Time to build

What to do, what to do?

Everyone is atwitter about reshaping our society so that people will treat each other with dignity. How to do that is what social engineers live their whole lives plotting and fantasizing about, only to have the bullet-point versions of their ideas finally put to work by men of action who invariably break more than they repair. So here’s my diagnosis and treatment plan.

On the surface it seems that, on the one hand, the only thing we will coalesce around is mutual dependency for survival together. That is the only thing that would force us to act to our mutual benefit without appeals to religious or secular principles (or other abstractions which only spit-out more sophistry for debate).

On the other hand, our purposes in whatever actions could not possibly have mere survival as their sole end. We abstract religious or secular principles from our reflections on experiences of such things as survival together, and those principles serve as guideposts to more than mere survival.

The work Christians do with our hands and our prayers is intended for good. We act but we also pray, so both means figure into the normal Christian life. How, though, do prayer and direct action relate? How should we frame prayer life in the face of immediate material problems requiring solutions? Do we only pray when we can’t help? No, God is with us in our thoughts and words when we pray in His name; and He is in our hands when we act in His name. It therefore takes more than mere survival as a goal for human beings to coalesce as one body with one intended final end for prayerful daily work.

Just one idea I’ve been kicking around: I’d like to build small, beautiful, chapels around the nation where people will know they can go for some respite from godless banalities and from the hard-hearted ignorance of Christ’s own love for humanity. We could have these small and beautiful chapels with great artwork, musicians and schoolhouses on site that they might concentrate our talents on the right permanent and final ends in a shared effort.

Let me preempt a common cheap criticism about the arts in church: No, this is not a matter of entertainment, and calling it that reduces the God-given talents of every artist to fleshly distraction from what—a lecture series (i.e., a sermon) that almost nobody hears?

We should also deal with the banal traditionalist notion of what constitutes great art. I’ll pick on Roman Catholics for this because they have the biggest movement of this sort of cosplay traditionalist in their ranks. They find a pattern of what they believe is inspired by God and they try to recreate it themselves by implementing a vast and intricate system—whether in ethics, in the arts, or in theology proper. 

So, as regards our chapels, the reason for the art in these spaces would be to magnify the Lord, not to express anything else—not even our sense of responsibility as stewards of ‘Western Christendom.’ Besides, this mindset is a sort of credentialism that betrays one’s own lack of talent for discernment—which is the requisite talent for the arts. To illustrate this point, for example, to my mind there’s nothing less worshipful about a seriously pious and theologically rich hymn written today than one written in 18th c Germany. To think there is something wrong with this statement is to betray one’s lack of artistic discernment. Moreover, God isn’t only ancient; He is present here and now.

What could we teach as pastors and lay educators in these planned communities? Law and gospel. I’m only sure of a few things and I won’t become more certain just by thinking hard about what Christians will say in these places. Many of our problems can indeed be resolved by thinking through them—but there is a problem with trying to integrate complete sets of ideas, stories, or moral instructions from a distance in time or space. We are needful creatures. So let’s deal with one pressing need at a time. The first need is to ease or overcome the sense of God’s indifferent silence and this is done by demonstrating with utter clarity the law and the gospel.

Why law and gospel? Because “Why should I believe that?” is the new “What is truth?” and a question directed at the will is answered with reference to God’s will, which we know by experience of a strained conscience (law) and its relief (gospel). Our beliefs are a matter of the will as much or more than they are intellectual. Christianity is the only way of life that saves from death, so anyone who departs will sense his desperate needs, see Christian reality against pagan unreality, and if he’s honest he’ll be back willingly, having experienced the weight of the law followed by the release of that burden in the gospel message.

The end to which Christians work and pray is an eternally happy one. We can be tempted to act as though we should be uncertain as to whether there is greater pleasure or happiness coming than what we can take for ourselves in life, but this is wrong. We should be certain of the coming joyful life because we are Christians and greater happiness is part of the gospel.

In every experience of pleasure or pain, God delivers more than pleasure or pain. As we come to this realization, we reorient ourselves to choose those greater gifts (perhaps transcendent is the word for them though I always hesitate risking being needlessly obscure) because they are always good. Rather than taking pleasure like dogs, we receive love and begin to choose love itself rather than pleasure alone. Our choices for these gifts become habits that shape our character as Christian people and, grouped together, these habits can be categorized according to God’s vocations for us. Life lived in awareness of the gospel therefore shapes our character so that we can be better members of the united body of Christ. It’s time to build.