“I am astounded that in this day and age many churches still don’t allow women to preach.”

I heard it again on the radio today and it always feels like fingernails down a chalk board. Never mind the church policy issue for now; it’s the “in this day and age” part that grates.

My favorite line in Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” comes where the prince announces — to his father’s protestation — that he’s going to marry a peasant girl:

Prince: “Now, father, you’re living in the past. This is the fourteenth century. Nowadays…”

King: “Nowadays I’m still the king, and I command you to come to your senses.”

All debates aside regarding the issue of “true love” versus “arranged” marriages, the script writer has amused and embarrassed us by showing the vacuousness of an appeal to modernity as the royal flush of argumentation. We find it very funny that the prince thinks he stands at the absolute apex of human enlightenment. This is because we believe we stand at the apex of human enlightenment, we of the 21^st century, before whom all were barbarians.

Next time some expert on the radio says she rejects this or that position or tradition because it isn’t “modern” or “progressive,” I would like to hear her interviewer redirect the conversation to more substantial avenues — such as whether the position has merit or is “true.”

A few years ago, after the actor Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn in “The Lord of the Rings”) made some mindless comments on The Charlie Rose Show, I took him to task on my blog. What I didn’t know was that a passel of neo-Nazis are big Viggo fans. Not long after, I discovered from the Web traffic coming to my blog (because I’m vain that way) that the neo-Nazis were having a debate, on their own website, about whether I was a Jew. They’d even posted a picture of me holding my son, so they could examine the shapes of our heads.

You can’t make stuff like this up.

Anyway, I was shocked, and incensed, and so I wrote what I thought would be a biting and hilarious post about it. Well, before long there was a wide-ranging debate in the Comments section of my blog, with a handful of the neo-Nazis weighing in about race and religion, and several of my regular readers arguing with them, and me jumping into the fray from time to time myself.

What sticks with me is that the neo-Nazis, despite their paranoia and the wickedness of their worldview, displayed more civility and logic than some people who post here.

That came to mind Friday, when I decided I was neither going to participate in, nor read, the WORLD webzine comments any more. I don’t have time to spend correcting people who deliberately assume the worst about my motivations, I told myself. I have a PhD in political science, and I worked in Washington, went the internal, preening monologue in my head, and these people want to lecture me about politics?

I got closer to the truth when I admitted that it feels like a wound, to try to make a point in good faith, and to be beset by what seem to be niggling remarks, and sarcastic one-liners, and diatribes about my hypocrisy or ignorance. It takes too much emotional energy, I reasoned. I have to preserve that for the parts of my life where it’s really needed.

Of course that wasn’t really the truth, either. The plain truth of it is that I want to look good to others. I want people to read what I’ve written, hold it up to the light, and celebrate its shimmering brilliance. So while there have been times I felt wronged — believed that a commenter wrongly assessed me as a person, or misread my words, or said something untrue and then failed to apologize when corrected — my indignation still springs from a sinful place, which is my desire to be admired.

Cross it with the fact that I want to see this website become something important, and I have a dilemma. To pull away from comments completely is to forego an opportunity to help make WORLD’s webzine a place where significant and thoughtful discussion — and therefore valuable learning — occurs. But to read them is to end up fuming, because of this nagging self-obsession that I have.

So I prayed about it, and discussed it with my wife. As I grow with her, I am discovering that helpmate means so much more than: someone who will cook your food. She gently confirmed my own suspicions about the matter, which is that I need to get over it, and participate where I think engaging someone might be worthwhile, and not let vanity put me on a path of “setting straight” every person who misperceives or misrepresents what I write, or who is simply mean-spirited.

This wise counsel, in turn, led me to formulate these rules of engagement, which I was going to keep to myself, until some reflection led me to think perhaps some of you might benefit from them as well. At the very least, you’ll know why I ignore some comments and not others.

WOODLIEF’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
I will endeavor to exhibit, and will only engage in discourse with those who exhibit, the following qualities:

Civility: Just to be clear, I appreciate an articulate evisceration (Mark Twain’s devastating and hilarious essay on James Fenimore Cooper, for example) and believe that, beneath the right pen, a lampoon or critical essay is a work of art. One usually finds such things written about public figures, who have afforded the critic a sizeable body of words and actions from which to draw conclusions about their motivations, personal qualities, and so on. I think in a Comments forum, however, which endeavors to be something like a roundtable discussion, and where the participants know relatively little about one another’s lives, I ought not to attribute motives, ridicule someone’s point of view, or speak in a generally combative or mean-spirited manner. Civility doesn’t require that I refrain from disagreeing with someone. It means that I begin with the assumptions that: 1) I may be the only Christ someone meets today; 2) the person I’m addressing has good motives; and 3) my responsibility is to make a valuable point, not to score points.

Logic: The Almighty Creator, in his infinite wisdom, bestowed us with a world governed by rules, and with brains designed to grasp those rules. In short: A ain’t B, and there’s not much point in tussling with someone who doesn’t see that.

Humility: If the goal of our discourse is to be understood, we have to be willing to understand, which means we have to — truly, in the deepest part of ourselves — be willing to be wrong. Perhaps it’s possible that one or two of us are never wrong, but the funny thing about such people is that they are indistinguishable from the arrogant errants; there’s no point in talking to members of either group. We should just let them hold forth, and then move on with the discussion.

So there you have it. Feel free to peruse my blog or other published work, find something I’ve written that violates what I’ve said here, and call me a hypocrite. (If you have trouble finding something like that, email me and I’ll point you in the right direction.) Or give me a Bible quote (King James version, please!) that reveals the unrighteousness in one of my proposed rules. Or just call me a big fat stupid doofus, with sugar on top.

But don’t expect a reply.

(PS: I wrote that last sentence with a cheerful countenance. If you don’t believe me, look at my little avatar.)

Recently one of the men in our church took to the pulpit, his usual poise replaced by a hint of nervousness. The person who was to give an update on one of the missions we support was ill; this man was his replacement. “I haven’t had time to prepare,” he explained. I understood his dismay. He is one of those men who is well organized, and thoughtful with his statements, and always very straightforward. Ordinarily, when he speaks to a crowd he is like a guided missile zooming toward its target. But there he was, standing in front of a couple hundred people, with no preparation. I leaned into my wife and whispered, not sarcastically, “This ought to be good.”

And it was. He confessed his hardness of heart toward Muslims, with whom some of our missionaries work. It choked him up, this fact springing up on him unplanned, and as he confessed it his voice caught, and he explained that it is only by grace that any one of us sitting comfortable in his salvation is not lost.

I like to think it took courage to speak the truth that way to all those people, or at least this is what I told myself as I wandered about the streets of Kansas City this weekend, trying to find the church where I was to deliver a talk about fathering. You see, I am one of those speakers as well, who likes to prepare well in advance. But the week had overtaken me, and I had finally decided to rise early the morning of the talk, avail myself of a Starbucks near the church, and compose a brilliant speech to the sound of Joni Mitchell and the smell of roasted Ethiopian Sidamo.

The church, according to GoogleMap, was only ten miles from my hotel. I left two and a half hours early. That should have afforded me ample time to prepare my speech. Instead, I got lost.

As I tried to navigate the bends and one-ways and angled off-shoot streets that must have amused the drunken madman who laid out Kansas City, I began to lose my cool. I was supposed to give a talk on fathering — didn’t God know that? I began to lose my temper. I hate being in front of a group when I am unprepared. I tried to compose my thoughts while driving, but all I could come up with was an opening joke about how having a map in Kansas City is like having a Bible in a strip joint.

Finally, half an hour before I was supposed to be at the church, I found its street, and a Starbucks. I rushed inside, placed my order, and sat down to jot at least a few notes on index cards. Then I made my way to the church, dreading what was about to transpire.

I met there with men who are striving to become better fathers. They put me up on a stage, and sat attentively, waiting. Lacking the grandiose speech with which I’d intended to afflict them, I confessed the ways I have failed as a husband and father. I told them I am trying to break generations of despair and sin, and that often I lose that battle. I explained that most of the time, I don’t feel like I’m anything close to what a man ought to be. I said that while there are plenty of books on how to train children, it seems to me that their sin begins with us, and that we ought to address our own darkheartedness whenever we start to fret over their behavior. I told them my story, without an opportunity to dress it up in the way that many of us do. I waited for them to throw rotten fruit.

Instead, a 15-minute question-and-answer session scheduled at the end of my talk became an hour-long discussion. Some men confessed their own shortcomings as fathers. Others offered encouragement. I felt like I was part of something, as opposed to the feeling I had been set on, which was to direct something. I had envisioned this being about me, but even as it involved laying out more of me than I’d intended to share, it became about all of us who are trying to be better fathers. If I’d had time, I could have delivered a much better speech. But I’m thinking it’s a good thing I didn’t have that time.

It’s funny how sometimes God does his best work by first wrecking all of our plans, isn’t it?

I went from atheist to believer to Christian between the ages of 16 and 29. I became a Christian in a Presbyterian church, and the resulting combination of Reformed theology and new faith made me want to set straight everyone who was not a Calvinist. I made sure to bring up the baptism of our children around my wife’s grandmother, a Baptist. I read lots of dour texts. I congratulated myself on my righteous theological precision.

I confess that I recoil from such people now — not only zealous predestination-obsessed Calvinists but all theology-besotted wagon-fixers. Perhaps this is simply projection — I see now the unkindness that was in my heart in those early years, and assume that it lurks in the hearts of some people I encounter today, in blogs and through email and sometimes in the flesh. I think I detect a stridency and smugness lingering in the throats of some who labor so strenuously to point out the errors of others. We are to speak the truth, always, but in love, no? We are to be salt, yes, but also light, remember? Perhaps it was only me who needed to be reminded of that. But maybe some others among us need to hear it, too.

The thing that gets me about the vituperation some Christians aim at the likes of Christopher Hitchens and other outspoken atheists is — and this may surprise you, given my opening brief against theology-as-fetish — well, the bad theology of it all. By grace we are saved through faith, that no man may boast. None of us has pulled himself up to salvation by dint of his intellectual or moral bootstraps. Dead in trespasses and sins, no man sees the truth.

To lord it over people who don’t share our faith, then, or to look down on them as if our exalted position has something to do with our own superiority, seems not only unkind and anti-Christian, but rooted in a misperception about the origins of faith. Christopher Hitchens is better educated than most people I know, and more articulate, and more thoughtful. But he is lost in a land of unfaith, a stranger and alien to God, and no amount of reasoning or debating will bring him into the kingdom of heaven.

We Christians, on the other hand, will gain entrance through no wisdom of our own. It’s a humbling thought, isn’t it, to know that we are saved in spite of — certainly not because of — ourselves? To know that some people with superior intelligence and reasoning capacity will not be saved? It seems that our attitudes ought to reflect this reality. We ought to proclaim the truth, yes, but in humility rather than smugness.

I had lunch a few months ago with an elderly man who was instrumental in my early theological education. When I first joined the Church he gave me scores of books from his imposing library, and fielded my questions about the Bible, and Calvinism, and the Reformation. He has imposing eyebrows, and a gruff manner, and is fond of that verse about how we are worms in the sight of God. He is the quintessential reformed American Christian. It had been years since we’d last broken bread together. I asked him what God has been teaching him, expecting an answer about holiness, or righteousness, or the importance of daily prayer (he spends over an hour a day on his knees). But he looked at me, his eyes welling up, and said, “God is teaching me that nothing I do — not one thing — is worthy. But He loves me anyway.”

I wonder what might be accomplished, were we Christians more inclined to confess our own sins than to point out the sins of others. Not to ignore wickedness in the world, but to start with the wickedness that dwells in our own hearts — to say: See? I am just like you, but I have been forgiven. To say: Let me help you with that burden, brother. To say: Here is a water that quenches all thirst.