What a beautiful church....I mean bar?

I've intended to write this post shortly after the event but after procrastinating for a while I decided to save it for a rainy day. And today is that day. Not that this post is extremely interesting and merited anticipation, it just never got posted and is still a slight point of interest to me.

On my way home for Christmas I stopped in Pittsburgh to visit my good friend Gustav. The evening I arrived we decided to go out for dinner and in an effort to avoid popular chains and get some local Pittsburgh food we decided on a place called "The Church Brew Works."

The food was great but even better was the setting. The restaurant is an old Catholic church turned into a microbrewery.

To be honest I didn't know what emotion to feel as I walked in; I didn't know whether to lament or rejoice and in fact I think i felt a little of both.

The lament came from seeing what seemed to be a once beautiful church vacated and left empty until the brewery took over. This seems to be a classic example of the church fleeing the city and leaving huge vacant buildings as signs that seem to indicate God's abandonment. This is such a sad state because in reality it is not God who has abandoned the city and its people but rather God's people who have abandoned the city.

Along with this very basic realization I also grieved when i walked inside. Where a baptismal font once would have stood to remind people of their baptism now stood a small sign that read "Please wait to be seated." To the right where the confessionals would have been now stood a long bar encompassing almost the entire wall. By far the most saddening sight was at the front of the church. There where the altar once stood - where the Eucharist was prepared and the word was proclaimed now stood a huge micro-brewery.

Now I say all this as lament not because I am a staunchly opposed to alcohol. Yes, I have never had a drink of alcohol, but I am not opposed to it's use in moderation. I lament these replacements because it seems to indicate a larger problem - namely the church fleeing the city, this signs of grace leaving the life of the city in favor of something else. Now, to be sure, it could merely indicate the church outgrew it's building and build another one 3 or 4 blocks over or maybe as people left the city the church was left with no congregants (but I highly doubt these scenarios). I am saddened by the replacement of grace-filled things for that which (though can be used by God) are not necessarily designed for that purpose. Although I was saddened by these things, I was also happy for a few reasons.

It was good to see a once abandoned building being used for some purpose and helping the economy of Pittsburgh. It was also great to see the beauty of the architecture of the building still intact and what seemed to be pointing to God. I was blown away to see that the Latin above the altar was still intact and that our waitress knew what it meant (something similar to: "By faith in Jesus Christ the Son of God we are saved."). Apparently they have been asked enough that they tell their servers what the saying means (that or we got a waitress who knows Latin...that would be awesome!) Oh and the food was great!

All that to say that The Church Brew Works is a very cool place. Yes it's sad that a church has been left behind, but maybe God is using this place as a small means of grace to help reach to people of Pittsburgh. Maybe the Latin causes curiosity, maybe the architecture points to the transcendence and maybe just being there makes people long for home and rest in Christ. Maybe none of this happens and it's just sad and depressing. I'm not passing judgment I'm just relaying my experience.

So I guess my post ends there..."and it was cool."

Short thoughts on Christmas music

I know the time has passed when this post would be appropriate but I'm going to write some short thoughts anyway... it is my blog after all.

In the days following Christmas I listened to the standard Christmas songs and as I listened I began to think that many of them are border-line heretical. This caused me to wonder if it was just me seeing heresy in everything (which some would say I do) or if they are genuinely quasi-heretical. I've continued to reflect on this and came to the conclusion that my descriptor of "many" might be a little bit of an over generalization. I haven't taken the time to sit down and analyze a great deal of them so I feel that 'many' is too strong of a word, but I do believe there are some songs that are seemingly heretical as well as, so I would argue, our larger conceptions of Christmas.

Let me explain.

Christmas is about the incarnation - God becoming human in the truest sense of humanity yet without sin. It is about Jesus Christ being truly human and truly God; 100% of both at the same time. Many of the heresies throughout Church history have been condemned because of errant thinking on the incarnation. Many of these heretics erred by over-emphasizing Christ's humanity at the expense of his divinity and it seems that an equal number of heretics erred by over-emphasizing his divinity at the expense of his humanity.

In protestant theology we seem to see both of these errant trends come to the surface. The arch-liberals deny the divinity of Christ while it seems (and here lies the point of the post) that many of the more conservative Protestants deny Christ's humanity (or at least minimize it) to emphasize his Divinity.

For example let us look at the song "Away in a Manger." I choose this song for a few reasons: 1) It supports my point - it's good to pick an example that supports your argument (or so I've been told). 2) It seems to me that although this isn't a song of vast theological content it encapsulates the themes of contemporary Christmas theology. 3) It's the only one that I can remember the words to off hand.

Now to the "heresy:" I don't think this is a horribly blatant heretical treatise against Christ's full humanity but I do think that traces of heresy are evident. Think with me how the infant Messiah is portrayed in this song (remember that this seems to be an archetype for most of our Christmas thinking). Jesus is viewed as peaceful and serene little child that doesn't cry, fuss or cause his parents any loss of sleep. Oh that cute little baby Jesus "no crying he makes." I am willing to grant that maybe Jesus was one of the babies that don't seem to cry at all when they are younger, but (and I am, for sure, no expert in babydom) isn't that the exception more than the rule. Isn't the rule for babies that they cry, they keep their parents up and they fuss. Maybe I'm grasping at strings for an example from a song but I think the assertions that baby Jesus never cried, never fussed, and never acted like a NORMAL BABY are all too prominent in our little Christian Christmas subculture.

I think it's good that we're saying Jesus was set apart from birth. Yes he was different, yes he was the fullness of God even while he was an infant, (emptied himself of "all but love" saith Wesley) but the nuance of our assertions of his divinity seem to make his humanity minuscule... is this not the beginning of heresy? It seems that we have characterized this first Christmas night into an image barren of any true humanity. Mary and Joseph are content and happy giving birth in a stable, and Jesus is cute, adorable, and doesn't act like any other baby.

I'm not trying to be a downer on Christmas but it just seems that the way we tend to think about and portray the first Christmas minimizes the humanity of it all. Our Christmas songs, our nativity scenes, and all the other trappings of the holiday seem to make Christmas more a time of myth and fantasy rather than the in-breaking of the divine into the real world.

Yes Jesus was a baby, one may argue that all babies are cute and thus was Jesus, one may also argue that Jesus was one of those peaceful babies, but to characterize Jesus' infancy so that resembles nothing like real infancy borders on heresy. This does not mean that I am willing to assert that Jesus sinned as a child or anything of the like. I am merely trying to assert that he was indeed FULLY HUMAN and FULLY GOD. He was incarnate without sin and suffered and died for us and for our salvation. Maybe our Christmas songs are fine, maybe they don't say anything heretical enough for us to kick them out of our hymnals, but this is not just a passing matter. We must strive to think rightly about the incarnation and the divine Godhead. For it is our thinking of this that shapes all of our other thoughts. Our moral lives, our social lives and the rest will be shaped by what we think of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Our obedience to the Holy Scriptures is directly corollary to our view of the God who speaks in and through those scriptures. This is why this isn't just a passing issue.

Christmas is over, but let us think hard next year (and at all times) about incarnation. Maybe we just need to readjust the lens through which we sing the Christmas songs, maybe we need to get rid of them, maybe we need a solution that is more outside of the box, who knows. All I know is that thinking correctly about the incarnation is paramount!!