Not Orphans
Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Through his Spirit, our Saviour is always near: to bless, to guide, to comfort, restore and forgive. For He has united himself to us, like a rabbi and his students, like a head and its body, like a shepherd and his sheep. It means Christ doesn’t forget us when we’re grappling with uncertainty nor overlook us when we’re grieving. He’s not out of earshot when we cry in a prayer of pain.
Israel had a rich tradition of rabbis and their students. A wise teacher would attract a band of followers and carefully instruct them in all the things that he wanted them to know. Over years of lessons and interaction, there would grow a close connection between the teacher and his pupils.
And so when a rabbi died, his bereaved disciples were often described as “orphans.” They were like parentless children, like youths without a legal guardian. Now there was no longer someone to lead them—they were on their own.
In the tradition of the Jewish rabbis, Jesus led and taught his disciples for years. And He knew they feared the day of being alone. So on the eve of his death, Jesus speaks comfort and hope. His words in John 14 have a Trinitarian theme. He tells them about the Father’s heavenly house, about the Son’s mission to do the Father’s will, and about the promised Counselor, the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is leaving, but this good rabbi won’t abandon his students as orphans. He says that He is going to come to them yet. He would be gone, but not absent! Ten short days after ascending, He would send them the Spirit.
Even as the disciples are despatched into all the world to testify about the Christ, and even as they face opposition and encounter a lot of unbelief, Jesus says in John 14:18,
I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.
After He ascends, the good Teacher will send the Spirit. And not just any Spirit, He will send his Spirit. He is a Spirit so connected to Christ, a Spirit so full of Christ, that it would be like Christ himself was still among them! “I will come to you.” This is how Jesus can say to his disciples just before He departs for heaven, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20).
This beautiful truth lives on today in this place. He has ascended, but Christ is with us. As God’s children, whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, Jesus comes to us, He draws near to us, and He stays among us.
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Redeeming Neverland: The Question of Shame & the Crisis of Agency Facing Modern Men
The very first line of Peter Pan is an ominous one: “All children, except one, grow up.” “Growing up” is more than aging, more than growing a beard, or more even than simply having responsibility. Without meaningful aspiration, Lost Boys will remain lost. Without glory’s inoculation of shame, masculinity will be reduced to performance dressed-up with double cigar holders. Neither are a sufficient Muse to virtue or character. Neither rescue men from this existential crisis, nor do they deliver more than momentary relief from shame. What then, shall men do?
J. M. Barrie first wrote Peter Pan as a play in 1904, expanding it into a full novel in 1911. Nothing he wrote before or since would ever come close to sparking such popular reception. It tapped into and articulated the tension of a society in the throes of rapid social change and economic reordering. British Imperialism’s assumed stability shuddered in the face of America’s rise to power on the global stage. Though Britain was technically victorious, the South African War (1899-1902) offered Great Britain both a disturbing preview of WWI and a painful illustration of the consequences in being slow to adapt to rapid technological advancement. Combining the dated tactics of the muzzle-loading era with breach-loading rifles led only to carnage. A growing fear of national decline was palpable, with its attendant implications spreading through British society.
The original play’s subtitle, “The Boy Who Refused To Grow Up,” encapsulated both a conflicted nostalgia for the passing Victorian Era and an anxious uncertainty of what the emerging Edwardian Age would hold. The world that was (Hook) no longer is, but what will be (Pan) is yet-unclear, with British men caught in an economic, cultural, and political crucible not unlike the liminality of our own cultural moment.
To mark the 70th Anniversary of their animated classic, Peter Pan, Disney is releasing a live-action remake, Peter Pan and Wendy. While I’m looking forward to seeing Jim Gaffigan in the role of Mr. Smee, it is highly unlikely to resonate with a new generation of young men. The most dark and honest themes of Barrie’s original work will undoubtedly be either cut or as kiddified as the animated version it celebrates the anniversary of. And if so, it will tragically miss an invaluable opportunity to offer hope to a modern generation of boys and men in crisis.
Men, Masculinity, and Culture Wars
For reasons largely outside of their control, boys and young men are falling through society’s cracks at alarming rates. This is happening so consistently and comprehensively that men are now imminently facing an even greater educational disadvantage and disparity in workforce representation than women have since Title IX passed in 1972. In an article focused on the friendlessness and despair facing modern men, David French shows that the disappearance of vocational outlets has left men with a crisis of meaning, purpose, and community – one greatly worsened by the collapse of institutional safety nets that historically mitigated the pain of similar socio-economic shifts.
Parallels abound between the Late Victorian Era and Late Modernity, but they end with the start of WWI (at least for now). The first Industrial Age conflict violently accelerated transition across Western society. Albeit at catastrophic cost, it also provided an outlet for young British men floundering in transition, “adventure” equipping them with patriotic meaning and purpose. We may be living through a period of similarly seismic erosion of consensus, but God forbid we become desperate enough to view war as a viable solution to modern liminality.
What are modern men to do when our culture provides vanishingly few realistic or socially acceptable outlets for men longing to matter and eager to prove it. What aspiration is left for men when the Left believes your sex is irredeemably depraved and the Right gives participation trophies for being born with a penis?
I too would rather take flight with happy thoughts or play the pirate king of a fictional paradise than fight over equally dishonest utopias. Like all escapist fantasies, anti-visions require nothing of those preoccupied by them except to conceptually “be against” the other. It’s an easy, distracting fantasy. But our modern culture wars and the anti-visions fueling them are not innocent distractions. A false 911 call is a felony because it draws life-saving attention and resources away from actual needs.
Dehumanizing legalism (on the Left) and empty caricatures (on the Right) make no meaningful impact on the existential realities of men and succeed only in compounding the existential crisis lurking beneath the economic and educational one.
The Existential Crisis of Unanswered Shame
Thanks in large part to Brené Brown’s popularization, many people finally have some language to describe the pool we’ve been swimming in – shame. But being aware that we’re drowning in shame isn’t the same as being equipped or skilled to wisely answer it (especially theologically), and Brown almost exclusively focuses on negative or toxic shame. Shame can be healthy. It functions as a guardrail to our most socially damaging inclinations (e.g. adultery or child neglect). Its absence can be disastrous to families, communities, and cultures, but shame-as-social-consequence is, on its own, limited in affecting long-term transformation.
To be “shameless” is not a complement. It describes someone who selfishly ignores social guardrails at the expense of their community (either knowingly or foolishly). Yet only sociopaths reach that point due to a true absence of shame. Counter-intuitively, it is when an over-saturation of shame accumulates and metastasizes, that we simply stop caring about social consequences. We become shameless when shame overwhelms our capacity to attend to it, resolve it, or both. We, men and women alike, will slide into shamelessness if we believe we no longer have any standing left to lose. Once shame reaches that tipping point within a person or community, it flips from guardrail to jet fuel, empowering the very social ill it was leveraged to mitigate.
Shame is the fear of insignificance, the lived experience of finitude (healthy) and/or not-mattering (unhealthy). Biblically, it is the opposite of “doxa,” or “glory” (also translated as “weight/significance”). Kids subjected to verbal abuse, or who are repeatedly shamed for minor infractions start to assume it’s true because it’s easier than being haunted by the question of whether it is or not. Anyone who has adopted or cared for foster children knows how much time and effort it takes to answer shame’s narrative with one of enough-ness and beloved-ness. If you are always a burden to those around you, why bother trying?
Richard Reeves points out in his new book, Of Boys and Men: Why The Modern Male Is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What To Do About It, that the two most common words men use to describe themselves are “useless” and “worthless.” “Well, if this supposedly is who I am,” men say to ourselves, “then why shouldn’t I (watch pornography/have an affair/embezzle money/binge digital entertainment)?” I encountered no narrative more consistent while screening soldiers for PTSD as a Chaplain in the Army National Guard. Over 9 years, I counseled over 50 soldiers with suicidal ideations, six of which culminated in a formal intervention (a medical 72-hour hold). All of them were warriors fighting demons of fear and despair, but stunningly only one of them suffered due to combat-related trauma.
Arguably, the most toxic aspects of modern masculinity are behaviors of despair – symptoms of deep insecurity and prolonged experience of not-belonging. As one of the few remaining institutions still seen as trustworthy, young men often gravitate toward the military as a means of overcoming insecurity through an even greater belonging. Many men enlist to flee their demons, but they never stop fighting them.
Contrary to their reputation as angry task-masters, Drill Instructors intuitively function as paternal glory-surgeons. They know, intuitively if not consciously, that when we puritanically tell men “be better” without believing they can be (never mind mentoring them in that journey), we empower the deep-seeded shame and insecurity that produced it in the first place. But shame’s insecurity, when answered with another’s authoritative reassurance of significance (“glory”), becomes the fertile soil of transformation. Apart from glory’s surgical renarration of the soul, shame will fester until not-mattering becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That is the existential crisis facing men, and the context for why it’s being ignored.
The Left’s Lost Boys and Cultural Shame
No one epitomizes the Left’s anti-vision of masculinity’s toxic excess more than John Wayne. Let’s avoid the minefield of whether that is fair or accurate, and assume for the sake of argument that I actually agree that he personifies toxic masculinity, that I also want to see a more kind, humble, and Christ-like servanthood to characterize modern men. So why isn’t that happening?
Predating Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s wildly popular book by three years, Stephen Metcalf traced a surprising thread through John Wayne’s career – being bullied.
That’s right. The man’s man who ain’t never took no lip from nobody was relentlessly and publicly shamed by John Ford, the man who discovered and molded him into the silver screen’s no-nonsense, gruff-talking stoic. Ford was apparently “savage in his mistreatment of Wayne” who so passively took it on the chin that others on set would have to step in to defend him.
Yes, we are indeed talking about the same John Wayne.
What’s even more surprising is why Ford bullied him: Wayne wasn’t man enough. To Ford, he was a floating signifier, a malleable vessel to project his idealized masculinity into. As much (twisted) Drill Instructor as Film Director, Ford wasn’t satisfied with merely shaping Wayne’s performance, he had to remake Wayne himself into his own (imagined) swashbuckling image. It was a projection birthed from his own unaddressed shame, even self-hatred, over what he saw as feminine attributes he longed to purge.
Like John Ford, James Hook relentlessly sought to purge Peter Pan from Neverland after losing both his hand and his significance in a sword fight with a child. Shame is ever the domain of the bully. And, to the degree that it directs his aspirations, one to which he is utterly enslaved (and compensating for). Prescient of the masculinity crisis that has grown over the last decade, Metcalf sees Wayne’s transformation as a cautionary tale:
Masculinity as puerile male bonding, as toxic overcompensation and status jockeying—this is what’s unleashed when masculinity no longer has an obvious function. Divorced from social purpose, “being a man” becomes merely symbolic. (emphasis mine)
If many on the Left want to actively encourage men to LARP as pirates and spread juvenile masculinity, then they should simply continue doing exactly as they are. To stunt all expressions of masculine strength – both healthy and toxic – is a doomed strategy, and one increasingly transparent in its goal of role reversal rather than real equality. This puritanical impulse simply genders depravity in the opposite direction, shutting down even healthy masculine expression for a counterfeit (i.e. “worthless” and “useless”).
Without affirmation of worth or aspiration to grow, shame begets shame.
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Courageous Pastors or Overbearing Leaders: How Do We Tell the Difference?
Notice the ease with which the apostles move between calls to strength, courage, fortitude, resilience, and resistance on the one hand and gentleness, humility, self-control, kindness, and care on the other. In healthy churches and healthy individuals, they’re two sides of the same coin. Both sides were needed in biblical times because overbearing leadership isn’t a modern invention.
This generation needs courageous pastors. Every generation does. Shepherds are charged with guarding and protecting the flock of God from harm, and there’s plenty of that out there, whether in the form of wolves or thieves—predators within or bullies without. Faced with threats to the church and with an Enemy who always seeks to kill and destroy, pastors need to lead clearly and bravely. We need courageous shepherds.
This generation has suffered under overbearing leaders. Again, perhaps every generation has. But recent years have seen a reckoning: a recognition that far too many men (and they’re almost always men) have trampled over the flocks under their care, fleecing and exploiting rather than feeding and tending them. Several high-profile ministry leaders have been exposed as abusive. Others have been challenged and have closed ranks. Some leaders have repented and stepped down; still others have claimed to repent and then started up again as if nothing happened. Even now, I doubt the reckoning is over. The fallout certainly isn’t.
Accentuating each of these challenges is the existence of the other one. Many an overbearing leader has remained in place and retained support from his team by portraying himself as courageous and his critics as cowardly, spineless, effeminate, or oversensitive. Equally, I suspect many pastors have failed to address clear errors, abuses, divisions, and sins in the church, or immaturity and underperformance in their staff teams, because they fear that to do so would make them strident, overweening, overbearing bullies.
The presence of each error provides cover for its opposite. Cowardice and heavy-handedness are symbiotic.
We all want to have or be courageous pastors—not overbearing leaders. How do we tell the difference? Some Christian leaders know perfectly well that their behavior is abusive and evil; it’s difficult to sexually assault someone without realizing you are doing so. But I suspect many people become domineering and overbearing without realizing the extent to which they have. That’s partly why they’re so resistant to the charge when it comes—sin almost always involves self-deception.
What are the defining traits in each case? How might recognizing them help us grow into courage without becoming overbearing?
Biblical Portraits
An obvious place to start is with the biblical qualifications for eldership. (I use the NIV throughout; all emphases are mine.) Several of Paul’s criteria in 1 Timothy 3:1–7 warn against an explosive, hectoring, or domineering use of authority: “Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money . . .”
At the same time, throughout this letter, Paul urges Timothy not to be squeamish about confronting those who are threatening the church, using robust and even military language: “command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer” (1:3), “fight the battle well” (1:18), “command and teach these things” (4:11), “those elders who are sinning you are to reprove before everyone” (5:20), “fight the good fight of the faith” (6:12), “command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant” (6:17), “guard what has been entrusted to your care” (6:20).
The same both/and is present in Titus 1:7–11:
Since an overseer manages God’s household, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it. For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced . . .
We find it in 1 Thessalonians 5:12–15:
Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone.
It also comes across beautifully in 2 Timothy 2, which begins with a call to strength and resilience, like that of a soldier or farmer or athlete (vv. 1–7), and ends by insisting that “the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone,” and that “opponents must be gently instructed” (vv. 24–25).
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The Armor of God
Written by S.M. Baugh |
Sunday, October 24, 2021
Putting on the armor of God that Christ Himself bore is tantamount to putting “on Christ,” which we have already done when we were baptized “into Him” (Rom. 6:3 ; Gal. 3:27). This is tantamount to telling us to look to Christ in faith for all things. Our faith in Christ informs everything about our daily lives so that we can stand firm in steadily sanctified holy array.Paul’s exhortation to take up the armor of God in Ephesians 6:10–18 is a favorite passage for many Christians. It is stirring and vivid. It reads like an inspiring call to battle. It inflames the Christian’s heart with language that radiates strength and courage for the warfare we face “in the evil day” (v. 13). Its position at the end of Ephesians makes this passage a reprise of Paul’s earlier teachings in the epistle and a final exhortation before he passes on to a very brief ending to the letter. The exhortation is quite simple: “Stand firm” and “pray.” But this beloved passage has a few striking features that come out with a closer reading, which we will briefly survey here.
The first striking feature of Ephesians 6:10–18 is an unusual term Paul uses for armed warfare. In verse 12, Paul refers to this warfare as “our struggle” (NASB, NIV), rendered as “we wrestle not” or “we do not wrestle” in the KJV and ESV, respectively. In Greek, the word is a noun that refers to a wrestling match. Such matches were commonly conducted in ancient Ephesus and elsewhere as well as in local, regional, and international games such as the Olympics. As is the case today, wrestling matches in the ancient world were not carried out in full military armor or with “flaming darts” (v. 16) and swords (v. 17).
The intriguing question is why Paul refers to our “struggle” as a wrestling match rather than as “warfare” or “combat,” or as a “battle” or “fight,” which are more fitting for a contest in armor. There are several reasons for this.
These attacks take place particularly through malignant teachings to throw Christ’s people off their feet and to take them captive as slaves.
The most important reason Paul says we are in a wrestling match is his repeated exhortation to “stand” or to “stand firm” (vv. 11, 13–14) and to “hold your ground” (v. 13; ESV “withstand”). This is not exactly a complete set of orders for a soldier in battle ranks, who would be expected to advance against an enemy rather than passively waiting to be surrounded, attacked from all sides, and routed. “Prepare buckler and shield, and advance for battle!” (Jer. 46:3, emphasis added). But the Christian’s warfare is more like a wrestling match even if we are clothed with the “armor of God” (Eph. 6:11).
It is true that in the ancient world, battles between heavily armed and armored soldiers often devolved into intense hand-to-hand combat, and the soldier who lost his feet would inevitably perish. He had to “stand fast” and “hold his ground.” Perhaps this explains Paul’s emphasis on our standing, which he accents through repetition in verses 13 and 14: “. . . to stand firm. Stand therefore.” As a result, it shows that Paul is not giving us a calm bit of advice during a pleasant retreat. No, the Apostle is urgently warning and exhorting us on the battlefield in the face of a grim onslaught “in the evil day” (v. 13). Steady . . . steady . . . Stand fast! Hold your ground! Stand! “Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand” (v. 11); “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:13–14).
Paul does not give a complete listing of contemporary combat gear. The main elements of armor in the passage are defensive: breastplate, shield, and helmet (with the exception being the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”). Perhaps this fits more appropriately with Paul’s point about the church’s standing firm like armored wrestlers.
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