Salvation for Narcissus

 

 The stream is so transparent, pure, and clear,

That, had the self-enamour'd youth gaz'd here,

He but the bottom, not his face, had seen.

 

-- John Denham 

A Calvinist narcissist at Takimag demonizes Michelangelo, Milton and Wagner but dares to speak of "my art"

My fart is more like it.

Here:

And yet, without this inner monstrousness, this will to affirm the self at any cost, art and science and civilization itself would not be the splendors that they are. Many great artists—Michelangelo, Milton, Wagner—have been very disagreeable personalities; it is a good question whether their achievements would exist as they do without the demonic will to glory those men exemplified.

The residuum of the introspective conscience of the West shows up in narcissism study

Once the religion is stripped away, the self-absorption lives on in another form.  

From the story here:

"Narcissists aren't afraid to tell you they're narcissists," said study co-author Brad Bushman, a communications and psychology professor at The Ohio State University. "They're not embarrassed about it at all."

People with a classic narcissistic personality tend to have an overinflated sense of self, an exhibitionist streak, a sense of entitlement and little empathy for others. People in Western countries rate higher on narcissistic traits than do those in Eastern nations, and millennials— people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s — are more likely to be self-centered than previous generations, at least in the United States, Bushman said.

"The self-esteem movement, I think, is a big part of that," Bushman said. "Also, I think social media provides a venue for people to project themselves to very large audiences."

Peter Leithart provides a helpful exegesis of Shakespeare's 3rd Sonnet, apposite our exceptionally narcissistic age

Here, in which he meditates upon the immortality afforded us by human reproduction, the urgency of it when young, and our obligation not to defraud the world of it, nor especially a mother like our own, and in the end, ourselves:

"Battle mutability, battle age. Reproduce."

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

Now is the time that face should form another;

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity? 

Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

   But if thou live, remembered not to be,

   Die single and thine image dies with thee.

Cassius Clay, black Narcissus who suffered from John Lennon disease, can't dodge the last punch like he did the draft: Dead at 74

"I'm the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren't no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn't know about them."

Is Missionary Self-Defense Taught By Jesus?

Is missionary self-defense taught by Jesus? The short answer is, No.

But Robert Gundry seems to think so, here, in criticism of the Zealot hypothesis revived by Reza Aslan:

Though Jesus wasn't "a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion," he "instructs his disciples immediately after the Passover meal" to go sell their cloaks and each buy a sword, as for a violent revolution. So says Aslan, but he fails to mention the context of an evangelistic mission requiring not only a sword for self-protection but also a purse, bag, and sandals for travel, just as he fails to mention that Jesus' bringing a sword has to do, figuratively and contextually, with division in families over whether to follow Jesus, not with revolution against Rome (compare Jesus' saying in the different context of violence that "all who take the sword will perish by the sword"). Undoubtedly Jesus was crucified as "The King of the Jews"—i.e., as a messianic rebel—but Aslan has to doubt or deny that the Sanhedrin shifted from the religious charge of blasphemy, under which they condemned Jesus, to a false political charge of sedition when arraigning him before Pilate [emphasis added].

The key evidence is in Luke 22.33-38:

And he said unto him, Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both into prison, and to death. And he said, I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me. And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing. Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for the things concerning me have an end. And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.

The first thing to be said about this is that if Reza Aslan has to doubt or deny a shift in charges by the Sanhedrin, Gundry has to believe and assert a shift in context to the evangelistic in this passage which is plainly absent.

To be sure, Luke here makes Jesus allude to Luke 9.3:

And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two coats apiece.

But now Luke makes Jesus reverse this command in the new context, and what's new about it is that Jesus plainly anticipates there will be a threat to the safety of the disciples, who like Peter will deny him and run away. Jesus isn't anticipating some new missionary activity for the disciples. He's imagining their scattering, and so their vulnerability, sheep without their shepherd.

If I were going to be mean, I'd call Jesus a situation ethicist on Gundry's reading. But Gundry's idea of new missionary activity is clearly by analogy from the previous instruction, not in evidence in the new instruction itself. At least on Luke's presentation of Jesus' words, the new situation might logically require carrying weapons, but to imagine a missionary reference at this point in the narrative looks strained, to say the least. And why weren't weapons needed before? Won't God continue to protect his own now without them? Faith as the grain of a mustard seed.

The problem is that Luke's overall presentation of the arrest of Jesus looks fanciful and muddled, quite apart from this reversal in the mouth of Jesus. It's almost as if Luke is trying to harmonize the unharmonizable. And this passage about swords seems to be representative of that.

For example, in 22:24 the whole question of who would be the greatest among the disciples intrudes unnaturally in the narrative, after Jesus' prediction of his betrayal by one of his very followers at the Passover meal, as if to suggest the disciples are a bunch of narcissists at the hour of Jesus' greatest need. And hadn't Luke brought up this argument going on amongst the disciples way back in chapter 9 already? Why bring it up again? Matthew by contrast knows nothing of this controversy popping up at the Lord's Supper.

Then in 22:43 an angel appears to Jesus to strengthen him at the Mount of Olives, but since the disciples are all asleep as this occurs, who is there to observe this, that Luke might know of it, hm?  Did a little birdie tell him? Matthew does not know of it, even though he claims to know about many appearances of angels otherwise, including to Jesus' father, Joseph.

Additionally, what sense does it make that one of the disciples took off an opponent's ear with a sword and didn't get arrested for it on the spot with Jesus, if Jesus is perceived by his opponents to be an insurrectionist King of the Jews on the Zealot hypothesis? Arrest the ring leader, along with his armed followers, right? In Matthew at least, where there is no new talk of acquiring weapons for such a situation, Jesus rebukes the resort to weapons forthrightly, and the offending disciples escape, as they do also in John but not without a second divine sign in addition to the healing the ear that was cut off.

And, of course, in the past missionary activity the disciples have had to eschew self-defense instruments such as staves according to Luke's own account, but now suddenly they already are seen to be in possession of swords! "Oh look, here's two", they say now, like Jesus didn't know they've had them all along.

Is that narrative to be believed while at the same time Jesus expresses indignation at his opponents for coming for him by night with weapons? Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black on Luke's reading? Neither Matthew, Mark nor John (!) make Jesus look quite so foolish, allowing weapons for us, but not for you.

There's something funny going on in the tradition about all of this, which may be illuminated by examining all the passages in the gospels mentioning swords and staves, where you will find not the slightest hint of approval for carrying weapons of any kind, except perhaps in two places.

In Matthew 10:34 we have this:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Yet the explanation following this makes it clear, as Gundry points out, that this is a metaphorical sword, one meant to explain repentance in the most radical terms as that which divides the follower of Jesus even from normal human relationships, as the case may require, just as a real sword would:

And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

That leaves us with Mark 6:8 only, which isn't even about a sword, but only about a staff, truly more of a defensive weapon than is a sword, which is an offensive one:

And commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse.

Mark, unfortunately, is not supported in this reading by Matthew nor by Luke, who both correct Mark and say Jesus commanded them to take not even that. Interestingly, when Luke's Jesus refers to this in chapter 22 (cited above), however, he merely summarizes what he had made explicit in chapter 9, glossing over the staves entirely, which he had earlier specifically prohibited. Luke is making Jesus look rather fast and loose with the facts here.

Was that intentional on Luke's part? I think so. Luke is writing from a later period, coping with the new reality of the kingdom's coming having been already long delayed. He is at pains to rationalize the Christian's continued existence in an increasingly dangerous world, and finds the earliest tradition about the imminently coming kingdom and its ethic of no possessions, not even weapons, difficult to reconcile with reality. The remarkable thing about that is how he knows that tradition and records it in the starkest possible terms (14:33), which no one else does (So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple). It's almost like it bothers him. And, of course, Mark's unique saying about keeping a defensive weapon would be in keeping with Luke's point of view because, like Luke, Mark is associated with the later, Pauline perspective, which has already rationalized to some extent the failure of the parousia.

It is fashionable to ridicule Luke the historian as anything but an historian for reasons such as this. On the contrary I would say that his realism about the on-going perils of human existence in the face of a delayed parousia mark him as a reliable recorder of the transition from failed apocalyptic faith to the phoenix of catholic faith.

But it will not do for us to sweep aside the Jesus who thoroughly disavowed the role of human agency in ushering in the reign of God and who believed to the bitter end that God himself would bring it to save the faithful few who repented and were waiting for it. Nor can we sweep aside Jesus' expectation of this imminently coming kingdom for one rationalized as delayed indefinitely in order to save the many who would be able also to repent and believe.

Both views trim the sorry evidence.

A Proposed Definition Of "Prophet" For The Devil's Dictionary

"Prophet": a person who takes himself too seriously, being a late product of a rich and declining civilization which has stopped excelling at everything except narcissism, which it has in such abundance, regrettably, that it exports it.

Is The Absence Of Human Transformation The Best Argument Against Christianity?

A certain fellow named Robin Schumacher, featured at Real Clear Religion, goes on at some length, here, to acknowledge that the best argument that is made these days against Christianity is the one made by ever larger numbers of contemporaries who point out that Christianity must be untrue because Christians behave so badly, and concludes:

"[T]he fact is that an authentic Christian life is the only thing that defeats the best argument against Christianity."

This is a very unsatisfactory conclusion to what really isn't a very helpful discussion about arguments for or against Christianity.

What it amounts to instead is a demonstration of what passes for the accepted understanding of what is true conversion in some circles. In other words, it's not really about Christianity per se, it's about human actors and their experiences relative to that subject. In short, it's about us, not about Christianity or its object, God.

Key for the author is the notion that conversion is a form of human transformation, which can be authenticated on the evidence of human experience. "If you were truly converted you wouldn't do x."

What is it about Christianity, contemporary or otherwise, that it so quickly veers off into a kind of narcissism where adherents and opponents alike wind up agreeing that man is the measure of all things? The authentic Christian life is the only thing that defeats the enemies of Christ? I'm sure that comes as quite a surprise to God. Last I checked, God needed or depended upon no one for anything. There is sophistry. And then there is philosophy.

I think one answer for this narcissism may have something to do with what Krister Stendahl once called the introspective conscience of the West. The tortured conversion of Muhammad comes to mind in W. Montgomery Watt's biography of the prophet. Or the Jesus of The Fourth Gospel, at war with the Jews over his paternity. Or the ever autobiographical 13th apostle, Paul of Tarsus, who happens to be the most interesting because he is so immediately, candidly available in his letters as he plies the waters between his sectarianisms and his Roman citizenship. It shouldn't come as a surprise that these models would attract adherents in whom the same tendencies operate. In truth, however, thoughtful people would probably agree that narcissism is a broadly human phenomenon, not simply a characteristic of the West.

But there are counter trends in some of our literature which bear thinking about. Consider, for example, that conversion in Luke's Acts of the Apostles is occasionally portrayed as conversion of a whole household, based on the personal experience of a single person in it. For those household members personal human transformation, being born again, is hardly in sight. Even in the cases of the personal salvation of the individual head of the household who leads the rest into the fold, notions of human transformation seem wholly absent. Far from the world of altar calls involving personal crises, repentance and emotional decisions for Christ, what we find instead is concrete deliverance from temporal calamities, infirmities, threats and dangers. Like Paul's own conversion, these amount to almost unwilled experiences submitted to and accepted in the face of an overwhelming, sovereignly acting, Providence.

Some of these stories in Acts are reminiscent of nothing so much as stories of God's deliverance of his people Israel from Egyptian slavery, the plagues, the angel of death and the Red Sea waters. It is more about God continuing to act in history than it is about what happens in the hearts of men.

One might also mention the apocalyptic ethics of Jesus in The Synoptic Tradition, where personal conversion amounts to a renunciation of all the traditional contours, roles and behaviors of human existence in a desperate attempt to escape the destruction which Jesus said was coming on the world forthwith. This is not some comfortable religion of personal fulfillment, but a (crazy?) rejection of it which depends utterly on God to establish his kingdom quite apart from any human agency, even Jesus'. 

Anyone with a little honest experience of the world knows that there are many what we call very fine people who are not Christians, and many Christians who are just plain drek. If one gets bogged down in this navel-gazing cul-de-sac, however, what gets distorted about our thinking about conversion is that conversion becomes too much about how we act, and not enough about how God does.

"We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein: Who in times past suffered all nations to walk in their own ways. Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."

-- Acts 14:15ff.

Marriage Today Serves Only The Need For Self-Fulfillment

"Having divorced marriage from sex and child-rearing, American marriage today serves only the narcissistic need for self-fulfillment. We have forgotten that marriage is not just about adult happiness, but also about the responsibilities of parenthood and preparing future generations to thrive and succeed.

So 'who needs marriage?' Despite the hang-wringing at Time magazine, the answer is really quite obvious. Kids do."

-- Jennifer C. Braceras, here

Well, I Tried

I frequently hear people attributing a statement to Einstein which goes something like this: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting it to work when it never did even once. That's how I've come to feel about attending services at a congregation of the PCUSA in Forest Hills, MI, although I have posted about what might be considered at least one positive experience there.

But the first Sunday in October was the last straw. I'm never going back there again, not even in a box.

For what seems like the umpteenth time now, the service advertised as "traditional" was anything but. This is a TINO church, Traditional In Name Only, hoping to lure in some poor suckers so that they can enlighten the darkness of their hapless souls with a sentimental gospel of Christian unity, narcissism and multiculturalism.

I'll never forget the time I looked forward to "Holy! Holy! Holy!" as featured during this nine o'clock hour, thinking I'd hear the beautiful old-timey version with its full organ and worshipful, drawn-out tempo. I'd heard such hymns before. Instead we were treated to a staccato version accompanied by enormous African bongo drums. Gee, what would the contemporary rendition sound like at eleven, I wondered?

Or the time the men's chorus not once but twice in the same service performed numbers which would have been completely suited to their beautiful male voices, but NO! Someone decided they should sing arrangements which would have been possible only for Die Wiener Sangerknaben. They looked and sounded absolutely silly as they strained at the notes, which I'm now sure was the whole point. That they didn't understand the joke being played on them made the scene all the more pathetic.

On this most recent Sunday, for the traditional service, the choir sang hymns in untranslated foreign languages. Boy, was that edifying and meaningful.

The liturgy was a cut and paste affair from liturgies used by sister congregations from all over the world, including a benediction from South Africa, which acknowledged that God created us human. Was that ever in question, except perhaps in Winnie Mandela's necklacing neighborhood? The invocation was from Zaire, which asked God for strength to find that obedience which creates unity. I couldn't imagine that there's ever been an historical example of such obedience. Obedience always creates division. Just ask Korah. In point of fact, an obedience which creates unity is no obedience at all. Oh, at the last day there will be unity, yes there will, and every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. But close readers of the Apostle to the Gentiles know what follows after that.

The children's message featured a show and tell of examples of communion ware from Malawi and Nicaragua and two other countries I cannot now remember. There were fewer than eight children up there. Eight. The sanctuary must seat 300 if the day and night are 24 hours long. Where were the children?

And the sermon, celebrating something called World Communion Day, concluded that the church is really what it is supposed to be, more than at any other time, when it celebrates this sacrament and we all participate and mystically become the body of Christ manifested in the world. The Body of Christ! Was I in a protestant reformed church? Why not just join the Catholics and sacrifice the Mass each and every day?


Well, for just a moment there, I almost thought I was listening to President Obama saying "We are the ones we have been waiting for."

Ye shall be as gods!

There they stood, the celebrants male and female, intoning the words of institution and proceeding to feast first upon the elements like the fat cows of Bashan they are. At least in the Lutheran church the celebrants first served the congregation, and symbolically communed last, as servants and good shepherds might do.

Next they distributed communion to the secondary celebrants, one of whom, a single fellow, had hair which looked like he had just crawled out of bed, and another, a female in pants, who was dressed in an outfit reminiscent of a Federation officer from a Star Trek episode, flared capri pants, boots, and all. She even wore a sling for a tricorder. Whereupon the lowest orders of the hierarchy were reached and the cattle filed up and were fed, one after another receiving with hardly a pause and chewing away as they walked back to their seats.
Who-eee, can you feel the mystery!

Speaking of which, our irregular presence in this church was once the occasion for a member to come up and ask me as we were leaving "What brings you here?" ("A Honda," I answered). At the time I did not realize that the question was meant more rhetorically, as in "What are you doing here?"

Because you see, in nearly two years of albeit infrequent attendance at this church not one effort was ever made to contact us at our phone number or mailing address. There has not been even one word from a pastor or elder or any other representative. Nothing. We might as well have not ever attended.
We do not exist.

And the reason? I finally figured it out today. Call me slow. Although this congregation does not appear on a certain gay friendly church list with other PCUSA congregations in our area, you don't see many young people with kids there. And you don't see many young women either, sitting alone in the pews. But you do see a fair number of unattached young men. The Presbyterian Church USA, you see, welcomes sexually active gay people. 

But not us.

Free at last! Free at last! Thank God, Almighty, I'm free at last!

You Got a Friend?

It will probably come as a surprise to many readers that the late-1946 film "It's a Wonderful Life" wasn't terribly successful in its debut. The movie placed 26th in revenues for 1947. One reviewer called attention to its unreality and "sentimentality," which is underscored in the closing when the angel Clarence, who finally gets his wings, tells George that "no man is a failure who has friends." Audiences fresh off the horrors of war weren't exactly overwhelmed. It took a generation to garner its critical acclaim and to reach its popularity as a Christmas staple, which its creator Frank Capra said in 1984 was sort of like seeing your kid grow up to be president. Obviously something had changed in America. The baby boomers had to take over before the film could really succeed.

In the intervening period the trend has continued in different forms with the buddy movie, a wildly successful television comedy called "Friends," and the meteoric rise of a friends craze on social networks such as Facebook, among others. The thirst for that sentimental something is strong among the boomers, but it gets harder to get a buzz on no matter how much they drink, and the morning after remains lonely, and is getting lonelier. Consider the conclusion of a 2004 study that the average number of confidants per citizen had dropped in America from three to two since 1985, and fully a quarter of the population reported having no friends to confide in at all.

There has been a similar trend toward the sentimental within the church of the boomers, where theology has taken on a distinctly more familiar tone, emphasizing a personal relationship with God and drinking deeply from the well of ideas found in the Gospel of John. There one meets such notions as being "born again" and "knowing" God, and its Jesus talks about friendship in ideal terms: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." These Christians appropriate these ideas and think God is deeply, passionately interested in everything about them and has an individual plan for each and every life, as if Salvation History culminating in the Incarnation was kind of beside the point. What matters in their minds is finding your own divinely appointed purpose in life. It is narcissism writ large.

These developments help explain the penetration of pentecostalism into mainstream Christianity in the 1970's, and the subsequent exodus from mainline Protestantism into conservative "evangelicalism" after that. But the novelty has definitely worn off. Maybe the boomers are finally ready to grow up. While the country today is still overwhelmingly Protestant, self-identification with it has now dropped below 50% and the numbers of the unaffiliated and the sectarian are on the rise. For growing numbers of people it would not be wrong to say that familiarity has bred contempt. More and more books are appearing which recount the de-conversion experiences of people from Bart Ehrman at Princeton University to William Lobdell, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-And Found Unexpected Peace.

In the same way the World War II generation was so different temperamentally from its children, it is interesting how the Synoptic tradition, which contains little if any positive teaching on friendship, differs dramatically in substance and in tone from the Fourth Gospel. For example, the Gospel of Matthew warns that "A man's foes shall be they of his own household." Its command to "love your enemies" practically makes friendship irrelevant by annihilating the category itself, which, as we have said before, is characteristic of the religious impulse. For the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, this abolition of the antonyms occurs at the eschaton, which for him has already dawned: "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand." Wherever this thorough-going eschatological message of Jesus predominates in the record, conventional social constructions are overthrown. "For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother," in contrast to his actual family which was in the street looking for him in the house where he was teaching. "In the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven."

Cultivating strong friendships is about the last thing on Jesus' mind in part because there simply won't be time for them. The end of all things approaches so fast that one must abandon all traditional roles immediately and follow Jesus. The normal niceties of interaction no longer apply. At one point we see how even his closest associate is rebuked for a misplaced intention to protect him. Jesus may indeed call many to follow him, but few are actually chosen. And even those whom we would call his mates were always kept at a certain distance despite various purported confidences shared, and the record shows that these followers consistently misunderstood him, failed him, and at length even betrayed him. If with Cicero a friend should be as a second self, Jesus didn't just die alone, he lived that way.

Which makes the emergence of the ideal of divine friendship in the Fourth Gospel quite startling: "Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you friends." Here we meet with a response of interpretation to the failure of the imminent end of the world to materialize. But instead of adopting the later development which we see already at work in the apocalyptic narratives in the Synoptic Gospels where hope of terrestrial transformation is postponed to an indeterminate time in the future, the Fourth Gospel eschews talk of the "second coming." Instead it conceives of the promised kingdom in a new way, located in a celestial venue where Jesus has gone "to prepare a place for you." His kingdom will not come with the Son of Man appearing with the clouds of heaven, but rather "My kingdom is not of this world." This is how the original ideology is neatly transferred by the Fourth Gospel to the unseen world, where it can cause little offence.

The Fourth Gospel's response to the Synoptic tradition also is on display in the way it co-opts the eschaton. One way it does this is through its notion of the coming of the Spirit: "the Father shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth." Another is through the love teaching of Jesus, which no longer emphasizes love of enemies but rather brotherly love within the Christian community: "Love one another, as I have loved you. If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Christians will continue to co-exist with other human beings who are still going to hate them and be their enemies. But Christians are to look at it this way: "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."

It is interesting how for the Christian community imagined by the Fourth Gospel it is not the Lord's Supper but the washing of one another's feet which Jesus establishes for its social cohesion. "I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you," he says of this custom, instead of "This do in remembrance of me" which he says of the Lord's Supper in the Gospel of Luke. The reason for this is precisely because the Lord's Supper is still understood by the author to be potently invested with the original eschatological significance, which is why there can be no place for an account of its institution in his gospel. It is an issue best left unaddressed, and better yet replaced, in view of the changed circumstances.

When it comes to choosing between variant readings in the manuscripts it is often the case that we choose the more difficult reading because its existence is harder to explain. The same holds true of interpretation. The Fourth Gospel in the main is comparatively more easily explained as derivative of the contents of the Synoptic Tradition. The latter puts us closer to the Jesus of history, but he is a sterner, more urgent, and less friendly figure.

The Absence of the Presence

If the experience of the divine presence can be as underwhelming in charismatic circles as it has been in sacramental Christianity, it is at least as equally elusive in what we may unhappily call "mystical" Christianity where a "personal relationship" with Christ is the emphasis.

Hard and fast borderlines between these forms do not exist universally, of course, and some mixture of these may be observed, depending on peculiar historical developments dominant in the experience of the individual congregation, especially since the 1970's when a great deal of interpenetration of ideas has occurred. For those sitting in the place of the unlearned, the sacramental churches may be represented as the far right of the spectrum, its mystical side is on the left but perhaps more to the center with the tongue talkers way out in left field. These last speak of being filled with the Holy Spirit in something called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so emphasize a direct and personal experience with the Godhead, and of a dramatic sort. Those to the center often claim to have a profound experience of conversion, but without the dramatic signs. Altar calls, emotional personal testimonies, and public dunkings are more their style. The most bizarre of the pentecostal types include those, I kid you not, who now even claim that God has actually restored missing teeth, in gold no less, and will do the same for you. Snake handling is oh so yesterday, while there is no question of the blind seeing and the deaf hearing. Hope springs eternal for the one who so believes: "the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father" (John 14:12).

The stodgy right wingers of the sacramental ilk or their rationalist brothers will sometimes glory in the fact of having no religious experience at all, and feel no regret about it either, which is why the authority and inspiration of Scripture is so important to them, for without that there would be nothing else. Among Lutherans of this type the old theological insight, simul justus et peccator, sums up human experience in Christ in formal, legal terms from God's perspective. The best analogy is the courtroom where the verdict of the jury and the sentence of the judge do not transform the essence of the person on trial. The person who goes free and the one who goes to jail differ in no wise from one another, except that the one knows this while the other does not. Technically freed from the consequences of sin, until the flesh is transformed in the resurrection the former is stuck with its baneful influences as much as is the latter. So he makes the best of it until then. It's schizophrenia only in the formal sense. Justification is forensic, but its temporal application requires other work outs first. Any kind of Christianity other than that, they will tell you, is madness in fact. That way lies manic depression at worst, fanaticism at best. No good can come of it. Mother Teresa, for all we know, now that her true feelings have seen the light of day, went to her grave in anguish over the absence of the divine presence in her experience. In public, she kept up appearances, as they say.

Mystical Christianity is all about human transformation, and it is no coincidence that its contemporary forms are heavily influenced by concerns, conceptions and terminology derived from the so-called science of psychology more than they are from the historic Christian faith. Ours is, after all, an age of enormous narcissism, a(n inevitable?) by-product of the success of the West. It is primarily a phenomenon of the twentieth century which has co-opted the first, and it comes as quite a surprise to its simpler devotees to learn that their hero, Saul of Tarsus, was an unwilling convert to Christianity who did not wring his hands in anguish over his sins when he "accepted" Christ on the road to Damascus. The Emperor Constantine was not brought to Christ in a fit of existential anguish about his failed life, substance abuse, and hurt feelings in his family but by a vision of the cross on the battlefield of war, if the sources are to be believed.

The stories of our converts are sniveling by comparison, and effeminate. We are constantly regaled with stories of slavery to drugs, alcohol, political power, sex and tobacco, none of which they were capable of overcoming without the help of Christ. When this was still a sane society, people told you to stop doing bad things because they thought God had so equipped human beings to stand on their own two feet. Not any more. The citizens of this country give the impression that they couldn't stop drinking for twenty-four hours let alone declare their independence from inside the confines of a paper bag, quite apart from the King of England.

It is not fair to single out the Christians for their bad behavior as if the same in non-believers is not also bad. It's just that their pretensions to transformation simply do not stand the tests of investigation. When no one else is awake early on Sunday mornings, they are out there on the highways in their freshly washed cars, as many of them speeding to church as the general population to work on a Monday morning. A Christian couldn't possibly pad a bill, especially if he's also your relative. We can't really treat you like one for whom Christ died unless you join our church. In fact, we don't really want to know you unless you do.

From where I sit, Christian or not, whether it's got tits or testicles, it's going to cause you trouble.