WHEELS-OFF NEWS REPORT: DTS Student Arrested After Expressing Pro-Enlightenment Views

(AP—Dallas)-- Dallas Theological Seminary campus police were called to quell a disturbance in TODD Hall late Friday evening following a Theology class in which a student took a pro-Enlightenment stance.

Details were scarce, but several sources reported that the student may or may not have meant the stance to be deliberate.

“I was there,” said Wendy Schlietternhausenshen. “I knew that Matt was just thinking out loud through the issues, and didn’t mean to actually come across as pro-Enlightenment. He would never do that.”

The professor of the class was visibly shaken as the student in question, Matt Towers, was escorted off campus.

According to Schlietternhausenshen, the incident began around 7:30 Friday evening in a Theology class, in which Towers asked a question about the role of the individual in the process of salvation. He danced nimbly around Arminianism, but was unable to keep from connecting the notion of “standing before your maker as an individual” with the Enlightenment-era ideals of similar value.

As the class began to discuss the ramifications of the emphasis on the individual in postmodern church culture, that connection immediately caused Towers trouble. While being led out of the classroom in doctrinal shackles, Towers offered a rushed explanation:

“I temporarily thought that the real culprit in self-centered modes of worship today was existentialism, which is a 19^th century German concept that has invaded our culture on all levels today, rather than the Enlightenment. It was only momentary, and I immediately apologized and professed by undying devotion to the idea that anything American is bad because it’s commercial. I’m sorry!”

After regaining control of the chaotic classroom in which several students were believed to have begun momentarily thinking for themselves, processing Tower’s comments, the professor immediately underscored the official attack stance against the Enlightenment: “The Church is community, and we have become individuals, but we should be collective in nature. Let us bow our heads and pray that Matt may find his way back into our community that we just threw him out of, and that when he returns he is driving a Prius.”

Though the class seemed somewhat disturbed, the professor attempted a soothing explanation of the evening’s events: “this is the real problem with the Enlightenment—the belief that the individual can think for himself. Now open up your notes and let’s continue this Power Point.”

Hilarious Facts About DTS #4: The Ubiquitousness of the Lengthy Prayer

If you graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary with a Th.M. degree, you will have earned 128 hours credit. This means that you will, on average, spend around 1500 hours in a classroom environment in the course of your degree plan. 

Of these, the average DTS student may reasonably expect to spend approximately 732 hours in prayer.

By "prayer," I don't mean actual prayer so much as being an unwitting member of an audience to someone else's prayer. It doesn’t take a prize-winning sociologist to notice that prayer on the DTS campus is a marathon, not a sprint. When asked to pray audibly, the average DTS student or professor will go easily above and beyond the common understanding of prayer as “communication with God”—and proceed directly to “small speech delivered to a broad audience in order to demonstrate mastery of theological principles.” This writer has yet to clock a campus prayer at anything less than 5 minutes, and many have logged record-pushing marks of 9 and 10 minutes. It is a fact of universal acceptance among DTS alum that a long prayer is a correct prayer. 

The old narrative comes to mind of former President Lyndon Johnson asking his chief of staff to pray over their cabinet meeting (possibly the last Democrat to do this). The chief of staff bowed his head and began to pray, but his voice was largely inaudible. “Speak up!” barked the President. “We can’t hear you!” The chief of staff raised his head humbly and remarked, “with all due respect, Mr. President, I wasn’t talking to you.” This story might be seen as wholly unremarkable in a seminary classroom. The prime audience of the average campus prayer is the campus, not God. 

There will be the required taking of prayer requests, and the pre-prayer discourse about the importance of prayer, and then there will be the prayer. Your greatest hope, if you’re in the classroom, is that Jesus returns before the prayer is over. If that doesn’t happen, your next best hope is that the professor does the honors, rather than a student. For if a student is called upon to intercede audibly before the Almighty, he will absolutely mount a filibuster of positively Presbyterian proportions. The goal is either to be remembered for his impressive prayer, or to be remembered as one upon whom NOT to call on for prayer in the future. 

The next cottage industry could well be a t-shirt sold in the bookstore that reads, “My Prayer Kicked Your Prayer’s Ass”. Of course, it would have to have a picture of Baalam on the front in order to squeeze the merchandise past the censors. 

It dawns on the objective observer that long prayers might have the unintended consequence of turning people off from prayer. If I knew, for example, that every day at 9:30 AM I would have to bow my head, close my eyes, and turn off my thinking mechanism in order to listen to a prayer, I might reasonably be expected to begin dreading that moment. Of course, this would be a wrong response to a necessary evil: public prayer is important. And, ostensibly, most of the seminary students will go on to become pastors in Baptist churches, in which they could legitimately be voted out of the pastorate for preaching less than a 7 minute prayer in front of the congregation. And so I must (and will) dutifully bow my head and close my eyes and pray to God in my own head. Of course, God and I can generally cover most of our material in around a minute in one setting, after which He is generally expecting me to go do something of value. 

However, I do not hold against my fellow seminarians their propensity for loquacious public prostration. When called upon to pray, they have rightly concluded that it is Show Time. Woebetide unto the student who surreptitiously checks his email during prayer—this is akin to a drama class not paying attention during a student’s monologue. We are a hostage audience to this incidental verbosity, and we know full well that our time will ultimately come, as well. For this reason, many of us have written out and memorized our lines, in order that we might have more material than we typically have. 

I can imagine my fellow seminarians praying over their food, and not actually having time left to eat it afterward. Think of it as a sort of hunger strike for Jesus….a testament to their level of dedication to the Marathon Prayer. It is truly an impressive display of religiosity that is unparalleled in any other setting.

I am considering suggesting a curriculum amendment that would allow us to actually receive course credit for prayer. If this idea is implemented, it would grant Independent Study credit to any student who has already sat through more than 200 hours of prayer. 

I can only pray, of course, that I would be automatically grandfathered in. But that prayer would probably be too short, and my application would be denied.

Hilarious DTS Fact #3: Beware The Student Who Fell Off The Deep End of Theology

One of the most hilarious facts about DTS is the dire warnings of students who go off the deep end in their theological studies and leave seminary—perhaps as graduates—with no love left for Christ. 

This sounds like it would not happen very frequently—especially in a culture that is adamantly opposed to any teaching that gets close to articulating modern apostasy among Christians—but apparently it does. In every class, and at every juncture, you will be bombarded with the sad narrative of So-And-So, whose name has been withheld in order to spare his family and friends the eternal shame. So-And-So came to seminary on fire for God, and couldn’t wait to study the deeper principles of the Word. But somehow, somewhere (probably from skipping too many chapels, you), So-And-So gave up on his passionate conviction. He became a purely intellectual automaton—a robot of theological knowledge. Too much theology killed off his faith. 

[EDITORIAL NOTE: OF COURSE HE DIDN’T LOSE HIS SALVATION. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A TEMPORAL STATE OF MISERY IN WHICH HE EXISTS ON THE PERIPHERY OF GOD’S GRACE, BUT IS STILL TECHNICALLY IN IT. YOU MAY PUT DOWN YOUR STONES NOW.]

This tale of woe is ubiquitously repeated. It is such a grave danger that the current Spiritual Formation program was started, in part, as a countermeasure to this inexorable slide into spiritual irrelevance for the budding young Bible Scholar. It is  the most consistently issued jeremiad on campus: there is a danger in gaining all this knowledge, so approach it fearfully, trembling at its greatness, wary of its danger, and with one foot still firmly planted in the Dobsonite-Young-Earth-Let’s-Ban-Halloween camp. 

If all the oft-repeated stories are to be believed, we must conclude that there is a veritable hotbed of spiritually shallow young people matriculating into graduate theological study without much experience thinking outside their own church culture. Perhaps the young seminarian in question grew up in a house of believers, attended a reasonably well-populated middle-class, mostly white megachurch, and faithfully went to youth group every Wednesday night instead of doing bong hits. He went to outings at Six Flags, saw David Crowder live 624 times, knows every Chris Tomlin song by heart, and attended every one of the candle-lit, frank discussions on sex that he thought were edgy (but which all youth pastors for 40 years have done). He dutifully went off to Bible College, where he studied Greek for the first time but avoided any dangerous literature or art or paper-writing. He had late-night discussions with his roommate about the inherent fineness of the girls on the other side of campus. He dreamed of marrying a nice blond Christian girl who could sing and play piano and had a heart for missions. He felt God’s call to seminary. He applied. Of course he was accepted (his youth pastor was an alum), and now he’s here. And by his second year, much of the theological framework in which he had happily existed has been challenged. The world is not as he thought it was—and he’s about to have to enter it for the first time. 

Of course this kid is disillusioned. The study of God’s Word is a bit more complex than Bob Jones University made it out to be, and all this exciting new knowledge is giving that Abeka culture a run for its money, in his mind. But the real, unspoken danger in this story is the fact that So-And-So is now thinking, instead of simply obeying. Up until this point, his spirituality was purely a function of his acquiescence to authority. Now that he’s thinking for himself, he’s kind of dangerous. 

The stories are repeated, apparently, as a warning to not think too much. Or attend chapel more. Or be a functioning part of a Spiritual Formation group. But it would ultimately serve the Greater Purpose of Hilarity for So-And-So to come back to campus one day. Would he appear disoriented, wandering aimlessly around campus muttering entire phrases he memorized from Dr. Campbell’s dissertation? Would he remain seated in front of the foot-washing statue, staring into space? Would he try to attend class? Would he confusedly try to open his old mailbox? Would security be required to escort him from the campus? How would DTS change if So-And-So happened to amble onto the pristine Calvinist scenery from his sojourn out in the world? This, I suspect, would be a Hilarious Fact to itself.

WHEELS-OFF NEWS REPORT: Worship Leader Fired For Using Real Drums In Church

Dallas (AP)—a Worship Pastor from a nondenominational megachurch in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has resigned under pressure to explain his controversial decision to use real drums in worship service instead of the popular electronic v-drums. Rev. Jerrod Crunchfauser delivered a resignation letter to the senior pastor of OCICTYC (Our Church Is Cooler Than Your Church) Wednesday morning. 

The decision came after a firestorm erupted following Sunday morning’s service. Many churchgoers were heard hissing disgustedly about the authentic sound of actual drums in church. 

“It’s disgraceful,” said one person who asked to remain anonymous. “I thought all of the non-denoms had gotten the memo that only fake drums were to be used in service.”

Another churchgoer displayed more anger: “Who does he think he is? Did he think he could just change the way people do things?”

Rev. Crunchfauser didn’t offer an explanation; only a bewildered look on his face as he slunk shamefully out of cleaned-out office. A gauntlet of staff members lined either side of the hall as the disgraced worship pastor slowly made his way through them. A military march was performed on the v-drums as he faced the senior pastor, who sternly eyed Crunchfauser as he performed the defrocking ceremony. The senior pastor then reached up toward the Worship Pastor’s lapel and removed his honorary David Crowder backstage passes and tore them in two, scattering the pieces on the floor. He then stepped on the Crunchfauser’s Toms shoes, leaving dirt from the horribly raped environment on the sensitive cloth shoes. “You have made us the laughingstock of other churches,” intoned the senior pastor. “Only if we returned to singing non-existentialist hymns could we be more embarrassed than we are now. Take the devil’s authentic instrument out of this house of praise. And may God have mercy on your soul.”

It was not immediately known how many years it had been since a Protestant megachurch used actual drums in a service; many experts suggested it may have been as far back as the days when people sang out of carefully edited hymnbooks, instead of illiterate power point presentations slapped together at the last minute. For his part, Crunchfauser seemed genuinely repentant of his crime. Shaking his head, he mumbled something about working harder to be a good conformist in the future as he climbed into his Chevrolet Volt. 

The church is having a drum-burning session Saturday night, and the entire congregation is expected to turn out to support the destruction of the drum kit. Many churchgoers voiced anticipation that Saturday was too far away. 

“That authentic sound was scary…like the devil himself was playing,” said one woman. The official church statement in the bulletin read: “The offensive instrument has been removed. That sort of sound is not safe for the whole family, and we will immediately return to the soft, soothing saccharine sounds of fakery.” 

Less clear is the impact on the church’s impressionable youth group. Some adults claimed that they had caught some of their children scouring YouTube for actual bands that used drums in years gone past. A great deal of collective nervousness pervades the churchgoers with respect to how soon the children can forget the terrifying sound of real drums once and for all. 

“We will continue to use v-drums and sing Chris Tomlin tunes,” said the senior pastor, who also asked to remain anonymous, “until we get the next memo from the Millennial Generation Cross Cultural Ministry representative, once they graduate from seminary.”

Musical Education #2

Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed

Two of the greatest and most underrated guitar players who ever lived demonstrate how they each had more talent in their fingernails than all the CCM pop singers put together. 

Wheels-Off Poll for Week of 16 Aug 11

The Evangelical and Global Warming

While I think the broader point that Christians are frequently wrong on extra-church issues (and frequently wrong on doctrinal ones, too…a topic for a different blog post), I think the contention that global warming and Copernicus’ findings are moral equivalents of one another is problematic on several levels. 

First, scientific findings like Galileo’s and Copernicus’ have withstood the test of time. They have quite simply been around long enough to go unchallenged. The global warming hypothesis is so recent that many can actually remember when the same crowd was going around predicting global cooling. Factually, the ideas put forth by Vice President Gore and the Western European cabal of Kool-Aid Drinkers have not stood up well to actual challenge—and that’s just in the same decade in which they were made famous. After the scandal involving the emails of East Anglia University, most of the rational world understands a hoax when they see it. Christians should not be in the business of jumping on bandwagons of questionable repute—whether that bandwagon be Republican or Democrat. And the global warming thing is, quite frankly, pretty questionable. For every True Believer who claims that it’s man-made and demands that we all drive Priuses and listen to the Indigo Girls, there are two or three equally reputable scientists who view the same data and offer different conclusions. For many, the belief that Man is capable alone of destroying God’s great earth smacks of an arrogance typical of the godlessness inherent in Marxist thought—but unbecoming to the Christian. Ironically, the greater community of global warming evangelists resemble the classical definition of “religion” in the strictest sense: they have a creation/destruction mythology, a salvation (by works) message, and punish nonconformists with excommunication from the community.

Second, those of us who would like to be objective about this issue keep running into another pesky problem: the proposed solution. If the Warmers didn’t all fall lock-step into the same formation of collectivism in order to solve the “problem,” the rest of us wouldn’t be so suspect. Why is it that the only solution to the problem of colossal planetary warming and eventual destruction is that a strong, centralized governmental entity must be empowered to strip property away from one sector of humanity and redistribute it to another? I say the “only solution” because IT’S THE ONLY SOLUTION THAT’S EVER BEEN ADVANCED BY THE WARMERS. I am old enough to recall that that was the primary argument of the militant feminist movement, as well: a societal ill exists, and the only solution to it is a form of Marxism. A movement loses instant credibility with freedom lovers whenever it advances collectivism, for the end result of collectivism is always totalitarianism—and totalitarianism definitely does not honor God. I would venture a guess that the only Christians left who don’t have a problem with  collectivism are those too young to remember the Soviet Union, or have read Huxley’s Brave New World or Orwell’s 1984 (I might be wrong, but it’s just a guess). 

If we’re going to have a free society, we’re going to have people who make choices with which we disagree. If the solution to an alleged “problem” like global warming is that we strip them of those choices, ridicule them for disbelieving us, and forcibly take their property and give it to others—well, then, surely a reasonable individual could conceivably be forgiven for finding the whole movement suspect. 

Lastly, when I think of Christianity philosophically, I am struck by how nonconformist it is, historically speaking. Notwithstanding, the effortless speed with which many younger evangelicals have conformed to a worldview that has been historically hostile to Christian thought has always been disturbing to me and others. Again, I’m probably exaggerating here, but it feels to me like the next twenty-something evangelical who stands up and questions the orthodoxies made popular by the mainstream media will be the first.  When I think of Christians being “led by their noses” by others, it isn’t the Global Warming Deniers who come to mind: it’s the True Believers. Before we place Al Gore in the same sainted category as Galileo or Copernicus, perhaps we could approach the issue with the right mixture of contrarianism and true pursuit of Truth. 

Now many on the other side of this issue will surely label me as an earth-hating heretic because of this contention. Not so, says I: I may not wear Tom’s shoes or drive a Hybrid, but neither do I consider it responsible to litter. I pay steep fees each year to legally hunt in two states, and that money goes to the proper conservation of the wilds in which I spend a good deal of time. I maintain my vehicle and teach my children that we are to be responsible stewards of the earth. I own property and maintain it over and above any municipal codes. I’m not going to sign on to the onerous, freedom-squelching shackling of private citizenry at the exact same moment as the kiddo’s who can’t actually remember the Carter Administration—but that doesn’t make me wrong.   

Yet.