Be Careful Where You Anchor Your Hope!
And therein lies the danger – when the wrong fear compels us to embrace the wrong kind of savior. But our souls are anchored elsewhere – where our real Hope awaits within the Veil. We cannot afford to forget that, no matter how discouraged or desperate we become when we consider how to rescue our country.
Once there was a Christian community which loved its Church, its country and its God. Its members were patriotic and loyal. Indeed, to be a Christian was to be a member of the national community. To serve God was to serve their country and vice-versa.
Flawed as it was, its constitution was one of the most advanced of any Republic in history. More than any other around it, this nation had successfully integrated a significant minority which had become an important part of its community, contributing to its wealth and progress. Compared to the oppression this minority had suffered in the past, their status since the mid-nineteenth century showed what was possible if freedom and equality was extended to everyone.
But a dark side had emerged. After a recent catastrophic war, this country’s standing at home and abroad had taken a serious downturn. The land these Christians were so proud of was no longer the respected leader it had been. And they became fearful of the future.
Their fears would come to govern their behavior and justify their actions. No longer were they governed by a fear of God, but by fear of “the other.”
Their government seemed incapable of governing. Factions, left and right, grew more and more hostile to each other as they battled for control. As one historian points out, The language of politics was permeated by metaphors of warfare, the other part was an enemy to be smashed, and struggle, terror and violence became widely accepted as legitimate weapons in the political structure….proceedings degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order… Mutual fear, mutual recriminations and mutual hatred between the two parties far outweighed any potential purpose they might have had in common.
The language of many Christians became more and more violent as did their behavior. At one point a “Fighting League” of Christian students was established at every university. What began politically led to conflicts in the streets. Many Christians feared the growing power of socialists and communists and the implications of their influence on the morality and the churches. Their anxieties grew.
Open gay lifestyles, pornography, and bizarre entertainment alarmed Christian citizens who wanted only the best for their country and a return to the morality of an earlier era. Older Christians felt angry and betrayed by the new cultural trends that openly mocked older traditions, both religious and political. There was also the growing belief that the new feminism and sexual openness was seriously eroding the traditional family. Indeed, as historians note, many conservatives perceived a “crisis of masculinity” and were especially incensed at the public campaigns for gay rights.
Democracy as they understood it wasn’t working. Serious economic problems threatened the middle classes. In desperation, many Christians were attracted to extreme right-wing groups that promised to restore the country’s greatness, to overturn the inept system, and to respect and nurture Christianity and the traditional family. A widely-held belief was that a left-wing conspiracy had overthrown their previous leadership to establish a socialist system. Loyal, patriotic citizens had been stabbed in the back and betrayed.
Street violence, effective use of new media technology, and political intrigue grew. Some media even undermined the Republic with their sensational exposures of real or imagined wrongdoings of… politicians. One major media empire had as part of its mission the “constant harping on the iniquities of the Republic… (and) was another factor in weakening (its) legitimacy and convincing people that something else was needed in its stead. In place of the feeble compromises of…democracy, authors…proclaimed the need for strong leadership, ruthless, uncompromising, hard, willing to strike down the enemies of the nation without compunction.
To overturn an unjust, inept, unpatriotic, and foreign system would require actions which were extreme but necessary. We must save our country or lose it. This is what God would want. We have no other choice.
And a leader emerged – uncompromising, patriotic, moral and, above all, effective. The fact that he was a political amateur worked in his favor since he was seen as untainted by the corrupt and inept politicians of the Republic. Here was a leader whose popularity was largely untouched by scandals that he himself generated. Even a violent attempt to overthrow the government was viewed by most of his patriotic Christian followers as unfortunate, but necessary to save the nation. Although tried and found guilty of treason, his record only enhanced his reputation to his followers. Christians flocked to his movement.
He was not alone. Judges routinely ruled “selfless patriotism” as mitigating factors in the extremists’ revolt against the State. In many ways, the legal foundations of the Republic were being slowly undermined by those who did not believe that the current government was “constitutionally anchored.”
Within the national Christian community, politically liberal sentiments were suspect. Christians associated with Christian communities in other countries were viewed as unpatriotic globalists. These nationalist Christian leaders rejected anyone who dared to deny the greatness and destiny of their nation. Influential media reported that more than half the candidates for ordination were followers of the extreme right. One Christian leader attending a conference reported that there seemed to be more concern for the economy and foreign policy than there was for theological issues. However, one clear-thinking theologian warned his fellow Christians in a broadcast that a leader like this could gradually become a “misleader,” making an idol of himself and therefore, mocking God.
Loyalty to the leader and his agenda soon became commensurate with loyalty to the nation. Anything less was branded as treason. Those with opposing political views were no longer merely friendly opponents but enemies of the people. It wasn’t long before Christians so embraced the leader and his movement that even the Scriptures were subject to bizarre interpretations based on the leader’s principles. The racism that had always percolated below the surface soon became the law of the land. Indeed, most Christians did not object to this increasing isolation of vulnerable people. After all, didn’t they do it to themselves? They have too much influence. It’s not our problem. They are “other,” politically and socially, and therefore, the enemy. They are vermin and have poisoned the blood of the nation.
One pastor and former war veteran, remembering his fellow soldiers who had died in action wrote that, “We had to fight on so that their death should not have been in vain or forgotten. But what had become of our country? A land of injustice and corruption, subject to the whims of liberal and conservative alike. Then the Party came into power with a program having a moral and religious basis. That’s why I became a member of the movement.” He went on to say that the leader, as opposed to his followers, possessed a deep morality and religion that could change people’s hearts so that the nation could be reconstructed.
The voices that sought to remind Christians that real power lay in suffering and in the weakness of Christ were ignored or silenced. The prophetic calls to return to the pure word of God were replaced by the word of the leader. Christians traded their birthright for the lure of naked political power. The fear of man had become a snare that failed to save their church and nation they loved. And what is saddest of all is that the leader they clung to in desperation shared neither their faith nor their morality. In private moments he despised their Christianity, their morality, and their sheep-like subservience. Their desperation borne of fear led them to cling to a leader and system that betrayed them in the end. The actions that their fear generated swallowed them and their nation whole. The reputation of their country never recovered.
Be careful, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ in what you place your hope. Proverbs 29:25 is just as meaningful today as it was in 1933 Germany. Snares do not advertise themselves. As Michael Horton points out in his magnificent book Recovering our Sanity: How the Fear of God Conquers the Fears that Divide Us, the fear of losing cultural, social, and political power often drives a large number of evangelicals to ‘put their trust in princes.’
And therein lies the danger – when the wrong fear compels us to embrace the wrong kind of savior. But our souls are anchored elsewhere – where our real Hope awaits within the Veil. We cannot afford to forget that, no matter how discouraged or desperate we become when we consider how to rescue our country.
Chris Bryans is a member of Northside Presbyterian Church (PCA) and is a retired professor of history from Eastern Florida State College in Melbourne FL.
*Whether one agrees with Bonhoeffer’s neo-orthodox theology is not the point here. What is clear is that he was so very convinced that Christ’s commands were not optional. He possessed an extraordinary command of Scripture as well as its applications. This was missing from what had increasingly become a cultural “cut-flower” Christian faith that characterized much of Germany even prior to the Weimar era. Indeed, liberal theology had so poisoned the Reformed doctrine of Scripture that it was easy to infect Christianity with extremism. Biblical illiteracy abounded within the average church. How else could so many believe the view that the Old Testament was a “Jewish book” that needed to be purged from Christianity? How else could the German Christian movement reconstruct a Christ who had more in common with Norse heroic myths than the New Testament? I remember hearing Bonhoeffer’s friend, disciple, and his greatest biographer discuss how very strange it was when Bonhoeffer had his seminary students engage in what we would call today “a quiet time” on the seminary grounds. It wasn’t a part of their church experience.
Sources:
Eberhard Bethge Dietrich Bonhoeffer Man of Vision, Man of Courage (Harper and Rowe, 1977).
Georg Denzler & Volker Fabricius (Herausgeber) Die Kirchen im Dritten Reich Band 1 & 2 Fischer Verlag 1988.
Richard J. Evans The Coming of the Third Reich The Penguin Press, 2003.
Heinz Hürten (Herausgeber) Deutsche Geschichte in Quellen und Darstellung Band 9 Weimarer Republik und Drittes Reich 1918-1945 Reklam, 1995.
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Nature, Grace, and Film
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, July 5, 2022
When we think about film we should ask, “is this a good piece of filmmaking? What is the nature of film? What makes a good film (e.g., screen writing, cinematography, directing, editing, acting etc)? These are the sorts of questions that Christian film critics ought to be asking and answering about film
.
I love a good film. I took three courses in film criticism as an undergraduate. They were more difficult than one might think. First, taking notes in the dark is challenging and reading them afterward is even more difficult. Second, I had to watch a lot of hard-to-watch films, which I would not recommend. Still, I got to watch a number of great films and got to learn a bit about how films are written, shot, and edited. I learned that the really great thing about Citizen Kane is not the banal script or even Orson Welles (1915–85)—the best performance in the film is Joseph Cotton’s—but the cinematography of Gregg Toland (1904–48). The opening shot amazes me still, even after CGI, etc. By the way, the best way to experience Orson Welles is to listen to him. If you enjoy podcasts go to archive.org and search for “Orson Welles old time radio.”
There is an approach to film criticism popular among evangelicals that seeks to find some aspect of a film, e.g., a theme, a story arc, or a character that somehow connects to the Christian faith. This is a mistake driven by a confusion over nature and grace. Evangelicals have long had trouble with the category of nature. For the most part they do not have that category in their intellectual toolbox. Things are thought to be valuable only insofar as they relate to grace (e.g., the new life).
When I became a Christian in the mid-70s, one of the fist things I learned informally, from other Christians, was that once a Christian has been redeemed he should no longer be interested even in the ordinary things that interested him when he was a pagan. Thus, an interest in sports must be replaced by an interest in what they called “spiritual things.” What they were saying is that Christians need to abandon nature for grace.
The Three Ways of Relating Nature and Grace
My new evangelical friends did not realize it but they were repeating an Anabaptist way of thinking about nature (creation) and grace (e.g., redemption). There are broadly three ways of relating nature and grace. The Anabaptist view is, as the Reformed complained, that “grace destroys nature.” The way I explain it to my students is to say that, in the Anabaptist view (which has greatly influenced American evangelicalism since 1800), grace obliterates (i.e., paints over) nature. They think this way because they have an over-realized eschatology, they expect too much of heaven and the future state now. This over-realized eschatology iReas a leaven throughout their theology. It leavens their theology, their ecclesiology, their view of the sacraments, their ethics, and their rejection of nature as a category of thought. In the Anabaptist/evangelical system, nature is thought mainly in terms of fallen nature and thus there is a quasi-Manichaean quality to the way they relate nature and grace.
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Handel’s “Messiah,” A Prophetic Masterwork—An Introduction
When you think of a work that has Jesus the Messiah as its sole subject, you would reasonably assume that the text is heavily dependent on the New Testament, and primarily the Gospels. But when you look through the text, roughly two-thirds of the passages used are Old Testament. That alone suggests its prophetic nature.
We [The Daily Declaration] present the first of a series on the prophetic voice inherent in Handel’s musical masterpiece, Messiah. This piece of sacred music presents God’s word to listeners, speaking of comfort, strength and ultimate victory for those engaging in spiritual battle.
A few months ago, Warwick Marsh asked me if I would write an article on Messiah, the Sacred Oratorio composed by George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), as we both felt that it was relevant to Daily Declaration readers, not merely as a celebration of one of the greatest musical masterworks in history, but primarily for the fact that we both felt it possesses a powerful prophetic anointing, which I’m not sure that the man who compiled the text entirely from Scripture, a rather vain and pompous aristocrat, Charles Jennens, was at all aware of.
But I realised very quickly that the subject simply couldn’t be covered in just one article, that the whole piece is so steeped in prophetic power. So, this will be the first in a series.
Reverberations Through the Ages
Before I get started, I want to appeal to those of you whose eyes just began glazing over when you saw this is about classical music, as though it’s just so stuffy and boring, especially when you compare it to the wonderful and inspiring contemporary worship music we’re blessed with today, or the secular music you may listen to. How can you possibly compare such out-of-date stuff to that?
The fact is that, without the music of Handel, and every great composer before and since, modern rock and other contemporary genres simply wouldn’t exist, and to listen to the masterworks of classical music with fresh ears will reveal why that is the case.
If any evidence were required, I can even go to the extreme of Heavy Metal, which my son loves in all its variants. He once loaned me a DVD series on its history, and the director of the documentary, who was also the “talking head”, first charted its origins to three particular classical composers: J. S. Bach (a direct contemporary of Handel — 1685-1750), Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840), the first two being the inspiration for Hard Rock and Metal’s modal “Gothic” sound, and Paganini the violin virtuoso, whose showmanship is the model for every Rock guitarist, and whose style is a distinct influence for virtually every rock guitar solo.
If any proof were needed, here it is. First, compare the first three minutes of the Bach Toccata and Fugue for Organ with this clip for rock guitar.
Then listen to Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries followed by its rock adaptation.
And finally to Paganini: (1) (2)
So much for “stuffy and boring”!
So, if you listen to the music clips from Messiah in this series of articles in the same way as you do the latest worship songs you will find that music is music, that there are many similarities, but they’re using different instrumentation and vocal techniques. To draw an analogy with speech, it’s not a different language, like English and French, but merely a different accent, like Aussie and American.
That’s because great music, of whatever genre or time period, has a paradoxical effect: it is both anchored in its own time, and yet timeless, all at the same time (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
So, in one sense, it is identifiable as belonging to the time and place it was composed; yet it can still profoundly impact us today — and that in a powerful way, body, soul and spirit (actually, the same thing can be said in relation to the Bible).
That fact holds whether it’s the secular music of Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert (my favourites), or in my own era growing up: The Beatles, Paul Simon, James Taylor, Pink Floyd, Yes, Cat Stevens, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues (also my favourites), or a hundred and one other great singer/songwriter/composers/bands of that time right up to the present.
The same holds for the sacred works of the past four centuries, the traditional hymns of Wesley and Watts and so many others, and those modern worship songs, some of which we’ve been singing for a few decades, and more that we’ll be singing for decades to come.
As Bill Muehlenberg noted in his recent article,
When it comes to things like the arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry, literature, and so on), there can be ungodly and immoral art, and there can be godly and moral art. The answer to the dark side of culture and the arts is not to say no to all these things, but to create good and godly versions of these things…
We can glorify God just as much in enjoying one of His beautiful sunsets, or by being enraptured by Handel’s Messiah, as by sharing our faith with others or by singing worship songs in church.
In short, the same Holy Spirit who inspires our contemporary worship songs equally inspired the works of the past. This is all worship music! That’s why Handel, at the end of Messiah, wrote the letters “SDG” for the Latin phrase “Soli Deo Gloria”, which means, “To God Alone be the Glory”.
My plea, therefore, is that you will listen to be inspired in the same way as you do when you listen to hymns or contemporary worship songs.
So, now that I have your attention, a little background is required on Messiah as a whole.
Inspired
Handel composed the music for Messiah in a feverish burst of inspiration in just 24 days in August and September 1741, after Jennens had compiled the text during July of that year.
When you realise that the whole work takes around two and a half hours to perform, and Handel was writing with a pen which had to be regularly dipped in ink, and that he had to compose separate music for vocal soloists, a four-part choir, five-part strings, trumpets, horns, oboes, bassoons, organ and harpsichord, you can understand how enormous a task this is.
As music commentator Miles Hoffman estimates, there are roughly a quarter of a million notes in Messiah. At a little more than three weeks of 10-hour days, Hoffman said that means Handel would have had to keep a continuous pace writing 15 notes a minute!
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When Genuine Obedience Becomes Impossible, Hell Becomes Impossible as Well
So we must have a category of Jesus that doesn’t mean you’ll never be tempted or you’ll never have imperfect motives, but you can live a life of ordinary faithful obedience. One of the problems when we don’t have that category is when we think, You know what? I never really obey. Everything in my life is just polluted, sinful, filthy rags. That is when we need to hear the alarm bells going off. We don’t hear it like we should.
Good Works vs. Obedience
There’s a really important but simple distinction we need to make in thinking about our good works or our obedience. And that is that our good works can be truly good even though they’re not perfectly good. They’re never without some imperfections. They’re always tinged with some kind of selfishness.
I remember a pastoral intern asking me years ago, “Pastor Kevin, how do you know that when you’re stepping up into the pulpit there’s not some part of you that’s doing this to be seen and to be heard or to draw attention to yourself?”
And I said, “That’s a really good question. I’ll let you know when I’m certain there’s no part of that in my heart.”
It’s not to excuse sin, but it’s to say, Yeah, there are layers to the onion of the human heart. So there’s always that presence of indwelling sin. It’s imperfect, and yet the best theologians have said that it can be truly obedient. I think that’s a new concept for some people, though it shouldn’t be, because Paul often praises the churches for their obedience. Jesus, in the Great Commission, said, “Teach them to obey everything I have commanded you.” And there’s no escape hatch that says, Oh, by the way, of course, you can’t really be obedient to anything.
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