Henri Nouwen, 1936-1996

I suppose that loneliness and the spiritual discipline of solitude are certainly apropos subjects for many of us on Valentine’s Day.  But that’s not really the point of this post.  Over on the Emerging Scholars Blog Michael Hickerson has written a great first post in a series on Henri Nouwen and the vital spiritual practice of solitude.

Life in academia, whether as a grad student or as faculty (or as a campus minister, for that matter) can be quite lonely.  Research, writing, studying, and even teaching and participating in seminars can be intensely isolating.  For this reason, InterVarsity works hard to build authentic caring communities for students and faculty.  But the truth is, as Nouwen and Hickerson point out, community is only part of the solution to loneliness.  Learning to be alone with God–learning how to be alone well–is just as important.

Kevin DeYoung offers what he takes to be 10 reasons for affirming the historicity of Adam and Eve.

James McGrath, professor of New Testament at Butler University, offers his point-by-point rejoinder.

I am going to withhold comment for now, but I would love to know what you think about all of this.

Sounds to me like the Vanderbilt administration is not budging even though the CLS president there offered a pretty solid reductio ad absurdum argument against it.

The Washington Institute seeks a renewed vision of vocation and the common good by teaching, serving and equipping people to understand their callings and careers as integral to the mission of God in the world.

The Institute embodies this vision through a number of initiatives and partnerships where they teach people how to connect their faith to their work to engage their world.  To get the flavor of what they’re all about , check out any of the incisive posts their blog.

Another great place to start is by reading their founder Steven Garber’s fantastic little book, The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving Together Belief and Behavior.  I’m hoping we can get Dr. Garber down to the Triangle before too long!

InterVarsity Senior Vice President Jim Lundgren is calling on InterVarsity’s staff, students, faculty supporters, alumni, and friends to be in prayer about campus ministry at Vanderbilt University.

The leadership of Vanderbilt University has decided that several campus Christian organizations, including InterVarsity’s Graduate Christian Fellowship, should be placed on provisional status until coming into compliance with Vanderbilt’s anti-discrimination policy. The policy, as it currently stands, would prohibit a Christian organization from using any religious criteria when selecting leaders.

You can read the rest of the Jim’s call to prayer here.  You can also read more on the situation at Vandy here,  here, and here.

Mark is the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Mark will share with us a little bit from his most recent book.  In short, he will be speaking as a Christian and as a professional sociologist on the social dynamics of the contemporary sexual marketplace.  So this will not be a youth-group-esque talk on “how far is ’too far’?” and such like questions.

Let me know if you’re not on the email list and are interested in coming out.

Myth 1: Most people lose their faith when they leave high school.  Reality: There has been considerable attention paid to the so-called loss of faith that happens between high school and early adulthood. Some have estimated this dropout in alarming terms, estimating that a large majority of young Christians will lose their faith. The reality is more nuanced. In general, there are three distinct patterns of loss: prodigals, nomads, and exiles.

Myth 2: Dropping out of church is just a natural part of young adults’ maturation.  Reality: First, this line of reasoning ignores that tens of millions of young Christians never lose their faith or drop out of church. Thus, leaving church or losing faith should not be a foregone conclusion.

Myth 3: College experiences are the key factor that cause people to drop out.  Reality: College certainly plays a role in young Christians’ spiritual journeys, but it is not necessarily the ‘faith killer’ many assume. College experiences, particularly in public universities, can be neutral or even adversarial to faith. However, it is too simplistic to blame college for today’s young church dropouts. As evidence, many young Christians dissociate from their church upbringing well before they reach a college environment; in fact, many are emotionally disconnected from church before their 16th birthday.

Myth 4: This generation of young Christians is increasingly “biblically illiterate.”  Reality: The study examined beliefs across the firm’s 28-year history, looking for generational gaps in spiritual beliefs and knowledge. When comparing the faith of young practicing faith Christians (ages 18 to 29) to those of older practicing Christians (ages 30-plus), surprisingly few differences emerged between what the two groups believe. This means that within the Christian community, the theological differences between generations are not as pronounced as might be expected. Young Christians lack biblical knowledge on some matters, but not significantly more so than older Christians.

Myth 5: Young people will come back to church like they always do.  Reality: Some faith leaders minimize the church dropout problem by assuming that young adults will come back to the church when they get older, especially when they have children. However, previous research conducted by Barna Group raises doubts about this conclusion.

Obviously, if you’ve bought into one or more of these mythological diagnoses of the problem, your solutions are likely to be either overly simplistic or completely misplaced.

Things I found particularly striking were the study’s category of young adult “exiles” from church, the fact that most of those who leave church were emotionally disconnected from church well before arriving at college, and that those who leave church are not really much more “Biblically illiterate” than their elders (which is not to say that either they or their elders are particularly Biblically literate–in my experience, the bar of Biblical literacy has been set pretty low in our culture).

Here’s what the article says about church “exiles”:

Another two out of ten young Christians were categorized as exiles, those who feel lost between the “church culture” and the society they feel called to influence. The sentiments of exiles include feeling that “I want to find a way to follow Jesus that connects with the world I live in,” “I want to be a Christian without separating myself from the world around me” and “I feel stuck between the comfortable faith of my parents and the life I believe God wants from me.”

That is a pretty damning finding: two out of ten young adults leave church not because they find Christianity to be too hard to stomach but because their churches’ versions of Christianity are insufficiently robust, too parochial, too detached from the needy world to which Christ calls us as ministers.  Ironically, nearly thirty percent of the young Christians who abandon church are precisely the Church’s most promising parishioners.

What are your thoughts?

As to the Pharisees’ concern over this matter, a little context goes a long way.  The Pharisees were very particular about meals.  The Pharisees got their name, ha’parushim, from the verb parash, “to separate”: they were “the separate ones.”  The movement got this name because their understanding of holiness, qodesh, was deeply rooted in Exodus and Leviticus where holiness means something like being “set apart” or “separate.”  The Pharisees, out of their conviction that all Israel was called to be a “kingdom of priests” (Exod 19:6), took the biblical priestly purity regulations (esp. Lev 21-22) to apply to pretty much every Jew.  For them, to be God’s holy people was to be a people set apart, and one of the key places where they lived this apart-ness out was at their meals.  For them, meals, all meals, were sacred affairs and so we find that of the 341 texts attributed to the chief rabbis of Jesus’ day, Hillel and Shammai, some 229 of them pertain to regulating meals.  For the Pharisees table fellowship, or chavurah, was a central place where they embodied and exemplified their vision for a renewed Israel and a restored Holy Land, freed from both pagan oppression and defilement.

So the Pharisees were not just nitpicking when they questioned Jesus about He and His disciples’ table manners.  They saw quite rightly that Jesus was calling the entire Pharisaic program into question and was offering an alternative chavurah and with it an alternative vision of who and what the people of God were called to be and do.  Indeed, my sense is that Jesus intended His table manners and those of his disciples to provoke a response from the Pharisees.  He is picking a fight by encouraging His disciples to break with the tradition of the elders, to not do what they had probably been brought up to do.

And a fight is precisely what He gets.  In verses 3-11 He goes toe-to-toe with His Pharisaic detractors in a heated halakhic debate, pointing out inconsistencies in their practice of the Torah and painting them with the same brush with which the prophet Isaiah had painted their unfaithful ancestors.  Jesus’ closing argument is less an argument than a cryptic but inevitably inflammatory proverb:

Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.

The Pharisees, naturally, are scandalized.  What exactly is He implying?  You just can’t talk that way!  This man is bound to lead people astray.  What about keshrut, the dietary laws of the Torah?  What do you mean ”it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person”?  Of course what you eat can defile you!  Go read Leviticus 11!

What’s Jesus’s game here?  What is He trying to accomplish with all this provocative behavior and this offensive speech?  The disciples were wondering this very thing (apparently Jesus had not yet let them in on why He was having them disregard the traditions of the elders) and so they said to Him, “You do know that the Pharisees  were offended when they heard this saying, right?”  Jesus explains that these Pharisees are not the plants God has planted (cp. 3:10; 12:33-36; 13:36-43) and that they are blind guides unworthy of a following.  Peter, as usual, speaks up and asks Him, “Explain the parable to us.”

“The parable.”  The harsh saying, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person,” is not a solemn, straightforward theological axiom; it is a parable, a mashal as it would have been called in Hebrew or Aramaic.  Parables are by their very nature polysemous, cryptic, and patient of multiple interpretations–they don’t necessarily mean what they, on the surface, seem to mean–and frequently in the Gospels Jesus only shares the meaning of His parables with those He trusts.  So what does this parable mean?

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled?   But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.   For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person. But to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.”

As Matthew tells the story, Jesus’s parable, despite first impressions, is not really about the validity of the Torah‘s dietary laws (Mark is another issue; cp. Mark 7:19b, which Matthew has excised), but rather about reorienting our thinking about purity and defilement, holiness and unholiness as being fundamentally about the heart rather than about ostensible and separatistic practices.

This reorientation towards cardiac-holiness is something Jesus began unpacking in the Sermon on the Mount where He set out His counter-cultural Kingdom ethic and which He has revisited several times more throughout the course of the Gospel.  This, you see, is what the Kingdom looks like.  The Biblical hope for Israel’s restoration was not simply that Israel would be redeemed from pagan oppression and granted political self-governance, but that Israel would be renewed through and through; God would circumcise their hearts (Deut 30:6), He would write His Torah on their hearts (Jer 31:33), He would replace their hearts of stone with hearts of flesh (Ezek 36:26-27; cf. Rom 2:12ff; 2 Cor 3:1-6, etc.).

Jesus’s table fellowship and table manners embody an alternative vision of the Kingdom, one radically opposed to that of the Pharisees.  They are an enacted parable of the coming Kingdom.  It is neither a table nor a Kingdom that makes fine distinctions.  It is neither a table nor a Kingdom where one’s holiness is measured in terms of one’s separateness from the unwashed masses or even from the rot-gut sinners.  Rather, it is a table and a Kingdom where, first and foremost, outcasts are welcomed, offenders are forgiven, enemies are cared for, people are seen as people, needs are met, and hearts are transformed.  It is a table and a Kingdom that does not separate the ritually holy from unholiness but is beacon of counter-cultural heart holiness in an unholy world.

I think there can be little doubt that we are to imitate Jesus’s table manners, which means that some of the questions before us as we read this passage are these: When we fellowship with one another, are we embodying a vision of holiness as separation or holiness as counter-cultural, radical love?  When we fellowship with one another, are we acting as a holy huddle or as a redeeming influence?  When we fellowship with one another, are we being transformed by the renewing of our hearts and minds?

The Pharisees were right at least in this: Table manners matter.  We are how we eat together as much as we are what we eat (cf. Gal 2:12-14).  Every meal and every meeting embodies–is an enacted parable of–a vision of the Kingdom.  So the really difficult question before us, the one that Jesus’s clash with the Pharisees brings out in full relief is this: What does our life together really say about what the Kingdom is and is all about?

Dr. Catherine Crouch, Associate Professor of Physics at Swarthmore College

One of the unexpected roles that I have found myself playing since coming on staff with InterVarsity has been that of dispelling common misconceptions about the university for Christian laypeople.  And there has been no more common misconception that I have run into than that the natural sciences and the Christian faith are locked in mortal combat.  The truth is that in contemporary academia the culture of the humanities is far, far more hostile to Christianity than are the natural sciences.  In any case, the misconception that the university laboratories and observatories are environments inherently dangerous for Christianity is deeply lodged in our public discourse, and that makes the Christian who is also a scientist something of mystery to many Christian pastors and laypeople.

Christian author and cultural critic Andy Crouch has addressed this problem with a great little essay over at The Well, “What I wish my pastor knew about…the life of a scientist.”  Crouch is writing particularly with reference to his wife, Catherine, who is an experimental physicist at Swarthmore College.  The article highlights many of the virtues of practicing scientists that oft go unnoticed by pastors and laypersons alike.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know what scientists’, particularly scientists who are Christians, lives are like.