by Matthew Raley Last night, my wife and I heard the Miro Quartet play with two guest artists at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, OR. The power of their performances fed my recent thoughts on music and corporate worship (first, second, third, and fourth posts).

For Theodor Adorno, as I sketched last week, the concert we attended would have been a bourgeois exercise in museum-like conservation. The Miro's readings of Felix Mendelssohn's f minor quartet (Op. 80, No. 6) and Brahms' f minor piano quintet, Op. 34, (with Shai Wosner) would have been utterly false, mere escapist flattery of the middle class's delusions and fantasies.

Furthermore, the 2006 work Héliades by Philippe Hersant, which three members of the Miro played with flautist Ransom Wilson, would have struck Adorno as an unforgivable embrace of the audience, lacking any historical integrity whatsoever. He would have censured the broadly tonal harmonies and the false freedom of its subjectivity.

Adorno's doctrine was that the modern composer could only be truthful by following the internal logic of his composition and alienating the listener.

But as I was transported by the music-making in Portland, I couldn't help thinking that the music Adorno approved is almost a century old. The twelve-tone technique pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg was on the cutting edge of the first part of the 20th century, had a relatively brief hold on the academy as late as the 1970s, and never had a large audience (for obvious reasons).

All this time, "historically false" and "artistically dead" performances of old works for the "complacent bourgeoisie," together with the flattery of their "escapism" by newer composers, continue to have a strange power to move people.

How do we explain this? If we take Adorno's side, then artistic falsehood has tremendous staying power as it defies the forces of history. But I think it's more likely that the dialectical philosophy of Adorno did not describe what was really happening in Western culture.

I think Adorno was wrong on one point, at least: there remains a true "we." Inarticulate and cloudy it may be, but music listeners, not least in churches, need to experience connectedness. Composers need to rediscover ways to express it.

The contrast between the free form of Hersant and the high structure of Mendelssohn and Brahms in the Miro's performances told me part of the composer's task.

Hersant's Héliades is beautiful, evocative, and intimate. The score displays marvelous combinations of sounds, especially in its uses of harmonics from the strings. The subjectivity of the form suits its allusion to the three daughters of Helios lamenting the death of their brother Phaeton.

Yet, delighted as I was with the piece, the first notes of the Mendelssohn were a pleasing shock. We were back in music that had the narrative drive of sonata-allegro form. This sense of drive, I need to specify, was not from the opening thematic material of the f minor quartet, which certainly is propulsive, but from the form itself. This music was going somewhere, and we were going with it.

I would never argue that subjectively determined, freely expressive music is aesthetically wrong, or that it fails to say "we." There were many ways Hersant embraced us with his music.

But I will say that recovery and reinvention of form will produce a shock of connectedness such as I felt listening to the Miro Quartet.

by Matthew Raley Last week, I was interviewed about my new book The Diversity Culture by Tracy Haney for Prime Time America on Moody Radio. The interview was broadcast on July 9th during Part 2 of the program and is archived on the web. Many thanks to Tracy for all his work and interest!

by Matthew Raley Can evangelicals be united by a common music today? Can sacred music edify, or must we wander in a consumeristic wasteland of narcissism? These are the questions I am considering here, here, and here.

One of the reasons corporate worship has decayed is that Western culture, as I sketched last week, has a troubled view of individuality and community. Modernism abstracted community into a collective consciousness -- to some thinkers a mystical, universal mind, to others the industrialized economy, to others a fascist state -- into which individuals were absorbed.

Individuals, in reaction, sought to recover freedom, rebelling against collective demands. Arguably, today's postmodern self-adoration is one result.

Let's go a step further into these themes. I believe there is a clear reason why Western culture has degenerated into alienation. The wrong god has been reigning, to the destruction of those who serve that god.

Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), many argue, set the idol on its pedestal -- if unintentionally. Hegel developed a view of history that influenced thinkers as divergent as Fichte and Marx.

History is sovereign over human events, working to realize its will through a dialectical process of synthesizing contradictions. What history does cannot be undone, ignored, or defied. History must be served.

In particular, history must be served by the artist, of whom Hegel required (in his Philosophy of Fine Art) “a liberal education . . . in which every kind of superstition and belief which remains restricted to certain forms of observation and presentation should receive their proper subordination as merely aspects or phasal moments of a larger process; aspects which the free human spirit has already mastered when it once and for all sees that they can furnish it with no conditions of exposition and creative effort which are, independently for their own sake, sacrosanct.”

Unpack that rationalist sentence.

The artist uses reason to master his culture. He stands back from cultural forms, seeing them merely as history's tools, not as truths in their own right. Thus the artist is culturally free. But he must use his freedom to express history's truth, subordinating forms to their role as "moments of a larger process."

Hegel himself did not intend history to become the god that, for instance, dialectical materialism made of it. But a god it became.

The Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) applied Hegel's view of the arts to music. Adorno opened his Philosophy of Modern Music (Trans. by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster [New York: Continuum, 2003], p 3) with a quote from Hegel’s Philosophy of Fine Art: “For in human Art we are not merely dealing with playthings, however pleasant or useful they may be, but . . . with a revelation of truth.”

Adorno also quoted the Hegel passage cited above (p 13), and responded to it. History, he argued, had swept away the freedom Hegel envisioned, moving through the force of collectivism (p 17). “At the present level of development the artist is incomparably much less free than Hegel could ever have believed at the beginning of the liberal era.”

Adorno saw the old world of art forms held in common by all as bankrupt. The domineering force of commercialism was suffocating individual expression, relying on old artistic forms and techniques (dance, tonality, polyphony) to lull the masses with empty certitudes. For music to say something historically true, it had to undermine the familiar with maximum individual expression.

Individual compositions, he said, became laws unto themselves, self-contained and self-defined structures that made no attempt to connect with an audience, instead ignoring the audience and rejecting its claims. Adorno analyzed the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Adorno's own teacher Alban Berg, showing how the atonal twelve-tone system of composition served history and rose to the level of truth by enabling a composition to obey its own laws. An example (Schoenberg's Suite for Piano, Op. 25):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGLTeRQ-Nf0]

But, Adorno said, this maximized individuality still didn't give the artist freedom (pp 17-18):

[T]he artist has become the mere executor of his own intentions, which appear before him as strangers – inexorable demands of the compositions upon which he is working. That type of freedom which Hegel ascribes to the composer . . . is, as always, necessarily related to the traditionally pre-established, within which framework there are manifold possibilities. On the other hand, what is simply of itself and for itself cannot be other than it is and excludes the conciliatory acts by which Hegel promised himself the salvation of instrumental music. The elimination of everything traditionally pre-established – the corresponding reduction of music to the absolute monad – causes it to ossify and affects its innermost content.

So Adorno further shows that, in twelve-tone music, the only option for the composer to express himself is to rebel against the internal laws of his compositions -- in other words, to go insane. As an example of this rebellion, he cites the heroine of Schoenberg's Erwartung, who finds her lover murdered (p 42): "Musical language is polarized according to its extremes: towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks."

Can music console? Adorno said no. There is no true consolation for modern individuals, only the expression of fragmentation and anxiety. Can music edify? Again, no. Adorno argued that music must not connect people. There is no we anymore.

The agony of this story is that Adorno's reasoning follows relentlessly from Hegel's premise. If history is sovereign, then individuals will serve it, artists included. The cultural bankruptcy Adorno saw was real, and the empty boasts of modernism have spawned the various strains of postmodernism.

For evangelicals to worship together in any other mode than demographic conformity, we will have to rebuild a concept of how individuals live in community.

As I'll sketch next week, that involves dethroning history and bowing to the God who is truly sovereign.

by Christopher Raley For Graham

What am I leaving him, this kind-eyed boy with the golden crown? Stone tree on a stone head? Lifeless sanctity sheltering lifeless foundation? From distance in struggle who can tell? For that is not where we climb.

We rise from shrinking lake on aged paths and search our footing a feet on scattered stones. We lose the sky when bent and clutching and stagger like forefathers on the angle.

The monkey-ed face of the lava-ed crest glares across the canyon. Too close to see threats of gaze, we breach the chin and circle forehead.

His ancient mischief is a bliss to picking and scratching through hairless cracks in his stone boulder skull till the top where we at last must forget all ridicules for what we now behold.

And what am I to leave him, my kind-eyed boy with the golden crown, who pushes my lead and pulls my will: Not a stone tree, but a tree from stone—

steady and single at the height, in view of all yet blind to view—

whose bark a warmer gray than rock, whose branches a cover of arms, whose leaves a green over death.

It sprang from where soil settled in the faults of hazard.

by Matthew Raley The question I'm wrestling with these days is what to do about evangelical music. I have been arguing (here and here) that sacred music should edify people by bringing them together before God, but that evangelical music mostly doesn't try. Instead, it merely pleases groups as segments of the consuming masses.

I divert today into what may seem an irrelevant story, but I plead your patience.

I think too much attention has been paid to recent demographic changes in America and their impact on evangelicalism. For these changes to have any context, we have to examine developments farther back in Western culture. Today, I'll sketch some problems in modernism concerning human individuality, problems that shifted the foundations of art music generally, and specifically undermined sacred music’s mission to edify, as I'll sketch next week.

Consider Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp, protagonist of The Magic Mountain.

Hans is from a bourgeois family in Hamburg. In the decade before World War I, he is about to take up his business career as a shipbuilder. On the cusp of this flatland life of science and profit, he journeys to Davos, high in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin being treated for a lung infection in a sanatorium. Hans stays there seven years, during which he has a spiritual and philosophical journey.

What does this fictional bourgeois individual feel about his place in the world?

Reinhold Niebuhr, in his Gifford Lectures (The Nature and Destiny of Man, New York: Charles Scribner's Books, 1941), might have answered that Hans was enduring his own gradual destruction.

Many modernists saw the defining human ability as reason. Niebuhr called these the idealists, tracing their philosophical roots back to the classical anthropologies of Plato and Aristotle, among others. The individual human mind, through the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, could express its greatness by mastering nature.

Hans comes from this rationalist, dominating culture: the shipbuilder from the flatlands.

But other modernists reacted against this view, as well as against its social consequences. They saw relatedness to nature as the defining human characteristic, a view which Niebuhr called romanticist. The romanticists saw primitive social forms and physical drives as more authentic than the machine-like operations of reason. For the individual to express himself, he needed to reach back to this natural vitality.

Which is why Hans stays on the mountain seven years. There, he is interacting with himself, with the mythic power of the altitude, the snow, the erotic, the night sky. The flatlands were not enough.

Niebuhr said (p 21),

The conflict between rationalists and romanticists has become one of the most fateful issues of our day, with every possible religious and political implication. Modern man, in short, cannot determine whether he shall understand himself primarily from the standpoint of the uniqueness of his reason or from the standpoint of his affinity with nature; and if the latter whether it is the harmless order and peace of nature or her vitality which is the real clue to his essence.

Hans is adrift in this confusion, listening to the perpetual debates of the other residents of Davos, who are a kind of microcosm of European social history and ideologies.

Niebuhr analyzed that history. The bourgeoisie rebelled against the feudal order during the Renaissance, and created the modern world through its relentless application of reason and science. “This bourgeois individual felt himself the master of his own destiny and was impatient with both the religious and the political solidarities which characterized both classical and medieval life.” (p 22)

Hans the shipbuilder ought to be on top of the world.

But by using his reason this way, said Niebuhr, the bourgeois individual destroyed his freedom. Niebuhr asserted that “he lost this individuality immediately after establishing it by his destruction of the medieval solidarities. He found himself the artificer of a technical civilization which creates more enslaving mechanical interdependencies and collectivities than anything known in the agrarian world.” (p 22)

By the 19th century, the bourgeois individual was longing to regain his freedom, and he tried through romanticism (pp 81-92). But early romanticism (e.g. Rousseau) dissolved him into a universal consciousness, and romantic nationalism (e.g. Schleiermacher) swept him into a racial collective consciousness, while romantic nihilism (e.g. Nietzsche) unbound him from every restraint and empowered him with cruelty to express his own will.

It is these debates that Hans spends his time listening to, and the reader waits in vain for some resolution that will transform the shipbuilder into a man of vitality.

Hans finally leaves the mountain and is swept into World War I. The reader’s last look at him is not as an individual, but as a soldier in a mass of others on a flatland industrialized battlefield.

In modern times, Niebuhr said, the idea of individuality is “a tragically abortive concept,” destroyed by both of the modern movements that tried to guard it, idealism and romanticism. We are still living with the impact of this failure, only further down the slope of degradation. The American consumer lacks any rationale for living as an individual in community. He wants to be himself. But his sense of community is so dessicated that he ends up looking and sounding like everyone else.

What this death of individuality did to music is the next part of the story.

by Matthew Raley

Someone defined romanticism as the mixture of beauty and strangeness, a combination that I certainly love in this painting.

by Matthew Raley The word edify seems to be out of favor. It has the feel of an antique, and the stigma of obscure religiosity. When reaching for an equivalent, evangelicals often use encourage, and the substitution tells a story.

The words are similar.

To encourage is to hearten or animate -- to give an emotional uplift when someone is down. Though one can encourage a group, we usually think of encouraging an individual, someone who needs a pat on the back.

Edification, like encouragement, has an emotional impact but is more specific about the purpose. To edify is to build, as both the Latin and Greek roots attest. Edification speaks of joining, cementing, adding, raising. It refers particularly to moral and spiritual improvement.

This is how Paul uses the Greek term (1 Corinthians 8.1): “Knowledge inflates, but love builds.”

Throughout the history of Western culture, sacred music has embraced the mission to edify. Congregations expected their music to cement them together in the praise of God, not just with people of one class but all classes, not just people of one generation but many generations. In the experience of being built together with other Christians, they expected to be improved. Music in worship was viewed as a corporate matter, as participation in a common sound.

This mission of connecting generations and classes was artistic. To achieve its goals, sacred music had tools to draw people in, like using familiar tunes from hymns and folk songs. It had other tools to propel people out of the familiar, not merely repeating tunes week after week, but resetting and combining them so that the folk elements acquired symbolic meanings. Until the late 1700s this music was not sold or performed outside the context of worship, and so had no commercial value.

It was crafted to evoke the spiritual zone where Christ’s people of all times and nations live.

Johann Sebastian Bach had a theology for this art -- a view of how God uses music. He believed that the glory of God came upon his people whenever the congregation made music, a belief he based on the dedication of Solomon’s temple in 2 Chronicles 5.11-14. But for this art, Bach also had a cosmology -- a view of how music operates in the physical universe. He believed that the planets and stars made literal music that human beings could join with their own sounds, all to God's praise.

Bach’s music expresses this worldview. In the motet Jesu, Meine Freude (Jesus, My Joy), for instance, he takes a hymn that was familiar to his people, intersperses its stanzas with quotes from Romans 8, a familiar passage, and then propels the worshipers into God’s cosmos.

Notice that at the beginning the hymn is sung in ordinary chorale style (familiar), but that the second stanza (movement 3, 3:55) is more complex. The hymn tune is set in even more complex ways toward the middle of the motet. Notice also that the words from Romans 8.1 are set with five intricate, mutually-imitating lines. This counterpoint evokes the universe's singing, the "music of the spheres." (English translation below.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVa3nR-2bVc]

Jesus, my joy, pasture of my heart, Jesus, my adornment ah how long, how long is my heart filled with anxiety and longing for you! Lamb of God, my bridegroom, apart from you on the earth there is nothing dearer to me.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who wander not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8, V. 1)

Beneath your protection I am free from the attacks of all my enemies. Let Satan track me down, let my enemy be exasperated -- Jesus stands by me. Even if there is thunder and lightning, even if sin and hell spread terror Jesus will protect me .

This music doesn't leave a worshiper in a familiar world. It connects worshipers to each other, to past generations of Christians, to the apostle Paul, to the physical universe (as they believed), and to God. It uses the familiar as a doorway into God's larger world. It edifies. The music is powerful enough to connect with people today.

It is hardly news that contemporary evangelical music does not have a mission to edify. Evangelicals use commercialized pop modes almost exclusively, and the mission of this music is merely to encourage individuals.

Pop music certainly succeeds in its mission. But it has little communal value, since pop audiences have become narrower and narrower, representing the divisions of demographics rather than the unity of Christ’s Church throughout time and space. Some churches do well by singing a broad selection of pop styles, and there are possibilities for unity by using pop tools.

But there are two things evangelicals need to face about music. First, music has been given a spiritual mission by God, a mission that requires it do go further than encouragement. Second, the category of "what I like" will never edify. Giving people only what is familiar will make them smaller.

Sacred music needs to embrace its mission of love.

by Christopher Raley They gather to build the fire, men of older dreams, men of dead dreams. Talk is out of mouths that hear to a world unseen, and fingers feel with knowing eyes use of axe and wood. Laughter comes just before the joke is punched.

Around them forest stretches and holds scared and quiet creature’s frozen eyes, through gnarled manzanita and drooping hands of pine hidden beholding heavy steps and strange, jagged rhythms of voice.

Beyond them forest stretches over patient deaths of fallen trunks sprouting rising falls. And peace is as many moments of silence until fear of alien perseverance drives out to word.

So at last I left the moment’s sanctuary to cross the dusty road where evening yet lingered and their voices were soundings in deep water.

In the trees again I hurry to the call of men around the fire, men of older dreams, men of dead dreams, a circle of wrinkled palms yearning toward the flame.

by Matthew Raley

I ran across this a couple days ago, and found my way back to it.

by Matthew Raley I'm going to say some things about evangelical worship music that cannot be said without seeming unkind.

I have no desire to be unkind -- and that's a change for me. When I was in high school and college, I got angry at church services frequently, both because of their musical quality and content. But most of that reaction was selfishness and pride, wanting everything to match my tastes. In the last fifteen years, I have become open to many styles of worship.

Still, not in anger but sorrow, I think evangelical music has failed. It has not united believers in local churches in common declarations of God's glory, and the reasons for this failure have to do with truths about music that evangelicals have chosen to ignore.

Music is communal.

The act of making music is for bonding with others, not merely for pleasing oneself. A musician wants his expressions to be joined by those around him -- joined through listening, certainly, but also through singing and moving. From the earliest times and in all cultures, music is for connecting.

Specifically, music is where a community's rituals and moral vision fuse.

A ritual is a community's repeated act that has acquired implicit meanings. Weddings and funerals are only the most obvious rituals. Sports, shopping, official decisions, and of course worship all have rituals as well. More often than not, music has a defining role.

A moral vision, the way I'm using the phrase, is a community's view of what makes a good life. Music is one way communities express this vision. There's a reason why spirituals sung by slaves are different from raps, a reason that goes beyond technology and even history. Among other things, the two musical genres express divergent moral visions of suffering.

So, with a bit a music, you encounter one culture's view of good in life. And you react to it, positively or negatively. If you were to hear "The Sidewalks of New York" in its original 1890's style, you would instantly react to the rituals and vision of good that it embodies.

Pop music is now too commercialized to unite diverse people.

This is just a fact of business: the target audience rules. Pop music is designed right down to the production values for that audience, to please that audience, especially by affirming its rituals and moral vision. Pop is designed to sell, not unite.

Those who market music are particularly concerned to avoid a negative reaction from the target audience. Radio people will tell you surprising things about where the dividing lines fall. For instance, people who love opera are not automatically the same as those who love "classical."

Evangelicals have embraced pop music as a marketing vehicle for their message without stopping to ask what happens when people are connected not by participation but by consumption, or what happens when churches target certain people -- that is, when they divide groups.

(By the way, consumers all around the world are rebelling against the music industry, because they are onto the calculation involved in the music itself. They are demanding authenticity, and they have the means to get it.)

Warning: this is the unkind part.

I think evangelical worship music most often mimics a girl's vision of the good life, as packaged by pop music.

The calculation for megachurches has been like this: if pop music is the Way, the Truth, and the Growth, then the musical stream in which the church swims has to be non-threatening to most people. Anything from edgier pop music, or worse, old music, will send people running away with their hands over their ears.

That's the reason for the Jesus As Boyfriend song. It's non-threatening.

The typical contemporary worship tune is straight out of boyfriend ballads. It just is. And it has to be sung like a boyfriend ballad in order to be remotely convincing -- with a certain breathy desperation.

The lyrics are also boyfriend ballad stuff. I need you. You are all I need. I'm desperate for you. Enough said.

The performers -- and I'm pushing the edge of the unkindness envelope, and I'm sorry about it, I truly am -- either act like girls seeking boyfriends, or like the boyfriends being sought, which is to say, cute.

(No offense to girls. Nothing wrong with girls. Nothing wrong with girls seeking boyfriends. Not trying to hurt girls' feelings ...)

The reason why worship music has failed to unite believers in a declaration of God's glory is that, for the most part, it does not bother to try. It does not even attempt to cross generational or demographic lines. It either helps a church target a certain narrow group, or it helps a church be unobjectionable.

There. I said it. And I'm not done.

by Christopher Raley Hills that were California brown and held rich in folds of laden heat and gave a scrub oak’s worth of shade against sun and dust;

hills that were fire black and held rich on islands in devastated calm, having given oaks to bare the brunt and wilt yellow who were too close to flame

are hills that are newly grown, regenerate who owes to no man scars of her rebirth— how she labored under God’s slow contract and pushed up nutrient earth around those preserved on malnourished soil.

So oaks are umbrellaed dots on hillsides, amber as a row of open graves. Theirs is not decided what may yet be life or death.

Christ In Y'all: Following Jesus into Community

Neil Carter (Ekklesia Press, 2008, 196 pp)

by Matthew Raley

In our crisis of identity as American evangelicals, we are several decades into a period of radical (root-seeking) experiments with local church life. Fellow believers are heading in many directions seeking community.

The church growth movement has fostered enterprises that are intimately in step with suburban consumerism. The Reformed movement is trying to revitalize body life through sharper doctrine. Many emergents have moved on from café churches to think in terms of missional communities.

Believers are amassing a lot of wisdom from these experiments. This period, though it is often painful and bewildering to me, will leave followers of Christ far healthier and with more varied skills for advancing Christ's kingdom. I think the home church movement will prove to be a big contributor to all this wisdom.

That is why I was eager to read Neil Carter's book, Christ in Y'all: Following Jesus into Community, and why I'm glad I did. I found much wisdom to keep working through our identity crisis.

Carter is focused on needs that, for believers, are primal. He asks, for example (p 30), "[H]ow many things do you do, either on your own or within your church, that honestly could not be done without God's indwelling presence?" Concerning prayer, he observes (p 41), "Somewhere along the line we got a picture of God as a task-oriented Being who gave us prayer primarily as a way to make us as task-oriented as he is. But what would we be left with if we removed from our prayer lives all prayers that ask God to do something? We'd be left with simple communion."

He also writes (p 45), "Spiritual formation is a collective endeavor [original emphasis]. It's not about you, the individual, becoming more like Jesus. It's about him coming to reside among the saints in their relationships with each other."

The theology behind these statements is life-giving and biblical. Carter loves the Bible, and he communicates from the deep intentions of texts, not from idiosyncratic passions.

In addition, Carter makes penetrating observations about American life (p 39). "While declaring our independence from each other, we simultaneously mimic each other in everything from our clothing and our possessions to our language, our political views, and even our personalities. American culture may very well be the most advanced manifestation of this malady to date."

This book is informed by experience. Carter and the brethren have taken these ideas and applied them seriously in a home church. He discusses how many of them intentionally live near each other, so that (p 158) they "often bump into each other and spend time together on the spur of the moment."

At the heart of the book, and the experiences it reflects, is the reality that suffering with other believers, and being hurt by them, is essential to the Christian life. Chapters 5-6, in this respect, are worth the whole book, and give a call to sobriety that believers deeply need.

The only weakness of this book is common to literature from radical experimenters. In a word, judgmentalism.

Those who seek the root of matters and do things differently get stared at by the community's worst face -- the snide, dismissive, over-confident face. This experience stings, and it's difficult to keep one's writing and teaching from stinging back.

The edge of judgment on others' efforts comes through in several of Carter's paragraphs about stereotypical traditional church activities, staffs, buildings, etc. The verdict on p 168 is one of a few unsustainable pronouncements: "It took me a while to admit that 'body life' cannot survive long within the traditional church setting because these two things are antagonistic to each other."

This doesn't match my experiences. But such sparks keep the experimentation lively. I'll put up with them to get Neil Carter's wisdom.

by Matthew Raley My post two weeks ago on the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop 8 initiated parallel discussions, one with fellow evangelicals (reflected in last week's post), the other with progressives.

My friend Dr. Ben Carson is a composer at U.C. Santa Cruz. He has been wondering what sort of conservative I am if I don't think Christian morality should be legislated. Ben wrote, "What kind of conservative recognizes society as [an] inherently plural nation in which the state has no business re-institutionalizing religious rites? And wants Jesus' teachings to be considered on a level playing field of alternatives? I think you might consider embracing your inner leftist."

I replied that the legal expressions of Christian morality are breaking down because our culture no longer lives by Christian morality. I want the motive for Christian morality revived -- namely, love. Ethics unmotivated by love have no integrity. Until Christ's love drives us, rebuilding the legal forms of Christendom can only lead to hypocrisy.

Christianity aims at this transformation of the soul as the key to transforming all else in human life. When Christians are motivated once again by the infusion of love directly from Jesus Christ, I believe the integrity of Christian ethics will quickly produce the most attractive lifestyle on a playing field of alternatives. If Christians do not regain this Christ-infused motivation, they will lose the culture and their souls.

Such is the background for Ben's further questions, which I thought were important and insightful.

How can I build a moral philosophy on love, a concept "that doesn't have a clear definition, or a clear criterion that signals its absence or its presence?"

Ben elaborates that love is supposed to be the motivating force behind a wide range of social relationships, sexual and parental in particular. "But it's so easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated in our language...what check do you have against its ephemeral nature? Couldn't selfishness sometimes masquerade as love, and then motivate a 'morality' that is immoral? If our morality is guided by love, then how do you work with that vulnerability?"

My answer includes scripture references, which I hope will not be tedious but illustrative of a quite different mode of reasoning.

1. In the New Testament, love is not defined in the abstract, but is shown as personally embodied.

I think what Ben says about love is accurate: it is "easily falsified, revoked, retooled, and manipulated." The more love is formulated in the abstract, the more vulnerable to manipulation it is.

The NT exhibits Jesus Christ as the embodiment of love in several ways. The Gospel narratives show him as love in action. Doctrinally, Christ is the security for reconciliation between God and sinners because he died to pay for sin. Ethically, his self-sacrifice for the sake of his enemies is the ground for all moral decision-making (Philippians 2.1-18), and is the standard for love in marriage (Ephesians 5.22-33).

The most neglected way Christ is shown as the embodiment of love in the NT is his participation in unity with the Father (John 17).

So the NT answer to the question of how define love is to point to a man.

2. In the NT, love is generated only through interaction with Christ, who embodies it.

Christ's resurrection and return are essential parts of the growth of love in the NT. Because he lives now, he is able to give us new life (Colossians 2.6-15) and to form himself in us (Colossians 3.1-17). Because he will return, our ability to love as he loves will be consummated (1 John 2.28-3.3).

Conversely, the NT explicitly and repeated denies that there is pure good apart from the love of Christ (e.g. Colossian 2.16-23).

So, not only is Christ the defining man of love, but is the sole source of it. There is no abstract teaching in the NT that can discipline a person's mind-and-heart to conform to Christ's example. There is only Christ's personal energy.

3. In this moral philosophy, a church's role is two-fold: call people to interact with Christ and nurture his love in community.

Practically speaking, I have never been successful at changing anyone's behavior. I do not want to try anything so presumptuous. My role is to point to the love of Christ that a person has already experienced and help him or her proceed further with that love.

This kind of work can only occur in the context of deep trust and interaction. Law can't even approach it.

In sum, a moral philosophy derived from the NT must be predicated on unbreakable bonds with each other in Christ's love. NT love says, "My commitment to you is irrevocable because Christ's commitment to me is irrevocable."

Love in our society has become an easily-manipulated abstraction, in my view, because we flee belonging in favor of autonomy. We keep the exits from our relationships clear. Our society cannot have a vision of love without strong grounds for self-sacrifice, and I do not hear any such ground articulated by anyone, left or right.

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_b8T1-SWkM&feature=related]

No comment needed.

by Matthew Raley Sometimes I slip statements into my posts to see who's paying attention to what. The award this week goes to my brother Chris, who spotted a matter of some importance in last week's post about the court decision on Prop 8.

What I said was,

Having entered the political fray with a fractured base — a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact — the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That’s elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.

So the enemies are homosexuals.

This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God.

Chris pulled out the last sentence: "That has a lot of implications. Like, to what extent do we do this to fellow Christians?"

My allusion was to James 1.19-21. In teaching how to endure temptation, James commands us to be "quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger." He is warming up to say later that wrangling and fighting is demonic (3.13-13; 4.1-12).  But here, the basic reason he gives to resist anger is that "the anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God requires."

Rather, we must lay aside our own wickedness, and "receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls." The word of God implanted in the receptive heart-and-mind is the source of godly obedience. Our anger is not the source.

James would say that we do inflict our wrath on other believers to produce righteousness, and we must repent. Here are some specific ways that we do what James forbids:

1. We often rely on conformist instincts to uphold standards.

No one wants to provoke the community's anger and bring shame or rejection on themselves. It is a high cost to bear. So, much of the time, church-goers keep their heads down. They will avoid any public non-conformity to the church's explicit and implicit standards, hiding any behavior that might expose them to disapproval.

Threats of the anger of man, in this case, produce lying rather than truth.

James teaches that God's righteousness is produced when someone responds directly to God's goodness (1.18). "Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures." Conformity to other human beings is spiritually barren.

2. We often use guilt manipulation to motivate people to godliness.

Guilt manipulation, to define it broadly, is making people feel bad about what they've done. It is what one human being does when trying to control another human being's behavior. This comes in a range of language from "Burn in hell, you sinner" to "We're disappointed in you." We do this because we know that shame is a disabling emotion.

In this method we, the human beings, are supposed to police sin and arrest it.

The use of shame is a kind of vengeance -- which is to say, the satisfaction of anger. It does not produce righteousness because it is disabling, not redeeming. God nurtures a living, joyful righteousness.

Obviously, a church needs to confront sins. James is not teaching that we can shirk that duty, nor am I. Rather, confronting sin must be done with abundant listening and the tender maintenance of meekness. God is the one who convicts sin, not us. It is his implanted word that has the power to save, not our emotional appeals.

3. We fight to preserve a culture that reflects our standards, believing that this will save future generations.

The whole motivation behind the campaign against gay marriage is to preserve our society's reflection of particular biblical values. This and other such issues are labeled the culture wars. They are social battlegrounds. The scenes of anger.

What these battles have unleashed in the conversation of Christians around me is not the righteousness of God. They have unleashed jealousy, mocking, lying, brawling, gossip, slander, and condemnation. If we "win," I can say with some confidence that not one soul will gain eternal life as a result. As for the souls of our children, many are filled with revulsion.

And all this for a goal that is of dubious value. Jesus Christ does not redeem human cultures. He redeems souls. Those redeemed souls then alter the character of the cultures in which they live.

James would not have shrunk from declaring God's will for sexuality, nor will I. But let the focus of our speech be where James focused his, on maintaining the meekness of souls to receive the implanted word.

No souls will be saved any other way than by the new birth in Jesus Christ.

by Matthew Raley

My wife and I had dinner recently with a local expert on Emily Carr's work. Our friend's name is Lydia Harris, a reporter for the Tri-County Newspapers who also teaches at Butte College. I was delighted to learn about such a powerful artist and will be exploring her work more.

by Christopher Raley The moon is a dirty yellow basket low on the edge of night’s walk where two wanderers carry it to sky or fall in with its horizontal suicide.

What evil is it craves this for a sign? Futures shift in swing of possible like a world of shadow in arc of a lamp. And the moon is born aloft by the wanderers.

Futures swing from one to the other. Evil fears death of longing which curses dark for absence of blessing. And the moon looks about to catch the wanderers.

What blessing is it grits its teeth when the lamp sets alight a thousand paths to one hated direction?

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cxkLZoEFEk&feature=related]

I was introduced to Chopin's music by a record of Pollini, so I'm grateful to the man. Here he is playing Chopin's Nocturne No. 8. What I like about this is not just Pollini's clarity and musicality, but also his insight. He teaches me that Chopin is about simplicity. The pianist who can command the virtuosic passages to serve the composer's simplicity this way is the one I want to hear.

by Matthew Raley There is only one issue that concerns me anymore.

I went through a conservative optimist phase in my not-so-distant youth, when I thought American society was salvageable by political means. I also went through a conservative pessimist phase, during which I groused about how days gone by were better than these.

I remain a conservative, but I follow the issues the way a sportsman follows athletes -- without a sense of personal investment. Today, I'm unimpressed with the teams of both right and left. Neither offers a coherent vision of what our culture should be.

The religious right is convinced that gay marriage is the tipping point for culture, where we shoot off the slippery slope into free-fall. So evangelicals across the country have poured resources into this battle appealing to the average American's supposed traditionalism.

Take that point of view apart.

1. The tipping point for our culture came decades ago. There was not a Christian campaign against no-fault divorce in California, the innovation that actually pushed the institution of marriage off its foundations. If evangelicals want state law to reflect marriage as God designed it, they should campaign for "One man, one woman, til death us do part."

Evangelicals won't be campaigning that way anytime soon because they've embraced the divorce culture. Statistically, as has been documented many times, there is no difference between the practice of evangelicals and other Americans. Anecdotally, I learned about divorce as a child by watching the splits of my parents' church friends.

Consider the consequences of so many broken evangelical families.

When the world says life is about personal fulfillment not personal holiness, we apparently agree. Christian counselors are sending couple after couple to the divorce courts on this basis -- and it's not as though this is a secret among evangelical church-goers. Our counseling center routinely helps couples who lost hope because of their Christian psychologists. In living this way, we have taught several generations of children that evangelical religion is about crying out to God on Sunday and being selfish during the week.

We have, indeed, manufactured the unbelieving majority in our country. The cynicism of young voters about traditional values was learned from church, not from Hollywood.

Gay marriage is not the tipping point. That point is long past.

2. Having entered the political fray with a fractured base -- a base that opposes threats to marriage in principle but that is under the thumb of family courts in fact -- the religious right has little option but to find enemies and blame them. That's elementary, abc stuff. If the base is not united, your tool is fear.

So the enemies are homosexuals.

This strategy is Pharisaical. Which is to say, it is the wrath of man leveraged to produce the righteousness of God. And like all works of the Pharisees, it is doomed to ignominious failure.

Gays are not my enemies.

3. Appealing to the self-righteousness of the average American is anti-Gospel. The Bible teaches that the average American does not need a Savior from the sins of others, but from his own.

So much for the team on the right. The left has its own problems.

1. Not so long ago, the left was portraying the family as an oppressive institution. Academically, many analyzed family relationships in terms of economic power. Politically and culturally, many more worked to eliminate the legal and economic incentives to marry and stay married, to "educate" young people out from under sexual "repression," and to stigmatize the traditional family as a relic of 1950s conformism.

To a great extent, the left has succeeded in blasting away the living culture of marriage. But now that the oppressive structure has been overthrown, it seems to have an Arcadian mythic elegance. I sometimes wonder if same-sex marriage is leftism, wistful for bourgeois tenderness, bringing a picnic to the evocative ruins.

2. Last fall the response of some to Prop 8's victory was to search out its supporters and harass them. This was condemned by many gay marriage supporters for what it was, thuggery. But there is still an unwillingness, most recently expressed by the New Hampshire legislature, to codify religious protections into law with regard to this issue, as if those who oppose gay marriage, as I do, should be compelled to endorse it.

This elevation of gay marriage over the health of civil society will inflame, not persuade.

The maneuvering of left and right leaves me cold because it obscures the one issue I care about.

Marriage is an expression of Jesus Christ's redeeming love for his church. I care that his power to transform and nurture is exhibited deeply in my relationship with my wife and sons. I care that his power is exhibited in the congregation I serve. I care that his power should reach people who at this moment may be antagonized by his name.

I'm grateful to the homosexuals who have come to the church, and those who've admitted me into their lives as a friend. In a time of rancor, I appreciate the chance to show respect and care even in the face of profound disagreement. I am confident that Christ can and will show himself in this way.

The California Supreme Court's decision yesterday contributes nothing to this overriding project.

by Matthew Raley [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXbgEbVTpys&feature=related]

I like this reading a great deal. It's not too fast, for one thing. For another, Mai Suzuki plays with guts. I can hear the pitches in the pizzicato section of this movement, something I can't always say. Though she has a tendency to push her tone, I would say the edge she gets is appropriate and satisfying.