On scruples and stumbling blocks

Why on earth people put up with it when someone wants to elevate the way they've done church for fifty years, or their personal likes and dislikes, or their own man-made conceptions of what is right and wrong to scriptural status--well, it's beyond me.

I know that people will tell you that you shouldn't do this or that because we shouldn't do something to make a brother stumble, and that is true enough, but oddly, I have never heard this objection from someone who was in danger of stumbling! They are always concerned about someone else, some hypothetical brother somewhere who might be put at risk by your behavior, even though they've never seen or heard of you.

Occasionally, the people who want to boast in your obedience to their rules will tell you that they are the "weaker brethren" who are at risk, but I don't buy it. I ain't never bought it. The people who spout these unnecessary and unscriptural rules couldn't be made to break them at gunpoint. They aren't at risk of anything, least of all stumbling over their own man-made rules.

Julie Neidlinger wrote recently about Christians who seem to make an article of faith out of nutritional fads:

Christian magazines -- World Magazine, for example -- are filled with ads for vitamin supplements that will restore health. Royal Jelly changed our lives! Eat like King David! Avoid the lions and eat like Daniel! Ezekiel 4:9! Live forever (with some addendums and qualifications)! Cleanse! Clean! Restore!

The ads read like some kind of salvation via food evangelism.

All I need is a good dose of sin-guilt the next time I eat pizza. Or crack open a Diet Coke. Obviously, gluttony is its own excess, but I wonder at all of these "Christian" nutritional concepts. They are a kind of excess in their own right, just another "little god" we start out innocently creating until it becomes yet another driving force driving us away from the meat of the Gospel.

I take a general multi-vitamin. I take fish oil capsules. We don't have a lot of sun in the winter and I know I don't eat enough of the best foods to get those vitamins. That's just doing the best I can to prevent preventable health conditions. Like scurvy or something. But all these ads...I agree with Rob Bell: "Christian" is a noun, not an adjective. I wonder at how we stick it in front of every imaginable product and somehow open the gates of trust and, subsequently, wallets.

Michael Spencer (Internet Monk), "Can Christians share in the joke?" a question I asked myself in college, when I would deliberately stop myself laughing at a funny but off-color joke for fear it would be a "bad witness."

More importantly, many Christians are unclear on when they can join in the laughter that other people may find in a particular situation. Put a group of conservative Christians into a movie surrounded by unbelievers. You'll soon notice Christians making an attempt not to laugh, even at what they know is funny, because of their belief that to laugh at some things unbelievers find humorous amounts to compromise. Others will be compelled to appear offended, and some genuinely are, while the majority of the audience laughs. Perhaps the minority is in the right, or perhaps they are seeing and hearing something quite different in the humor presented....

Here Christians do have to make judgments, and those judgments are not simple or always predictable. Elsewhere, Lewis says that it is not a good thing when someone insists that all persons exercise total abstinence in an area where temperance is appropriate. So it is with humor. Complete abstinence seems like the easier route, but I am convinced that temperance, which will risk some participation that the teetotaler refuses, is the better route. So I prefer to risk engagement with humor rather than to avoid all worldly varieties of it.

From a 2002 essay by Michael Spencer, "Why Do They Hate Us?" -- us being evangelical Christians:

7. We take ourselves far too seriously, and come off as opposed to normal life. Is it such a big deal that Christians are offended at so many things others consider funny? I'll admit, it is a small thing, but it is one of the reasons ordinary people don't like us....

We are frequently unable to see humor, absurdity, and the honest reasons for humans to laugh at themselves. What very normal, very healthy people find laughable, we find threatening and often label with the ridiculous label "of the devil."

The message here isn't just that we are humorless or Puritanical. The message is that being human or being real is somehow evil. This is one place I can feel exactly what the unbelievers are talking about. When I see Christians trying to rob young people of the right to be normal, ordinary and human, it angers me. I feel threatened. It's hard to like people who seem to say that God, Jesus and Scripture are the enemies of laughter, sex, growing up and ordinary pleasures. Some Christians sometimes seem to say that everything pleasurable is demonic or to be avoided to show what a good Christian you are. Isn't it odd that unbelievers are so much more aware of the plain teaching of scripture than we are?

Andy Crouch on "The Pleasures and Perils of Fermentation," a talk given to a chapel service at a Christian college during "Alcohol Awareness Week," looking at two episodes in the Bible involving alcohol -- Noah's drunkenness in Genesis 9, and Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana in John 2:

But what about when we leave college, legally of age to drink? Then, again, we'll have to ask what story we are joining with our choices. We may know our family story well enough to know that alcohol, in this fallen world, is very likely to master us in the way it mastered Noah. Or we may find ourselves in a culture where alcohol has become so intertwined with shame that for a Christian to consume it would be to bear false witness. That is true right now in many parts of Africa, where our Christian brothers and sisters have seen the evil that the colonizers' alcohol brought with them; it may well be true in Russia, with its devastating national history of alcoholism; and I suspect it's true at Michigan football games.

Whether we abstain for our whole life or just in certain contexts, there is good news for us. We know the Jesus who turned water into wine. Jesus is the life of the party. He does not require wine to get a party going. He can work with anything. He does work with anything, or anyone. He will make us effervescent, bubbling over with life, a sign of the best news for the world, without a bit of fermentation required.

On the other hand, we may well discern that in the place and time where God has put us, fermentation is a gift we can receive. If so, there is good news for us there, too. Jesus heightens our senses. He makes us alert to everything that is most real in the world, and dulls our taste for everything that is false. So we will never need to drink too much. One beer will last us a long time, because we will be tasting it, savoring it, noticing it, knowing it--not just drinking it. If we have any sense we'll save our precious discretionary dollars for what is best--the best beer, the best wine, the best whiskey, so we will not drink often but we will drink well. We will drink from glasses that bear witness to culture at its best, to the long history of grapes and barley and wheat, to the lingering taste of soil and water and barrels and air.

An anonymous correspondent explains to Anna Broadway and the rest of us why evangelical Christian single men are such "hapless hesitators":

Then, one day, the Christian boy feels physical attraction to a girl, and since nobody has delimited where physical attraction ends and where sinful lust begins, the whole thing is tainted with guilt. He sees no way he can express attraction or flirt with a "sister" with "absolute purity." ... And finding that the feelings haven't gone away, he approaches the girl in an unappetizingly timid fashion, or lurks at a distance, or approaches tangentially as if his obvious attraction isn't noticed. He's been convinced that flirting and dating are "sinful" or "manipulative," and is embarrassed before himself that he even has physical attractions, 'cause all he's ever been told is that character and godliness are all important in a mate. (Christian authors and preachers often won't even acknowledge the aspect of physical attraction which initiates virtually all pursuits.)

So what often happens next is that the godly Christian guy goes to the Christian book store for help (I'm telling you, just about all of my friends have done this, and all of them are still single)-because God knows his dad is never going to teach him how to flirt, to read body language, or to practice proper dating etiquette, and what he finds is that all the books in the Christian book store on relationships only talk about the morals (in other words, more accusations of wrongdoing and wrong feelings), and not the mechanics of winning a girl's heart....

Christian men who are serious about their walk with God... tend to fixate on becoming godly/virtuous etc. and neglect the physical and social aspect of their cultivation . . . and then they become a bunch of awkward weirdos unequipped to do anything but fail at pursuing Christian women. And even if character will carry the relationship in the long run, if the guy is a total turn off to the girls he's interested in, the relationship he's hoping for is not likely even get started to begin with.

Spurgeon, once more:

There is growing up in society a Pharisaic system which adds to the commands of God the precepts of men; to that system I will not yield for an hour. The preservation of my liberty may bring upon me the upbraidings of many good men, and the sneers of the self-righteous; but I shall endure both with serenity so long as I feel clear in my conscience before God.

Originally drafted on 2007/10/14, rediscovered and actually published on 2025/01/01. I'm not sure why I left this in draft. Perhaps I intended to add more related links, perhaps I intended to write some comment that would draw all the different quotes together. Where I could I updated dead links using the Wayback Machine at archive.org. Sadly, Dan Paden's No Blog of Significance is long gone, and the article linked was not archived (although many of his entries are), and Julie Neidlinger opted some time ago to exclude her website from the Wayback Machine, although she is still actively writing at loneprairie.net, so the fragments quoted above will have to suffice.

Anna Broadway is still writing, having published a new book this year, Solo Planet; research involved a year and a half traveling around the world to learn about the experiences of single people in Christian communities. Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

One further good quote from Andy Crouch's chapel sermon, referring back to Genesis 9 and an anecdote about a lecherous, drunken boor at a football game:

I can't help noticing that sex is present, along with shame, in the stories of both Noah and the Michigan football game. It's hard to talk about alcohol without talking about sex, and you can't talk about sex these days without talking about alcohol. One of the most remarkable developments in the last twenty years has been the rapid rise of binge drinking not among college-age men, but among college-age women, 40 percent of whom have had more than 4 drinks in a row in the last week. I have a theory about this. I believe that drinking for college-age women is largely a way to make sex easier--to ease the pain of hooking up, the pain of anonymous sex. Sex with someone you've made no promises to, for whom you haven't changed your name, is indeed anonymous, without-a-name sex. It's also story-less sex, with no history and no future. When it stops feeling good, it hurts, because sex is made to change our names, to change our stories. And when it doesn't change us, it leaves us empty and lost, stranded outside the story we were made to live in. It's a shame--and because it's a shame, it doesn't just affect the individuals who choose it. It leaves all of us, like the father in the gray shirt, like my friend Harold, like the crowd at that game, stranded outside the best story.