. Second, anybody can edit Wikipedia. If you think that an article displays liberal bias, edit the article to remove that bias. Wikipedia even has a special mechanism for disputing articles that aren’t deemed neutral. Why do you need a separate source for articles with conservative bias no bias at all?

I ask because in several political dimensions I still am a conservative, and this sort of thing just embarasses me.

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The Names of God

Theology | Good Ideas | Bad Ideas

Devout orthodox Jews today often abbreviate the word God in writing as “G-d”, as is explained here. The other day I read a reminisce from an elderly Roman Catholic gentleman, and he said most Roman Catholics used to devoutly bow whenever the name of Jesus was used.

Question: are these good ideas or bad ideas?

At one level it’s obvious that they are both unnecessary: the third commandment says not to use the Lord’s name in vain, but it does not stipulate that you should never write all of its letters or that you shouldn’t ever mention Him without bowing. I find it faintly ridiculous to insist that a violation of these customs necessarily means violation of the 3rd commandment. These seem to suggest that this stuff is a Bad Idea, or at least not necessarily a Good Idea.

However, these both also serve a purpose. Namely: with the commandment against blasphemy fenced about this way, it’s almost impossible to commit blasphemy. That is, if you are trained to so respect the name of God that you won’t even right it in full or say it without bowing, you will find it almost impossible to actually blaspheme without either explicitly rejecting your training or being a rank, deliberate hypocrite. If you haven’t been trained to think this way–if you have never been trained to use any particular respect when invoking God, you might never really know when you’re blaspheming, or worse, you might get the idea that it doesn’t really matter how we speak and write about God, and so just stop even thinking about blasphemy as something important. This suggests that these sorts of rules are a Good Thing.

Were you expecting some sort of a conclusion? Sorry to disappoint. I’m not sure what to say, but I think that I have another post on this topic (tangentially) that I will write tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it.

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The Smoking Service

Life | Bad Ideas

Coming soon to an alternate reality near you:

Until last week, Meadowbrook Community Church was just an ordinary, non-denominational church on the outskirts of Portland, OR. Then, however, the pastors launched a popular–but controversial–evangelistic service aimed at a little-coddled segment of the community: the smokers.

“Smokers have long been pushed to the margins of our society,” said Meadowbrook’s senior pastor Blake Pederson, a thirty-something blonde man with a crooked grin. “Smokers are rarely seen on television, most restaurants don’t allow smoking, and more and more cities are passing restrictive rules about smoking in public places. We wanted to buck the trend here at Meadowbrook and send the message to smokers that Jesus loves them, and the church has a place for them.”

Last week’s inaugural smoking service, going under the slogan of “Light Up and Let God”, was among the most well-attended services that Meadowbrook has ever hosted, with over 1,200 in attendance. Meadowbrook’s sanctuary was filled with a dense blue haze, and a cursory around revealed that around two-thirds of the audience was smoking. The service began with a rousing, rockabilly rendition of several classic hymns, performed by a cigar-chomping pianist and several smoking band-members, then moved into Pederson’s sermon.

“A lot of people will be against what we’re doing here,” Pederson stated confidently, his two fingers firmly clenching a lit cigarette as he paced the stage. “They’ll say that it’s sin, or a bad witness. Well, I’m here to tell you that those people are wrong!” The audience applauded and hollered, and several people held lighters aloft.

After the service, Pederson explained in an interview what the church’s vision was for the service. “Paul said that he would become all things for all people. We’re just putting that into practice.”

He then went on to explain how he himself has been forced to take up smoking in order to properly lead the service. “I didn’t like it at first,” he chuckled, “but now I can hardly go without it. Do you mind if I smoke during the interview?”

Not everyone is happy with the decision. A former member, who wished to remain anonymous, commented, “This goes against everything the church has stood for in its history. You can’t just throw out everything that doesn’t fit with your desire to be hip. I really see this as a compromise.”

Pederson was nonplussed by reports of dissent. “People said the same things about contemporary worship music when it first became popular,” he said. “But just as most of the church has come around to contemporary music, I think that eventually people will realize the validity of this form of outreach.”

Another controversial aspect of the new program is the fact that cigarettes are sold in the lobby, and Meadowbrook is allegedly in negotiations with Camel to for an exclusive distribution contract. Responding to accusations of crass commercialism, Pederson said, “This is just stewardship. God gave us tobacco, and He gave us smooth, low-tar Camel cigarettes. It’s simple wisdom for us to use these gifts to support the church.”

For now, the smoker’s service appears to be here to stay. At least one other church in the area has indicated it might start a smoker’s service, and evangelical leader Rick Warren commended Meadowbrook’s initiative.

“This is the sort of thing that we have always stood for in the Willow Creek community,” Warren said. “I really think that smoking is God’s vision for the church right now.”

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I Promised

Theology | Bad Ideas

I promised grisly tales of butchered Greek and linguistic eisegesis this week. Unfortunately, I don’t think you’ll be getting it.

Yes, this week our favorite Greek pseudo-scholar masquerading as a local priest did not actually pontificate on Greek too much, or at least he didn’t say anything that sticks out in my mind as deserving of a good skewering. This isn’t because he learned linguistics and good scholarship over the week–no, he simply refrained from talking about Greek much at all. Instead, he talked more about Hebrew. I would wager a fairly large sum of money that his Hebrew isn’t any better than his Greek, especially since he also explained Hebrew words with elaborate definitions and then used those definitions to draw dubious theological conclusions. However, since I don’t actually know Hebrew yet, I will give him the benefit of the doubt.

Still, he didn’t disappoint us with his usual fare of bizarre and near-heretical ideas. This week we learned:

• That the opening collect was wrong because it asked for “an increase of grace”, while we’ve already gotten all the grace that there is.
• That Jesus will return on a particular day of the Hebrew calendar. This was based on a typological interpretation of the Hebrew festivals, combined with a creative reading of Revelation.
• That Jesus’ ministry lasted exactly 70 weeks, which are the 70 weeks from Daniel. The devil snuck the error of a 3-year ministry into John, and the church bought it.

There was probably more, but I’ve blocked the rest of the sermon out of my memory.

Of all of these, the second one, about the second coming, bothers me the most. I just don’t see why people incessantly want to avoid the clearest statement Jesus ever made about his return: You can’t know the day or the hour. Furthermore, he told us to “be about our business”, doing what he expects us to do any time when he comes–which is precisely the opposite of what rapture-predicting engenders.

Fortunately, Fr. John comes back this week. There will be much rejoicing.

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A somewhat worse day at church

Theology | Bad Ideas | Linguistics

Had a nasty time this morning at church. Our regular priest is out of town for two weeks, and the visiting priest this weekend, well…

I’ve complained here before about the “Greek is a magical language” fallacy. This is the myth that Greek words are somehow more exact and theologically profound than English words, and that every Greek word in the Bible has mysterious spiritual meanings covered over by their plain English glosses. This myth is especially popular among people who have spent too much time with the Amplified Bible, or who have spent lots of time in a Greek lexicon but have no linguistic background and can’t actually read a Greek text. There were several egregious examples of this in today’s liturgy.

The first and worst was when he said that the word µακαριος, usually translated “blessed”, actually means “where God is active and moving.” Um, no. Not even close. Μακαριος means “happy,” “blissful”, or “blessed.” It is not derived from or related to any word that means “action” or “movement”. This is true both in Classical Greek and in Koine Greek.

Later, he declared that δικαιοσυνη meant “the righteousness that takes away the veil between us and God.” This is a somewhat trickier case, because it’s not simply wrong in the way the previous example was. Rather, it’s an example of taking a theological conclusion and trying to load it into the lexical meaning of a word. Δικαιοσυνη means “righteousness”, “justification”, or perhaps “acquittal”, but it is not an explicity theological word, and it certainly doesn’t carry enough lexical specificity to be paraphrased with the phrase given above. If you had asked a thousand people in the ancient near east to define δικαιοσυνη for you, I guarantee that not a one would have said anything like the above. Now, it could certainly be argued theologically that the δικαιοσυνη that Paul talks about does in fact remove the veil between us and God–but this is an entirely different thing than saying that the word carries all that baggage by itself! Saying what this pastor said is entirely duplicitous–you load your theology into the lexicon rather than developing it properly, and give your homily a semblance of profundity that comes entirely from misusing Greek and promoting false linguistic ideas.

(To be fair to the pastor, this sort of abuse is tremendously widespread. He probably just picked it up from another well-meaning but badly informed teacher.)

The other aspect of the morning’s service that bothered me was the priest’s incessant asides from the liturgy. A minimal amount of explanation and elaboration in the liturgy is fine, and Father John, our rector, rarely says every word exactly as it’s printed in the Book of Common Prayer. However, this priest seemed to take the printed liturgy as merely a suggestion for what he might say, or the basis for a rambling, ad-libbed reminisce. During the absolution, for example, he paused to tell the story of the man let down through the roof, then told us to imagine Jesus telling us that he forgave us. Sheesh. I would much rather have stuck to the words of the rite, in which the priest, representing Christ, just tells us we are forgiven. I don’t have to imagine a thing because I can see it and hear it in front of me.

Ah, well. Life goes on. Father John is back next week, so I won’t have to put up with this again.

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The Wrong Basis for a Renewal

Theology | Bad Ideas

Previously I blogged a brief history of the Oastea Domnului, the “Lord’s Army”, a Romanian renewal movement in the Orthodox church. As I said then, the modern movement has become almost entirely Protestant, something that I don’t think the founder Fr. Iosif Trifa intended. But beyond that, the concepts behind the modern face of the Lord’s Army disappoints me on a more fundamental level. Let me illustrate with a quote from the Baptist history of the movement:

The Lord’s Army movement has kept to this day its four principal points. At their meetings they are essentially concerned with:

1. Free speaking (preaching) with a calling to repentance

2. Reading spiritual poems

3. Singing religious songs with instrumental accompaniment

4. Free, spontaneous prayer

All of these are things that are not permitted in the Orthodox Church.

I’ll take these one at a time:

1. Since preaching and repentance is practiced every Sunday by the church, I have to assume that “free” is the operative word here. This probably refers to the oratorial, animated style that Protestants and, evidently, Army pastors use, as opposed to the plainer homilies that you’ll hear at an Orthodox church. In other words, the only real difference here is the style of the preacher. And even this isn’t a matter of dogma, but custom.
2. There have been plenty of Orthodox poets through the ages, so the only difference that I can perceive here is that the Orthodox don’t read poems during the liturgy. (And even that isn’t strictly true, since new poems and hymns can be approved for church use, though it takes a while.) Let’s concede the point, then–but how much does it matter? If the poems read at the Army meetings are the typical saccharine evangelical fare, the Orthodox aren’t missing much.
3. Instruments are key here. Once again, it’s true that the Orthodox don’t use instruments in church, but this strikes me as unimportant.
4. You’ll have to point me to the Orhtodox council that forbade spontaneous prayer. The Orthodox don’t pray spontaneously during the Liturgy, but this is a positive–the prayers are excellent and Biblical, and many of them are said corporately, providing a point of congregational unity. Spontaneous prayer is for individual devotions, but not for public worship.

So while each of the points above is technically true, they’re all utterly trivial. If these are the “four principal points” of the movement, then the modern Lord’s Army has become rediculous. You might as well form a revival based on the use of blue chairs and low-carb communion wafers. These things have nothing to do with the Gospel; they are no ground for a renewal.

What’s most disappointing, though, is that this statement falls so far short of Fr. Trifa’s original vision. Read Trifa’s own words about his goals:

Jesus crucified - this has been my programme in all of the years of the Army, and this is the programme of the Lord’s Army. It is not a new programme. I found it complete from the godly Apostle Paul.

Jesus crucified - this is the only reformation that interests me. I really couldn’t care less about preaching styles, instruments, modes of prayer, or whatever is trendy for churches these days. I want to hear Jesus Christ proclaimed in his crucifixion and resurrection.

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Gospels, True and False

Bad Ideas

Here is a good article about Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames, one of the more revolting “evangelism” efforts to have made the rounds of Christendom in my lifetime. I remember seeing a production of this when I was in junior high and being embarrassed even then by the tacky earnestness and bald manipulation of the piece. I’ve since seen posters for it in various other places, and I know of a non-Christian friend who was dragged to a performance.

All I can say is: uck. I appreciate this article because I shows this ugly Christianity for what it is. The Gospel does not need to be this way, and these kinds of abusive spectacles do not convey the Gospel.

The real Gospel is described much better here.

Double hat-tip to the iMonk.

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Six Problems with the Orthodox Church in Romania

Bad Ideas

I’m writing this in self-defense. There are many things that I like about Orthodoxy, but the way I have seen it practiced in its large, institutional setting is a large turn-off. These are the things that I don’t like:

1. Nominalism. Everyone in Romania is supposedly Orthodox. However, probably less than 5% of those people actually attend church regularly, and even fewer let their faith have an appreciable influence on their lifestyle. The situation of the Orthodox Church in Romania is ultimate proof of the fact that what is universal eventually becomes meaningless. Orthodoxy has been reduced to a cultural backdrop, a word that describes everyone, and thereby to be an Orthodox Christian is, in that context, next to meaningless. This is the root, I believe, of all of the problems that follow.
2. Profiteering. It is normal and right for the members of a congregation to support those who take care of them, and it’s likewise normal for families to compensate the priest for special services (weddings, baptisms, etc.) performed for them. Sop I don’t object to the concept of paid clergy, but simply to the prices in Romania: everyone knows that getting married or buried is exorbitantly expensive, and that all priests are quite well-off as a result. I became quite angry when I realized that a poor family was paying more than a month’s wages to have their mother buried. I believe that the priests are directly responsible for this, since the prices for such services aren’t fixed by anything other than local custom, and there’s nothing that keeps a priest for refusing payment from a poor family, or even discreetly returning a portion of their payment. Yet as far as I could find out, such acts of mercy are rare to nonexistent.
3. Clergy-centeredness. There is almost nothing that an interested layman can do to get deeper involved in the life of his parish. The Church’s charity work is almost all handled through monasteries, and every other spiritual activity is done by the priest. The only two exceptions I can think of are icon-painting and singing in the choir, both of which are related pretty directly to the main church service; there are no Bible studies, lay outreaches, or any other forms of involvement in Church life for a layman. The secular/sacred dichotomy is severe: the spiritual world belongs to priests and monks, while the everyday people can only look on.
4. Ignorance. Most Romanian laymen are woefully uneducated about their faith. This ignorance does not just apply to advanced theology; I don’t expect everyone to be able to hold forth on the two natures of Christ or the meaning of theosis. But most Romanians couldn’t even explain the basics of the Trinity or tell you more than one or two Bible stories. Biblical literacy is rare, as is any grasp on what the Orthodox faith is really about.
5. Idolatry. This is a direct result of the previous problem. The Orthodox doctrine of icons is not idolatrous when properly understood, but I doubt whether any Romanian layman properly understands it. They simply are never taught what the icon really is and how to use it, and so they develop and extremely primitive view of the icon. It becomes, at one extreme, simply a good luck charm. People who never attend church will still adorn their cars and houses with icons in the hope that this somehow blesses their endeavor. At the other extreme, people believe that Jesus or Mary are somehow “in” the icon, and so pray directly to the icon rather than to the person pictured therein. Thus you get people who cannot pray unless they have their preferred icon in front of them, and those who think that the icon is Jesus. This is a gross distortion of Christian and Orthodox doctrine.
6. Superstition. This problem also stems from the general ignorance of Orthodox laity in Romania. Because people aren’t educated in the true Orthodox faith, all sorts of folk practices and strange distortions seep into peoples’ lives, and they are almost never addressed. One example that I came across in Romania was the “Nine Day Prayer”, a prayer which promised 100% SUCCESS if you only prayed it nine times a day for nine days, and then left nine copies of the prayer at nine different churches. When I asked the Orthodox priest about it, he said it wasn’t anything truly Orthodox–but the priests at the churches let people continue on spreading the prayer around.

These things form the heart of the pocăiţi (neo-Protestants) criticism of Orthodoxy in Romania, and if the Church would get serious about addressing these things, she would protect herself from quite a lot of her losses to Protestantism. And some things are, slowly, being done, though in a top-down, clumsy manner.

I do note that none of these have to do with what defines Orthodoxy, simply with the way it is practiced in Romania.

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Orthodoxy and Glossolalia

Theology | Good Ideas | Bad Ideas

Today I found an interesting article discussing Greek Orthodox perspective on speaking in tongues. It thus combines two of my major preoccupations (Orthodoxy and Charismaticism), and I find that I almost completely agree with it:

The Greek Orthodox Church does not preclude the use of Glossolalia [speaking in tongues], but regards it as one of the minor gifts of the Holy Spirit. If Glossolalia has fallen out of use it is because it served its purpose in New Testament times and is no longer necessary. However, even when used, it is a private and personal gift, a lower form of prayer. The Orthodox Church differs with those Pentecostal and Charismatic groups which regard Glossolalia as a pre requisite to being a Christian and to having received the Holy Spirit.

In defense of the Charismatics, I should point out that they don’t see speaking in tongues as a prerequisite of salvation or receiving the Holy Spirit, merely as the single definitive evidence thereof. But even this modified belief is false, as there’s no Biblical evidence for seeing glossolalia as the assured evidence of the Holy Spirit, and there are plenty of non-Christian groups that also speak in tongues.

What interests me the most is their explanation of why the Corinthians were having problems with this manifestation:

Corinth was greatly influenced by Greek paganism which included demonstrations, frenzies and orgies all intricately interwoven into their religious practices. In post Homeric times the cult of the Dionysiac orgies made their entrance into the Greek world. According to this, music, the whirling dance, intoxication and utterances had the power to make men divine; to produce a condition in which the normal state was left behind and the inspired person perceived what was external to himself and the senses.

In other words, the soul was supposed to leave the body, hence the word ecstasy (ek stasis). They believed that while the being was absent from the body, the soul was united with the deity. At such times, the ecstatic person had no consciousness of his own.

Change just a handful of words, and this could describe any number of Charismatic meetings. You can see the multitude of ways that Christian worship has been paganized by the excesses of this movement. In fact, there’s a point-by-point correlation between the items mentioned here and popular elements of Charismatic worship:

In contrast to all of this, Christian worship throughout the centuries has focused on the presence of God in ordinary liturgical worship, which doesn’t require ecstatic states, and in the Sacraments given to us by Jesus. There has always been a place in Christian spirituality for the mystical, experiential side of worship, but it was never allowed to overwhelm these divine ordinances. No, it took Charles Finney’s revivalism and the Pentecostals to plunge us back into pagan ideas of “spirituality”.

So this, then, is the right and proper conclusion:

Church does not rule out Glossolalia. She simply does not regard it as one of the important ones. Better to “speak five words that can be understood … than speak thousands of words in strange tongues.” This is the Orthodox Christian viewpoint.

UPDATE: After a few more hours of thought, I think I was too harsh in my comparison of charismatic worship to paganism. As I’ve argued before on this site, intention matters, and the intention of charismatics is not to engage in pagan orgies, but to worship God. I consider it a corruption of the Christian worship tradition that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, but we do need to give Charismatics the benefit of the doubt.

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Joel Osteen

Bad Ideas

The iMonk wants us to blog about Joel Osteen. To hear is to obey, O monkish one.

I have watched Joel Osteen exactly once on TV. It was a sermon, broadcast on a day when I had nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t even stomach the whole thing, because there was absolutely no Gospel at all in his message. There was no mention of Jesus. No sin and salvation. There is this guy called “God”, but he doesn’t do much except wish that you would have a positive attitude so that he can bless you. Nothing that resembles the Gospel of Jesus Christ is there at all.

I’m not an expert on Osteen or a theologian, so I won’t pretend that I can chatter knowingly about this. However, it doesn’t require a lot of theological smarts to see that Osteen has no Gospel at all in his message. He gives some decent advice. If you simply take his messages as inspirational, they’re not bad. But until he starts preaching the Gospel, he’s simply making a bunch of inspired, happy people who are not Christians. I suppose there’s a market for that, but he sure shouldn’t be calling himself a preacher of the Gospel, then.

[This message was edited because I got the Osteens mixed up. Joel Osteen is the one we’re writing about. Thanks iMonk.]

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