“These people relate to the church probably just as positively as they do to sports…only less actively.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1928

Dear Christian Parents,

This letter is not intended to (1) create guilt, (2) return to “the Law”, or (3) attack anybody.  Rather, it’s just my attempt to get at and explore a phenomenon which I and pretty much every single pastor I ask about these things are curious about.

Let me preface this letter with the following statements that I really do believe are true.  Athletics are good, build character, and help children grow.  If our kids commit to a team, they should be taught to stand by their commitments.  I played sports in school (albeit, poorly!), and am glad I did.  My daughter plays, and I’m glad she does.

With that being said, let me ask some question that have arisen from lots of conversations, lots of watching and listening closely to people, and lots of (frankly) grief over what I think is a damaging trend among Christian parents and their children concerning athletics and the body of Christ.  My point here is not that you must be at church every single time the doors open or you are a “bad Christian.”  Far from it.  My point is not that your child should or must always choose a church event over an athletic event.  Far from it.  In fact, my point is simply that there is now an observable, verifiable shift in priorities among Christian parents that is overall damaging to our kids, to the body of Christ, to our corporate and individual witnesses, and to our and our children’s spiritual development.

With that, some questions to (honestly) ask yourself.

1. What percentage of your child’s ballgames do you attend?  What percentage of church services do you attend with your child?  Which is higher?  Why?
2. If your child said, “I just don’t feel like playing in the game tonight,” what would you say to him?  If your child said, “I just don’t feel like attending church this morning,” what would you say?
3. For what reasons would you allow your child to miss practice?  For what reasons would you allow your child to miss church?  When you compare those reasons, how are they alike or different?
4. What percentage of practices does your child attend?  What percentage of church services does your child attend?
5. Do you view your child’s team as “a team”?  Do your view your church as “a team”?
6. How excited are you about seeing your child excel in athletics?  How excited are you about seeing your child excel in Christlikeness?
7. If the church has scheduled an event and your child’s team has scheduled practice, which, on average, will your child go to?
8. Do you “expect” your child to attend practice faithfully?  Do you “expect” your child to attend church faithfully?
9. Do you “expect” your child to contribute to the team?  Do you “expect” your child to contribute to the body of Christ?
10. Which is a more exciting thought to you:  your child receiving an MVP award for his team or your child leading a friend to faith in Christ?
11. How excited do you get about the big game?  How excited do you get about corporate worship?
12. If your child routinely asked to stay home from practice, would you speak with him/her about “commitment”?  If your child routinely asked to stay home from church, would you speak with him/her about “commitment”?
13. What is commitment?
14. How would you define “idolatry”?
15. What do you figure is the overall spiritual and psychological impact of communicating to your child that sports are crucial and the church is optional?
16. If your child attended the same percentage of practices as he/she attends worship services, would the coach let him/her play in the game?
17. If your child attended the same percentage of practices as he/she attends worship services, would the coach let your child stay on the team?

As I say, just something I’m curious about arising from something I (and others) have been observing.

The seraphic Mrs. Richardson and I settled down the other night to watch the dvd of “The Road,” the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel.  To put it mildly, we both were absolutely blown away by it.  Please understand, if you haven’t read the book, that  you may find the movie very depressing.  But if you get the broad contours of what McCarthy is doing here, I suspect you’ll find the movie absolutely stunning.  Frankly, the movie is stunning in its own right, whether you’ve read the novel or not.

Viggo Mortensen and the boy absolutely nail the tenor, tone, and pathos of the characters.  The boy is mesmerizing.  The scene where he cries after his “Papa’s” encounter with the man who wants to take the boy is one of more emotionally riveting scenes you’ll ever see.  Throughout, he is the very picture of innocence surrounded by terror.

Mortensen, as always (or, mostly always), is genius.  He has a kind of understated rawness that’s funneled into (1) his utter determination to see the boy survive and (2) his unhinged rage at anybody who threatens them.  The occasional narrations are a nice touch, and the flashbacks to his wife are not overdone (as I feared they would be).  As an aside, Charlize Theron plays the wife very, very well!  I wasn’t sure about that in terms of casting, but she really did a great job in her depiction of the wife.

It’s a cliche, I know, but it must be said that the scenery and the surroundings are themselves a character in the movie (and the novel).  Filmed mainly in Pennsylvania, the landscape evokes a sense of nihilistic futility and barrenness that you really have to see to believe.  One shot in particular – the shot of the mansion with the cellar – actually captures Faulkneresque Southern gothic like nothing else I’ve ever seen.  Furthermore, some of the horizon shots are creepy beyond description.  Also, the sounds in the movie – creaking and falling trees, rain hitting the ground, a kind of environmntal groaning – are handled masterfully.

The movie is a devastatingly beautiful and haunting rendition of the book.  It resonated deeply with my own visualization of the story while reading the novel.  What is more, the spiritual dynamics have not been removed, as so often happens in films, and that’s a good thing.  (The scene in the church – which wasn’t in the book – was beautiful in its imagery.)

I read an interview with the director from Christianity Today.  He says that McCormac told him he didn’t want the spiritual element removed or softened.  Clearly the director listened, and for that he is to be commended.  The movie is stronger for it.

Check this movie out.  Truly, truly great!

Well I’ll be!

A package arrived in the mail a couple of days ago from my buddy Darrell Paulk, Pastor of Hayneville Baptist Church in Hayneville, AL.  I open it up and what do I see?  Glad you asked.  I see five old copies of Christianity Today dating from 1961, 1963, and 1967.  They are, in a word, awesome.  I mean, at this very moment I’m looking at the cover of the May 22, 1961, issue and what three names do I see?  Francis Schaeffer, Herman Ridderbos, and Harold John Ockenga!  Not too shabby!  (The name Ridderbos makes me feel as if I’ll break at in whelps.  It’s an old, painful seminary war story involving a little paperback by Ridderbos that I thought would be a piece of cake…but I digress.)

So I open said issue up and what do I see on p.16 but a letter from an Edward A. Johnson, the then Director of Alumni Relations at Carthage College, taking Carl F.H. Henry, the then Editor of Christianity Today, to task (no small thing to do, by the way) for some criticisms that Henry had made of something said by a Dr. Hazleton.  In the context of Johnson’s protest to Henry, he says this:

“Sometimes a Faulkner or a Camus actually comes closer to basic religious truth, with or without Christ, than some of our preachers who piddle around Sunday after Sunday with pious moralisms and hackneyed, soporific platitudes…The works of men such as Faulkner of Camus are apraeparatio evangelica, a ‘preparation for the Gospel,’ serving to call to mind certain religious truths for men who would never come near either Bible or church.”

To which I say:  precisely, absolutely!  It is not to exalt a man like Faulkner: a man, by the way, who desperately needed, but apparently did not come to, Christ.  Nor is it to denigrate modern preaching (in 1961 or now).  It is simply but one more bullet-point in the growing list of why secular writing can play a role in introducing certain truths of which the secular writer himself likely did not grasp the full import.

For instance, there have been times in reading Faulkner when I thought, “How is it that this man seems to understand the gospel more than lots of folks who claim to have embraced the gospel?”  (I often say that of a man like Umberto Eco, too.)

It’s an interesting thought…just as much so in 1961 as today.

Think about it.

And thanks, Darrell Paulk: a good friend with a keen eye for very cool stuff!

Over the last few days I’ve been able to watch Steven Soderbergh’s film, “Che,” starring Benicio Del Toro in the titular role (it’s at Blockbuster in a 2-dvd set).  I am of the generation that knows Che Guevara primarily through the famous t-shirt image which is usually worn by folks whom you gather don’t really know much about him.  He remains a kind of darling of the left just as he is scorned by many on the right.  He was a Latin American (Argentine) revolutionary and Communist, most famous for the role he played as Fidel Castro’s Lieutenant in the Cuban revolution.  Che’s cult status was sealed by his charismatic personality and, ultimately, his execution.

As a movie, the film is fantastic.  It focuses primarily on Che’s activities in Cuba under Castro and his failed attempt at bringing revolution to Bolivia.  Benicio Del Toro looks eerily like Che and does an astounding job depicting the controversial figure.  I note as well that he served as one of the producers of the film.  The scenery is stunning and convincing and the combat scenes have an understated quality that somehow make them seem more real.  Furthermore, the depictions of Che’s mindset and rationales as well as of his interactions with the men he led in guerrilla warfare evoke sentiments of sympathy from the viewer.

Again, as a movie, it’s a pretty stunning, if overly-long, biopic.  There are moments of jarring emotional poignancy and I daresay the movie causes a certain measure of introspection on the grand questions of life:  human nature, justice, sin, virtue.

But history is a tricky thing, no?  I believe it’s safe to say that the film glosses over Che’s less endearing traits, and it certainly glosses over (even while referencing) those executed at Che’s hand.  The executions are mentioned, and even powerfully so by a young Bolivian soldier who mentions to Che that he, Che, had executed his uncle, but overall such notions are lost in a sea of appreciation for Che.  Del Toro dedicated one of the awards he won for the film to Che himself, and it is safe to assume that the film is a hagiographic appreciation of a man who had blood on his hands.

Most tragically, I suspect that young folks who watch the film may come to believe that Communism is a compassionate movement of kind-hearted men who merely want “peasants” to be able to read and write and enjoy liberty and equality.  History, of course, offers us all the shocking evidence to the contrary.

Che was a fascinating character, and it ought not be assumed that he did not believe in the cause he sought to advance (or that he was some demonic monster), but, in the end, Guevara contributed to a system that has brutalized untold millions of human beings.

At the end of the movie, a young soldier asks Che if he believes in God.  “I believe in mankind,” Che responds.  It is a powerful, honest, and terrifying moment, for the track record of Communism indeed reveals just what calumnies mankind is capable of.

A great movie.  A very poor history lesson.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings are among those that I return to again and again.  I do not always agree with him, but I almost never read him without benefit.

In a couple of weeks I’ll be preaching revival services at my brother David’s church on the theme, “Christ and His Church.”  This theme brought to mind a comment I saw attributed to Bonhoeffer.  I’ve just located it in vol.10 of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works.  It’s from a sermon he preached on July 29, 1928, while serving as a pastor in Barcelona.

I think Bonhoeffer is correct here, both in his observation and the urgency of his appeal to reconsider the meaning of “church.”  Check it out.

“There is a word that evokes tremendous feelings of love and bliss among Catholics who hear it, a word that stirs in them the most profound depths of religious feeling ranging from the awe and dread of judgment to the bliss of God’s presence, but a word that assuredly also evokes feelings of home for them, feelings of the sort only a child feels in gratitude, reverence, and self-surrendering love toward its mother, the feelings that come over us when after a long time away we once again enter our parents’ home, our own childhood home.  And there is also a word that to Protestants has the sound of something infinitely banal, something more or less indifferent and superfluous, a word that does not make a person’s heart beat faster, a word often associated with boredom, a word that in any event does not lend wings to our religious feelings – and yet a word that will seal our fate if we are unable to find in this word a new, or rather the original meaning.  Woe to us if this word – the word “church” – does not soon acquire significance for us again, indeed if it does not become a matter with which our very lives are concerned.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barcelona, Berlin, New York 1928-1931.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol.10, Clifford J. Green, ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 505.

A friend has asked me why I read and review secular books.  It’s a fair enough question and one that I think warrants an answer.

Maybe it’s best if I just present my answer in the form of bullet points:

• I think it is a question of balance. Falling into culture with no discernment and safeguards is dangerous. We should think on things that are above. On the other hand, retreating into the Christian ghetto is dangerous as well.
• I think we need a more holistic view of Christian culture. At present, we have a stunted understanding, in my opinion.
• I do not think that all aspects of non-Christian culture are inherently wicked. Think of great art from non-Christian painters, great literature from non-Christian writers, great music from non-Christian musicians, and great films from non-Christian directors and actors.
• I daresay that non-Christians can often shine the limited light they do have in ways that are powerful, poignant, and constructive. I see it as the light of “general revelation” shining through cultural forms.
• In Acts 17:28, Paul quotes, in his sermon to the Athenians, some words from pagan Greek poetry. That reveals (a) familiarity with literature and (b) likely appreciation for aspects of it as well.
• I do not believe that taking pleasure in art that is not explicitly Christian is wrong. “All truth is God’s truth,” as they all saying goes.
• I sometimes think we are quick to call somebody a “non-Christian” because they do not explicitly present Christian verities in a propositional format. I’ll grant that Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is not a book we should linger over (thus, my review to that effect), but McCarthy’s The Road is, in my opinion, a profound Christian statement. I think we should celebrate Christian truths told in popular works.

Just a few thoughts. There is, again, a danger in reading secular works, but there is a joy in it as well…a joy we need not be ashamed of as Christians.