Minor Minutia

"I was glad when they said unto me, 'Let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem....' Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.... Because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek thy good." Ps. 122:1-2, 6a, 9

The reason that Jerusalem was given such high status by the Jews was because it was the home of the Temple, i.e., the dwelling place of God. Peace was prayed for not for Jerusalem's sake, but rather because of the Temple ("Because of the house of the Lord our God"). By itself, the city was (and is) nothing; just another temporary home of man.
Many, however, still mistakenly pray for peace in Jerusalem because they think that it is the city that is important. It is not. What is important is God, and Him dwelling amongst man. To confuse the cynosure here is similar to what the Israelites did with the ark (I Sam. 4:3): they deemed the ark itself as important rather than the God who the ark represented.
We continue such mistakes today. Though there are plenty of things worth fighting for, we more often than not fight and nit-pick with much candor about minor minutia (frivolous things like denominational jingoism and established lists of approved and disapproved Bible translations, musical preferences, and hair styles). Meanwhile, important things (like God) get lost in the shuffle, and we fall from being the light of the world into just another religion; for the world does not need or rules or opinions. They need God, which means that they need Jesus, the only way back to God (John 14:6).

-Jon Vowell

God-Seeker

"...let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Seek the Lord and His strength; seek His face evermore." Ps. 105:3b-4

The rest of the Psalm gives the grounds for "why" we should seek Him. Like Ps. 78, we are given a mini-history of Israel. Its purpose is stated at the beginning: "Remember the the marvelous works that He hath done." Know this God: see His activities, that they are good; know His character, that He is holy; and then seek Him out, for it is who He is that drives us to Him. The heart of the God-seeker rejoices because this God is worthy to be sought, the only thing worth seeking. He has proven Himself to be the one and only hope, the one and only God, the highest and the greatest, the beginning and the end, the First Cause and the Ultimate Purpose. Taste and see that the Lord is good, and you will desire Him like wine for the soul.
It must be stated, however, that God is to be sought for Himself and not for the mere sake of seeking. Many people (through time and esp. today) are seekers for seeking's sake, and many others additionally believe that they can somehow properly seek God without any established concepts of Him. They stress subjective experience above objective truth(s).
God is a person, and therefore is to be known in an experiential subjective dynamic. However, God is not a person like we are a person. He is holy, i.e., absolutely perfect and complete, and thus has no changes. Therefore, there are definite and certain things about God, things that without knowledge of we will never truly seek Him: we will fall into every ditch and lurch into every side eddy imaginable. God is a person about which there are definite and certain things, things that He has graciously revealed to us through His word, things that He is to be sought for. The true God-seeker understands this: their subjective experience(s) must necessarily be bound to an objective reality or else it will wander aimlessly in the dark.

-Jon Vowell

The Loss of the Sacred: Holy Places, Dark Places

"And Jacob awoke out of his sleep, and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.' And he was afraid, and said, 'How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.'" Gen. 28:16-17

For the Hebrews, "house of God" was not a mere term; it was a truth about reality. It was no mere sign divorced from concept; it was the concrete declaration of a meta-physical actuality. For them, the "house of God" (the tabernacle/temple) was the intersection of Heaven and earth. There, the presence of God literally dwelt in the Holy of holies, meeting every year with the High Priest to atone for the sins of the people. It was a sacred place, and thus still dreadful and awesome.
Now, however, the house of God is merely a building for social gatherings, buildings that litter our countryside with all the frequency (and presence) of fast food joints or coffee shops, or any other trapping of American consumerism. Going to church is like going to a rally (or the mall, or a concert, or a press conference, or work), and picking a church is like picking shoes: whatever fits me best. The dread, the mystery, the wonder, the sacred, is gone. We go to church to meet and make friends (or a spouse), increase in head knowledge, receive encouragement, maintain our social status; anything except to meet with God, a thought that probably never even crosses our minds. A "den of thieves" indeed (Matt. 21:13).
In the old days of Christendom, churches were not littered everywhere, and thus they were still considered special and sacred things. Worship was a set and established affair, the same in almost every church, because its purpose was to praise God and prepare you to meet with Him, not to please your emotional needs and aesthetic preferences. The Eucharist was (and is) about meeting with God, face to face, and (from a Roman Catholic view) in the flesh. Views on salvic purposes aside, the common idea was that the whole of believers, by the right of the atonement, could now step into the Holy of holies and stand in the presence of God. Think of that! Even the Hebrews did not have such a privilege, but now we do by the blood of Christ. Yet now even the "Lord's Supper" is reduced to a mere event, one of many, of the social gathering. Who knows what varied reasons we have for partaking of the bread and wine; I doubt they have anything to do with stepping before the presence of the Living and Holy God Almighty.
It used to be that holy places were "dark places" (as Mr. Lewis put it), places of mystery and wonder, of holiness and dread, where God met with man face to face as friend does to friend. Now it is not so: we have thrown open the windows and aired out the rooms, cleaned up the blood and put out the fires, and have consequently suffered a loss of the sacred. We sing songs to our emotional gratification, eat the crackers and grape juice without flinching, have sorry feelings for our sins, and head back into the light of day as though we had done no more than taken a trip to the grocers rather than having just left alive, by the blood of Christ alone, the dreadful place, the gate of heaven, the house of God.

Lord, have mercy on us.

-Jon Vowell

Love and Righteousness

"Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of Thy name; and deliver us and purge away our sins, for Thy name's sake...and render unto our neighbors sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached Thee, O Lord." Ps. 79:9, 12

Redemption and damnation, salvation and judgment, love and righteousness; whichever way that you put it, these are the two arms of God's government, two of the most essential qualities of His character. It is these two qualities that are the most sorely attacked today by the religious and secular alike.
We hate the love of God as Scripture presents it, i.e., a holy love that desires to make lovable and lovely the hateful and ugly beloved. It is less like Romeo and Juliet and more like The Taming of the Shrew. It is a love that will not tolerate any stain or blemish, not matter how much we tolerate or even cherish it. We despise such a heavy-handed and true love, so we boil God's love down into either a fluffy sentimentalism that means absolutely nothing or a cruel toleration that winks at the damnation of a soul out of fear of being labelled "mean," "insensitive," or other useless buzz words of contemporary society. The love of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
Likewise, we hate the righteousness of God because it directly conflicts with our damnable version of the love of God. If our supreme deity is to be sentimental and tolerant, then He must necessarily not be moral. The sentimental and tolerant man suffuses all things into an incomprehensible whole; the moral man sets everything in rigid distinctions, distinctions like right and wrong, good and evil. Such distinctions are inherent in true righteousness, and thus righteousness is an insufferable eye-sore to the modern world (esp. Modern Christendom). Consequently, they choose not to talk about it; it is too much of a landmine. The righteousness of God is a consuming fire: all that is imperfect will burn away.
If we are to remain loyal to God and His revelations of Himself, then we must maintain the reality of His holy character, i.e., the fullness and harmony of His qualities, viz., love and righteousness. The world does not need sentimental toleration, a fluffy cruelty that "loves" it by amassing it into a pile of indistinguishable nothingness that it can safely ignore; what the world needs is a holy and true love and righteousness that burns away our impurities and makes us fit for itself.

-Jon Vowell

Desiring God: Something Real

"O God, Thou art my God. Early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsteth for Thee. My flesh longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. I have looked for Thee in the sanctuary to see Thy power and Thy glory. [...] My soul followeth hard after Thee...." Ps. 63:1-2, 8a

The whole of Christianity these days (esp. in the Western world) comes off as either dusty and fragile or fluid and messy rather than solid and real. We could help it come off as solid and real more if we, as Christians, took seriously this concept of thirsting after God, of desiring Him above all things. Some of us desire head knowledge, with good theology and proper exegesis. Others of us prefer respectable religion, with practical advice and moralisms. Many other desire various things. Very few desire God. All other things are not bad per se. They become bad when they take the place of God, as they often do in our lives. To paraphrase Charles Williams, we say "This is Thou," but never get to "This is not Thou." To paraphrase Lewis, we mistake the inns for home.
Perhaps Christianity and its current Christians would be taken more seriously as something solid and real (i.e., as truth) if we (1) unapologetically told people that there is a God, that He can be known, and that to be known by Him is the soul's deepest desire; and (2) unapologetcially live like it, because it is the truth. If people gazed into a common sanctuary and saw souls thirsting after and satisfied by God, His power and glory and all that He is, rather than dusty scholars and amiable moralists, then perhaps they would begin to see why the Gospel is the only good news out there, for it tells us how to satisfy our deepest longings by taking us back to God through the Cross of Christ.

-Jon Vowell

Give me God (or, A Catharsis)

"Truly my soul waiteth upon God; from Him cometh my salvation. [...] Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie. To be weighed in the balance, they are altogether lighter than a breath. [...] God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this, that power belongeth to God." Ps. 62: 1, 9, 11

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." II Corinthians 4:18

It's easy to get caught up in temporary things. Besides the fact that they are what is "seen" (and thus more readily relatable), there is also nothing inherently wrong with them. The only time that they go wrong is when they are given precedent over what is eternal, and yet we do this all the time. The whole of the truly modern age (right up to our current choking fog of the post-modern swamp) can be quite accurately defined as a time of treating temporal things as fundamental and necessary while treating eternal things as superficial and trivial. "Please," we cry, "don't bother troubling us about our souls or whatnot. Just wake us up when the latest cultural/political/ideological fad or fashion rides by so we can jump on its bandwagon." To paraphrase Lewis, we are far too easily amused and distracted.
Christians don't escape from this problem either. The whole of Modern Christendom can be quite succinctly described as one long, horrendous fashion show, with every single item being a mere retread of what the world had already paraded out with much better ability last year. As the blood-bought children of God, we are the unworthy (and therefore humbled) recipients of the deep, eternal truths of God, and yet we keep traipsing across the world's stage like a pathetic johnny-come-lately to every secular and worldly stage show under the sun. We are supposed to be leading all men unto Christ and into the fear of the Lord, and yet the best that we do today is to teach everyone how to be moral, amiable apathetics courtesy of our Christian knock-off versions of self-help guides and practical advice columns.
What's even worse is that we're not only mimicking the world concretely, but also abstractly, taking its philosophies and ideologies and merging them with Christianity in a most unholy union. As sudden as a winter evening, "faith" now equals "doubt," and all the rich teachings and history of the Christian Faith are summarily declared stupid. Faith itself becomes wholly subjective, having been violently cut from all objectivity, until it means absolutely nothing precisely because it means anything. On all counts, we look and sound and feel so much like the world and all of its vacuous and counterfeit pleasures and promises that we render the gospel and all of God's truth utterly impotent. The world assumes a priori that we have nothing to say that they haven't already heard before and better from the mouths of their own prophets and preachers.
I don't want to be well-adjusted. I don't want to know how to balance my checkbook or work the stock market. I don't want to be amiable or moral or decent. I don't want to "just get along." I don't want psychotherapy, anti-depressants, or self-help tips from people as fallen as myself. I don't want a "dialogue" or "conversation." I don't want to be represented. I don't want another agenda, fashion, or fad. I don't want to be where truth is not allowed to "colonize the space." I don't want to hear your subjective opinions or experiences. I don't want me subjectivity to be cut from that which is objectively real and true. I will tell you what I want. I will tell you what the world really wants, what it has always wanted, and what Christianity has always had to give to it. I want to know if there is a God, and if He can be known, if He can know me, and how. I want to know if repentance and forgiveness are real and capable of doing away with real sin and real guilt, that grace is truly greater than all my sin. I want truth to not only "colonize the space" but also colonize all of me, filling me up like blood and air and water and food. I want abundant life and life everlasting. I want to be consumed by the fire of the God who is there. I want to love God like a man loves a woman, to be enraptured and intoxicated by Him always, to want to protect Him from His enemies and myself. I want that which is solid and real, timeless and eternal, something that has sustained those before me and will sustain those after me. Give me God and all that He is or else I will perish, and that without remedy.
All these things and more are offered as unflinching and unapologetic objective truths and realities by the Christian Faith to all people regardless of their experiences or circumstances. Is that the message that the world hears, though? Is that what the Church even hears? I'm afraid not. The Faith begun by the Incarnate God of the universe has been made by its followers into an impotent side-show act. May the Lord have mercy on us all.

-Jon Vowell

The Dispensable God

"Give us help from trouble, for vain is the help of man. Through God we shall do valiantly, for it is He that shall tread down our enemies." Ps. 60:11, 12

"For it is God who worketh in you both to will and to do, because of His good pleasure." Phil. 2:13

"...without me, ye can do nothing." John 15:5b

God is as much a necessity as He is a luxury. He is a luxury in that he is a delight to our souls and more than we ever could have imagined (or deserved). He is a necessity in that we cannot dispense with Him. To do so means death, of our souls and minds and bodies. He is the thing that we simultaneously want and need in the ultimate sense, though we are perhaps incapable of expressing such a fact adequately. He is such a luxury that man, in our darkened ignorance, still seeks to fill the void that separation from Him has left behind. He is such a necessity that we cannot even choose Him unless His word gives us the power to do so (Rom. 10:17). On all points, we cannot live without Him, though the world desperately tries to.
The Church tries to as well, sadly. The denial of God's luxury and necessity, of Him being what we most want and need, is a hallmark symptom of practical agnosticism, a curious yet obvious aliment of Modern Christendom. We view God as quite dispensable, like a hat that can be worn our not depending on season and climate or fashion and mood; and that's if we even think about Him at all. Perhaps if we got our heads screwed on straight and our priorities realigned, if we would stop treating God like something trivial (like a hat or other accessory) and return to treating Him like something vital (like air or chocolate), if we would simply dispense with the dispensable God and get back to our luxurious and necessary God, we would all be much better off, and our lives far more Christian.

-Jon Vowell

Godless Christianity

"An oracle within my heart on the transgression of the wicked: there is no fear of God before their eyes." Ps. 36:1 (Rev. Marg.)

Herein is the key difference between a child of God and a child of the devil: to the former, God is everything; to the latter, God is nothing, not just in an abstract and conceptual sense but also in an absolute sense. To the Christian, God is the abiding reality; to the unbeliever (esp. in our time) God is non-existent, lost, and dead. The two great tragedies that have laid the foundation for the two great crises of this age are (1) the overt attempt to absolutely define and categorize a God whose thoughts are unsearchable and ways past finding out (Rom. 11:33), and (2) the subsequent "loss" of God when Human reason could no longer track Him.
Unfortunately, Christians today do very little (esp. in the western world) to remedy this "loss" of God precisely because most Christians have no fear of God either. We have become (in Mr. Chamber's words) "rationalistic infidels"; we have been infected by the modern disease of run-away rationalism, though we are unaware of its symptoms because it has so ingrained itself into our cultural thinking. We too, like unbelievers, believe that if our rational mind cannot encompass a thing, then there must be something wrong with that thing rather than our minds. What arrogance! It is indeed a loss of the fear of God, the reverence of God, when we think that our limited, feeble, childish minds can comprehend the incomprehensible.

-Jon Vowell

The Gospel

"[Lucifer is] the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms, that made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof, that opened not the house of his prisoners." Isaiah 14:16b, 17

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath appointed me to preach good tidings to the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound, [...] to comfort them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.... I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall be joyful in my God...." Isaiah 61:1, 3a, 10a

"For this purpose the Son of God was manifested: that He might destroy the works of the devil." I John 3:8b

To see Jesus as a social revolutionary is an injustice and a crime against the Gospel. To see Him as a mere statement of Divine sentimentality is a blasphemous hatred against the Gospel. To see Him as a cash cow, a cosmic ATM, is to rob the Gospel of all power and glory. To see Him as the liberator from cruel governments of men is to be as confused and disappointed at His coming as the Jews who eventually killed Him were. If you see and preach Christ as anything less or other than the propitiation for the Sin of the world, as the revelation of God's holy wrath and loving kindness, as the only mediator between God and man, as the Destroyer of all evil and corruption caused since the Fall, and as the Kinsman Redeemer of all men who have fallen, then you blaspheme and disgrace the work and name of our Lord, and we have no part in you, for what fellowship has light with darkness? Indeed, if you preach any gospel other than that which proclaims the forgiveness of sins and atonement of men back to God through the shed blood of Christ, then you are merely adding to the darkness that already blinds so many. Every breath you breathe that carries with it your false gospel sends unholy fog across the souls of men, furthering their natural obscurity, so that the true light is even harder to find. In the end, you will be one of the ones mentioned in Matthew 7:21-23; you will have your reward.

The lost and lonely people of this dying world do not need a social revolutionary. They do not need beautiful phrases of sentimentality. They do not need a cosmic ATM. They do not need a usurping liberator. They do not need a guru, an enlightened one, a homeboy, a co-pilot, or a moral mentor; they need a savior. They need the awesome and terrible truth that God is there, He is not silent, and He has come to us, "His arm [has] brought salvation...the Redeemer [has] come to Zion." (Isaiah 59:15, 20) This world needs good news that transcends and outlasts all cultures, kingdoms, fashions, and fads; news that is good no matter what social, cultural, political, or religious environment you live in. This world needs a saving truth that is the same for all at all times no matter what happens, and that truth has always been: God is, God loves, and God can be found.

"We have seen God's Glory:

Not beautiful words and phrases,

But Redemption based on the

Blood of Christ..."

-Jon Vowell

Biblical Christianity

"Your iniquities have separated you from your God...and the Lord saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgment; and He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor; therefore His arm brought salvation for Him, and His righteousness sustained Him...the Redeemer shall come to Zion..." Isaiah 59:2, 15, 16, 20

Much that passes for 'gospel' these days does not fit the biblical criteria, and it is a biblical criteria. Orthodox teaching on salvation is not a New Testament anomaly; it is a foundational theme of the whole of Scripture. Even in this ancient prophecy, which we today like to think says 'nothing about nothing,' even it contains the familiar formula. We are sinners (vs. 3-8), and our Sin has separated us from God (vs. 2). We cannot save ourselves and get back to God (vs. 9-16a), so God brought salvation to us (vs. 16b-20). That is not a New Testament thing; it is a Bible thing.

We must beware of those who claim disharmony in the Bible. We must be stiffly embattled against those whose 'gospel' comes under the guise of Christianity, yet carries none of the marks of Scripture upon it. Those who undermine or discount Scripture in any way are our enemies, no matter who they are or their intentions. Anything that tampers with man's true condition and man's only hope must not be tolerated. We must call anything that takes away from the firm, biblical teachings of man as a great sinner and Christ as a great Savior by its proper name, i.e., heresy. It is absolutely astounding how amiable we are towards things which will damn men's souls, and anything that undercuts Scripture by preaching another gospel (whether it be prosperity, social, love, or liberation) damns men's souls by leading them away from eternal life. Scripture alone is good news; all else is the smoke and mirrors of Hell.

"We gather together

And claim two things:

That Christ, the Mighty Maker died

For man the creature's sin..."

-Jon Vowell

Nominality

"Hear ye this, [you] who swear by the name of the Lord, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth, nor in righteousness." Isaiah 48:1

Nominality is one of the greatest plagues within the Christian Church. Sometimes is seems that our cup runneth over with people who claim Christianity, but are not Christians; those who follow after Christian precepts, but know nothing about "Christ-likeness." Perhaps this is the Church's fault: too much fluff, not enough substance; too much therapy, not enough doctrine; too many traditions of men, not enough biblical authority, too much questioning doubt, not enough truth. By the hallmarks of Modern Christendom, we are breeding a whole generation of nominal Christians.
"...in truth..." Solid, grounded reality must be the norm again. No more skepticism or "partyline" mentalities. We can be critical thinkers and still arrive at conclusions. "...in righteousness..." Enough nonsense about "following Christian morality." Doing that does not make you a Christian; it only makes you "moral," and that in only human terms. In God's terms, you cannot be righteous because the only true righteousness is His own, and the price to obtain it is the blood of His Son. If you are a Christian, you do not claim morality; you claim the Cross of Christ.

"Away from delusions and closed-minds,
And into Your certainty and mystery..."
-Jon Vowell

Godless Christianity II: Numbness

[God] hath poured upon [Israel] the fury of His anger, and the strength of battle; and it hath set him on fire round about, yet he knew it not; and it burned him, yet he took it not to heart." Isaiah 42:25

Another consequence of Godless Christianity is numbness. The absence of God's presence in our lives and religious practices produces an ignorance of what His presence is, which consequently produces a numbness to His presence when it comes. Because Israel is God's chosen people, His sons and daughters, He will chastise them for their sin (vs. 22-24). They are so far away from Him, however, that all that chastisement on numb hearts and numb minds.
Godless Christianity, the religion of many a Christian, produces this numbness. It produces it so well that people can easily and foolishly mistake other things for the presence of God: emotions, self-esteem, agreeable sermons and services, amiable dispositions, etc. All is utter self-centered nonsense. Look at Jesus: if there was ever one person who was totally disconnected with himself, it was Him. His Father was an ever present reality to His mind, while He himself was an afterthought. Godless Christianity is exactly the opposite: there God is forgotten, and consequently we grow a numbness towards Him and an oversensitivity to ourselves. Godless Christianity is yet another worship of man.

"Turn me ever from myself
And unto You;
From the shadows in my cave,
To the Sunlight of Your Reality..."
-Jon Vowell

Godless Christianity

"Hear, ye deaf, and look, ye blind, that ye may see. Who is blind, but my servant; or as deaf as my messenger that I sent? Who is as blind as he that is perfect, and as blind as the Lord's servant? Seeing many things, but thou observest not; opening the ears, but he heareth not." Isaiah 42:18-20

There is a difference between the mechanics of a thing and the function of the thing, between its practical operation and its teleological significance. The mechanics of the eyes is to see, while the mechanics of the ears is to listen. However, the function of the eyes is to observe, and the function of the ears is to hear. In other words, both of their practical operations are that of receptors of information, while their teleological significance is a comprehension and understanding gathered from that reception. In addition, you can see things without observing anything, and you can listen without hearing anything. Though the function necessarily includes the mechanics, the mechanics do not necessarily include the function.
"Who is as blind as he that is perfect...?" This paradox is a sad statement on the (perhaps unconscious) hypocrisy that was plaguing Israel. Their "perfectness," their status as a separated people, the people of God, was merely nominal, mere formalism, a form of godliness that denies that godliness's power, a dead godliness, works without faith, whitewashed tombs, etc. This is the same exact state that Jesus would find Israel in when He came: all of the mechanics of the covenant people were there (ceremony, ritual, temple worship, Torah observance, festival days, etc.), but its function was absent (i.e., God's presence was not there). The Pharisees exemplified this (and hence made good literary villains): seeing many things, they could not observe God, even as He walked amongst them; listening to much, they could not hear Him, even when He spoke right to them. "He that is of God heareth God's words; ye therefore hear them not because ye are not of God." (John 8:47) Israel was the spitting image of a lifeless religion: lots of motion, yet going nowhere.
Much of Christianity today is a lifeless religion. This lifelessness is very deceptive because it comes with all of the mechanics (even the most pious ones) of Christianity; it just lacks (and, oh, what a lack!) the function, the teleological significance, the vital thing, i.e., the presence of God. Lifeless Christianity is an atheistic religion because it is a Godless Christianity. I say "Godless" as opposed to "godless" because lifeless religions all have the same god: the form of religion. We do all of the things (songs, ritual, sermons, invitations, revivals, tent-meetings, mass, etc.) for the things themselves and not for the God that they are to lead us to. All Christendom has fallen prey to this, from the most liturgical to the most emergent, from the most ardent congregationalist to the most open ecumenicist. We some times describe their plight with different words (from "stuffy," "dull," and "dead," to "fluffy," "shallow," and "hollow"), but we all are talking about the same thing: they are all lifeless. The presence of God is not amongst them, and when He is lost from the faith, then the mechanics must lead to something else, typically either us or the religious form, and it usually stops with both: songs we like for song's sake, sermons we like for sermon's sake, liturgy we like for liturgy's sake because that's how we like it.
Godless Christianity is yet another blight of Modern Christendom. It is a wasting away of ourselves with the mechanics of religion while completely ignoring the object of our faith. It is perhaps Modern Christendom's greatest crime (and tragedy). God lays Himself open before us as a vast ocean to be explored forever, but we are quite content (and even prefer!) to play with our mud pies.

Lord have mercy on us,
Christ have mercy on us,
Lord have mercy on us. Amen

"O make me Thine, forever,
And should I fainting be,
Lord, let me never, never
Outlive my love for Thee..."
(from "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded")
-Jon Vowell

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

"At that time [the king of Babylon] sent letters and a present to Hezekiah; for he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick and was recovered. And Hezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house of his precious things...Then said Isaiah to Hezekiah...'Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house...shall be carried to Babylon, nothing shall be left, saith the Lord.'" Isaiah 39:1-8

This was not a punishment; this was a reality check. Hezekiah's flaunting did not cause the Babylonian exile; the exile was an inevitable consequence from things before Hezekiah's time. What God did here was demonstrate to him how the impending exile rendering all his flaunting foolishness, i.e., shatter his supposed reality with His true Reality. "Why do you treat like friends those who are not your friends? Why are you obsessing with that which does not matter?" Good question.
One of the biggest caveats to being a Christian in the modern world (both of the East and West) is the danger of being swept up into a corporate consumeristic materialism. This is not merely "mega church" syndrome. This is "the American Dream" syndrome. If you want to do or be anything or something around these parts (or so we are told), you need money, status, and power. To get that, you must throw yourself, body and soul, into the world corporate machine, or into a business endeavor. You have to "know people," you have to "schmooze," play politics, jump through hoops, dance, play ball, etc., etc. The tragic irony of it all is that once you have finally got the money, status, and power, your life is now consumed with the pursuit of them, and all spiritual applications of your life are left to the back burner. In trying to be useful to God, we become absolutely useless. In trying to serve Him, we serve ourselves. In trying to love Him, we become friends of this world. If one could just stand back and take in the whole horrific scope of our "busy-ness," our frittering and fluttering about, one would be led to ask, "What are we doing?"
God does not need money, either yours or others. He does not need your talents and abilities. He does not need your usefulness. He does not need your wit or wisdom. He does not need your pluck or personality. He does not need your humor. He does not need your sense of fashion or style. He does not need your creativity or "new" ideas. He does not need your strength or determination. He does not need your political candidate. He does not need your political party. He does not need your country. He does not need your denomination. He does not need your translation of the Bible. He does not need you to save souls. He does not need your service. He does not need your praise. He does not need your sermons and your lessons. He does not need what you "know." He does not need what you are. He does not need anything. What He wants, what His will is for you is (please pardon the cliche) for you to "let go and let God," i.e., stop trying to tell God what kind of person He gets to use and start letting Him make you into the person that He wants to use, i.e., a spitting image of Himself, a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29).
Jesus Christ is not a cookie cutter. God is not monotony, sterility, and generality. All the unique elements of your person that He created will be brought to bear in a life of Christ-likeness. However, all those elements too often become distractions and hindrances to God's will for us when we get wrapped up in them and not in Him. "Oh God! I am so beautiful! So witty! So talented! So smart! So useful!" No you are not. You are nothing without Him (John 15:5). You can offer Him nothing (Philippians 3:4-11). All you can offer (pardon another cliche) is yourself (Romans 12:1), the real you, the one unhindered by fleeting wishes, wants, desires, and ambitions. God wants to take our fading dreams and gives us His own eternal ones, to make His desire our own. That can only happen when we stop dictating to Him how things are going to work and start being swept up into Him.
We so easily take our eye off of the ball. God does not need anything from us, nor does He even need us. The wonder is that (despite His lack of need) He still wants to use us, to take us into Himself and make us one with Him; but to do it as He says, not as we say. We do not know ourselves as well as He does. What we see as a talent could actually be a hindrance that must be removed, and what we see as a triviality (or even a weakness) could actually be what God plans to use (What good are the skills of a shepherd on the field of battle? And yet the giant was not slain by a warrior). The key here is that we do not get wrapped up in ourselves, in what we "can" and "cannot" do or be; but get wrapped up in God, Who He is, what He does, and what He is doing and being through us. To put it simply: keep your eye on the ball, i.e., God. That was king Hezekiah's foul--He thought he knew what was up, what he was doing. God demonstrated that he did not: "You think you know what's up? Here's the reality. All 'your' greatness, I will give to Babylon."
Do we keep our eye on the ball? Do we live in the reality of God? Do we walk in that light? Do we realize that life is found, not in doing things or being something for Him, but by being swept up into Him (John 17:3)? Do we realize (as Lewis put it) that our lives are "a perpetual Evangel, a story written by the finger of God," and not written by our own finger? Are we ready and willing to stop distracting ourselves with our own stories, our own plans and our own knowledge, and let God take us "further up and further in" to the adventure that is Himself? Are we finally ready to stop flaunting our feathers before Babylonian kings and start letting all become shadows as we stand in the light of His presence? That is true Christianity; that is what it means to be "Christ-like"; that is eternal life. The burning question is, "Are you ready?"

"Let Your Presence, like a fire
Burn all dross and tin away.
Lead me ever away from me,
And take me further up and further in
To You..."
-Jon Vowell

The Face of Modern Christendom

"[These people] say to the seers, See not; and to the prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth things, prophesy deceits: get you out of the way, turn aside out of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us." Isaiah 30:10, 11

There is a generation that hates the presence of the truth.
This generation demands that only one bible version be true and all other damned, and that demands that all versions are true save one. This generation crams tradition down people's throats, and wants to cast tradition into hell fire and be forgotten. This generation believes agreeing with their opinion, creed, doctrine, or denomination is just as important as being a Christian, and that demands all opinions be relevant at the same time. This generation demands that you follow the rules, and demands that you respect their rights. This is a generation that does not want to hear the truth, but only what can bolster their opinions.
This generation is called Modern Christendom.
It affects all kinds of Christians: conservative and liberal, denominational and independent, Catholic and Protestant, orthodox and otherwise. It is Satan's oldest trick: make us want what we want over what God says, and (as an added bonus) make what we want sound like it is what God says. This is the single greatest threat to the Church (esp. in the West). God is very clear on what will come of such nonsense: we will be broken (vs. 13, 14), which is the only way God can put us back together again.

"Cut through these chains that tie me down
To so many lesser things
Let all my dreams fall to the ground
Until only You remain..."
-Steven Curtis Chapman

The Primacy of Being

"The vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed, which [no man can read]. Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth...but have removed their heart far from me...therefore...the wisdom of their wise men shall perish..." Isaiah 29:11-14

Here we see marked the sharp (and yet constantly muddled) contrast between being and doing. The Israelites were doing much: they kept (quite religiously) the outward ceremony, pomp and circumstance of their belief system. God, however, was not satisfied. All of their ceremony was asinine; it was all mindless subterfuge that distracted them from what was real and true, i.e., intimate communion with God. They had done many things, but they had left their first love (c.f. Revelation 2:2-4). It is the reverse of James chapter two: their works were plenteous, but their faith was dead. Consequently, their dead faith produced dead works: "Let them kill sacrifices." (Is. 29:1) You can almost feel the sarcasm.

The error Israel committed was a confusion between the primacy of being to doing. The Israelites got it backwards: they thought all of their doing would bring about their being God's chosen people, i.e., who they are was produced by what they do. This is incorrect; the reverse is the truth: your being brings about your doing, i.e., who you are produces what you do. The Israelites had to be God's chosen people before they could truly do like ones, and such being comes about by "hearts drawn near to God," by intimate communion and relationship with God.

This same confusion afflicts the Church today. We have people all across traditional and denominational lines who are still trying to put the cart before the horse. We know that we are to be "Christ-like," but we have the bizarre notion that that being will come from our doing. Such a confusion hits both legalism and liberalism: either you become like Christ by following the rules, or by saving the world through activism. Both ideologies are ultimately about doing. Unfortunately, both ideologies' goals (keep the rules, save the world) are beyond our abilities. Only Christ did both perfectly, so obviously we need to be like Him before we can do like Him.

Christ was who He was because He was one with the Father, and that union is what He desires for us (John 17:3, 20-23). We will get nowhere and be nothing without that intimate communion and relationship with God. All of our doing, regardless of how pious or noble, is all so much sanctimonious hubris, ultimately ranking as our own righteousness, which is filthy rags.

So many ministries, sermons, books on Christian living and life, churches, Christian schools, institutions, organizations, coalitions, programs and services are based solely on this error, i.e., what you do produces what you should be. Very few anymore stress the vital importance of the primacy of being, of the primary role of the intimate communion and relationship with God in Christ. Many churches, ministries, etc., are now dead in the water or spiritual wastelands because they left off knowing God for trying to serve Him.

"Without You

My works are Nothing;

Without You

I am Undone.

Without You

I am still Nothing

Without You

I am still just me..."

-Jon Vowell

The Hand that Smites

"For the people turneth not unto Him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the Lord of hosts." Isaiah 9:13

God is not being malicious when He smites. He is not a sadist (Lamentations 3:32, 33). He finds no delight in causing affliction. Affliction is a necessary evil. It is always meant as an attention-getter, meant to make us turn around and seek God in the matter. If He smacks you on the back of the head, like any good father would do to a misbehaving child, He does not want you to wilt like a dead flower and whimper like a quivering puddle of spinelessness. His smiting is to smack you back to reality so that you, with all the power and honor of a child of God, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and say as Samuel said, "Here am I, Lord."

How quickly we fade like chaff in the wind under the hand that smites. It should not be. Through Christ we come from hardier stock, i.e., the bloodline of God Himself. There is no whine or whimper in a child of God, only the rousing of yourself up by the power of the new man within to seek the Lord while He may be found.

"There is no possibility of lying like a limp jellyfish on God's providence," says Oswald Chambers. God's smiting is meant to rouse you to seek Him, not shatter you into whining pieces of self-pity. There is no backbone in Christendom anymore: we do not really believe that all things are working for our good, including the smiting of God.

A Petition for the Dissolvement of Christendom

What you are about to read is a paper I wrote for a class just this semester. I found myself unable to gather my thoughts for it as what I wanted to say and what the topic was about did not seem to flow together. One prayer and two hours later, this paper was produced. Maybe it is not the most intellectually stimulating, but it has been my heart's cry for some time now. Enjoy, and Soli Deo Gloria:

Exactly what is the fate of Christendom? It depends on who you ask. For some (esp. “relevancy” Christian circles), things could not be better: the “gospel” (pick your poison: social, love, or prosperity) is being received, church attendance is up, self-esteem is up, positive-thinking is up, and some 80% of people say they believe in “God.” If you listen to most of mainstream Christendom it would seem as though the Kingdom of God is just ‘round the corner.

Others, however, are not so optimistic. A few dissenters claim that Christendom is going the way of the dodo, that the Gospel is absent, that the churches are full of nothing but the religious and not the regenerated, that no one understands being acquainted with grief or living by faith, that suffering is avoided and replaced with apathy, that “relevancy” is a cancer to the Church, and that the “God” that 80% of people believe in is not the God of the universe Who will one day judge the world in power and righteousness. What these pessimistic few are trying to say is that true Christendom is, in fact, disappearing. Slowly but surely, it is fading away, merging ever so diabolically with worldly ideals, goals, projects, and processes, so that soon you will not be able to tell Christendom apart from the world it is reputedly trying to save. It will have been assimilated, and resistance is futile.
Now is the time where I am supposed to inject something about Tan and Miller’s books (Foreign Bodies and A Canticle for Leibowitz), but I find it difficult to do so. You see, what I gathered from the books and what I actually want to say somehow meshes, but unfortunately, the meshing does not allow direct quotes are citations. Instead, it deals with the over arching themes of both books. There is, however, something on my chest that must come off, something brewing in me ever since Endo’s Silence shocked me out of lethargy with his literary image of the “crucifixion of the soul,” of Christ being made sin. Tan and Miller’s themes, not so much the stories themselves, helped shape my thoughts.
The theme of Tan’s is about foreign bodies, and not just the wounds that shape our lives, but also the place of Christendom as a “foreign body” (demonstrated by Mei seemingly being the only Christian in Singapore). Therefore, Tan’s theme is twofold. Miller’s theme is twofold as well: (1) the depraved nature of man will invariably lead to man’s destruction, and (2) the place of Christendom as the preserve of what is good and right, i.e., as “salt and light.” The latter of these two author’s themes is where my thoughts are going: Christendom as a foreign body, and Christendom as the preserver of the good.
The question of Christendom’s fate is ultimately bound up in the question of Christendom’s purpose. Here is where the battle lines are drawn. On the one side, you have a Christendom whose purpose is based on relevancy and positive-thinking, on best-selling books and fat bank accounts, on well adjusted lives and amiable souls, on self-esteem and therapy, on grandfather God and peaceful Jesus, and on doing whatever it takes to reach the world with this message of peace, prosperity, and toleration, even the sacrificing of Christendom’s own integrity. This Christendom will be known in this paper as “Modern Christendom.”
On the other side of the battle line, you have a Christendom whose purpose is based on Scriptures and tradition, on the synthesizing of grace and law with truth, on Trinity and Incarnation, on sacrament and transcendence, on the Lord Almighty and the Passover Lamb, on sacrificial love and holiness, on sanctification and justification, and on the stubborn insistence that God is not to conform to the world, but that the world is to be transformed by God, or (as Dorothy Sayers put it), “[not] to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.”[1] This Christendom will be known in this paper as “Christianity.”
If you cannot tell where my loyalties lie, then you are obviously not paying attention. I believe that Christianity is the right way and Modern Christendom is nothing but heresy, a farce, a lie, and damnable. It (like its kissing cousin “political correctness”) is a cancer of the West, a vicious, infectious tumor, and the sooner it is cut out, the better.
This is where my thoughts are headed: the basic question our professor raised in class is “Will Christendom fade away in the future?” My answer to that is a solid “Yes and no.” Tan would say “yes.” Miller would say “no.” I agree with both.
With Tan, Christendom will fade away. Its osmosis with the world will eventually lead to Christendom’s destruction, leaving behind it a Christendom that is only a foreign body, i.e., a lone outsider that no longer relates to the world. Christendom will fade away, and that is a good thing. It is good because the Christendom that will fade away is Modern Christendom. It is the one trying to augment the church with the world; and as I said before, the sooner that damned nonsense ends, the better.
In Tan’s world, the only examples of Christendom are Mei and Andy, and even they have their issues. Mei and Andy live in two places at once: (1) Singapore, a place that is paradoxically both a bastion of modernism and a haven for oriental tradition that is naturally adverse to “western” ideas, such as Christendom; and (2) a post-modern world, a place where values are subjective, and individualism is the sole standard for judgment calls. The post-modern mindset is chillingly embodied in Loong, a diabolical, amoral character whose worldview is summed up thusly: “God determines what is right and wrong. And so the trick is to be God. When you rule, you make the rules.” Loong is a direct result of the post-modern world that Mei and Andy live in, the world we live in. Such a world does not bend or conform; it sucks in and molds in its own image because it makes the rules, and if your want to be a part of it then you bow to its rules and do not enforce your own. That is the world that Modern Christendom is conforming to, and in conforming, it will fade away into nothingness. We can only pray that this happens soon. Why? Because in a world where Christendom is whittled down to a foreign body, it ceases to be Modern Christendom and becomes Christianity, it becomes real and solid, full of substance and meaning. Despite all of their flaws, give me the faith of Mei and Andy, and let all the noise of relevant, Modern Christendom fade as chaff in the fire. Thus, I say, “Yes, Christendom will fade away, and that is good. Let the conforming traitor that is Modern Christendom collapse under its own weight and to hell with it!”
For Miller, Christendom will not fade away. The faith grounded in reality, in the real God and what He really said and did, has stood the test of time and will stand it still. Even when man’s vacuously destructive course finally swallows itself in oblivion, Christianity will be there, stubbornly sticking to defending the truth in spite of the mindset of the culture. The book-leggers will defy the Simplification and protect knowledge of the past, the abbot will not concede to new renaissance thinking that man is not responsible for his own wickedness, and even when man’s evil brings oblivion again, Christianity will still be there, taking the truth to where it will be heard.
When Christendom tries to mesh with the world, it will be welcomed, but it will also become a mere shadow of itself as it is slowly consumed into the black abyss that the world is. Thus is Modern Christendom. When Christendom is despised and hated of men, then will its reliance be upon God and God alone, its truth upon His word only, and its faith real and reconciled to desolation and glory, pain and pleasure, sorrow and joy, tears and laughter, death and resurrection. Thus is Christianity, and thus is my petition: let Modern Christendom fade away; we were better off without it. Let Dorothy Sayers prayer be realized—let the dogma of the church be dragged out “from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set [upon] an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.”[2] Let the slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment be absorbed into the darkness; that is where it belongs. The sooner Modern Christendom fades away and Christendom returns to being the minority, the outsiders, the foreign bodies, and those outside the camp, the better.
Will Christendom become a minority? We can only pray that it does. Free from institutions, politics, individualistic agendas, greed, power, and corruption, and solely the body of Christ—that is Christianity, that is what turned the world upside down, and that is what can turn the world upside down again. Christendom was never meant to be some corporation, some institution, some political party or platform. It was meant to be the minority, those who walk a narrow way that few will find, those who carry about in their bodies the death and life of the Lord Jesus, those who bring into the world the presence of God with all His terror and beauty, those who bring with them “not beautiful phrases, not comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”[3]
I am unsure as to how you will take this paper. I am not quite certain as to how I take it either. I can only say that this paper is speaking of what has been brewing in my heart, not only within this class, but also throughout this semester. This class has helped it boil over, and Tan and Miller were helpful catalyst in crystallizing it into ink and paper. Desiring to be an author of Christian commitment myself, I have been reconciled to the fact that if I am to write about what Christendom really says, to be a follower of Christianity and not Modern Christendom, I will be left out in the cold, the foreign body, the lone book-legger, the small potatoes next to the big fish of Modern Christendom’s literati. Though I may be unfaithful to the Modern church, I will not have been unfaithful to my Lord, and that is all that matters.

End Notes:

[1] Sayers, Dorothy, “The Dogma is the Drama,” Letters to a Diminished Church (W Publishing Group, 2004), p. 21
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.