"At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore" (Ps. 16: 11)

Food and Drink #6

“When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper. For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken” (1 Cor. 11:20-21)

We learn how to eat at the Lord’s Supper, and we are learning to eat wisely when we focus on our table companions, and not on the contents there on the plate. We should learn to eat in a way that nourishes, not just our own bodies, but to eat in a way that is a strength and joy to everyone who eats with us.

The early church used to have what they called an agape meal together with the Lord’s Supper, meaning that there was bread and wine, but taken in the context of a larger church potluck. And at that larger potluck, it appears that some of the saints were misbehaving—taking too much wine, for example, or crowding to the head of the line and not leaving anything for those who came behind. People cared more about what food went into them, or how much of it, than they cared about those who were there to share table fellowship with them.

When people have the kind of food issues that they ought not to have, one of the first things that happens is a disruption of fellowship, and particularly table fellowship. But the oneness of the eating is far more important than the oneness of the food. If you are invited to a Christian’s house for dinner, the Lord’s Supper (that you share together) should be the governor of what happens when you sit down together. This means (among other things), you should not take all the dessert, you should not bring your own specialty dish to eat instead of what the hostess prepared, and you should not quarrel with those who are at the table.

There really are food fads that are no good for you. But to simply ban those fads would be to be guilty of the same offense—dividing over food. All that is necessary is to ban a sectarian attitude  when it comes to food, and this takes care of all the problems—because if there is a problem, sectarianism is the point. A right approach to the Lord’s Table makes us food catholics at every other meal.

In a previous post, I chided James K.A Smith for not including the cineplex as the religious mall's Sunday School class. I am almost done with the book now, and wanted to make a point of noting that he does in fact tackle that problem.

"Over time, the theater is a kind of classroom; it constitutes a pedagogy of desire . . . This is not to say that we should avoid the cinema (though that might always be a bad idea); rather, I think it is important to see that movies don't just 'have' worldviews; rather film is more like a liturgy" (p. 110).

This is exactly right. But the difficulty is that Smith explicity fences off the bad lessons that must not be learned in this cineplex at the mall -- we don't want to "find ourselves unwittingly becoming disciples of Americanism" (p. 110). Smith (perhaps) mentions in passing somewhere else that he is a Christian socialist, which perhaps explains why he is so attuned to all that stuff for sale out in the mall, which capitalism produces in its sleep, and why he is so jumpy about any rah rah movies that defend the manufacture of said stuff. But Hollywood churns out more didacticism than can be found in the films of Jerry Bruckheimer. There are all the movies in which the CIA are the bad guys, for example, which is to say, lots of them. There are all the movies in which opponents of homosexual marriage are viewed exactly as Smith views them. And of course the evil corporation is a character right out of central casting. The cineplex has more than one teacher that we need to watch out for.

Now I think I can call all of you to witness the fact that I, though a loyal American son, and one who loves this country simply, freely, unabashedly, and lots, have still, from time to time, offered analyses of our public affairs that would seem to indicate that I believe our peculiar form of governance is "of the idiots, for the idiots, and by the idiots." And I have no patience for that form of patriotism that looks like it might

Here is a capable diagnosis of a spreading rash in the contemporary church -- the Christian hipster. HT: Justin Taylor. 

An ancient error, that of pendulum swinging, finds that when the cognitive functions of man have been emphasized too much, the time has come to careen toward the passions. And when life under the tyranny of the passions becomes unbearable, which it always does, the error is to swing back to the life of pure cogitation. The Apollonian and the Dionysian alternate. The life of the mind is pitted against the life of the gut; the cerebral is set against the visceral. But of course God made both brains and viscera, and He did not do so that we might set them in a perpetual quarrel.

Plato wanted the head to rule the gut, and the Dionysians wanted the gut to rule the head. The neo-classicists wanted the head to rule the gut, and the romantics wanted the gut to rule the head. School superintendents and college presidents in the late fifties and early sixties wanted the head to rule the gut, and the hippies wanted the gut to rule the head. And some Christians, whenever they live, their middle name being "tag-along Charlie," want to appeal to Scripture for whichever of these options they would prefer at the time. Which is trendy right now, and which one is coincidentally what the Holy Spirit has been trying to teach us in Scripture all along? What a coincidence. Depending on where they are in the novel, they want to be sense, or maybe sensibility. Nietzsche thought that the peculiar tension between these polarities resulted in a remarkable fusion, the results of which we call Attic tragedy. But what did he know? He attempted the fusion his own self, and blew the whole circuit board.

The Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. The borders between the three Persons are not blurred or confused borders. The distinctions between the Persons are absolute. And to make this truth even more glorious, one that only the triune God can reveal to us, and which He will take all eternity to do, is the fact that each of the three Persons, being infinite, have no borders. Each of the three indwell the other two, and indwell the other two fully.

At the beginning of James K.A. Smith's book, Desiring the Kingdom, he has an extended conceit -- that of comparing a trip to the mall as a worship experience -- that works pretty well. I'd like to extend that conceit a step farther, and take it in a direction that Smith would perhaps not be as comfortable with.

He calls the mall "one of the most important religious sites in our metropolitan area" (p. 19). The site is "throbbing with pilgrims" (p. 19). As we enter, we are "ushered into a narthex of sorts" (p. 20). "The layout of this temple has architectural echoes that hark back to medieval cathedrals -- mammoth religious spaces that can absorb all kinds of different religious activities all at one time" (p. 21). He points to the product posters, exemplifying the "catholicity of this iconography" (p. 21). When we have found our holy object, that which we have been seeking, lo, these many days, "we proceed to the altar" (p. 22). Afterwards we are released "by the priest with a benediction" (p. 22). I don't know about Smith, but in my neck of the woods, that benediction is usually "have a nice day!" delivered by a cute coed priestess. And if you think that Smith is simply being clever with some similarities, he pushes back against the charge. "But I want to adamantly contend that describing the mall as a religious site is not merely a metaphor or an analogy" (p. 23).

But what surprises me is what he left out of this -- the Sunday School classes. What would they be? Well, of course, the 8-theater cineplex. In every church, you can tell the really dedicated die-hards -- they are the ones crammed into the catechetical lectures that accompany divine services. In many churches, you have the Christmas and Easter crowd -- as when I make my biannual trek to the mall to get a cord from RadioShack -- and you have the regulars. But the ones who are really faithful, the devotees, are the ones who come to hear the didactic instruction, the narrative of our people. And they really learn their lessons. They internalize them.

But I would be really surprised if Smith wound up telling folks to stop going to the movies. That's the kind of thing you hear from a dour and elderly aunt who spent her whole life among the Free Methodists and who, if you said weltanschauung in her presence, would tell

In a recent discussion with some men I made mention of the problem that I call "clogged filters." Like a car going down the highway, the air available is the air the car is driving in, and so the air filter needs to be replaced from time to time. The environment we live in is what runs through our filters, and that environment includes political matters, food questions, movie issues, music problems, and neck tie width issues. The problem is that most Christians today put all cultural issues into the adiaphora category without much thought, like everything was a neck tie width issue. And the more they do that, the easier it gets to do that. And no, not because they are becoming wise, but because their filters get clogged.

A few years ago, I preached a series of sermons called A Worldview Wheel, and that would be the place to start for those who want help on keeping their filters clean. A worldview is not just thoughts in your head, even if they are orthodox thoughts. A worldview consists of four major components -- catechesis, narrative, symbols, and lifestyle. Catechesis concerns how you answer the questions. Christian, what do you believe? Narrative raises and answers the question, "Who are your people, and how did you get here?" Symbols are the unspoken ways that we communicate who we are, and what our allegiances are -- baptism, cross necklaces, liturgies in worship, and so on. Lifestyle has to do with the day-to-day stuff -- eating habits, clothing, sexual mores, etc. The first two elements of a worldview are propositional, and the last two are not. For more on all this, you can get the set of six sermons from Canon Press here.

Every distinct group in the history of the world has been distinct by virtue of creating and maintaining a distinctive take on all four of these. Conservative evangelicals have been no different in this respect, but because they have not worked through the ramifications of their

In his second chapter, Michael Pollan reveals two important things. The first is that he believes that ethical norms are created by a mythic state of nature. And since that mythic state of nature was long ago, far away, and mute on top of that, the standards that come from this state of nature need to be (helpfully) supplied to us by Michael Pollan.

"If, as has sometimes been said, the discovery of agriculture represent the first fall of man from the state of nature, then the discovery of synthetic fertility is surely a second precipitious fall. Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum" (p. 45).

So the fall was not rebellion against God, eating what He told us not to eat, but rather figuring out how to eat at all. Pollan thinks the fall from the state of nature was learning how to grow food in rows, and trying to feed someone other than yourself. Picking huckleberries would be okay, I suppose, so long as you didn't have a bucket. If you had a bucket, then you could pick more than you needed, and that would create temptations to share. And that would be agriculture, which was a calamitous fall.

And then the second fall came within the last century, when we learned how to feed even more people than we were able to do originally. The way back to innocence, therefore, is to become hunter/gatherers again. Since that is obviously not possible, we are left to live our lives in a cloud of food guilt. With this definition of a fall, ladies and gentlemen, there will never, ever come a savior. But also rememer that not getting you a savior is kind of the point.

The second thing revealed in this chapter is that Pollan doesn't understand economics at all -- although he thinks he does.

We should all know what it is to fall victim to a metaphor. This is like that, and it is in some ways, but then when you press it, you discover that it is not like that in lots of other ways.
Consider the summary evaluation of left wing/right wing. This is saying that the hurly burly political activity of millions of people can be compared to a line on a blackboard, drawn from left to right. Republicans are over here, and Democrats are over there. But consider what a slender metaphor it is -- one horizontal line to represent how many variables?

I have been rolling this over in my mind trying to come up with a three-dimensional graph, one with up and down and front and back, and even that would be enormously inadequate.

What could be the basis of making fun of other people's liturgical or ritual religious practices? Isn't the Lord's vineyard a big place, and so where do we get off making fun of the color of the bag that some other laborers are using to put the grapes in? Isn't that a bit churlish?

Well, no, depending on what you mean. The thing that immunizes different customs from ridicule is holiness and integrity. The thing that opens you up to pungent observations on how wide your phylactery is is hypocrisy and iniquity. Devour a widow's house, and the nearest prophet worth his salt will pull your chasuble over your head and roll down your socks.

Why? Because the Lord cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly linked together -- as we are taught in numerous places. Here's just one.

"Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting" (Is. 1:13).

God detests this kind of thing, and we are required to do the same. If we don't detest it, we have no business being anywhere near it -- it would not be safe.