Elliot Ritzema

Blog

  • Mars Hill on a Wintry Night

    This past Sunday I went to Rob Bell’s Mars Hill Church in Grandville, MI (not to be confused with Mars Hill Church in Seattle, or Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle, none of which are related).

    I read Bell’s book Velvet Elvis last year and found it to be an entertaining read. I’ve also listened to a few of his teachings online. He is quite informal in his speaking style, and conveys a great deal of excitement about what he is speaking about. He also devotes a lot of attention to the Jewish cultural background of the New Testament, and I must say that I have benefited from that.

    This Sunday, though, was an atypical Sunday. Not only was Bell not speaking (though he was there, introducing the speaker and playing a guitar as part of the band), but there was also a snowstorm that had started early in the afternoon and was raging by 6 p.m., when the evening service started. My dad and I walked in and were underwhelmed by the amount of people there. We sat down, and people continued to trickle in, but the seats were only about half full (this is highly unusual, as there were a couple of jokes made about how many people were there in the morning compared with the hard-core people who showed up for the evening). Even though nowhere close to all the seats were filled, I’d say there were easily more than 500 people there (it could have been closer to a thousand; I’m not so good at estimating crowd size).

    The service (or Gathering, as they are called at Mars Hill) was very simple: we sang a few songs, listened to a sermon (or teaching), sang a few more songs, and then it ended. The services take place “in the round,” with all of the seats arranged around an elevated platform in the middle. This works out very well for the teachings, I think. Though Rob Bell didn’t speak, Ed Dobson did, and he seemed at ease with moving around and directing his attention to the four sides of the audience.

    In my opinion, the way the room was organized didn’t work out as well for the worship. A few worship leaders are stationed on each side of the platform, but instead of facing out toward the people, they face inward, toward the platform. There are four screens above the platform, one facing in each direction, that display song lyrics and notes during the teaching. I suppose the worship leaders face inward in order to minimize the feeling that we are watching a band instead of worshiping. But since we all face those screens, it looks a little bit like we are all worshiping a big cube.

    (As an aside: I once went to a Russian Orthodox worship service in a church that had a fantastic choir, but you couldn’t see them. They were in a special balcony just above the rear door. So their beautiful sound filled the sanctuary, but when you looked up at the front all you could see was the altar. Maybe something like that could get rid of the worship-leaders-as-rock-band problem?)

    But the worship was good; we sang traditional Christmas songs with new, rocking arrangements. Ed Dobson was also a very engaging speaker, and I definitely benefited from his talk about peace. Afterwards, I heard from my aunt that he suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease. I was even more impressed with his speaking ability after that.

    On the negative side, I thought that on the whole it was a little too stripped down for my tastes. I tend to like a little more in the way of liturgy. Like prayer, for example. I’m not saying that they don’t pray at Mars Hill, since I looked at some of the things they have scheduled during the week, and prayer definitely seems to be a part of their life as a community. But I was uncomfortable with the fact that prayer was not part of this large group gathering. Maybe they have a good reason for that, but I don’t know what it is. Also, though Dobson was a very engaging speaker, I thought that he perhaps bit off more than he could get through in one talk. After all, peace is big in the Bible. I thought he spent a whole lot of time doing a word study of “shalom,” when perhaps he would have done better to narrow his scope a bit.

    But this is just nitpicking. Overall, it was a positive experience, and I worshiped God in that experience. I’ve never been part of a megachurch myself, but I find the way different large churches “do” church to be fascinating.

  • Rookie Dad

    ‘Tis the season for not writing many blog posts. I’ve been visiting family for the last several days, and will continue to visit family for a few more. I flew from Vancouver to North Carolina to visit my parents, and I drove from North Carolina to Michigan with my dad a couple of days ago. Now we will spend time with my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in Grand Rapids until just after Christmas. Then we will go visit my brother, sister-in-law and nephews in Wisconsin for a few days. Then, back to North Carolina for a few days and then back to Washington.

    So as you can see, I’m too busy relaxing and enjoying the company of family to write much.

    Rookie Dad

    The main point of this post, though, is to encourage all of you to read a book that was written by a friend of mine. It is called Rookie Dad: Thoughts on First-Time Fatherhood, and is written by David Jacobsen (The link to the blog that he and his wife Christine write is on the right). Dave graduated from Regent a couple of years ago, and he was the editor of the Et Cetera my first year there. He is a wonderful writer, and has a great sense of humor. I’ve not read the whole book, but I went to his Arts Thesis presentation when he read some excerpts from it. The excerpts that he read were funny – as I would expect from him – but also sincere and thoughtful, but not in a corny way, or a way that makes you think he just tossed in a bit of sincerity because he thought he should.

    But don’t just take my word for it: visit his web site and read some sample chapters for yourself. Or, go straight to Amazon and buy it.

  • Woohoo!

    Finished writing a paper today, and now I’m done for the semester. It was a 3800 word paper, and I’d been so busy with other things until mid-week this week that I didn’t actually start writing it until Wednesday. After hours and hours of writing and reading and subjecting my body to obscene amounts of sugar, caffeine and sitting, it’s finished. I now know lots more than I used to about postmodernism in the church.

    I’m just not interested in talking about it right now.

  • Confessions of a Prodigal Tigers Fan

    I’ve not posted about this before, so some of you may not know this, but I’m a Detroit Tigers fan. I have been since I was a kid. I can’t remember why, though it probably has something to do with the fact that 1) my family is from Michigan originally, and 2) there was no city with a professional baseball team within hundreds of miles of where I grew up in Fayetteville, NC. I could have been like my brother, and taken advantage of this situation by choosing to root for any team I pleased (he is a Toronto Blue Jays fan. I’ve never been sure why. I’ll have to ask him sometime). But for some reason I decided at a young age to remain true to the Michigan roots by cheering for the Tigers and, in football, the Lions.

    Trouble is, the last time the Tigers won the World Series was when I was five. The last time before 2006 they had what anyone would call a good season was 1987, which was right about the time I was collecting baseball cards and cementing my allegiance to them. Then came many years of disappointment, though I must admit I kept myself from feeling that disappointment too deeply by not following baseball that closely. Same with football, since the Lions were just as awful. In retrospect, it was a good thing. I got a lot of things done. Went to college, spent some time overseas, and went to grad school.

    But in the spring of 2006, one of my friends from college (a good friend, to whom I had confided my shameful status as a Tiger fan) told me that the Tigers were doing well for once. REALLY well. Well enough to get to the World Series that fall. And get trounced by the Cardinals in five games.

    But that taste of the Tigers being good again has overpowered me. I follow them again. I check scores. I read articles. I was disappointed with every injury and blown save this year. And I’m excited that they are acquiring several talented players this offseason. In November, they traded with Atlanta for Edgar Renteria, and just last week they traded with the Marlins to get Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera. I still feel that they need better relief pitching (a couple of years ago I could never have told you that), but overall I’m feeling optimistic.

    And other people are too. There is now a Facebook group called “2008 Detroit Tigers: Undefeated?” Go Tigers!

    I just hope this doesn’t mean that this is the end of me doing anything with my life and the beginning of me sitting in front of the TV and having my emotions jerked around by a bunch of millionaires.

  • The Golden Compass and Misunderstanding Christianity

    So The Golden Compass (a movie based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy) opened yesterday, and there has been a lot of controversy about it. There is an article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly about it (and also an accompanying article online), and also one in this month’s Christianity Today. Matt Barber has also written critically about it in the Examiner.

    Many Christians have been critical of the books because Pullman is an atheist who has told interviewers that his books are about killing God. The gist of the Atlantic articles is that Hollywood, now aware of conservative Christians, has toned down the explicitly atheistic tone in the movie. But some Christians (and I must admit, I’m one of them) are not interested in seeing the movie because they don’t want to see the next two books made into movies, and don’t want to give Pullman any more money or success or encouragement than he already has (You may notice, however, that off to the right-hand side of this page it says that I am reading The Golden Compass. This is true. I checked it out of the library. Because while I am not interested in supporting Pullman, I am not against reading books that are popular both for entertainment and to see why they are popular).

    Some Christians, though (some quoted in the Christianity Today article and others, I am told, which include Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams), have a more positive view of the series. They see in Pullman’s books a criticism of things that should never have become part of Christianity, or are Pullman’s own misunderstandings of Christian doctrine. An example is Pullman’s caricature of the Christian understanding of sexuality, which he talks about in the first Atlantic article:

    This is exactly what happens in the Garden of Eden,” Pullman told me. “They become aware of sexuality, of the power the body has to attract attention from someone else. This is not only natural, but a wonderful thing! To be celebrated! Why the Christian Church has spent 2,000 years condemning this glorious moment, well, that’s a mystery. I want to confront that, I suppose, by telling a story that this so-called original sin is anything but. It’s the thing that makes us fully human.

    It is true that some stripes of Christianity have viewed sexuality as something bad. It might even be true that some stripes of Christianity have equated original sin with sexuality (though I have gone to church all my life, and the first time I ever heard of such a thing was when I was talking with a group of Moonies). But if this is true, it is not because they got this from the Bible.

    The events that Pullman refers to occur in Genesis 3, when the serpent tricks Eve into eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had told Adam and Eve not to eat. Eve gave the fruit to Adam and “the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths” (Gen 3:7).

    But the fruit can’t represent sexuality, as Pullman thinks, because sexuality came about before these events occurred: “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (1:28). And also, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (2:24-25). If these two verses don’t refer to pre-sin sexuality, then I would like to know what they DO refer to.

    From reading Genesis, it is hard to believe that sexuality and sin could ever be equated. Yet, sometimes in the history of Christianity, it has been. So I thank God for people like Philip Pullman who criticize ridiculous ideas like this, because they’re not Christian (or Jewish, for that matter). I only wish Pullman knew that.

  • Happy (?) First Sunday of Advent!

    Two quotes on Advent from the always-reliable Wikipedia:

    Advent (from the Latin word advenio, meaning “to come”, “the coming of Christ our saviour”) is a holy season of the Christian church, the period of expectant waiting and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, also known outside the Church as the season of Christmas.

    and

    From the 4th century, the season was kept as a period of fasting as strict as that of Lent (commencing in some localities on 11 November; this being the feast day of St. Martin of Tours, the fast became known as “St. Martin’s Fast,” “St. Martin’s Lent” or “the forty days of St. Martin”).

    Two resolutions: One, never again will I refer to this season as “the Christmas season.” Two, although I will probably not leap directly to keeping a 40-day fast, I will now proceed to think of the season of Advent as a time of penitential (yet still joyful) anticipation of Christmas Day.

  • Why I Love Christmas Carols

    Soon (This Sunday) it will be the season of Advent, and it will be time for the church to prepare for Christmas. One of my favorite things about the Advent season (and, let’s be honest, some other seasons as well) is listening to Christmas carols. I am not entirely sure why I love Christmas music so much (especially since I can be picky about the Christian music that I listen to), but one reason might be that it is usually apocalyptic.

    Fra Angelico, 'The Nativity'

    When I say “apocalyptic,” I don’t mean that it has to do with the end of the world (although the Incarnation does inaugurate the “last days” – see especially Heb. 1:1-2, but also Acts 2:17; 2 Peter 3:3; 1 John 2:18). Instead, I’m talking about “apocalypse” in its original sense of “unveiling something hidden.”

    There are a lot of songs that we sing in church that talk about God’s attributes of power and love and holiness, and some songs that talk about the action of God in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and some songs that talk about God’s action in Jesus’ earthly ministry, but relatively few (that I can think of right now) talk about God breaking into earthly time and space in the way that Christmas carols do. When I hear them or sing them, I think about God invading this wayward planet, with the night sky full of angels to celebrate. I think about the relatively few humans alive at that time (Mary, Joseph, the wise men, the shepherds) who truly knew the importance of what was going on, and how the rest of the world went on about its business. I think about God’s kingdom breaking out into the earth. Here are a few lines from my favorite Christmas songs (see if you can tell which ones they are from):

    1. The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger;
    In all our trials born to be our friend.
    He knows our need, to our weakness is no stranger,
    Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!

    2. Still through the cloven skies they come,
    With peaceful wings unfurled;
    And still their heavenly music floats
    O’er all the weary world:
    Above its sad and lowly plains
    They bend on hovering wing,
    And ever o’er its Babel sounds
    The blessed angels sing.

    3. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
    The silent stars go by
    Yet in thy dark streets shineth
    The everlasting Light
    The hopes and fears of all the years
    Are met in thee tonight

    4. Saints before the altar bending,
    Watching long in hope and fear,
    Suddenly the Lord, descending,
    In His temple shall appear:
    Come and worship,
    Come and worship,
    Worship Christ, the newborn King!

    5. Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace!
    Hail the Son of Righteousness!
    Light and life to all He brings
    Ris’n with healing in His wings
    Mild He lays His glory by
    Born that man no more may die
    Born to raise the sons of earth
    Born to give them second birth

    And finally, perhaps the most apocalyptic of them all:

    6. Rank on rank the host of heaven
    spreads its vanguard on the way,
    as the Light of light descendeth
    from the realms of endless day,
    that the powers of hell may vanish
    as the darkness clears away.

    At his feet the six-winged seraph,
    cherubim, with sleepless eye,
    veil their faces to the Presence,
    as with ceaseless voice they cry:
    Alleluia, Alleluia,
    Alleluia, Lord Most High!

  • Thanksgiving at a Glance

    Well, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, and it has been fun and relaxing so far. Regent has gone to two reading weeks per semester, and in the fall the two reading weeks coincide with Canadian Thanksgiving (in early October) and American Thanksgiving. So I’ve had the whole week off from classes, though I’ve been reading quite a bit. Mostly what I have been reading is Theology, Music and Time by Jeremy Begbie. It explores what music can teach us about theology and time. I had trouble getting into it at first, mostly because of the time spent early in the book on music theory. Later portions of the book have been much more interesting, though I wouldn’t say that it’s a groundbreaking book. There are a few new insights, but they are more along the lines of, “Oh, that’s interesting” than “I’ve never thought about that before!”

    Since Wednesday, I’ve been hanging around with Mary and her family in Washington. Wednesday night, we watched the number one movie on AFI’s Top 100 Movies of All Time, Citizen Kane. I was impressed. The plot I found interesting, and it sustained my interest for all 2 hours. The cinematography was of a kind that I don’t often see in black and white movies, but I see more of those kinds of techniques nowadays. I guess there’s a reason why it’s number one: it’s so influential.

    Thanksgiving was spend down in Bothell, WA at Mary’s aunt and uncle’s house, and Black Friday was spent far, far away from the mall. We mostly read our respective books, either at home or at a coffee shop. It’s nice to be dating a person who is also in grad school; I don’t feel like so much of a nerd for reading constantly when Mary has to, as well.

  • Horror in the Cafetorium

    Mary and I were eating some tater tots recently, and they reminded both of us of growing up and eating them at our school cafeteria. I would wager that upwards of 90% of my lifetime intake of tater tots happened at lunch during elementary school. Since we grew up in different parts of the country, we compared the sorts of food that we used to eat at the cafeteria and we realized for the first time that school lunches might not actually have been that healthy. When I think of school lunch growing up, I think of tater tots, syrupy canned pears or peaches, chocolate milk, corn dogs, Rib-B-Q (whatever THAT was), and square (or sometimes, hexagonal) pizza. I once got a barbecue pork sandwich that contained a little slice of pigskin. But that wasn’t the worst part: there were some little stubbly hairs in it! I learned many things that day: first, that pork came from pigs. Second, that pigs are apparently mammals. And third, barbecue pork sandwiches are disgusting (I later qualified this to: “poor quality barbecue pork sandwiches are disgusting”).

    I remember that there was a salad bar in my school cafetorium (it was called a cafetorium because while it was a cafeteria during the day, it transformed into an auditorium for school plays and PTA meetings), but I also remember that almost no one ever visited it. I might have once or twice. But the main memory that I have of the salad bar is crouching near it and covering my head for several minutes during a tornado warning. It’s a good thing that a tornado actually didn’t come close to the school; I would have ended up unconscious with cottage cheese all over me.

    Is it just that I remember those things that were really bad for me, or was it all like that? I may never know. The only person I still keep in contact with from elementary school days is my brother. Maybe he can shed light on this subject. . .

  • Wolterstorff on Love and Justice

    Last week Wednesday and Thursday, philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff came to Regent to give the Laing Lectures: 3 lectures, 2 days, 1 topic. The topic of his lectures was “Love and Justice.” He was basically answering the question: “Why is it that so many Protestant Christians are uncomfortable with the category of social justice, especially when ‘rights’ language is used?” Most are OK with the idea of retributive justice, and are also OK with talking about justice when it comes to family matters (e.g., abortion), but why the discomfort about social (which Wolterstorff also called “primary”) justice?

    He gave some secondary answers to this question to start the lecture: this kind of justice is usually associated with liberalism, almost all social reform movements in the 20th century used “rights” language, and the popular understanding of “rights” language among these Christians is that it came from Enlightenment individualism, which is bad. But he traced the primary root of this discomfort back to the way that love (agape) has come to be understood by these Christians. The particular understanding of love known as “agapism” was exposited by Barth, Niebuhr, J.H. Yoder, Kierkegaard and others, but especially Anders Nygren. According to Wolterstorff, these men believed agape to be a love that is a form of benevolence. It wishes a person’s good, and is justice-blind and justice-indifferent. It is so strict a form of benevolence that it is not possible to love another person while at the same time seeking your own benefit. Loving someone because you have an attachment to them (they are in your family, or they live nearby) is also not agape. It has no attachments. Kierkegaard said that a recognition of duty is the only thing that can make you love agapically. Other kinds of love, like friendship love and erotic love, fail the test, because they are not done out of duty.

    In the second lecture, Wolterstorff showed that “Nygrenist agape” is not an accurate interpretation of the New Testament use of the word. Nygren opposed the moral vision of the NT to the Old Testament vision of law and justice. Whereas justice has requirements, agape is spontaneous, and therefore they can’t coexist. Nygren believed this, Wolterstorff claimed, because he thought that forgiveness was paradigmatic of all of God’s actions. Since God is not required to forgive, Nygren reasoned, justice (with its ideas of requiredness) is taken completely out of the picture.

    But justice still intrudes on this picture, and in the end the agapist scheme won’t work. Agape which is never motivated by justice will sometimes perpetrate injustice. An example that Wolterstorff gave was of a professor who, out of his love for a student and desire to make him less cocky, decided to give a “B” to an “A” paper. The professor was truly motivated by a desire for the student’s well being, but his agape perpetrated injustice. In an example that hits a bit closer to home, Wolterstorff said that, unlike someone who has a sense of justice, the pure agapist cannot object to torture if it is perpetrated in the name of some greater good.

    Nygren interprets Jesus’ parables in defense of his thesis that we should not be disturbed if agape abets injustice: the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, and the parable of the lost son. But the point of these parables, says Wolterstorff, is not that love trumps injustice, but that we need to re-think what our ideas of justice are.

    In the final lecture, Wolterstorff claims, against Nygren and the agapists, that Jesus nowhere teaches that justice has been supplanted by a different idea of love in the NT. He refers to Jesus’ reading Isaiah 61, to Jesus’ response to John the Baptist asking about his identity, and Matthew’s claim that Jesus came in part to proclaim justice to the Gentiles (12:18). Wolterstorff also made a fascinating excursus into the uses of dikaios and dikaiosune in the NT. In most places they are translated “right” and “righteousness,” but Wolterstorff emphasized that they also have the meaning “just” and “justice.” So for example, in the fourth Beatitude, when Jesus says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for dikaiosune,” it should be translated “justice.” Because who is ever persecuted for righteousness, which is after all only a personal trait? It is those who seek justice who are mocked and insulted by society.

    Wolterstorff then proposes a way forward that emphasizes justice as the recognition of the worth of persons. Justice is nothing more nor less than a respect for worth, which Christians can recognize because of people being made in God’s image. Justice is not, as someone like Reinhold Niebuhr would say, merely a way of mediating conflict.

    He also proposes that we re-think love: it is not only advancing the well-being of the neighbor, but honoring that neighbor’s worth (thus, love includes justice – and we need look no farther than Leviticus 19 to see the close relationship between the two).

    All in all, I thought that Wolterstorff was right-on. And Iain Provan and Patti Towler, who responded to him, thought so as well. In their responses, they generally didn’t say that there was anything wrong with what he said; if anything, they said that he should take it farther (e.g., toward respecting the worth of creation because God made it). As I’ve mentioned briefly in a previous post, the idea of human rights is something that I fully endorse, but I’m skeptical of the Enlightenment individualistic reasons behind the current interest in human rights. The world needs a view of love, justice and human rights that is built on God’s relationship to human beings; if built on anything else it is built on sand.

    Update (June 2, 2008): Wolterstorff’s lectures are available for purchase from Regent Audio here.