The Science of Applause

The patterns of an audience's applause is a strange thing if you start to think about it.  Have you noticed it usually just takes one inspired person to start an applause in a big group?  Some join the applause to equally express their agreement.  Some join in to make sure there isn't that really awkward "one-person clap" which makes you wish no one clapped at all.  Many others join in unconsciously just because everyone else is clapping.

But there are some applauses that begin not really because of inspired audience members, but literally because there is a part of the performance where the music stops or the passionate speaker pauses and an applause is actually expected.  Have you noticed this?  It is very interesting.  They will literally draw an applause out of an audience.  This isn't necessarily manipulating.  For example, in a school play an audience may genuinely want to give an applause throughout the performance, but for disruption purposes they are instead guided to specific points where applauses are then expected.  But for many other performances or speeches there are not such noble reasons.  In fact, if you pay attention you will notice it is often quite an artificial contrivance.  Think of some fiery political speeches or some impassioned preachers for example.  Many of these people know how to artificially draw out an applause at the right moments to solidify their wooing of an audience.  Or think of bands at a concert and the way they might end their songs quite dramatically with the expectation of applause.  Can the audience do anything but applaud?  In these situations many audiences often will clap out of necessity or habit, or not wanting to make the speaker or performer feel bad.  All this is quite intriguing to me.

In many contemporary worship services it is not infrequent to hear an applause at the end of a worship song.  I wonder sometimes, what is the congregation truly applauding in church?  There is not one answer.  Every church is different of course.  Many are carried away in worship and adoration of God.  And the applause is actually a collective expression of their sense of the magnificence of God.  But I would also say, for many churches there are not such noble reasons.  Some impassioned church bands will do the same thing many other bands do on the secular stage; and they artificially draw out an applause from the congregation for their performance, like was mentioned above.  Some are not as brazen, but congregations are still confused and find themselves clapping for reasons they probably would have difficulty explaining.  To what or to whom they are clapping is quite ambiguous.

Some congregations, no doubt, just want to be respectful to the church band for its hard work and performance in the worship.  But there again lies something of the true underlying values of many church members and its leaders.  Church is an experience, where the congregation is on the receiving/viewing end and the band and the pastor are the performers.  And the one thing a respectful audience always does toward performers is give them a respectful applause.  I wonder how much of our fellowships and the members thereof actually view church through this lens.  A lens of performance.  In fact, there are many churches who do not call the members gathered for worship the congregation, etc. but actually call them the "audience."  Audiences receive performances.  Audiences don't participate in performance.  Audiences are always meant to be doing something significantly different than those on stage.  Is that really how we are supposed to think about church?  Is the Pastor or the worship leader doing something fundamentally different than everybody else?  Are those in the pew experiencing the worship or producing the worship?  It's very telling what's actually happening often by just the language that is used.  I wonder what would change if in people's minds God was actually the audience (not themselves) and every church member is on display for Him on Sundays.  Or even better, if everyone is the audience of just one performer: God.  I wonder what would change in how music is lead or how sermons are preached.  I also wonder the ways it would challenge congregations to rethink the objects of its applause.

De-debunking Trinitarian Analogies

It is said St. Patrick once explained the Trinity to the pagan inhabitants of Ireland by using a three-leaf clover.  Augustine preferred the psychological analogies of the mind, the emotions, the will, etc. as three expressions of one being.  Other analogies such as a single component of water (H2O) existing in three different states (ice, liquid, vapor), or a man who exists with three distinct roles (husband, father, friend, etc.) have become popular.  But actually Trinitarian analogies have now fallen out of favor.

In his systematic theology, Wayne Grudem typifies the theological posture of standard evangelical scholarship toward these type of Trinitiarian analogies.  First, he debunks the adequacy of the more common analogies comparing them to ancient and modern heresies, and then summarizes: "It is best to conclude that no analogy adequately teaches about the Trinity and all are misleading in significant ways."  So how does he debunk them?

Take the water analogy for example.  Grudem outlines its inadequacy by showing that there are parts of the analogy that don't translate to the Trinity.  For example "...no quantity of water is ever [in these states] at the same time," or "the element of intelligent personality is lacking."  But this is just a misunderstanding of what an analogy does.  Grudem confuses an analogy for an allegory.  An allegory has lots of elements and parts that are meant to be translated and interpreted as a symbol for something else.  Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory because many of the parts of the story are meant to be interpreted as a symbol of our spiritual journey.  An analogy is similar, but differs in one important respect.  There only needs to be one element that is translatable for an analogy to be well formed.  For example, God is our rock, the bible says.  This is an analogy.  How is God like a rock?  God is firm and immovable and trustworthy for building our life upon.  But is God made of granite?  Do rocks have intelligent personality?  No.  But I hope you can see that this doesn't mean the analogy is inadequate or misleading!  That is because the true function of an analogy is more limited than what Grudem and so many others assume in this context.  I am sure you can think of hundreds of biblical analogies along these lines.  God is a shield.  Jesus is a lamb.  Paul is a drink offering.  All these analogies have non-translatable features.  God is not made of metal.  Jesus does not produce wool from his body.  Paul is not inanimate liquid.  But none of those possible features mean the analogy is misleading or inadequate.  No analogies, including Trinitarian ones, need to be translatable in every or even in most parts for it to be an accurate or decent analogy.  It only needs at least one part.

Grudem knows this.  But I'm not sure he has worked through the implications of this for Trinitarian analogies.  He even knows that there are biblical words that are meant to be an analogy of the members of the Trinity.  The bible says God is a Father.  It also says Jesus is the Son, and the Word of God.  He says they are "close to an analogy" of the Trinity.  It is true they are not analogies of the doctrine of the Trinity per se, but they undoubtedly are analogies of the members of the Trinity and the inter-Trinitarian relationships.  And they are faithful biblical analogies not because for instance everything that characterizes a son in a typical family is like Jesus.  They are faithful analogies because one (or maybe two) characteristics of sonship match perfectly to Jesus.  If we only demand this more limited role for analogies whenever we (or the bible!) use them, why then do we demand some entirely different standard from Trinitarian analogies?

Skin-n-Bone Trinitarianism

Peter Leithart in highlighting parts of the historical work of Philip Dixon (Nice and Hot Disputes), observes that beginning with the English Enlightenment critical writers began launching “moralistic and rationalistic attacks on the doctrine [of the Trinity].  It didn't make sense, and, besides, it made no difference.  A doctrine so rationally absurd couldn't be the cornerstone of religion; a doctrine so practically insignificant wasn't worth believing.”

“Dixon argues that the more fateful dynamic came not from outside the church but from within, not from detractors of Trinitarian theology, but from defenders.  In responding to attacks, orthodox Christians turned the Trinity into a polemical doctrine, and the rich speculations that characterized the earlier part of the seventeenth century dried up.  The Trinity becomes a sheer, irrational datum of revelation, to be believed and defended but not a source of intellectual and spiritual delight...”

Here I Stand: Disney's Frozen vs. Martin Luther

In the cresendo moment of the Oscar-winning best original song “Let it Go” in Disney's 2013 film Frozen the character and hero of the story repeats resoundingly “Here I stand!”

Martin Luther in his famous defense before the Holy Roman Emperor used the same phrase: “Here I stand.”

But as Tim Keller and others have pointed out, the meaning behind these two identical phrases are vastly different.  Right before making this pronouncement, the character Elsa in Frozen sings:  “It is time to see what I can do, to test the limits and break through.  No right, no wrong, no rules for me.  I'm free.”  Right before making the same pronouncement, Martin Luther says “...my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”  Notice the difference.

Keller says, “Luther meant he was free from fear and from other authorities because he was bound by the Word of God and its norms.  Elsa speaks for contemporary culture by saying she can be free only if there are no boundaries at all.”

Jaded and Confused

A viral wedding video is now hitting mainstream news after getting almost 2 million views in less than a week.  It is a New Zealand video of family and friends performing a traditional Maori war dance called the Haka to honor the bride and groom.  The video is filled passion, zeal, tears, and joy to the point where the bride and groom themselves are overcome with the same feelings.

Here is the video

The response to the video is what interests me the most.  We're not too familiar with these powerful emotions in our culture.  Or at least the first two I mentioned.  And it was quite evident in the massive response to this video that our culture doesn't even have a category for this level of zeal and passion for anything really.  We grind through our day at the office, we try not to stir the pot too much at home, we chuckle a little watching our favorite TV show, and then we do it all again the next day.  Were also incredibly jaded.  Americans are the most entertained culture in human history. But also the most bored culture in human history.  Is there anything more ironic?  We've seen it all –usually in chunks of about 30 second sound bites (because we don't really have a much longer attention span).  And because we don't have a category for this level of pure passion, we shovel it off as craziness, backwardness, etc to make ourselves feel better.  

Do you have anything in your life worth getting this passionate about?  Is there an aspect to your life that would ever stir you like this?  I'm convinced that the popularity of this video is primarily because we are stunned by such a rare picture of passion and zeal.  It is the rarity that leaves us confused; and hopefully leaves us thinking there might be more to human passion and the objects worthy of such, than the self-induced numbness we often find ourselves under.

The Rise of Nationalism

“Among the ideas that the Middle East imported from the West, none has been more popular and durable than nationalism,” says Goldschmidt and Davidson in their Concise History of the Middle East.  “Often called the religion of the modern world... we define nationalism as the desire of a large group of people to create or maintain a common statehood, to have their own rulers, laws, and other governmental institutions.  This desired political community, or nation, is the object of that group's supreme loyalty.”

It might seem strange to American ears, but having a nation-state that governs according to the interests of its people is a relatively new phenomena in history.  It started in Europe and toward the end of the 19th century began to reverberate around the world and into the Middle East.  They go on to say: “[Middle Easterners] learned that bad governments did not have to be endured (indeed, many earlier Muslims had defied tyrannical rulers), that individuals had rights and freedoms that should be protected against official coercion, and that people could belong to political communities based on race, language, culture, and shared historical experience -in short they formed nations.”

But of course creating political borders of defined groups of people based on language, ethnicity, and culture can create a charged atmosphere that often tends toward uniformity and not diversity.  It can tend toward exclusion and monolithic communities, not inclusive ones.  So for example in South Asia, a place where Hindus and Muslims lived side by side for centuries, two new nations were created in 1947 (ostensibly to serve the unique interests of each people) and what happened?  Immediate population exchange.  Hindus left Pakistan.  Muslims left India.  The opposite of diversity, inclusion, and peaceful co-existence.  A natural segregation based on race and especially religion became the real product of nationalism and its nation-creating solutions.  The same happened at the creation of the modern nations of Greece and Turkey.  Population exchange.  There are dozens of similar cases, especially in Africa.  The fact is that unless checked nation-states naturally create an atmosphere that tends toward homogeneous communities of the same race, culture, religion, and language.

Nevertheless, western European and North American countries have historically and quite uniquely maintained checks built into the political system that have kept much of these trends at bay.  Of course America was created with these types of checks built right into the constitution (e.g. 1st and 15th amendments).  But for many reasons the collective feelings have begun to shift.  The migrant crisis for example has forced many in Europe to rethink why they should continue to allow influxes of diverse communities into their country.  America even has a politician publicly promoting the exclusion of people based solely on their religion.  And his popularity has not waned in its wake.  The checks put in place are beginning to erode and I wonder if the natural trend will carry the West along the same trajectory of so many others.

But there is more to reflect on here.  There is a value at the core of nationalism that is pulling these trends.  And these two historians have defined it perfectly: “This desired political community, or nation, is the object of that group's supreme loyalty.”  The key word is supreme.  Individuals are to subordinate any other loyalties underneath their supreme loyalty to the nation.  The trends mentioned above are simply symptoms of this underlying value.  It still surprises me that such a vast swath of Christendom continues to live under this vision of loyalty and allegiance.

Joy to the World (Unedited)

Unless you are pulling out a traditional hymn book in church you are unlikely to sing the richest part of the Christmas song: Joy to the World.  Most of the versions on the radio, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, even Veggie Tales omit this incredible verse of this song.  It reads: "No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns invest the ground, He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found..."

And strangely this verse stands at the very center of the biblical reason why this baby is actually bringing joy to the world.  It gets me every time I sing it.