I’m constantly fascinated with the “fine line.”

On a grand scale, cosmologists hypothesize that had certain physical constants varied – by seemingly infinitesimal amounts – no mind would be here to ask, “Why is there not nothing?”

On the moral front, Alexander Solzhenitsyn spoke compellingly of the fine line separating good and evil that “passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.”

It seems that God has woven this fine line into the very heart of being – even down to already-but-not-yet determinations of “particleness” and “waveness” in quantum mechanics.

“The fine line” appears to be an integral part of the world…

… So much so, that it can allow the most devout believer and the most convinced non-believer to look at the same reality and affirm with equally thoroughgoing certainty, “Thus it must be and cannot be otherwise!”

Now self-described “recovering pharisee” Kary Oberbrunner’s newest book, The Fine Line: Re-envisioning the Gap between Christ and Culture, attempts to limn anew what it means to “live in the world, but not of the world.”

While I haven’t had a chance to read the entire book, Oberbrunner has offered a limited number of free audio editions in exchange for posting an Amazon review of the excerpt on his Zondervan press page.

(So my response to anyone who questions the fairness of “reviewing” a complex argument such as Oberbrunner’s without having read the entire book is, “I’ve been given permission by both author and publisher.”)

With that in mind, here are a few thoughts on the material available at the Zondervan site, as well what I’ve gleaned from other online sources about Oberbrunner’s book and work…

Oberbrunner takes as one starting point the work of Yale Christian theological-ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr (brother of theologian Reinhold).

But where Niebuhr speaks of “conversionists” – those who are more concerned with God’s divine activity of “present renewal than with conservation of what has been given in creation or preparing for what will be given in a final redemption” – Oberbrunner’s chief category is that of “Transformist”.

Transformists are those who inhabit the fine line of “Relevance” between Separatist rejection and Conformist embrace of culture.

All well and good – and as mentioned above, I’ve not yet read the book in it’s entirety, so in large part I’m shooting from the hip here – but I always have a concern when “Relevance” wants to be elevated to the status Oberbrunner seems to give it.

This is the “fine line within the fine line” we disciples of Jesus must walk.

Because when relevance is invested with inherent value, it runs a high risk of tipping the balance toward cultural conformism.

It creates in the disciple a bias toward “marketing to” what the culture wants, instead of ministering to what it needs.

Yes, there are times we are called toward relevance.

This indeed seems to be one of those times.

But there are also times when as children of God we may be called to be disdainful of relevance as well. (Luke 4:24-27)

It may be that an ill-advised hunger for relevance is what led to the excesses of the Christian Right over the past few decades. It may be that at bottom, the need to be relevant always positions us more “of the world” than just “in the world.”

This isn’t to say we should avoid relevance, no more than we should seek irrelevance.

Indeed, Paul seems to endorse some form of relevance when he writes:

To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law.

To those not having the law I became like one not having the law  (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law.

To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. (1 Corinthians 9:19-23 NIV)

But as Paul concludes his argument, we see that it wasn’t his intention to be relevant for the sake of relevance, or even for the sake of transforming culture as his final goal; it was instead to “share in the blessings of the Gospel.”

Those blessings do not find their ultimate home at the level of culture, but in the individual life that is transformed – here, now and for eternity – as one is brought into conformity with Christ – whether or not culture is transformed.

No doubt there will be huge, beneficial changes in any culture when a critical mass of individuals undergoes such inner transformation. And the spillover from those blessings to the culture at large will be profound. But it is not for the sake of cultural change that we are called to discipleship, as appealing as that change may be.

And I also agree with Oberbrunner that it’s generally along the “fine line” that God would have us walk.

The same fine line that’s illuminated by terms such as “missional churches” and “new monasticism”. At their best, both these movements seem to walk side-by-side as they address culture on the razor thin division of the fine line Oberbrunner seeks to describe.

I look forward to hearing more from Pastor Kary on these issues – including reading his newest effort in it’s entirety. I hope you’ll do the same!

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It’s possible you’ve recently acquired a copy of “Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism” by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.

Much has been made of the favor in which the doctrine of “Animal Spirits” is held by the current administration.

Michael Scherer recently wrote a piece on Obama and the Animal Spirits for TIME.

In that article he at one point gently chides the Administration for its faith in the Spirits. But Scherer ultimately concludes that these same Spirits are likely our only salvation.

William Safire provides a serviceable if somewhat truncated genealogy of the phrase in his recent “On Language” column.

If you’re not familiar with the term and haven’t the leisure time to dive into Akerlof and Shiller’s book, don’t despair – because Mr. Shiller offers some insight into his thinking in a column he recently penned for the Wall Street Journal. (More on that coming up)

But first, I’m going to shamelessly claim-jump Mr. Safire and reconstruct the fossilized underbelly of the “Animal Spirits” meme.

What I found should give at least momentary pause to those now enthusiastically touting the Animal Spirits as our path to redemption.

But only insofar as they’re able to recognize the source of their misplaced hope.

We’ll get to that source in a moment.

Right now, let’s go back to Mr. Safire’s dig site and examine what he’s unearthed…

As Safire notes, the term has a long history dating back to at least 16th century medical texts in which the “animal spirites” were employed to explain then-current notions of the elan vital, or vital animating force.

But it is in the term’s Economic usage, and particularly its deployment in Keynesian Economic theory, that Akerlof, Shiller – and the Obama brain trust – have resurrected their hope in the Animal Spirits.

Here are the relevant passages, quoted by Safire, from Keynes 1936 treatise, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.”

Most, probably… our decisions to do something positive . . . can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.

“In that passage,” writes Safire, Keynes “was warning about overconfidence; in another, he (Keynes) encouraged risk-taking: ‘If the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die.’”

“I like that one more,” Safire opines.

What’s interesting to note – at least in the columns mentioned – is the unconscious and reflexively deferential attitude Safire and Shiller (and by extension, Obama, Summers and Geithner) show toward the unexamined premises of Keynes’ argument.

And the reason of course is because they are the shared premises of what Dallas Willard describes as the “life-form called modernity.”

Or to use Alasdair MacIntyre’s phrasing, they are the premises of emotivism – the moral underpinning of Keynes’ economic theory.

On Keynes view, success at moral suasion rests not on the power of rational appeal, but with those who “speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction,” and can “best use the accents of infallibility.”

To the modern (by definition, emotivist) mind, what matters is not that our convictions have solid foundations.

In fact, there’s no need for our convictions to have any foundations, or even any need for us to have convictions at all.

All we need is the ability to speak in clear “accents of infallibility” with the “appearance of undoubting conviction” (emphasis added).

But in these uncertain times and while wholly in the grip of the life form called (post-)modernity, we can’t keep ourselves from asking our political, corporate and bureaucratic leaders if there isn’t at least a token gesture toward something of substance beneath their histrionics.

Even if just a knowing wink that they could produce it if we were to ask.

We instinctively know not to inquire too closely, “but still,” we think, “it would be nice to see a marker on the table indicating something real supports all those casino chips.”

“We want to trust you,” we tell our leaders.

But when trust is no longer confidence grounded in reality, but is simply a subjective psychological state allowing us to suspend disbelief, does it really matter if we can trust our leaders or not?

And if it’s no longer necessary to restore confidence based in reality – but simply to restore trust in Keynes’ “appearance of conviction” – then there’s not much need to inquire as to what the Emperor is wearing.

The only thing necessary is that he appear undoubtingly convinced his robes are as magnificent as he says they are…

It’s been said that in the last decade or so, we’ve lost our capacity for irony.

But given recent events, the quote at the beginning of this post from Paul Mazer – the now long-departed employee of the recently departed Lehman Brothers – ought to induce smiles from even terminal post-modern life forms such as we.

Because Mr. Mazer is correct – just not in the way he intended.

We indeed must be “trained to desire”.

And whether our training was haphazard, or left to currently fashionable management theories, or intentionally guided by the most profound grace, our desires must always overshadow our needs.

Given this state of affairs, the questions we must continually and humbly ask are, “Who or what am I allowing to train my desires?” And, “If what’s now training my desires leaves me a slave to my animal spirits, what can allow me to retrain them before they consume me?”

Substituting “animal spirits” for “flesh” in the ESV translation of Romans 8:13 we get:

For if you live according to the animal spirits, you will die, but if by the Holy Spirit you put to death the deeds of the animal spirits, you will live.

If a significant number of us begins to do that, perhaps we can once again demonstrate real trust in each other, instead of an impoverished
counterfeit of trust.

The alternative – as our intellectual, corporate and political leaders see it – is to concede that “managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government.”

Of course there is a huge bootstrapping problem here. Exactly who is it that’s managing the animal spirits of those who would manage us?

Because if MacIntyre is right when he says in After Virtue that “the barbarians are no longer waiting beyond the frontiers, but have already been governing us for some time” – then it’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of prayerfully considering exactly who it is we can trust to train our desires.

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