In other movie news, the awesomeness of this red band trailer for the ‘Merican remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo transcends the fact that it’s a video camera capture — in fact, that might even make it better. You get plenty of foreboding, some sick editing, and Karen O and Trent Reznor covering “Immigrant Song.”

This trailer for The Muppets is just as awesome. But completely different in every respect.

“EPIC” (Facebook account required) kicks off this Thursday at Watkinsville First Baptist. It’s a . . . um . . . I’m actually not sure what it is. It’s a teaching series focused on the “story of the Bible.” That’s about all I know. I got volunteered to lead a discussion group, though, so if you’re a high schooler/college student/recent graduate/graduate student/”young at heart”/still live with your parents, you can come chill with me. Because of course my group will be the best. Might even bring the Phokus Phishe out of retirement.

Roger Olson has a good post about contexts and emphases.

Not much is happening in the football world, the biggest story of the week being Phil “Georgia could run the table in 2010” Steele releasing his pre-season All-SEC teams. The potential super-conference rumblings are intriguing, but they won’t make a difference until next season at the earliest.

Songs I’ve been listening to this week:
Killa — Lecrae
Dry Bones — Gungor
Bulletproof Heart — My Chemical Romance
All of the Lights — Kanye West
Little Girl — Death From Above 1979 (They’re back together! Yeah, old news, I know.)

In closing: I finally saw this, so now I get the joke. My Man Card application is in the mail.

And, as usual, xkcd nails it.

When around thy throne we sing / There no tongue shall silent be / All shall join in harmony / In those blessed kingdom days

It made me think (I have a hard time concentrating in church) about the idea of “harmony.” Harmony is a great thing; melodies are nice, but harmonies take it to the next level. ”Kingdom Days” is probably using the term in a slightly different sense of the word. It probably means that one day all humanity will sing and praise God together, as “one voice.”

But I thought: Whose harmony?

Music is as old as human culture. It started with the human voice and the human body, then we got percussion and horns and stringed instruments and a couple thousand years later we wind up here. Um, maybe that’s a bad example. Point is, between the first aboriginal drum circle on the African savannah and Justin Bieber, a lot’s happened.

There’s a ton of music in the Bible, from Moses’ song of victory after the crossing of the Red Sea, to the Song Around the Throne in John’s Apocalypse. You may have also heard of the Psalms.

But if every nation and tribe will one day praise God in their own tongue, is it too much to say that they’ll also have their own music? And who’s to say one culture’s music is better suited to praising God than another’s? Sure, we European-Americans love us some Handel, but why should we expect baroque to take precedence over, say, Chinese opera? Or Chinese Opera over a didgeridoo?

So we have a potential problem. Every culture, from every place, from every time, singing in harmony . . . but which harmony is it going to be?

Maybe it’ll sound something like this:

It’s a great song and a great video, but I don’t think it’s going to do it. Yeah, you have people from different places and different cultures playing and singing together, but they’re singing one song (an American soul/R&B song) in one language (English). That’s not going to cut it, not with the standard we have in Revelation. But if that won’t suffice, what will?

The mashup.

Sure, the genre originates from one particular culture (the West) in one particular time period (our generation), but there’s a difference. Mashup isn’t actually a genre of music. It’s an approach to making music. It’s about taking existing cultural artifacts and combining them in a way that produces something more than the sum of its individual parts. It’s about “transformative” art — not creation ex nihilo, but ex omnibus – creation from everything. Like so:

But again, your average mash-up, which usually combines one vocal track with one music track, isn’t going to cut it.

Enter Girl Talk.

By my count, that’s twenty-six songs sampled in a track that goes for 5:23. It’s part of a continuous mixtape that runs for 71 minutes, including 372 different songs. If you want to count them all for yourself, go here. (You can download the mixtape for free, as a single track or divided into twelve parts for convenience).

Even this particular instance of supercharged mashup falls short of the universality we see in Revelation; Girl Talk samples mostly Western artists and the whole mixtape leans heavily on rap and hip-hop. But again, it’s the concept that’s instructive. If one guy can take 372 different songs and make a coherent whole out of them that stands on its own as a legitimate work of art, who’s to say that the Creator of the Universe can’t take an instrument from every tribe or a style from every culture or a verse from every language and mash it up into a beautiful work that sings God’s praise through the contributions of creation?

Whose harmony? Ours — and God’s. When heaven and earth collide, our song will be transformative, the music of every time and place brought woven together by God into something that none of us could imagine on our own.

And that will only be the beginning.

Today’s totally non-random video, in honor of my new lifestyle:  

Advocates who give rhetoric its due — working the commonplaces, defining the issue in the broadest context, and switching from values to the future — increase their batting averge. The country benefits as well. Out of sheer political self-inteterest, the advocates find themselves on the middle ground. Suddenly, an intractable, emotional, value-laden issue like abortion begins to look politically arguable. Making abortions rare is to the nation’s advantage, as Aristotle would say. Now, what are the most effective (and politically popular) ways to make abortions rare? The answers might give the extremes of both sides a lot to swallow; one the left, pro-choicers would have to agree that abortion is a distasteful form of contraception. On the right, pro-lifers would have to allow some abortions.

Of course, they don’t have to. They can stick to their guns. And remain unpersuasive.

from Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion by Jay Heinrichs. New York: Three Rivers, 2007. p. 119

Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself [Jesus] likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.  For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.  For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.

– Hebrews 2:14-18, ESV

We read this passage in community group a long time ago, but that last sentence has stuck with me. “Because Jesus himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

Most of the time when I think about temptation, I think about an objective choice, not a subjective experience. I know that sin has two facets, the sins we commit and the sins we suffer from; I’ve always associated temptation exclusively with the former. But is the phenomenon of temptation — of having the inclination to do something which will ultimately harm you — not, in fact, a type of suffering? Is there not pain in having a soul that consistently prompts you to participate in your own self-destruction?

Maybe not. We wholeheartedly desire some sins: to tell off that ignorant loudmouth we work with, to hit downtown hard after a long week of school, to spend the night with our significant other and finally go all the way. We do these things because we want to do them.

But what about when these things become habits? As Neal Plantinga argues in Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, sin often looks like addiction. Binge drinking involves an external addictive element, while sexual compulsion takes advantage of our own powerful brain chemistry. But even something like losing your temper can become like an addiction; it can become a habit that begins to control you and then destroy you.

When that gasbag at work says something idiotic and you know that replying in kind will just make things worse but you still do it, that’s suffering. That’s the pain of temptation.

Habits and addictions are one example. Here’s another: everyone has purposefully broken a rule and felt guilty about it in the act. Maybe you were with a bunch of friends and agreed to participate in something stupid or cruel, and possibly illegal, and you went along with it, regretting it before it even happened. Maybe you knocked back your first beer terrified of what would happen if your parents found out. Maybe you honestly didn’t want it that first time, but your partner did.

The truth is that all sin is suffering. You don’t have to understand what the effects of your sin are to feel its consequences. Every act of sin is self-destructive, fracturing our relationship with God and frustrating our God-given desires to flourish as human beings.

We can debate exactly what is meant when the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews said “suffered when tempted.” Did Jesus’ soul really prompt him to participate in his own self-destruction? What is it like for the Word Made Flesh to be tempted to sin? I honestly don’t know the answer.

But here’s the point: Jesus didn’t come simply to tell us everything we were doing wrong. He came and experienced, in an exhaustively authentic way, what it’s like to be a human. We suffer in our temptation; Jesus suffered with us, and so we have in him not just a judge but a brother. We have a savior who does not simply stoop from a throne in Heaven to scold us when we fail, but who dives into our dirty, ugly mess and lifts us out. His Father does not lead us into temptation to evaluate our moral fiber, but delivers us from the evil of the pain we freely choose.

Thanks be to God.

]]> http://ifmercyfalls.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/the-pain-of-temptation/feed/ 0 Gob http://ifmercyfalls.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-word-52311/ http://ifmercyfalls.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/the-word-52311/#comments Mon, 23 May 2011 16:46:01 +0000 Ben http://ifmercyfalls.wordpress.com/?p=1078 ]]>

We get a surprising glimpse of what service to God means for Jesus in Matthew 6:24. He said, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.” The surprising thing here is that serving God is compared to serving money. But how do you serve money? Not by helping money or meeting money’s needs. You serve money by treasuring it so much that you shape your whole life to benefit from what moeny can do for you.

So it is with God in the way Jesus sees the service of worship. We do not help God or meet God’s needs (“The Son of Man came not to be served,” Mark 10:45). Rather we serve God by treasuring him so much that we shape our whole life so as to benefit from what he can do for us. And, unlike money, what God can do for us above all other treasures is be everything we’ve longed for.

from What Jesus Demands from the World by John Piper. Wheaton: Crossway, 2006. p. 104

The book is both a history and a polemic (10); the first two chapters are almost entirely history. Constantine himself only appears a few times in the first 30-40 pages — the first chapters are concerned with Dioclectian, the Roman emperor who instituted the Roman Tetrarchy. If need to brush up on your late Roman history, Wikipedia is a good place to start: basically, Rome had four emperors ruling together, of whom Diocletian was the first and most senior. In A.D. 303, at the suggestion of his junior emperor, Galerius, Diocletian issued a series of edicts that enforced the violent persecution of Christians.

Leithart argues Diocletian’s main motive was was to restore Rome’s relationship to their ancestral gods. In the emperor’s eyes, because they did not sacrifice to the Roman gods, Christians were betraying Roman religion, politics, and culture all at once. He makes the important point that almost a century before, all “free residents” of the Roman empire had been granted citizenship (35). Thus, as citizens of Rome, faithful Christians were in a real sense treasonous and represented a threat to the Roman way of life, at least as Diocletian understood it.

The first two chapters are fascinating as history, even though Constantine himself only gets a few mentions. I do have a issue with the book’s structure, however. The first chapter starts with Diocletian and details the lead-up and aftermath of his “sanguinary edicts.” The second chapter, however, jumps back in time and explains how Diocletian came to power and how the Tetrarchy was formed. It was all good information, but putting it in the second chapter seemed like an awkward structural decision. If the information really was essential to Leithart’s argument, it should have been the first chapter; if not, it should have been summarized and incorporated into the chapter about the Christian persecutions. As it was, I had to stop reading halfway through the first chapter to look up the information on my own, since I was so unfamiliar with that period of Roman history. But that just may be a personal problem.

Leithart made two important points in the first chapter that begin to build his argument in defense of Constantine and “Constantinianism.” The first is to point out that by the time of Constantine, Christians were already integrated into Roman society. As mentioned above, all Roman denizens, and therefore all Christians in the Roman Empire, were citizens by Constantine’s time. The Diocletian’s first edict mandated that Christians be removed from the army and from “high positions in government” (21); if Christians had been wholly withdrawn from the public life of the Roman government, there would obviously be no need for the emperor to order that they be removed. As Leithart explains in a footnote: “This . . . demonstrates the continuity between the church of the martyrs and the church under Constantine. Neither was an isolated ghetto community; if Christians had been isolated, they would have been left alone” (21, n. 26).

The second and related point, following the main thrust of his first chapter, is that the generation that suffered the persecutions under Diocletian was the same generation that welcomed Constantine as a Christian emperor. “Eusebius exaggerated Constantine’s virtues and ignored his vices,” Leithart concedes, “but his attitude toward a Christian empire makes more sense once we realize that he had personally witnessed some of the horrors of persecution in Palestine” (28). While the church may have made a mistake in endorsing incipient Christendom, the historical context indicates that it was less of a brazen grab for power and more the genuine hope of God’s earthly deliverance through the agent of the Roman emperor.

There’s not much to argue with here. Leithart only mentions my boy Yoder a handful of times in the first two chapters, and then only in footnotes. But the history is well written and it’s keeping my interest. I’m looking forward to going deeper with this one.

– Page numbers taken from Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by Peter J. Leithart. Downer’s Grove: InterVarsity, 2010.

– Image credit: Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG) is an open source project released under the GNU/GPL terms

And today’s totally non-random video, in honor of the Graduate: