A plague of bored locus

Our Locus Acumbens, that part of the brain which registers pleasure, is over stimulated. Pleasure begets pleasure. What feels good guides action, and so the stress and variety, the emphasis on dynamic and novel experience, the accelerated pace of life, evokes a high with the overproduction of “flight” chemicals in the parasympathetic system (the same adregynic chemicals that correspond to violence and panic.) The door swings open to addiction (where addiction is the result of dis-regulation of the pleasure centers of the brain), and for the craving for the new and the novel. One example of this can be seen in the practice of Christian worship over the last few decades. The way we shape our worship services contributes to this ultra-excitation. That isn’t God. It is finally achieving a threshold of stimulation which actually stimulates one’s already stunned Locus Acumbens.

With time and overstimulation, the Locus Acumbens gets calloused. The resulting depression, not in mood but in affect--boredom, melancholia, carelessness, being numb--is called anhedonia.[1] It is the new depression. Not sadness but listlessness, melancholia, boredom. People cease to feel anything. The real pleasures of living, the green of grass, the smell of flowers, the simple enjoyment of friends, they fade. What’s worse, according to some neuropsychologists, this condition is so native to the Western lifestyle that everyone may as well assume they suffer from this to some degree. What can be done? How do we Westerners come clean from our Acumbens-addiction and reshape our appetites toward better, more meaningful foods?

The answer is in taking Sabbath. The answer is fasting. The answer are the liberal arts--yes, the liberal arts as a program for achieving a good and healthy life. The arts as real pleasure; fasting for the sake of real food; being God’s creatures in his good creation. Creation was designed for worship, to stimulate our proper system, the sympathetic system. Spiritual practice as eudemonic praxis, achieved as a re-regulation of our pleasure centers, and using our minds instead of simply our Locus Acumbens.

[1] The original title for Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall was Anne Hedonia, the perfect description of Woody Allen’s character in the film.

Summing up Gaffin

A few months ago, I began a post which addressed John Calvin's understanding of the fourth commandment using Richard Gaffin's published dissertation, Calvin on the Sabbath. For want of time, I never completed a review of Grudem's critique . . . until now. The sabbath, Gaffin concludes, is thoroughly eschatological. Calvin simply does not understand this, and therefore is unable to do justice to the fourth commandment. His reasoning is as follows: (1) Calvin’s generalization of the fourth commandment as rest nullifies its uniqueness The heart of the fourth commandment, Calvin says repeatedly, is the injunction to practice spiritual rest. Spiritual rest, he makes clear, is perpetual cessation from sin so that God may perform his sanctifying work in us. This conclusion, however, isn’t just a portion of lawfulness but a summary of the whole law! Further, to attribute to any one of the ten commandments the comprehensive force that belongs to Christ’s summary of the law--to love God and neighbor--effectively deprives that particular commandment of its place in the decalogue so that a portion of the decalogue receives the meaning divinely intended for the whole. “He [Calvin] has overlooked its specific [unique] place in God’s law and consequently missed its true meaning” (146). (2) Calvin does not devote serious attention to the Sabbath as an ordinance of creation Calvin’s teaching addresses only a post-fall Sabbath and does not understand that the meaning of the Sabbath must be governed by the pre-fall, creation Sabbath. If the basic concern of the fourth commandment is, as Calvin says, resting from sin, then sin (as well as the entire ordo salutis) was required before the fall. “The meaning of the Sabbath institution prior to the fall seems not to have crossed his mind” (146). (3) Calvin’s teaching on the Sabbath disparages the other six days of creation If the message of the fourth commandment is: Stop Sinning!, then the other six days are the producers of the sin from which one is resting. Calvin saw no use or value in the six days of work. The six days are, for Calvin, days of the sins of the flesh, days which were supposed to be rested from on the Sabbath. The six days become an influence which must be resisted and bound up to make way for piety. That is why Calvin understood the Mosaic commands to cease from labor on the Sabbath as necessary in the face of “sinful human inability to practice daily public worship”(ibid). People need a command to make them cease from labor, otherwise worship would be precluded by the market. Indeed, Calvin enjoins a daily assembly for worship. "The mention of six days of labor is a recognition of sinful actions, not a command to engage in legitimate human callings or other cultural activity. . . . These two elements can only be related antithetically, or the days of work viewed, at best, concessively” (147). Thus, the meaning of the Sabbath is spiritualized and made wholly ecclesial. (4) Calvin’s teaching on the Sabbath forbids positive interpretation. Calvin equates the six days of labor with labors of the flesh. He spiritualizes work and rest as sin and the cessation from sin. It is true that the other commandments presuppose sin, but they also have a positive side; do not murder is also an injunction to protect and value other lives. There is no such postive interpretation available to Calvin for the fourth commandment. Should Calvin have understood it positively, where working as well as resting is in view, then sin would have become a requirement for God’s good governance of creation--a real dilemma! Indeed, the interpretation Calvin gives to the fourth commandment is only meaningful in a world of sin & redemption. On the other, when Calvin states as its core teaching that the creature is to imitate the creator--a notion with relevance apart from redemption--the result summarizes the whole law and neuters its specific force [per the first point above]. Therefore, Gaffin concludes that Calvin is unable to do justice to the fourth commandment as a Creation ordinance, as a principle intended to govern human life before and after the fall and which, together with its neighbors, fits within the framework of Christ’s summary of the law. (5) Calvin ignores the eschatological purpose of the seventh day Gaffin is sympathetic to Calvin's reasons for spiritualizing work and rest; the law of types is replaced by the reality of Jesus’s work. But, he says, Calvin did not fully consider types existing in creation before the fall. The Sabbath is an eschatologically-oriented type. We look forward to its eschatological fulfilment. Eschatological light has shone upon the creation from the beginning, and a creation Sabbath has to include that. It is the Spirit who is “the source of (eschatological) life” (152). The pneumatological is always the christological, to be in the Spirit is to be “in Christ.” The realm of the Spirit is the eschatological realm. The weekly Sabbath was a continual reminder to Adam that history is not a ceaseless repetition of days. Rather, at the beginning of each week he could look forward to the rest of that seventh day. That weekly cycle impressed on him that he, together with the created order as a whole, was moving toward a goal, a nothing less than eschatological culmination. (ibid.) A weekly day of rest faithfully observed by the church is a concrete witness to a watching world that Christians are not enmeshed in the turmoil of an impersonal historical process but look with confidence to sharing in the consummation of God’s purposes for the creation. There does indeed remain an eschatological Sabbath-rest for the people of God. It is not a command, but a reminder of the better that is coming. Thus, the fourth commandment makes the meaning of the seventh day interact with the meaning of the previous six. The day of rest gives meaning to, and in turn receives meaning from, the six days of labor. There is a philosophy of history here. The Sabbath’s enjoined rest from labor not a practical demand but an eschatological reminder: we are to meditate upon our six days in the light of the eschatological seventh. Quoting Geerhardus Vos (from what I assume is The Eschatology of the Old Testament (P & R Publishing, 2001)) Gaffin writes: The Sabbath is not in the first place a means of advancing religion. It has its main significance apart from that, in pointing forward to the eternal issues of life and history . . . a day devoted to the remembrance of man’s eternal destiny cannot be properly observed without the positive cultivation of . . . religious concerns. . . . But, even where this is conceded, the fact remains that it is possible to crowd too much into the day that is merely subservient to religious propaganda, and to void it [of any spiritual good.] Finally, the eschatological nature of the Sabbath makes Sabbath-keeping a present impossibility. After the fall, human beings cannot possibly fulfil the fourth commandment. Its rest points to the state where all has been perfected, and no more work is necessary. In this present age, work is always necessary. Human beings can't achieve a consummation from their own resources. They cannot bring the psychical creation to its eschatological fulfillment. Therefore, Sabbath-keeping requires and is fundamentally a pneumatological extension of grace, and a practice of hope (and suffering--see Moltmann Theology of Hope chapter 1). fourth commandment; John Calvin; reformed theology; Wayne Grudem; eschatology; theology of work.

Calvin on the Sabbath Day

A good half-hour with John G. on the approach of covenant theology to the fourth commandment led me to seek out John Calvin. I suspected two things. First, that Calvin would not forego the chief insight of the Reformation - that we never did nor can we add anything to the sum of salvation's graceful equation. Second, that Calvin would seek to find the moral heart of the commandment, and thus discover another way into the open country of freedom. I was right on both counts. Here is Calvin from the Institutes II.8.34:

The resurrection of our Lord being the end and accomplishment of that true rest which the ancient sabbath typified, this day . . . serves to warn Christians against adhering to a shadowy ceremony. I do not cling so to the number seven as to bring the Church under bondage to it, nor do I condemn churches for holding their meetings on other solemn days, provided they guard against superstition. This they will do if they employ those days merely for the observance of discipline and regular order. The whole may be thus summed up: . . . first, that during our whole lives we may aim at a constant rest from our own works, in order that the Lord may work in us by his Spirit; secondly that every individual, as he has opportunity, may diligently exercise himself in private, in pious meditation on the works of God, and, at the same time, that all may observe the legitimate order appointed by the Church, for the hearing of the word, the administration of the sacraments, and public prayer; and, thirdly, that we may avoid oppressing those who are subject to us.

Richard Gaffin summarizes Calvin's teaching on the Sabbath from the 1536 and 1559 edition of the Institutes in his dissertation-turned-book, Calvin and the Sabbath (Mentor, 1998). His summary reads as follows: The fourth commandment, as an element of God's immutable Decalogue, is binding upon all men at all times. Its requirements are three fold. 1. The weekly Sabbath was given to Israel as a type of spiritual rest from sin. The rest of every seventh day was to stimulate their thinking upon the Lord, who would be their Sanctifier. At the coming of Christ, spiritual rest became a reality. The Sabbath then ceased to exist as a promissory sign and, consequently, no longer has typical significance for the Christian church. This does not mean, however, that this first requirement of the commandment no longer obligates the church. On the contrary, its demand is intensified. Christians must strive to case from sinful works and thereby enter into and enjoy spiritual on every day of their lives. [1] 2. The fourth commandment requires of the Christian church, as it required of Israel, that stated times be set aside for public worship. In the case of Israel, the time was designated specifically by the Lord. For the church it is a matter of indifference which day of the week is chosen, although the first day, the day of the Resurrection, is most appropriate.[2] 3. The fourth commandment requires of the Christian church, as it required of Israel, that rest be granted to all those who labor under the authority of others.[3] (58) ---------- [1] The fourth Commandment appoints a day to symbolize (figura) spiritual rest. Gaffin writes, "Spiritual rest is 'keeping holiday' from our own works that God may perform his work in us. It is realized by renouncing fleshly inclinations and accepting the guidance of the Holy Spirit That is not something done sufficiently on one day of the week. On the contrary, once believers have begun spiritual rest, they must continue in it throughout the whole course of life," and again, "spiritual rest is an actual possession yet it will not be fully experienced until the Last Day." In the words of the 1545 Geneva Catechism, "[The fourth commandment] calls us to the reality behind it, namely, that being grafted into the body of Christ and made members of his, we cease from our own works and so resign ourselves to the government of God." [2] Calvin is clear that though the church is not commanded to meet in order to satisfy some lawful requirement of God's justice, it should meet in order to encourage the proper and orderly practice of religion. Calvin thinks the seventh day is best because of its identification with the resurrection and also because seven is a number of perfection and so, "is suitable to indicate the perpetuity of the eternal Sabbath," though suggesting that "this spiritual rest (though the same in kind) only begins in this life and does not reach perfection until we depart this world." [3] Gaffin comments, "If a day of rest is given to laborers, the order and productivity or society in general will be promoted. For when one day is assigned for rest, everyone accustoms himself to work the rest of the time." (65)