I’ll be leading a small “break-out” session during the meetings.  My topic: youth culture.

Much of what I’ll be saying derives from a new class I’m working through this semester entitled “Studies in Youth Culture.”  You’ll likely be hearing more about it in coming weeks.  For now, though, just a brief list of some of the principles for studying youth culture that I’ll recommend:

I.          Observe carefully.

II.        Be humble and realistic.

III.       Withhold judgment.

IV.       Beware of the “tyranny of the visible.”

V.        Consider all factors, ecologies, and vantage points.

VI.       Beware the “back in my day” approach.

VII.     Ask: What does this tell you about the student(s) and their context?

VIII.    Ask: What does this tell you about humanity?

IX.       Ask: How does God/Scripture see this?

X.        Reflect on how culture(s) affect those involved.

XI.       Think/pray/meditate/consider first, act later.

That’s all for today, and for this week.  Let me know what you think.  Spring Break begins this weekend, so I’ll be taking a hiatus until Monday 18 March.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

As opposed to the ones we have looked at so far, there seems to be a lot more going on here.  This said, the main focus on the Fifth Amendment seems to be on the rights and privileges of the criminally accused within the American legal system.

The amendment limits the role of the government in running roughshod over those charged with crimes, and in so doing echoes the restraints (explicit or implicit) placed upon organized national power by the previous four.  For me, this is the interesting thing about looking at these basic freedoms.  All of my life I’ve never really thought of “the government” as the enemy, or something from which I need to be protected.  I grew up simply assuming that the government’s job was to protect me.  I still think that’s partly true, but perhaps only because the government (in the form of the Bill of Rights) took steps to protect its  citizens against the possible excesses of its own being.

Early citizens of the United States knew the grievances they had against the British authority.  While they wanted a government of their own, they were afraid of national power that went too far.  Hence these amendments.

When we today hear people tell us that “the government is the enemy” or “the less government the better,” we sometimes think they might be a little overdramatic.  Perhaps they are…but when looking at the first five amendments to the Constitution, it appears they are in good company.  Interesting, that.

The goal for the students was to gain an appreciation for the way “church” was done in a few different contexts, make observations that might serve to benefit their future ministries, and analyze a variety of sermons.

My experience of the weekend was similarly organized, but at some point it also turned a bit pessimistic.  Observing so many church services in one weekend, while supposedly meant to be an “uplifting” experience, actually caused me to wonder why in the world we do all of the things in we feel that we have to do.  If Christianity is a matter of the spirit, both individually and as gathered with others in communion with Christ, then why does so much of “church” feel so…artificial?  Strange songs, standing and sitting, listening to someone talk for an hour, varying dress codes, Christian clichés.  Even that portion where we’re all forced to shake each others’ hands.  Really?  What is it all about?  It is an interesting question.

Some of our discomfort with the “strangeness” with church life might simply have to do with the “strangeness” or other-ness of God.  This I accept wholeheartedly.  God’s ways are not our ways, and as a good Pentecostal I recognize that the presence of the Almighty can manifest itself in diverse and unexpected ways.

Some of the reason that church services seem artificial might simply be because our world can tend to be rather secularized, or antagonistic to such organized religious faith.  Because we live in a world that doesn’t like to talk about or reflect upon religious faith, places where we do so naturally feel weird.

All the same, neither of these two things really get at some of the ways in which church as “church” can become rather a thing unto itself.  An institution not serving the world or its Lord, but rather itself.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not one of these “Jesus hates the Church/religion” people.  I think that’s a little overblown.  As it is the Body of Christ, I love and cherish the Church Universal throughout all space and time.  Yes, Christianity is about relationship, but as relationship is organized it naturally takes form and structure.  When it comes to human relations with God, that structure is called religion.  That’s simply the way it is.  But I’ll tell you what…I do think that some of the ways we act and organize ourselves when we as the gathered community join together for church services can be strange (at best).

Ultimately, I believe we keep doing things in certain ways because a) we think we have to by the bonds of tradition or sometimes misunderstood Scripture, b) we’re not creative enough to think of any other way, and c) we are more comfortable with it than we are changing.  I’m not sure that any of these is sufficient reason to keep doing what we’re doing.  If the goal in all of this is a matter of the Spirit, in our predictable churchy ways I’m not sure we’re following where the Spirit’s blowing.

I’ve been vague about which practices, habits, and forms I’m critiquing here.  Perhaps intentionally so.  I think that all of us, if we think about it, could come up with ways in which our churches and local congregations are focused so much on peculiar side-quests and the maintenance of non-essential and (from an outside point of view) bizarre practices we don’t even realize that we’re propping up what amounts to nothing but our own preferences or lethargic momentum writ large.

It is times like this that I think about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his thoughts about “religionless Christianity.”  His use of the term is debated, so I’ll just quote him:

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless–and I think that that is already more or less the case…what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our “Christianity,” and that there remain only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them?

If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity–and even this garment has looked very different at different times–then what is a religionless Christianity?

I’ll name only a few real issues here, yet even they need to be understood in the light of Moorhead’s proviso early in the book:

…other important matters receive relatively light treatment: for example, student life at Princeton, the seminary’s contributions to the church and world through its alumni, the growth of the school’s physical plant, the development of its music program, and the process by which the endowment of the seminary was raised….this book makes no claim to offer a complete or definitive history of Princeton Seminary.  It is, to reiterate the point already made, a narrative tracing the school’s sense of mission, its basic values, and the way these interact with–and sometimes against–the religion and culture of the time.

Though being forthright about what he chooses to pass over, I still wonder if by omitting these and other elements Moorhead is leaving his story a little less rich.  Student issues, for instance, are discussed a little early on and with regard to the slavery debate  as well as concerning the Student Volunteer Movement (i.e. missions) in the later 1800s.  These issues and episodes both provide additional insight into the seminary and its place in American religion.  It is unfortunate, however, that even more attention is not paid to the role the seminary’s student population played throughout the  seminary’s existence, especially in the twentieth century.  When compared to the rest of the text, discussions of student’s thought and experiences play a very small role.  More of their perspectives would serve to offer an alternate or complementary narrative to a history often dominated by the ideas and actions of professors and other leaders.

A second concern is about something else Moorhead leaves out:  youth ministry.  Though appearing in the caption of one tangentially related photo, he takes no real time to discuss the Institute for Youth Ministry.  The work of the Institute and Professor Kenda Dean is, I think, one of the more important developments in the seminary during the past two decades.  Dean’s work and influence at both a scholarly level and with a rising field of practical theologians is indicative of a larger shift in the Church and has the potential to be transformative for years to come.  I’m a little disappointed that these efforts were overlooked.

Lastly–and I find this true in most similar histories–as we get closer to the present Moorhead’s analysis become a little  more disjointed in theme and can take the form of a list of developments and people rather than broad ideas.  Even though he comes to a helpful conclusion, the narrative breaks down a little in the post-Mackay era.

These questions about Moorhead’s text are, however, small in comparison to its achievement.  I personally look forward to pairing it or selections from it with a survey text of American religious history for use in the classroom.  Focused yet broad in scope, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture is in itself an argument for the place of the historian as society’s scholar, sage, storyteller, and explanatory guide.  I highly commend it to any who wish to know more about American religion and that way it has changed and grown over time.

At different points in its history Princeton Seminary was dominated by certain key figures, and Moorhead does well here to provide adequate attention to those individuals.  The seminary’s first two professors, Samuel Miller and Archibald Alexander garner attention early on.  As the story of the school moves into the middle of the 19th century, the life and thought of Charles Hodge becomes the focus of Moorhead’s writing.  Hodge is, of course, a controversial figure for many, and Moorhead does not shy away for some of the things for which he is remembered: 1) an “undiluted paternalism” (161) with regard to African-Americans and a tolerance for slavery (at least in the short-term), and 2) his rather conservative and traditionalist theology that today can be cariacatured as retrogressive.

But even of this latter reality Moorhead makes clear the Hodge should not be, as some have

…reduced him to conservative Presbyterian theology, opposition to Darwinism, or the debate over biblical infallibility.  All of these were indeed a part of his legacy; but understood in the context of his own time and not simply as a precursor to the Presbyterian conflicts of the 1920s, he was also much more and deserves to be remembered as such. (232-233)

Moorhead echoes this kind of even-handed treatment when speaking of another commonly cited leader of Princeton conservatism (and theological successor to Hodge) B. B. Warfield, not that he “does not fit easily into the stereotypes forged after the religious conflicts of the 1920s and ’30s.” (279).  This balanced and generous approach to history that seeks to explain rather than evaluate has long been one with which I have identified.  Jim Moorhead no doubt influenced me ever further in this direction during my studies with him.  To me it simply makes sense that we as historians are called to tell the whole story, even of people we might not entirely like.  For instance, even Moorhead’s discussion of the somewhat unsympathetic J. Gresham Machen manages to offer some context for this theological views and position on Presbyterian polity.

Besides this historiographic balance, another notable feature of Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture involves Moorhead’s discussion of one of the school’s presidents, John Mackay.  An influential figure at the school, in national politics, and in ecumenical affairs during the middle of the 20th century, Mackay’s life and presidential tenure have not yet been given all the historical attention they deserve.  Moorhead’s efforts in chapters 14 and 15 are a helpful corrective to this.  Most notably for me and my research interests, even Mackay’s connection with Pentecostalism and the Charismatic Movement is given attention within the text.

The fifth chapter, entitled “Princeton and the Presbyterian Schism of 1837″ also stood out as a masterpiece of historical writing that I look forward to assigning for my students.  It is, quite frankly, a marvelous synthesis of issues in which the school, theological issues, and church politics are woven together in a fascinating pattern.  Moorhead’s treatment of what on the face of it might seem a rather boring episode in the life American Presbyterianism came across as an expert and engaging look at a number of cogent issues of great import.  As he says that the beginning of the chapter, Princeton’s decision to side with a particular side in the conflict “was a fateful decision, shaping the identity of the school profoundly for decades to come.” (119)

Because of the book’s great merits I consider it essential reading for all incoming students at Princeton Theological Seminary, both for its careful description of the school’s DNA and the way in which big ideas and large personalities came to dominate and define the course the institution in some sense still charts today.  Others too will accrue great benefit from considering the issues and themes Moorhead skillfully raises.

So, without further ado, here are my thoughts…grade away!

James Fowler confesses that earlier in life he had been “a citizen reared in the land of theology…try[ing] to earn dual citizenship in the new world of psychology of human development” (38).  While we as readers are often strangers to both worlds, if the rest of Stages of Faith is as helpful and insightful as this section has been, we should have no fear in relying on him as our trail guide through unfamiliar terrain.  Having spent his first few chapters discussing matters related to faith proper, in Part II Fowler turns his attention to three theories of human psychological development.  In so doing, he draws upon the thought of Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erickson.  How we think, how we make moral evaluations, and how certain characteristics come to define us as individuals are essential topics here.

Fowler uses a novel approach in this section: an imagined conversation.  In chapters 7-11, he posits what a discussion about human life stages from infancy through adulthood might look like from the perspective of his assembled experts.  These collected thoughts reframe what could be a dry academic monograph into a much more engaging confab amongst intellectual peers, pointing the way forward for a future discussion of developmental faith.  This said, readers dealing with such heady subject matter deserve better illustrations than the confusing models in chapter 10.  While Table 2.1 (immediately preceding chapter 7) is essential in comparing each scholar’s perspective to the others, the frequency with which readers must return to it again and again indicates: a) such a resource be featured prominently in each chapter, and b) the material even as mediated through the imagined conversation can at times still be a bit opaque.  Yet despite its few shortcomings, Fowler’s unique approach represents a worthwhile time investment and readers will be richer for having engaged the ideas within.

There’s a lot to be said about this diligently researched monograph, and as such I’ll be splitting my review into three parts over the course of the week.  For today, I’d like to think a bit about the central thesis of the book.  As Moorhead describes it, his desire was to discover what the leaders of PTS hoped for the school to accomplish together with “placing the seminary’s vision, and goals within the larger ecology of American religion, culture, and society.” (x)  On both counts he does a masterful job by weaving together the world the seminary made and its relationship to the world around it.  Quite deliberately, Moorhead here looks to George Marsden’s history of Fuller Seminary vis-a-vis American evangelicalism (Reforming Fundamentalism) as he attempts, in some sense, to look at American Christianity through the lens of Princeton Seminary.

As a uniquely national Presbyterian seminary, Princeton from its founding was committed to:

…and emphasis upon religious experience, a faith in solid learning and the Enlightenment, and an optimism that these forces together were improving the human lot. (xx)

Elsewhere Moorhead refers to this ideal as a Common Sense Realism commitment to both “learning and piety.” (63ff) Though clear in the minds of the founders,

the subsequent history of the seminary would in part be a narrative of the way in which these varying commitments played themselves out or how, like the design in a kaleidoscope, they shifted into different patterns.  It would not a trouble-free story, for the various loyalties sometimes fit together awkwardly. (xx)

Indeed, the entirety of the seminary’s 19th century existence was dominated by maintaining faith and learning as twin paths of truth and orthodoxy.  Yet when faced with the critiques of higher criticism, theological liberalism, and advancing evolutionary theory the seminary convulsed.  By the 1920s the issues of fundamentalism and liberalism, writ large in the societal debate over evolution, sundered Princeton as well.  Yet as Moorhead has shown, this sundering did not negate the school’s commitment to faith and learning.  It simply renegotiated the relationship between the two.  This explains why Barth’s Neo-Orthodoxy found an early home at the school that persists to this day, and also why issues of faith and a specifically Christian spirituality–while sometimes contentious–have nevertheless been a persistent part of the school’s life.

In part, this journey helped me personally connect my experience of Princeton in the early 21st century with its storied and Hodge-filled 19th century existence.  Moorhead’s closing quotation of missiologist Andrew Walls, that “we need each other’s vision to correct, enlarge, and focus our own; only together are we complete in Christ” (509) rings true for the diverse new world of Princeton Theological Seminary and the Church it serves as it continues in an historic commitment to piety and learning today.

As a description of the theological, structural, and personal elements that went into making Princeton Seminary what it is, Moorhead has done his school a great service.  By offering this story in a way that connects with the broad stream of Christian faith with American culture he has helpfully informed us all.

The megachurch in question was none other than Saddleback Church.  Pastored by Rick Warren and having an attendance of over 20,000 per week, it is serious business.  The campus of the church is immaculate and immense, yet not, I think, overly ostentatious.  Not for a church whose pastor has written the blazing bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life or prayed at the 2008 inaugurate of President Barack Obama.

This lack of ostentation was on display in the person and presentation of Rick Warren himself, who spoke on the Saturday night service we attended.  It was a very basic and unassuming message without a lot of flash or excitement.  He spoke plainly yet truthfully.  It was the kind of message that seemed to fit with the feel of the congregation and the Southern California culture, yet would have been as expected in a church of 100 as it was in a 20,000 person behemoth like Saddleback.  My outside expectations were somewhat altered.

My favorite moment, I think, was when Warren spoke of service and humility.  Though I do not have the exact quotation, he talked about how so many people he meets wants to speak with him about leadership.  Considering the achievements that surround him, this makes sense.  All the same his answer was telling.  He basically said leadership isn’t about tricks, skills, or methods, so much as it is being a servant.  As he said it, many people want to talk to him about leadership; not a lot want to speak with him about service.  It’s a simple yet bold teaching from a man who could have said anything he wanted.  It is Scriptural.  It is truth.

It is encouraging to know that in our day of endless leadership book after leadership book, there are those in lofty places who do recognize and reflect upon those truths upheld by Christ himself:

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.” (Mark 9:35)

Select two courses you will teach during the upcoming year and develop one assignment for each course in which content is informed by faith.

I cheated a little by choosing four, but I think they have some potential.  Tell me what you think.

1. Church History I: Students will consider the issues involved in the Christological debates of the early Church and work to design their own creed to answer the complicated questions of Christ’s divinity and humanity.  This creed may be no more than 250 words, and should address the major concerns of the various parties involved.  Students should supplement their creeds with 1-2 pages explaining their choices with regard to historical and theological issues as well as their personal beliefs.

2.  Church History II: For this assignment students will imagine themselves to be a Christian believer during the Reformation.  Though born into the traditional Roman Catholic Church, over the course of their lives numerous changes will have taken place.  Among the new Reformation options include: the Lutheran Reformation, the Zwinglian Reformation, Calvin’s Geneva, the Radical Reformers, the English Reformation, and Tridentine Catholicism.  Based on their personal beliefs, students will be asked to place themselves in the midst of the reforming options of the 16^th century by means of a three page personal narrative.

Students should be prepared to stake out their opinion on a variety of issues including, but not limited to, the relationship of Church and State, faith/works, Church tradition, humanism, communion, heresy, baptism, Scripture, salvation, and sanctification.  Students are not required to align themselves wholly with any one historic Reformation option, but must be prepared to justify their personal beliefs in light of the theological and historical climate of the era.  On the date the assignment is due, students will come to class and, based on their beliefs, align in small groups for dialogue and debate with believers of other persuasions.  Students will be evaluated on both the strength of their essays and participation during in-class discussion.

3.  Discipleship and Spiritual Formation:  Early in the semester, students will be assigned a small gender-based group of 2-3 individuals with which they will regularly practice the practice of confession (see Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, for more).  Students are expected to meet weekly with their group and keep a journal of their experience and evaluation of its place in the practice of Christian discipleship.  Groups discussions are expected to remain confidential and journals will be reviewed in kind by the professor at the end of the semester.  During the last week of the course, a class session will be devoted to a discussion of the experience from students’ perspective.

4.  Family Ministry Capstone: Students will review their “Philosophy of Ministry” projects from your earlier ministry courses and be prepared to illustrate that philosophy in action.  Students will be expected to design an activity/event/curriculum/message that exemplifies their assumed priorities.  Assignments are expected to be written professionally and must both align with their stated philosophy and explain the nature of that alignment.  Students will present their projects for peer review and, following revisions, will include these as a part of their professional online ministry portfolio.

“I have seen magical, crazy things happen. I’ve seen people be healed. Even now, in the church I go to, during Praise and Worship I could feel that I was maybe getting ready to speak in tongues, and I’d have to shut it off because I don’t know what that church would do if I started screaming out in tongues in the back.

“It feels like a lot of energy coming through the top of your head — I’m going to sound like such a lunatic — and then your whole body is filled with this electric current.”

I won’t comment on what I think of Fox’s sense of Christianity except to say that the Scripture speaks of spiritual fruit in the lives of believers AND removing planks from our own eyes before judging others AND the fact that God’s ways are not our ways.  There’s a mystery to things that I cannot fully understand, so I’m content to leave ultimate matters up to God.

What is interesting about Fox’s confession is that, quite honestly, she might actually check the box entitled “Pentecostal” on a faith survey.  She, in others words, may very well be “on my team.”  For Heaven’s sake, she’s even into that classic hobby of Pentecostals, end-times prophecy:

“I’ve read the Book of Revelation a million times,” Megan Fox says. “It does not make sense, obviously. It needs to be decoded. What is the dragon? What is the prostitute? What are these things? What is this imagery? What was John seeing? And I was just thinking, What is the Antichrist?“

Now, other than the obvious benefits for recruitment, what does this mean for Pentecostal self-identity?

I have to chuckle when I hear that someone like Megan Fox has had such experiences, or that singer and fellow sex symbol Katy Perry grew up in a Pentecostal minister’s home.  I chuckle because despite how strange that seems (considering traditional Pentecostal ethics and Fox/Perry’s sexual provocations and ubiquity), it fits in a certain way.

Pentecostalism has always carried within it the seeds of a very un-Gnostic message: that the body is meant to be linked to the Spirit, and that our faith is experienced and lived out in very bodily ways.  Tongues.  Dancing.  Shouting.  Falling down under the power of God.  A friend of mine in seminary once said that Pentecostals “twitch.”  I don’t like the word, but it is true we are a very embodied faith…for better and for worse.

Despite Pentecostalism’s generally conservative moral and social stances, it has also had its share of scandals involving the complicated matters of the flesh.  At the turn of the 20th century early founder Charles Parham was once accused of committing “unnatural offenses” (i.e. homosexual acts).  Aimee Semple McPherson of Foursquare fame once disappeared for a season in the 1920s, claiming kidnapping but more likely running away for a lengthy tryst with her lover.  And then, of course, can we forget the infamous Pentecostal sex scandals of the 1980s with Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker?

Understand me: I’m not trying to Elmer Gantrify my fellow coreligionists here or say that we are necessarily worse on this count than others (though this would be an interesting research project).  Indeed, there are an overwhelming host of Pentecostal ministers and laypersons who are sexually faithful to their spouses and their chastity.  I just think  it is fascinating that Megan Fox, as a frequent object of popular sexual fascination, is also in some sense Pentecostal.  It is a strange development, no doubt.  But also one that fits a certain understanding of my own faith tradition.  The body–our God created, though now fallen flesh–gives us trouble, but we Pentecostals refuse to give it up because it is a part of who we are.  Though it can cause us trouble (see above) we believe that it is a part of how God made us, how God redeemed us, and how God continues to work through us.  Such a flesh-spirit faith is an earthy and risky one, but it is richly biblical.  It can and does often go “off the tracks” from time to time, but Pentecostals are not ones to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

If David, Samson, and Solomon are in some sense all heroes of the faith and the writer of Ecclesiastes a source of wisdom in Scripture…and if the history of my own movement involves such risky openness to the body, perhaps Megan Fox can be Pentecostal too.

In a time when global expressions of Christian faith are becoming increasingly Pentecostal, Fox’s life is testimony to the fact that the term may now very well “contain multitudes.”

What a world.