Talking about genitals makes some people jumpy. Two dynamics are at play here. First, a pornographic culture causes people to hear penis and think porn. Second, Western Christianity is largely a disembodied faith. It focuses mostly on the mind. James K. A. Smith says the Western church considers people to be “brains on a stick.” This leaves the rest of the human body out of the equation. The gospel doesn’t however.

The Apostle Paul wrote that the gospel is a “great mystery” (Eph. 5:32). It is the marriage of divinity and humanity. It begins with God. He is a Mystery, three persons – Father, Son, and Spirit – in one nature. This reality is so far “beyond” us, the only way we could encounter it would be for the Mystery to come down to our level and reveal himself. God did – and why the church historically taught that “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.”¹

The way our flesh works opens the door into the mystery of God as well as the marriage of divinity and humanity. This glimpse begins with God is love. By definition, love is the enjoyment of another as well as the desire to expand the circle – enjoyment and expansion. For all eternity, Father, Son, and Spirit enjoy one another and seek to expand the circle of love. Expansion requires creating other beings. The marriage of divinity and humanity requires human beings, male and female, made in the image of divinity.

Adam was created first. His name means “body-person.” In his infinite wisdom, God knew that it was not good for Adam to be alone (Gen. 1:18). Adam however was finite and didn’t yet know what “alone” meant. He had never felt alone. My hunch is that if God had told Adam it was not good to be alone, Adam would not have felt it in his body. It might have registered in his brain as some sort of concept (“concepts” are what the Western Church tends to teach), but he wouldn’t have felt it in his bones.

God instead had Adam replicate what God did over seven days. God spoke reality into existence. For example, he “named” day and night. God brought animals to Adam for naming. This is the part in the story where those who confuse body talk with bawdy talk might find the following to be too graphic. Adam was naked. For a long time, largely due to coming to faith in a disembodied faith tradition – I imagined Adam decked out in lab coat, clipboard in hand, scientifically surmising what to name the animals. I was wrong.

In his outstanding book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, James K. A. Smith writes: “We feel our way around our world more than we think our way through it.”² Adam felt his way along in naming the animals. God didn’t run the animals assembly-line style by Adam. Adam instead petted them, played with them, talked to them – much as we do with our pets. In the pristine creation, the animal kingdom didn’t fear humans. Yet, as Adam was feeling his way along, we know from our experience that he did not feel one particular sensation – sexual arousal. Adam began to sense in his body that he hadn’t found “a suitable companion” (Gen. 1:20).

God put Adam to sleep, formed a female, and presented her to Adam. In a flush of erotic enthusiasm, Adam gushed: “OMG!!! This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh!” He didn’t sigh, “Gee, a woman who thinks as I do.” Adam felt love. Adam felt Eve. Love is enjoyment and expansion. Adam’s penis expanded. He called the woman “Eve,” meaning “Open.” It is a picture of spreading, or receptivity. Eve’s outer labia – the two folds of skin and fatty tissue on each side of the opening to her vagina – expanded. Her nipples expanded, becoming erect. What happened next is what you are imagining at this moment. Eve spread her legs and the two became one flesh (Gen. 2:24.)

Christopher West sums it up well. “Our sexuality illuminates the very essence of our humanity as men and women made in the image of God.”³ It is in our sexuality, particularly in our genitals, where we most instinctively feel what it means to be made in the image of God and designed for the marriage of divinity and humanity. We experience physiological and biochemical sensations designed to point humanity to the immortal, invisible God who loves us and desires to expand the circle of love.

Our design also explains Adam and Eve’s instinctive reaction after they fell into sin. They immediately covered their genitals. Why didn’t they cover their head instead? It is mostly in our genitals that we intuitively feel the image of God – and feel fallen. Adam and Eve, feeling shame, instinctively cover their genitals with clothing. Clothing is for modesty. It holds in tension two realities. First, our bodies, particularly our genitals, are designed to tell a public story of love – enjoyment and expansion. Our entire bodies ought to be celebrated. But particular parts of our bodies poignantly remind us of the fall. Desire easily degenerates into lust. That’s why particular parts of our bodies, breasts and buttocks, designed to be public, require an appropriate degree of covering and privacy. That’s why we wear swimsuits. That’s why only cover our “private” parts. And that’s one reason why men and women in times past believed in Christianity.

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen;” C. S. Lewis wrote. “Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Only a graphic gospel explains reality, including erections and swimsuits. Christians who confuse body talk with bawdy talk find this gospel too graphic. Christians who see neighbors succumbing to a pornographic culture feel otherwise. If you are one of the latter, the next few weeks will grapple with the graphic gospel. If you like graphic novels, stay tuned. If you find it all too graphic, we’ll see you in September, at the end of swimsuit season.

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¹ Catechism of the Catholic Church (1015)
² James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), p. 57.
³ Christopher West, At the Heart of the Gospel: Reclaiming the Body for the New Evangelization (New York: Image Book, 2012), p. 18.

Educational reform is a hot topic these days even though Ken Robinson says we’re not yet making many reforms. Robinson is a recognized leader in education, creativity and innovation and worth watching. If you have 18 minutes, catch his hilarious TED talk: Ted Robinson says schools kill creativity

If you don’t have 18 minutes, here’s one highlight. “As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up,” Robinson notes. “Then we focus on their heads – and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien, I think you’d have to conclude – if you look at the output, who really succeeds, who gets the most brownie points, who are the real winners – that the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.”

A former university professor himself, Robinson highlights what’s abnormal about academicians. “There’s something curious about university professors,” he says. “They live in their heads – and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied. They look at their bodies as a sort of transport for their heads.” No doubt professors will be peeved at his remarks, but the rest of us – the 99% – believe Robinson is on to something.

Robinson is echoing an ancient understanding of knowledge and education. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, learning was doing. Knowledge was hands-on, as in Ezra 7:10, where the same Hebrew for “seek” (or “study”) is also rendered in the same verse as “practice.” You practice, you learn. Knowledge is hands-on practice. This explains Genesis 4:1 – “Adam knew Eve.” Their knowledge of sex didn’t come from a seminar. It was exploration, experimentation, and ecstasy. As educational philosopher Kieran Egan insists, “Knowledge exists only as a function of living tissue.”¹

This understanding of knowledge went into eclipse in the 19th century. Robinson roots the problem in a 19th century movement called progressivism. Progressivism said knowledge is best gained by writing papers. Academicians are good at writing papers, so they became the most knowledgeable people. The new “experts” then helped plain people (students) progress up from their backwardness. The point of progressivism is that plain people (those who only have hands-on practice) cannot progress up unless they are pulled toward the light by the enlightened – academicians coolly devoted to facts and science. Out of progressivism came today’s public education.

There are boatloads of problems with progressivism. When scripture records that “Adam knew Eve,” it doesn’t mean Adam wrote a white paper on sex. I am continually astounded at Christians, particular clergy and academicians, who believe they can study something – faith, work, economics, the arts, etc. – by writing white papers. In the 19th century, British academicians wrote bloated “blue papers” (so-called because of their blue covers) detailing legislative ideas for consideration by Parliament. MPs couldn’t understand them. So the academicians whittled down their bulky reports, reissuing them with white covers, and, with uncommon logic, calling them “white papers.” Of course, reissuing doesn’t resolve a problem. Had Adam reduced sex to white papers, Eve would have lost interest. Had Adam reissued his papers, Eve would have walked.

And that’s what is happening in public education. Some of our most innovative people are walking away from college. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard because he had 1,000s of hours of hands-on computer programming practice. His professors – so-called “experts” – had little. Gates had dirt under his fingernails. His professors had writer’s cramp. Google’s director of talent, Judy Gilbert, says the most important thing educators can do to prepare students for work in companies like hers is to show them how problems can never be understood or solved in the context of a single academic discipline. Classes have to become “hands-on,” she says, and students have to become creators, or experts, not merely passive consumers taking notes.

The good news is that Robinson is not a voice in the wilderness. David Brooks recently cited the work of Jim Manzi, a consultant who has spent his career helping businesses learn from experience. In his new book, Uncontrolled, Manzi chastises government and academic experts for pushing untested models. “What you really need to achieve sustained learning,” Brooks writes, “is controlled experiments. Try something out. Compare the results against a control group. Build up an information feedback loop. This is how businesses learn.”²

This is how Harvard Business School students are now learning. This past fall, the new dean at HBS, Nitin Nohria, dropped the case study method. He replaced it with fieldwork – students going out and talking to real people and helping solve their problems. As the Economist reported, “this is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors.” Now the educational model is “learning by doing.”³ This is promising, even though many HBS faculty – the 1% – are unhappy. Of course they are. Nohria is upending the whole purpose of education, reinventing it to produce practitioners. If he prevails, the other 99% will be winners in an educational system presently designed to only produce university professors.

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¹ Kieran Egan, Getting It Wrong From the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget (New Haven: Yale, 2002), p. 68.
² David Brooks, “Is Our Adults Learning?” The New York Times, April 26, 2012.
³ “Field of dreams: Harvard Business School reinvents its MBA course,” the Economist, December 3, 2011.

The neuroscience I’m referring to comes from Daniel Kahneman, a cognitive psychologist who has been studying human judgment since the 1960s. The story starts when he and his wife were debating whether to move from Berkeley, California to Princeton, New Jersey. His wife was against it, claiming that people were less happy on the East Coast than in California. Kahneman thought this unlikely. But he didn’t think further debate would resolve anything. So he conducted a study. Sure enough, while most people in California – and elsewhere – believed that Californians were happier, Californians themselves reported being no more satisfied with their lives than people in Ohio and Michigan. When Kahneman reported this to his wife, she reacted, No way!

She’s not unique. Beginning in 1969, Kahneman teamed with Amos Tversky, a fellow psychologist, to study human judgment, decision-making and choice. It turns out everyone has a tendency to automatically reject uncomfortable realities. These findings are explained in Thinking, Fast and Slow – a book Kahneman wrote and probably would have co-authored with Tversky had he not died prematurely in 1996 at the age of 59.

Kahneman and Tversky discovered that we have two interrelated systems running in our heads. “System 1” is fast, automatic, and unconscious. “System 2” is slow and deliberate (our conscious reasoning). System 1 accounts for as much as 95 percent of human judgment.¹ System 2 accounts for about 5 percent. This is where the two systems can present problems. System 1 operates by coherence and comfort. Only the facts that fit how you imagine reality make sense. Anything making you uncomfortable is kicked out – unless System 2 says, Wait a minute… slow down and think about this. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often. That’s because System 2 is lazy.²

These two systems together explain why horrific highway wrecks happen. System 1 says drivers are largely unconscious of the millions of decisions their hands and feet make every second. When something unexpected happens – a thick fog bank suddenly appears on a sunny day – System 1 doesn’t immediately fit this fact into a “sunny day” frame. No way! The brain takes comfort in assuming it’s only a wisp of haze wafting over the highway. Once a driver realizes he or she is flying 70 mph through a fog bank, System 2 kicks in, screaming Slow down!!! But it’s often tragically too late.

System 1 and 2 explain why Jewish leaders reacted with disbelief when told the nation had been sent into exile in Babylon. Exile should not have come as a surprise. For hundreds of years God had prophesied the fall of Jerusalem. Exile was an indictment of idolatry (2 Chr. 36:17-20). This fact however didn’t fit how Jewish leaders imagined “sunny day” reality. They assured everyone Babylon wasn’t exile. It was a brief excursion and would prove temporary. One such leader, Hananiah, predicted that within two years the Jews would return to Judea and Jerusalem would be restored. God disagreed. He served as the Jews’ System 2. Through the prophet Jeremiah, he explicitly called the Jews “exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon” (Jer. 29:4). He told the Jews to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile” (29:7). He told the Jews to ignore their leaders. “Do not let your prophets in your midst and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream. They are prophesying lies to you in my name. I have not sent them” (Jer. 29:8-9).

These two systems together also explain why church leaders often react with disbelief when analysts suggest the Western church is in exile. These analysts include Richard John Neuhaus, Walter Brueggemann, Michael Frost, and James Davison Hunter. Just as the Babylonian exile of 2,500 years ago was an indictment of Jewish idolatry, they say much of the modern church is also under indictment for idolatry. Hunter writes, “Ours is now, emphatically, a post-Christian culture, and the community of Christian believers are now, more than ever – spiritually speaking – exiles in a land of exile.”³

One of the idols most often mentioned is American individualism and consumerism. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City writes how Charles Finney introduced a form of faith that put an inordinate weight on an individual’s personal decision for Jesus. Faith shifted from church-centric to individual-centric. The church began to hire larger numbers of staff to cater to Christians’ increasingly consumerist demands. “And this is one of the reasons (though not the only reason),” writes Keller, “that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.” Of course, if you try to point out this dark reality, many church leaders react, No way!

The good news is there are two ways to strengthen System 2. The first is including “the outsider view” Kahneman writes. This is someone who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid. I only know of a few churches or companies that have an outsider, prophet, or what Ernest Hemingway called a crap detector, on the board. In these churches, if someone suggests the church is in exile, their leaders say, Let’s slow down and think about this.

The second way to strengthen System 2 is to write a premortem. Postmortems are written after the corpse is cold. A premortem calls for leaders to write a one-page story of why – a year out – a project failed. What might have happened if Jewish leaders had written a premortem hundreds of years before exile? I don’t know. And what would happen if a church’s leadership team wrote a story about why – a few decades out – their church was reduced to utter irrelevance? I’m not sure. But I bet their System 2 would be strengthened – and that would be a very beneficial thing.

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¹ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 13.
² Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), p. 44.
³ James Davison Hunter, To Change The World: The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford Press, 2010), p. 277.

In a recent New York Times column, Meg Jay describes the downside of cohabitating. The dangers are reminiscent of the old warning – go against the grain of the universe and you get splinters. What’s puzzling is that Jay is hesitant to tell couples how to prevent getting splinters. Charles Murray might know why.

Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia. She’s also the author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter – and How to Make the Most of Them Now. Her clients regularly include young couples who lived together before getting married. Quite often, their year-old marriages are already on the rocks. Jay writes of one young woman who spent over a year planning a lavish wine-country wedding. A few months into the marriage, she was looking for a divorce lawyer. “I spent more time planning my wedding than I spent happily married.”¹

A growing number of young couples assume cohabitation helps prevent divorce. That’s partly why cohabitation has become so common. In the United States it has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past 50 years. In 1960, less than 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the number exceeds 7.5 million. Today, the majority of young adults will live with a romantic partner at least once, and more than half of all marriages will be preceded by cohabitation. Nearly half of 20-somethings now agree that living together before marriage helps couples “find out whether you really get along.” About two-thirds say they believe that moving in together before marriage is a good way to avoid divorce. Unfortunately, it’s not.

Jay reports that couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages – and more likely to divorce – than couples who do not. Researchers attribute this to “sliding, not deciding” about a relationship. Jay writes that moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

These shortcuts don’t work. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage. Men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship, postpone commitment, or enjoy casual sex. “This gender asymmetry,” writes Jay, “is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage.” In other words, you get splinters taking shortcuts.

“When you go against the grain of the universe,” writes Eugene Peterson, “you get splinters.”² Cohabitation goes against the grain of the grand story called the gospel. In this story, God – Father, Son, and Spirit – desire to expand their circle of love by having the Son wed a bride. The bride was supposed to include the entirety of humanity – us. The plotline was – and still is – Jesus coming to earth to wed his bride. This plot was twisted when we sinned. The gist of the story however remains the same. Jesus is coming to earth to wed his bride. It’s only the disposition of the bride that’s different.

Only those who desire to be married to Christ are now the Bride of Christ. Desire is a drive – you don’t “slide” into marriage with Jesus. It’s an act of faith that includes reflection, repentance, repudiation of the former life, and embrace of a new one. Believing in Jesus makes an individual “betrothed” to Christ (II Cor. 11:12). In Christ’s day, betrothal was a period of time when a couple was considered married but lived apart from one another to demonstrate chastity and devotion. The husband prepared a place to live (notice how Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you” – John 14:2). When Christ returns, he’ll sweep away his adoring bride who wants to be married to him. They’ll celebrate with a grand wedding ceremony and sumptuous feast. Afterward, the couple will consummate their marriage (Rev. 19:7). In this story, there is no such thing as cohabitation before consummation.

When marriage was considered to be an earthly picture of an out-of-this-world reality (Eph. 5:32), social relationships were shaped by this sacred story. Cohabitation was considered to be going against the grain of the universe. Do it and you get splinters. I don’t expect Meg Jay to “buy” this story, but you’d think the devastating outcomes she witnesses would cause her to caution against cohabitation. Nope. “I am not for or against living together,” she opines. “Cohabitation is here to stay” Jay writes, so she only counsels young adults to “protect their relationships from the cohabitation effect” by discussing expectations. I call this “the condom effect.” Condoms might protect from disease but they’re poor at preventing divorce. Discussing expectations might mitigate some of the effects of cohabitation, but there is no evidence it prevents divorce.

Meg Jay has fallen prey to the trap of today’s nonjudgmentalism. In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray notes, “If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping all the good stuff to itself.” America’s elites can see destructive patterns, but they’re hesitant to pronounce any judgments about them.³ This seems to describe Jay, who recognizes how cohabitation is often ruinous, but can’t bring herself to recommend against it. It’s a troubling state of affairs when we assume it’s better for young couples to experience painful splinters than prevent them. It wasn’t that long ago that preventive medicine was considered better than corrective. That seems to be less the case today.

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¹ “The Downside of Cohabitating Before Marriage,” the New York Times, April 15, 2012
² Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (Downers Grove, InterVarsity Press, 2000), p. 121.
³ Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012), p. 290.

This past Saturday night, April 14, marked one hundred years since Titanic struck an iceberg just before midnight. The massive ship, which carried 2,200 passengers and crew, sank two and half hours later with only 700 or so survivors. It was a horrific disaster, as shocking as the atrocities we witness with appalling frequency on the news, including the alleged massacre of Afghan civilians in March. David Brooks however sees this atrocity as rooted in a cultural conscience. If he’s right, it’s a red flag.

As most know, Sgt. Robert Bales stands accused of the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians in March of this year. These atrocities are rooted in “the worldview that prevails in our culture,” Brooks writes. It goes like this: “Most people are naturally good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people who are fundamentally warped and evil. This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don’t have to contemplate the evil in ourselves. But when somebody who seems mostly good does something completely awful, we’re rendered mute or confused.” People are confused “that a person who seemed so kind and normal could do something so horrific.”¹

Our confusion is partly due to America having drifted to a culture where we assume “normal” people are incapable of horrific acts. Yet studies indicate that every individual is a mixture of virtue and viciousness. For example, University of Texas professor David Buss recently asked his students if they had ever thought seriously about killing someone, and if so, to write out their homicidal fantasies in an essay. Buss “was astonished to find that 91 percent of the men and 84 percent of the women had detailed, vivid homicidal fantasies,” Brooks writes. “He was even more astonished to learn how many steps some of his students had taken toward carrying them out.”

Our astonishment would be attenuated if we hadn’t drifted from Christian theology. “In the past,” writes Brooks, “most people would have been less shocked by the homicidal eruptions of formerly good men. That’s because people in those centuries grew up with a worldview that put sinfulness at the center of the human personality.” Brooks cites John Calvin who believed that babies come out depraved (he notes that Calvin was “sort of right” – the most violent stage of life is age two). Brooks quotes G. K. Chesterton who wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. C. S. Lewis said there is no such thing as an ordinary person. “Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism. According to this older worldview, Robert Bales, like all of us, is a mixture of virtue and depravity.”

We can’t avoid every atrocity but if Brooks is correct that America is “a culture with an easy conscience,” scripture sounds a warning siren. Christian theology says conscience takes one of four shapes – clear, arrogant, defiled, or seared – but only one, a clear conscience, is not easy. The other three are, and often result in shipwreck.

A clear conscience is difficult because it wrestles with keeping virtue in charge and depravity in check. Paul claimed to have “lived with a clear conscience before God all my life” (Acts 23:1). He told his protégé Timothy to “fight the good fight, keeping faith and a good conscience, which some have rejected and suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith” (I Tim. 1:18-19). Fighting a good fight is hard work. Keeping a good conscience is never easy. It wrestles with human sinfulness. It recognizes we are capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism. The brutal reality is that a clear conscience is the only way individuals and institutions avoid shipwreck and finish well.

The other three shapes that conscience takes are at ease. They don’t wrestle with personal sinfulness. The Pharisees for example had an arrogant conscience, seeing themselves as saintly and unsoiled. A handful of believers in the Corinthian church had a defiled conscience. They had done wrong, didn’t take responsibility for their sin, acted instead like victims, pointed the finger at other believers who lived freely, and accused them of being unloving (I Cor. 8:1-13). It’s an easy conscience, as it relieves an individual of taking responsibility. A seared conscience constitutes the third shape (I Tim. 4:2). It too is easy, flicking the bird at others and saying screw you. According to Christian theology, Robert Bales is a product of one of these easy consciences – the culture of America – as well as being personally responsible for his conscience’s shape.

In The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man, University of Texas professor J. Budziszewski writes, “The reason things get worse so fast must somehow lie not in the weakness of conscience but in its strength, not in its shapelessness but in its shape.” The four shapes that conscience can take account for good and evil but are foreign to many Americans, including those in the faith community. Familiarity began to recede in the 19th century, writes Philip Johnson, when the worldviews of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud formed a knife “to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of the Judeo-Christian culture.”² America today is a society adrift. Few see the four shapes that conscience can take. Few hear the warning sirens of Christian theology. Brooks seems to. He writes that a culture with an easy conscience explains why alleged atrocities “shock the soul.” Worse, they “sear the brain.” If Brooks is right, one solution is returning to our traditional moorings in Christian theology and a difficult but good conscience. Otherwise, we’ll continue to hear reports of horrific atrocities.

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¹ David Brooks, “When the Good Do Bad” the New York Times, March 19, 2012
² Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 5.

The Masters is “a tradition unlike any other.” You don’t for instance hear boisterous fans bellow You da man!!! after a golfer hits a tee shot. Augusta National is an example of prohibitions playing a part in creating unique cultures. It’s worth a closer look, since much of the Western world regards prohibitions as judgmental.

This year I enjoyed the Masters up close and personal – at least the Tuesday Practice Round. A friend and I walked the hallowed grounds of Augusta National for nine hours. We met hundreds of workers who were unfailingly courteous. The restrooms were spotless. The food was inexpensive ($1.50 for an egg salad sandwich). There was no trash. I saw only three cigarette butts on the ground (impressive, as smokers assume the world is their ashtray). This kind of decorum demarcates the Masters from other tournaments. It dates from the founder, Bobby Jones.

In 1934, Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts decided to hold a gentlemanly golf tournament. The point was to create a first-class player experience on a first-class course while showing the player guests “every courtesy possible.” Roberts proposed calling the annual invitational the Masters Tournament. Jones objected, thinking the title was presumptuous. The name Augusta National Invitational Tournament was used for five years until 1939 when Jones relented and the name was officially changed. What didn’t change was the culture. Fans continue to be called “patrons,” commercialization is limited, and the decorum is shaped by Augusta’s many prohibitions.

Cell phones for example are prohibited, as are bags, backpacks, beepers, beverage containers, coolers, periscopes, strollers, and cameras (cameras are only allowed on Practice Rounds days). There is no lying down on the lawn. You can’t take off your shoes. And you won’t see Gary McCord broadcasting the tournament. During the 1994 Masters, McCord joked that tournament officials “don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” McCord’s zinger was deemed to be indecorous. Masters officials prohibited him from ever again broadcasting the tournament.

Prohibitions might prove beneficial for golf, but many Americans and Western Europeans believe they have no place with God and religion. They assume religion doesn’t deal with reality, so when religious people pronounce prohibitions – “Thou shalt not” – they are castigated as judgmental.¹ In other words, it’s fine to judge a banana mushy. But if you judge someone’s beliefs as mushy, you’re out of bounds. We’re slouching into a sloth of “niceness” where religious prohibitions are considered judgmental. They are being replaced by “a set of mushy injunctions to be nice,” writes Charles Murray in Coming Apart. “Call it the code of ecumenical niceness.”²

There is now so much mush that few Americans and Western Europeans recall “nice” means “silly” or “stupid.” Niceness yields stupid people. They spout silly things, like the virtue of nonjudgmentalism. This is one of the more prominent – and baffling – features of America’s new-upper-class culture writes Murray. He notes for example how young upper-class women hardly ever have babies out of wedlock. They recognize nonmarital births produce boatloads of problems. Yet these same women find it “impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births” by middle- and lower-class women.³ The code of niceness creates a culture of stupidity: Who are we to judge?

The best statesmen and business leaders don’t suffer this stupidity. Because they deal with reality, they know cultures are defined by boundaries – saying “No.” Prohibitions make cultures strong. That’s why Winston Churchill liked Alexander the Great’s assessment “that the peoples of Asia were slaves, because they had not learned to pronounce the word ‘No!’” It works the same way in business. The strength of a company’s culture is defined by whether leaders say “No!” to top-revenue producers who only pay lip service to the company’s purpose. There is power in saying “No!”

The problem in America and Western Europe is that ecumenical niceness is beginning to even include golf. In 2003, Martha Burk, head of the National Council of Women’s Organization, demanded that Augusta National include female members. She judged the prohibition to be sexist. Augusta’s President, Hootie Johnson, politely replied, “No.” He said Augusta would invite a woman on its own timetable, “and not at the point of a bayonet.” The club had its reasons for prohibiting women and they weren’t sexist. Augusta National’s prohibitions played an essential part in the club’s decorum.

In 1967, Bobby Jones summed up this decorum. It’s reprinted in the Masters program every year. “In golf, customs of etiquette and decorum are just as important as rules governing play. It is appropriate for spectators to applaud successful strokes in proportion to difficulty but excessive demonstrations by a player or his partisans are not proper because of the possible effect upon other competitors. Most distressing to those who love the game of golf is the applauding or cheering of misplays or misfortunes of a player. Such occurrences have been rare at the Masters but we must eliminate them entirely if our patrons are to continue to merit their reputation as the most knowledgeable and considerate in the world.”

I felt firsthand the power of this decorum on Tuesday at the Practice Facility. We were sitting in the stands enjoying lunch. After finishing my chicken wrap, I began to toss the wrapper under my seat – but stopped. No, I thought, this is the Masters. I held my wrapper until I found a trashcan. The culture of prohibitions worked. It explains why you don’t hear You da man!!! at the Masters. Do so – and you are gone. The alternative is having fewer prohibitions, but that would likely means the Masters culture goes away. And then it wouldn’t be “a tradition unlike any other.”

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¹ Philip Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority, Kenneth S. Piver, General Editor, Volume I, Sacred Order/Social Order (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006)
² Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012), p. 288.
³ Murray, Coming Apart, p. 289.

In their 1974 boxing match, called the “Rumble in the Jungle,” reigning champion George Foreman rained blows on Muhammad Ali. Still, Foreman lost. Ali had a secret tactic. He had trained his body to not flinch. Jesus did the same over the course of three years. The payoff came during Passion Week, which is commemorated this week.

On October 30, 1974, World Heavyweight Champion George Foreman fought former champ Muhammad Ali, who was past his prime. The Rumble in the Jungle took place in Kinshara, Zaire on a hot, humid night. Ali was older than Foreman but told his trainer Angelo Dundee he was unconcerned. He had a secret plan – “rope-a-dope.”

Human beings have a bodily instinct to flinch in the face of impending pain. For boxers to become champions, they have to learn to not flinch and take a body blow. Ali took it to another level. He had developed a secret tactic. Ali would lean against the ropes when Foreman unleashed his sledgehammer blows. Resilient, the ropes would absorb much of the force of Foreman’s punches so that Ali’s body wouldn’t flinch and fold. In the early rounds of the Zaire fight, Foreman expended critical energy throwing punches that did little damage. Ali knocked out Foreman in the eighth round, the rope-a-dope strategy having sapped Foreman’s superior strength.

In the liturgical calendar this is Passion Week, when Christians commemorate Christ’s suffering. This pairing – passion and suffering – sounds odd to some folks. Passion is a positive thing today. The word however comes from paseo, “to suffer.” This is why the week of Christ’s most intense suffering is called Passion Week. It’s the culmination of Christ’s three-year strategy, summarized in Hebrews 5:8: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” Jesus learned obedience? Why?

In taking on a human body, Christ was subjected to the natural impulses of the human body, including the bodily instinct to flinch and pull away at the threat of impending pain or suffering. Jesus trained his body to cooperate with his spirit, to not flinch. Christ learned obedience because he had acquired a body, not because he was bad. Training camp ran three years for Jesus, as the writer of Hebrews notes that obedience was learned from “what he suffered.” The Son’s sufferings began with the temptations in the wilderness and closed with his pleadings in Gethsemane during Passion Week.

In the wilderness, Jesus practiced many of the disciplines of abstinence over the course of 40 days. They included silence, solitude, secrecy, prayer, and fasting. When Satan appeared, appealing to the lusts of the flesh, Jesus’ body served as an ally in warding off temptation. For the next three years, Christ further trained his body. Practice, practice, practice. By the last week of his life, Christ’s body was well trained. The final temptation occurred in Gethsemane, when his body made one final plea to flee. Christ subordinated his body to his spirit and stepped into the ring. He was beaten, spat upon, mocked, kicked, and cursed. Jesus had roughhewn, jagged nails driven through his hands and feet. There were no pain medications. He had the most severe societal shame inflicted on him – death on a cross. Yet Christ’s body didn’t flinch.

Since an untrained human body involuntarily recoils at the threat of pain, shame, or suffering, Paul urged Christians to “present your bodies as instruments of righteousness” (Rom. 6:13). The flesh is weak. Serving others is strenuous. Laying down your life for others will routinely go unrecognized, unreciprocated, and unrewarded. That’s painful. You will suffer if you serve. An untrained body recoils at this prospect. It flinches. It fails.

The solution is “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb. 12:2). Fixing your eyes means giving uninterrupted attention to how Christ lived. He practiced the spiritual disciplines to whip his body into shape. A healthy discipline for fixing our eyes might be diverting some attention from social media. It “is in essence an interruption machine,” writes Maggie Jackson in Distracted.¹ For instance, when the TV is on, children ages one to three exhibit the characteristics of attention-deficit syndrome. When adults twitter, text, and update their Facebook page throughout the day, studies show they exhibit less ability to pay attention to important truths, most of which are invariably complex. Their bodies become fidgety. They literally cannot linger long enough to learn. As Nicholas Carr points out in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, the ubiquity of the Internet and social media is making it harder for people to stop and dig into difficult literature.² Christians who joke that they are ADHD are unwittingly admitting they cannot fix their eyes on Jesus. Their bodies are most likely to flinch in the face of impending pain or suffering. They are poor candidates for following the Lord.

Muhammad Ali’s secret tactic paid off in crunch time. It’s no secret how Christians can do well in crunch time. To habitually serve others, practice serving others. Train. Secretly. Selflessly. Daily. Quit posting your good works on Facebook. Take U2’s admonition seriously – Get On Your Boots. An untrained body instinctively flinches in the face of suffering. That’s sobering, since only those who endure suffering for Christ will reign with him (I Tim. 2:12). That’s why Passion Week is a sober but healthy commemoration. It explains how Jesus won the Rumble at the Cross. With a body trained to absorb brutal blows, he didn’t flinch. Neither should we.

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¹ Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age (New York: Prometheus, 2008), p. 72.
² Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010)

Last fall Google recognized it had a problem. It’s California headquarters is frantically abuzz with activity. Scarfing down a burrito is standard lunch fare. This presents a host of potential problems, including lower productivity and higher healthcare costs in the future. To correct the problem, Google called in a Buddhist monk. It’s yet another instance of other faiths eating our lunch.

Google is a go-go place. “Few places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.,” wrote the New York Times earlier this year.¹ Hoping to instill healthy eating habits, Google brought in Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk, in September of 2011. Nanh is co-author of “Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.” Hundreds of Google workers showed up to enjoy a lunch in silence. There was a discussion afterward. The result is that scores of Google workers now enjoy a monthly hour-long wordless vegan lunch at the Google campus.

I’m happy they’re eating healthy but sad at another missed opportunity for the church. Why didn’t Google contact a Christian? The Christian faith has much to say about mindful eating. The answer of course is that America’s culture-shaping institutions generally do not take the church seriously. It’s a TGIF world, Twitter-Google-iPad-Facebook. Google is a culture-shaping institution. It takes Max De Pree’s maxim seriously – its first responsibility is to define reality. Google does not imagine the church as helping them define reality. What then would it take to change the equation?

In the first place, Christians would have to know the equation. In his book “Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge,” University of Southern California professor Dallas Willard writes how the church once made five contributions to culture. It was seen as a resource for:

• The knowledge of reality
• Belief
• Commitment
• Profession
• Adherence

The most important contribution was the knowledge of how reality works. For “most of Western history, the basic claims of the Christian tradition have in fact been regarded by its proponents as knowledge of reality,” Willard writes.² The Western church taught what was considered real and right as a “public resource for living.” This knowledge “was made available to people in general through institutions of one kind or another.”³

In the 19th century, the knowledge of how reality works came to be reserved to institutions other than the church. This was largely the result of a philosophy called positivism. Positivism grew out a general revulsion with religious wars in the Middle Ages. By the 1700s, positivists sought to “cleanse” the world of religious involvement by making an “absolute distinction between facts and values,” writes Harvard professor Louis Menand. By the 1800s, it was generally assumed that facts were the province of science while values were the province of what was mockingly called metaphysics.⁴ There was no reality beyond – meta – the physical world. Thus, the church was relegated to merely offering belief, commitment, profession, and a call to adherence. Google however does not take these seriously unless they are perceived as grounded in reality. The result is the modern church is out of the reality business.

This leaves a world where tolerance is the highest virtue. Religion has no place in the “real” world. It is merely a matter of an individual’s private “values.” This is why Buddhism is popular. It is a philosophy, not a religion. It preaches tolerance while promoting ideas such as mindful eating. This kind of philosophy explains how the “real” world works, and ‘fits’ how Google imagines reality.

The good news is that there is still plenty of opportunity at the Google trough. Their in-house food service is a thing of legend, both in New York City as well as Mountain View. “Orchestrated by an official Top Chef and regularly winning plaudits,” writes Adam Martin in the Atlantic, “you pretty much expect to see things like suckling pig on display; but that doesn’t make it any less impressive.”⁵ Newsweek iPad editor Melissa Lafsky Wall is not impressed however. She tweeted photos of a suckling pig recently served at the New York headquarters. Viewers have been mostly grossed out. Google, cognizant of maintaining its “cool” image, might start sniffing around for healthy alternatives.

The best way to get in the reality business is to solve real problems. Google, Twitter, Apple, and Facebook have problems. Every institution does. But solving them is not a matter of curriculums and discussions according to professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. They are the authors of The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, noting how real life problems are, by nature, unpredictable and uncertain. Curriculum-driven approaches (typical of many churches) are static and don’t capture how reality works.⁶ Their solution is to stop talking, roll up your sleeves, and solve problems. The gospel for instance has much to say about pigging out. But until we solve these kinds of problems, our faith won’t be taken seriously. And that means Buddhism will keep eating our lunch.

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¹ Jeff Gordinier, “Mindful Eating as Food for Thought,” the New York Times, February 7, 2012.
² Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009) p. 8.
³ Willard, Knowing, p. 200.
⁴ Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 207.
⁵ Adam Martin, “Google Wins at Pigging Out,” the Atlantic wire, March 13, 2012.
⁶ “The innovation machine” The Economist, August 28, 2010, p. 57.

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is a tour de force of data. Murray notes how 80 percent of America’s elites are “balkanized” in 882 U.S. zip codes. Most “do not have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian.”¹ Nor are they familiar with the founding virtues of industriousness and honesty as well as “the institutions through which right behavior is nurtured – marriage and religion,” he writes.²

The founders believed these virtues necessary for the flourishing of the American experiment. America’s elites – those who run our economic, political, and cultural institutions – are however largely unfamiliar with them. This doesn’t bother Murray. He believes neuroscience will usher in a “civic Great Awakening among the new upper class.”³ Genetic and neural science can serve as a new basis for the virtues by vindicating “many age-old ways of thinking about human nature.”

This is good news for a few age-old Christian traditions. It’s bad news for more recent renditions of the faith. The distinction becomes evident in America’s three Great Awakenings. The first began in the mid-1720s and is associated with George Whitefield. It reached its apex in the late 1730s, influencing urban cultural elites. The Second Great Awakening began around 1800 and lasted until 1840. Led by Charles Finney, it was markedly different than Whitefield’s. Finney’s revivals were highly individualistic (urging individuals to “make a decision for Jesus”), rationalist (an Enlightenment take on human nature), and rural. It launched modern evangelicalism (i.e., Methodists, Baptists, Bible and community churches, and the parachurch). In the third awakening, dated variously from the 1860s and to the early 1900s, these new evangelicals came under attack and retreated, creating parallel sub-cultures of schools, music, publishing, etc.

Modern evangelicalism is laudable for its concern for souls. Its rapid rise however is rooted somewhat in being cultural copycats. As the Second Great Awakening unfolded, Tocqueville noted how Americans had become “individualists.” Much of modern evangelicalism is “highly individualistic” writes Tim Keller. America is a nation shaped by Enlightenment rationalism. Much of modern evangelicalism is rationalist, with the sermon as a service’s centerpiece and small groups for Bible discussion. It’s mostly a head-trip – and why Calvin College professor James K. A. Smith critiques modern evangelicalism for assuming people are “brains on a stick.” It’s an Enlightenment understanding of human nature that’s being overtaken by neuroscience.

Cal Berkeley professor George Lakoff says neuroscience is discovering how 95 percent of our behavior is unconscious. It turns out human behavior is less rational and more culturally conditioned. That’s not determinism; it’s a more developed view of human beliefs and behavior – what Iris Murdoch essentially meant when she wrote, “that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”⁴ Our desires are shaped more by culture and less by cognition, or choice. The good news is this understanding of human nature is found in age-old Christian traditions such as Catholicism, Anglicanism, and many of the early European Reformers. They see the Cultural Mandate as foundational. They assume human nature is shaped more by culture and less by cognition. They understand the Great Commission as seamless with the Cultural Mandate, a reiteration of the original mandate. The Commission takes into account the fall and why followers of Christ are best suited to make flourishing cultures.

This is not how much of modern evangelicalism understands human nature. Focusing more on the Great Commission than the Cultural Mandate, discipleship is reduced to “think right, act right.” It’s worldview seminars and Bible studies. Nobel economist Robert Fogel says this faith tradition began to decline in the late 1990s. In The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism, Fogel says the United States experienced a Fourth Great Awakening beginning in the 1960s. It was fueled by “enthusiastic religion” with the evangelical movement focusing on being born again. Megachurches mushroomed but culture deteriorated (Murray’s book tracks the tragic decline of marriage, honesty, and industriousness from 1960-2010). Fogel predicts that the “eventual result” of this Fourth Great Awakening will be “no specifically religious influence” on the making of American culture. Murray has a slightly different take.

Murray believes breakthrough findings in neuroscience will bring about the next awakening. “The more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated. The institutions surrounding marriage, vocation, community, and faith will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives.” The age-old Christian traditions resonating with findings from neuroscience include Catholicism, Anglicanism, and the early European Reformers. They see science as catching up to scripture. Because of their view of human nature, these traditions could become critical resources for restoring the founders’ civic virtues. That can’t be said for the more recent renditions of the faith. They are being overrun by reality.

Almost 100 years ago, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany, wrote “The Tortoise and the Hare.” It was a story about settling a bet regarding who could run the swifter. The hare thought it a ridiculous question. He was fast. The moral of the story is that tried-and-true always wins. Is it possible that much of modern evangelicalism is the hare? Its growth until recent times has been swift. Now it’s being overrun by genetic and neural research. Is neuroscience the tortoise, slowly but surely overtaking modern evangelicalism’s truncated gospel and Enlightenment take on human nature?

Some of America’s younger evangelicals think so. Savvy to science and culture as well as Christianity, they’re exiting modern evangelical churches for more age-old expressions of the faith according to journalist Colleen Carroll Campbell.⁶ David Kinnaman notes the same exodus in his new book, You Lost Me. He guesstimates there are as many as 20 million “exiles” between the ages of 18 and 29. They feel lost because they approach Christianity via culture. The good news is that if neuroscience is ushering in an awakening, those exiles joining age-old faith traditions will find the connection they long for. Their churches might even become contributors to restoring the founders’ virtues.

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¹ Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012), p. 107.
² Murray, Coming Apart, p. 130.
³ Murray, Coming Apart, p. 305.
⁴ Heather Widdows, The Moral Vision of Iris Murdoch (London, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2005), p. 109.
⁵ Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012), p. 300.
⁶ Colleen Carroll Campbell, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2002).

St. Patrick’s Day is known for all things green, including beer. But beer enthusiasts insist on a good beer head as well. It’s an important part of the drinking experience. It’s also an important part of the faith experience.

This Saturday’s holiday is based on the work of Patrick who was born in England in 385. Kidnapped by pirates at age 16, he was sold as a slave to a Druid chieftain in Ireland. While herding pigs, Patrick recalled the Bible verses his father had taught him. He came to faith in Christ. In his Confessions, Patrick wrote, “in a strange land the Lord opened my unbelieving eyes and I was converted.” Patrick eventually escaped from his captors and returned to Britain. Then he decided to return to Ireland, this time as a missionary.

This was during a dark period in Western history. “The intellectual disciplines… that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers in the Dark Ages,” writes Thomas Cahill in his delightful book, How the Irish Saved Civilization.¹ In the sunset years of the Roman Empire, throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, invading barbarians had destroyed Roman civilization including the great libraries containing ancient learning. Patrick understood this in returning to Ireland. He knew for example that the Irish had no written alphabet.

Patrick began to introduce the gospel by introducing the Irish to written language. They loved the newfound words and invented playful limericks. Many Irish also came to love God. Over the course of some 29 years Patrick baptized over 120,000 Irishmen and established at least 300 churches (other historians say 600 churches). Irish monks began to preserve Christian literature as well as all writing that came their way, including Augustine and Aristotle. Cahill says they “took up the just labor of copying all of western literature – everything they could get their hands on.”

Over the next 100 years, the great texts of Plato, Thucydides and the Bible survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock 18 miles from the Irish coast. Then, in the mid-500s, Irish missionaries scooped up these sacred texts and set sail to turn the lights back on in Britain and Europe. This is why Cahill writes that the Irish, starting with the work of St. Patrick, literally saved civilization.

There is however an additional aspect of Patrick’s story that few modern Christians know. He was part of an ancient Christian tradition that viewed the heart of the gospel as “the redemption of the body” (Rom. 8:32). Salvation was bodily and included things like good beer. Patrick for example kept his personal brewmaster, Mescan, at his side while introducing the gospel to the pagan land of Ireland. St. Brigid, the famous Irish saint who labored in a leper colony, asked God to turn bathwater into beer so that her lepers could also enjoy the taste of beer. This was an era when Christians held to a fully embodied faith. We hear echoes of it in writers such as Flannery O’Connor: “The things we taste and touch and feel affect us long before we believe anything at all.”

A full-body faith assumes our bodies are integral to salvation. It is why God wants us to enjoy good food, good wine, and good beer. “For he gives wine that gladdens the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread that sustains his heart” (Ps. 104:15). This is why the Bible urges us to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8). A full-body faith assumes bodily redemption requires just the right amount of head. We see how this works by noticing what Guinness – an Irish brewer – puts in every can of its beer.

When beer is poured into a glass, a head forms that holds the multifaceted aromatics within the body of the drink, helping a drinker relish the complexities of the brew. That’s why a can of Guinness contains a widget, a small plastic capsule that allows a can of Guinness to be properly nitrogenated and form the best head. A good head is the only way to fully enjoy a good body of beer. No wonder Guinness’ widget won the Queens award for technological achievement in 1991. In 2005, the British people voted it the greatest invention of the past 40 years. Cheers!

It is only recently that a full-bodied faith gave way to a Big Brain faith. In Desiring the Kingdom, Calvin College professor James K. A. Smith says much of modern Christianity assumes people are “brains on a stick.” It’s a no-body faith. Church services are centered on sermons. Congregants mostly sit and listen. A few take notes. Small groups are mostly about cultivating the mind, discussing Bible verses. Evangelism and apologetics are about winning the war of competing worldviews.

“Brains on a stick” is a faith that mostly produces froth. It’s a beer head without a robust beer body. It’s why we hear frothy statements about “passion” and what God is supposedly doing in our churches – all the while ignoring an overwhelming body of evidence indicating the faith of many Christians is not very robust. This bodiless faith has the same appeal as the best selling beer in America – Bud Light. Americans apparently prefer a beer with little body. You can acquire a taste for it, but why drink simply because it’s less filling? The same question goes for Christians. Any believer can acquire a taste for a faith with no body, but what’s the point if it’s only less filling?

In his book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven, Peter Kreeft observes that beings with brains but no bodies are called ghosts. “The human soul needs the body to express itself. That is why the resurrection of the body is… not a dispensable extra.”² This Saturday, visit a pub and ask for a pint of Guinness. Observe the bartender carefully fill the glass by tilting it and then drawing off some of the head. A good head is not too much head. Then tilt the glass, relish the aromas, and enjoy the taste. Afterward, ask whether your faith community urges you to drink this deeply of a bodily faith. If not, consider switching to a better brand.

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¹ Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe (Doubleday: New York, 1995), p. 204.
² Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), p. 93.