What do you do with this?
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Piper’s Heart in the 2008 Election
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I’m not really sure what you mean by the question? I really only watched it because you posted it, but I thought it seemed like he was honestly sharing some of his own personal inner thoughts and struggles. I’m not sure what you “do” with something like besides watch it. I appreciate his honesty and apparent openness and willingness to say things that, especially for someone who comes from the South (as I understand he does) takes some considerable movement to say.
If you mean, how does it influence my decision to vote, I’ve already voted. But even if I hadn’t, a youtube video by Piper would have little or no impact on my thought processes. I have no relationship with him and he is not a source to whom I turn for any sort of guidance. So I wouldn’t “do” anything with a Piper video in any this context in any situation I can imagine.
The only other sense I can gather from your question is what do I “do” with his questions and struggles in a context larger than this specific race in this specific election. But once again, I’m not sure I “do” anything with it. There are a few places where, at least on some level — perhaps by squinting and looking sideways — that I agree with him.
Some people are far too invested in the kingdoms of this earth and in American nationalism of different sorts in particular. And if we follow Jesus of Nazareth (which Willard points out again and again is what it means to be a disciple) then, as Wright points out, that certainly means we declare him Lord — that is King of Kings and Lord of Lords and of his Kingdom there shall be no end.
That doesn’t mean I agree with his corollary that we shouldn’t be invested because this world is passing away, we’ll be Plato’s happy philosophers, and the things we do here lack permanence. Nothing here is passing away save in the sense of: Behold, I make all things new. I’m just not sure I read that the same way Piper does. But I could be wrong. I could easily be reading too much into his comments there. I had a comment in this vein in marko’s post today on the topic.
And I absolutely agree with him that electing a half-black, half-white man as President would be a huge step forward for our country. Yes, I know. Nobody is the slightest bit racist today. Race and ethnicity plays no part in most people’s thinking. Prejudice is mostly considered a bad thing. The problem is that these attitudes are deeply engrained and they’ve simply become subtler. Every bit of research and study group I’ve seen that has actually dug below the surface has found that race and ethnicity do significantly color our actions and thoughts. No, most people don’t think of themselves as prejudiced, but we still have considerable progress we need to make before our image of ourselves truly begins to align with our reality.
In most other ways, I disagree with Piper. I utterly reject his view about women which drove his comment as well as every other nuanced view along the spectrum upon which he resides. Period. Categorically. And unequivocally. I may be wrong. I’ll that to God to sort out. But I’m not uncertain. And I’m not about to change. I find my perspective is largely supported in the ancient church continuing to this day and in the arc of the narrative of scripture. The practice at any given time was sometimes better and sometimes worse. (The Church has rarely if ever been perfect.) But the thread has always been pushing for a greater place for women than the surrounding culture generally allowed. The modern aberration is just that, a culturally based aberrant reaction against the arc of the story of Holy Scripture.
And while both Piper and I could say we agree that God is sovereign, in fact we don’t. And that’s because we don’t mean the same thing by the words and we are not looking at the same image of God when we use them. Piper’s sovereign God is more similar to Plato’s God of perfect order than anything I see in scripture. And while I’m sure the lens through which I try to see and understand God is just as darkened and twisted in its own way as Piper’s, that doesn’t mean I’m going to trade mine for his. Perhaps because it’s not mine, I can see where his wanders into strange territory. And I know my own lens will shift and hopefully become still clearer. It’s changed many times over the years. The lens I have now is certainly vastly different from the transcendent and largely impersonal (though I had a strange dichotomy there) god I once saw — separate from the lens of Jesus of Nazareth.
I suppose the real question is what are you doing with the video? Clearly it struck you in some manner or you wouldn’t have posted it with that particular question. So it must be having some sort of impact on your own thoughts and perhaps on the way you are processing this election.
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THAT, my brother, is what you do with it…process, analyaze, nail against the whole of Scripture.
I’d take issue with his comments on women (as you would), among some other things, but the most poignant comment to me (as of today, at least) is when Piper says something to the effect that if we are hurt by the economy, ‘maybe we need to be hurt’.
i found that interesting and at least worthy of considering.
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Scott,
I am very curious about you concept of sovereignty. you state your view is different than Piper’s but don’t explain the difference.
As far as investing in this world I understand his point to an extent. At least I understand it has more to do with allegiance than the temporal nature of our existence here in this world. As I have explained to my 17 yo son many times It comes down to who you serve, and letting that understanding color your views on how you deal with the world. In his case that means being heavily involved in politics and attempting change the political landscape for the better. As I am more oriented toward serving G_d in the calling I have upon my life I have very little to do with politics. I believe that the battle for the future of this country is one for hearts and minds and the route to real change in this country will come from that route.
I do have to agree with both of you on his views on women. And this from a man who strongly encouraged (and did everything possible to ensure that she could) my wife to stay home and raise our children.
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Tom, I have little objection to his statement that if we are ‘hurt’ by this economy ‘maybe we need to be hurt’ in the bare sense of the words. We are consumed by the gods Mammon and Narcissus in this country. I’m even somewhat aware of that reality and yet struggle to gain even a toehold against it. The economy had little, if any, bearing on my vote. Unlike Piper, though, I don’t believe it’s anything God is ‘doing’ to us in any active sense. He’s simply allowing us to experience the natural consequences of our own collective greed.
Eaglewood, I appreciate the question on how God is sovereign, but it’s not one I can easily answer. It’s one of those big topics that can be a long and winding conversation for hours. I could reference it with Tom and know he would more or less understand since he’s been a part of a number of those conversations with me.
My background is such that I don’t really have a ‘native’ view on this question. As I moved from a perspective on the nature of reality shaped more by Eastern monism toward the strange Hebrew God made fully known to us in Jesus of Nazareth, I found most of the answers I encountered … inadequate to account for what I saw in the story.
The major Western strains on this question are the Reformed branches headed by Calvin and Arminius, the Anabaptist perspective, and the Roman Catholic perspective. All of those are simply variations on the same theme and I had issues with the theme itself. All of those perspectives felt like they were trying to answer the question within the framework of Plato. And that just didn’t seem to be the framework within which this Jesus fit.
I spent more than a decade quietly trying to flesh out my own perspective from the story of Holy Scripture and by reading other sources, especially the ancient writings of Christianity, but also more modern voices.
Several years ago, I stumbled onto Orthodoxy. (I had ‘known’ about the Orthodox Church in some general sense, of course, but had simply accepted the common description as ‘eastern Catholics’.) And I discovered that, on several of the ‘big’ questions, like the sovereignty of God, my perspective fit within the Orthodox perspective like a hand into a tailored glove. That was actually a tremendous relief to me. I’m deeply aware of my ability to construct my own reality. And so I wasn’t comfortable that what I saw and experienced didn’t line up with what everyone else seemed to say. But at the same time, I just couldn’t sustain any lasting belief in what I was offered. And I did try on several variations to see if they would fit.
I know that was a lengthy non-answer. But it’s the context in which the answer fits and the answer itself is too long for a single comment.
Related to this topic, as Piper explores his thoughts, I listened last night to Father Thomas Hopko. He’s been doing a series on how the Orthodox Church has related to the governments under which it has lived in different eras for the past two thousand years, how that has impacted it, where it has ‘worked’ and where there have been problems. It’s a series that’s probably only interesting to those who share my interest in history and social constructs. But the last one in the series, Church and State Part 8 discusses how Christians can interact with the government in the various forms of representative democracy. I found it interesting and refreshing that priests, monks, and nuns are forbidden by the canons of the Church from belonging to a political party. He looks at it from a variety of perspectives in a thoughtful way. I enjoyed it.
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Oh, and my wife has mostly not worked outside the home. There have been a lot of forces at play that often made that the only real option for us at times in the past, even when we couldn’t ‘afford’ it. And she prefers it. My perspective on women has nothing in it that requires that women (or men for that matter) pursue careers or ministry outside the home. The question runs deeper than what you do and such a requirement would simply be another form of tyranny.
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Hmmm. I realized when I listed the primary Western perspectives, I left off ‘open theism’. It’s not because I’m unaware of it. I’m not sure I really see it as another perspective. Rather, people within the various Western perspectives are increasingly seeing its weakness. I empathize with what the open theists are trying to do. They see the problems within their perspective and are trying to address them. However, they are trying to do so while operating still essentially within the Western framework. And the problem is in the framework itself.
Creation is not a static picture. It’s not a tapestry. It’s not a tapestry that is complete and which God must maintain. And it’s not a tapestry within which God is working to form the not yet existent final creation. It’s much more dynamic than that. And we are beginning to realize that reality is much more dynamic and much less fixed than we ever imagined. I try to use metaphors like creating ‘soup’ and the like, but they are limited as well. We need to see with God that his ‘will’ (as expressed in Holy Scripture) is not most centrally tied into events and perfectly coordinated and synchronized actions. Rather, it is his will to sum up all things in Christ. It is his will that none should perish and all should be conformed to the image of Jesus. We see constant revelations of the ‘will’ of God. But in us, he has created beings with ‘will’ of our own. That synergy is what cannot be summarized. But it makes the whole mix, not just the individual and directly causal, extraordinarily volatile.
Now, how do I answer the question some like to raise about how God can utterly respect our will, participate with us in each and every decision and exercise of will we make, and yet still have foreknowledge and be able to move creation toward the fulfillment of his will? Curiously, I found the Orthodox answer to that question exactly paralleled my own and it’s an answer that is largely foreign to Western debate.
God can accomplish all of that because he’s God.
It sounds trite, but it really isn’t. I’m not sure how the West forgot that central truth. There will always come places where our ability to speak of God will fall short. (In fact, I think we need to be cautious any time we try to speak of God of all the ways that what we say is also wrong even as it is right.) There are places we cannot go. There are things God can do simply because he is God and we are not. That is probably the greatest failing of the platonic God of perfect order. We can understand him. We may not know how he does all he does, but the image of an artist who creates a magnificent portrait and then protects it from damage is one we can wrap our heads around. And that should be our first warning that it’s deeply, deeply flawed.
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“God can accomplish all of that because he’s God.”
Scott, I think that we may think alike. I often talk about the fact that we as finite beings can not begin to comprehend the vastness of our G_d because he is infinite.
I am quite sure we could have some interesting conversations.
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