White Elephant in the room [1]

Well, so this is the big news: after having a nice exchange of about 150 words, iMonk has asked me to have a little palaver over the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) and the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA). I have honestly meant to blog hard on this subject since I opened up this Blogger account, but I always seem to find other things which grab my attention which also seem to have a broader appeal. And no: iMonk is not the "White Elephant".

iMonk has sent me 10 questions, and one of the terms of the chat is that we're going to share the content between our two blogs. I'll be posting the intro and first Q here, and I'll be sending him Q2 and my response for him to post over there. The subsequent cross-posting and eventual collision of worlds will undoubtedly bring and end to civilization as we know it, but the hits should be amazing, so it was nice knowing you.

Along the way, I'll bet iMonk will have some follow-up Qs, and I'd be willing to field those as we go. I'm not running for the presidency of the SBC, after all: no need to screen questions. The only real ground rule is that I'm not going to answer questions which I think strike too close to home and might raise the ire of my full-time employer.

Fair enough? On with the show. iMonk's words will be like this.

I've been wanting to do some occasional posts on Christian publishing and its influence and effect on American Christians, particularly the local church. I know a few folks in the business, but none of them are as interesting and as potentially entertaining as my personal therapist, Frank Turk. I've been impressed with Frank's posts on the CBA and his asides about Christian retail in his comments are always interesting. So I asked Frank- a Christian retailer himself- if he would answer some questions about this topic, and he was gracious enough to accept the invitation. Any resulting t-shirts are not my responsibility.

Before we kick this off, there might be some "new" readers who are unaware of the history of iMonk and centuri0n, and rather than rehash that history let me frame up this exchange in a couple of ways.

First, iMonk and I both think there are problems with the contemporary American church. However, painting broadly, I would say that I think what iMonk represents is a large part of the problem, and (again, broadly) iMonk thinks what I represents is a large part of the problem. We may both be right.

Second, it turns out that we prolly agree that another large part of the problem is what passes for "Christian retail". The Q & A that iMonk proposed here and I accepted really is a kind of ex tempore stink-eye against an industry that somehow takes itself both too seriously and too lightly.

Last, I claim full responsibility for all t-shirts and overpriced gimmicks that get created and sold as a consequence of this exchange. Let's just not pretend that said gimmicks and apparel are in any way spiritually edifying: they are merely self-deprecating commerce.

1. Where, in the recent history of Christian publishing, do you feel there was a significant shift in the relationship between publishers and the church? (My nomination: Late Great Planet Earth.)

Well, I think your question oversimplifies the problem by a lot. A good comparison would be the question, "Which church council founded the Roman Catholic church?" I think you and I would agree that no church council founded the RCC, but that it was built up by a series of events -- some pragmatically good and some cynically bad -- over about 1300 years.

So even if we zoom in on the history of the publishing industry as it interfaces with church life in America in the last 100 years, to say there was "one" significant shift is a little reductive. Someplace in a blog entry I said (in words to this effect) that the problems with Christian retail (which includes the ECPA marketplace) have one foot in the local church, and the other foot in the local church. I'd say that the bastardization of the local church over the last 100 years has been the foundational problem with American Christian culture, and in that it is the foundational problem with Christian retail today.

To answer your question more narrowly, I think the greatest single damaging "event" which intersects both ECPA/CBA and the local church is the explosion of media ministries, beginning with the grand-daddy of media minsitries: the Billy Graham Crusades. Hal Lindsey is a small fish in a dirty pond compared to the damage I think has come about in the exercise of the local church mission due to media-based ministries which have convinced people they don’t need to "go to church" in order to "be a Christian".

I think the chain of causation goes like this:

- media ministries (MM) have supplanted local church ministry over the last 50 years. If we're 100% honest with ourselves, local churches ceded their position to media ministries in part because MM looked good on the outside and in part because local churches tried to be "like" MM.

- media ministries are more like media-based organizations than like ministries

- media-based organizations thrive of "spin off" or "franchise"; for example, a good book gets a movie; if the movie is target-rich, it gets trinkets (cf. Star Wars); if the movie is hit, it gets a sequel; the sequel gets a book; etc.

- media ministries propagate themselves like media-based organizations and not like Gospel-based organizations.

- Thus, the franchise-driven CBA channel of retail.

So what we really have is a media-based paradigm frankly over-running any and all paradigms contained inside the Gospel. I'm 100% ready to admit that the delivery of the Gospel is not necessarily restricted to guys with one cloak and one staff and a pair of sandals who only stay in towns were someone will put them up for the night, but I am also 100% sure that the Gospel is tied inextricably to local church bodies who are working personally to deliver the work of Christ in word and example.

To be clear: CBA is a tangle because the right-side-up version of Gospel ministry from the local church is not even upside-down but inside-out. That doesn't absolve CBA and ECPA from its complicity in this gigantic mess, but it does explain why CBA and ECPA has such an easy time remerchandising its goods every coupla months: there's nobody there to stop them.

You can follow the whole "interview" with these links:
[Q1] Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10

Hold on to your hat

I just got an e-mail which has proposed the unthinkable with the unmentionable doing the inconceivable.

And I don't believe I just agreed to it, but I did.

Stay tuned. This is bigger than WAL*MART.

risk and reward

I have no idea how I found this post, but I did, and now I'm going to pay for it.

See: I think that the right reverend iMonk has a lot of "right stuff" in that link. For example, it is for the most part neanderthal to get out the torches and the pitchforks and storm the gates of Duke U demanding that they deliver Dr. Ehrman in a cage so that we may then destroy the monster without at least doing ourselves the favor of reading the work in question. We are at out worst, culturally and ethically, when we start burning books -- figuratively and literally -- without having read them or, frankly, comparing them to what are rather vanilla claims about history which are not really in dispute.

It is also right to note that not everybody is equipped to read stuff like Ehrman's work and review it critically. For example, someone who has never read Livy or Tacitus (as two examples) -- either in a critical translation or in Dr. Brown's Latin class as an undergraduate -- probably doesn't have a lot of experience with ancient historical sources and the actual history of the first-century world. So that person is probably at a disadvantage in reading Ehrman and doesn't have the practical know-how to investigate Ehrman's claims. You know: for example, the average NPR reporter.

And in that, I have a problem with iMonk's approach to overviewing Bart Ehrman. I disagree with the idea that Ehrman is not "evangelizing" for his beliefs. In spite of Ehrman's faculty position, his view of the history of the church is problematic at best -- and not from a "it might hurt my faith" standpoint: from a "it is sloppy and glib" standpoint. It is precisely because Ehrman has a casual and superficially-dispassionate tone in his discussion that we cannot simply talk about him as if he is doing us a favor by challenging our beliefs.

Let me be clear: I don't think iMonk has endorsed Ehrman in his essay. iMonk has said that Ehrman is wrong about "a lot" of things. The question is if iMonk's essay here gives the impression that Ehrman is a merely clever foil or something more insidious.

Now talk amongst yourselves.

provocative speech

h, you crazy kids. I have a full calendar today, but I'm wondering: when was the last time we thought about the Eph 5 standard of Christian discourse?

Why, I'm not sure we have thought about it at all in this blog -- which is astounding, given the dust that was raised here over a certain 8-letter word of conflagration.

You think about the Eph 5 standard while I'm signing a new lease for the bookstore, and I'll get back to you on this topic this afternoon.

Shoot. I was gonna ...

fter a weekend off from everything except canoing with my kids, mowing grass and hitting my son in the face with a football so to make sure he's not a wimpy little bookworm like I was/am, I did a little toddle through the blogosphere and found that John MacArthur has blogged on a subject which I had on the agenda for the summer.

You can use that post for future reference on this subject, because I am sure it will come up again.

Another kind of ugly

You prolly read this someplace else, but if you didn't, read about the facts of hurricane Katrina.

Now, wait: before you do, let me ask you ...

How many people died in the state of Louisiana in the hurricane?

How many people died in the SuperDome?

What demographic was the most devastated by this storm?

OK -- now go and read that article.

Another Dip [3]

es, you thought I forgot about the baptism thing, didn’t you? I cannot forget about baptism, people. It’s like a song I cannot get out of my head.

So that nobody thinks I’m shirking my agenda here, I was going to “do” Ignatius (c. AD 50 – 107?) next, but for those of you in the know, the references to “baptism” in his letters are all in the controversial longer versions and not in the more-traditionally accepted shorter versions.

Well, you know: except. Except in Ignatius’ epistle to Polycarp:

Chapter VI.—The duties of the Christian flock.

Give ye heed to the bishop, that God also may give heed to you. My soul be for theirs that are submissive to the bishop, to the presbyters, and to the deacons, and may my portion be along with them in God! Labour together with one another; strive in company together; run together; suffer together; sleep together; and awake together, as the stewards, and associates, and servants of God. Please ye Him under whom ye fight, and from whom ye receive your wages. Let none of you be found a deserter. Let your baptism endure as your arms; your faith as your helmet; your love as your spear; your patience as a complete panoply. Let your works be the charge assigned to you, that ye may receive a worthy recompense. Be long-suffering, therefore, with one another, in meekness, as God is towards you. May I have joy of you for ever!

It’s the highlighted part that is somewhat engrossing. Ignatius is here using the “full armor” metaphor, and perhaps composing one of the first versions of “Onward Christian Soldiers” – because he is exhorting the believers (to and thru Polycarp) to be soldiers who do not abandon their posts.

Do not be deserters, he says. And the first item on the list of supplies is . . . baptism! “Let Baptism endure as your arms,” he writes, and in that, we have to consider what he means by that. For example, it’s clear he means “arms” in the sense of “weapons” or “equipment of war”, and not merely your beefy pythons. But in that he calls on those submissive to the bishop to let this weapon “endure”.

The good Presbyterians reading this know already what this means because they are not ashamed to use with the phrase, “improve our baptism”. Warfield said it this way:

Thus we shall, as our fathers expressed it, "improve our baptism." We improve it "by serious and thankful consideration of the nature of it, and of the ends for which Christ instituted it, the privileges and benefits conferred and sealed thereby, and our solemn vow made therein: by being humbled for our sinful defilement, our falling short of, and walking contrary to, the grace of baptism and our engagements; by growing up to assurance of pardon of sin, and of all other blessings sealed to us in that sacrament; by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin, and quickening of grace; and by endeavoring to live by faith, to have our conversation in holiness and righteousness, as those that have therein given up their names to Christ, and to walk in brotherly love, as being baptized by the same Spirit into one body." Surely, he who does these things shall never stumble, but shall be fully girded for entrance into that eternal Kingdom for which we are marked and sealed in our baptism.
Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 1, Edited by John E. Meeter, published by Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1970. originally from a pamphlet of eight pages published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication, Philadelphia, 1920.

Now, given that we are reading the ECFs to gain an understanding of how they thought about baptism, I’m not sure the part, in yellow above, is of much help. We’re trying to figure out or deduce the meaning of baptism from the ECFs, so assuming it has one which is 20th-century Presbyterian in meaning is not quite inside the methodology. But it seems to me that the rest of this is exactly what Ignatius is talking about. That is: baptism is surely something more than a bath – it is a sign of something in which we stand. I think it does Ignatius no injustice to say it is a sign of the Gospel itself from which we may desert if we are not watchful. In that, it seems clear to me that Ignatius calls our baptism part of the equipment of our faith. But it is no mere device: it is our arms, something with which we can act to advance our cause.

That’s an interesting affirmation as far as it goes.

Your turn: what’s Ignatius talking about here?

Mickey Finn. Eee. Finney.

f you go poking around TheResurgence.com, you will eventually find this post, and you can read it for your personal edification. There's nothing like placing the blame at the feet of those who deserve it -- which would be all of us, btw, for allowing the kind of historical mistake this essay uncovers to simply pass by without a word of complaint.

Read that link so you know what you ought to be complaining about.

An interesting blog post

I was following the links from my site meter log this afternoon, and I found this post on Mark Driscoll. In reply to it, I said this:


here is a vast difference between "There are flaws in some of the finest diamonds in the world, and yet they do not prevent their being rated at a priceless value" and refusing to reform one's tongue.

Listen: I have the same problem Pastor Driscoll has -- I feel better after I swear. I do -- I admit it. I feel like I said what I meant.

Here's the real question: should I feel that way in the first place? Should I feel the way you have to feel to drop an F-bomb? How about the way you have to feel to call something "BILL TUSH" (it's an anagram -- you do the cryptology)?

Out of the mouth comes the overflow of the heart -- that's rudimentary Christian, NT reasoning. Hiding behind the "I'm a diamond in the rough in Jesus' eyes" riff is ethical quackery.

But, I think Pastor Driscoll has a problem he cannot admit: if he stops swearing in public, he'll lose cred with the Seattle crowd, which is his local church. That's no better or worse than an SBC pastor who has to wear an Armani every week in order to present himself approved to his congregation, I suppose -- if the point is that the pastor should seek the approval of his church.

The Welcome Mat

We have had some visitors from First Baptist Springdale to the ol' blog, and we bid you all a hearty welcome. Nice to see you.

As visitors, you probably have noticed that we're not always very excited about everything that happens in the Christian life. Well, who is, really? Sometimes things in this life aren't very humanly appealing, and sometimes, frankly, they're not very spirtually appealing.

The best thing (if you're looking for my opinion, and it's my blog so I suppose you are) in all accounts is that we know the difference between those two things, and we try not to be part of those thing in the latter group.

Is that fair? I thought you'd think so. Stop by any time.