If My Luck Holds . . .

Rodney Clapp’s next chapter is on the tension between holiness and hedonism. Music with Southern roots exalts and celebrates two times in the week that are worlds apart and are very close to each other — Saturday night and Sunday morning. A recent example of this is the song Boondocks by Little Big Town — “five card poker on Saturday night, church on Sunday morning.”

Now of course, Saturday night admits of degrees. A lot of things can happen on Saturday night. True hypocrites can prowl, tormented souls can careen in between the polarities of holiness and hedonism, and other more phlegmatic types can just take it all in stride — no cheating or treachery is involved here, just a little good timing with good friends.

Clapp does a good job here warning those who are tempted to dismiss all conservatives involved in politics as just so many hypocritical yahoos.

“What is true for the southern music world holds as well for southern-accented political and social involvement. It is not all and simply the ravings of hypocrites. The Christianity is (very often) genuine and indelible. Where we disagree with it, we do not get very far by supposing it to be mere posturing and manipulative pretense” (p. 58).

Not all inconsistency is high-handed hypocrisy. A man who does not believe in Christ at all, and who joins the biggest church in town because that is the best place for business contacts is a hypocrite simpliciter. Someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, who believed in the truth of Christianity with all his might, and who was also driven and possessed by great balls of fire, is not in that same category. Neither is someone like Johnny Cash, who knew himself to be a sinner and who repented his great failings, did so as someone who believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and he believed this from the beginning of Saturday night to the end of it.

Of course the problem is a dualism of some sort or another, and this southern country music problem exemplifies it very well. But it is all very well to denounce this kind of dualism, as many of my friends and cohorts in the Reformed world have done. But it ain’t that simple. I see as much confusion on this issue among avowed enemies of dualism as I see among honky-tonking church-goers. An integrated life is not one in which all the elements are separated out and placed in their own strata, as though they were layers of sediment. For example, I am a Christian, an American, a Wilson, and a male, and these are not arranged in discrete layers, with the unnecessary layers getting burned up in the Eschaton. That cannot be. Each aspect of my identity interpenetrates all the others. In this fallen world, loyalties and duties can certainly conflict and when they do, my responsibility to obey Christ trumps all the others. But if my duty to Christ (for example) required me to challenge the American powers that be, I would have to do so in a distinctively American way. I don’t know any other way to be. If my responsibility to follow Christ meant that I had to disregard a requirement placed on me by my parents, I would have to do that — but I would have to do that as a loyal son. I don’t know any other way to be.

Those who want their loyalties to be “just to Christ” are not integrationists — they are upper story gnostics. Those who want their loyalties to remain entirely here below are functional atheists. Integrationism means that our loyalties indwell one another in a perichoretic fashion. When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun — I will still be a man, I will still be an American, I will still be a Wilson, I will still be white, still descended from the Scots, and, if my luck holds, I will still be a presbyterian. Or, if Frank Turk is right, I will be a baptist once again.

In the resurrection, nothing good is lost. Christ redeemed it all. He did not do this so that all of us would then be identical — no, He did it because He is going to unify all things in heaven and on earth. And unifying them is not the same thing as annihilating them.