South wind shivers the leaves an anxious relief from summer's heat,and the moon fights a thin cover that might, in another season, be a storm.

Bushes groan laments against the splintered fence, and grass blades whisper a chatter so quiet you get closely and do not hear it.

The man wants sleep but wonders: do enemies yet live? Every liar is a mirror and every friend what I want, so perhaps I should wonder, do friends yet live? Is there a language more vague than friends and this wind?

She has traveled with this man where brown fields are the truth of mid-day heat and wondered how she truly knows one who smiles through words so difficult to say.

Do distant oaks stand a line of cool? Or, like thunderheads over the mountains, offer relief delivering pressure?

They live life like the gap in the stride of shoe falls, longing to hear a word so true it is substance, yearning to blanket love in the rise and fall cave of winds where close marches the beat of motive.

But the south wind blows through the screen a channel of breath between two backs in bed. The anxiety of trees is music for dreaming.

Sermon audio: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately? This question from the community invites me to do what some believe I do best: criticize my own subculture. Of course, I will answer, "Evangelicals often do not portray Jesus accurately." And, of course, I will try to specify which evangelical qualities are misleading. By merely asking this question, someone has presumed a negative answer.

There is a larger issue. What attitude should we have toward the deepening problems of evangelical churches?

The criticisms from emergents that American evangelicals are Christianized consumers, that they lack authentic community, that their worship is stilted, and that they are not on the side of the poor all have merit. The doctrinal criticisms from the reformed movement (MacArthur, Piper, et al.) rightly indict the lack of biblical integrity among many evangelicals. Even the criticisms that the church growth movement has made over the past thirty years -- that churches are not reaching non-Christians -- are accurate. (The criticisms just happen to be accurate of the church growth movement itself, as well.)

Put all of these criticisms together, and the picture is dire. A movement that is not growing, not intellectually coherent, and not engaged with other cultures is a movement near death.

James Stockdale, one of the most famous American POWs in North Vietnam, has been used as an example of how to survive dire situations by business author Jim Collins. (The book is Good To Great.) What kind of man did not survive the POW experience? Stockdale said the optimist, the man who was sure he'd be home by Christmas, but whose steadily retreating target dates for release were never kept. The positive thinkers died.

The survivors, said Stockdale, had two things. They had faith that they would survive, and discipline to confront the brutal facts of their environment. Collins tagged this the "Stockdale paradox," the irony that unstinting honesty about dire situations can actually bolster the faith one needs to survive.

I want to see evangelicals eschew optimism about their predicament.

Let's take, as an example, their recent explosion of support for Gov. Sarah Palin. Personally, I like her. She gives a great speech. I admire her decision not to abort her baby boy, and I respect the way she and her husband have handled the appalling media abuse of their 17-year-old daughter. I think the clash of the classes her nomination has provoked is good old-fashioned political fun.

But the adulation of her by evangelicals is in one important respect delusional. She will not change Washington from the vice president's mansion -- populists to the contrary. She will not change American culture. She will not even change the culture of evangelical churches -- though she reflects and represents them well. Her presence on the national stage simply does not address the spiritual issues we face.

We won't be freed from the dire evangelical crisis by Christmas.

A brutal honesty about our future says:

1. Our compromise with America's consumer society has been a disaster. Consumerism will have to be rooted out of our churches soul by soul.
2. Our transformation of churches into entertainment platforms has been a disaster. Devout worship of the living God will have to be rediscovered soul by soul.
3. Our financial selfishness will have to be corrected by the good hand of God soul by soul, until we are once again the people who stand with the poor.
4. Our doctrinal ignorance and folly has turned our brains to mud. Knowledge of the truth will have to be taught soul by soul.
5. Our fear of the cultures around us, and our refusal to interact meaningfully with them -- that is, interact beyond marketing ploys -- has left us unable to articulate the gospel in our own time. Soul by soul, we will have to rebuild a vigorous way of life and witness in hostile territory.

I believe that, once we are honest about these things, we will have ground for a strong faith that Christianity will survive and prosper in the future. The moment we look at these five realities, harsh though they are, we realize that the tool for teaching soul by soul is everywhere in this country: the local church. The body of Christ in its many meetings has been doing this job for centuries. We just need to start doing the job again.

Our ultimate ground for faith is our Lord and his plan. As we follow him afresh, Jesus is well able to portray himself accurately in his churches.

The liar sat at the table drinking his favorite beer.Calloused, bloated feet scuffed the tile and the ocean air breezed through the open windows. He ranted his gravel voice his views on politics, on prisons, on children.

He stood in the entry as we were going out, elated and stamped the booming floor, growled at them, clawed the air a stained hand, man as animal in jubilant pretend and the dog barked, shivering.

We took the boys to the beach so they chased the waves in and out and screamed happy fear, a child's fear of danger that never quite touches. But of a sudden they were quiet and sat making signs with driftwood. We laughed to them the meanings but their serious faces cast mystery.

Seagulls sounded the kind of cry that pierces a pleasant dream. The dog snapped at their shadows as they passed across the sand

So, those of you who have been missing the sermon audio for the Tough Questions series can now get the mp3 file on this blog. I have put the audio for the first four sermons in their respective posts here, here, here, and here. I'll continue to do so until the church puts up a new site. Thanks for your patience.

Sermon audio: Can We Live Like the Devil and Go To Heaven? I left the wording of this question exactly the way it came to me. I like the flamboyance. But I do wonder how anyone came to ask it at all. I think one factor is the evangelical reliance on the sinner's prayer.

Here's the gist: "Jesus, please forgive my sins because of your death on the cross. I ask to you live in my heart, and to give me eternal life." People are exhorted to pray this way to become Christians, and many have been encouraged to see their prayer as the guarantee of their new life in Christ. After praying this, we've been told, you cannot lose your salvation.

Our questioner is asking how strong that guarantee is.

My own relationship with the sinner's prayer has been troubled.

In a sense, my Christian life did begin by "praying the prayer." One evening when I was five, my dad was giving me a piano lesson. At one point, he stopped talking about music and asked if I'd ever invited Jesus into my heart. I said no. So we prayed together and that same night my parents took me to both sets of grandparents to tell what I had done. Which was better than finishing my scales.

Dad told me recently that he saw a marked change in me after that prayer.

In another sense, however, the prayer was not the beginning of my Christian life. It only summed up what the Lord had already been doing in my heart-and-mind, and gave expression to a faith I already had. Crucial aspects of walking with the Lord came later in my experience, and these were more deliberate moments of commitment.

In my teenage years, I wondered what the sinner's prayer really accomplishes.

Some of the things I saw growing up in church had made me skeptical. One Sunday morning a man gave his testimony, telling a great story of how he came to pray the prayer. A couple weeks later, I overheard a conversation that my mom had on the phone, in which she learned that this man had left his wife for another woman.

I saw kids in youth group go forward during the altar calls at big conferences. We would throw a party over the sinner's repentance, only to see him continue his immoral lifestyle. In fact, few of the converts from youth group remained Christians past college.

The more questions I asked about salvation, the more I heard answers that didn't work.

One idea was that those who abandoned the Christian life after praying the prayer were still eternally saved. I thought it was simply unbelievable, flying in the face of both direct experience and scriptural teaching. Another idea was that lapsed converts didn't believe "enough," which wasn't any clearer to me. By and by, I learned that there was a theological category for "carnal Christians," who live like the devil but make it to heaven anyway. Another flop, as we'll study on Sunday morning.

I concluded that the Christian life was founded on something larger than one prayer. (More thoughts here.)

But after years of wrestling, I'm returning to the sinner's prayer because it does accomplish a few basic things.

It gives a person words.

Someone who senses the reality of Christ needs a way to express his faith, even if he has a church background and biblical knowledge. When a person recognizes his sense of Christ in the words of the sinner's prayer, and adopts those words as his own, his understanding grows.

The prayer also articulates a beginning.

Repentance has to start somewhere, and the prayer offers an excellent place. Viewed as the start of an earthly life of hope in Jesus Christ -- as opposed to the final purchase of a ticket to heaven -- the prayer can frame a person's future decisions about right and wrong, personal crises, and relationships.

The sinner's prayer can even set that hope into a pattern.

If someone confesses sin specifically, seeks forgiveness explicitly, and asks for the work of the Spirit, then she has a model for a spiritual discipline she can use every day. When salvation is taught as the work of God rather than the result of a prayer formula, there is less danger of her thinking that she's "lost her salvation" when she sins, and more encouragement to return to her salvation's source.

The biggest virtue of the sinner's prayer is that it can put the individual face-to-face with Christ. The person summons the courage to address God -- no small thing. He asks for something according to God's promise. And he starts acting on the belief that Jesus is not dead but alive.

In other words, the work of God in a person's soul is what guarantees salvation, not a prayer -- however significant that prayer may be. The Christian life is founded on God himself.

And what poetry is there to write here?Achievement lacks the labors of time and borders the safe guard of hazard: truly the place where dreams come true.

You slide from scene to scene and no meaning takes you. Over large creatures still their faces and no words greet you.

What can I say? Not even the irony of unhappy kids and angry parents is of any value. Just believe in your heart that you are good and lo! Dreams come true.

Yet outside the castle lives an animal more demon than any fairytale. Off the road where busses pace and beyond the median of mowed grass stands a wall of tree and vine yet untouched. Look and you cannot see. Enter and you may not know. But she is there like a myth in the swampy heart of your careful footfalls: Perhaps her thick green hide once beautiful skin, her yellow eyes once blue, their narrow once innocent. Do not look and you will see. Stand too close and then you know when the hiss and the steam: It was like this that men once called her Dragon.

Sermon audio: Should God Send People To Hell? Henry Adams, the 19th century man of letters, said that his sister Louisa was "quick, sensitive, wilful . . . energetic, sympathetic and intelligent . . . ." In their relationship as adults, Adams wrote (referring to himself in the third person) that "he was delighted to give her the reins -- to let her drive him where she would." (The Education of Henry Adams, Riverside Editions, 1973, p 85)

In 1870, Louisa was thrown from a cab in Italy, and by the time Adams arrived from London at her bedside, he wrote, "Tetanus had already set in." "Hour by hour the muscles grew rigid, while the mind remained bright, until after ten days of fiendish torture she died in convulsions." (p 287)

Adams wrote, "[T]he idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. . . . God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person." (p 289)

In so exaggerating the biblical view of God, Adams expressed what many 19th century people were thinking about God and human suffering. God could never cause or permit torment. The idea was unbearable. So He was portrayed more and more as impersonal, a new, humanitarian god rising over inhumane urban landscapes, and rising very much in the distance -- uninvolved in real life, only in idealized dreams.

But here is the way Adams described Louisa's end, one paragraph before his rejection of God's being a person. In her death, Adams had finally seen "Nature." Read the passage (p 288) at length, if you can:

Nature enjoyed [her death], played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with midsummer blood. The sickroom itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

Though Henry Adams could not bear God as a person, he felt able to personify nature -- the nonrational, primal person tormenting Louisa, and loving it. In fact, Adams was working up to the theme of his Education, that the essence of modern life is the shift from God's power to Nature's. Human beings are still held by vast forces, but at least the savagery squashes us without reason.

It's hard for me to see what problem Adams solved.

Many evangelicals seem to have appropriated Adams' vaporized god. When the issue is even more intense than human suffering, like the question I got this year about whether God should send people to hell, evangelicals often spin into waltzes of abstraction. They hope to make the doctrine of hell bearable with banal euphemisms.

The gold standard for evading the realities of the biblical hell has been set by the phrase, Christless eternity. That is where unbelievers go, into that . . . whatever it is. The phrase is a gem of emotional dishonesty: one feels that a Christless eternity must be quite bad, but only theoretically. The apparent doom is enough to cover the phrase's total inaccuracy (Revelation 14.9-11).

In such versions of hell, God is safely depersonalized. He is absent, passive, merely allowing unbelievers to feel their poverty. Evangelicals often do the same thing with hell that Adams did with human suffering in general: make God incapable of involvement. Evangelicals apparently feel that the picture of a Personality capable of vengeance is indefensible.

But in order to answer questions about hell, that very picture is the one we must face. The Bible claims that God will take judicial vengeance on those who revile him (Jude 8-16). In fact, when the Bible pictures God in judgment, it places his personal hatred of sin front and center. Psalm 2.4-6, in which God laughs at the kings of the earth and terrifies them by pointing to Messiah, is a relatively tame example. The final judgment, as Christ himself taught it in Matthew 25.31-46, is explicitly a personal cursing of the wicked.

So evangelicals should not pretend that the question about hell is whether God punishes sin actively and personally. He does. The question is whether he is right. That is the issue we address on Sunday.

Like Adams, evangelicals do not solve any problems with a vaporized god. Hell is no less painful, no less eternal, when it is described in euphemisms. We should deal with hell as it is, not as a place where God turns away from sinners in disappointment, but as a place where He turns toward sinners, those who never wavered in their hatred of Him, with personal, perfect fury.

Hell is, by definition, unbearable.

How many times the heroic have gone down this roadby the same swamp of flat-tufted green and spiking palm, under the same grave yard sky where thunderheads cast their menace, to the same rockets, those beasts of a single rage, rockets.

Hear their eruption and feel you tremble. How to ride on thundering fear to severe stillness? There is no mistaking the child's will in this, for why have we gone if not wonder?

How many times the heroic have died in the blue beyond, held up and suffocated in their perch, pushed up and obliterated in the form of Y. Victorious pontificate peace on the efforts of the dead, but is not the hand of God a terrible mischief?

See its motion and feel you humble like the minds of ancients who first heard them babble. There's no mistaking the child's fear in this, for why have we gone if not pride?

How many times the heroic have dreamed off this road where once there was no road at all, where a man's leather boot first broached a world of flat and vulnerable, moist and alien horizon. He saw no familiar of sharp mountains and dusty plains, felt no weight of throne and icon comfort. He spoke to a world whose voice he could not hear, this slave of the stretched finger rule, and called it for a possession.

Hear the words and feel you disdain the proclamations of our former greatness. There's no mistaking the fall of the child. He rises above his father with a steel body and a furnace mind, sparks from which the stars themselves shine no equal.

Sermon audio: Should Faith Influence Politics? I once tried to be a speechwriter for a gubernatorial candidate in Oregon.

The former five-term congressman was fighting to win the Republican nomination, and his staff thought he needed help in the English language department. He began speeches by saying, "You all know I'm a straight shooter. So what you hear tonight is coming straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart." His researcher winced every time she heard it.

Since I was a recent graduate of the congressman's alma mater, someone recommended me to the campaign manager as a speechwriter. So, by and by, I showed up at the headquarters wearing chalk stripes and carrying a portfolio of political stuff I'd written, and I got the volunteer position.

At one point during the interview, the manager left me sitting alone in her cubicle. I happened to look up, and was startled to see the congressman, his hand in the trouser pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, chewing gum and staring at me without any intention of saying hello.

He didn't want a speechwriter.

The first meeting I attended was with the congressman, the manager, and the researcher. The goal was to produce an op-ed about the release of a murderer because, that year, the crime issue was a good bet for mobilizing voters. But we got stuck on the first line. "The first line," said the congressman, "has to be, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

Silence. The researcher offered, "We could start by stating what we're objecting to." The manager nodded.

"No. Just, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

The meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He didn't want to be told what to say.

There were road trips. Several of us would pile into a Lincoln and roar down the I-5 at 90 mph, the radar detector blinking on the dashboard. One would think it was an ideal time to get to know the man whose voice I was supposed to capture in writing. But the candidate took numerous calls, chatted with the driver, and read position papers. I had very pleasant conversations with his wife -- number three, very smart.

I watched and listened to the congressman for a day, and returned a week later with a draft. I handed the speech to him, the manager smiling, and without so much as a glance, he handed it to the driver. "I won't be using it today." And we were off again.

But a few miles up the freeway, the phone rang. It was the manager. She asked the congressman if he was on the speaker phone, which he was. So he switched to the hand-held. "Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah." Click. He reached into the pile of papers his driver had put in the car and read through my speech.

"It's good. Yeah. I like it. Some good lines in there."

But he went back to "straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart."

Evangelicals have savored their few moments of influencing politics. But they haven't achieved the cultural change they were hoping for. The country hasn't turned to Christ. Families are not measurably stronger because of any legislation passed. The main evangelical successes have been in opposition to gay marriage and abortion, not in advancing a vision for the country.

The lack of progress boils down to resources.

In politics, you have to influence a five-term congressman. You have to be big enough, mobilizing a large enough constituency or having the money to lobby him. Or, you have to have access to the person who influences how much funding goes to his district. Or, you have to have helped elect him in the first place.

Fundamentally, he must want to listen to you. And even that is not enough. He can think of many reasons to listen to a lot of other people too.

Evangelicals have committed vast resources -- not just financially, but in terms of grass roots organization, media time, and depth of experience -- to influencing five-term congressmen. They have been successful at becoming big. But now they are experiencing again how hard it is to move a nation from the top.

What would have happened if, for the last twenty years, they had committed the same resources to making disciples for Christ? Imagine the impact on American culture if local churches had been successful at saving marriages, nurturing new generations of Christians, deepening people's knowledge of the Bible, and developing their capacity to pray. Imagine the impact if local churches had been as passionate about God's priorities as they've been about ballot initiatives.

When confronted with what it really costs to make disciples, most evangelicals for the past twenty years have said the same thing. "We don't have the resources. We don't have the time, the money, or the patience. We can barely make disciples of our own kids."

The sad reality of these two decades is that political parties have been able to attract evangelical resources, but the cause of making disciples has not. We will talk about the political implications of this reality on Sunday morning.

My candidate for governor got the nomination, but went down in flames that November. My effort to influence him didn't even survive the primaries. He fired the campaign manager.

There is one thing that will make a five-term congressman want to listen. A cultural transformation in his district. The question is, how much do evangelicals really want to influence politics? Are they willing to move a nation from the bottom?

It's easy to see sometimes why they hate us,looking up from the pit to where our mouths consume without tasting and our eyes receive without knowing. We build the world on the floor of our amusement. We watch tiny players from too great a distance to see them move. And the props of their lives far too removed to arouse concern. Shacks perch on a parched earth hillside where bruised girl clings the tough guy who's a boy. Laced tight canopy covers bone-skin child more tightly than his shirt, standing in the mouth of a hut. Drawn old city mother hocks her daughter, toothless come-on, breasts plunging red-shirt. Cathedral relentless squanders heaven's citizens inside a wall of some 800 years. There live the motionless. There live the numbered. There they soak up storms and feel the great cloud of the protected.

Have pity on us, so hard to pity. Arrogance is not the excess but the defense of a stomach that expands and is never full. We try and we try, but no hardship we create makes the having worthwhile. Children of divine warning we are sky high as good as on ground. Ears hear their satisfaction from emotion's stick. Eyes see their possession in the screen thought placed it. Where ever a man goes there he finds with him the device of his anesthetism so no comfort is too evasive, no squalor too great to draw water from the well of empathy. And the landscape orbits beneath us.

We are not a country called so by contours of earth. Day by day and night by night she tells of what she knows, of lights and signs, of chaos waters and those alien to air, of valleys fragile enough to break and mountains strong enough to shake. This before stars were gas, continents shifts of pressure and the land a prop for slogans, when no built psyche her space of three dimension evils could hazard, when gates opened only imagination could walk through and longings ached only the prophet could speak to. Do we feel? The desert is empty, the prophet is gone. He long since has spoken what long since has come. Yet even here it vibrates the ground from where it first shook.

So do not be anxious over what we have, wealth transcends nothing. No one's heart can make him a fortress of paper or a guard of digits. We are all the black and the frightened chased down by the huntsman for curse or for blessing. And yes, the numbered lie here as well. Even in the palace of our distraction where castle dreams sparkle so unnaturally grey and fear is figures of paper mache and Jamaica and Aruba are but walking distance by a pink brick path that follows along the white sand, the thick grass, the man-made lake. Even here there are clouds above us. They gather and hang and the suspended air begins to break. A man and his son hold hands when they realize they are walking nowhere in the rain.

V. You have said the righteous is like a tree planted in a garden by a river. The world passes by and they wonder: Who are these that stand like guards of no gold?

They are silent. Then they speak but not words understandable to natural ears. They are still. Then they move as if by force. They are deaf, but silence is like hearing.

The world mocks, the world laughs: the world. But Your river runs from spring to ocean and in the slow and deep You are there.

The roots of Your trees emerge from the bank to take more urgently what nurtures them, and they lean out over the river, that to revere.

Sermon audio: Should a Christian Question Authority? I'll tell you about the time I got sent away for counseling.

When I matriculated at Willamette University in 1989, freshlings were herded through a course on world views. That year, the powers assigned readings from Victorian England -- Mill, Dickens, Marx, et al. -- and we were supposed to discuss them seminar-style. This was intended as a perspective-softener. We would get points of view from other times, other social strata, and other students, and we would come to the breezy but Correct conclusion that the world is not as we assumed.

But what the powers intended as a means of softening my perspective, I took as a means of expressing it. Well, I thought, they said we should discuss. So I did discuss. I discussed what I thought of Darwin's theory, Mill's utilitarianism, and the university's relativistic world view -- all of which I'd had the distinct impression was relevant. But I discussed my perspective without the least intention of softening it, which meant I wasn't really obeying the powers.

My professor took me aside after about two weeks and said, "I want you to go talk to Charlie." She meant Charles Wallace, the university chaplain. She was nice about it, but she'd clearly had enough. You're a Christian, she seemed to say. Maybe Charlie the Christian will know what to do with you.

2008 is the third year I've collected questions from the community about spiritual and moral issues for a sermon series. (The link to the two previous years is on my blogroll.) The first question that jumped out at me from this year's batch was, "Should Christians question authority?"

I have to admit my bias.

I have a contentious personality. For me, arguing is fun, and arguing with authority figures is even better. Winning those arguments is so much fun that it's probably immoral.

So I chose to address the question about authority because it appealed to my baser instincts.

In addition, trouble-making is part of my heritage. My grandfather, my great aunts and uncles, my dad and his sister, have all been contrarian and stubborn. On vacation, I took my family to visit Aunt Jan, who has used her genetic sonar for absurdity well and often. Over breakfast (french toast battered with eggs and whiskey), we sounded off against Mel Gibson's Passion, the evangelical mania over it, and its theology. We also shared precious moments of confrontation with the film's devotees.

In the end, however, we had to agree that the underlying reason we hated it was that everybody loved it. Tell me the last time everybody was right.

But personal and familial biases aside, I also chose to address the question about authority because of the questioner's sensitivity. The woman asked specifically about the virtue of meekness. Can a Christian habitually criticize those in authority without becoming arrogant? Don't we owe submission to those over us?

I have learned valuable truths by over-exercising my critical faculties. I've learned, for example, that the vast majority of people hate arguing. Contention fills them with dread, and they will not voice their opinion if they fear that someone will debate them. This has led me to nurture discussion by shutting my mouth. I've also seen that the process of learning must go deeper than mere questioning. If I am really going to learn a subject or a skill, I have do things contrary to my experience and instinct. That means, again, shutting my mouth so that I can submit to my teacher.

These are good arguments for meekness.

But I have learned something else. While critical questioning is a terrible way to discover whether an authority is speaking the truth, it is a great way to discover whether the authority is interested in nourishing, imparting, engaging, and being understood, or whether he is merely interested in conformity. The authority figures I've known who nurture life in their students have all embraced criticism as a sign of a living mind.

What we face today is not the authority of a few. We face the authority of the masses, the despotism of the People. We face the unrelenting tyranny of everybody's opinion. We used to wear what displayed our place in our culture. Now we wear the latest fad. The legacy of ethics used to teach us how to make decisions. Now, our decisions are dictated by fashion, and our ethics are retrofitted rationalizations.

I think that churches, in this environment, need to focus less on controlling people's behavior than on educating their consciences. This means using the authority of parents and elders to earn submission and to empower people to question. I believe that the church where this is achieved will continue to make new Christians, generation after generation. That is the theme I will preach on Sunday morning.

At Willamette, I went to the appointment my professor had already scheduled with Charlie. I don't remember much about our session, except that we ended up trading favorite scenes from Monty Python, and that I continued in class as usual. Charlie the Christian did indeed know what to do with me.

But I wouldn't have known what to do at Willamette if I hadn't been given a trained conscience.

IV There, a shaft of light falls on a gnarled branch cut down some time ago and left alone. And, there, the river's shallows gurgle round a limb like a claw lifeless on the bed.

A tree stands pained from the loss of its hand like a man on a corner in a world of concrete and steel, bewildered by cars that pass and people who speak without talking

because the things he called his life are gone and unreachable. Though he grit his teeth and strain to get them back, still they are gone.

And in the garden the snake rattle curses for the Gardener comes to shape those He loves. But the snake will not find one leaf fallen.

A lot of people I know are revising their understanding of the gospel. I worry about those who aren't. Much of what we learn about Christ comes from the communities in which we worship and the traditions of interpretation those communities embody. Though we say we learn truth from the Bible alone, our actual doctrines often come from other human beings, and this way of learning is not necessarily wrong.

But over time, many believers can't sustain the assumptions they inherit. I know former charismatics who question the mysticism they grew up with, former Baptists who bristle at the legalism of their parents, and former megachurch attenders who have grown weary of the showmanship they used to admire. Such believers find their assumptions challenged by spiritual failures, family struggles, and church conflicts. They either revise their understanding of the gospel or they give up on Christianity.

These crises are often healthy. No community of believers has everything solved, and learning your community's shortcomings can help you grow in Christ. We need to be disillusioned now and then.

But there's potential for a wild goose chase.

Believers can search endlessly for the solution to The Problem With Christians Today, taking a tour of various communities. The Baptist thumbs through Calvin, perhaps, to discover grace, but wonders if he can go as far as infant baptism. The megachurch refugee knocks on doors until she finds a human-proportioned body of believers. But that body proves not be as caring as she had hoped.

I don't think we were designed for rootless spirituality. Living on tour can make one's disillusionment permanent.

Brian McLaren records his own tour through communities of faith in a chapter of A Generous Orthodoxy called, "The Seven Jesuses I Have Known" (pp 43-89). He shows how Jesus is portrayed by different traditions -- which parts of Jesus' ministry they emphasize, which teachings they embrace, which they overlook.

"The Conservative Protestant Jesus" came to die, says McLaren, to save people from hell. But that's pretty much it. "The Pentecostal/Charismatic Jesus" is "up close, present, and dramatically involved in daily life," but tends to make people proud of their advancement in spiritual experience. "The Roman Catholic Jesus" rises from the dead, and so defeats everything associated with death.

McLaren says that by his mid-20s, he had incorporated all three of these views into his understanding of Jesus. He believed that "each was a new facet, a new dimension, of the Jesus I had met as a child." He proceeds through the visions of the eastern orthodox, the liberal protestants, the anabaptists, and the revolutionaries. He talks persuasively about these communities because he's interacted with each of them directly.

But the only thing McLaren seems to have taken from his tour are snapshots. His criticisms of the Jesus of this or that tradition are mostly oversimplifications (the evangelical Jesus only dies). Even when he praises a tradition, his comments are too often trite and sentimentalized. For instance: "If the Evangelical Jesus saves by dying, the Pentecostal Jesus by sending his Spirit, and the Catholic Jesus by rising from death, the Eastern Orthodox Jesus saves simply by being born, by showing up, by coming among us."

That's like a Hallmark card from Constantinople. Whatever credibility McLaren might gain by his generosity, he loses by his dilettantism. His breezy commendations of the good in each tradition imply that he has outgrown all traditions.

Our communities can teach good lessons too well. We can stop learning, and the truths we stand upon can make us lame. Other traditions within Christianity serve to remind us that the Bible has unfamiliar passages just as worthy of our devotion as the familiar ones.

But I fear McLaren doesn't make this kind of point at all.

If orthodoxy is ultimately unknowable and all traditions merely approximate what lies unreachable in God's mind, then the tour of traditions is a revelation of truth in itself. In fact, McLaren seems to honor a beatific vision conceived by intellectual sentimentality, the abstracted life. The true human being has no constraints on his mind, no prejudices, no blinders, no culture. He is free. He embraces all perspectives. He has risen above partisanship and has attained the nirvana of the holistic worldview.

This vision of life without intellectual limits is beguiling. But like all sentimental pets, it doesn't actually exist. We need our roots, constraints and all.

They speak, these of the congregation,as the wind moves unseen when it comes, only heard as each one is touched by it, and looked for when it leaves the garden silent.

Then it stirs the maple, leaves like a wave under its touch rustle down words to stillness. The wind gone again, then appears below where, distant, the anxious elm flutters.

The bird stares down from limbs not her own. The rattle snake coils up and waits among the pruned branches and starving weeds

and parched soil sifts in from out like sand until the wind, gathered up, drives these gone and the trees groan among themselves and sing.

Intellectuals thrive on complexity. They regard certainty and simplicity as signs of immaturity, and they have some good reasons. Take Brian McLaren's critique of mainstream evangelicalism. McLaren has identified an attitude that is a hindrance to everything from effective persuasion to loving fellowship. The attitude is the us v. them, chip-on-the-shoulder, we're-right-they're-wrong impatience with which evangelicals tend to deal with the wide surrounding world. From his writings, one gathers that McLaren has had enough.

The problem with evangelical pomposity is that it has preempted learning. If we're right and they're wrong, then all we have to do is stay right. Tell the unbelievers one more time why their views on abortion, education, government, and values are heinous. Our fidelity to the truth can reduce to repeated talking points -- say it again, this time with feeling! -- a tactic that shuts out feedback and degrades relationships to mere exchanges of rhetorical bullets.

McLaren wants to change this attitude, and he is right. I have devoted many posts to the cultural backwater that is evangelical populism, where applications of truth are stagnant.

But McLaren's desire for greater openness seems to have led him to oversimplifications of his own, and ultimately to a redefinition of truth itself. The book is, of course, A Generous Orthodoxy.

His now-famous modification of orthodoxy with generous suggests that orthodoxy by itself is petty. When he comes to defining what orthodoxy is, McLaren starts this way (p 28): "For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,' as opposed to ‘what they think.'" For McLaren, orthodoxy tends to be petty because most people view it in adversarial terms.

The sentence is an early bit of slippage. I know many self-satisfied Christians who like few things better than to hear the us v. them story again and call it Christianity. But their pettiness does not determine what orthodoxy is. McLaren is building up to his redefinition by implying a simple choice between orthodoxy alone (petty) and orthodoxy plus generosity (loving).

His alternative definition comes in the next sentence. "In contrast, orthodoxy in this book may mean something like ‘what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.'" The truth is beyond our reach, in God's mind, and the various factions of human spirituality each have pieces of it. To follow orthodoxy, according to this definition, is to be generous to the other factions and to learn from them.

Orthodoxy may mean that. It may mean something like that. In this book.

The care with which McLaren poses as tentative and playful is necessary to disguise the enormity of what he puts over in that definition. Orthodoxy is inaccessible. It's "what God knows." This is a romanticist punt, even transcendentalist. Emerson could've written it, irony and all. Intellectuals may feed on such continually evolving knowledge, but the gruel is too thin for simple believers.

Actual Christian orthodoxy teaches that God himself is incomprehensible, but that he has given us a revelation of his nature and will by which he is knowable. Orthodoxy is not in God's mind. It's in his Word, both written and incarnate. It's accessible. The distinction between the living God and the doctrines about him --the distinction that ought to keep us humble -- already thrives where theology is a scholarly discipline rather than a grass-roots rallying point.

But I just ran smack into another sentence closing McLaren's paragraph on orthodoxy. McLaren says, "Most people are too serious, knowledgeable, and busy for such an unorthodox definition of orthodoxy." So he makes an intriguing definition tentatively and then bluffs his way out of being examined, an escape-hatch from accountability that he seems to open pretty often.

The definition I've analyzed comes in a chapter titled, "For Mature Audiences Only." How would McLaren define mature? I'll venture a definition for him: "For most people, maturity means being accountable for what you say. In contrast, maturity in this book may mean something like being comfortable with irony."

I hope we can learn and grow as human beings without intellectual games.

You have taken them from across the world.Uprooted from their native soil, planted in this foreign sanctuary, strangers by instinct, they grow together.

The Banksia Rose creeps her sinewed vines ‘round the rough branches of the ancient oak; the gray smoothed trunk of the Honey Locust patient behind the swaying Jerusalem Thorn.

Such coexistence not found in nature You make a habitat in Your garden that enforests, for on it no bounds are set.

Where once there was barren land, the elm gently ‘clines across the bamboo straight of the ground that resonates to the footsteps of God.

I. You have said the righteous is like a tree planted in a garden by a river. Your river runs its course from spring to ocean carving its slow and deep mark in the earth;

rushing its way through the wild lands, stone gorges and meadows painfully green; looping back and forth the valley like a string in frozen fall to the mouth of the sea.

Where the river is most deep and slow channels divert to water Your trees and surround them as far as they might grow.

They grow tall from Your care and their roots entangle for theirs is not to journey. But the world passes by scoffing under their shade

Intellectualism has long said, to coin a phrase, "Everything must change." Will emergent intellectuals be any different from the utopians of the past? Not so far. Their knowledge seems enslaved to ideology: Evil is built into our social structures. Racism is systemic. Economic inequality is institutional. War is the result of the military industrial complex. Poverty in the developing world is the legacy of imperialism, imposed first by Western colonial powers and then by cold war superpowers. So, if we're serious about addressing all these problems, the world has to be reorganized.

Fortunately, this is now possible.

A new generation has outgrown the confines of the Enlightenment and is emerging into postmodernity. We no longer think in outmoded ways. We're no longer shackled by the prejudices of ye olde puritanism, or the bigotry of Western thought, or the obsession with proving others wrong. We know that we can change everything because we have what previous generations lacked: dialogue about theoretical models.

And all God's people said, "Yes we can!"

Utopianism of this kind has a pretty well-documented history. Michael Burleigh's recent book about the decline of Christendom, Earthly Powers (HarperCollins, 2005), narrates how political schemes for restructuring society gained religious authority. Among the vast collection of intellectuals Burleigh sketches is Auguste Comte (pp 229-230):

One of the fathers of modern social "science", who in 1839 coined the term "sociology", Comte sought to establish the philosophical basis for the sciences and for the scientific ordering and reform of society, a formula calculated to appeal to the right as well as the left. . . . [Comte's] Positivism was supposed to be a third way between the outmoded theologically grounded world of the ancien regime and an abstract, critical rationalism that had become anarchic and incapable of creating anything.

Burleigh continues:

The essence of his Religion of Humanity was to redirect mankind's spiritual energies away from the transcendental and towards the creation of a happier and more moral life here on earth through the worship of the best in man himself.

The idea that science must direct cultural change led to an array of horrors.

Burleigh narrates the course from Saint-Simon and Comte, among others, to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. Turning to older scholars, Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, showed the many responses of Anglo-American thinkers to the destruction of culture by utilitarian reformers. In The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued that centrally planned economies lead to tyranny. Jane Jacobs documented the dehumanizing impact of urban renewal dogma in The Death and Life of Great of American Cities. Paul Johnson scandalized the chattering classes with his book Intellectuals, which did the extreme disfavor of comparing the ideals of famous thinkers with their actual behavior.

And the emergents?

Infatuation with causes on the left is deepening, especially among younger evangelicals. It is now God's work to protest the war in Iraq, to bring about world peace, to end poverty all over the world, and to advocate environmental regulations. A renewed identification of the gospel with social justice can be heard in many churches, as well as impatience with the idea that salvation is for heaven and not for this world.

I am not saying that emergents are simply latter-day versions of Comte. But I will say that many of them are intellectuals in the old style. Their obsessive theorizing about the course of history and their absorption with grand political change are characteristic of alienated model-mongers. I see two problems with their leftward tilt, just as I see other problems with populist conservatism among evangelicals.

1. The evils of this world are not systemic, but spiritual. Reorganize, restructure, reform all you want, but the power of wickedness will merely shift. A culture is only transformed as the individuals who live in it are reborn in Christ. The reason evangelicals are failing spiritually in America is not that they have ignored progressive political causes, but that they have ignored the Holy Spirit's call to their own souls.

2. Evangelical pastors should not surrender their authority to intellectuals. Every generation since the French Revolution has seen vicars of "progress" emerge. These parsons, whom Malcolm Muggeridge used to call "tame clergymen," bow from their pulpits to the greater authority of Comte's social sciences, giving their benediction to whatever totalist model has favor this year, whether it's emissions caps or a UN war crimes tribunal. A pastor's authority is in his fidelity to the Bible, not to the consensus at Davos.

The linkage between the Kingdom of Christ and earthly power is an old, old folly. If emergents are unable to shake the euphoria of knowing how to change everything, they will end in the enclaves of bitterness, and nothing will have changed.

One night during my first year of college, I was riding with some fellow believers, all from the same InterVarsity group at Willamette University, and we were talking about the megachurch we attended. Willamette is a secular liberal arts school (its historical connection to Methodism is now purely notional). It's the oldest on the left coast, and has the ivy of the Ivy League without the pedigree. It is not the preserve of the wealthy, necessarily, but let's just say I was only there because of a scholarship. And, at that time, Willamette had little interaction with the surrounding community of Salem, Oregon.

The megachurch we all attended had a dynamic preacher and up-tempo music. It was known as a relatively wealthy church, the cars in the parking lots being a major indicator. Because of its youth group and extensive children's ministry, it was also the place in town for families, especially white ones.

My friends and I went there for the preacher, who was smart, likable, and passionate. But the wealth of the congregation, or maybe the display of it, was somewhat embarrassing. And the music was irritating. In all, my friends in the car were conflicted about the church, frustrated with it.

At last, one guy said, "It's just so middle class!" The rest laughed bitterly.

I was taken aback by the hostility in his voice, and by the others' identification with it. Even though I felt the same frustrations with that church as the others, I couldn't understand the contempt they were expressing for being bourgeois. It hadn't occurred to me to think of myself as having risen beyond my origins. My thought was, "All of you are middle class."

In that year of 1989, there wasn't a name for young evangelicals who went to liberal arts schools, took books, cinema, and ideas seriously, and explored such exotica as liberation theology. There wasn't a name for graduates who followed their passion for the poor into work with Habitat For Humanity. There wasn't enough momentum for politically liberal evangelicals at the start of Reagan's third term to gain a label. Nor was the suburban megachurch the object of scorn that it is now.

But today my friends would be called emergents.

I have spent time on this blog exploring the barren flats of evangelical populism. Now it is time to take a look at the swamp of evangelical intellectualism.

I should be clear about my use of the term. I'm not using intellectual as a synonym for scholar. A scholar is removed from ordinary life and work to pursue an academic discipline. An intellectual is not so much removed from ordinary life as disaffected from it. He is embittered by the lives other people lead, contemptuous of their lack of sophistication, and resentful of their lack of attention to his accomplishments. The intellectual class sees itself as society's critic, wrote Robert Bork in 1996 (Slouching Toward Gomorrah, p 83):

Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to utopian fantasies.

Not all farmers are populists. So, too, not all scholars are intellectuals in the sense I am describing. And, truth be told, very few intellectuals are scholars. Most are merely glib with general knowledge.

Think Al Gore. Tortured, complicated, afflicted by a sensitive conscience -- and proud of all three. He is not trained deeply in any academic field. He studies science not for knowledge but for advocacy. His career trajectory is typical of an intellectual: liberal arts training, journalism, politics. His intellectualism, at least in many people's eyes, redeems him from grubbiness. He's more than an advocate, more than a politician, because he's about ideas.

Some of intellectualism's cultural characteristics:

1. Urban, not rural.

2. Scornful of business and money. Money is corrupt, and the businesspeople who pursue it are all animated by greed -- all of them.

3. Contemptuous of patrimony. Wherever an intellectual came from, whatever class or location or religion, that is the seat of hypocrisy and sick living.

4. Patronizing toward the middle class. All those poor, narrow people who just work, work, work in their office cubicles and then go to Applebees, all those parents with massive strollers and screaming children, who've never even met a poor person, who've never gone to Guatemala, who only care about money and their 401Ks and the prohibitive cost of filling their SUVs ...

5. Able to evoke positive emotions only with abstractions. Obama.

I see all of these characteristics among emergents. Now, the emergent phenomenon is about many things -- theology, history, abuse by authority figures. Emergents target many legitimate evils: consumerism, a mistaken identification of Christ with the Republican party, the neglect of the arts. Many stories are coming together to make the emergent stream. But it's intellectualism that I am finding over and over again. Many emergents are about class.

Here's a funny thing. Both evangelical populism and intellectualism, even though they have the opposite cultural characteristics, lead us to the same place: grievance. I doubt that resentment is going to advance the Kingdom of Christ, whether it comes from self-satisfied middle class Americans or self-hating middle class Americans. So why do so many evangelicals seem to seethe with it?

My friend's outburst that night in 1989 showed me early signs of the splintering of evangelicalism, and nearly twenty years later I'm still trying to figure out what it means.