Increasing numbers of twenty-something men find they cannot be aroused by their actual, real life partners. Many are becoming convinced that erectile dysfunction (ED) is normal. Most assume Viagra is the solution. But there might be a better Rx for ED.

The rise of erectile dysfunction isn’t new news. If you watch TV commercials, you’d assume ED is approaching epidemic levels in older men. This seems to call for desperate measures, as the most common prescription, Viagra, carries risks of sudden vision loss, ringing in your ears, hearing loss, chest pain, back pain, pain spreading to the arm or shoulder, nausea, sweating, headache, memory problems, upset stomach, irregular heartbeat, swelling in your hands, ankles, or feet; shortness of breath, feeling light-headed, fainting, or “an erection lasting more than four hours.” Yikes.

The new news is the rise of ED in younger men. A 2011 article in Psychology Today concluded that the use of internet pornography has created a generation of young men who cannot be aroused by their actual, real life partners, and that “many are becoming convinced that [erectile dysfunction] at twenty-something is normal.”¹ The culprit seems to be the debilitating combination of pornography and subsequent masturbation.

Erotic images have been with us for a long time. As Naomi Wolf notes in her article “The Porn Myth,” “For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women.”² These images usually portrayed the female form with all its imperfections. Nowadays, men have seen hundreds if not thousands of fake-breasted, airbrushed, aroused-beyond-belief pixelated women, all contorted into positions that would make a yoga coach drool – before they’ve laid with an actual, warm-blooded woman. “For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women,” writes Wolf.

Today, approximately 70 percent of men ages 18-24 regularly visit porn sites. They form desires for sex that cannot be met in reality. Masturbation follows, which releases oxytocin into the male system, a chemical that facilitates human bonding and trust while reducing fear. All the joys, comfort and psychological attachment that nuptial union is designed to bring are being attached to pornography. Small wonder we’re witnessing a generation of young men addicted to pixels but unable to perform with an actual person.

The good news is that neuroscience is discovering a solution. The brain’s plasticity makes porn damage reversible. In The Brain That Changes Itself, psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about patients who used porn and were able to quit, cold turkey. They turned off the Internet after doctors explained what was happening to their brain and being told to stop watching porn – now. For those who did, “their appetite for porn withered away.”³ The entire rehabilitative mental process requires “unlearning” old pathways by cutting billions of connections in the brain, having a compelling reason to do so, and then hacking out new neural pathways.

The even better news is that science is simply catching up to scripture on this one. The same rehabilitative process can be found in the Bible. In Proverbs 6 we read of a man who is stupid about sex. A woman thrills and then seduces him. Immediately after climax, the thrill is gone. The young man is horrified to learn his bedposts are sunk in Sheol. His life is being sucked out of him. This is why scripture says: “Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body” (I Cor. 6:18). Like Joseph with Potiphar’s wife, porn is the kind of sin that demands you take flight – fast.

The entire rehabilitative process requires more than simply fleeing. It is also filling in new neural pathways. That’s one reason why Jesus told a story about an unclean spirit (Mt. 12:43-45). It went out of a man, passed through waterless places seeking rest, and did not find any. “Then it said, ‘I will return to my house from which I came’; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.” Jesus’ point is that simply saying No to porn is insufficient. You have to also say Yes to something new or else lust will return, more virulent than ever. When it reignites, your last state will be worse than your first.

The Apostle Paul reinforces this process in Ephesians 4:22-25: Stop doing this, start doing this, and here’s why. For instance, “Lay aside the old self and put on the new self, because you are created in the likeness of God.” Or, in verse 25, “laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another.”

This is not to say science and Viagra are bad. Science is not the problem. It’s scientism, wrote C. S. Lewis, “a certain outlook on the world which is a caricature of the true sciences.” Scientism believes pharmaceutical prescriptions are the only solution for any and every problem. It prescribes Viagra but opposes religion. With the rise of neuroscience, this could change. As the faith community points out how science is catching up to scripture, the Bible might eventually be recognized as offering an effective Rx for ED.

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¹ Marnia Robinson & Gary Wilson, “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow”, Psychology Today, July 11, 2011.
² http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/
³ Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 131.

I wonder if Dallas Willard knows it now. Dr. Willard passed away last Wednesday morning at the age of 77. He leaves behind a legacy of profoundly shaping many lives in many ways – including mine.

I first met Dr. Willard in the summer of 1995. I had resigned from the pastorate in May of that year. That same month a friend called and recommended we take a Doctor of Ministry course under Dr. Willard. We signed up. I preached my last sermon on a Sunday in June, left the pulpit (wanting to have nothing to do anymore with the church), and found myself in a front row seat in Dr. Willard’s class the next morning.

The first thing that struck me was Dr. Willard’s humble, suggestive style of teaching. A brilliant man, he taught like someone who had nothing to prove. Dr. Willard was comfortable in his own skin. I have too often felt the need to prove something. I began to sense that much of my anger and depression was self-inflicted. I wasn’t alone.

Sitting straight in front of Dr. Willard was a pastor with a big chip on his shoulder. From day one, he grilled Dr. Willard – not in a kind way, but a who-do-you-think-you-are? kind of tough tone. He sounded like me at times. On the third day of class, right in the middle of a seemingly aimless rant, this pastor paused – and then began to sob. Right there in front of Dr. Willard. Dallas came around the lectern and embraced the man. They cried. “I’m a mess, a failure… I don’t know what I believe anymore,” was all this pastor could sob. Dr. Willard assured him all was not lost. I shared vicariously in that hug.

Word began to get around campus that week how strange and wonderful things were happening in Dr. Willard’s course. On day two or three, I began to notice other students and faculty sneaking into the back of the classroom. They sat in rapt attention. My first thought was, “Hey I paid for this course – you didn’t.” I had a lot to learn.

That week Dr. Willard was taking us through drafts for his upcoming book, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. In it, he writes, “If those in the churches really are enjoying fullness of life, evangelism will be unstoppable and largely automatic. The local assembly, for its part, can then become an academy where people throng from the surrounding community to learn how to live.” Other students and faculty were thronging to taste the fullness of life we were experiencing in class. I began to experience a better way to do ministry.

This is not to say the course wasn’t provocative. Dr. Willard discussed ideas that would be incorporated into The Divine Conspiracy. For instance, he exposed us to what he called “gospels of sin management.” They get people to heaven but lack “any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon occupations or work time.” Willard suggested that this truncated gospel is “the basic message of the church as it is heard today.” This explains the anemic state of the church.

Several of us wanted to know further how Dr. Willard felt about the church. We invited him to lunch. This was immediately after a morning discussion on fasting. That tied us into knots. Do we order a hamburger or try to look holy? Dr. Willard ordered a hamburger. After a few pleasantries, one pastor picked up the thread of the conversation and asked, “Dr. Willard, what do you think of the church?” As he took a big bite, Dallas muttered, “It’s a lost cause.”

It might sound strange, but that comment gave me hope. Over the years, bumping into Dr. Willard here and there, I came to see that he hadn’t given up on the church. His reservations had to do with a particular kind of church infected by modernity and elements of the Enlightenment. Dr. Willard helped many of us who longed to face the brutal reality of our present situation without losing hope. Dr. Willard did that by delineating between an ancient faith and the many modern aberrations out there. He hadn’t given up. He invested in churches. That was lifesaving. He turned many beaten down pastors, including that front row pastor and me, back to investing in the church.

Last but not least, I am especially appreciative of how Dr. Willard defined who gets into heaven. In The Divine Conspiracy he writes, “God will let everyone into heaven who, in his considered opinion, can stand it.” Heaven is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s for those who long to be united with Christ in matrimony, nuptial union with Jesus. That’s what Willard meant by “standing” it. For those who pant for Jesus – intensely long for him – passing from here to there feels pretty seamless. The pleasure is so intense that it takes a while for believers to realize they died a few days back. I think Dallas Willard got that right. He got a lot right. I am one of many who will miss him.

For the uninitiated, Argo is the movie version of CIA operative Tony Mendez’ book, The Masters of Disguise. Mendez led the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. It’s a good film, but if you’re were familiar with Robert Parry, you know moviegoers would learn more if Affleck went further back in history. Parry wrote America’s Stolen Narrative, a book detailing the CIA coup in 1953 as well as President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to free 52 embassy employees. He details the complex relationship that has existed between the United States and Iran. Had Affleck included this bit of history, Americans might better understand the story of the U.S. and Iran is a bit more complex than simply good guy vs. bad guy.

The same can be said about a new series of courses on college campuses. As Jennifer Schuessler reports in the New York Times, “a specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.”¹ Elite colleges and universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and Cornell, are offering a growing number of courses on “the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.” Capitalism is becoming cool. The trend seems to have started at Harvard, when, in 1996, historian Sven Beckert offered an undergraduate seminar titled “The History of American Capitalism.” There were nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots. The seminar has grown into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism.

These courses are a step in the right direction. The only drawback is that they don’t step far enough back in history. They only go back to the 19th century. That’s shortsighted. If these courses went further back, students would see how commerce and capitalism is a story about bosses, bankers, brokers – and believers.

For starters, the church father Augustine ruled that price was a function not simply of the seller’s costs, but also of the buyer’s desire for the item sold.² Monastic estates operated this way, giving legitimacy to the eventual involvement of the church in the birth of capitalism. That birth dates from about the 9th century. The great estates belonging to monastic orders experienced increases in agricultural productivity that resulted from such significant innovations as the switch to horses. No longer limited to mere subsistence agriculture, these estates began to specialize in particular crops or products and to sell these at a profit. A cash economy emerged. Monasteries then began to reinvest their profits to increase productive capacity. As their incomes continued to mount, many monasteries became banks, lending to the nobility.

This rich history is why Randall Collins describes monastic estates as not merely a sort of proto-capitalism, but a version of the developed characteristics of capitalism itself. In fact, he calls this development of commerce “religious capitalism,” adding that the “dynamism of the medieval economy was primarily that of the Church.”³ We see this dynamism in the 11th century, when Thomas Aquinas explained just prices by posing this question: “Whether a man may lawfully sell a thing for more than it is worth?” He answered by first quoting Augustine that it is natural and lawful for “you wish to buy cheap, and sell dear.” This was common knowledge by the 13th century, when Saint Albertus Magnus proposed that the “just price” is simply what “goods are worth according to the estimation of the market at the time of sale.”

The role of theology in all this cannot be underestimated. Church theology stressed that reason informed both political philosophy and practice. The result was that responsive states began to appear in medieval Europe, sustaining a substantial degree of personal freedom and providing safe havens for the flourishing of capitalism. The overlap of products, profits, and political stability meant that by the 14th century, the term “capital” had come into use to identify funds having the capacity to return income, rather than simply being of consumable value. The term “capitalism” soon followed.

In his book The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, Rodney Stark surveys the historic contribution of Christianity to capitalism. He suggests “capitalism was not born of the Protestant ethic, having appeared in full flower in Italian city-states centuries before the Reformation.” Rather, when we go back far enough in history, we see the Protestant ethic was born of capitalism. This is why courses that begin the history of capitalism in the 19th century are shortsighted. They leave students shortchanged.

The cheat is that bosses, bankers, and brokers pretty much disconnected religion from capitalism in the 19th century. Starting a course in the 1800s shortchanges students, leaving the impression the Christian faith has little to do with capitalism. The solution is stepping further back in history. But that’s easier said than done. That would require resolving this question: What would it take for Harvard or Cornell to take the church’s contribution to capitalism seriously? At the very least, it would require a farsighted strategy. That’s not a bad place to start, since it would keep the church from proposing shortsighted solutions. No sense in repeating the error of shortsightedness currently happening at so many colleges.

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¹ Jennifer Schuessler, “In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism,” the New York Times, April 6, 2013.
² Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 58.
³ Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 58.

In the planning stages for years, Apple’s new headquarters is scheduled to open for business in 2016. Revised renderings reveal a glassy, four-story, 2.8 million square feet of spherical building. Able to accommodate up to 14,200 colleagues, the headquarters does not include a single straight pane of glass. It’s a sphere.

Jobs’ spherical inspiration came learning about the benefits of roundtable environments, such as MIT’s Building 20 (http://www.doggieheadtilt.com/why-the-wounds-are-faithful/). In 1999, Jobs designed the new Pixar headquarters with the building wrapped around a central atrium. It featured mailboxes, meeting rooms, coffee bar, gift shop, and cafeteria, all designed to literally drive people towards routinely bumping into colleagues. Apple’s new headquarters is designed to be a testimony to Steve Jobs’ final innovation.

What Jobs probably didn’t know is that spheres are actually testimony to older Christian traditions. As Iain McGilchrist notes in his magisterial The Master and His Emissary, the ancients believed the sphere “reflected the shape of the cosmos, the universe, and ultimately of the Divine.” He cites the long history of spherical thinking, from “at least as early as the Corpus Hermeticum, a body of early Christian texts from Hellenic Egypt dating back to the third century” all the way to a thirteenth-century bishop, Alain de Lille, throughout the Hermetic tradition in the Renaissance, notably in Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century and Giordano Bruno in the sixteenth, who wrote of ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere,’ an idea that was given its most famous expression by Pascal in the seventeenth century.”

It appears that roundness and the image of the sphere has come and gone with the influence of the right hemisphere. Circular motion accommodates the coming together of opposites, helping individuals see things as a whole, and in depth. Shelley speaks of the phenomenological world as a sphere: “The devotion to something afar / From the sphere of our sorrow.” Wordsworth’s most famous lines speak of the phenomenal world as a sphere: “the round earth and the living air, rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,” phrases which convey much more than the banal fact that the earth is a sphere and that it rotates. Van Gogh agreed, writing, “life is probably round.”

To the early Greeks, the sphere was the perfect shape, expressive of eternity and divinity. Older Christian traditions, including early Western ones, represented the cosmos in the curved roundness of the ceiling of the apse, or of the dome of the church, or of the tympanum over the great west door – but rarely on the flatness of a wall. This was long before there was any idea of the roundness of the earth.

With the Enlightenment, interest in the sphere waned. Straight lines became prevalent. The reason this happened is arresting. Modernity and the Enlightenment tend to rely more on language, a function of the brain’s left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is binary, either/or. Computers are binary, one or zero. This is why a computer cannot draw a circle. It can only connect two points in a straight line. A circle is a never-ending spherical line. Circles are products of the right hemisphere, where we think both/and.

Circles and straight lines go a long way toward explaining the inefficacy of much of the modern Western church. It is only in the brain’s right hemisphere that we have direct access with reality. It is only in the right that we imagine spheres. “Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates,” McGilchrist writes. The language of “concepts” and “principles,” as well as three-point outlines are reflective of left hemisphere straight-line thinking. But the left hemisphere has no direct access to reality. Straight-line thinking yields a faith with, at best, only indirect access to reality.

Spheres are why Celtic Christianity proved so effective. As George G. Hunter notes in his book, The Celtic Way of Evangelism, the Christian faith flourished in Ireland (and later Europe) because early Irish Christians built “round” communities with buildings that often had two concentric circles. This contributed significantly to the health of Irish Christianity in two main ways. First, it made the experience of faith less individualistic and more community-oriented. Second, Hunter writes that “Celtic evangelization took people’s ‘right brains’ seriously; it made the gospel’s meaning vivid, engaged people’s emotions, and energized their response by engaging their imaginations.”¹

As the proverbs remind us, there is really nothing new under the sun. Steve Jobs was a visionary and a fabulous innovator. But his final innovation is a very old one. What if a well-respected Christian had pointed out to Jobs that Apple’s new headquarters actually reflects an ancient faith tradition? We’ll never know how he might have responded, but these kinds of connections are vital if the Christian faith is going to one day be taken seriously by those presently disinterested in the Christian faith.

Jeff Simpson contributed to this article. A recent graduate of the University of Maryland College Park, Jeff is working this year as an intern with Cru at the University of Maryland.

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¹ George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (Nashville: Abington, 2000), p. 38.

Last Monday’s terrorist attack in Boston is a tragic example of what it means to live in a fallen world. But it’s an example of something else. If we want to rid the world of these heinous acts, last week was an example of how much of the Western world is pursuing an inadequate strategy.

This past Friday authorities arrested Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after an intense manhunt. He is one of two brothers alleged to have exploded two homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon Monday, killing three people and injuring more than 175. Details will continue to unfold, but here’s one worth recalling – the initial reluctance on the part of many leaders to use the word terrorist. Why the reticence? The late Philip Rieff had an answer.

In his monumental work My Life Among the Deathworks, Rieff wrote that we live in a world shorn of any sacred canopy. All religions and ideologies are now considered fictions. In the final analysis, they’re not factual but rather fanciful – a “personal relationship” between individuals and their God. Rieff coined a word for these types of societies – “deathworks.” They’re deathworks because they treat ideologies, or faiths, as individual options or inclinations. These should never intrude on real life. Cultivated in our elite colleges and universities, this “invincible ignorance” (as Rieff described it), overlooks the reality that all behavior is rooted on ideologies.¹

Invincible ignorance coincides with a second development – positivism. Positivism grew out of a general revulsion with religious wars in the Middle Ages. By the 1700s, positivists sought to “cleanse” the world of religious influence by making an “absolute distinction between facts and values,” writes Harvard professor Louis Menand. By the 1800s, positivism shaped the arts, law, commerce, and our elite educational institutions. It posits a world where facts are the province of science while values are the province of what the positivists mockingly called metaphysics, or religion.² In truth, positivists believe there is no actual reality beyond – meta – the physical world.

The collapse of a canopy and the rise of positivism explain the initial reluctance on the part of our leaders to use the word terrorist. While we want our leaders to err on the side of caution, setting off bombs to maim or kill spectators is terrorism, plain and simple. Only in a deathwork society, where leaders assume ideologies are fictions, do we see such reticence. Acculturated to assuming tolerance is the cardinal virtue, leaders are initially reluctant to appear to be intolerant by uttering the insensitive word terrorist. Common citizens experience no such difficulty. Leaders, slowly sensing the sensibilities of the nation, soon come around. But they frame our nation’s response as “the war against terrorism.” This is another example of invincible ignorance.

Terrorism is a tactic. So were Nazi concentration camps in World War II. The Nazis were not however animated by operating concentration camps. They were fueled by an ideology, fascism. The Allies understood this distinction. They were first and foremost fighting a war against the ideology of fascism. Today, in a world shorn of a sacred canopy, leaders are reluctant to go after ideologies. Religions are the realm of “personal values.” No one wants to step on an individual’s values. Hence, we witness a flaccid tolerance that is reluctant to mention any ideology that might be behind the attacks. The prime example is our leaders being reduced to talking about tactics, such as “the war against terrorism.” Can you imagine Franklin Roosevelt rallying the nation around “the war against concentration camps?”

The Western world should fight terrorism, but this alone is an inadequate strategy. First and foremost, we must take seriously the ideologies behind terrorist attacks. At this point, Western societies seem generally incapable of doing this. Last Monday’s terrorist attack is tragic, but until we reconstruct a world where leaders take a sacred canopy seriously – and dismantle positivism – we will fight one terrorist tactic after another. That’s an expensive and necessary tactic, but insufficient for ridding the world of these heinous acts.

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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), p. 56.
² Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), p. 207.

It’s likely that the Supreme Court will rule on the same-sex marriage case this summer. Regardless of how the justices decide the Defense of Marriage Act, the tide is turning toward accepting same-sex marriage. Male-female marriage is being swept away. But this isn’t the end of the world. There’s a lesson to be learned. It has to do with sand castles.

Jesus once told a story about a foolish man. He listened to Jesus but doesn’t do what Christ did (Mt. 7:26). That man built a sand castle. Now consider one of the many things Christ did. He spoke in parables. He probably expected his followers to follow suit – to do this. The early church did. It communicated in pictures. But over time, language began to trump metaphor – argument over imagination.

The shift toward language began with the Greeks and was resurrected with Islam. The story starts with the vandals who sacked Rome, destroying much of the writings of the West, including those of the Greeks. The Greeks believed truth was “something proved by argument,” not metaphor.¹ A few centuries later, Islamic scholars reintroduced Greek thought to the West.² The importance of metaphor was forgotten.

By the time of the Reformation, metaphor was feared as well as forgotten. Iain McGilchrist writes that Reformation involved a shift away from the capacity to understand metaphor towards a literalistic way of thinking – a move away from imagination, now seen as treacherous, and towards rationalism. Rationalism ignores Jonathan Swift’s wisdom: you cannot reason someone out of a position they never reasoned their way into.

The Enlightenment exacerbated this trend – or more correctly, Enlightenments. Four differentiated Enlightenments hit America’s shores – the Moderate (1688-1787), Skeptical (1750-1789), Revolutionary (1776-1800), and Didactic (1800-1815).³ The first, the Moderate Enlightenment, provided many benefits, including the Scientific Method. The Skeptical and Revolutionary were short-lived and hardly influenced America. The final Enlightenment – the Didactic – was more consequential and detrimental.

The Didactic Enlightenment came from the Scottish “Commonsense” school. It’s highly rationalistic. Teachers teach. Pupils sit and take notes. The assumption is think right, act right. According to Henry May, this Enlightenment was marked by “second and third-rate thinkers” who put forward a version of epistemology and human nature that was easily incorporated into the burgeoning 1800s evangelical movement in America. The sermon replaced the sacraments as the centerpiece of the worship service. In time, the church came to “a kind of comfortable cohabitation” with this Enlightenment.⁴

It’s a costly cohabitation. Didactic Enlightenment clergy began presenting marriage as a series of facts, “principles,” and “concepts.” But people don’t live by concepts. The reality of marriage as a picture or metaphor for the gospel became an abstraction. People can’t live by abstractions. This might be why divorce rates in the American faith community are similar to those communities outside the faith.

The Western church has forgotten that facts are like grains of sand. Metaphor is the mortar holding facts together. People require both for something to be meaningful. The gay community gets this. Advocates for same-sex marriage operate in metaphors. In After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s, gay leaders tell us they assume that, “without reference to facts, logic or proof…. the person’s beliefs can be altered whether he is conscious of the attack or not.”⁵

For the faith community’s understanding of male-female marriage to be taken seriously, much work will have to be done. First, it would help if there were a larger percentage of outstanding marriages in the faith community. Second, it would be beneficial if more spokespeople in the faith community learned to communicate in pictures. There are indications of a growing number of believers learning about the power of metaphor. That’s good. But most appear to be merely doubling down on the Didactic bet. They teach others about metaphor. But they don’t speak in metaphor. Big difference.

Learning to communicate in metaphor requires coaches and crap detectors. Metaphorical thinking is mainly a function of the brain’s right hemisphere. By the age of 20, most of your neural pathways are set in place. If you are older than 20 and came to faith in a typical Western church, you’re operating mostly out of your left hemisphere. Hacking out new pathways in your right hemisphere will require re-scripting how you talk, crap detectors telling you when you unconsciously opt for the left, and lots of practice. Until that happens, you’ll talk about metaphor but will hardly talk in metaphor.

Re-learning how to talk sometimes calls for not talking – for a season. This is James Davison Hunter’s advice. In his book, To Change The World, Hunter notes how the church has turned to politics to try to be taken seriously. Politics has a rightful place, but the church has naively become politicized. Hunter suggests that the church and its leadership should “remain silent for a season.” That makes sense. Traditional marriage is being swiftly swept away. It appears we’ve built a sand castle. Better to start over. That might mean remaining silent for a season and learning to communicate in metaphor.

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¹ c.f., Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010)
² c.f., Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995)
³ Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
⁴ Newbigin, Proper Confidence, p. 33.
⁵ Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s (New York: Plume, 1990), pp. 152-153.

In late June the U.S. Supreme Court will likely rule on the same-sex marriage case argued two weeks ago. Regardless of how the justices decide the Defense of Marriage Act, attitudes are clearly shifting. As David Brooks recently wrote, “In 3,000 years of Western civilization, no major culture has shifted this fast to give gays and lesbians equality, as the U.S. and Europe have recently. It’s astounding.”¹

It’s astounding because we live in an “unprecedented” age according to Philip Rieff.² In every culture in the past, a sacred canopy more or less ordered the society’s social behaviors. I say more or less because, in reality, there are four contributors to shaping cultures. They include the sacred canopy, the resulting social mores, the state enforcing those mores, and the rights of the individual. Rieff believed our modern, or “third” culture, operated without a sacred canopy. That’s unprecedented.

Rieff arranged history under three different cultures. In the “first culture,” the canopy is fate. It includes the earliest pagan religions to “the complex rational world of ancient Athens to the enchanted mysticisms of aboriginal Australia.” In the second culture, the canopy is faith. It includes the great monotheisms such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The third culture, prevalent in the West, is unprecedented. The canopy is considered a fiction. Fiction might make for fine reading, but most folks don’t see it as having a place in shaping public policy. That’s what we see happening in the marriage debate.

Advocates for same-sex marriage are not opposed to male-female marriage. Rather, they’re arguing for equal protections under the law, appealing to social mores, the state, and individual rights. Attorneys defending the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act took the same tack, forgoing any appeal to a sacred canopy. It’s telling that Justice Kennedy found their line of reasoning unconvincing, lacking any sort of “rational basis.”

This is exactly what Rieff predicted. Third cultures are committed to the leveling of all authority. Marriage can no longer be defined by including the “vertical,” such as “The Bible says.” Christians can claim to enjoy a “personal relationship with God,” but outside the four walls of their church and home, their faith is considered a fiction, a personal preference. There is in actuality no sacred canopy. The result is the U.S. and Europe operate in third cultures defined horizontally by individual preferences and, as Rieff predicted, “endlessly contestable and infinitely changeable rules.”

This makes for a mess. In his 1882 work, “The Parable of the Madman,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes of the madman announcing the death of God. He warns of a coming culture where we don’t know which way is up: “Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward in all directions, is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?”

This is like driving without directions. Third cultures operate without GPS. GPS is a tracking system that requires four coordinates, or four satellite signals. It’s simple physics that four fixed points, or coordinates, are necessary to see objects in three dimensions – height, breadth, and depth. That’s why GPS can provide car drivers and airplane pilots with reliable directions. Four coordinates. First and second cultures operate this way, with four coordinates – a sacred canopy, social mores, the state, and the individual. They provide a picture of marriage in three dimensions – its height, breadth, and depth. Third cultures cannot do this.

Third cultures flatten the image of marriage. Lacking a sacred canopy, they operate by only three coordinates. It’s simple physics that three fixed points, or coordinates, can only see objects in two dimensions. The institution of marriage in the U.S. and Europe is being reduced to a two-dimensional relationship – a privatized matter of social mores, state jurisdiction, and individual preference.

Rieff coined a word for third cultures – “deathwork.” This resonates with the Christian faith, as the Bible presents permanent, monogamous, heterosexual marriage as the most poignant picture of the gospel. The gospel is a matter of life and death. Two-dimensional marriage is the death of this crucial metaphor. That’s a significant loss, for, as C. S. Lewis rightly noted, “All our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor.”³ With the dramatic rise of the “nones” – now more than 20 percent of the U.S. population – it is apparent that the Western church is not only not winning the marriage debate; it’s also not winning as many Americans to Christ as it once did.⁴

Rieff felt this is a war that, at present, cannot be won. “But it can be lost.”⁵ He wrote My Life Among the Deathworks in 2006 “in order to stop the losing streak.” So far, not so good. There are however steps that the faith community can take to restore the institution of marriage as it was historically understood. That’s grist for another mill. Or another column. Next week.

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¹ David Brooks, “Marriage Security and Insecurities,” the New York Times, March 28, 2013.
² 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), p. 7.
³ C. S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” The Importance of Language. ed. Max Black (Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 50.
⁴ Michael Gerson, “An America that is losing faith with religion,” Washington Post, March 25, 2013.
⁵ Rieff, Deathworks, p. 20.

If you were in church this past Sunday – Easter – you likely heard a message about hope. Hope is one of three virtues Paul highlights in I Corinthians. It is virtuous, but in the Book of Proverbs we also discover why hope can be cruel. In the first half of Proverbs 13:12 we read: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Deferred means delayed, or postponed. When our hopes don’t come to fruition in the way we imagine or in the timetable we expect, our hearts become ill. This explains many mental and emotional illnesses. They are rooted in hope, the cruelest virtue.

The delay is due to design. We’re made in the image of God, wired according to the “four chapter” gospel of creation-fall-redemption-restoration. The last chapter, the final restoration, or fully restored kingdom, is what we hope for. The tension, as Jesus noted, is “the kingdom is at hand.” It’s pregnant with the promise of spring. Aslan is on the move. Winter is losing its grip. But most of the kingdom will not arrive here and now. It’s coming then and there, in eternity. And, as the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, even though God has wired eternity into our hearts, “no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:11). The timetable is unclear.

This produces three great groans. Creation “groans with the pains of childbirth.” So does the Spirit of God. So do believers (Rom. 8:22-26). We are “longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” as we feel the kingdom being birthed on the earth (II Cor. 5:2). This is our hope, but most of the time, these hopes are postponed. Deep heartaches result. But that’s not the end of the story.

There’s an old management saying: solve problems, manage conditions. Deferred hope is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be managed. We manage it according to the second half of Proverbs 13:12: “Desire realized is a tree of life.” Along with having a fair percentage of our hopes go unrealized in this life, we also require a fair number of desires coming to fruition in this life. The trick is having rightly ordered desires. Otherwise we become discouraged. Or give up. Or in the worst case, become cynics.

People who lose hope often become cynics. Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. These people are hard to restore. Cynicism acts like shellac. It’s the hardened heart – smooth, glossy, and rock hard. The root of the problem isn’t however postponed hopes. It’s disordered desires, or loves. If you love God and then your neighbor, you’re on your way to properly ordered desires. They won’t cancel out the cruelty of hope. But they will help you manage the reality that most of our hopes will go unrealized in this life.

The Apostle Paul recognized this tension. He described hope as not losing heart (II Cor. 4:7-9). That’s noteworthy, given that Paul was frequently imprisoned, savagely beaten times without number, and often in danger of death (II Cor.11: 23-25). That’s a lot of postponed hopes. Paul managed them by imagining his life as an “earthen vessel.” In his day, earthen vessels were fragile clay pots. But Paul said his vessel, while it could be kicked around, could not be crushed. It could be dented but not destroyed. “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” Paul is an example of living with the tension of many hopes being deferred while some desires are realized.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized the same tension. In 1939 he accepted a teaching position at Union Seminary in New York City. Within a few weeks, Bonhoeffer knew he had made a mistake. He wrote to a friend: “I shall have no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.” He returned to Germany to help the Jews flee Nazi persecution.

The war broke out in September. Bonhoeffer returned briefly to New York in 1941. During his brief stay, he was appalled by “Protestantism without the Reformation” and found only in “the Negro churches” the missing piece – what he called “the final hope.”¹ Bonhoeffer returned to Germany to work with the resistance. When a plot to assassinate Hitler was uncovered, Bonhoeffer was implicated. He was arrested and sent to notorious concentration camp Flossenbürg.

On April 7th 1945, Bonhoeffer and a group of other prisoners celebrated Easter with a short service. He read from 1 Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Bonhoeffer was then taken back to Flossenbürg, where on the night of April 8th, he was arraigned, convicted, condemned to death. In the gray dawn of the following morning, April 9th, Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging. In a cruel coincidence of the calendar, the Flossenbürg camp was liberated a few days later.

In his diary, Bonhoeffer wrote that hope is “a way of avoiding disappointment.”² Disappointment is a myth. No one can see what is appointed to happen in this life. Disappointed people forget that. They think they see which hopes will be realized in this life. When hopes don’t materialize, their hearts are broken. People of hope are different. They recognize hope can be cruel virtue, but they’ve learned to live with the ache by properly ordering their desires.

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¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. N. H. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 279-280.
² Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison (New York: Simon & Schuster, First Touchstone Edition, 1997), p. 15.

“A Few Good Men” is a story of Marine honor and discipline. PFC William Santiago is an underperforming Marine stationed at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Unpopular, he tries to bargain for a transfer by going over the head of his superiors and blowing the whistle on another Marine, PFC Louden Dawson. Santiago claims Dawson fired an illegal shot towards the Cuban side of the island. On the morning of his transfer Santiago is found murdered. Dawson and Downey are charged with his murder.

The defense claims that Dawson and Downey were merely following orders – that Colonel Jessep ordered a code red. A “code red” is a euphemism for a violent extrajudicial punishment inflicted on a Marine who’s not measuring up. The intent is not murder but rather to inflict a degree of suffering that will stretch a Marine to his or her maximum capacity. This code red went tragically wrong.

The story’s instructive because the Marines understand how a disciplined mind and body are absolutely essential to their mission. You could say the military is an embodied tradition. The Christian faith used to be viewed this way (which might be why the Apostle Paul often used military metaphors). One of the best books on the embodied Christian faith is Christopher West’s Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing. West helps readers understand how and why bodily disciplines and suffering stretch believers to their maximum capacity.

He writes that throughout scripture (as well as church history) it is understood that our bodies as male and female proclaim the mysteries of the gospel. For instance, the promise to Abraham was for fruitful nuptial union (he would have offspring more numerous than the stars). The sign of this covenant was circumcision – the shedding of his blood and the sacrifice of his flesh – exposing the most intimate aspect of Abraham’s anatomy. Abraham’s bride would see this sign every time they consummated their marriage, thus hoping to fulfill the promise to Abraham of offspring.

This sign of the Old Covenant foreshadows the sign of the New. Eucharist is celebrating the shedding of Christ’s blood and the sacrifice of his flesh for the sake of the most fruitful union of the cosmos – the union of Christ and the Church. The human body as male and female proclaims the mysteries of the gospel.

We also see signs in the female body. In nuptial union, there is the tearing of the hymen. In the Catholic mystical tradition (rooted in Old Testament), a woman’s womb is understood as symbolizing “the holy of holies” of the temple. When Christ consummated his marriage at the cross, the curtain that veiled the “holy of holies” was torn from top to bottom, analogous to the hymen tearing in nuptial union.

Sadly, some Christians consider this kind of body talk to be bawdy. It’s not. It’s holy. It’s seeing our bodies as essential to the church’s mission. In a disembodied faith, believers only talk about the heart and head. In an embodied faith, believers appreciate how the male and female metaphors used to describe the process of salvation, or sanctification, include “circumcision of the heart” (Deut. 30:6; Rom. 2:25-29) and “labor pains” (Jn. 16:21-22; Rom. 8:22-24). “The masculine is not intended only for men; nor is the feminine intended only for women,” writes West.¹ “Labor pains” can also be considered “dilation of the heart.” Circumcision, labor pains, and dilation are all instances of suffering. As West notes, the dilation of the heart “speaks of the need in both men and women for our hearts to be stretched to their maximum capacity – to the point that they are large enough and open enough to receive and even ‘give birth’ to infinity.”²

The idea of giving birth to infinity takes believers beyond what they can fully comprehend. Suffering seen this way reminds us there are limits to what we can understand. Christians who understand that their bodies proclaim the mysteries of the gospel recognize this. They see how suffering stretches them to their maximum capacity, opening them enough to receive that which is, humanly speaking, inconceivable.

This is the last week of Lent 2013. Lent is a time to practice restraint and remorse, appreciating how pain and suffering stretch us. I don’t think reading Fill These Hearts will prove painful. But it might stretch your imagination to embrace the mystery of suffering. That would be a good thing to begin learning as the Lenten season comes to a close.

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¹ Christopher West, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex, and the Universal Longing (New York: Image, 2012), p. 69.
² West, Fill These Hearts, p. 69.

Last week we began feeling our way into the mystery of suffering. Suffering is connected to salvation – a mysterious view of salvation. It goes like this: believers have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved. Salvation is a past and completed action, a present and ongoing endeavor, and a future state. Believers have been saved – “for by grace you have been saved; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Believers are being saved – “for the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (I Cor. 1:18). Believers will be saved – “the one who endures (suffers) to the end will be saved” (Mt 10:22).

In those seven words – the one who suffers to the end – we peer more deeply into salvation. Christ’s sufferings and death, while tragic, saved lives. His past sufferings are sufficient for our past salvation. However, his present sufferings are not yet completed for our present and future salvation. The Apostle Paul wrote that believers are privileged to “fill up” what is still lacking in Christ’s sufferings. “Now I rejoice in what was suffered for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24). Our sufferings fill a gap.

This is a deep mystery. Suffering is what “saves” saved believers so they will reign with Christ. “If we suffer with him, we shall also reign with him” (II Tim. 2:12). This is why the question is not why God allows suffering. It’s what do we get out of it? Believers get the fullness of salvation. This is not “works” salvation. Rather, it’s “working out” our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Fear and trembling has everything to do with a sobering metaphor Paul used to picture the Christian’s life on earth.

In I Corinthians 3:10-15, Paul warns “saved” Christians of a clear and present danger. He pictures being saved as similar to building a home. Christ is the only foundation – we have been saved. “But be careful how you build.” Our home can be constructed with six materials – wood, hay, straw, gold, silver, and precious stones. When Christ returns, he’ll test the home’s quality with fire. Fire vaporizes wood, hay, and stubble. Fire refines gold, silver, and precious stones. It’s worth quoting Paul at this point.

If any man’s work that he has built on it remains, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire (I Cor. 3:14-15)

The image is of a man barely escaping a burning building. He’s saved and, in the best case, only singed, reeking of soot and smoke. In the worst case he is horribly marred. Believers can be saved yet singed. Worse, they can be tragically disfigured. This is not the end of the story however. Chapter four of the gospel is the final restoration. Believers will be fully restored in eternity. Eye has not seen nor has ear heard all that God has in store for eternity, but the opening scene might look like this.

The final restoration begins with believers being judged (II Cor. 5:10). This is the burning home that Paul imagined in I Corinthians 3. Those believers who didn’t suffer and fill up Christ’s afflictions will suffer loss. They will be marred or, even worse, horribly disfigured. Tears will be shed. There’s an old Fram Filter commercial: Pay me now or pay me later. Christians can suffer now or suffer later. At the end of the day Christ’s afflictions will be filled up. Believers can participate now or later – but they will partake and suffer. Suffering means tears will be shed – here and now, or then and there.

This final purifying is due to destiny. Believers are destined to be the Bride of Christ. But given Paul’s warning of escaping a burning home, a disfigured bride is a distinct possibility. Tears in heaven would indicate this happens, and that the bride not ready to be married. Have you ever read how, after the judgment, Jesus leads his bride “to springs of living water” to “wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Rev. 7:17)? It might be that the tears are only momentary. In the final restoration, there shall be no mourning, nor crying, nor pain, “for the former things have passed away” and everything is made new (Rev. 21:1-4). Once the bride is fully and finally restored, the couple enjoys a sumptuous wedding banquet and later consummate their love. Christ’s afflictions are finally and fully filled up.

Granted, we only see these mysteries through a glass darkly. Suffering reminds us there are limits to what we can understand. God has a greater responsibility than we can possibly fathom. That’s another thing Colonel Jessup got essentially correct. As he told Lieutenant Kaffee, “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it!” The Apostle Paul, who was imprisoned, savagely beaten times without number, often in danger of death, and shipwrecked, said he rejoiced in suffering (II Cor.11: 23-25). That might be why he wrote: Who in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? (Rom. 9: 20-22).

To be saved is to be one of God’s elect. Lesslie Newbigin understood election as taking “our share in Jesus’ suffering.”¹ The practice of Lent recognizes these mysteries. It is a time of restraint and remorse – pay now or pay later. It’s also a time to remember how suffering is designed to stretch our hearts to their maximum capacity. It’s part of the mystery of the gospel written right in our bodies as male and female. We’ll keep feeling our way into our bodies next week, before this year’s Lenten season is officially over.

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¹ Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 82-87.