Fools

I'm not much of a Proverbs man. I don't read a proverb a day, and when I read them I'm looking for the same thing I always do: the person and the work of Christ. The proverbs confuse me a great deal, probably because I make them too complicated.

But they nonetheless hold a lot of quotable moments for me, and among my favorites is the famous "As the dog returns to his vomit, so the fool to his folly." It struck me in the past few days that this verse really describes the essential nature of the fool: someone who works folly and goes back to it. The fool is also described (Ps 14.1) as an atheist, as one who does evil, as one who works iniquity.

It is no wonder that Solomon describes the beginning of wisdom as "fear of the Lord." Foolishness in the eternal sense relates more to lack of faith (it's worth noting here the behavior of the Israelites with respect to their idols) than it does poor business sense or misuse of resources. It's not surprising to me to find this faithlessness an endemic quality of mankind (Ro 3, Ps 14, et c.).

My own sin alone convinces me of these things, and so does my experience with others. Why we are driven to touch the stove again when we know that it burns is not a hard question for me, I suppose; but it is still striking.

Creation

I do not often enter the Evolution / Creation debate, and I don't really intend to. One of my more submerged interests is philosophy, and I think that a significant source of conflict between creationists and evolutionists, whether they realize it or not, is a vastly different philosophy. It's fair to say that at least some philosophical considerations enter the debate, but in my experience most of the argument is spent (wasted?) on science.

This isn't sufficient because when the Christian says that God created, he does not use the word materialistically—the way that it must be used in science. The Scripture treats creation more fully than simple creation of stuff; God also created spirit and soul, neither of which are under the purview of science.

Someone with better vision than I will be able to better connect the immaterial creation with our own ability to create; materialism cannot explain narrative or myth, it cannot explain babies or consciousness, or why Terry Brooks simply cannot write another good book. In fact, materialism is probably one of the least descriptive philosophies, and one of the greatest arguments against chance.

The Corporate Nature of Worship

I am confessedly not much of a singer, a fact that belies my heritage (both of my parents are reasonably good at it and like music) and whatever musical education I had growing up. My wont during worship is to read my Bible, either to catch up on the recent readings from the one year Bible, for comfort, or whatever.

I began doing this as a defensive practice in high school youth group in response to the worship songs we would sing week to week. My distrust for youth group and the church was at an all time high then, spurred largely by the semi-pelagian perspective that dominated the church I attended at the time.

Then, as now, my interest remains more in doctrine and less in praxis. I have always been more interested in the meaning of baptism than the mode of baptism, the motivation for worship rather than the regulative principle, and so on. I have found, however, that as my interests in theology grew, I couldn't really divorce the study of doctrine from its implementation. This is probably earning me a big fat "duh" from the three readers or so that this blog enjoys, and it's well-deserved.

(This is not to give credence to ridiculous debates about the mode of baptism or any other nonsense; just that doctrine and praxis are inseparably woven together, I think.)


Worship is one area in which my feelings regarding practice and theology have not really had much time to settle. The beginning of the connection between the practice of worship and the theology of worship was the phrase "Proper orthodoxy breeds proper doxology," or "Right theology breeds right worship." This makes sense in many respects; worship without theology is idolatry, because we worship a god of our own devising.

All this is a pretty long introduction to the main story, for which I apologize.

I have been a little under the weather, which tends to exacerbate my logorrhea. However, it also has provided me a different excuse lately for not singing during church. There is a member of our group who has a pretty strong baritone (his father sings up front, and this one definitely takes cues from him) and isn't ashamed to use it.

As I was listening this past Wednesday to the various songs—the selection is usually better on the off days—it struck me more fully that worship really is a corporate experience. We worship together. And so in Psalm 34, we read, "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together" (verse 3).

One of my complaints about praise and worship songs is that they're hard to sing harmony for if you're at all like me. There's no songbook in our church, so I can't even make any pitiful efforts to read the music, so I'm stuck with the melody, which is generally out of my range (if not also my theological purview). But as this fellow was bravely adjusting the music for his baritone, I saw a glimmer of what worship used to be like for me: an opportunity to sing with other people, to commune in the things that cause us to praise God. It was not an individual's experience, but the body's.