D.A. Carson Defends British Christianity

Anyone who hasn't had their head in the ecclesial sand has probably heard a thing or two about the kerfuffle caused by Mark Driscoll's dismissive denunciation of British churches as full of "cowards" in a recent radio interview here in the UK.  Driscoll's attack on UK Christianity followed similar lines to those favored among the Christian Right in America—the churches over here are dying because they're wimpy and womanish, and they need to man up, stop wearing robes, and start speaking out without worrying about how offensive they're being.  As an American Christian in the UK, this kind of attitude has often disheartened me.  I mean, let's not deny the fact—much of the Church here is in shambles, and a few godly courageous men could make a world of difference.  But sensitivity is not an un-Christian trait, and perhaps only an American could be brash enough to think that being wilfully insensitive is a good way to make UK Christians less sensitive and therefore, apparently, more Gospel-preaching.  

So I was very encouraged to read this essay by D.A. Carson today (thanks to Peter Escalante for the link), in response (but very obliquely and judiciously) to Driscoll's accusations.  Carson patiently points to the impossibility of generalizing about the UK as a whole, and to many of the really excellent things that are going on in portions of the UK church.  And he ends with a powerful and much-needed reminder that faithfulness is not measured by success.  A church can be faithful, courageous, and shrinking, and if this is the case, it needs all our admiration and support, not contempt.  "We must not equate courage with success, or even youth with success. We must avoid ever leaving the impression that these equations are valid. I have spent too much time in places like Japan, or in parts of the Muslim world, where courage is not measured on the world stage, where a single convert is reckoned a mighty trophy of grace."

Finally, he reminds us that, even where rebuke is needed, "the Jesus who can denounce hypocritical religious leaders in Matthew 22 is also the one of whom it is said, "He will not quarrel or cry out; no one will hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out."  

How to Make Conferences Less Awkward...by Not Trying

I've been away at the Society for the Study of Theology Conference with no internet for a few days, and I am now emerging, having been inspired in the meantime to write this little (firmly tongue-in-cheek) satire.  This post may only make sense to those of you who have regularly gone to academic conferences (though admittedly, the same phenomena often appear in other more mundane academic settings), indeed, perhaps only those who have regularly gone to British academic conferences.  One has the sense that the vices (or misplaced virtues) I am about to deplore are a particular affliction of the British people, with their penchant for uncomfortable politeness.  

The goal of an academic conference, you see, is to facilitate the free exchange of academic ideas with the minimum discomfort for all those involved.  We come, we sit, we listen, we ask polite questions; then we take our turns at the podium to boost our CVs, while everyone else listens and asks polite questions.  Ideas are gently expressed, gently prodded, and gently defended.  Everyone goes home enriched and intact.  Sounds great, right?

The problem is that this is all built upon a myth--the myth that all ideas are created equal--have equal value, equal coherence, deserve an equal hearing.  And ultimately, most people at these conferences do not buy this myth.  We must publicly pretend we believe it, pretending to be unfazed in the presence of a an idea that is hardly worthy of the name, but privately, we are painfully aware of its falsity.  Before we were academics, after all, we were humans.  And a human being can detect awkwardness the way a shark can detect blood--we have a built-in satellite dish to detect when someone is absolutely blowing it.  In normal social settings, we have built-in damage-control mechanisms--someone interrupts, and diverts attention from the epic failure unfolding before our eyes; or perhaps everyone just bursts out laughing, the offender included.  Or, failing all other devices, someone says, "Well, that was awkward," and once we have named it, we can move past it.  Not so at the academic conference.  We don't want anyone to feel awkward, so there will be no interrupting, no laughing, no acknowledgment of failure.  We will Stoically continue on, as if nothing had happened. 

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Bombs over Benghazi

I concluded my post on Thursday by reflecting that we had no right to blame God for the deaths of tens of thousands in Japan’s tsunami as long as we went around screwing up the world in manifest acts of evil on our own account.  Alas, I had no idea those words would prove so immediately relevant.  On Friday, following a frenetic month-long media blitz to convince us that Gaddafi was an evil war criminal exterminating his own people and must be stopped, the US, Britain, and France achieved their ambition--a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire or else our militaries would act to impose a “no-fly zone” in Libya to prevent airstrikes on civilians.  The cease-fire was immediately announced, but somehow two days later here we are not merely having established a no-fly zone, but having proceeded immediately to bombing soldiers, convoys, and according to many reports, plenty of civilians of our own. 

How on earth could we be pulled into this madness again so easily?  With the bitter taste of the Great Iraq Deception and its disastrous effects still in the mouths of the UK and US public, with the memory of the shameless propaganda that led up to it and our shameful capitulation to it still so fresh, how could we possibly let this happen again?  Back then, I was young and stupid, and I bought the warmongering hook, line, and sinker...now I know it what it must’ve felt like for the few who kept their senses back then and watched as the godlessness unfolded around them--angry, confused, helpless.

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Red Tory Blues

Concreteness and relevance are this book's greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses.

Allow me to explain.

Most books from Christian theologians these days (perhaps this term is a stretch in Blond's case, but as John Milbank himself is rumored to have been the ghost-writer for the meatier core of the book, it is probably apropos) seeking to engage the problems of modern politics and economics with a "third way" that eschews both statism and free-marketism, reasserting a holistic, mutualist, communitarian and ethical kind of human society (and such books are perhaps a dime a dozen these days), suffer from a glaring lack of concreteness. It is effortless for critics to dismiss them, labeling them pie-in-the-sky fantasies that offer no substantive engagement with real-world political realities and no plausible and concrete policy solutions. Such criticisms, I should hasten to add, are more often than not quite unfair, because such concreteness is not always possible or even desirable, at least not the kind of concreteness the critics want. Nevertheless, the critics do have a point. 

Blond's book, however, is ironclad against such criticism. It is nothing if not concrete. It is aimed squarely at the problems facing Britain in 2010, not "modern society" in general, and it backs up its diagnosis of the problems with an overwhelming dollop of statistics and examples on almost every page. Nor is Blond content (as are so many of the books in the aforementioned genre) with a single slim chapter at the end venturing some "practical solutions" or "blueprints for change"--the whole last half of the book is dedicated to outlining a thorough and specific policy agenda to remedy the problems described in the first half. This latter half is particularly concrete, delving into the minutia of British local-government policy and the inner workings of various bureaucracies and outlining new structures that could be created.

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