"Surely He hath borne our griefs."

Christ's heart was wrung for me, if mine is sore;
   And if my feet are weary, His have bled;
   He had no place wherein to lay His Head;
If I am burdened, He was burdened more.
The cup I drink, He drank of long before;
   He felt the unuttered anguish which I dread;
   He hungered who the thousands fed,
And thirsted who the world's refreshment bore.
If grief be such a looking-glass as shows
   Christ's Face and man's in some sort made alike,
      Then grief is pleasure with a subtle taste:
      Wherefore should any fret or faint or haste?
Grief is not grievous to a soul that knows
   Christ comes,--and listens for the hour to strike.

---Christina Rossetti

I don't really know the right way to respond to the recent accusation that I am a critic. On the one hand I'm tempted to thank my mother who always encouraged me to express myself, to thank my wife for sticking with me through the lean years, to thank the Academy....

On the other hand, being critical of fundamentalist culture doesn't seem to justify such a high honor. I might have been just as honored by receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for putting on my socks.

But it does give us an opportunity to repeat what I take to be an important point.

We are speaking here about a culture: a set of virtues, values, and aspirations, a presumption about what is permissible and what is unacceptable. Fundamentalism has a culture; it permits things, it honors things, and it condemns things. This is not news. We were saying this in April of 2005, and it wasn't cutting edge stuff even then.

A few are curious to know how I'm different from Fundamentalist culture. To satisfy that curiosity would involve a cumbersome list of dissimilarities, but one of the more obvious dissimilarities is cunningly concealed in the word culture. I am not a culture. I have never been a culture, and I've made no preparations to become a culture.

This is surprisingly important to bear in mind. As objectionable as I might be to some, it's a bit of a reach to equate what I write with what a culture does.

When we look at a culture we see three essential components. Culture isn't limited to the arts, but I will use the terms from the art world. It won't be hard for you to make the applications.

There are the poets, the painters, the dancers, the artists; the people who give expression to ideas the entire society considers. Then there are the critics who bring a certain skill at explaining how successful that expression is. And finally there is the audience. We may tend to think that the audience is the least important because it is the least skilled. In a sense it is the most important because it is really in the audience that these ideas live healthy lives. What an artist makes and what a critic judges is really not all that significant if it doesn't help the people in the audience make widgets, enjoy their leisure, and bury their dead.

Some resent the presence of the critic. We know fundamentalists do.

But before we accept their judgment we should think about what a society would be like if it didn't have critics. We at Remonstrans had the uncanny prescience to arrange a demonstration.

You will recall our suggestion that you read the poetry of Adele Sakler. Some Emergents came over to thank us for recommending her work, and they did this with a view to discouraging us: they thought that by letting us know that we unwittingly advanced her reputation, we'd think twice about doing that again!

But if you read their justification of Ms. Sakler's work, you'll notice that they had nothing to contribute on the subject of its quality. No one could tell us what was good about it. What did they say?

They commended her for being strong enough in her faith to share her struggles and her doubts. If she'd howled at the moon they would have been satisfied. They respected her blog for being a place where people can come to discuss theology, experiences, and feelings. Even they do not like her work; they engage in exercises of personal validation. How Sakler compares to Rossetti is beyond them.

If you want to see a culture that celebrates drivel, check out Emergence: the dead end of American Evangelicalism. They don't do art over there, they validate personal expression. And while we're sure they see personal validation as a great thing, they forget that the audience gets nothing out of it.

And all of this is not too unlike Fundamentalists who honor inept leadership because they prefer "men of action". They validate activism irrespective of what it produces. Don't ask them what kind of action we should honor, just validate the activism.

Whether the audience is helped? whether the whole is benefitted by the blunders of the few? that escapes their concern.

I'm wondering if this is wise.

I recently spoke with a young composer about what I think music does. What do good musicians try to do? It is not as easy as you may think to explain what great music does. It is harder to explain to someone in our historical moment because so few great artists still walk among us.

It is hard to explain because it is an abstract thing, and if two people sitting in a noisy restaurant can't share concrete examples, the discussion can slip like sand through fingers.

And part of the reason it is hard to explain is because it doesn't happen predictably. It doesn't happen on cue. Not every performance is good; some are not even adequate. Sometimes we are not ready. Sometimes we are ready but we stifle a good thing by expecting the wrong thing; sometimes we can walk right by a wonderful thing because we are looking for something else. An awful lot of people really just "use" music.

Part of the reason it is hard to explain is so few people even know how to listen to music. If you don't know a canon from a rondo, you really don't know what you are hearing. The string of notes that makes for a great fugue doesn't tend to make for a great berceuse. If you don't know what the music is trying to do, you are just left to your own devices. And given today's entertainment environment, people tend to do what I call tune-scavenging.

While looking for something tangible to help make the abstract more comprehensible, I found this.

This is David Stern, son of Isaac Stern, talking about Ivry Gitlis. It may help you to watch it. Here a real, live musician and the son of an artist talks about the work of another artist. Stern is talking about a man who worships music. And before some among us run off to choke on their tongues, remember he is using the English word worship "in the original": weorthscipe.

We used to gather at weddings before God and men to hear someone say, "With my body I thee worship". We don't worship a wife as God, and we don't worship music as God. We worship a wife as a wife, music as music, and God as God. And notice how profaning things and people has led us down a path to profaning God himself.

Can we worship God with profaned things do you think?

These comments may at least get you to look for something you haven't been looking for, and so much of art is a matter of simple looking.

It is ironic that I had that discussion the Monday evening after Monday morning's post; among men for whom labels mean nothing, it is hard to feature a place in the imagination where "every note means something".

Watch it.

Here are two guys perplexed by labels, rubrics and categories and the difficulties attending their use.

Tony Jones sat down and puzzled at length before writing: [Emergents] "have a particular antipathy toward rubrics, labels, and categorizations. They seem to us convenient ways of boxing someone in, which all too often leads to writing someone off."

First is Dave Doran, the Barney Fife of Fundamentalism, a man who has devoted his life to the confusion of seminarians, (often by means of boxing in and writing off). Now those seminarians are seeking accommodations in a part of town he disapproves of. He attributes this emigration to confusing labels.

I guess I find myself back at a spot where most of these discussions end for me these days. I think they are all handicapped by the use of labels from the 20th century which no longer fit and, therefore, don't serve the discussion well. By thinking of three circles-new evangelicalism, conservative evangelicalism, and fundamentalism-all of the energy of the discussion goes into who's in and who's out. The unavoidable problem, though, is that nobody can define in and out at this stage of the game. So, where I differ with Bauder is that I don't think that we can say anything definitive about a group. We need to look at individual men and ministries, find out what they believe and how they apply those beliefs, and then draw our conclusions.

---Dave Doran, president of a Fundamentalist seminary

The second is Tony Jones, the Mr. Bean of Emergence, who understands conservatism just as well as Mike Morrell does. He too boxes in and writes off, but he does it from the other end of the spectrum.

Please allow me a tangent: Was Thomas Aquinas a "liberal" or a "conservative"?  Well, we might at first paint him a conservative, for he rescued orthodox Christianity from a particularly stagnant period by recovering - i.e., conserving - scripture and tradition.  But how did he do that?  By entering into a thoroughgoing dialogue with the Aristotelian philosophy of medieval Islam.  I daresay that if a theologian today were to admit that he or she was dipping into the wells of Muslim philosophy in order undergird Christian theology, that theologian would be condemned as having slipped off the slippery slope.

My point is that the question, Was Thomas a conservative or a liberal? is nonsensical, because "liberalism" and "conservatism" are modern categories, linked to modern (read, analytic) philosophical presuppositions.  If I can make the point even more strongly, they are not theological categories.  Thomas was not a liberal or a conservative, Paul was not a liberal or a conservative, Jesus was not a liberal or a conservative.  And, if I may be so bold, I am not a liberal or a conservative.  Those non-theological categories become less helpful each day.  I suggest we stop using them.  OK, end of tangent.

---Tony Jones, ex-national coordinator of Emergent Village

How do you suppose a good man might live in a world defined by Deputy Fifes and Mr. Beans?

When error comes to us all spry and apple-cheeked, it promises hope to the naïve. But soon it will move to Florida and spend its senior moments in a rocker. We were promised a generous orthodoxy, now we are told that if we don't share their hope, we have no hope at all.

Brian McLaren's blog turned out to be a shameless exercise in self-promotion consisting of the trivia of one man's life and mind told in two basic sentences: those that contain the phrase my new book and those that don't. This is leadership for a generation which violently rejects crass commercialism?

On the other hand, here is the work of another woman courageous and vulnerable enough to express her heart through creative means. Here is the eye of a woman with more to tell us about the world than a church bus full of Fundamentalists.

Ironic in a cruel way, is it not?

The World

By day she woos me, soft, exceeding fair:
  But all night as the moon so changeth she;
  Loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
And subtle serpents gliding in her hair.
By day she woos me to the outer air.
  Ripe fruits, sweet flowers, and full satiety:
  But thro' the night, a beast she grins at me,
A very monster void of love and prayer.
By day she stands a lie: by night she stands
  In all the naked horror of the truth
With pushing horns and clawed and clutching hands.
Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell
  My soul to her, give her my life and youth,
Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell?

---Christina Rossetti