You are told to pray especially for the people, that is, for the whole body, for all its members, the family of your mother the Church; the badge of membership in this body is love for each other. If you pray only for yourself, you pray for yourself alone. If each one prays for himself, he received less from God’s goodness than the one who prays on behalf of others. But as it is, because each prays for all, all are in fact praying for each one.

To conclude, if you pray only for yourself, you will be praying, as we said, for yourself alone. But if you pray for all, all will pray for you, for you are included in all. In this way there is a great recompense; through the prayers of each individual, the intercession of the whole people is gained for each individual. There is here no pride, but an increase of humility and a richer harvest from prayer.

--St. Ambrose

In a conversation a few weeks ago I had opportunity to revisit a post from my 2008 series about the Theology of Calvin and Hobbes.

Specifically, I was discussing how the focus in the comic strip upon Calvin's inner, subjective experience illustrates what Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age describes as the "immanent frame," and how that frame has increasingly privileged religious experience and the challenges that places before us.

Immanent, according to dictionaries, is defined as:

Immanent
adjective
1. Existing or remaining within; inherent.
2. Restricted entirely to the mind; subjective.

According to Taylor a "secular age" is an age where the transcendent, vertical dimension has collapsed leaving only the human, horizontal dimension. A rich two-dimensional universe has now been flattened to only one-dimension. Nothing higher, no meaning from Beyond penetrates our scurrying to and fro, back and forth, on the one-dimensional immanent frame of human affairs. The only meaning and purposes are those we find within ourselves and our societies. No meaning is to be found outside of human minds. Meaning is now subjective.

A feature of the Immanent Frame in this secular age is the advent of what Taylor calls "the buffered self." In earlier "enchanted" eras the self was porous. That is, the boundaries between the self and the world were vague and blurry. The self could be affected, penetrated, and overtaken by demons, spells, or gods. But in our "disenchanted" age of mechanism and science the self has been closed off, buffered from the world. The boundary between self and world is now clear and inviolable.

With the rise of the buffered self and the collapse of the transcendent, the secular age is often characterized by attempts to gain "depth" by going deeper into the self. If we cannot reach the Heavens at least we can dig into our psyche. Consequently, the Immanent Frame, per its definition, is characterized by subjectivity, interiorization, and the valuing of "authenticity" (digging deep and then staying "true" to what you find). In short, the secular age is an "internal" age, an age of private, buffered subjectivity.

There is no greater example of Taylor's notion of the buffered self, a self dominated by its own subjectivity, than Calvin. A dominant theme in Calvin and Hobbes, perhaps the dominant theme, is the portrayal of Calvin's inner world. The magic of Calvin and Hobbes does not come from an "enchanted" world. There are no fairies or wizards. Rather, the magic comes from Calvin's own mind. It is true that Watterson blurs the lines between objectivity and subjectivity, but the force of the strips comes from entering the "interior" of Calvin. We get inside Calvin's subjective experience and see how viewing the world through his eyes changes what we see.

Here is a tour through the thematic strips that routinely take us inside Calvin's subjective experience. First, there are the wonderful and zany Spaceman Spiff strips, where Calvin has adventures of a Buck Rogers sort (click on strips to make them large for reading):

There are also the many strips where Calvin becomes a dinosaur:

Also, who can forget Stupendous Man?:

Beyond these thematic strips there are numerous strips where Calvin has subjective, imaginative adventures:

And, finally, there is the subjective/objective issue surrounding Hobbes:

Truth-hood and reality in Calvin and Hobbes is dictated by Calvin's subjective experience. This is exactly the point Taylor is making about the buffered self in the Immanent Frame. Meaning and reality is now an internal and subjective affair.

Overall, and this was the point of the conversation I was having, life in the Immanent Frame with its focus on subjective experience has had an effect upon Christian apologetics. Specifically, appeals to an unseen transcendent realm are less persuasive in the Immanent Frame. More persuasive are appeals to religious experience.

However, this appeal to religious experience is troublesome to many. The focus on subjective experience privileges the individual and the individual's interior experience. And yet, in a secular age God cannot be pointed to as a "fact" as could be done in prior enchanted eras. Thus, in the Immanent Frame, for better or worse, subjectivity is what we lean on. The Immanent Frame dictates our experience of reality. The self is no longer porous, but buffered. We look inside for God, not outside.

And yet, I wonder if Calvin might help us find our way forward here, a way to pull us out of our buffered selves and back into the world.

Specifically, while the focus of the strip is on Calvin's internal experience the magic of the strip--and I use that enchanted word intentionally--is how Calvin's imagination affects reality. The ontological status of Hobbes is the key example here.

Calvin imagines a world and that world comes to be. Or, phrased differently, Calvin's imagination changes and shapes the world.

For the Christian, then, the key would be shifting focus away from interior religious experience to capture the magic of imagining the Kingdom and letting that magic remake the world.

"Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance." --Albert Maysles

Twitter anyone?

Our bible class on Sunday morning was working through the stories in 1 Kings 18.

Most of the time in this chapter we focus on the contest on Mt. Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. But early in the chapter our class paused to take note of the witness of Obadiah.

The chapter starts three years into the famine that Elijah pronounced to the wicked king Ahab:

1 Kings 18.1-6
After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah: “Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land.” So Elijah went to present himself to Ahab.

Now the famine was severe in Samaria, and Ahab had summoned Obadiah, his palace administrator. (Obadiah was a devout believer in the Lord. While Jezebel was killing off the Lord’s prophets, Obadiah had taken a hundred prophets and hidden them in two caves, fifty in each, and had supplied them with food and water.) Ahab had said to Obadiah, “Go through the land to all the springs and valleys. Maybe we can find some grass to keep the horses and mules alive so we will not have to kill any of our animals.” So they divided the land they were to cover, Ahab going in one direction and Obadiah in another.

The moral witness of Obadiah is fascinating. Obadiah is the palace administrator for a corrupt and wicked king. But Obadiah is a devout believer in the Lord so he hides a hundred prophets of the Lord and keeps them alive by supplying them with food and water. And we can assume this has been going on for about three years. No small task. And a risky one at that.

Basically, what Obadiah does is the equivalent of hiding Jews during the Holocaust as a Nazi government official.

And the witness of Obadiah isn't an isolated case. Throughout the Old Testament we find servants of the Lord serving pagan kings.

Joseph. Daniel. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Esther.

I find these cases interesting as many of us serve or work in vocations, organizations, institutions or systems that don't seem very just or holy.

And yet, like Obadiah, we can be faithful people within these institutions, doing good and protecting people within our sphere of influence. 

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness.

The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.

The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began.

God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve...

The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying:

“Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

"I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise.

"I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell.

"Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you..."

--from an ancient homily on the Harrowing of Hell

If you are a Simon of Cyrene, take up your cross and follow Christ.

If you are crucified beside him like one of the thieves, now, like the good thief, acknowledge your God...

If you are a Joseph of Arimathea, go to the one who ordered his crucifixion, and ask for Christ’s body...

If you are a Nicodemus, like the man who worshiped God by night, bring spices and prepare Christ’s body for burial.

If you are one of the Marys, or Salome, or Joanna, weep in the early morning.

Be the first to see the stone rolled back, and even the angels perhaps, and Jesus himself.

--St. Gregory Nazianzen

So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am.

If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet.

I have given you a model to follow."

--John 13.13-15a

Above all things, keep peace within yourself, then you will be able to create peace among others. It is better to be peaceful than learned. The passionate man often thinks evil of a good man and easily believes the worst; a good and peaceful man turns all things to good.

A man who lives at peace suspects no one. But a man who is tense and agitated by evil is troubled with all kinds of suspicions; he is never at peace with himself, nor does he permit others to be at peace. He often speaks when he should be silent, and he fails to say what would be truly useful. He is well aware of the obligations of others but neglects his own.

So be zealous first of all with yourself, and then you will be more justified in expressing zeal for your neighbor. You are good at excusing and justifying you own deeds, and yet you will not listen to the excuses of others. It would be more just to accuse yourself and to excuse your brother. If you wish others to put up with you, first put up with them.

--Thomas à Kempis, from The Imitation of Christ

I'm back over at Luke Norsworthy's podcast this week. Here's the link.

We spend much of our time talking about, in relation to Luke's most recent podcast with Peter Rollins, the possibility of good transcendence and good certainty. We then go on to talk about penal substitutionary atonement and the "blood medley" from old time hymnbooks. And lastly, we talk about the Devil and my upcoming book Reviving Old Scratch--soon to be the #1 New Release in Demonology!--to tease what's shaping up to be a very exciting book launch event the first week of May in Malibu.

And by the way, given that this is Passion Week, here are some of the songs from the blood medley I sang growing up. And like I said in the podcast, I still have great affection for these songs. Anyone remember these?

"Nothing but The Blood"
What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus;
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Oh! precious is the flow
That makes me white as snow;
No other fount I know,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

"Victory In Jesus"
I heard an old, old story,
How a Savior came from glory,
How He gave His life on Calvary
To save a wretch like me;
I heard about His groaning,
Of His precious blood's atoning,
Then I repented of my sins
And won the victory.

O victory in Jesus,
My Savior, forever.
He sought me and bought me
With His redeeming blood;
He loved me ere I knew Him
And all my love is due Him,
He plunged me to victory,
Beneath the cleansing flood.

"There's Power in the Blood"
Would you be free from the burden of sin?
There’s pow’r in the blood, pow’r in the blood;
Would you o’er evil a victory win?
There’s wonderful pow’r in the blood.

There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r
In the blood of the Lamb;
There is pow’r, pow’r, wonder-working pow’r
In the precious blood of the Lamb.

When it comes to clothing Jana and I don't do retail. Just about everything in our closets we've gotten secondhand, from either consignment sales and stores or thrift stores, Goodwill being a favorite place to shop. Looking at us, I think people would be surprised by that. But you're not lacking a sense of fashion if you shop at consignment and thrift stores. You're just refusing to pay retail prices for it.

The other say Jana and I were having a conversation about the theology of consignment and thrift stores. The obvious points are those about simplicity, materialism and justice. When you shop at consignment and thrift stores you're living more simply, stepping away from the materialism of the culture and contributing less to the injustices in the worldwide clothing industry.

But Jana went on to make a theological distinction between consignment and thrift stores. "I really like thrift stores," Jana said, "because thrift stores are about resurrection."

Both consignment and thrift stores are selling second hand clothing. But the crucial difference is that in consignment stores the person bringing in the clothing is selling them. They bring in the clothing to sell to the consignment store or they get a percent from the store when the clothing sells. And this profit motive generally makes consignment stores nicer than thrift stores.

But thrift stores like Goodwill? That clothing is simply given away. That clothing is no longer wanted.

Consequently, when you pull something off the racks in a thrift store it's resurrection and restoration.

Something discarded is brought back to life again. Something deemed useless now has a purpose. Something that had no value becomes valued again.

That's Easter.

That's the theology of the thrift store.

Exult greatly, O daughter Zion!
Shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem!
Behold: your king is coming to you,
a just savior is he,
Humble, and riding on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.

He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim,
and the horse from Jerusalem;
The warrior’s bow will be banished,
and he will proclaim peace to the nations.
His dominion will be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.

--Zechariah 9.9-10

The Abilene city buses stop running at 6:15 pm. So on Wednesday nights most of the Freedom Fellowship community who use the city buses can use them to get to our meal at 6:00. Worship follows the meal at 7:00.

But what that means is that when worship ends around 8:00 a large part of the Freedom community can't get home on the bus.

Consequently, an important part of Freedom is helping get everyone home after church. We have a van but there's not enough seats for everyone. So we do a lot of car-pooling at the end of services.

I've got a regular crew I take home every Wednesday night. Josh, Henry, Robert and Judy. The five of us have been spending Wednesday nights together for the last two years. Mainly I'm just dropping everyone off, but sometimes we go get ice cream at Dairy Queen or stop because someone needs to pick up something at the store.

Josh and Henry love music so I turn control of the radio over to them.

Josh and Henry are both Hispanic so they inevitably tune the radio to 93.3 FM. La Voz, our local Tejano station. So Wednesday nights has become the night where Josh and Henry are educating me about Tejano music.

It helps that on Wednesday nights La Voz does a weekly countdown, the Top 8 at 8, a rundown of the week's most requested songs. That countdown is right when we're driving home from Freedom.

Right now, my favorite song is one from the band Siggno, clocking in at Number #2 this week.

"That, my friend, is a good song," I say to Henry.

And he turns the volume up.

"Tell me how much you know of the sufferings of your fellowmen and I will tell you how much you have loved them.”

--Helmut Thielicke

Question the beauty of the earth,
the beauty of the sea,
the beauty of the wide air around you,
the beauty of the sky;
question the order of the stars,
the sun whose brightness lights the days,
the moon whose splendor softens the gloom of night;
question the living creatures that move in the waters,
that roam upon the earth,
that fly through the air;
the spirit that lies hidden,
the matter that is manifest;
the visible things that are ruled,
the invisible things that rule them;
question all these.

They will answer you:
"Behold and see, we are beautiful."

Their beauty is their confession of God.

 --St. Augustine

As I mentioned a few months ago, I was recently asked by an evangelical institution to participate in a discernment process regarding same-sex marriage. This organization, like many evangelical organizations, was trying to map the terrain of a post-Obergefell world in an informed and gracious way.

Given that this was an evangelical group they had a firm grasp on non-affirming positions regarding same-sex marriage. What they wanted my help with was discerning the shape of an affirming position regarding same-sex marriage, a position rooted in the Bible and Christian theology. This collection of intersecting arguments was something the group was less familiar with. So I was asked to help them map out and consider these arguments.

I wasn't allotted a lot of time to share, there were many others presenting along with me on different issues (e.g., the legal implications of Obergefell), so to prepare for my remarks I looked out over the landscape of this debate to locate, condense and summarize the main arguments that have been made by Christians for an affirming position regarding same-sex marriage.

Overall, I said, the affirming Christian position regarding same-sex marriage is built around one or some combination of four main arguments.

1. Apples and Oranges
Similar to the Copernican Revolution, when we came to recognize that the earth revolves around the sun, humanity has only just come to recognize sexual orientation as a durable and intrinsic feature of human sexuality. That is, sexual orientation is not a choice and it's not amenable to change.

Consequently, when the biblical authors, in both the Old and New Testaments, observed sexual activity they could only explain what they were seeing through the only lens they had, that of disordered and excessive sexual desire. That was the only reasonable explanation, in the eyes of the biblical writers, for why men would desire sex with men. Or women with women. What was being condemned in the Bible was this excessive and disordered sexual desire, desires deemed, given the science of the time, as being "contrary to nature."

We're in a very different situation today with our modern understanding of sexual orientation. When a teenage boy or girl, often raised in good, stable Christian homes, begins to experience same-sex desire during puberty we don't see those desires as intrinsically disordered or "contrary to nature." Even many conservative Christians have stopped condemning these desires as "unnatural."

All that to say, what the Bible condemns when in comes to human sexuality is licentiousness, sexual lust run amok. For the ancients, homosexuality appeared to be one among many examples of licentiousness, sexual desires so excessive and out of control that men could get to the point of desiring sex with other men.

An affirming position regarding same-sex marriage comes alongside the Bible in condemning licentiousness, same-sex and straight manifestations of it. But the affirming position recognizes that a same-sex couple who pledges life-long and monogamous fidelity to each other in the Christian sacrament of marriage don't fit what the Bible is condemning. It's apples and oranges. If anything, given that we recognize sexual orientation as natural (as even many conservative Christians now do), and that the marriage covenant is devoted to disciplining our sexuality--training eros to become agape--married same-sex Christians are the exact opposite of what the Bible is condemning.

Again, apples and oranges. What the Bible is condemning isn't what we're talking about in affirming same-sex Christian marriage.

As an example of this argument see Matthew Vines' God and the Gay Christian.

2. Marriage as Grace
"Male and female God created them" and "Be fruitful and multiply." Non-affirming views of same-sex marriage root their views of marriage in biological complementarity and biological reproduction. Marriage is between a man and a woman. In this Adam and Eve become the model of marriage, what we mean when we say that a marriage reflects the Image of God.

Affirming views of same-sex marriage argue, however, that there is another marriage found in the Bible, the marriage between God and Israel. This marriage is not based upon biology but upon election and grace. In this marriage the Image of God is witnessed in covenantal fidelity.

The primacy of grace over biology is also highlighted by Paul when he discusses the inclusion of the Gentiles into the church, the non-biological children who are grafted into Israel "contrary to nature" via the grace and election of God. This grace is also displayed in the family of the church, a family not formed through biology but through the Spirit and our pledges of covenantal fidelity to God and each other.

In short, an affirming position of same-sex marriage argues that marriages can reflect the Image of God in different ways. There are marriages and families in the Bible that are born out of grace and covenantal fidelity rather than biology.

As an example of this argument see Eugene Rogers' Sexuality and the Christian Body or Rowan Williams' essay "The Body's Grace."

3. The Holy Spirit Changing a Literal and Traditional Reading of the Bible
A huge hermeneutical crisis faced the early church when the Holy Spirit fell upon Cornelius and his household in Acts 10 and Peter allowed them to be baptized, formally bringing the Gentiles into the church and recognizing them as co-heirs of the covenant God made to Abraham. This was a hermeneutical crisis so big it split the church.

The issue was that circumcision was proclaimed by God to be an "everlasting" sign "in the flesh" of the covenant between God and Israel (Gen. 17.13). A plain and literal reading of the text argued that the Gentiles, therefore, would have to be circumcised to gain access to the promises made by God to Abraham.

And yet, the Holy Spirit was being poured out upon the uncircumcised. God was doing a new thing. Not just with Cornelius, but also with the Gentile converts in Antioch. How was the church to reconcile a plain, literal and centuries old traditional reading of the Bible in light of what was happening among the Gentile converts?

The issue came to a head in Acts 15 in what we call the First Apostolic Counsel. There the issues were debated--literal and traditional readings of Scripture clashing with experiences and testimony about the Holy Spirit at work among the uncircumcised. Hesitantly, the church decided in favor of experience and testimony over literal and traditional readings of Scripture.

In short, the Bible itself shows us how the action and activity of the Holy Spirit can guide the church toward different readings of Scripture, even overturning literal and traditional readings. Affirming views of same-sex marriage argue that something similar is happening in our time. We observe the fruits of the Spirit in same-sex unions, evidences of holiness, fidelity and grace. The same way the early Jewish Christians saw the fruits of the Spirit manifest among a group they knew to be--because the Bible told them so--sexually depraved and under the judgment and wrath of God.

For an example of this argument see Luke Timothy Johnson's Scripture and Discernment.

4. Love and Liberation
The fourth argument for an affirming position regarding same-sex marriage is a direct appeal to the Golden Rule: Love your neighbor as you love yourself.

In some hands this appeal is a simple appeal to love and compassion in embracing our shared humanity as beloved children of God in affirming same-sex marriages. 1 John 4.8: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

In other hands, the appeal is for justice, often informed by a biblical and prophetic appeal to liberation theology: God's preferential option for those who are oppressed and suffering. Following the Hebrew prophets and Jesus' Nazareth Manifesto (Luke 4.16-21), the Bible must be read as "good news" for those who are suffering in the world due to hate, violence, oppression and marginalization. As it says in Romans 13.10: "Love does no harm to a neighbor."  

For an example of this argument, on the love side more than liberation, see Gene Robinson's God Believes in Love.


Affirming Christian arguments for same-sex marriages, I told the evangelical organization, generally use one or some mixture of these four arguments. The arguments are nuanced, supplemented and blended in various ways, but these are the four recurring arguments.

For example, you can make the appeal for compassion and justice (Argument #4) more compelling and urgent by citing statistics about gay teen suicide and homelessness. The argument that the activity of the Holy Spirit affects how we read Scripture (Argument #3) can be supported in a variety of ways. A common example is how the Holy Spirit convicted the church about slavery. Evidences for how sexual orientation is now understood to be a natural and durable feature of our sexuality (Argument #1) and stories of the Spirit's fruits exhibited among gay Christians and same-sex couples (Arguments #2 and #3) are often given in memoir form (see Justin Lee's Torn).

Mixed, supplemented, nuanced and presented in various ways, these are the four main arguments for affirming same-sex marriages. 

My newest book Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted is coming out in May. You can read some book endorsements and pre-order at Amazon.

Regarding the pre-order sales on Amazon I noticed the categories the book was ranking in, the ranks you'd use if you wanted to say a book was a "#1 New Release" or "Bestseller" on Amazon.

Pre-sales for Reviving Old Scratch has the book ranking highest not in "Theology" but under the category "Angelology & Demonology." That's perfectly appropriate--there is a chapter in the book entitled "Angels and Demons"--but also somewhat funny as my book is targeting a modern, skeptical audience who aren't all that sure the devil or demons exist, or who find it awkward or embarrassing to talk about the devil and demons.

That said, believers in the devil and demons aren't left out, they'll get a lot out of the book as well. Perhaps even more.

Reviving Old Scratch tries to find a middle way between two extremes, quietism and awkwardness on the skeptical side and occult spookiness on the believing side.

As C.S. Lewis once wrote when faced with the question if he believed in the devil:

"I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is ‘Yes, I do.'"

All that to say, I hope sales in May for Reviving Old Scratch go well enough so that it can reach the top spot to become on Amazon, if only for a second, the "#1 Bestseller in Angelology & Demonology."

"I wrote a #1 bestseller about demons." That's way too quirky of a life achievement to pass up.

We have some sweet and dear friends who are a wonderful family at our church. They have a big and active family, but they have also been a wonderful witness to our church in being foster parents, welcoming foster babies into the loving environment of their home.

Our friends just welcomed another foster baby, a tiny baby boy, just a few weeks old. The Becks were lucky enough to find ourselves sitting next them at church and Jana got to help, feeding the little fella his bottle. I pulled out my phone a took a picture.

And not wanting to miss out I asked for my turn holding him. So I got to hold this sweet baby for much of our church service. But alas, I eventually had to give him up as another dear friend, Amy, was in line to hold him.

I'm so grateful for the witness of our friends and how they let the church be a part.

And goodness gracious, there is nothing better than holding a baby. I've missed that feeling.

Update:
Jana sent me a picture she took of me holding that sweet little baby. BTW, regular readers might also like to know that to my right is Kristi, our friend sits with us during church and who I visit during the week to help her shop and stuff.

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another) ... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

After having written a series about the theology of Johnny Cash (see the sidebar or start here) I've continued to explore the music of the Man in Black.

Given my own work in a prison I'm drawn to the songs Cash sang about prison as well as the two live concerts recorded in Folsom and San Quentin prison. In exploring these prison songs and concerts I stumbled across an interesting scholarly analysis of this aspect of Cash's music.

This is a 2010 paper entitled "Johnny Cash: The Criminologist Within" by Patrick Gerkin, Aaron Rider and John Hewitt from Grand Valley State University in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture (pdf). In the paper the authors approach Cash as a criminologist. They write:

Did Johnny Cash pay any attention to what criminologists were putting forth over these decades? Cash never went to college or took courses in criminology, and he likely never read a criminological text. Yet, he appears to have found a way to become a “folk” voice regarding crime and punishment.

So what did Cash think about crime and punishment? To find out the authors conducted a content analysis of Cash's music:

Johnny Cash wrote, recorded, or performed on television over 400 songs and sold over 90 million records. This paper will examine that portion of Cash’s body of music, some 60 songs, which gave voice to concerns dealing with the causes of crime, punishment, and the potential for rehabilitation and redemption.

Some of the results? First, the content analysis focused on the types of crimes mentioned in the songs:

These songs include a total of 58 identifiable crimes: 22 homicides, four assaults, four cases of domestic violence, and one robbery. 

Regarding the criminal justice institutions mentioned in Cash's music the authors report:

Life behind bars, in jail or prison, is the subject of 27 songs while being on a chain gang appears as a subject in nine. Of the songs critical of the justice system, three make reference to police or correctional officer brutality. The criminal justice system’s ultimate punishment, the death penalty, appears in 13 different songs. 

The heart of the paper's analysis focuses on the model of criminal behavior described in Cash's music. While the authors note that Cash's music does focus on environmental factors the most consistent explanation for criminal behavior is choice. The summary of the authors: "[Cash's] songs predominantly reflect a rational choice model as an explanation of criminal behavior."

Relatedly, in most of the songs the criminal tends to admit responsibility, and often regret, for his crime. The authors write: "The protagonists in Cash’s songs rarely deny responsibility for their actions as demonstrated in several of the songs previously discussed. Overall, there was no denial of responsibility on the part of the subject in 26 (43%) of the songs. In 20 of the songs, the lyrics make it abundantly clear that the offender accepted responsibility for the crime(s) identified."

This sort of model--choosing to kill, taking responsibility, expressing regret--is likely due to the "murder ballad" genre explored by Cash. See the chilling song "Delia's Gone" as an example of this.

But themes of innocence are also featured in Cash's music and are used to criticize the criminal justice system. The authors write:

Not all of Cash’s protagonists admit responsibility. In six songs, the subjects actually claim to be innocent of the crimes they are accused of having committed. Cash often employed the protagonists’ claims of innocence to critique the criminal justice system, suggesting that innocent men and women have been sent to prison, or worse yet, sentenced to death for crimes that they did not commit.

I've long been a critic of penal substitutionary atonement. It's a hugely problematic doctrine.

But in my post yesterday about fragile worshipers in the comments Mike asked me about how I've come to be more grace-filled when I bump into penal substitutionary atonement at church.

Because you're going to bump into it. In songs, prayers, sermons. You can't avoid penal substitutionary atonement. And if you bristle and become unglued every time you bump into penal substitutionary atonement you're regularly going to be miserable and upset at church.

So, how do you cope with it? That was Mike's question. Here was my answer from yesterday's post:

What helped me is seeing how something I found problematic was helpful to others.

For example, I'm with you about penal substitutionary atonement. But I've grown more tolerant of it because of how I've experienced it out at the prison. The men in the prison have done horrible, terrible things. Murder. Rape. Child abuse. Consequently, they feel damned. They feel an acute sense of God's wrath and judgment. Understandably so.

So the notion that God absorbed the damnation, wrath and judgment that was rightly and deservedly falling upon them is hugely impactful and transformative.

The notion that God wants to damn you for your sins doesn't preach well in American suburbs. But it preaches with murderers and rapists. They get it.

Basically, if you're burdened by a deep sense of guilt and shame--and a lot of people are--penal substitutionary atonement makes a lot of sense. I still have some deep theological problems with the notion, but I get the emotional resonance and I've seen the doctrine change lives for the better. Is that worth the costs, the negative effects the doctrine has had? I can't say. I'm just describing how I've come to check my knee-jerk reactions to get to a more reflective place.

I used to be a fragile worshiper.

I'd go to church and there would always be something that set me off. Sometimes it would be a song lyric that I found theologically problematic or overly sentimental. Sometimes it was something someone said from the stage. And a lot of the time it would be getting upset about something I wished we'd do differently. "I wish we would do it this way instead of that way," I'd often remark.

The littlest thing would get me disgruntled and annoyed. Worship had to be perfect. Any theological slip ups and I'd pounce. I had to agree with and like everything. Start to finish.

Perhaps you've been a fragile worshiper, and maybe still are. Are you overly sensitive to and emotionally triggered by anything that is said or sung in church that you don't like or agree with?

Over the years I've worked hard to become less brittle in worship, more tolerant of song lyrics or shared thoughts I don't really like or agree with. I got fed up with the vanity and entitlement of being a fragile worshiper, fatigued by the narcissism of making myself the measure of all things theological and liturgical.

Yes, any given Sunday there is a bunch of stuff I which I wish wasn't said or sung. But I'm filled with a lot more grace about it all.

I've given up being a fragile worshiper.

I love riding my bike to work.

I live about four miles from work and West Texas is really, really flat. So it's a very easy bike commute. I've been riding my bike to work for about fifteen years. I got the bike (Thanks Mom!) when Aidan was born and we were a one car family. I wanted to leave the car with Jana so I got a bike and starting riding it to work.

In the early days I cared about speed. Now, I ride like a child. I have a comfortable bike with fatter wheels and a padded seat. And I just ride at a slow, leisurely pace.

People sometimes ask if I bike for fitness. I don't, and never have. Even in the speed days it was speed for fun. "I bike for the lifestyle, for the fun of it, not the exercise," I respond.

So it takes me about 30 minutes to cover those four miles. Yes, I could get there more quickly if a pedaled harder or got a faster bike.

But what's the rush?

There is the sunshine and the sky and the breeze in your face...

There are a list of people who have hugely impacted my faith. George MacDonald. William Stringfellow. Dorothy Day. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Jean Vanier is in this list. If you're unfamiliar with Vanier here is an interview he did with Krista Tippett's On Being. The conversation is entitled "The Wisdom of Tenderness." You can follow the link above or listen to embed below.

"Christ of the Breadlines" by Fritz Eichenberg, one of my favorite pieces of artwork from The Catholic Worker.

Would you like me to list also the paths of repentance? They are numerous and quite varied, and all lead to heaven.

A first path of repentance is the condemnation of your own sins: Be the first to admit your sins and you will be justified. For this reason, too, the prophet wrote: I said: I will accuse myself of my sins to the Lord, and you forgave the wickedness of my heart. Therefore, you too should condemn your own sins; that will be enough reason for the Lord to forgive you, for a man who condemns his own sins is slower to commit them again. Rouse your conscience to accuse you within your own house, lest it become your accuser before the judgment seat of the Lord.

That, then, is one very good path of repentance. Another and no less valuable one is to put out of our minds the harm done us by our enemies, in order to master our anger, and to forgive our fellow servants' sins against us. Then our own sins against the Lord will be forgiven us. Thus you have another way to atone for sin: For if you forgive your debtors, your heavenly Father will forgive you.

Do you want to know of a third path? It consists of prayer that is fervent, careful and comes from the heart.

If you want to hear of a fourth, I will mention almsgiving, whose power is great and far-reaching.

If, moreover, a man lives a modest, humble life, that, no less than the other things I have mentioned, takes sin away. Proof of this is the tax-collector who had no good deeds to mention, but offered his humility instead and was relieved of a heavy burden of sins.

Thus I have shown you five paths of repentance; condemnation of your own sins, forgiveness of our neighbor's sins against us, prayer, almsgiving and humility.

Do not be idle, then, but walk daily in all these paths; they are easy, and you cannot plead your poverty. For, though you live out your life amid great need, you can always set aside your wrath, be humble, pray diligently and condemn your own sins...

Now that we have learned how to heal these wounds of ours, let us apply the cures. Then, when we have regained genuine health, we can approach the holy table with confidence, go gloriously to meet Christ, the king of glory, and attain the eternal blessings through the grace, mercy and kindness of Jesus Christ, our Lord.

--from a homily of St. John Chrysostom