HOLY FIRE BLOG

• ISSUE: Affairs are two people, each “turned in on oneself” using the other. No love there, but surely a lot of law squeezing between the sheets, right there in bed with them. Just ask the Guv or his Argentine girlfriend. They both were guilty as hell.

• UPDATE: "…moral lapses of Republican Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina will damage the GOP brand in the South. Sanford, who is married with four sons, had been a strong public advocate of ‘family values,’ but he has been making headlines because of his admitted affair with his Argentine mistress, Maria Belen Chapur."

• UPDATE: "South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has cleared his schedule this week to take a personal trip with his wife, three weeks after announcing his extramarital affair with an Argentine woman, his office announced Wednesday."

You have heard of Governor Mark Sanford? He’s back.

For a day or so Michael Jackson’s death grabbed the headlines; then his funeral drowned-out Sanford again. But sequentially, like an unending soap on daytime TV, squeezed between Jackson’s death, his memorial, and debate about where to plant his body, the story of Sanford’s affair with an Argentine mistress has long enough legs to jump from South Carolina where Sanford is governor to California where in Los Angeles Jackson reigns as king in his death as he never did in life. But intermittently, Sanford resurrects: several lead stories in a couple of days, see above, and here.

More than mere tabloid sex keeps the story alive.

Sanford had already admitted to adultery, five liaisons, in fact; he apologized to everyone, but insisted he would stay in office. He cited ancient Israel’s King David as reason for doing so. You know Bathsheba and all that? Of course, David had Bathsheba but one time, not five; but then he did do away with the lady’s husband.

Perhaps Sanford now owning up to several more than just five trysts with his lover is his way of keeping up with David. Then, too, he says he’s crossed the line with other ladies, as well.

But how did David get in the mix? Here emerges the drama turning cheap tabloid trash into a dynamo for the political press. Pundits smell more than a little hypocrisy from a sitting governor whose rise to Republican stardom began with winning a congressional seat way back in 1994. That’s when the ‘family values’ revolution engineered by Newt Gingrich threw the House of Representatives into wide-open, holier-than-thou, back-to-the-family Republican arms. Back then, Freshman Congressman Sanford was as holier as they come.

Now, the odor of two-faced legalism that exempts the politician from rules made for the public wafts through this whole affair like stink from my long-dead-dad’s Limburger cheese. Like a bumbling clown with a fan at a funeral, Sanford’s inept efforts to cool the affair keep the smell of something rotten hidden in the casket floating around the room.

Continue reading "Integrity of the Gospel: Guv’nor, Meet the Glory" »

Posted by paul at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple years back, theologian Scot McKnight in a CT article described the so-called emerging church as "one of the most controversial and misunderstood movements today." Then he cited writers Aaron Gibbs and Ryan Bolger who define emerging churches as "…communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures."

Even taking into account practices they describe as essential to these communities, one finds little variation from what the church—every church—should be. So where does the emerging come in? Why emerge rather than just be? It all sounds rather uppity and judgmental, like, "We’re the ‘should be’ getting away from the dregs we leave behind."

McKnight also observes lightly, "It is said that emerging Christians… drink like Southern Baptists—meaning, to adapt some words from Mark Twain, they are teetotalers when it is judicious…[but] evangelize and theologize like the Reformed—meaning they rarely evangelize, yet theologize all the time."

And this clue may help unravel the enigma that so-called emerging churches are yet today: they are closer to Mark Twain than McKnight imagines. Indeed, beyond fitting Twain‘s quip, like Twain they cannot escape the tug of the birth canal, the tie to what birthed them squalling, bawling, and bloodied into an upside down world. If they are at all the church, they cannot escape being the church. However emerged they may think themselves to be they are not really.

Let me explain.

First, Twain, too, was an emerging believer in his own ‘gospel’ who never quite made it—to the fully emergent side of his faith, I mean. He remained always tied to what he desperately wanted to run away from.

Further, Twain certainly fits McKnight‘s analogies cited above. On the one hand, while not a Baptist, he drank like one: abstaining when judicious just long enough to win the hand of his beloved Olivia ‘Livy’ Langdon. Twain affirms in a letter, "I shall do no act which…Livy might be pained to hear of—I shall seek the society of the good—I shall be a Christian…" He followed this with another note assuring Livy‘s mother he would "never taste wine or spirits upon any occasion whatsoever; I am orderly, and my conduct is above reproach in a worldly sense; and finally, I now claim that I am a Christian."

A Twain scholar sees in these two letters "a type of spiritual progression; the first indicates a desire to become a Christian, the second contains a declaration of faith…considering the yearning for faith…and his lifelong fascination with biblical themes, it seems likely that this struggle for faith was at least partially genuine."

Even so, the same scholar observes, "this flirtation with orthodoxy was short-lived…shortly after the marriage, some of the piety did disappear, and Twain did begin to slip away from whatever doctrinal orthodoxy he may have attained."

Twain wears the emergent Baptist shoes rather nicely.

On the other hand, Twain writes, "I was brought up a Presbyterian…I was sprinkled in infancy…. It affords none of the emoluments of the Regular Church – simply confers honorable rank upon the recipient and the right to be punished as a Presbyterian hereafter…"

Continue reading "Mark Twain‘s Adam: the Proto-Emergent Un-Emerged" »

Posted by paul at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)