Africa can teach us something. . .

There are times when we presume that our situation is unique to us today and that because we have such unique circumstances today, there is nothing that we can learn from the past.  This is not simply foolishness but wrong.  The world is not a constant string of new and unique circumstances and situations but often a constant refrain of what was and still is, what was once but has come back again.  We would do well to pay attention to and learn from how the Church dealt with the same challenges and issues we are now facing.

In my reading a while ago, I was pleased to come across this history of the the African Church, only to discover that it fermented into one of the most intellectually formidable areas of the early Church.  Indeed, it is said that had Christians casually walking its streets during the Apostolic age -- even in times of persecution throughout the empire.  Africa provided very fertile soil for early Christianity and gave birth and formation to some of the intellectual giants of our early history -- men like Tertullian and Cyprian.  Yet it did so amid a very cosmopolitan atmosphere which blended conflicting cultural influences that did not exist in other parts of Rome's influence. It was Africa which was home to Augustine, not only a profound figure in Africa but throughout the West.  Although he was bishop of Hippo, his shadow was cast well beyond that domain.  It was here that synods and councils enumerated the Western canon, where formative teaching on original sin, the relationship between the spiritual and temporal estates, monasticism (at least in the West), and moral theology.

By the time of Augustine, North Africa had become a vibrant and deeply Christian community.  With  hundreds of bishoprics and the site of many councils and synods, the Church in Africa was catholic and apostolic, rooted in tradition, and practiced a vibrant sacramental theology.  By the time of Augustine's death in 430, the Vandals created a climate that led many Christians to flee to Italy and southern Gaul.  But the history remains and it shines a light upon our current situation.  Although we have some differences in our society and culture, the Church has tended to decline in the midst of diversity and has not held its own in the public square nor has it flourished in the kind of cosmopolitan shape of modern society in the West.  Clearly, one of the keys might a difference among the leaders today.  Are our bishops, pastors, and members as clearly orthodox and vocal in their public witness as were those of Northern Africa in the earliest days of Christianity?  Can we learn something from the way they gave testimony to and demonstrated their Christian witness within a diverse and cosmopolitan setting which is common to nearly every urban area in the world today?

With the arrival of the Vandals and the beginning of the end of the shining moment of the African Church, we find how things can change with the force of power against Christians.  The Church certainly suffered but so did the rest of the culture and civilization when the conditions caused  Christians to flee.  Indeed, it was Tertullian who first raised the question that haunts us today, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”  To put it another way, what does culture have to do with the Church?  What is revealed is, of course, the fact that the Church and the culture around it are not insulated from each other and deeply entwined on several levels.  Yet at the same time, it also reveals what happens when the Church becomes captive to that culture and how the culture itself suffers with the absence of a vital Christian presence.

Christianity can never simply be reduced to culture.  We all know that on some level.  But what is the relationship between the Church and the world around the Church?  Christianity does not live in a vacuum but neither is the Church a sponge to absorb all that is around it.  When it did flourish, the African Church lived in a flourishing world and it provided a setting in which Christianity could develop, expand, and build upon its witness and draw people into the life of the Church.  When things fell down due to the invasion of the Vandals, the absence of the Christian voice, and the decline of the institutions of the community, it was not simply the Church that suffered.  In the end, those who remained among the Christian community could not preserve what was severely tested by the threats to the civilization and the Church itself suffered by abandoning its former place within the society.

Within the West, we find ourselves as Christians increasingly isolated and insulated, some by threat and force against us and some by our own surrender, choosing to embrace the values and culture more than to stand forth and stand out in testimony to the Biblical witness and in continuity with the catholic tradition.  What is clearly apparent is how the culture itself is suffering without the vibrant presence of a committed Christian community but what is not always apparent is how the Church suffers when we no longer carry forward the banner of Christ's death and resurrection and the yeast of His Gospel into the world around us with the same urgency and lively proclamation.  That is also something to be learned by the African lesson as well.   

What the revolution won. . .

Having grown up in the time of the sexual revolution and, having already made it through puberty when the freedom was being claimed, I should be one of its champions.  In reality, it is an embarrassment that I was part of the generation that pushed for the liberation of desire from love and commitment.  It has changed not only our vocabulary or the sense of appropriate sexual decorum but also transformed the most vaunted institutions which form the bedrock of society.  And for what?

Freud insisted that sex was at the heart of our identity and personality as people as well as the core and center of our lives together as a society of people and the shape of our culture.  When we began to dismantle them in the cause of freedom and to liberate people from the prison of mores and values deemed ancient and prudish, we did not realize that we would at the same time sanction the dismantling of all those essential human relationships and bonds the defined us as a society and a civilization of people.  That is, after all, what the sexual revolution ended up doing.  It turned overturned the established lifelong union of husband and wife within the primary purpose of procreation and replaced it with a mere recreational activity designed more for self-expression, self-fulfillment, and, in the end, pleasure.  

The shape of the bond between a man and a woman (and any other gender or desire bonded together) was made into a partnership of whose success or failure hinged primarily upon the fulfillment of the members and much of that fulfillment was measured by the sexual needs of those in the "relationship". The end result is that sex today is not about self-giving or any other kind of giving.  It is about taking what you want, what you desire, and what you deem to be right and good and it has turned the partner into merely a another who consents to be a part of it all.  Who has been liberated by rampant divorce, a slower marriage rate among all, the absence of children from love and marriage, the objectification of sex to the point where even scripted pornography takes a second place to artificial intelligence versions of it all?  Is there anyone who has not been touched by this or harmed by it all?  By removing love, commitment, and fertility from the sex act, the act itself was turned into something merely erotic and eventually only prurient.    

In once sense, this had already happened in Germany in the wake of the first great war.  Germany ended up as a nation whose morals had gladly been surrendered to the gods of pleasure and desire.  It did not last and it could not.  The Nazi's rose up to end the reign of terror that had weakened family, home, work, and faith.  In the end their own form of terror replaced both the liberty and what was a hallmark of German virtue prior to the rise of the Kaiser and his socialist replacement.  It has taken longer for the sexual revolution to take hold in America and yet its fruits are little different from that which happened in the pre-Hitler Germany of the 1920s and 1930s.  Now we have come to think it natural to define marriage as a local commitment between any two people who can meet each other's needs and children have become the exception rather than the rule.  Any form of desire is considered legitimate and the traditional domains of family and home have been painted with the brush of patriarchy and submission which no woman can stomach and no man dare expect.  So, instead, the people have made marriage itself into a temporary arrangement subject to the whims of pleasure and happiness defined almost exclusively in terms of the individual.  But are we really happy?  Are we happier than those who went before us?  I am afraid that we all know the answer to that question. 

 

Constant remodeling. . .

I am a fan of DIY projects and remodeling shows.  It amazes me to deconstruct a house that has been improved over the years until it is merely a hodgepodge of failed attempts to make better what was simply the character of the time or the house or its plan.  Sometimes you have to give up and let the house be what it is.  Not every home can be turned into a wall-less wonder of an open plan and not every detail is a character flaw to be replaced by modern simplicity.  Sometimes it just is a Victorian or Craftsman or Foursquare or whatever and either you make your peace with it or not.  And, sadly, sometimes it is a candidate to be simply torn down to be replaced by something better (though the construction methods and materials are not always an advance, to be sure).

Life is like that.  We live in an improvement era in which everything is being constantly remodeled.  I can barely put my phone down between updates and every time I most need my computer, it is downloading and installing one more idiot updates.  All to give me more emojis and security and bug fixes that do little to help -- at least as far as I can see.  We face the same problem and the same failed solutions with our humanity.  There is a profound utopian impulse common in modern culture which has decided that we can take what is old and make it new, improve upon what we deem to be bad, and fix what is wrong. While with a house it is merely a money pit with dubious results, with humanity there is the innate risk of improving out of us who we are and turning the things that we cannot change into the rabbit holes that distract us from what we can change.  

We have decided that suffering, vulnerability, illness, aging, and the current in vogue human failures are simply problems to be solved.  We have forgotten that sin has placed its mark upon our human condition and that this will not be a defect easily engineered or solved by medical options that kill.  We have lost, at least in our communal mind, the need for and relevance of religion and so we bristle at the idea we need anyone's help.  Of course, God is convenient to blame but not as redeemer or savior.  We will not breed our way out of these things nor will we engineer our DNA to prevent them from staining our image of perfection.  We will not self-improve ourselves out of suffering or frailty or moral dilemma.  Such is the lot of a human condition since the Fall. We must begin by admitting this before anything else can help us.  Repentance is not meant to satisfy a demanding God but to admit that God is our helper and His goodness is not optional for us but key to any hope we might have. 

It amazes me how often in the home improvement shows we are told about smart switches or screens as if these are what will make a house into a home.  It is typical of our penchant for technology to believe that every problem is a technical one and every solution is a technological one.  Even for us.  That is why artificial intelligence is so enticing for us.  If we are having problems with the remodel, maybe we can make a technology which can do for us what we cannot -- an artificial humanity to fix our real one.  How unsurprisingly the solution seems to be more leisure, more entertainment, and more pleasure.  If you cannot live forever, live the time you have well until you decide to check out of Hotel California.  But, if you will recall, you can check in; you just cannot check out, at least in the song.

A just social order is a lofty goal and a life without constraints of pain or disappointment is a common enough one but is that really what we need?  Indeed, the Christian Gospel insists that there is something more that cannot be measured in earthly standards, except perhaps in guilt and shame, not exactly in great quantity today.  Forgiveness and a clear conscience are not perfunctory steps toward a greater goal but the beating heart of Christian faith and life.  Peace with God comes before we have peace within and can make peace with our brother.  Rome keeps talking about human dignity, common good, and justice as a basis for social order.  Protestants keep talking about individual conscience, self-government, and the limits of political authority.  I wonder if both cases have pursued prosperity and, at least in comparison with the past, achieved that dream but at the cost of knowing who we are and why we are here and the divinely given orders of marriage, family, children, and home.  Have we remodeled out of our modern lives the very things that gift us with purpose?  That is what I fear.

Judgment. . .

I read a critique of Protestantism (in which the author would also surely criticize Lutheranism) as a blind alley of judgment which makes it impossible to know who is correct.  

After visiting churches, reading books, talking with pastors, praying, and studying Scripture, I realized that every proposed solution eventually brought me back to the same place. I had to decide which interpretation of Scripture made the most sense, determine which doctrines counted as essential, judge which pastor had interpreted Scripture correctly, and evaluate which scholar presented the strongest case. In the end, every road led back to my own judgment. . . Yet that was the very problem I set out to solve.

I get it.  Protestantism offers a dizzying array of choices and answers and perspectives.  Indeed, how can you know which is right and which is wrong.  It is a judgment.  Now, to be sure, Lutheranism is not exactly the same thing as the myriad of options under the banner of Protestantism.  We have a written confession and claims of catholicity that appeal to Scripture and to the church fathers.  But that is for another post.  In this case, the author is contrasting Rome and Protestantism.  It is presumed that he is saying the choice of Protestantism is left to individual judgment and the choice of Rome is not.  That, however, is a false statement.

The choice of church, Rome or Protestantism or Lutheranism, is always a judgment call.  It is not that any of them offers a way to bypass judgment on the claims made by any of them.  No, the problem is not to find a church which does not require you to come to some conclusion or judgment.  The problem remains by which criteria you judge.  Is it reason or Scripture or catholicity or the implicit authority claimed over years or a teaching magisterium or an office (pope)?  I would suggest that Rome loves to press the issue of authority as if it were a way to bypass judgment when the real issue facing any serious Christian is which church stands with Christ and the Scriptures.  It is not antiquity alone or tradition or office (papacy) but Scripture.  

The person was hoping for some sort of objective judgment to relieve him of the need to judge the claims along side the authority (Scripture).  There is not.  Not in Rome, not in Protestantism, and not in Lutheranism.  You cannot skip over the judgment but you had better judge according to the right criteria.  Rome forgets this.  But Lutheranism here is in a different position than Protestantism.  We have a book, a written confession, that does not equivocate.  Looking for a church?  Dig deep into Scripture and into the claims of all churches.  Lutheranism looks good  It is not that hard to look good in comparison to the many versions of Protestantism but Lutheranism looks good compared to Rome as well.   

 

Death of the family ties. . .

The old joke is that if you have only one child, you are not a real parent.  After all, you always know which kid did it.  It is only when you have to stare into the faces of multiple kids, each of which is denying responsibility, that you earn your parent badge.  Yeah, I know.  It is only a joke.  But there is something to it.  Family ties are not simply parent to child and child to parent but sibling to sibling.  As the number of single child families increases and the number of families with multiple children decreases, the shape of those family ties is inevitably different.  

Europe is already well ahead of us.  Half of all families have only one child.  Here in the US it is still about a fifth of all families with but one child.  By choice.  This is not happening among parents who would like to have more children but cannot but is largely driven by a conscious choice to have one and only one child.  That means no siblings for those children.  The family dynamic is radically different with but one child and the child growing up without a brother or sister knows parent and home life in a very different way than one who lives with siblings.

There was a time when two or three children was considered a small family.  In those days children had no expectation of private bedrooms or bathrooms.  Life was shared in sometimes complicated ways that became normal and even routine.  One bathroom for six or eight people was not exceptional but typical.  Toys were shared.  Chores were shared.  Life was shared.  All that has changed.  We call them improvements.  Bedrooms that are no more only for sleeping but have become refuges for the silent and individual life with the screen.  Homes that have enough spaces to avoid bumping into others.  Meals that are short order or fend for yourself kinds of experiences rather than the whole family around a single table with a single menu.  It is different even for families with more than one child but it is radically different for the single child.  

Churches were filled with families that took up entire pews -- no matter how long the seat.  They filled the churches with the sounds of children and Sunday school rooms with boys and girls and VBS classrooms with hot, sweaty kids waiting for the recreation times.  Photos of the confirmation classes were two or three deep with the washed and earnest faces of youth -- girls in white dresses and boys in their first real man suit jackets.  Part of the reason the churches are less full is the smaller size of the families there.  Even with two children, there is plenty of room in the pews for more than a single family.  We see it in the schools of our communities but it is a pivotal factor in the congregation as well.

Could it be that not having siblings has taught us not to get along or, rather, left us without the memory or tools or skills of how to get along with those we do not like or with whom we do not agree?  Could our lack of tolerance and our desire to insulate ourselves from those who have a different view than we do be attributed to the loss of that memory of growing up and figuring out how to make it work in a home with limited bedrooms and probably a single bathroom and shared toys?  Could it be that our quickness to resort to violence is, in part, our inability to figure out how to deal with conflict or disagreement and our limited tolerance of those who dare to challenge us?  I have no data but I suspect that as the family changes, society changes and many of those are not for the better.  Churches are finding the same short tempers and we are more apt to find folks packing up their things and leaving than investing themselves into communities where there is a chance they might be offended.  It spreads to all our institutions.  Even the old civic groups and youth organizations of old are suffering.  We want our thing and we are much less willing to suffer with those who do not want our thing.  No, the death of family ties brings with us unintended consequences all around.