SEEING THE SIGNS FROM STREET LEVEL

BOOK REVIEW: David Leong's Street Signs

David Leong has done us all a great service. With his recently-published book Street Signs, he has added appreciably to an understanding of what it means to live and proclaim the word of God speaking both from and into the cultural landscape.

Using Seattle as his paradigmatic exemplar, Leong, who serves as Assistant Professor of Missiology at Seattle Pacific University's new seminary, writes compellingly about what it means to exegete the neighborhood (the "signs" at street level) and to weave it into a theological context for embodying and witnessing the good news of Christ. His insights, which draw broadly on semiotics and sociology as well as missiology, will provide an additional and likely powerful filter for local churches, parachurch ministry, judicatories, and the academy in their understanding of the nexus of religion and American life -- with untold potential. Especially evocative is his three-"lens" model for urban contextual theology, discussed at length in the book but graphically encapsulated with a diagram on page 220.

As an opening salvo in the emerging subdiscipline, Leong's work does have a few rough edges and places which call for more development. The book reads a bit like a dissertation -- which, apparently, it is, in reworked form. (Leong has his Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary.) At times, the insistence upon reading with the culture and being influenced by insights from the context threatens to overshadow the Biblical mandate to speak into the human story of history, culture, and society. I would have liked to see a bit more of the "hows" of practical application -- which, to be clear, are there to be mined and have great potential for working even interculturally.

For those who are serious about urban ministry, about Christianity's confrontation and interplay with culture, and about how the everyday characteristics of neighborhood life can be potent memes with semiotic significance for mission, this is a book not to be missed. David Leong has given the future of urban Christian work -- indeed, all ministry -- a true gift.

(Leong, David P. Street Signs: Toward a Missional Theology of Urban Cultural Engagement. American Society of Missiology Monograph Series, vol. 12. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2012. Pp. xx + 250)


Prince Frederick, Maryland (Providence)

"For the unholy and profane ..."

THREE KINDS OF IMPIETY: 1 Timothy 1:9 (part 4)

... understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers ...

Paul continues his roll call of those for whom the Law is divinely tailor-made with a delineation of three kinds of impiety.

Contempt for the things of God. To be "unholy" is to think, speak, and act in a way which deliberately repudiates or denigrates what God has made holy. It is a form of blasphemy, slandering God through the misuse of His good gifts for evil ends. "Profane" means to treat the holy as common, failing to make a distinction between what is sacred and what is common and disreputable.

Still, it is not necessary to say the Lord's Prayer backwards or hang a cross upside down to act in an unholy way; nor is Belshazzar's use of the sacred temple vessels for a drunken party (Daniel 5) the one and only paradigm for treating the sacred as vulgar and common. There is a certain casualness which can creep into our spirituality, to which those who handle holy things routinely may be most vulnerable, which by its levity can not only passively dishonor God's majesty, but rob others of the sense of the mystery of the beauty of holiness.

Failure of filial piety. The law of Moses decreed death for those who strike their parents (Exodus 21:15). Most people would say, "I would never do that; I would not in a hundred years hit Mom or Dad." But again, this law says more than it at first seems. Too often I have had occasion to witness the abandonment or rejection of family members by parents, children, siblings ... those whose homes and lives should have been ever open. We live in a culture which glorifies youth at the expense of age, and in ways too many and complex to delve into here, sets the interests of generations at odds with each other.

Disdain for human life. "All life is sacred," intones our society with its facile credo, but actions say otherwise. In fact, we tend to hold sacred the life that we value in some way, and dismiss other life -- whether it is the unborn child, the prisoner, the victim of poverty or warfare in the third world, the unseen worker or victim of human trafficking. Nor is "murder" limited in its scope to the actual ending of biological life, for the casual disruption of someone's livelihood and willful character assassination can be just as destructive, as is the robbing another of a future which might have been his or hers. A worker's years of devoted service to a company fail to receive their due reward in old age because a corporate raider breaks it up to sell off its assets; a young person's place in a college or training school is stolen due to corrupt practices; a home is destroyed or a dream shattered by another's selfishness.

The law calls for respect in fact where there is a tendency to offer only lip service and platitudes. The Gospel ethic of course is higher still: active love.

Lord, when I first read this list I think these things cannot apply to me. I don't take Your name on my lips in vain; I don't hurt my parents; I don't commit murder. Yet the deeper impieties of heart and contemptuous ways of mind and spirit convict me to the core. Forgive me, O holy Lord, and let me be conformed inwardly as well as outwardly to the holiness without which "no one shall see God". For the sake of Christ: Amen.


Prince Frederick, Maryland (Providence)

"For the ungodly and sinners"

COMMISSION, OMISSION, AND FOOLISHNESS: 1 Timothy 1:9 (part 3)

If the contrast between the "lawless" and the "disobedient" turns on whether or not one has the law, that between the ungodly and sinners falls on the fault line between those who have God but do not walk in God's way, and those who are fully apart from God.

"Sinners" is a straightforward word. To be in sin is to be alienated from God; to commit sin is to violate God's law or God's will. Original sin is the term for that alienation from God which is our common lot as human beings apart from grace; actual sins are those actions or inactions which cause us to runafoul of God's purposes for us. The latter come in two varieties: transgressions or "stepping across the line", which are active sins of commission; and the neglectful sins of omission, which can be just as active in their own way but feel to us to be passive.

But who are the "ungodly"? Who else could they be, but those who do not know God or acknowledge Him as Lord? The Psalmist declared: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). Yet the distinction is subtler than it may first appear, since we can confess God's existence and sovereignty with our lips, while functionally denying Him (as Jesus pointedly reminds us in Matthew 7:21). In fact, it's tempting to say that while many "secular" seekers in the world are indeed sinners, the great tragedy is the way in which conventional religion -- even much of what passes for Christianity -- is nothing less than an exercise is pious-sounding ungodliness.

Lord, I echo the apostle's sentiment that I am the chief, the very king, of sinners. Forgive me, I pray. Even more, forgive my bent toward ungodliness and deliver my heart from the casual neglect and denial of You. Amen.


Prince Frederick, Maryland

A HAPPY AMENDMENT TO HISTORY

Witnessing Lincoln

Steven Spielberg's new historical movie, Lincoln, is a tour de force, if not always of historical accuracy (on which, see Howard Holzer's piece in The Daily Beast, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/22/what-s-true-and-false-in-lincoln-movie.html), at least of something of the drama and spirit of the history surrounding the sixteenth President.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field do a masterful job of portraying the Union's first couple, mired in the national as well as personal heartache of the Civil War. Ever noted for his immersion in the roles he plays, Day-Lewis captures a sense of both the man and his remarkable placement in history. The tenor voice, the war-weariness reflected in his shambling gait, the bent to diffusing tension with a pertinent (or not-so-pertinent) story or bon mot, the sense that he was a smarter man than given credit for yet found his element at just the nexus of national crisis when otherwise he might have been a wanna-be politician of merely local prominence (not unlike his great general U.S. Grant) -- all of these add depth, authenticity, and lustre to an exceptional performance. Let's not forget that this actor portraying one of our greatest Presidents is from the British Isles -- a fact easily put out of mind, the more so as he cracks one very funny story at English expense. He may add a third Best Actor Oscar for this performance and if so, it would be well-earned.

The portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln likewise captures the alternation between high purpose and venality, machiavellian lucidity on the one hand and borderline hysteria on the other. In this, Field avoids the excesses of portrayals like that of Mary Tyler Moore a couple of decades ago.

Even the likenesses are well-done: David Strathairn makes a very credible William H. Seward, but the winner in my estimation is Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Stephens.

The depiction of black Americans, while in some ways anachronistic (their welcome into the House gallery, for instance), lends gravitas and drama and highlights the importance of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery in all U.S. territory. This points, for me, to the greatest achievement of Lincoln: its almost religious faith in how democracy, for all its messiness and even squalor, can by a confluence of interests and guided by visionary leadership, "get it right" in ways which are truly profound and bear immense and lasting consequences.

If you haven't seen Lincoln, do. Not a regular movie-goer by habit, I did so, twice. It was not only a delight, but a worthy investment of time. And a reminder of what there is to believe in about America, and why we do.


Prince Frederick, Maryland