Thursday, July 26, 2012

Some Initial Thoughts on James 2

In James 2, the author makes the famous proclamation that faith without works is dead. By saying this he made Martin Luther very angry as his understanding of being saved solely through our faith was really disrupted by this idea. So Luther thought we should take the book out of the Bible. 


He didn't mince words 
or 
have problems with confidence.


It would seem that James is arguing for faith and works operate together by means of informing one another. There is the assent and the action. The assent is that which we claim to believe. This would be our doctrinal values and all of our beliefs about what it means to follow Jesus. This is where we would state the expectations of a Christian life. 


Our actions serve as a type of mirror by which we see whether or not we actually believe those things that we claim in our assent. For example a Christian may claim that Jesus teaches that all human life contains inherent value and as such we should love freely all people as our neighbors regardless of their 

             status
                                          wealth
kindness
                                                                                                        lovability
                                                                                                                                      smell. 


She may verbally assent to this claim. However, when she is organizing a meal or a church service at which there will be both powerful and impoverished in attendance, she may arrange it so that the powerful are given the best seats and the impoverished are sent to the outskirts. There is a contradiction between her assent and her action. 


Her works demonstrate 
that her faith is dead. 


Works act to demonstrate the incongruity between our verbal assent and our lived assent. This person does not actually see both the powerful and the impoverished as equally valuable and this is demonstrated by the way she arranges her social and religious space. In this way, our works speak to our faith to actually demonstrate whether or not we have allowed ourselves to be transformed by the faith of Messiah or if we are in need of repentance. 


Or take as another example, the Christian who looks at pornography. His assent would be to say that he lives with his wife in sexual union and that in that oneness, his sexuality can only be expressed through her participation. 


But he  still really
enjoys looking at porn.

While he is cognitively aware that pornography is destructive, the belief has yet to take on flesh in his behavior. His faith here is dead. His faith, his belief that pornography is destructive for society, his wife, and himself mean absolutely nothing until he acts on it.

Yet there is hope.

By looking at our behavior, we find out what we actually believe. We are able to see our failings and flailings. This introspection is essential. 

If we try to shrug off the importance of acknowledging and confessing our sins, we are like a man who wakes up the morning after a new haircut. He eats his cereal and does his crunches (or yoga or whatever the kids are doing these days) but walks out of the house without looking in a mirror and patting down all the places where his hair sticks out 

all the while telling everyone how great his Barber is.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Stupidity and Creativity

You have to risk one to get the other.

I was reading about CS Lewis tonight. (<--- Things that should surprise no one.)

Old Jack had a friend named Ruth Pitter and like all of his friends she was ridiculously smart and talented and made beautiful poetry and thought beautiful and true things about the world. She was the first woman to ever get the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and out of character, the Queen actually showed up for the ceremony. At one point, Lewis said that if was the marrying type, he would have like to marry Ruth Pitter (the fact that he was less than 2 years from a civil marriage to Joy Davidman not withstanding).

Ruth fetched him a good one
on the jaw
 one night.

As he sat with her and his brother Warnie, Lewis asked for her comments on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and while she was generally entertained by it, she pointed out some lapses in the logic of the story. Being the consummate logician and apologist, he found this inconceivable (and he probably wasn't psyched about hearing it from someone with ovaries either, oh Jack) and demanded an example. She asked how it was possible in a land of perpetual winter and without foreign trade partners that the Beavers were able to provide the children with milk, potatoes, oranges, suger, and suet. 

STUMPER!!

And like any good brother,
Warnie burst into laughter
at his brother's inability
to respond.

But is making that mistake 
and suffering that embarrassment 
worth never picking up the pen? 

So many times, I find myself stuck. 

As I read the story tonight, I thought about reading these books to children and what reading does for children. When you get to this moment in the story, you could look at it and say, 'this mistake makes the whole world fall apart, I can't go on.' letting your demand for internal consistency predicate your enjoyment as if the origin of the Beavers' oranges were the atomic mass of the Higgs Boson and its inaccuracy ripped the universe asunder. 

Boom.
Physics.

Or, if you are an attentive reader, 
you ask, 
'where did the oranges come from?'
And now, YOU get to create something totally new.

What's the point of literature and art if it doesn't leave us with questions? Why would we ever want to read, listen to, look at something that was good only because it was correct? I am without doubt that my life is not beautiful because it has been done correctly.

Ask any person that I have played music with. I make a lot of mistakes. Most often than not, if I'm on stage I am playing bass, an instrument that my mom asked me to learn because the church 'had enough acoustic players.' Yea, I know what that means: 

Dear Sloppy McSlopSlop, 

Cut it out and pick up an instrument where you can only misplay four strings instead of six. 


Hugs, 
Your Mom

My main instrument, which I'm not all that bad at these days, was put in my hands as a result of some stupidity. Not knowing what I was doing. Even now, the band leader who has most enjoyed having me as a co-musician pointed out that he doesn't keep me around because I play everything correctly, it's that I take risks and when I make the mistakes, I find a way to make them sound less like mistakes. 

It's a remarkable talent
developed
through years of error and error.

You (I) can't stop what we are doing because we are afraid of someone finding the errors later on and making us look like fools. We (I) are (am) fools. We just need to slide out of those sour notes and figure out where the oranges came from. That's where all the beautiful stuff happens anyway.

PS, What is Suet?