How do gospel proclamation and mercy ministries fit together?

Don Carson considers this question, ending with these reflections:

Still, we returned again and again to this pointed question: Granted that we ought to be engaged in acts of mercy, what safeguards can be set in place so as to minimize the risk that the deeds of mercy will finally swamp the proclamation of the gospel and the passionate desire to see men and women reconciled to God by faith in Christ Jesus and his atoning death and resurrection?Two stood out.

First, it is helpful to distinguish between the responsibilities of the church qua church and the responsibilities of Christians. Some writers flip back and forth between references to “Christians” and references to “church” as if there is no difference whatsoever. But many Christian thinkers, from Kuyperians to Baptists, have argued that if the church qua church is responsible for some of these substantial works of mercy, such works of mercy ought to come under the leaders of the church. It is very difficult to find any warrant for that step in the New Testament. Even before there were pastors/elders/overseers, the apostles themselves, according to Acts, recognized that they should not be diverted from the ministry of the Word and prayer, even by the inequities of food distribution among the faithful, so they saw to it that others were appointed to tackle the problem. Ministers of the gospel ought so to be teaching the Bible in all its comprehensiveness that they will be raising up believers with many different avenues of service, but they themselves must not become so embroiled in such multiplying ministries that their ministries of evangelism, Bible teaching, making disciples, instructing, baptizing, and the like, somehow get squeezed to the periphery and take on a purely formal veneer.

Second, one pastor astutely urged, “Preach hell.” Two things follow from this. (1) By adopting this priority we remind ourselves that as Christians we desire to relieve all suffering, from the temporal to the eternal. If we do not maintain such a panoramic vision, the relief of immediate suffering, as important as it is, may so command our focus that we fail to remind ourselves of Jesus’ rhetorical question, “What good will it be for you to gain the whole world yet forfeit your soul?” Read the closing lines of Revelation 14 and Revelation 20 when your vision becomes myopic. (2) As long as you are prepared to plead with men and women to be reconciled to God and to flee the coming wrath, you are preserving something that is central in the Bible, something that is intimately and irrefragably tied to the gospel itself—and those who want to shunt such themes aside and focus only on the relief of present suffering will not want to have much to do with you. Thus you will be free to preach and teach the whole counsel of God and to relieve all suffering, temporal and eternal, without being drawn into endless alliances in which people never focus on anything beyond threescore years and ten.

“The Gospel and the Poor”

Tim Keller explains how the gospel motivates and informs ministry to the poor in this Themelios article.

An Israeli view of Israel

Michael Totten recently published his interview of Benjamin Kerstein, who has taught him much about Israel.  The interview, on the whole, is worth reading if you’re interested in the Middle East.  I’m including a couple of quotes here.

Outsiders’ perceptions of Israel and the importance of the refugee roots of so many Israelis:

MJT: What is it that outsiders tend not to understand about Israel? I’m not asking because I want to pick on them, but because I don’t want to be clueless myself.

Benjamin Kerstein: The first thing visitors notice is that Israelis are prickly. Native-born Israelis are called sabras. The sabra is a cactus fruit that has prickly thorns on the outside, but is soft and sweet on the inside. That’s how Israelis view themselves. We can be aggressive and rude, but once you get to know us, we love you and we want you to marry our sisters and brothers.

What outsiders first encounter is that, and they often tend to base their view of Israelis on that first impression. And they either react negatively or are enthralled by it. They either see us as boorish, violent, and obnoxious, or as honest, tough, and straight-talking but also sentimental and lovable. But either way, they rarely see what’s underneath.

Amos Oz once gave the best description of us. He said there is an Israel of the day, and an Israel of the night. Israel during the day is a prosperous and cosmopolitan Mediterranean society, but at night it’s the greatest collection of nightmares on the face of the earth. Everyone here, at one point or another, has seen the devil.

Although there’s a general awareness of the Holocaust, I’m not sure outsiders are aware of the depth of the sense of trauma in Israeli society. We’re a people who really are deeply wounded. Around seventy percent of the people who moved here were forced out of the places they came from. That’s true of almost all the Jews from the Muslim world. It’s true of most of the Jews from Europe who fled persecution before the Holocaust, during the Holocaust, or after the Holocaust. Very few people came here out of free choice.

MJT: Mostly just Americans, right?

Benjamin Kerstein: People from the Anglo-Saxon world, yes. Even Jews who are coming here now from France are coming to escape anti-Semitism. The Jewish community in Turkey right now is undergoing a kind of silent exodus. Initially these people come here with a feeling of liberation. They release a lot of themselves. But they also have a strong sense of trauma and resentment because of what they had to go through. Particularly in the regards to the Jews from the Muslim world, there is hardly any understanding of this on the part of outsiders. There is almost no recognition of it. Outsiders are gloriously unaware of this side of Israeli history.

Most people come here and see the conflict. They come here originally as conflict tourists, like you and me. [Laughs.] They come here for the action. They go to the West Bank, they see the checkpoints and the shootings and the riots. And they develop a loyalty to one side or the other.

There are other people who come here to see the country and have a good time. My sense is that they are astonished at the sense of normalcy here. They’re amazed that there aren’t bombs going off every day.

It’s important to understand that outsiders come here with preconceived notions.

How Israelis perceive criticism from European and Arab countries:

Benjamin Kerstein: But I also think officials in the US, Europe, and elsewhere are much less naïve than their public statements make them appear. I don’t think many of them believe that the peace process, for instance, is nearly as easy as they say it should be. They say things like, “If we could just get the Israeli and Palestinians to sit down and talk, we could reach a solution.”

I think most of them are smart enough to know that isn’t true. I also think they’re smart enough to know that a lot of it isn’t Israel’s fault, but by blaming most of it on Israel they can buy themselves leverage in the Arab world. I think the Arab world understands this perfectly well, that it’s the politics of the gesture.

I have to say, though, that when foreign governments say Israel has to make concessions and take responsibility for the conflict, Israelis take it all very seriously. The charge of disproportionality during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the Goldstone Report—Israelis do not take into consideration the possibility that these may just be gestures. Israelis take it personally, and they become very angry. Israelis feel very strongly that the world is against them.

MJT: Why do you suppose that is?

Benjamin Kerstein: Most Israelis are here because they fled from Muslim and European countries. They don’t feel that either of those blocs have the right to lecture them about anything. Why should a country where your parents were expelled or killed have the right to tell you how to conduct yourself in a war against people who are trying to kill you today? This is something hardly any non-Israelis understand. They don’t understand how galling we find this.

Israelis are often accused of being arrogant, but they find it extremely arrogant for Europeans and Arabs to lecture them about morals, especially during a war. What has Israel ever done that is as brutal as what Europe did to the Jews, or what Arabs routinely do to even each other during armed conflicts?

On the Bush administration’s democratization policy:

Israelis were never sold on Bush’s democratization plan. The neoconservative argument for democratic peace in the Middle East is something most Israelis never bought into. Sharon a few years ago congratulated Natan Sharansky for convincing the Americans of something nobody else in the country takes seriously.MJT: It’s funny because so many people in the West think Israel was behind it.

Benjamin Kerstein: They’re just ignorant. That’s simply false. These are claims made by people who do not know what they are talking about. They don’t know anything about Israel. They don’t know anything about our politics. They don’t speak the language. They have almost certainly never been to this country. They’re picking up on ridiculous stereotypes that have been spread around for various reasons. It’s simply inaccurate.

A lot of Israelis supported getting rid of Saddam, but we also thought you should have packed up and left right away. No one here cried for Saddam Hussein, but turning Iraq into a democracy is something most Israelis thought was impossible. Looking back on it now—and I hate to say this—I think they were right. I personally thought it was a good idea at the time, but it was probably wishful thinking.

I don’t agree with Kerstein that historical anti-Semitism means that European and Arab countries can’t criticize Israel’s actions.  I understand where he’s coming from, but every country has sordid parts of its history.  This common history of sin should make countries consider carefully their criticisms of other countries, but there’s still a responsibility that the people of the present have.

Divisions among China’s Catholics

Joel shared this interview of Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong.  Zen describes the ongoing reality of the open, government-approved Church and the underground Church connected to the Vatican.

The Romans as “helpful insects”

I’m reading Rémi Brague’s Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization as I prepare for another semester of Western Civ courses.  His theory is that European civilization is always referencing civilizations outside itself: the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans.  This makes Westerners fundamentally Roman, he says.  I’ll write more on this later.

Brague believes that the Romans often get short shrift because of the perception that they only reused the materials of the Greek and Hebrew civilizations to create their culture.  He quotes historian Heinrich Graetz, a German Jewish historian, from Graetz’s Geschichte der Juden [History of the Jews] (1874):

What, then, is the origin of the high elevation of moral views that the civilized people of today’s world boast?  They themselves didn’t produce it; they are the happy heirs who have speculated with their inheritance from Antiquity and made it grow.  There are two creator peoples who were the authors of this noble morality, who have raised mankind up and brought him out of his primitive state of barbarism and savagery: the Hellenes and the Israelites.  There is no third.  The Latin people created nothing and transmitted nothing other than the strict order of a civilized society and a developed art of war.  Besides, it was only at a decrepit age that they performed the service of some helpful insects by transporting some preexisting pollen to a fertile soil already prepared to receive it.  But only the Greeks and Hebrews have been creators, founders of a superior civilization, and only them (30).

Probably the most remarkable thing that I learned from Richard Weikart’s very good From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany was how almost every element of Hitler’s racial theories was present at least somewhere in German racial thought even before World War I.  (Darwin was not a proto-Nazi or even a true Social Darwinist, but he did share racial views with 19th-century Europeans that would be condemned today.)  Hitler put all these elements together and flourished in an environment of resentment, but the idea of more moral, more creative peoples that created higher cultures seems to have been quite common in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Graetz’s dismissal of Roman creativity has something in common with Hitler’s insistence that non-Aryans could not create culture because most could only borrow it while the Jews could only destroy.

This quotation from Graetz does not share the same degree or kind of malevolence that characterized some of the racial rhetoric of his day, and it certainly doesn’t come close to Hitler’s ravings.  But it is an indication of how prevalent this kind of racial rhetoric was in late 19th- and early 20th-century Europe that a Jewish historian would make use of the same school of thought that was deployed so mercilessly against Jews (and many others) in modern Europe.

Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany

The meaning of the West Bank

Israeli scholar Yaacov Lozowick compares his ideas about the West Bank and the peace process with those of peace activist Dror Etkes.  It’s an interesting, short post, and ends with this conclusion:

Finally, a point we didn’t discuss, and may or may not agree on: It is the Biblical heartland, the West Bank is. I’ve been advocating an Israeli departure from it since the 1970s – a long time ago. Yet it’s the place we come from. You wander its hills and read the Bible, and each hill is in there; each story is on one of them. We’ve been reading the stories and commenting about them, uninterrupted, since before the Athenians quarreled with the Spartans, a thousand years before the Roman Empire, two thousand years before the major cities of Europe began growing out of unimportant villages. They’re not as dramatically beautiful as Norway or Montana, but if you’ve been participating in the Jewish discussion for the past few thousand years, they’re home. You can’t roam them and remain unmoved.

To Change the World, Essay III and Book Review

I’m going to review Essay III and the book as a whole in one post, but I will do a summary of each chapter first.

Chapter 1, “The Challenge of Faithfulness”: Hunter looks at two major facets of this challenge: difference and dissolution.  In a pluralistic society, the existence of many different beliefs pose a challenge to Christian beliefs.  Hunter discusses what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures,” which are the cultural and institutional supports for beliefs.  Think about a medieval person for whom Christianity was a given and much of the culture supported the centrality of the faith (to borrow Doug Wilson’s example).  Even kings who fought the church for influence would claim that God willed it so.  A more pluralistic society undermines this certainty as the institutional supports are not nearly as aligned.

The challenge of dissolution, which Hunter defines as the waning of the belief that words and concepts can have any ultimate meaning, comes from both high culture and middle/low culture.  On the high cultural end, we have deconstructionist theory and skepticism that doubts the existence of truth.  On the other hand, the pluralism and especially the media environment of modern American life have contributed, as electronic media have significantly reduced the barriers of time and space, present information in a more fragmented way than ever before without any “overarching narrative structure” or differentiation between the serious and ephemeral, present everything as entertainment, and “create an illusion of intimacy” with people that we’ll never know.  This all creates an environment that trivializes information and makes depth and reflection more difficult and helps to dissolve meaning.  This was really interesting but probably required a whole book to be completely convincing.  It rings true, though there are also many good things that come from having access to so much information.  But it will drive us crazy if we let it.  Figuring out how to deal with this cultural transformation is essential for the church, Hunter believes.

Chapter 2, “Old Cultural Wineskins”: Here he revisits the three predominant Christian approaches in America that he has discussed.  He characterizes them as “defensive against” (conservative Christians), “relevant to” (mainline Protestants, progressive evangelicals, emerging church, and seeker-sensitive churches), and “purity from” (neo-Anabaptists, New Monastics, and Pentecostals who withdraw from the world).  Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses.

Hunter also evaluates these stances in relation to the challenges of difference and dissolution.  Two interesting points stood out.  Progressive evangelicals tend to focus more on living out the faith to the point that Hunter worries that doctrines themselves will be deemphasized for future generations.  Secondly, conservative evangelicals have embraced the electronic media, which he believes plays a huge role in the dissolution of meaning, in order to get out their message.  While he sees benefits in this, the problem is that they offer the same “pseudo-intimacy” with famous Christians that the electronic media offer with secular celebrities, and the whole industry is sold using the same market rules as the wider culture.  Thus, he believes these play a role in the dissolution of meaning as well.  I think that one way Hunter might explain it is that it’s great to listen to a sermon by John Piper (which I actually intend to make a part of my week when he comes back from leave), but it’s even better to listen to and know your own pastor who you can have a real relationship with.  And I imagine that Hunter is really worried about the cyber-church phenomenon, which kind of freaks me out too.

Chapter 3, “The Groundwork for an Alternative Way”: This is a mostly theoretical chapter.  Hunter turns around the concerns of Christian leaders who say that Christians just don’t think and believe enough.  The problem, he says, that Christians are not formed by the church but instead by the wider culture.  Thus, it is the leaders’ responsibility to recapture a church that truly forms its members in a Christian culture, the church.  The church’s goal is to model shalom (the Hebrew word translated as “peace,” with deeper connotations of “human flourishing”), a way of life that is better than the world’s and based on God’s revealed will in the Bible.  In light of this, the church has a stance of both affirmation of the good in creation and human culture and antithesis in which it offers a better way.  He believes that it must avoid the error of Constantinian takeover or taking back of culture, but that we must engage in “critical resistance” in which “the church … stands antithetical to modernity and its dominant institutions in order to offer an alternative vision and direction for them” (235).

Chapter 4, “Toward a Theology of Faithful Presence”: Hunter roots his idea of “faithful presence” in the creation and incarnation.  God’s creation and the incarnation of Christ show true identification between word and world militates against the dissolution that we experience in late modernity and God’s acceptance of us in Christ, though we are “other” because of our humanity and sin, provides a new model for encountering the pluralism of the world in which we live.  He writes that God’s “faithful presence” bears four attributes: he pursues us, identifies with us, offers us life in its fullest sense, and sacrificially loves us.  We, then, are to be faithfully present to each other, in his words, in our tasks, and in our spheres of influence.  He believes that the downfall of the relevance-driven liberal and emergent Christians is they focus on deeds without creeds, that evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to prioritize specifically Christian work (celebrating C.S. Lewis’s apologetics, for example, but not his work as an academic), and that the neo-Anabaptists see the world as neutral at best and denigrate work.  Faithful presence, instead, calls for the pursuit of faithfulness and excellence in all that we do.

Chapter 5, “The Burden of Leadership: A Theology of Faithful Presence in Practice”: Hunter now wonders how Christians lead, since that is what he is asking them to do.  I think that a good way to put it is that the church needs to be a culture that envisions life differently and according to God’s vision of life.  This culture is present in the broader culture, not isolated from it.  One way that Christians can show a different vision of life is through the idea of broad and deep covenantal relationships rather than narrowly-defined contracts.  In business, for example, the employer-employee and business-customer relationship is based on a deeper idea of obligations, rather than simply the exchange of labor, products, and money/benefits.  One example of this was that a car dealership group noticed that its profits were much higher in its inner-city locations as compared to its suburban locations (the implication that Hunter gives is that higher-educated people in the suburbs had a greater ability to shop for bargains and perhaps make deals with the dealership, but it’s not entirely clear).  The company decided to fix its prices in the inner city, lowering profit margins but attracting many more customers.  It also decided to pay college tuition for its all employees’ children.  The reward for this has been employee loyalty.

Christians’ faithful presence needs to be supported and connected by local churches.  Also, the results will vary depending on the circumstances, but faithful presence is nonetheless good for whatever community it touches.

Chapter 6, “Toward a New City Commons”: The final chapter sums up Hunter’s points and considers a bit more how “faithful presence” can become reality.  Leaving behind ambitions of world-changing, as commonly defined, the church must focus on being a community that models shalom.  Hunter considers Jeremiah 29’s call to the Jews to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” to be relevant for Christians in a post-Christian culture today.  It would be a long period of exile, and exile in which the first generation of exiles would have to raise their children rather than returning to Zion in their lifetimes.

Hunter calls for patience, even self-imposed silence, while Christians figure out how to engage the world in ways that are public expressions of shalom rather than purely political.  Christians also must learn to unite and love each other that they might be able to love the world.  He believes that the primacy of the formation of Christian disciples actually means that differences between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox are largely irrelevant in the face of the need to form disciples in late modern culture.  In thinking about our relationship to the outside world, Hunter returns to the double responsibility of affirmation and antithesis.  He ends with the suggestion that if Christians truly focus on creating the alternate culture of the church, they may succeed in making the world slightly better.

The end of the book is very much in keeping with what Hunter has been saying all along. Changing the world is difficult, and making it our goal without understanding how culture change works sets us up for failure.

There was a lot about this book to praise.  Reading Hunter’s observations on cultural change and seeing some examples (Chapters 4 and 5 of Essay I) was fascinating and it seems like an important thing for publically-engaged Christians to understand.  His description of the political culture (Essay II, Chapter 2) was a skillful diagnosis, and his exploration of the Christian Right, Christian Left, and neo-Anabaptists were insightful and thought-provoking.  His vision for the church as a true community that offers a vision of a better life and forms disciples is something that we need to be reminded of in a culture where we want the church to help us feel good and “spiritual” and to follow our program.

On the other hand, there were some frustrating things about it.  It sometimes felt like a rough draft, especially in the latter part of the book.  He didn’t seem to have his idea of “faithful presence” fully developed, and I feel like he would have a tough time defending it in debate once he got beyond the very good foundation that he has laid for it.  Toward the end, his arguments felt repetitive, and I don’t feel that he sketched out what faithful presence would really look like in academia, media, etc.  Finally, I think that his engagement with the ideas of the Christian Right was too isolated from Christian practice.  As he explained in Essay III, Chapter 5, many Christians are living in ways that reflect faithful presence.

Hunter also assumes that pluralism and secular governments are here to stay and that Constantinian ambitions of church-state cooperation are to be avoided, as Doug Wilson has pointed out in his chapter by chapter interactions with Hunter.  Wilson, as usual, has provocative critiques (most notably here, in which he turns Hunter’s biblical examples of the exiled Israelites’ faithful presence against Hunter’s own argument), but it should be said that Hunter is definitely in the majority with these assumptions.  The contrast between their positions is definitely an illustration that eschatology makes a big difference when we think about the relationship between Christ and culture.

I certainly benefitted from reading this book.  If I were making a recommendation, I would say to read Essay I for sure.  That’s where the best stuff is.  In Essay II, read Chapter 2’s description of our political culture and Chapter 7’s reflections on power, and read the rest if you have time.  Essay III is interesting, but I would say skim it if you’re pressed for time.

War and meaning

Peter Leithart notes that many soldiers find war to be more meaningful than normal life, according to Sebastian Junger’s WAR.  Leithart’s musings are interesting:

First, Junger’s observations help to make sense of the fairly common historical combination of cultural degeneracy and war-making.  When normal life seems pointless and decadent, war is an attractive alternative.  War is a way to make a difference.Second, what does the US do with a sizable group of committed, well-trained, efficient soldiers who have been “ruined for anything else” but war?  What happens to them when (if?) America is at peace?

Third, the churches should inspire and equip her young men for something like a “moral equivalent of war.”  (“Like” it, because war is not per se immoral.)  The church should give her young men a sense that even in normal life they are “in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted.”  To do that, we have to recover some deeper, real sense of what it means to be a church militant.