Blog Archive
for June, 2008
Southern Baptists, the Family, and the Rule of the Appetites
— Friday, June 20th, 2008 —
For too long, Southern Baptists have maintained some right ideas about the family, even unpopular ones, while keeping those ideas segregated neatly from the broader picture of the gospel to which we witness. To engage this issue, Southern Baptists must walk away from modernism and see once again the universe as the Scripture unveils it: as an invisible conflict of the kingdoms, a satanic horror-show being invaded by the reign of Christ.
This means that a Baptist vision of the family must be grounded in what theologian Gregory Boyd calls a “warfare worldview” (without Boyd’s unorthodox doctrine of God). This worldview is particularly needed in an era when Western Christians are all too distant from the demon-haunted landscape of the Old and New Testaments, so much so that we unwittingly are blind to the personal and cosmic aspects of the struggle around us.
In his seminal study on thriving Christianity in the Global South, Phillip Jenkins attributes part of the resurgence of conservative Christianity in the Third World to the consonance between the biblical worldview of unseen spiritual conflict and that of African and Asian cultures. When the gospel comes with power and conviction, an African ex-animist or an Asian ex-ancestor worshipper is able to read the Bible better than an American ex-rationalist can, precisely because, at this point, their idolatries are closer to the truth of God than ours are.
This mindset explains why the Global South churches see such a connection between Christian orthodoxy and family stability. “This spiritual-warfare perspective helps explain the depth and fury and alarm expressed in recent sexual controversies within the Anglican Communion,” Jenkins writes. “When conservative African and Asian clergy invoked the name of the diabolical in these conflicts, they were not just indulging in overheated rhetoric.”
We have much to learn from our African and Asian brothers and sisters here. Yes, Southern Baptists have an “outrage” catharsis about the culture, but can we say that we have acted with “depth and fury and alarm” about our own divorce culture, about our own family breakdowns, about the loss of more and more of our baptized adolescents to post-Christian American culture?
Unlike our African and Asian and Middle-Eastern brothers and sisters, we fail to see reptilian eyes behind such things. Could it be that God will humble Southern Baptists by making the Bible belt a mission field for Nigerian and Indonesian Christian missionaries, who will explain to hurting families who their real enemy is–and how to crush his head?
Keep Reading...The Kingdom of the Crushed Skull
— Friday, June 6th, 2008 —
A couple of weeks ago, I took my older boys to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just as I’d promised months before. The aliens didn’t scare me, and I didn’t flinch at the skeletons. I ate popcorn without a care in the world as the screen filled with killer ants. But I’ll admit to you that I squirmed with revulsion at the snake.
I hate snakes.
And this movie had only one, not a whole pit filled with them like the first film in this series. Still, the sight of the scaly thing made me want to pick up an axe or a revolver, anything would do.
According to a recent study, Indiana Jones and I are not alone. The Atlantic Monthly notes a recent study in the journal Psychological Science that suggests that “humans may have a built-in aversion to snakes and their hissing, slithering, menacing ways.” Researchers at the University of Virginia studied 120 preschool-age children and their parents to pick up reactions to images of various things, including snakes. The researchers were surprised to find that the children, even those who had had no exposure to snakes, immediately picked out the snakes as threatening.
The preschoolers had no such “threat-relevant” reaction to pictures of frogs or caterpillars. This suggests, says the Atlantic, “an innate predisposition to see a snake as a threat.” The authors of the article contend that humans and “other primates” could “have an evolved tendency to rapidly detect” a snake.
What, though, if this loathing isn’t at all evolutionary?
Keep Reading...
