Right off the bat, let me commend to you and include by reference everything in Douglas Wilson’s opening post in his brief series interacting with the book.  As is often the case, Pastor Wilson is clearer, cleverer, and quicker to market with much of what I had hoped to say.

Having said that, I wish to begin with a few observations about some of the less charitable tweety-bloggy reactions I have seen:

1. Some cessationists will take every opportunity presented to them to pick on Mark for being unashamed of his own charismatic experiences.  Particularly problematic in their minds: he heard an audible voice tell him to marry Grace, preach the Bible, train men, and plant churches; what’s worse, he sometimes has visions (in the technical sense) that uncover things about the histories of others (often sexual sins committed by or against them).  Some have gone so far as to accuse Mark of mistaking some sort of demonic mental pornographer for the Holy Spirit, but these critiques seem to me to exemplify the kind of foolish hermeneutic (let’s call it “theological spice-tithing”) that latches on to single details in a way that manages to completely ignore both context and plot.  Mark describes these visions not as cause for salacious lust, but as occasion for mourning and weeping on behalf of sinners and victims, and frequently as the opportunities of their repentance.  There is nothing authoritative about these “revelatory” experiences (so “revelatory” is probably a misnomer), leaving us to judge them as the Bible teaches us to: do the experiences agree with the testimony of Scripture or contradict it (Isaiah 8:20), and do the fruits of these disclosures lead to confession, repentance, and thanksgiving, or do they lead to more sin, pain, and death (Matt 7, 1 Corinthians 14)?  Since I’m what you might call a chandelier-swinging charismatic, my only concern about these stories is that Mars Hill hasn’t yet found a theology of the Spirit that’s actually big enough to account for them.
2. Some from the egalitarian/equalitarian camp think it’s contradictory for Mark and Grace to simultaneously advocate (a) hierarchy of role and (b) sexual mutuality within marriage.  As I understand the Bible, (1) there is a recurring principle of particular mutual servanthood between spouses as an instantiation of the principle of the general servanthood of believers toward others (Luke 22, Ephesians 5, etc), (2) there is a recurring imperative for a wife in particular to specifically and distinctively submit to her husband in particular, who in turn specifically loves the wife in particular (Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, etc), and that (3) particular texts which apply mutuality to particular areas of marriage (such as sex, as taught in 1 Corinthians 7) in no way invalidate or conflict with the general theme of a structured leadership and submission relationship between mutually-serving spouses.  The donning of sufficiently thick hermeneutical glasses can render point (2) obscure, which wrongly turns the concurrent and mutually-informing commands of Scripture into a contradiction that needs to be untangled and resolved.
3. I’ve seen few reviews speak skeptically about the book’s approving citations of Archibald Hart on “testosterone-induced depression”.  This is another case where critics uncharitably latch on to one detail at the expense of context and theme.  The idea as presented is couched in Mark’s usual language about “this doesn’t excuse sin” and “this is not a weapon to use against your spouse”, phrases that most Christians would do well to repeat to themselves at pretty much all times.  Testosterone-induced depression is easy to scoff at until you or someone you love actually experiences it.  It’s not for nothing that 1 Cor 7 commands spouses not to deny each other sexually and tells singles that it’s better to marry if their alternative is to burn with desire; those blessed with the gift of chastity or with the gift of a satisfying sexual relationship with their spouse need to be very mindful of publicly taking their graces for granted.  Interestingly, this skepticism tends to come from the same sources that dislike the general frankness of the book; with Wilson (above), I worry that these reviews look more like willful obliviousness or denial about just how broken and confused so many of us are (congregants, pastors, everyone) than like pastoral wisdom.
4. Some have complained that the book doesn’t say enough to legitimize Christian vocational singleness (those who are called and gifted not to marry).  This complaint is fine so far as it goes, but really it’s just asking this book to do something it doesn’t claim to do: articulate a comprehensive theology of sex, gender, and sexuality.  There are plenty of other books that try to do that; this book seeks to be helpful to people who are or who desire to be married.

But enough about what everyone else says!  A few of my own thoughts:

1. Most importantly: mega-kudos to the Driscolls for their transparency in this book as sexual sinners, victims of sexual sin, and pastors/ministers.  This is as close as I’ve seen a book come to meeting the challenge of my Christian Sex Books Rant, and anything less-than-flattering I may have said above or below should be read as a footnote to my appreciation and gratitude.  Without diving too deeply into my own autobiography, the story of their own marital problems and God’s often slow, often painful work of redemption between them has encouraged and challenged me in ways too personal to share here.
2. Noticeably missing from the book is a development of a theology of marriage and sex; Paul connects the revelation of Christ and the church with marriage as a living illustration and embodiment of the gospel.  I appreciate the desire to try to get straight into the practical/”helpful” content, but it feels like the “It’s All About Jesus” meme could have made a stronger showing.  Some of my more sacramentally-minded friends will say this is to be expected given Driscoll’s de-spiritualized reading of Song of Songs; if it’s anything of the sort, I think it’s Mark’s Calvinism drawing his focus too quickly to the sin issues within marriages.  A brief chapter would, I think, have been helpful in providing a stronger foundation going into the questions in the “Can We ____?” chapter, and would have afforded an opportunity to preempt the quips about vocational singleness to boot.  To fill this gap, I recommend Sex and the Supremacy of Christ and Peter Jones’ “The God of Sex“, and wish to dissuade you in no uncertain terms from paying any attention whatsoever to Rob Bell’s “Sex God“.
3. The “Can We ____?” chapter, which many seem to latch on to as the “controversial part of the book where the Driscolls go too far”, struck me as truncated; the hype said “all your questions” so I fully expected the questions about body modification and home-made sex tapes that were asked but not answered in The Radical Reformission to make the cut.  As a series of brief and oversimplified case studies in how to apply the three-part ethic (“Is it unlawful? Unhelpful? Enslaving?”) to a relatively short list of controversial sexual topics, it’s a helpful starting point.  The message boards at http://boards.themarriagebed.com/ are a very useful resource for working through these questions with more depth and nuance; in addition to the technical points of the three-part ethic, it’s valuable to reflect upon pastoral questions about a spouse’s purpose and motive in making one of these decisions, and also to consider medical implications (What about oral sex with someone who has cold sores? What are the medical risks of anal sex? etc).

In short: if you’re married, or if you hope to some day be married, or if you’re in any way involved with counseling people who are, please read this book.  It sets a very different tone for the Christian conversation about sex and marriage, and I pray it’s a tone that will outlast whatever buzz the book itself generates.

What atheists foolishly call the contradictions of scripture, wise men see as a reproach to our bent toward simple-mindedness.  The magistrate IS a minister of God’s wrath on the unrighteous, and we should believe it, but we should not believe it in such a way as to invalidate God’s claim that He would rather see the wicked repent and not be destroyed.  The people rightly rejoice when the wicked meet their end; but the vengeance was not theirs but the Lord’s, so we must do so humbly, lest we fall into all kinds of temptation.  Jesus calls us to a simple faith, but not a simplistic one, in part because He has not been deceived (as we are) into thinking that our enemy’s machinations against us will be simplistic.

This illustrates a point that bears repeating: the Christian tradition consists almost entirely of resources for perpetual self-critique. On every side of this issue stands a Scriptural corrective reminding us just how creative we can be when it comes to finding ways to sin.  A wicked officer would refuse to pursue justice; a wicked blogger would demand that he refuse to.  A wicked man gloats over the death of a military enemy, but another wicked man cannot conceive that this enemy’s death may indeed have been just; yet another wicked man cannot tell the difference between gloating and rejoicing (and scolds the latter as if it were the former), and still another doesn’t understand why we should care what happens to a mastermind of mass murder, since he is God’s to judge.  And lest we forget, Christianity (as Judaism before it) is a faith forged under exile and oppression, so when the powerful claim great accomplishments we are not so credulous as to simply accept their version of history uncritically.

None of us get to speak infallibly ex cathedra on this issue; we all stand condemned of our sins of commission, omission, and motivation.  But God in his mercy has not left us there to mud-wrestle in the squalor of our confusion and speculation.  The Holy Spirit now indwells us to teach us how to think, love, judge, and walk as Jesus walked, and to teach and encourage one another to do the same.  The Scriptures stand as our reference point for God’s gracious self-revelation, not to provide us with one simplistic rule for any given situation, but to shape in us the kind of wisdom which begins with the fear of the Lord and works itself out in loving community.

I heard the dumbest testimony I’ve ever heard recently on the radio, and I’ve heard a lot of dumb testimonies. It was so bad, I almost vomited so hard that I almost triggered my airbag. It was literally this: “My life was horribl e and painful, and then I met Jesus and now everything’s perfect.” That’s not true. You didn’t meet Jesus. You met Jack Daniel’s and you are not paying attention to reality. A true testimony is this: “My life was pretty hard and I met Jesus. It’s gotten a lot worse, but he’s worth it and one day I’ll be with him.” That’s a good testimony. Jesus doesn’t fix everything. Jesus just makes the death purposeful. He makes the suffering and the pain and the hardship and the sacrifice meaningful.

In fairness, “perfect” is a strong word, and if we think the testifier means it literally then she’s indeed gone off the tracks and needs some loving correction.  But “perfect”, used conversationally, is almost always meant in a superlative sense: not to indicate actual perfection, but rather perfection by comparison.  If Jesus has truly set me free from slavery and bondage to sin and the devil, if He has truly transferred my citizenship from the dominion of darkness to His own Kingdom, if the God who once was a distant and ominous foe now draws near in brotherly fellowship, if my dealings with others in word and deed are now seasoned with salt and peppered with grace, if indeed it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me, and if these are not mere platitudes but the realities of my daily walk, then might not even the most trying adversity seem like a slice of heaven when compared with what came before?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but is Jesus’ burden so hard and his yoke so heavy that every sinner who comes to Him is made a liar if they are not groaning “some day it’ll be worth it” under its colossal tonnage?

I’ve made variations on this point before, but I think this highlights a hole in the middle of Mars Hill’s understanding of the Holy Spirit: it is His active work within us which enables us to take James 1:2 literally and “count it all joy”, to testify honestly to the world that as we are beset by light and momentary troubles, His strength truly is sufficient, and that by the sufficiency of His grace even a trial embodies His perfection when compared with the death and condemnation which used to saturate us and everything we touched.  Is our only consolation the “one day” when we’ll be with him, or is His kingdom in-breaking even now through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, who even right now is not only with us but within us?  Am I referencing mere verses to confess, or the narrative elements of our own stories?

None of this, of course, is to say that we should all expect Jesus to grant us immediate and uninterrupted smooth sailing as a quid pro quo of our conversion.  Far from it!  But at the same time, let us be wary of encouraging a congregation to sneer “they are filled with aged whiskey” (a la Acts 2:13) when we could in fact be hearing a testimony to the Spirit’s gracious generosity pouring out wisdom, courage, strength, joy, power, love, and a sound mind (for example) upon those whom until recently spent their entire lives stumbling down the wide road to perdition, dragging the curses of their iniquities every step of the way.  If the theologians in print are correct that the Kindgom is an “already-and-not-yet” reality, that the Church lives today in the “inaugurated eschatological present“, then we must be at least willing not only to give an “amen” when a brother or sister testifies that it is indeed so, but concerned for our own faith if that reality has never leapt from the page into the realm of our lived experience.

So do take up your cross, do not shy away from it, even as it pushes you past what you thought was your breaking point, for you know full well that it is no longer you who bears it, but Christ in you who has already born it for you and now fills you with His Spirit who enables you to bear, believe, hope, and endure.

Now, you will never hear me argue that Spiritual gifts and giftings have not been abused in many churches.  The observation is true enough, so far as it goes.  Its flaw is not that the observation is false, but that its scope is misleadingly narrow.  “People born in 1971 are susceptible to the influenza virus.”  “The water of the Massachusetts Bay is too salty to drink.”  “The city of Mogadishu does not receive enough rainfall to support a deciduous forest canopy.”  Yes, true, fine, but I think you will find that all years, whole oceans, and vast swaths of the African landscape share the same problems.

The abuse of tongues, prophecy, and healings are instances of the much broader pattern of abuse of what would otherwise be legitimate ministries.  Is it possible to abuse pastoral authority?  Yes.  Preaching?  Yes.  The Lord’s table (communion/eucharist)?  Yes.  Prayer and fasting?  Yes.  Bible study?  Yes.  Accountability/confession?  Yes.  Church discipline?  Yes.  Yes, all of them, yes; we can even find biblical examples of these abuses and God’s rebukes against them!  And while some sins are obvious to all — the prophet who is overly impressed with himself, the tongue-talker who shows no love and consideration for her fellow parishoner, the healer who is more show than good fruit — many more sins hide behind the facades of formal piety, personal sincerity, and institutional legitimacy in the guise of preaching, counseling, and fellowship.  But I’ve rarely heard it suggested, in spite of countless Scriptural rebukes of false teachers and the centuries of history testifying to the immediacy of this danger, that we should cease from preaching and only gradually, cautiously, reluctantly, and timidly re-introduce it.

By contrast, we see in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians a very different pattern.  The Corinthians made a mess of the Lord’s table; Paul’s response was not to declare a moratorium on the Eucharist, but rather to correct the error and encourage the church in doing what it ought.  The Corinthians made a mess of their sexuality; Paul’s response was not to call for mass castrations or universal abstinence but to tell those who struggle to be faithfully available as spouses to one another and those so-gifted to continue in their chastity.  The Corinthians made a mess of the exercise of the charismata when they gathered; Paul tells them he practices the gifts even more than they do, offers strong corrections to their abuses, and encourages them to continue prophesying and speaking in tongues, but to do so rightly.  He does not say “do so only so much as you are able to do it rightly”, but rather “do it rightly”.  The distinction is subtle, but the implications are huge: what God has commanded and commended we must not neglect, but rather must seek to do faithfully and consistently with His loving wisdom.

The charismata are no more the problem than prayer and preaching are the problem; all afford opportunities to love God and serve others, and all afford opportunities to sin against God and His people.  The ministries are not the problem; we are the problem.  Left to our own devices, we turn every good thing on its head, weaponizing and warping that which God has given to be balm for our wounds to straighten our paths.  And I find it ironic that the Scriptural prescriptions for our flesh’s predilection for sinful abuse are “do by the Spirit” and “be in the Spirit”, but that the ministries we most quickly and willingly quench for fear of “sinful abuses” are precisely those most evidently associated with the Spirit’s being and doing in and through us!

It’s possible to read Oliver Twist, and to be able to correctly answer a battery of questions about all of the horrible injustices and cruelties visited upon poor Oliver, but to completely miss that Dickens is commenting on the economic brutality of 19th century British industrialism.  This is why theologians make a distinction between exegesis (the correct reading of the words in a particular text) and hermeneutics (the interpretation of those texts in the context of the whole of Scripture) — to remind us to look not only for trees, but for the forests they belong to.  This is the first short-circuit of many would-be charismatic New Calvinists: they are content to be exegetical charismatics, but the hermeneutic which they apply to the remainder of Scripture — including many texts which refer to the Spirit directly — is still dominated by the categories and principles of cessationism.

For example, an old-school cessationist will insist that the New Testament’s exhortations to “prophesy” really mean to “carefully prepare a sermon, and then deliver it publicly”.  In spite of centuries of prestigious written tradition backing it up, such a reading is hopelessly unfaithful to the text, so a New Calvinist rightly concedes that Scripture says what it says, that there must be some sort of place for prophecy (an unpremeditated utterance under divine unction) in the believer’s life.  But he moves on to 1 Cor 14:26-31 and is at a loss as to its application, because he has taken the command for an “orderly” Church gathering below (1 Cor 14:32) and read into it ideas from Congregationalism, or Baptist tradition, or the regulatory order of his Presbytery, which esteem formal reverence and despise anything which smacks of spontaneity.  Because he has not yet kneaded the idea of prophecy as corporate ministry into the dough of his thinking, he fails to recognize that the Lord gives us prophecy for an essential and integral part of orderly worship, and not as an exception to it or violation of it.

This is often a throughgoing problem with our New Testament scholarship and preaching.  Cessationist tradition has taught us to treat “The Spirit” as a gloss for the Bible, or for self-discipline, or for education, or for the ordinances of the church, or for perseverance, or for maturity of mind or heart; but if we confess that the Holy Spirit is a person, then every time we encounter a reference to Him in Scripture we must immediately think of Him as “Him” — a personality, a will, a doer, an agent, an active participant.  I found this exercise illuminating: read Romans 8 or Ephesians 5, and every time you come across a reference to “the Spirit” write down everything you’ve been told (in sermons, bible studies, books, blogs, etc) that is referring to.  If you’ve been around the Christian block a few times in virtually any protestant circles (charismatics included, sadly), you will be shocked by just how many times and in how many ways you’ve been told to substitute some instrument, action, technique, idea, or inscrutable truism for the Spirit Himself as our constant companion, helper, and sanctifier.

And all of this is not to say that I’ve arrived at a correct pneumatology, by the way.  This is not a true/false criterion, it’s a journey of discovery and a discipline of learning and experience that, if all goes well, will span the rest of our earthly lives.  This is just a brother pointing out a stumbling block in the hopes of helping others clear it.

Our cultural dialog about sex has been turned precisely upside-down.  Fornication, adultery, pornography, sodomy, exhibitionism, and general licentiousness are talked about as “liberties” and “rights” which evil repressed men want to take away, when in reality each is a loaded snare just waiting to enslave unwitting passers-by.  The important question is not whether young women should be free to flaunt their sexual perversion on television, but why they are doing so with such calculated regularity; even a moment’s reflection makes the answer clear: to get a barbed hook into the brains of people they will never know, to play upon their weaknesses and extract as much money from them as possible.

When someone is an addict, you can respond in two ways: you can love yourself, or you can love them.  If you love yourself, you’ll manipulate, feed, and take advantage of the addiction so you can fulfill some want of your own: a codependent enables an alcoholic in order to feel needed, a dealer enables a junkie in order to keep demand for his product up, a media executive dangles an unending stream of addictive sexual imagery before the eyes of the world to keep them hooked and coming back for more.  Loving others above yourself demands a wholly different response, and it is a sick world that turns a blind eye to this kind of manipulative selfish greed hiding behind the pretense of “art”.

Almost as exciting as the time my review of Lincoln Brewster’s first album was quoted on his website, back in the heady days of the dotcom bubble.

Pastor Piper’s message included an interpretation of Romans 8:5 (particularly the phrase “the things of the Spirit”) which I can only call cessationist.  For those of you fortunate enough not to regularly wade waist-deep in theological lingo, cessationism is the belief that extraordinary manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s activity were normal in the first century of the church, but ceased at some point around the end of the first century, and that today the Holy Spirit restrains Himself and acts in and through believers and soon-to-be-believers in much more subtle ways.  The way this usually comes out in a cessationist’s theology and preaching is that Scriptural descriptions of overt and recognizable Spirit phenomena which are to continue to and through the present day are passed through an interpretive matrix which transforms them into actions which are outwardly indistinct from well-studied human action and in which the Spirit’s distinctive action is not discernible anywhere outside of the inmost secret parts of those involved.  For example, “prophecy” becomes “right preaching”, or “tongues” becomes “bible translating”.  In this particular sermon, it was Pastor Piper’s equation of “the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:5) with Scripture (by way of 1 Corinthians 14:37 and Ephesians 6:17), and thus “have their minds set on the things of the Spirit” was equated with “are deliberately filling their minds with the promises of Scripture, i.e. verses” (my loose paraphrase).

Now, I’m not saying that anything wicked or evil or heretical has gone down here.  I’m not saying Mars Hill shouldn’t have given him the pulpit.  I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to the message — in fact, you probably should; my qualms aside, it has much to commend it.  I’m not saying that the “things of the Spirit” aren’t Scriptural.  I’m not saying that the Spirit will do anything contrary to Scripture.  I’m not saying that the Spirit won’t normally make use of Scripture as His preferred mechanism to make plain to us that which He is doing.  I’m not saying that having command of a vast wealth of memorized verses is anything but beneficial to the believer.  I’m not in any way implying, insinuating, suggesting, or alluding that understanding and submitting to the whole counsel of Scripture is not immensely beneficial to those who would walk in and think upon “the things of the Spirit”.  However, it seems to me that simply equating Scripture and Spirit is a problematic way to read Paul because it dismisses the Spirit as the involved, experienced, active personal actor when a believer is “living according to the Spirit” (see Gordon Fee’s scholarly work God’s Empowering Presence), and that a theologically aware trinitarian congregation that is also self-consciously charismatic would be attuned to and not entirely comfortable with such an oversimplification.

That John Piper gave a sermon that was cessationist in some of its points is, of itself, not surprising, and not really problematic, at least not in any way that I’m interested in addressing right now.  If you understand me to be chucking a stone at Piper, keep reading, because stopping here, getting into a huff, and either leaving or posting in said huff will cause you to entirely miss the points I do think worth talking about, which follow from reflecting upon what appears to me to be a peculiar juxtaposition of facts:

1. John Piper gave a sermon which included clearly cessationist readings of Scripture in the pulpit of Mars Hill.
2. Mars Hill’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit is continuationist/charismatic, i.e., rejects cessationism.
3. Mars Hill’s teaching emphasizes the importance of studying your bible and thinking theologically, no matter what gets said from the pulpit.
4. The conflict betwen (1) and (2) has not produced any significant public clarifications, conversations, dialogs, etc.

Now, there are a number of ways I can understand how these seem to hang together, the first and most likely being that #4 is incorrect and that I am simply not in a place to have noticed this flurry of theological engagement and dialog.  I am not plugged into the heart of the Mars Hill leadership network and I am not a social butterfly intimately connected with a network of community groups, so it seems entirely plausible that the conversation could be going on in many places and has simply escaped my notice; if that is the case, mea culpa and my apologies for wasting all of your time.

Another potential explanation is that I’m wrong about #1, that in listening to the sermon three times in relatively short succession (I was eating dinner during the fourth service) I have somehow profoundly misunderstood an essential pastoral point in its narrative; again, if that is the case, then I’m sure someone will gleefully point it out to me, and I will be glad to acknowledge my misunderstanding and again apologize for the few minutes it’s taken you to wade through my wordy, thick, and often belabored prose.  (Sadly, I’m almost certain that even if I’m completely right about #1, someone will try to argue about it simply to score some sort of theological pissing content points.  Just an FYI, I do not intend to play that game.)

Similarly possible is that I have overestimated, and therefore overstated, #2.  However, I think Mark’s sermons on the matter have been fairly unambiguous and I do not think that the conflict between #1 and #2 rests upon some subtle minor point of charismatic doctrinal minutiae.

However, there are other possibilities that have, I think, important pastoral implications for Mars Hill.  For example, it could be that this discrepancy between Piper’s pneumatology (theology of the Holy Spirit) and Mars Hill’s is well-known, and people simply have chosen to politely overlook it, taking the wheat and leaving the chafe, and that I am demonstrating my own immaturity by even making an issue of this, in which case the community is to be commended and encouraged and I am to be reprimanded.  Unfortunately, it has not been my impression that Mars Hill’s culture defaults to such a style.  If anything, I was under the impression that we were in the midst of a multi-decade effort to offend and thereby scare away the neatnik nit-pickers who seem to flock to whatever the latest hot “Reformed” trend is, so I find it unlikely that the begged-for conversation about the distinction between Scripture Memorization as Sanctifier and the Holy Spirit as Sanctifier has simply been charitably skipped.

It is possible that Mars Hill’s people are simply not accustomed to applying critical theological thinking to sermons from well-spoken-of ministers. That it could be so seems wholly unremarkable to me; a quick look at the cultural morass we find ourselves in illustrates why.  But it does imply that the translation of #3 (above) from theory into practice isn’t going as well as it ought, and such barometers can be rightly used to inform pastoral course-corrections and sail-trimming.

Equally likely and more difficult to rectify (in my estimation) is the possibility that the street-level pneumatology of Mars Hill has almost nothing to do with its charismatic doctrinal statements and occasional sermons on the subject, and that in spite of what may be said and thought at the top, many (most?) Mars Hillers are not at all familiar with the categories, concepts, and language that surround the Spirit in the New Testament, and are thus simply unable to detect the theological divergence between Pastor Piper’s reading of Romans 8:5 and Mars Hill’s affirmation of the presently-phenomenally-active Spirit.  Again, if this is true then it’s an important navigational aid that it may be unwise to ignore.  Indeed, whichever of the aforementioned logs may be lodged in either or both of my eye sockets, this last possibility has to me the appearance of a splinter that steadier hands than my own should recognize the importance of removing.

Ladies, you do know that all of your male friends can see your status updates, right?  And you do know that all of your young male friends know the size of your breasts, right?  (Yes, we have noticed, and yes, we do remember.)  And you do know that most such men have keen visual imaginations, right?  And you do know that for many, knowing what the meme means, it’s an uncontrollable instinctive to immediately construct in their heads an image of you wearing a bra of the color you posted, right?  So you do realize that, at least from the point of view of your visually-minded brethren, there is little practical difference between this meme and the kind of exhibitionism most of you would balk at — say, posting a picture of you wearing only your bra — right?

As an observer of culture and a current reader of Libido Dominandi, I also feel compelled to add: And you do realize that, as a cultural force, female exhibitionism encourages men to demand more of you sexually while offering less of themselves relationally, right?

I only want to know about the bra worn by one woman: my wife.  And I don’t particularly want any of you whippersnappers to know anything about it, thank you very much.

I know, I know.  “Shut up, you misogynistic cancer-loving killjoy.”  I’m done now, I just needed to get it off my (proverbial) chest.

Modern “mass media” only works when it has a “mass man” to act on.  Mass man is a disconnected consumer, a credulous and compliant cog in the economic machine of production and consumption.  An important part of the formation of mass man has been his transplantation out of households, catalyzed in part by his migration into the modern industrial city.  This modern city – unlike the heavenly city of Jerusalem, the end of our pilgrimage – is a plausibility scaffold around disconnected individualism, in which mass man is disconnected from his historic faith (by his illiteracy, chronological snobbery, and over-specialization which isolate him from centuries of critical thought), his face-to-face faith community (by his individualistic spirituality and anonymized consumption through inorganic media channels), his extended family (by job-chasing distances and trend-chasing generation gaps), and his immediate family (by invasive non-stop entertainment, furious over-scheduling, and emotional self-absorption reinforced by a cultural exalting sexual selfishness).  A man so isolated is easy prey for advertisers and propagandists, swaying him by every whim of sophistry and tempting him by every appeal to his untamed covetousness.

This world seems bent on concocting as many “-isms” as possible, full of immobilizing deception and moral foolishness, and throwing so many at us that eventually enough will stick, neutering our witness, blunting our testimony, and torpedoing our mission.  However, in looking at the households I am called as a Christian to belong to — local Churches, the Church historic, and my family, immediate and extended — I see these innumerable fads constantly rebuked and shown up for the false passing-away wisdom of the age that they are.

Through the church I have come to know and love people whom my squeaky-clean career path and separated single-family home life would ordinarily keep me from ever encountering: brothers and sisters with Tourette’s, Parkinson’s, MS, MD, Down, and other neurological disorders.  When the libertarian right tries to make me an Ayn Rand-style Objectivist, I remember these dear friends, and remember that their conditions show up “self-ownership”, a man’s axiomatic ownership of his own body, as a fragile illusion, a laughable fiction.

Then the neoconservative right tries to sell me on the glories of American exceptionalism and her proactive military expression through preemptive war.  But I knew my great-uncle, Ken, who stormed a French beach on D-Day and for the rest of his life never really recovered from the experience.  While the almost unmeasurably vast cost of war sometimes must be paid, it is only at the utmost, and the bar for “utmost” is too-easily deflated when veterans are people on television and not dearly beloved and connected family.

Later an imperious adherent of materialism plies me with appeals to “reason untainted by superstition” and “scientific consensus”; when he does, my dear grandmother comes immediately to mind, and her long descent into Alzheimers disease.  And my pity for her low estate toward the end also struck down any rational pretense of a high self-estimation of my own awareness and rationality.  The mind’s grasp upon itself and the world around it is anything but a forgone conclusion; it is full of self-aggrandized self-assessments and corrupting delusions.  Such a mind, of itself, ungrounded, unbounded, and fully subjective, cannot rationally assert its own rationality on its own authority, because it lacks any objectivity with which to make sure an assessment.  And then I recall the dearly departed wife of another great uncle; she fled the Soviet invasion of Hungary, knowing full well the brutality brought by a regime drunk on the arrogance of its own unflinching rationality.

I could go on, but the big idea is this: real connection with real people makes a real difference, by helping us see for what it is the almost limitless fount of foolishness this age spews at us.