Whom we ought to love.

My wife and I saw one of my favorite bands in concert last night—The Mountain Goats. John Darnielle is even better in person than on record. Two things struck me about the show.

First, common grace. God has preserved some good in the world, and it doesn't take a Christian to produce something beautiful or pleasing. Darnielle's spirituality is far from orthodox (in any sense), but his brilliant lyrics and music are worthy of admiration and enjoyment. Clearly, he gets some kind of pleasure in performance, and the audience shared it.

Second, the raggedy crowd. It struck me that the hipsters and freaks and weirdos were among those Christ came to save, but which His church so often has a special aversion toward. These are not mostly pretty people, people you'd feel safe around, or people you could talk small with. Yet they were all together in one place, united by a mote of common grace swirling in the dark.

What if they could all be united to us through Christ? What if we could grasp that grace common among us all and show them the particular grace of faith in Our Lord and eternal salvation? Why don't we? If we're willing to stand among them to watch a good show, why not stand before them with the Gospel? Why do we act as though common grace was any more than a taste of goodness in the midst of a crooked and depraved generation starving for the Bread of Life?

After long silence....

My wife is pregnant (just in her third trimester), I've been working 50+ hours per week for over a month now, there's always pleny of yard/housework to be done, and I've been teaching Sunday school every week at church. This isn't braggadocio, just an explanation of why there haven't been any posts for so long. Oh, my sister got married, I was in a dear friend's wedding, my car's been in and out of the mechanic's, and other stuff. So, I'm going to start writing shorter posts, but I'm going to commit to posting five days a week. Whether you've missed me or not, I'm back.

God is love.

There are infinite ways in which God is love. One of the most basic of these is that God is the only being of whom it can be said, His perfection not only justifies but demands His own self-love. If we long to approach His perfection through sanctification, the only path is to love God ourselves and submit to His will.

It doesn't bear simple intellectual acknowledgement: the idea that God's perfection necessitates His self-love requires sweet but arduous reflection. We finite human creatures are so far from perfection that our self-love is always tainted by impure motives, so much so that we are commanded in Scripture to not love ourselves. We are so imperfect that we are forbidden from loving ourselves, and yet God is so perfect that He must love Himself.

That He would also deign to save any of us is literally incomprehensible. We cannot take this seriously enough, yet in our arrogance and unpardonable silliness, we frequently (perhaps always, in one way or another) make light of God's love for us. We could try to excuse ourselves with an appeal to our imperfection, but that imperfection makes us no less culpable before the Sovereign of heaven, and yet He still shows us mercy and grace.

God is love. It sounds almost trite now, after millennia of misusing the phrase and shoving it into shapes in which it doesn't belong, after millennia of trying to make it trite. But it is the least trite statement with which we will ever be confronted. God is love means for His children that He pardons and forgives us, and for His enemies that He is quick to punish and mete justice.

How are these both true? Because of His self-love. If God loves Himself, then any people He has made His own He will also love, and any that have rejected Him without repentance He will force from His presence. Either of these are weighty enough concepts to incubate reflection throughout eternity, but it is the former that is most worthy of contemplation.

These three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. God is not some local deity or nebulous life essence to be greedy and mean (on the one hand) or silly and powerless (on the other). Love is great because God is love; and, likewise, God's love makes Him great. A king that is known only for his cruelty and oppression is soon forgotten or relegated to the big black book of history; but a King known for His magnanimity is never forgotten, though His enemies rightly fear the jealousy with which He guards His subjects.

It won't do to think improperly of God's love, but it also won't do to replace His love with intellectual propositions and hard sayings. The only path to enlightenment on this score is the Scripture and its revelations of God's character and nature. These bear constant reflection, not for the sake of mere knowledge, but in order to hear, feel, sense, experience and understand Yahweh, the God who is Love and who simply and absolutely and completely Is.

NOT american literature you should read.

The King James Version of the Bible (for obvious reasons)

Paradise Lost, by John Milton (my favorite piece of literature)

The Pardoner's Tale, by Geoffrey Chaucer (my second favorite piece of literature)

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence (maybe the finest example of an autobiography)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (as Steve Coogan said, the first postmodern novel. one of the funniest books you'll ever read, and one of the best novels)

Essays, by George Orwell (the man was a genius and a prophet)

The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich von Hayek (also a genius and prophet, and the spokesman for true conservatives in the traditional sense)

Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan (you simply have to read this one)

A History of Philosophy Volumes 1-9, by Frederick Copleston S.J. (the best of its kind, and more entertaining than you might think)

Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare (Aaron the Moor)

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (best fantasy, best Christian novel, best modern epic)

Njal's Saga, by anonymous (if you've never read an Icelandic saga, this is the best place to start; you won't find more violence or snappy one-liners in even the best Schwarzenegger movie)

The Scarlet and the Black, by Stendahl (my uncle thought this was the best novel ever written; I wouldn't go that far, but it's up there)

Fear and Trembling, by Soren Kierkegaard (the greatest Christian philosopher writes on the things that matter most)

Twilight of the Idols & The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche (the greatest Pagan philosopher writes on the things that matter most)

The Institutes of the Christian Religion, by John Calvin (theology as it was always meant to be--apprehendable yet deep, intellectual yet applicable and spiritual)

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, by John Knox (first of all, the man knew how to title a book; second, the monstrous regiment was comprised of Elizabeth I, and his arguments are compelling)

If on a winter's night a traveler...., by Italo Calvino (so brilliant it's hard to understand why anyone since him has tried writing fiction, or whatever you call it)

The Master of the Day of Judgement, by Leo Perutz (a supernatural mystery story that actually makes sense and is actually scary)

Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens (underrated and largely unread, this is a masterpiece in every sense)

Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens (if Dickens had written nothing else, he'd still be the greatest novelist of all time)

The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, by John Owen (the Puritans are my heroes; this book is pure devotion to Jesus Christ)

The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, by Walter Moers (who knew Germans had such a sense of humor??)

Hunger, by Knut Hamsun (never has deprivation been so carefully rendered)

A Universal History of Infamy, by Jorge Luis Borges (why isn't this required reading everywhere?)

The Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake (post-World War II Europe in a fantasy setting; this novel will blow your mind and remind you that fiction can indeed be great and worthwhile)

The Tain, by anonymous (an Irish cattle raid in the roughest poetic language you'll ever encounter)

The Kalevala, by Elias Lonnrot (when Vainamoinen sings the world into existence, if you don't lose your breath you're heartless and inhuman)

Mr. Standfast, by John Buchan (spies who use codenames from Pilgrim's Progress AND a veteran of the Boer War who ends up in a fighter plane)

The City of God, by St. Augustine (duh)

and finally

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (because really, he accomplished something great there)

American literature you should read.

The last post was fairly abstruse, so I compiled this list:

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (the Great American Novel, and the first experimental novel)

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (great first-hand introduction to the problem of American racism)

Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis (best introduction to the "American dream" and business politics)

 

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (just beautiful)

 

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (explains why the 1960s happened)

 

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (one of the finest novels of all time, and best fictional presentation of the Depression)

The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway (fishing, baseball: it's the ultimate American adventure story)

 

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut (hilarious, one of the first great postmodern novels and a brilliant deconstruction of American civil religion and military smugness)

The Deerslayer, by James Fenimore Cooper (the first American adventure novel; at least, the first good one)

 

Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown (the first American novel, and a great horror story)

 

Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor (a Southern Gothic allegory about Jesus and scary fundamentalists)

 

The Movie-Goer, by Walker Percy (an expose of American individualism and confusion)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allan Poe (a little-known but AWESOME horror/adventure story)

 

Black Boy, by Richard Wright (posing as an individual's autobiography, this is better described as the autobiography of blacks in America)

 

Roughing It, by Mark Twain (the American West as it really was)

Ethan Fromme, by Edith Wharton (heartbreaking, and very New England)

 

The Sea Wolf, by Jack London (survival of the fittest, more action-packed and scary than Call of the Wild)

 

As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner (a dead woman tells of her life from the coffin her people are carrying her to her grave in)

 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder (great redemptive adventure story)

 

Hiroshima, by John Hersey (what America did to Japan in WWII, very sad)

 

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison (the Black experience told with full literary abandon)

 

The Thin Red Line, by James Jones (redemption in Guadalcanal; the best WWII novel ever)

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac (the American rebel spirit encapsulated in vigorous prose)

 

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (how real-life becomes fiction, in the form of a terrifying crime story)

Lie Down in Darkness, by William Styron (the finest stream of consciousness novel written by an American)

 

Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein (the great sci-fi novel by a man who knew sci-fi was more than just escapism)

Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (the best book no one's ever read, and the best Latino novel)

 

The Man in the High Tower, by Philip K. Dick (what if Hitler had won?)

 

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin (what if Hitler hadn't won?)

 

Dune, by Frank Herbert (the greatest sci-fi novel of all time)

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (post-apocalyptic monks saving what remains of civilization while philosophizing: how awesome is that?)

Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo (the saddest war novel I've ever read, and one of the best)

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien (man oh man oh man. maybe my favorite novel ever)

Ancient Modern Epistemology (Part I)

Ancient modernism is predicated on two assertions: That there is an external world which can be known directly, and that there is a spiritual reality which can be known only by the mediation of divine revelation. The first assertion is in turn based on two premises: That we, by experience, are able to apprehend and comprehend the physical realities to which we all are subject; and, that divine revelation tells us God created matter intentionally and placed man within it, to interact with and to exert influence over.

Some will protest that this is circular reasoning. How can the first assertion include an essential element of the second assertion without begging the question? The fact is, every philosophical position that is logically and practically cohesive is similarly interrelated. If the two foundational assertions were wholly independent, how could the structure stand? It would collapse like a building built on two foundations and insufficiently joined.

It is actually the second assertion that is primary. Left by himself, man can only produce absurd stories as to his origins, his telos, and his nature. Dropped as if by chance into the cosmos (as he perceives it), man is able only to postulate answers to his deepest questions based on chance, going so far in some cases as to declare the universe and everything in it without meaning, as though human civilization and the world of external realities exist simply because they exist, and that everything we suppose has inherent meaning is no more than a construct.

The only rational proposition is that something outside man produced him, along with everything else that exists. Did this origin point in turn have an origin? To suppose so is irrational: an infinite regression of origin points is as meaningless as a single cosmic chance. A number of mediatory points between the "original originator" and the world as we know it is similarly absurd, mainly because it's an unneccessary postulation, and secondarily because a force powerful enough to originate the cosmos wouldn't need intermediaries to accomplish the work.

Is this overly simplistic? Only if one's presuppositions have led one to the conclusion that there is no all-powerful God who controls all things in infinite wisdom and power. Complexity of the philosophical kind is only really requisite once the obvious and simple solutions have been relegated to the realm of impossibility. But in that case, any potential for philosophical freedom or exploration is also abolished: to limit possible explanations to the synthetic and complex is to abandon the philosophical project before it's even begun by setting for it arbitrary and inviolable boundaries.

Ironically, these are exactly the parameters set by those most vocal about the necessity of free thought, those whose idea of intellectual integrity is defined by the ability to think entirely outside structures, even as they limit themselves to the most tyrannical of philosophical frameworks. Ancient modern thinkers, on the other hand, allow for true intellectual liberty by asserting the knowableness of the cosmos and its God, by asserting the finitude of man's ability to comprehend, and by asserting the latitude within those two parameters for developing unique and creative ideas.

The pillar of ancient modern epistemology, then, is the understanding that man is not the originator of knowledge or truth but its discoverer by the grace of God. If we believe this, we necessarily believe that the world of external realities is knowable, that it is created by God, and that God Himself has spoken to us indirectly through this creation and directly through His Word.

Without such a foundation, the pursuit of knowledge or wisdom is fruitless, without ultimate meaning (or at least, without discernible ultimate meaning) and therefore mere nihilism. Ancient modernism rejects both this nihilism and its underlying materialism for a world of material and spiritual truth predicated on the creative purposes of the God of the Universe.

Ancient modernism is not a theory of everything.

First of all, the attempt to construct a theory of everything betrays a misunderstanding of both science and philosophy, and of their intersection. A theory of science has its place within the philosophical framework of ancient modernism, but theories are for science and philosophy is not science in the way that word is currently used.

What is a theory of everything? Marxism is probably the readiest and most accessible example. Karl Marx sought to explain every facet of existence under the rubric of economic evolution, interpreting history, religion, morality, war, and so on as part of a massive teleological project to bring all humanity out of subjugation via violent revolution.

That's an unfairly simplistic analysis of Marxism, to be sure, but it demonstrates the "theory of everything" principle: man's need to put everything into place and give it meaning in light of some "big picture" context. Even nihilists have a meaningful theory of everything (the idea that nothing has meaning is, in itself, an assertion of meaning).

Postmodernism would seem for many to have eliminated the need for or possibility of a theory of everything. More thoroughly even than nihilism, postmodernism destroys any basis for assertions of meaning, compelling its adherents to reject truth claims of every kind and defy meaning on even the most ontological level by accepting all truth as truth (and thereby, accepting none of it).

Yet, because human nature refuses to die, even in the face of existentialist assertions of its non-existence, even postmodernists infuse their philosophy with a strong dose of teleology. Maybe there isn't an all-encompassing end toward which mankind is headed, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work hard to be accepting of one another in the interest of a loving and compassionate society.

I'm speaking, of course, primarily of postmodern popularizers. There are those under the label (though increasingly the label is becoming passe and old-fashioned) that would assert the supreme autonomy of every individual to construct a life for himself of his own imagining and desire. But this, too, is teleological, and amounts to a theory of everything.

A theory of everything only works in a world where there is no reliable truth, no ontological realities to affirm, no God and therefore no revelation. The man who accepts God's Word as his standard for truth and reality need not construct a comprehensive theory of everything beyond what the Bible offers—he need only understand what God says and live according to His precepts.

Ancient modernism is not an attempt to explain everything. It's a philosophical attitude which admits both intellectual curiosity and exploration, and reliance on God's self-revelation. It attempts to marry the naivete of the ancients and Medievals with the cynicism of the moderns, to bring skepticism under the directional guidance of Christian reason.

The goal of ancient modernism is neither to explain everything (except as the Bible allows), nor to foster credulity. We must be careful thinkers, but we must also affirm there are many things we will never and can never know, to be simultaneously bold and humble as people and as thinkers. One man can never come to truth alone, and it is the project of ancient modernism to overturn the rampant island-making that has characterized so much of modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern thought.

On Posturing

It would take a peculiarly unobservant person, or someone living in a dangerously insular society, not to notice the posturing that goes on all around us. Skinny kids in coffee shops carry huge books and name-drop obscure bands; dudes with shaved heads drive gigantic pickups and spit tobacco; the Amish wear clothes without zippers and look askance at "the English"; middle and upper middle class Americans buy boats and big houses and trips to Europe and SUVs.

Behind all this posturing are much less impressive realities: the obscure hipster bands are obscure because they're so bad no one wants to listen to them, and the books go unread because Dave Eggers and David Mitchell are boring; the pickup-driving rednecks are henpecked at home and hate their jobs; the Amish teach false doctrine and their communities often foster abuse; and the spendthrift American families are all deeply in debt.

So why posture? Do people really think no one can see past the facade? Are the posturers themselves unable to see past their own facade? or the facades of others? And yet one thing that typically characterizes those who posture is their finely cultivated ability to look past the surface of other peoples' lives to the more shallow interior: punks ridicule rednecks, rednecks ridicule yuppies, yuppies ridicule hipsters, hipsters ridicule normal people, and normal people ridicule punks.

Part of the problem is our innate willingness to stereotype. We see it as inevitable, so we give in on a regular basis and sort every person we see into a prepared category. This propensity is so deep seated we even stereotype ourselves, wearing the appropriate clothes, watching the appropriate TV shows, doing the appropriate things to fit into our chosen subculture or group. The act of stereotyping is precisely the act that allows us to see through facades even while maintaining our own.

What's really important isn't the stereotyping, however; it's the corresponding idea that the stereotype to which we belong is the only legitimate one. This is why we posture: to make sure everyone else sees to which group we belong, and that they understand our group is more important, more real, more authentic than theirs. And everyone does posture to one degree or another; some are less obvious, but we all seek identity in a group of some kind.

For Christians, this is sin. Not that we can't be scholars or mountain bikers or blues musicians: but we must not seek identity anywhere but in Christ and as members of His Church. Posturing is ultimately an act of idolatry, assuming that your chosen group is somehow superior to all the others, and that collectively you share an edge on reality. We must abandon posturing, and to the extent that it facilitates posturing we must abandon stereotyping.

Probably the worst form of posturing is that which goes on among Christians as Christians. We carry our Bible ostentatiously wherever we go, we drop catchphrases, we look askance at bums and the morally suspect, we put bumper stickers all over our cars, we wear fish and crosses on our T-shirts and jewelry. Where does this get us? If it's an attempt at evangelism, it fails because it's non-direct and amounts to no more than a show of piety; if it's anything else, it makes no sense.

Our only identity as Christians is as fallen humans saved by the grace of God and the Blood of Jesus and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We aren't cool, we aren't macho, we aren't sexy; we're nothing but broken and yet redeemed. The whole human race is broken—attempts to find wholeness as part of a group shouldn't surprise us, but neither should they seduce us. Only one group offers the wholeness we seek, and that is Christ's Body, and we should offer it to everyone humbly and without a hint of posturing or merely human identity-mongering.

Corruption vs. Glory

I watched one of my favorite movies the other day—El Cid (1961), the story of Spain's Medieval hero and defender against Muslim invasion from North Africa. One thing in particular stood out this time, something I hadn't noticed before, and that was the sharp distinction in the film's depiction of the militant Islamic forces and the Christian armies.

When the forces of Ben Yussuf are arrayed outside Valencia, we're given long shots of both the Islamic soldiers and their siege towers. The soldiers wear mostly black, carry strange shields of zebra skins and weird symbols, and march to the ominous sound of huge drums. Their siege towers are decorated with horned animal skulls, their spears are adorned with black feathers, and their are thousands upon thousands of them. They carry black flags.

The Christian knights ride white horses. They are dressed in white and red and gold, they carry dozens of brightly colored pennants and banners, their shields are gold and red. The Cid himself is the brightest of all, mounted on a white horse, wearing white and blue and silver, the sun breaking on his silver shield in every direction. Before they go into battle, they pray and are blessed by a priest.

Obviously, viewers are supposed to understand that Ben Yussuf's armies are the bad guys, and that the forces of El Cid and King Alfonso are good. We're also supposed to get a sense of Medieval morality, that there isn't a blurred no man's land between what is right and what is evil, but rather a sharp distinction and clear sides.

If that was all, El Cid would simply end up being another action movie, an adventure film set in the Middle Ages but that could be easily transposed onto any time period. I think the real message of the representation of the two armies goes much deeper, and that it shows not simply the difference between good and evil, but the nature of pagan warfare vs. Christian warfare.

Ben Yussuf's heathen armies attempt to strike fear in their enemies using that which they fear most: Death. They dress in black, they wave frightening shields, they mount skulls everywhere. They fear death because they have no real hope of salvation when it comes, and they expect their enemies to share this same fear.

The Christian armies, on the other hand, fear God, and therefore they awe their enemies, not with depictions and displays of death, but with portrayals of glory. Christians have nothing to fear in death, for it is our final sanctification. We fear God, the King of Creation, and we attempt to spread that fear wherever we go, not merely to terrify, but to reveal and to convert.

In history, El Cid Rodrigo de Bivar was a Christian knight dedicated to purity, chastity, loyalty, and piety, the only true foundations for any true gallantry and honor. The only way a man can live by these things is to fear God, not death, and yet to live as though death might overtake him at any moment. Anthony Mann's beautiful film ably depicts this, and for that we can be glad.

simplicity and depth

In his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation, C.S. Lewis encourages readers to read at least one old book for every three modern ones. This is good advice, both because (as Lewis points out) the old books are so accessible, and because modern books tend to be infinitely more complex and specialized than they have any need or right to be.

This is particularly true of Christian books (precisely the kinds of books Lewis is talking about, actually). As he says in the introduction, a Christian book must stand the test of time before it can be widely accepted, not because years equal truth, but because Christians must hold it against the Bible and the rest of accepted orthodox Christian doctrine.

One of the most important reasons to read old books in the Christian tradition, however, is that they are much clearer than most of the books published in the last two hundred years. The farther back we go, the clearer the writing: the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds are models of clarity and brevity, as well as some of the oldest Christian documents we have.

It's not just that the writing is clearer, but that the ideas expressed are so much simpler and Gospel-oriented. Modern writers fall over themselves responding to critics, clarifying their highly specialized use of language, cutting away the baggage of centuries of scholarship, or simply adding to it with their own assertions and ideas.

Of course, there's nonsense among the older works, too. Not everything the Church Fathers wrote is worthwhile, there's plenty of bad Medieval theology, the Renaissance and Enlightenment were largely too man-centered, and so on. But you're also far more likely to find excellent Christian writing in the literature of these periods than in our own era.

I would argue that it wasn't primarily because those writers were smarter, or better stylists, or anything temporal like that: they were simply more in love with Christ's true Gospel and its application to the life and thought of every believer. The Puritans in particular (here I'm betraying my own bias) are able to balance incredibly deep theological reflections and baldly practical applications of that knowledge.

We often somehow think that the more complex something is, the deeper it is; John Calvin and Martin Luther ably disprove this as a matter of course in their writings. Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion is one of the deepest doctrinal works you'll ever encounter, but on every page he shows how the concepts he explores are important for our life in Christ. The same goes for Luther's The Bondage of the Will and John Owen's The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

Theological scholarship is important: it would be disingenuous of me to suggest otherwise. At the same time, it must always be balanced by serious reflection on the core doctrines of our faith: Christ's work, death, and resurrection; God's sovereignty; the universal curse of sin and death under Adam; the justification and sanctification of the saints through Christ; the life everlasting. Without an unbreakable anchor in these truths, the scholarship is meaningless and even harmful.

Even (especially?) popular works aren't free from the trend I've identified. While they aren't scholarly, authors of these books find anything to talk about but the Gospel, appealing to socio-economic analysis, social gospel concerns, psychology, postmodern ideas of "story," etc. to connect their message to a modern audience. The truths a modern audience needs to understand and affirm, however, are the same as they were 2000 years ago, and so is human nature.

We could read all the modern books, mindful to cut through the dross, looking for the kernel of truth or insight in each one; or we can read the old books, the ones focused on Christ alone, and be genuinely enriched and quickened to better service. The message hasn't changed, after all; we've simply invented more ways of getting around its incisive and convicting truth.

Ecclesiological Deism

The particular doctrinal mindset that allows Jack Crabtree to make his outrageous but not original claims is something I would call ecclesiological deism. It's a view I think he shares (to his chagrin, if he knew it) with many groups in contemporary Christendom. Basically, ecclesiological deism is the idea (implicit or explicit; both forms exist) that after Jesus instituted the Church, God stepped back and let His people sort things out for themselves.

Probably the most common source of this view is a misunderstanding of the apostolic age. If you think the Holy Spirit supply was simply cut off after the death of the last apostle, thus introducing an era of practical materialism, ED would make sense. Also, if our salvation depends primarily on knowledge, then it would make sense that we'd be fully responsible to apprehend it on our own through the exercise of our intellect and reason.

What any view leading to ED fails to acknowledge, however, is that the Church doesn't belong to Christians, but to Jesus Christ through the agency of the Holy Spirit for the Father's good pleasure and glory. The Church is not primarily a physical entity (though it has a physical element or manifestation), but a spiritual one. How else could Paul speak of it as the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, or the Temple of the Holy Spirit?

The implication for Jack's case is clear: if the Church is simply an invisible collective of people each striving for truth on their own recognizance, then of course he can reach the proper view of doctrine all by himself. If, however, the Church is the Body of Christ as maintained throughout the centuries by the Holy Spirit, his claims become a lot less plausible.

This isn't to say that no bad doctrine will ever creep into the Church. Because while the Holy Spirit is our guide and helper, we're also sinful human beings who don't always use our reason to the glory of God. It is to say that 2000 years of Christians haven't gotten the Gospel wrong. This isn't an intellectual cop-out: unless we think Christ abandoned His people to their own devices at the ascension, we have to understand that He left us with provisions against the complete loss of biblical truth in the form of His Spirit.

Perhaps Jack's ecclesiological deism results from his abandonment of the Trinity. People like Brian McLaren who hold similar (if not identical) beliefs seem to be influneced more by semi-Pelagian ideals and an overemphasis of common grace (both of which Jack seems to embrace as well). The temptation to elevate human beings beyond their due is a perennial problem, both within the Church and outside it. All we can do is renew our efforts to preserve the truth passed down to us from our spiritual forebears under the auspices of God's Holy Spirit.

Ancient Modernism and Intellectual Individualism

I've been preoccupied with heresy lately because a man I'd consider one of my intellectual mentors recently revealed himself to be a thorough heretic. Less than a year ago, Jack Crabtree of Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR issued a series of lectures at his church (Reformation Fellowship) condemning most of the core orthodox teachings of Christianity and putting in their place a variety of resuscitated heresies.

When I was a teenager, I attended a philosophy discussion group led by Jack and his brother David, in which we read texts and talked about them. I'm guessing we were exposed to some weird ideas (in retrospect), but the value was that we learned how to analyze texts and form ideas, how to interact with the ideas of others, and how to think logically. I'd give my dad most of the credit for my ability to do those things, but many of the skills he'd taught me were focused and honed in the discussion group, and I was forced to defend my statements by people who often didn't agree with me.

In light of this new development, I can see that one of Jack's purposes for the group was to impart a Greek sense of intellectual individualism to each of us, to force us to wrestle with every idea we held and to reconcile them all into a workable whole. On one hand this is an ability every Christian needs to foster: there's too much shoddy thinking, lack of thinking, and pernicious thinking in the Church, and we need to counter it with good theology, good philosophy, and good logic.

At the same time, we need to fit our thinking in to the broader picture already assembled by those Christians who've gone before us. I'm not suggesting we ought to blindly accept everything handed to us by our pastors and elders, by Christian thinkers, even by the Church fathers. No one is infallible, and everyone makes errors. Scripture is our final standard for truth, and it is that rather than human dogmatism to which we submit.

I am suggesting that human fallibility spreads beyond the Church fathers or contemporary pastors and includes every one of us, no matter how intellectually astute we find ourselves to be. We cannot hope to assemble a coherent theory of everything independent of everyone else, not only because we're fallible, but because we're finite, limited, and chronically subjective even when we believe ourselves to be wholly objective. The second someone says they've finally figured everything out, I immediately become suspicious of everything they say subsequently.

Which is how Jack Crabtree began his lectures (available here), positing that he was sitting in a coffee shop when suddenly the whole "Christianity thing" made sense to him. Unfortunately, his "Christianity thing" excludes a meaningful doctrine of the atonement and justification, calls our sin nature "a philosophical fiction" and claims "it doesn't exist," eliminates the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity, and imparts to Jesus mere God-consciousness rather than actual deity. All this is the result, not of humble submission to Church doctrine tempered with arduous and careful study, but of a desire to simply "make sense" of the Bible in purely rationalist terms.

There are plenty who would simply retreat from this extreme individualism into a dogmatism that is deaf, blind, and speechless. As a Reformed and Presbyterian Christian I acknowledge and even celebrate a certain kind of dogmatism, but only a dogmatism that is informed and able to interact with traditions outside itself. The insular dogmatism is certainly not the right response to Jack's radical individualism, mainly because it provides no basis for showing him his error.

The proper response, what I would call the ancient modern solution to this problem, is to admit the necessity of personal study while submitting to the standards for doctrinal orthodoxy handed down through all true Christian traditions. To presume that the entire Church has been wrong for two thousand years, and that one man can finally discover the truth found in Scripture all by himself in the 21st century, simply doesn't make sense. He claims we've been bullied and forced to believe the doctrine of the Trinity, but I challenge you to show me one person who believes in the Trinity who doesn't do so of their own accord.

Do any of us fully understand the doctrine of the Trinity? No, absolutely not. Does that mean it isn't a true doctrine? Only if human reason is the final standard for truth. But if you understand God to be an infinite transcendent being, whose self-revelation in the Bible includes both paradox and mystery, it only makes sense that there would be essential truths about his nature and character that would be impossible for fallen, finite, subjective human beings to grasp entirely. Jack's real sin, therefore, isn't his accusation against the Church, it's his presumption that he can know and understand everything the Bible proclaims about Yahweh, and that he can do so entirely on his own.

A few good reasons to not like Hollywood.

1. Johnny Depp is celebrated as a great actor, apparently in virtue of his ability to look perpetually surprised at his own drunkenness.
2. Mel Bay.
3. Jurassic Park came out when you were young enough that you still remember it with nostalgic fondness.
4. Tim Burton.
5. Slow motion and 3-D.
6. Every musical score is the product of equal parts Howard Shore, John Williams, and unbridled maudlin sentimentality.
7. Films in which Shia LaBeouf manages to stutter and look confused become massive box-office successes; films in which he proves his acting abilities remain largely unknown.
8. Films which are remakes of themselves (Johnny Mnemonic/The Matrix) don't even have the decency to cast a human being in the lead role. Granted, both films feature Keanu Reaves playing himself as a computer, but at least 2001 featured a computer who could act.
9. Russell Crowe actually seems like a really good actor compared to most of his colleagues.
10. Steven Spielberg is allowed to make historical dramas.
11. Steven Spielberg is allowed to make films.
12. Steven Spielberg.
13. The Academy Awards.
14. Books that are shorter than War and Peace are allowed to be made into more than one film.
15. CGI.
16. Tom Cruise.
17. The original version of Sleuth is out of print; Saving Private Ryan exists in a collector's edition.

The proud and the humble.

We need to be careful at the outset not to let our humility become our arrogance, and to let ourselves diminish for the sake of the Gospel. The problem with all heresies is that they're always predicated on hubris—the heretic believes he sees the truth of Scripture more clearly than all the saints who have come before, and that his own reason is superior to their collected reason.

This doesn't mean we affirm truth by consensus or anything of the sort. The logical reaction to "one finite man can't apprehend all truth by himself" is not "truth is that which has been agreed upon by the majority." What we need to affirm, instead, is that God has given us as much truth as we can handle in His Word, that He intends His whole Church to apprehend that Church as a body rather than as individuals, and that the truth present in the Bible is bigger than any one or group of us.

By bigger I don't mean to suggest that it is therefore immaterial or shouldn't be sought after, but that the Bible, for all its clarity, is also incredibly abstruse at times and presents problems that aren't easily dismissed. How could it be otherwise? Christians take the Bible to be the self-revelation of a transcendent God communicating Himself both narratively and propositionally to finite human beings who are necessarily limited.

No heretic takes any of that seriously. That doesn't mean he can't make a seemingly airtight case for his position, or that he can't root that position in his own interpretation of Scripture; it simply means that he doesn't think his intellect is limited, and that he can figure everything out if he just thinks about it hard enough. In essence, then, he sets himself in a position of equality with the King of Heaven and Lord of the Universe.

Heretics often make their ideas seem humble. They couch them in peculiarly imminent terms, often gentle terms, trying to give us a sense of their Christian virtue and willingness to submit to Truth rather than to mere Tradition. What they fail to acknowledge is that their whole project is inherently arrogant, and abbrogates one of the key tenets of the Christian faith: the emphasis on unity.

An appeal to tradition is likely to spark controversy of its own in many quarters. What I mean is not tradition in the Roman Catholic sense, in which extrabiblical doctrine and practice is imported in virtue of its use within the Church. Tradition in the Reformed sense refers to no more than the essential teachings of the Church as maintained by faithful Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit acting on reason and practice. The clearest and most basic expression of these teachings can be found in the ecumenical creeds, and in the three forms of unity and the Westminster standards.

Submitting to these doctrines requires humility. Do the creeds and confessions contain doctrines that are difficult to understand and grasp? Absolutely, but so too does the Bible. Assuming that we can make perfect sense of God Himself is beyond courage: it's outright rebellion and unmitigated pride posing as intellectual freedom. To those who would reject the creeds I can only ask what alternative there is; how can we be sure we've got it right if we jettison the teachings of all those who came before us in the name of Jesus?

Humility requires our admission (primarily to ourselves) that we can't know everything, especially everything about God, and that we can't know anything perfectly or fully. Jesus didn't call a bunch of individuals to individually be His Church; He calls individuals to become united in Him as His Church, submitting to Himself and to one another in love. This doesn't appeal to human pride, but it is the only way we can hope to be united to Christ, or to understand the truth of His incomprehensibly gracious and beautiful Gospel.

God, the maker of analogies

Another thing heretics often do is to try to establish a single metaphor for God and His workings in and through the world. One of the men I mentioned in the last post has attempted to make his new theology coherent by using a "God-as-author" analogy in which God's sovereignty is explained by comparing Him to a novelist and we humans to the characters in the novel.

There's nothing immediately wrong with the analogy. In some ways, in fact, it's very helpful: we often trip up on the doctrines of God's election, foreknowledge, and foreordination, and imagining Him to be writing us can be useful in explaining those things. It's when the analogy doesn't stop where it should that the whole thing goes wrong.

Christ's deity, for instance, is whittled down to fit into the overriding metaphor. Christ is no longer the eternally-existing second person of the Trinity, He's simply a human God used to put Himself into the story He was writing. Christ, then, is as created and ontologically one-sided as we are, except that Yahweh put Himself into the consciousness of Jesus so He could interact with us.

Too many things are wrong with that to address them all here. The point is, if the individual in question were willing to relinquish his analogy when biblical doctrine has clearly outgrown or transcended it, he wouldn't be in the position he is of rejecting centuries of received Christian doctrine. Of course, he doesn't care that he's done this, but we should.

We should also try to learn something about the use of analogies in the Bible itself. God never uses a single metaphor to explain Himself, His operations, or His will for mankind simply because a single metaphor isn't sufficient. God created metaphor, and He created the analagous objects and ideas which serve every metaphor; how could just one ever tell us everything we need to know about Him?

If our goal really is to get at the root of the Bible's message, it seems to me that our first task should be to understand what kind of book the Bible is. It isn't simply a collection of literary pieces, and it isn't only a series of rational/intellectual propositional statements. Why? Because God can't be reduced to a single theme, idea, or rational precept.

The problem with heresies is that they never give God His due, they never allow the God of the universe to transcend or overwhelm or baffle His creation, they never suffice. We should be afraid of worshipping a God who stays strictly within humanly comprehensible lines; we should be terrified not to worship the God of all things who routinely challenges our perceptions and our clockwork reductionism.

The Danger of Heresy

Sometimes heretics (especially those emerging from orthodox quarters of Christianity) misrepresent the Christian attitude toward heresy. This should surprise no one, but it does call for clarification and rebuttal. A couple men I'd consider mentors in the early stages of my intellectual pilgrimage have recently revealed themselves as heretics (forthrightly, as it happens), and have made the same mistake many others have made in trying to guess why Christians eschew their teaching.

The misrpesentation is this: Christians are characterized as believing it is doctrinal knowledge alone that leads to salvation, that without doctrinal knowledge an individual is eternally damned, and that lack of such knowledge makes one an enemy and an outsider. The difficulty, I believe, is that heresy is always a lack of, or distortion of, orthodox Christian propositions, and therefore its formulators see everything in terms of the intellect.

Orthodox Christian doctrine is often hard to swallow, even for the most devout. How can Jesus have two natures? How can God be three persons yet indivisible? How can man be responsible for his actions even while his every action is foreordained by God? In what way precisely does the atonement take away our sins? These are all difficult questions (difficult is really too soft a word), and no one has ever answered them adequately.

The reason for this should be obvious to anyone. These doctrines are truths about an infinite, transcendent God, recorded for us asystematically in a book that defies genre and categorization in any meaningful sense except as the Word of that same transcendent God. That Scripture is God's own self-revelation is the only reason we are able to understand anything about Him; even so, we are finite and sinful human beings, and the only resolution we can offer for many of the doctrines we find between Genesis and Revelation is to plead for mystery.

If the Bible states two things that seem to be in opposition (God is three persons yet one God, for instance), we accept both of these concepts as truth and assume that they are deeper and more glorious than we can comprehend. As Christians, our immediate response should not be to dismiss one or the other (or both) of these concepts, but to plead ignorance as to their fulness. Any other response is blasphemous in its arrogance and pride.

Heretics assume that, when they encounter a doctrine they don't understand, it is the doctrine rather than the reader that must yield. Human reason, for them, can be bound by nothing, least of all by propositional concepts. So, they attempt to make sense of every part of Scripture, using as guide only their reason and casting aside all reliance on past saints, the wisdom of the ancients, or the received/traditional/orthodox interpretations.

This is because heretics misunderstand true spirituality and the necessity of pure doctrine. Good doctrine isn't so essential simply because it's knowledge; it's essential because it helps us identify the God we serve and worship. Likewise, true spirituality isn't a purely rational or intellectual matter; it's the transformation of the heart, soul, mind and body through the healing agency of the Triune God, the reclamation of what was lost to salvation and goodness.

It's ironic that heretics so often blame the orthodox for overemphasizing knowledge when that's exactly what they're doing. It's also strange that anyone could think the Holy Spirit would have so abandoned His people as to allow them to wallow for two millennia in false doctrine, and that one or two people would be the lone voices in the wilderness proferring the truth. Such ideas are sad in their arrogance and ludicrous in their absurdity.

Does the Bible ever use the word Trinity? Of course not, and no true Christian supposes it does, or that the doctrine is laid out anywhere in anything close to a systematic form. But the Bible does present an organic picture of God that reveals insofar as we can understand who He is, who we are, and what our relationship with Him is and should be. Why does the Bible go on to reveal paradoxes concerning Him? Because He is the transcendent God, and we aren't meant to understand everything about Him, nor would we survive the ordeal were such knowledge given to us mere mortals.

Love and Fear

There were hundreds, thousands of birds. There were so many birds I was still seeing them after they were long past, moving specks entwined in the soft orange of the sun blending with the horizon. They were swallows, brown and not still and crowded in the air, but I thought they might be doves come to warn us of God's love.

All men tremble at God's wrath; how many weep and shake in the shadow of His love? How many see those gentle birds as harbingers of peace, rather than harpies from the throne of the Most High sent to terrify us into His presence? Why is love now all gentle smiles and kindness? What about the kindness of fire and whirlwind?

Where I live it's rare to see more than a moderate flock of birds at one time. Traffic on the freeway slowed in the midst of silent wings, each of us awed by the sheer number. Number itself is frightening to those who are singularities. We are one; in the face of multiplicity we tremble, afraid of being overwhelmed. This is partly why we fear God.

God is perfect singularity because He is also perfect multiplicity. We fear Christ because He is both God and man, a lion and the lamb, two natures in one person. When one thing reveals itself to be more than itself, our human propensity is to hide, to shut ourselves away from what is capable of overwhelming us. So it is with the peace and love of God.

The love of God that set the Son at the Father's right hand is the same love that will judge all men from the throne of justice. The peace that surpasses all understanding issues from the same source as the wrath that plagued Egypt tenfold. Moses strikes a rock and lives; he strikes another, and dies. For all that we can know about God from His Word, He remains a mystery, transcendent.

We embrace the softness of swallows, the hazed blur at the edges of wings as they flail in the sunset, clouds that have deigned to come near the earth. We listen to their high voices like the voices of careless angels, sharp and clear and sudden. We smile as they play, smile as they jerk their little heads back and forth, smile as Adam must have smiled naming them.

But when they swirl like an Israelite smoke column, cutting us off from the sky, hemming us to the dust from which God stirred us, then we wish them dispersed. Then their song becomes a banshee shriek, a siren of impending doom, the storm that is God's love. All the swallows but one flock, and we are afraid because the many are one.

It is good to fear God, as much because He is love as because He is all perfection and strength. How can we exult in the selfless love of Christ without hiding our faces from its ultimate expression on the stark and lonely cross? How can we love His creation without dreading its terrors? How can we love the little swallow and not shake when he becomes a host?

The Importance of Reading Books

A lot of people talk about how important it is to read books but seldom provide compelling reasons. It isn't enough to encourage reading for its own sake—that's just begging the question. It's not even enough to encourage reading certain kinds of books for their own sake—that's just posturing. When anyone tells me to read the Classics, for instance, simply because they're the Classics, I immediately want to know why they're the Classics, who gave them that distinction, what a Classic even is, and why reading one is inherently beneficial.

Others give one-dimensional answers when asked why reading is important. The purpose of reading, they may say, is to gain knowledge, or to "broaden oneself," or to understand, or some other not necessarily bad but far from complete answer. Of these apologists I want to ask, why is knowledge important? won't experience broaden me? can't I understand without books?

The immediate reply to the second question will likely be, "But you can't have as many experiences in real life as you can in books." So reading is simply an existential exercise? We read only to dip our feet in a wider pool of experience than would otherwise be open to us? If that's the case, why not simply watch a bunch of movies? It generally takes less time to watch a film than to read a book, so if we just watch plenty of movies we'll be all right. Oh, the reply comes, reading is so much better than just watching movies. But why?

Such questioning is likely only to produce frustration, however. For many defenders of reading, their arguments are couched solely in terms of preference: these individuals like to read, and so they try to construct paradigms in which reading is preferable to not reading. None of these paradigms are very realistic, however, and usually they're simply another ruse for separating the goats and the sheep. Am I saying that reading, then, is merely a game, unimportant, and worthless?

I am saying no such thing. Reading books (the right ones, anyway; there's plenty of garbage out there) is extremely important, and I'll be the first to defend the practice. But anything worth doing is worth defending properly, and the more important an activity is, the more important it becomes to defend it well and responsibly. Simply saying "read cause it's good" or "read these books cause they're these books" is juvenile and actually a pretty good reason not to read whatever is being presented as worthy literature.

While vicarious experience has a modicum of value (not near as much as is often assumed), and knowledge can be a good thing (a wonderful thing, even; and also, a terrible and horrible thing), these are not in themselves sufficient reasons to read books. The real reason to read is for perspective. It's awfully easy to assume humankind has progressed imeasurably, or philosophical questions are different today than those posed by Socrates and Aristotle, or that Americans know what's going on better than anyone, or that Europeans are inherently more sophisticated than everyone else, or whatever. The only real way to understand these are all lies is to read authors who identify them as such.

Sure, going to Europe will probably clue you in to the fact that rednecks, hipsters, and drug addicts exist everywhere, but then again, you might be so overawed by the exotic unfamiliarity of it all that you come back with a universally positive report. Sitting in your chair at home and reading about another culture from a fairly objective point of view will likely yield much more balanced results, though. And while it's entirely possible that your chosen author will have rose-colored glasses of her own, or will be a curmudgeon with nothing nice to say, that will (to an observant reader) become clear as the book progresses.

Which is the reason to read widely. It's not going to do any good to read for perspective if you only read one or two authors, or only read three books a year, or only read escapist literature, or only read fiction. These habits will simply succeed in foisting narrow perspectives, and will probably end up worse in the long run than if you read nothing at all. Reading for improvement or benefit is pretty much either a commitment or nothing; you can't do it halfway.

Perspective is largely why we read the Bible. It shows us who we are, who God's people are, what the world is like, why it is like that, and (supremely and all-importantly) it shows us who God is. We don't read Scripture simply for the stories (or, as pomos would stress, the story), for knowledge, or for fun. We read God's Word for the perspective no other book can offer, and this is why we ought to read it more often than any other book. At the same time, good books can help flesh out this perspective, or enhance our biblical perspective, and this is why we read those other books, too.

MGT and other things I've never heard of.

I recently read a book by Calvin Beisner called Evangelical Heathenism?: Examining Contemporary Revivalism. In it, he reveals a contemporary heresy known as Moral Government Theology, which is basically a form of Pelagianism and open theism. Apparently many leaders of Youth With a Mission have been or are mixed up in this doctrinal error (heresy, blasphemy, etc.), actively teaching that humans are born with the internal ability to choose good or bad, that God doesn't know the future, and that God's goodness hinges on His constant choices rather than His inherent nature.

Needless to say, there's a lot wrong with this idea. What really disturbed me, however, is that such an idea exists and is largely unheard of. The fact that almost no one has heard about MGT while at the same time it is so pernicious and apparently widespread bodes ill for the watchfulness Christians are supposed to maintain in the face of doctrinal error.

How many Christians have been unwittingly drawn into this way of thinking? It would seem that a doctrine teaching a god who is neither omniscient nor omnipotent would be automatically rejected by Christians across the board, but that is apparently not the case. Obviously, there are many firm enough in orthodox doctrine that they can't or won't be dissuaded from the truth, but what makes these doctrines appealing to less well-educated Christians?

There seem to be only two factors, both working in tandem. First, the idea that we are completely autonomous free moral agents who can thwart the will of God plays on our inherited human pride and arrogance. This is likely a subconscious motivating factor, but one nonetheless that is powerful and omnipresent in all of us: every time we sin, we're asserting our own godhood.

The second factor is lack of knowledge and rejection of any kind of authority. Our churches are notoriously lax in doctrinal instruction, opting for feel-good sermons and opinion-based Bible studies rather than rigorous doctrinal catechesis and exhortation. But it's more than that: contemporary Christians are completely uncomfortable with the notion of objective absolute truth, and with the idea that humans can obtain it.

Oddly, this seems most rampant in what most would classify as conservative Evangelical churches, concentrations of Fundamentalism in its most restricted and unbiblical sense. On one hand, they cry out that there is truth and meaning, but through their behavior and teaching they deny it. How is this best demonstrated? Through the near-universal rejection of the creeds and confessions of the historic Body of Christ.

But, they argue, the Bible is our final authority! As interpreted by whom? we may well ask, to which the response is usually silence or an appeal to the Holy Spirit. Yet, if the Church is truly a body, wouldn't the Holy Spirit reveal Scriptural truth to the group as a whole, rather than to each person individually? Can we not trust anyone but ourselves? Such spiritual solipsism is not only dangerous, it's rank unbiblicism.

By it, heresies like MGT are allowed entry under the guise of proper interpretation and piety. Ultimately, if there is no objective interpretive method external to the individual, there is no interpretive method, and therefore no grounds for dismissing heresy. If, on the other hand, the Holy Spirit has revealed truth to the Church as a whole to be safeguarded by all true believers, then we have guidelines for objectively determining what is right and what is wrong, for dismissing heresy, and for training the saints in doctrine. If we let this go, we've relinquished our faith entirely, and only destruction will ensue. The only proper response is faithful doctrine and faithful living in the face of opposition from without as well as from within.

Chaos and Light

If it is true of moths and flames, it's much truer of humans and chaos. Where darkness gathers, people throng; where it is light they disperse and flee. Shame and guilt, carried by each of us, prefers to hide rather than to be made known, but there's more to it than that.

Finite humans constantly struggle against confusion. There's too much to make sense of, so to remain sane we hide in oblivion, erasing the boundaries to make room for paradox. Somehow we convince ourselves that the void of chaos is more interesting, more liberating, and more all-encompassing than the colors and definition of broad daylight. Somehow we believe what we can't see is deeper than what we are able to behold. Somehow, we believe chaos is more mysterious than order.

Whatever else John Hillcoat may believe, at leat he understands that such a proposition is absurd, that the light will always be more fascinating than the darkness, and that the complexity of good is sufficient to render evil meaningless. His two most recent films, The Road (2009) and Lawless (2012), ably demonstrate this.

In both films, evil is an ever-present force. It is often tangible (as in The Road, in which the physical darkness is often associated with the presence of evil), and permeates both landscapes and individuals, bending them away from what is true toward what is rotten and dead.

What is striking in Lawless particularly is the director's reluctance to show evil directly, instead intimating its presence and horror through suggestion and the withholding of detail. Evil is certainly there, and it is certainly evil, but there's no reason to dwell on it directly because, as evil, it is inherently not worth our devoted attention. By contrast, the camera lingers long on the central characters who, though lawless themselves (they're Depression-era bootleggers in Franklin County, VA), are nonetheless devoted to an ethic and character standard that has no reason to hide itself.

The film featured exquisitely fine performances all round, but of special note are the roles of the three brothers Forrest, Howard, and Jack Bondurant, played by Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke, and Shia LaBeouf respectively. Each actor endows his character with a complexity, humanity and power that could never exist in a purely evil person....as brilliantly demonstrated by Guy Pearce's role as the bad guy, a chilling individual indeed, but more chilling because he lacks so much depth.

Hillcoat doesn't pander to our desire for titillation by showing us just how bad Pearce's character (Charlie Rakes) is, instead giving us hints that get the point across, while saving the camera's gaze mostly for depictions of the horrors evil causes, as well as the constant moral quandaries with which principled people are constantly confronted.

Lawless is a good film for a number of reasons; but it's especially refreshing to find a movie that gets at least one important thing very right. Societies and cultures are always huddling around in dark places, hoping the smoke never clears. A film like Hillcoat's latest effort looms bright, just like the bootleg stills on the hillsides of Franklin County.

The Tribulation of Temptation

It's easy to think of temptation in terms of its object. The point, we assume, is that we aren't supposed to have something we want. If a Porsche drives by, we identify the automobile itself as our temptation, that somehow it is the car itself that is tempting. This is completely wrong: the temptation isn't the car, but to engage in sinful thoughts about the car, i.e., envy and covetousness.

To be mistaken on this point leads to two problems. The first is to make us think that objects themselves are bad; the second, and worse, mistake is to think that temptation itself is somehow sin, that we incur guilt when we are tempted. If this latter point were true, Christ Himself would have been guilty of sin, because He was tempted by the Devil in the desert.

This temptation of Jesus is often presented with an underlying confusion. If Christ was, by His nature, not able to succumb to temptation, why did His temptation at the hands of Satan make Him exhausted to the point that angels had to administer to Him? This confusion, it seems to me, results from the objectification of temptation.

If Christ's exhaustion resulted from His desire for what the Devil offered, His sinless nature and perpetual sinless state would be called into question. As Christ Himself points out again and again, it isn't simply our actions that implicate us, but our thoughts and attitudes as well, anything that is in opposition to God's will and Law.

On the other hand, if we take temptation to be another form of tribulation or trial, a hardship we endure rather than a desire we repress, there is no confusion. Christ was so exhausted because His temptation came directly from the Devil himself. Things aren't bad in themselves: Christ in fact received all the things the Devil offered Him, but from God not Satan.

How much more able to withstand temptation will we be if we can learn to see it as tribulation rather than simply thwarted desire? It's not that the sin we want to commit is something that actually should be desired: the point is that we endure the temptation and conquer it through Jesus' power and grace because it should not be desired. Temptation is no sin, but we must resist it so that we do not sin.

Rule Suburbia

My wife and I went camping about a week ago. We cooked all our food over a fire, slept on the implacably hard ground, felt the morning coolness, and walked to a small lake. It was a lovely weekend, but it was far from the escape I'd envisioned.

Americans (for the most part) don't understand the purpose of camping. The campground where we stayed was wooded and close to the beach....and resembled nothing so much as suburbia relocated to the outdoors.

Here was the opportunity to leave daily existence with its distractions and boredom behind, and instead these hundreds of campers decided to bring the distractions and boredom with them, to use while complaining about the mosquitoes and the dirt.

I'm not sure what that is, but it's not camping. No commitment to enjoying nature or a primitive existence here. Instead, RVs with televisions larger than my tent, smartphones constantly vomiting "personalized" ringtones shared by thousands of people, microwaved meals (again, courtesy of the RVs), screaming children, loud music, and generators powering TVs to which were attached Xboxes and Wiis.

Why even go camping?! Unless you embrace the experience, living out of doors, even temporarily, is miserable. You don't get to shower properly, you don't get a good night's sleep, your food is undercooked, and there's mud everywhere. All of which become genuine pleasures when you seek them as an alternative to the daily routine—and even more annoying and aggravating if you're trying to pursue your daily routine despite them.

The behavior I witnessed at the campground (ironically) is the result of certain strands of Christian thinking as much as typical American consumerism. The idea that God calls man to dominion over the created world has been so bent out of shape that many now take it to mean we have the right of all creation, that it belongs to us to do with as we will. This is neither a proper understanding of dominion, nor a proper understanding of the Church's role in relation to Jesus Christ.

But this idea has led in turn to a worse one: the idea that creation is in fact meant to serve us. While I don't for a second intend to imply that the opposite is true (we are not the servants of creation, either), or that we should worship nature or extend toward it more respect than God Himself has given it, I do mean to imply that man is still part of the created order, crown though he may be, and as such has no right to turn it to purposes beyond what God has designated for it.

As the great Jacques Ellul pointed out, cities were first formed as acts of rebellion against God. That's not to say Christians shouldn't live in cities; cities are as viable a dwelling for Christians as for anyone else, especially given that the New Jerusalem is itself a city. But cities, while they have their place, should not be allowed to encroach further than their own jurisdiction.

There are things nature tells us about ourselves and (more importantly) about God that we can never learn in an urban or metropolitan area. To take the city into nature, therefore, is to wilfully subject the wilderness to man's desire for comfort, his desire for control, even his desire for community that is not God-sanctioned. For how can God condone community that is predicated on mere numbers and presence, rather than on meaningful knowledge and relationships?

God is not nature, as the pantheists assert, nor is he present in nature the way panentheists suggest; but He is the Lord of nature just as he is the Lord of the city, the Lord of the Sabbath, the Lord of Heaven, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The insensate drive to bring man's creation wherever man goes is not only arrogant, it's idolatrous.

I wouldn't imagine these ideas are conscious in most people, but I would suggest they are at least subconsciously present to one degree or another. I'm not going to stop camping as a result of this nonsense, though; but I am going to find a more secluded place to do it in.

Art's Objective Standards II

Once the creator's intent, and ability to consistently and effectively convey that intent, have been determined, it's essential to then assess the content of any work of art. Is what the creator is saying good? Does it make logical sense, and does it fit into what we know about the world, human nature, God, and history? Or is it humanistic, cliche, pernicious, false?

In our time, it's considered passe, uncharitable, and to some extent even dangerous to make value judgements of any kind. The typical postmodern bilge about "it may not be right for me, but it's right for you" or "one must find truth/peace/meaning in one's own way" have conditioned entire populations to refrain from judging anything on strictly moral grounds, instead reducing all art criticism to "I like it" or "I don't like it" or to mere intellectual posturing.

Even Christians have largely accepted these conditions. Instead of holding everything up to Scripture for comparison and analysis, we retreat into the fallible and usually inaccurate territory of trying to "feel" whether things are good or not. Unfortunately, our feelings are too susceptible to sin, illogic and confusion to ever be appropriate guides. This is why the Medievals insisted emotion must be subservient to the reason, and the reason to divine authority; without this graduated chain of command, we're left with the slavery of solipsistic subjectivity.

As a result, we have Christians who love the movie Braveheart, Christians who read the Twilight novels religiously, Christians who listen to Eminem on a regular basis, all because they've (consciously or unconsciously) jettisoned the idea that there's an ideal standard of good and bad by which to evaluate everything. I'm not arguing for monasticism; watch Braveheart, read Twilight, listen to Eminem: but do so from a judgemental standpoint, determining whether these things are the types of things Christians ought to fill their minds with on a regular basis.

This is the real crux of the issue: people on both sides try to force a dichotomy, and dichotomies are nearly always false. On the one hand are those who say we (as Christians) shouldn't engage the culture at all, that even the most minimal contact with secular art will pollute us beyond repair, and that there's nothing the world has to offer us on any level. On the other hand are those Christians who assume that interacting with art means we have to accept it all willy-nilly and immerse ourselves in it if we want to have any kind of voice.

The truth is less narrow and less broad than both of those. Christ never tells us to close our eyes, put our hands over our ears, shut our mouths, or tie our hands behind our backs. He tells us to be in the world, but not of it. In other words, live among people, but don't let them carry you away with false beliefs or sinful behavior. In a very real sense, this requires knowing something of the culture in order to combat it and offer something more real in response.

What is wrong is to accept anything with a meaningless, vapid or pernicious message as an integral part of our daily lives. I wouldn't now why Braveheart is a bad movie if I'd never watched it, but if I continued to watch it over and over again knowing it is bad, that's when I've crossed the line of reasonableness and godly character. Maybe many viewers don't know why it's bad, but that simply reflects lack of absorption in the one thing we ought to revisit every day as often as possible: God's Word.

It's frankly disturbing how many people say they haven't got time to read their Bible, but they spend hours (or even one hour) watching television or listening to music or reading comics every single day, seemingly unaware of the hypocrisy. There is only one sure standard by which to judge all things, and that is God's Word, and any Christian who attempts to "engage" the culture on any level without the protection of Scripture is doomed to failure or complete defeat.

Christians ought to understand the culture around them, and we all have a responsibility to respond in a biblical manner: what we should never do is replace our adherence to God's Word with this understanding. Ironically, it is such an exchange that makes any insight gained utterly meaningless, and which simultaneously undercuts any witness or responsible voice we might have. To understand art, we must understand the Bible, and we must understand it more thoroughly and more faithfully than any painting, novel, album, statue, or film.

Art's Objective Standards I

Everyone who creates does so with a purpose. Perusing some of what passes for art (from any era, not just our own), this isn't always patently clear—a lot of paintings, songs, books, etc. look as purposeless as one feels after engaging them. But creation is not possible without at least a modicum of intention, and that intention is the purpose for which the creator creates.

By art, I'm including everything that is not explicitly utile except for recreational or contemplative purposes. It's easy to try to distinguish between art and entertainment, but ultimately the distinction is impossible to maintain: there's simply good art and bad art, art that is entertaining and art that isn't, stupid art and intelligent art, and so on. An attempt to dissociate art from entertainment is wrong both because it elevates art beyond its proper due,  and because it simultaneously insinuates that art is not meant to be entertaining or enjoyable.

But properly made art is meant to be enjoyable, even while it's meant to instruct and to direct its audience toward the better life. To make art of this kind, the artist must do so intentionally; good art doesn't come about by accident.

On the reverse of the "entertainment vs. art" coin, attempting to distinguish some attempts from the real or perceived dross that surround them is usually little more than arrogance and posturing either on the part of the artist or his fans. For instance, movies become "art films" to differentiate them from the typical box office hash; novels are called "literary fiction" as opposed to genre titles; avant garde music is "art rock" as opposed to pop. There's some good stuff in these categories, but the only reason to stand by such designations is to make sure everyone knows you aren't just part of the herd, consuming the same intellectual junk food as everyone else.

All that isn't to suggest I'm advocating watching run-of-the-mill movies or reading a bunch of cheap paperbacks, just that we need to recognize the tendency for status-elevation based on our so-called superior tastes. Increasingly, what is often deemed most intelligent is simply transgressive or simply nonsensical; our goal should be to find what is good, not simply to promote our own intelligence by jumping on some bandwagon.

So how do we go about finding the good? If there are objective standards for separating good and bad art, what are they? I don't think they're as difficult as a lot of people seem to assume. There's a pretty widespread attitude that, even if objective standards exist, we can't know them. I vehemently repudiate that notion, and assert that the objective standards can and must be known, especially if Christians are going to engage the arts on any level, either as creators or consumers.

To return to the beginning idea: everything that is created is created with a purpose. If the purpose of the artist is simply to make money, that will be evident in what he creates; if he wants to celebrate sin, he will; if he wants to make a significant statement about God or hunanity, that will be apparent; if he simply wants to create something with lots of explosions and knife fights, he will do just that. It isn't possible for anyone to make anything with no purpose at all, and it isn't possible for them to obscure or hide that purpose.

The first objective standard for evaluating art, then, is found in determining the purpose of the given artwork. This may be more difficult in some cases than in others, but with proper training in logic and reason it's never impossible. A major reason people are often unwilling to analyze a book or movie in this way is because they're afraid the conclusion will force them to give up something they like, which in turn means they're often unwilling to admit this as an objective standard for art analysis, but there is nowhere else to begin evaluation.

If a movie (for instance) passes the first test (i.e., the purpose of the film is legitimate and not merely meant to titillate or shock or violate), the secone step is to determine whether it adequately lives up to its purpose. For instance, the classic Western The Sons of Katie Elder is clearly meant to demonstrate the influence of a good woman on her community, but through directorial ineptitude, poor acting, and clumsy symbolism the point is lost. On the other hand, a movie like Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light is clearly meant to explore the phenomenon of loss of faith and depression from an existential perspective, and ably does so.

These are the two most basic litmus tests for objectively judging a work of art. Both withhold value judgments and allow the audience member to analyze the work based solely on the work itself. If we don't start here, we can hope to make observations only in the most desultory manner, finding elements here and there yet unable to connect them. To avoid this, we must assume an objective base for analysis, and proceed from there.

"Christian" doesn't make it good.

This is the last post about music for awhile, I promise.

What about music from so-called "Christian" artists? A lot of people assume that if something is labeled Christian, it's acceptable. Plenty of artists seem to think the same thing, pumping the name of Jesus into every song regardless of whether it belongs there.

The fact is, a lot of what passes for Christian is often just as damaging (and, in some cases, more so) as its secular counterparts. Audio Adrenaline (who purvey bad music in addition to bad lyrics) have a song familiar to many called Big House, comparing Heaven (i.e., God's holy and eternal presence) to a place with lots of food and room for football games. This is clearly pernicious art, and should be abandoned by anyone professing the name of Christ.

There are far too many songs like this. Without assuming motive (it's easy to do; a band can pretty much assume an audience for themselves if they append the moniker "Christian" to themselves and their music), we as Christians cannot let this kind of thing stand as Christian art.

To be sure, if there were good music attached to poor lyrics in these songs, they'd still be bad songs in virtue of the lyrics; the fact that the music is so often bad simply adds insult to injury. And I'm not saying there's no good Christian music—far from it. Bands like Gungor and Cush manage to combine insightful, biblical lyrics and very good music that is both accessible and Christ-honoring.

What I am saying is that if a band that claims to be Christian churns out bad music and bad lyrics, we should have the guts to distance ourselves from them. There is nothing honorable in accepting everyone who claims to come in the name of Christ as our brothers and sisters, and there is nothing honorable in letting bad art or bad theology off the hook because it's "Christian."

There's too much good art that is also Christian for us to have to settle for that which is neither good art nor truly Christian. We aren't displaying solidarity by listening to everything "Christian radio" has to offer, just as the early Church wouldn't have been displaying solidarity had they accepted the claims of a heretic like Arius or Nestorius. We aren't doing ourselves or anyone else a bit of good by blindly accepting whatever purports to be Christian; in fact, by doing so we're creating a great deal of harm.

Lyrics matter.

It seems like the question of lyrics should be an easy matter to decide from a Christian perspective, but relatively few Christians seem to give it the attention it deserves. If music itself has an influence on us, surely the lyrics do, and the worse the lyrics the worse the influence. The argument that "I just listen to the music, not the lyrics" is untenable, and should be rejected; everything affects us, and if it's not something good it will affect us negatively.

Nearly everyone acknowledges this on some level, but almost as often as it's acknowledged there's a hint (or a lot) of inconsitency. People who refuse to listen to gangsta rap for the lyrical content will turn around and listen to AC/DC; those who won't listen to AC/DC will listen to Lady Gaga; those who won't litsten to Lady Gaga will listen to Shaniah Twain. Worse, many Christians will simply admit that the lyrics are foul or inappropriate, but listen to the songs anyway, saying that the music is really quite good.

If anyone tries to defend Lady Gaga's music on any level they've got more problems than this post can or will address, but what if the music really is good? Surely, Angus Young is a good guitar player; do we have to throw out his entire body of work just because Bon Scott and Brian Johnson write and sing deplorable lyrics?

Quite simply, yes.

First of all, there will always be an artist with equal or superior skill whose lyrics aren't juvenile celebrations of sin and wrongdoing. But even if that weren't the case, it would be morally wrong to listen to songs glorifying evil whether the music itself is good or not.

This doesn't mean just because a song has profanity or references to immoral behavior we should throw it out and never listen to it. The lyrics of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, for instance, has some pretty dark, sinister, and even depraved content, but Cave's songs are well worth listening to because of the way he deals with such content. Rarely if ever is he outright glorying in wickedness; more often, he's wondering why humans commit evil deeds, what attracts us to it, and whether there's a plausible alternative and solution.

That's a far cry from Highway to Hell or Back in Black which simply celebrate (in mindless fashion, no less) the depths to which humans are able to sink. A song's lyrical content, then, should be judged not on what makes an appearance in the song, but on how that content appears, in what light the songwriter chooses to cast his subject matter, and what he's saying through the song. This is true of art forms in general, not just music, but because music has become so prevalent in our culture and so constantly accessible, it's possibly the most important.

Perhaps even worse than blatant celebrations of sin (which make their way into music of every genre), however, are those songs which are subtle. Pop country is perhaps the worst of this kind; on one hand, artists are singing about their so-called Christian upbringing, while on the other they're talking about bedding hot chicks, getting in fights, and hating people from other nations, all in the name of syncretized American religion.

Any lyrical content that distracts us from the Gospel, or that is directly opposed to the Gospel, or that misrepresents the Gospel, is bad. We can rationalize all we want, but part of denying ourselves is giving up things we like that we shouldn't. I may like listening to Nas or Public Enemy, but there's little to nothing redemptive in their lyrics, and the more I listen to them, the more I'll begin to accept (however unconsciously) their un-Christian worldview. How much better that I should simply give up their music in favor of songs that are thoughtful, wholesome, and good?

Praise vs. Worship

Some will no doubt accuse me of making some pretty sweeping statements in the last post, statements that bear support for which I offered little. True enough, so I offer support now.

First: what is a praise chorus? A praise chorus is any Christian song designed for use during a church service, and which is centered around a repetitive phrase or group of phrases (both musical and lyrical) that can be easily learned and remembered. Most church music has assumed this character, presumably to facilitate greater congregational participation, and because knowledge of musical forms has deteriorated to the point where average congregants are unable to follow the frequently complex and difficult melodies and harmonies of traditional hymns.

Second: why are such songs inherently emotional? It isn't because of their lyrics (though those are usually of similar ilk), nor is it dependent on the instruments used. Praise choruses are inherently emotional because they're designed not to elevate the intellect and thereby the emotions, but rather specifically to excite the emotions. If this sounds like a tautology, bear with me.

Complex musical forms require intellectual engagement not only if one hopes to understand them, but also if one hopes to be genuinely affected by them. Praise choruses are deliberately simple in order to appeal to the broadest audience (thereby estranging a large contingent who prefer artistically valid pieces!), and thereby eschew the intellectual aspect of their composition. It's hard to sing a complex melody line, but recognizable chords played in a repetitive progression are relatively simple to sing and can be used over and over with all kinds of lyrics.

It's essential at this point to introduce the idea of the effect lyrics have over a song. In order to keep choruses singable, songwriters must also simplify lyrics, so that not much (if any) thought is required to sing them. When lyrics are thus reduced, any truly meaningful content is similarly diminished or eliminated. One once-popular song consisted mostly of the words, "Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes yes, Lord," repeated ad nauseum. This is meaningless gibberish made to seem pious by the insertion of a particular word (but not the true Word).

What do such songs leave us with? A false sense of emotion. If there is no meaningful intellectual or rational content in a song, and only rudimentary music played in such a way as to elicit a given response, the only conclusion we can make is that the song's purpose is to evoke an emotional response. Of course, as we've attempted to show it's impossible to engender real or actual emotion in the absence of intellectual or rational content, and thus the feelings induced by praise music are empty and nebulous (at best).

Last: why are hymns not merely emotional as well? Hymns are designed to teach us about God even while we praise Him for His greatness, His beauty, and His infallible love. True emotions will naturally follow from such expressions, even very strong emotions, but those emotions will be preceded by apprehendable truths expressed in rational language.

Ultimately, praise music fails at the true purpose all church music should aim for: genuine worship. A feeling is not worship any more than embers constitute a fire. For songs to serve their true purpose in a church context, they must deliberately direct us to known truths about God, not simply toward our feelings about indefinable elements of religious experience. After all, dervishes work themselves into religiously-induced states of pure emotion, but that is in no sense genuine worship of any kind. Why do we suppose our purely emotional music is any different, even if Christ's name is mentioned fifty times throughout?

The purposelessness of "praise" music.

What is the real purpose of most church music these days? If it's to worship Yahweh, the eternal and perfect embodiment of intellect, power, beauty, and love, why do so many of the songs lifted to Him betoken and represent none of those things? Why do congregations split over which songs to sing, which instruments whereby to accompany those songs, and any number of similar concerns? I'd venture to say it's because the real reason most contemporary praise music exists is to emotionally manipulate congregations into feeling as though they're worshipping God, whether this is actually what they're doing or not.

In some ways, I wouldn't try to put church music on the same plane as other types of art. Hymns and psalms are specifically designed to help Christians praise and worship God, and to reflect on Him, whereas most art is of a much more universal and less sacramental nature. However, I would urge that church music be held to the same high standard as any other art form, and probably an even higher standard given its purpose.

Contemporary Christians have become obssessed with the suppossedly laudable goal of getting their emotions in the right place about worship. Most of the ancient Church fathers would have agreed that this is largely impossible, at least until essential truths about God had first been grasped and internalized. For instance, it isn't possible to feel the freedom Christ offers through His Gospel until one first understands rationally the claims of Jesus, the nature of atonement, and the existential necessity of conversion, repentance, and sanctification.

The kind of music many (yes, even most) churches favor these days is seemingly designed to bypass the intellect and directly affect "the heart," whatever that nebulous entity might be in today's linguistically challenged culture. To feel God is seen as superior to knowing God, primarily because the intellectual community is seen as merely intellectualizing the faith, and thus separating it from its real-world essence and application. Nothing could be further from the truth, but that's another post altogether.

What's important for this post is that church people could make the fallacy that the life of the mind is somehow unimportant for "real life" and day-to-day experience. It's only by contemplation and study that we can hope to know how God wants us to live. As sinful people, if we let gut-feeling indicate our ethical and behavioral path, nine times out of ten we'll end up doing the wrong thing, and the tenth time when we get it right will be an accident. Studying God's Word, contemplating it, and comparing to it the ideas of other Christians past and present is a vital and essential activity that will trump mere feeling in any circumstance.

Yet the Church has become increasingly anti-intellectual, and this bias has entered the very church service itself. Hymns that teach and illuminate are eschewed in favor of "catchy" songs that evoke emotions, and usually pretty paltry ones at that. God wants us to know that we know who He is and what He's done for us, not simply that we feel good about Him in a vague kind of way.

Obviously, if your Christian life is devoid of emotion, something is wrong. But how can you be sad about Christ's sufferings on your behalf, elated that He has saved you, or anxious to spread this good news, if you don't understand those things at a rational pre-emotional level? Notice that typical praise music avoids negative emotions at all costs in favor of those that will make the singer feel good about himself and about his relation to Christ. So not only does praise music entrench itself firmly in anti-intellectualism, it also denies the negative feelings all Christian ought to feel concerning their sin and their own unworthiness.

The purpose of praise choruses, then, is no purpose at all. If the purpose of praise music is (as I would argue) to make people feel a certain way, it inherently fails because it does not first orient them toward a rationally affirmable truth. People no doubt feel a certain way while singing praise choruses, but it's an inherently empty feeling because it has no foundation. How can we countenance this as God's people? How can we allow our worship of Him to be reduced to a subjective, vapid experience? If we have any sense of who He is, gathered from careful study of His Word, we cannot.

Appreciation precedes enjoyment.

I'm listening to one of my favorite metal bands as I write this. Scale the Summit plays technical instrumental heavy metal with a strong progressive element. Their appeal is twofold: first, each member of the band is a proficient and experimental musician, and second, in their music one can discern both a rational and an emotional element.

Like a lot of Classical music, Scale the Summit's compositions require careful attention. A cursory listen of many of their songs can be disorienting, for (like the best metal bands) despite their four-piece approach, Summit's pieces are complex in ways popular music is not. Each of the musicians is a virtuoso, but none is a prima donna, making their blend of two seven-string guitars, six-string bass, and drums nothing short of sublime.

That's not to suggest anyone who listents to Scale the Summit will (or should) have exactly the same reaction to their music. What I don't want to imply in my theory of music is that all music can be submitted to a single rigorous test which will force a given piece to have a single effect on everyone who listens to it. I do think all music should be rationally contemplated and judged accordingly, but once that has been accomplished I think a variety of reaction to a single piece actually serves to demonstrate its power, artistic effect, and beauty.

A lot of this goes back to a fundamental consideration in art criticism of any kind: the difference between appreciation and preference. There are many Classical compositions I can appreciate but that I have little predilection for or enjoyment of (most opera comes immediately to mind). The same is true of all music; there's plenty of music I don't listen to that I can nonetheless qualify as good art because it meets certain essential criteria.

Scale the Summit is one of the bands I both appreciate and enjoy. The appreciation is the rational level—throughout all their songs there is attention to melodic themes, an orderliness despite the occasional apparent dissonance, and a structured complexity, all of which point to a proper understanding both of the role of music (to train us to think and feel correctly), and the world in which music is created (a deeply complex though often confusing realm which nonetheless evidences an inherent teleology).

From this appreciation comes my enjoyment. And yes, much of that enjoyment is emotional: a song like Rode in on Horseback calms me even as it elates my spirit, both essentially emotional responses that are at the same time mediated through my intellectual appreciation of the song. Without the intellectual mediation, my "emotional responses" become mere animal instincts, and can be manipulated any way I want them to be.

Trading in rational thought leading to emotional enjoyment for immediate visceral response culminating in mindlessness or mere behaviorism is simply trading freedom for slavery. Good art ought to free our minds and spirits from the selfishness and nihilism of everyday life, but if we approach it with empty minds our only reward will be more emptiness, and its power will be effectually negated. To truly enjoy something, we must first be able to understand it and appreciate it; otherwise, we're ruled by it and kept in a consumerist subjection to the very thing that should elevate our minds, our hearts, and our emotions to a nobler plane.