Category Archives: Society

Some reflections on war

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

In a well-tended cemetery with uniform grave markers situated just outside the city of Jakarta (Indonesia) repose the remains of my paternal grandfather. Harold George Gissing was an ordinary man, a painter by trade. His was a tragically short experience of war. Perhaps a year stationed in England for training and for civil defense, but less than two weeks in theatre and he was gone. His remains entombed in a common grave such was the destruction of his battlefield–remains were difficult to identify and assemble into a peculiar grave for each person.

There are strange mercies in war, however, and some might count it a mercy that he did not survive. His brother Charlie (who served in the same unit) survived the battle, but became a prisoner of war–a living hell by all accounts.

On the other side of the world, back in England, a little boy is experiencing warfare prior to the advent of precision-guided ordinance. Air raid sirens. Barrage balloons. Shelters. As I’ve talked with my father over the years I’ve been increasingly struck by the horror of those experiences. As a child, he recalls, there was a thrill to the sirens and tracer rounds. And yet there were unspeakable horrors like discovering a woman’s scalp in the back garden–apparently blown from her head by the force of an explosion. The rending of families. My Dad recalls that perhaps half of the men on his street died in the war. Countless families without fathers, wives without husbands.

To claim that “war is hell” is perhaps an understatement. War is inhumane. War is horrific. War is evil. War is sometimes necessary–fools rush to war. And yet generation by generation men (and women) repeatedly respond in the affirmative to the request to enter into this hell. I find this to be quite remarkable. And it evokes in me a profound respect that recoils from spectacle, from pomp and circumstance, and from grandiosity. In face of such evil, of such sacrifice, I find that silence is really the only thing that can even begin to capture to weight of the moment.

When calendars collide

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

When secular and ecclesiastical calendars collide, the secular calendar always wins. At least, it seems that way to me. Christmas on a Sunday? Let’s cancel church–Christmas is a time for family, right? Pentecost on Memorial Day weekend? Time to head to the beach. Observing this little fact over the years suggests that culture is more deeply shaping many American Christians than the story of the Church.

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Pentecost celebrates the church’s coming into being as recounted in Acts 2. The giving of the Holy Spirit is no small part of the story of the Church and it’s no small part of the story of individual Christians. That we are so immune or ignorant of the Spirit’s work in our own lives is, again, testimony to the ill health of the Christian community.

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Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with secular holidays such as Memorial Day. As a Reformed Christians I have no problem observing the sacrifice of members of the Armed Forces who have given their lives in the defense of the nation. The military is an extension of the civil authority and therefore is to be respected.

Further, I don’t have a great deal of problem with a sense of allegiance to or respect for one’s nation. After all, we’re all born somewhere and as part of some people. It seems to me that love of neighbor begins with love of one’s fellow countrymen. It should be remembered, of course, that love of country and allegiance to the flag (or the crown) has its limits.

There is a prior or more ultimate allegiance for the Christian–Christ himself and His bride, the church. We shouldn’t forget how radical a statement that can be. After all, imagine such words coming from the mouth of a Muslim. Some of us might feel somewhat different in that instance.

What I long for is a day when the evangelical church is marked by a growing sense of its on-going participation in the story of Christ as marked by the church calendar. What I hope for is the sense that above and before all other commitments is a commitment to a local group of believers who live in intentional accord with the testimony in the book of Acts (2.42):

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

I get excited envisioning a day in which when two calendars collide, the church calendar wins.

Don Quixote de la Vanderbilt

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by Jeff Gissing | @jeffgissing

They’re tilting at windmills again! Thirteen campus ministries are continuing their attempt to get Vanderbilt to reverse its decision to implement an all-comers policy for determining qualification to lead a student organization. As I understand it, the policy prohibits religious groups from using religious criteria to select their leaders. It has effectively revoked university recognition for more than ten student groups.

The saga continued this week with the publication of an Open Letter to the university. Personally, I have never seen the point of Open Letters (but that’s just me). Here it is:

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It is challenging to believe that university will reverse itself based on this letter. Parents, alumni, and donors of the university have expressed concern over the policy–to now avail. The Tennessee legislature passed a bill threatening state funding to the university. They had their bluff called by the university aided by the Governor who (not unreasonably) vetoed the bill.

Do InterVarsity, et al, really believe that they can prevail against an institution with the money, influence, and time that Vanderbilt enjoys (the university has the money and influence to outlast a protest movement)?

I haven’t the faintest idea. However, I do know a couple of things.

  • First, it is never wrong to fight for what is right though it may cost a great deal.
  • Second, truth is stronger that falsehood. Regardless of the outcome truth will, in the end, prevail.
  • Third, the Christian God specializes in using the marginal to overcome the powerful, using folly to outsmart the wise, and using the weak to defat the strong.

I guess that means that, in the end, the Don Quixotes of Vanderbilt have more going for them than one might think.

Five questions about online education

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What is the largest university in the United States? Ohio State or another large public research university? No, the University of Phoenix, a for-profit and largely online institution, is the nation’s largest university with more than 319,000 undergraduate students and more than 60,000 graduate students.

David Brooks writes with cautious optimism about what he describes as a coming “tsunami” in education–the transition of online learning from marginal to mainstream, even among elite universities. Read his essay here.

There are five question that come to mind in thinking about the mainstreaming of online education in the way we form undergraduate and graduate students for their vocations:

-How will online students experience community? One of the benefits of a residential university is a common life with shared experiences rooted in learning. How will this be created (can it?) for online students?

-What will this mean for faculty? Good teachers are more than talking heads. Sure, information transfer can happen virtually, but something is missing in the interpersonal interaction that takes place in real time and unmediated by technology.

What will this mean for the humanities? Online education more closely mirrors the working environment of a business. Intuitively, it seems easier for business and other professional disciplines to be taught this way. It’s a little more difficult for me to envision reading and discussing Hagel that way.

What will this mean for campus ministry? How will the work of making disciples and sharing the Gospel happen in a virtual community? How would it be different? How will it be the same?

What will this mean for local culture in indigenous contexts? If, as Brooks suggests, American universities will be able to exert a considerable influence in teaching students across the globe, we have to pose the question: is this exclusively good? Is there a down side? I don’t know. It seems to me that the internet has a remarkable flattening power that is not innately good (I don’t suppose it’s innately bad either).

What do you think about the future of education? Are you hopeful?

Gay Marriage 2 – The case for

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This post is part two of a four part series on the issue of gay marriage prompted by the upcoming vote here in North Carolina on a constitutional amendment intending to define marriage as between a man and a woman. For my introductory post go here. Tomorrow I will post a case against gay marriage. Later this week I will post about my convictions on this matter. Oh…my lawyer asked me to direct your attention to my disclaimer.

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A couple of notes…

In this post I will make an explicitly Christian case for allowing (or at least not objecting to) the state recognizing gay marriages and/or civil unions. Note that this is only a version of the Christian case, I am not claiming that it is the only case and by writing it I am not claiming that this is my conviction. It is simply my attempt to think through the issue using my own presuppositions as a reformed evangelical Christian.

Here we go…

There are several justifications a reformed evangelical Christian person could point to in order to support (or at least not object to) the state’s recognition of gay marriage–I have chosen to limit myself to three.

  • The distinction between the church and the civil authorities.

Sphere sovereignty – the principle of sphere sovereignty (developed by Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper) holds that each sector of society has its own particular and peculiar duties and responsibilities, and each sector is has its own integrity apart from the others. Each sector (the family, business, the church, government) ought to limit its role to the part of creation it is responsible for.

One way to apply this principle to the case in point, granted not the only way and perhaps a corruption of the principle’s original intent, would be to argue that often (not always) marriage has two actors (it co-mingles the church and the state) in a single act.

Church and state should be differentiated in the act of marriage such that the government could (as it does already) recognize a marriage independent of sanction by the church (as in when a marriage is conducted by a judge). Separating church and state involvement makes broadening the definition of marriage much more sensible, if not palatable.

Why? Because the separation of the two authorities exposes a definitional problem. Increasingly society answers the question “what is marriage?” in a way that is distinct from procreation (perhaps the single greatest argument to bar same sex marriage). Where marriage is defined as a way to give tangible expression to love and love is defined in first person terms (i.e., what fulfills me) the state (the electorate) has little reason to object to the broadening of marriage.

In fact, the broadening of marriage may even be seen as a good in that it provides legal protections for more people and creates greater social stability. Not to mention, any argument to limit marriage would need to appeal to arguments not explicitly Christian in nature (since the government is not the church and ought not to rely upon theological rationale for its policy decisions). Using the definition of marriage found above it is difficult to find a non-Christian argument against allowing same sex unions/marriage–perhaps not impossible, but probably not terribly compelling to society at large.

Spirituality of the church. This is a peculiarly Presbyterian and American (especially Southern) way of understanding the relationship of the church to civil society (in some ways it is similar to the concept of sphere sovereignty). This view emphasizes the differentiation between the roles and responsibilities of the church and state.

The church is concerned with matters “spiritual” and the state is concerned with matters “secular” and “civil.” The church shouldn’t wander into secular and civil matters even as the government ought to restrain itself from intervening in matters of theology or spirituality.

Insofar as one sees marriage as something that the church does and that the state does, those holding consistently (rather than selectively) to the spirituality of the church would hold strong views about the theological integrity of gay marriage (or lack thereof), but would likely conclude that the state ought to be free to regulate and expand (if it wishes) marriage beyond its traditional form.

Note: the doctrine of the spirituality of the church had, I understand, a great deal to do with the Southern church’s reticence to become involved in the Civil Rights movement. Rights, so it would seem, are a secular and civil matter which could lead Christians to be as politically uninvolved in this issue they are perceived to have been in the Civil Rights movement.

  • The principle of hospitality. 

Throughout the Old Testament we see a principle of hospitality to the alien and the outsider as a prevalent theme. Some Christians might draw a parallel between Gentiles in ancient Hebrew society and those whose sexual identity is other than heterosexual. Such a person may not believe that homosexual relationships are good, right, or ideal, but at the same time wish to be generous in extending to someone in a class of people often treated poorly by parts of our society the right to express their love through the legal act of marriage.

  • The principle of accommodation.

Why do we recognize divorce? Is it not because we recognize that our world is not a utopia (we’re east of Eden). Divorce, in the Biblical witness, is an accommodation on the part of God to the hard-heartedness of humanity. Might we consider same sex marriage as a similar accommodation? We might think that same sex attraction and homosexuality are not good or right, but as a practical matter we often make provision for the less than ideal. Is same sex marriage part of this category?

At least in the case that I’ve outlined here, the Christian case for gay marriage rests heavily on drawing a distinction between the purpose of the church and the purpose of the state. To reiterate, I have tried to limit my case to exclusively Christian beliefs or ideas and not appealed to sources like the U.S. Constitution, etc.

These are my thoughts…what are yours?