Continuum

One must respond to Donald Miller’s “Blue Like Jazz.” It certainly is a refreshing take on what it means to follow Jesus Christ. Here is a writer who gets away from formula writing which it seems encompasses most of the literature we would classify as “Christian.” The occasional writer who manages to get out of the proverbial box and give us a new take may end up with iconic status or be dismissed as a passing fad. In any case, I and it seems multitudes of others have had a belly full of formulas and party line and long for realness. Miller is nothing else if not real. Like him or not, what you get is his real deal. Except that I deduce that some of the realness actually got edited out for being a bit over-the-top raw. I say that because he used the phrase “what the hell” a couple of times on his web page but that doesn’t appear anywhere in the two books I read. I would bet $100 that this phrase salted the original manuscripts. So, the most real stuff we have available to us probably isn’t as real as reality, but a company has to sell books. Don’t mean to bash the publisher here as they really took a risk publishing this stuff and I applaud them for it. I am going to get to corporate mentality here. It just goes to show that even things we most directly stand against can seep into our modus operandi in subtle ways.

Anyway, Miller’s books are all about relationships and a couple of things that stuck with me after reading him involved people he mentions and so I felt good that maybe I caught some of the relational mindset as that is not my default mode. I do better with dealing with things than people normally, though I value the relational very much and try to be more that way.

Don refers to Ravi Zacharias in passing at one or two points. I don’t remember the exact context. I tried to find the passages this morning but couldn’t. No search feature available, unfortunately. In my dichotomous thinking, the thought of Ravi Zacharias set up a continuum in my mind with mysticism on one end and apologetics on the other. Zacharias is one of the great apologists for the Christian faith of our day. He is a brilliant man whose life is about articulating compelling intellectual, logical reasons for believing that Jesus is who he said he was and that the record we have of the whole deal in the Bible is actually truth. The apologist comes at Christianity from the angle of “is it true or not?” If it is true, then the only logical response is to live in a way compatible with it or be completely intellectually dishonest with one’s self or be insane.

The apologist looks at most of what we call evangelism in our day as presenting the Gospel as an answer to meeting felt needs. Your life is crummy, Jesus is the answer. Truth is somewhat cheapened because it doesn’t matter so much if it is true or not as long as it meets my felt need. Listen to John Travolta or Tom Cruise talk about Scientology and it makes sense that they believe in it because it is meeting their felt needs. Whether or not it is true is not really the point. We present Christ to the world using much the same marketing plan. But the strategy falls apart when you run into the rare person who seems to be happy with his or her life apart from Jesus. Self deceit notwithstanding, some folks profess this condition. If there is no felt need, and we are offering solutions to felt needs, then we have nothing to offer. Truth, on the other hand, is it’s own reward. It doesn’t matter what I need or want, a thing is either true or not on it’s own. The problem is that so many want to just swallow the blue pill. It doesn’t matter what is true as long as I make it through the day feeling okay.

Miller spends a good bit of time dealing with the mystical. He kind of dismisses the art and science of Christian apologetics as ending up in a spitting contest to see who is the smartest. He has a point. I have been around at least one very smart apologist who played that role well. Several times in my work I had occasion to spend time with another man who is on the short list of famous apologists of our time. He is brilliant and I admire him greatly. He is one of my modern day heroes of the faith. But I have to say after being near him, that he just lacked warmness. I think he could use a bit more of the mystical. He expended great energy reaching out to people. I would have to say he is extremely gracious. So much so that I tended to doubt it could possibly be completely genuine. He is a world-class glad-hander, smiling and saying the right words to make people feel they are valued and appreciated. But the few times I talked with him directly, I realized he was not listening. It was amazing and a true privilege to eat a meal at a table with him or hang out, but the man is so full of ideas that the flow out of him is endless. He has to take input somehow as his thoughts are full of observation, but one-on-one it’s like he has a disability. He can’t seem to hear anybody. It was like a friend of mine said of another famous Christian writer he grew up around of whom he said, “it’s like he’s always writing a book in his head.” So, though he is still a hero of mine, he is not a guy I think I could be very good friends with. In fact, though I also spent some time around guys who were supposed to be some of his best friends, I wondered whether he really had any truly close friends. I wondered if he even knew what it was like to have a really close friendship, one that went two ways. And frankly, I felt sorry for him. But I digress.

Miller tells of being compelled to believe in Jesus. It fits in with the concept of predestination pretty well. Bottom line, the reasons for belief he lays out are pretty weak intellectually. There is basically no compelling argument offered. It is all about the mystical. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not disparaging what he has to say. It is good stuff. I’m not going to reiterate a lot here. My point is the continuum I mentioned.

So, on one end we have the mystical aspects of faith and the stuff about Jesus we just can’t quite quantify. There are concepts like the Bible being the “living word of God,” a unique book that has boundless depths of more to offer, peeling away like skins on an onion every time I come back to it. The entirety of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Biblical record is about the supernatural. About reality outside of what we know. Everything about Jesus’ life, our hope for life after death, it’s all about the supernatural. So in that sense, one cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.

I have been in church since I was born. And I have been fairly mobile most of my life. We moved a number of times when I was a kid and a whole bunch of times during my adulthood. And we spent a couple of years doing the support raising thing which ran us around to countless churches, mission conferences, and so on. So I’ve been in lots of churches. Quite a variety of denominations and traditions. It’s ironic how evangelical churches shy away from the mystical. There is plenty of lip service paid to it, but in real life, day to day activity, it is all but denied. It makes sense when you look at some traditions that lift up the mystical with great pomp and circumstance, towering cathedrals and flowing robes, but pitiful emptiness echoing throughout. And then there are the televangelists trying to sell snake oil to everybody. It makes the idea of the mystical an embarrassing absurdity.

Moving along, one would think that the discomfort level with mysticism would push someone toward the other end of my continuum, which would be to embrace logic and apologetics. And some get into it deeply. But, by and large, the average church-goer warming a pew on Sunday morning can offer little “reason for the hope that lies within you,” let alone a grasp for the contents of “Evidence That Demands a Verdict.”

The point of my blithering here is that it seems to me, in a broad sense, that the evangelical church is not even on this continuum. So where is it? My answer is cynical and I welcome comments to make me see things in a more compassionate way. But it seems to me the church has gotten distracted from presenting the braid of mysticism and logic wrapping around and through each other and is chasing supply and demand driven by marketing. The corporatization of the church has brought it down to the level of something that conveniently fits into our lives rather than something that towers above them. The Bible clearly shows us that being a disciple of Jesus is the opposite of convenient. Paul’s idea of us being “of all men most miserable” if not for the hope of existence beyond this life is completely incompatible with the church as corporation.

Well this certainly has gotten long. If a sign of good writing is getting big ideas into a small amount of words, then this is an excellent example of the opposite. If you have born with me this long, I’d certainly appreciate your response.

(note: Much of this thought is thanks to the influence of Dr. J.P. Moreland.)