I am reading, with two friends, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel set in New York City in the years immediately following the World Trade Center attacks. I haven’t gotten very far—only about thirty pages, actually—so this more like a report along the way than a review. I’m already hooked, which is always a good sign, drawn into the lives of Hans and Rachel van den Broek, and their son, Jake, and Hans’ friend, Chuck Ramkissoon whom he met while playing cricket in a city park.

Hans and his wife had recently moved to New York from London, and then were forced to move into a hotel room when the Trade Towers collapsed. Their apartment is shrouded in dust, and though their jobs are secure, life, their relationship, their sense of belonging in New York are all now shrouded with uncertainty. Rachel tells Hans she is returning to London with Jake.

I felt my wife sit up. It would only be for a while, she said in a low voice. Just to get some perspective on things. She would move in with her parents and give Jake some attention. He needed it. Living like this, in a crappy hotel, in a city gone mad, was doing him no good: had I noticed how clinging he’d become? I could fly over every fortnight; and there was always the phone. She lit a cigarette. She’d started smoking again, after an interlude of three years. She said, “It might even do us some good.”

It is Hans’ voice we hear in Netherland as the narration unfolds. But it was the next paragraph that caught my attention. In it Hans lifts the veil, as it were, so we can see more deeply into their lives. And as he provides a glimpse into this tiny slice of the reality in which they live, he also allows us greater clarity about the world in which we all move and have our being day by day:

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight. Evenings, after Jake had been put to bed, we quietly ate watercress and translucent noodles that neither of us could find the strength to remove from their cartons; took turns to doze in the bathtub; and failed to stay awake for the duration of a TV show. Rachel was tired and I was tired. A banal state of affairs, yes—but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.

[Excerpted from Netherland by Joseph O’Neill (New York, NY: Vintage Books; 2008) pp. 22-23.]

I was reflecting on that when I read this brief quote by John Stott. What he says is worth thinking about:

Submission and obedience

In my view the 1662 Prayer Book marriage service was wrong to include the word 'obey' in the bride's vows. The concept of a husband who issues commands and of a wife who gives him obedience is simply not found in the New Testament. The nearest approximation to it is the cited example of Sarah who “obeyed Abraham, calling him lord.” But even in that passage the apostle Peter’s actual instructions to wives is the same as Paul’s, namely, “Be submissive to your husbands” (1 Pet. 3:1-6). And ... a wife’s submission is something quite different from obedience. It is a voluntary self-giving to a lover whose responsibility is defined in terms of constructive care; it is love’s response to love.

[excerpted from The Message of Ephesians (The Bible Speaks Today series: London: IVP, 1979), p. 238.]

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Ross Douthat, Op-ed columnist for the New York Times, takes another look at the brouhaha that resulted when a journalist suggested Tiger Woods should consider Christianity since being revealed as an unfaithful husband. Brit Hume, on Fox News many people noted with displeasure, had made the gaffe, showing both the moral bankruptcy of Fox as a news source and the danger of religious people being allowed to proselytize in the public square.

Douthat asks us to ignore the hissing in the background and be more thoughtful about what took place:

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

A week ago, Brit Hume broke all three rules at once. Asked on a Fox News panel what advice he’d give to the embattled Tiger Woods, Hume suggested that the golfer consider converting to Christianity. “He’s said to be a Buddhist,” Hume noted. “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. ”

A great many people immediately declared that this comment was the most outrageous thing they’d ever heard.

Douthat suggest that the outcry misses what might in fact be the most essential issue. “Theology has consequences,” he argues. “It shapes lives, families, nations, cultures, wars; it can change people, save them from themselves, and sometimes warp or even destroy them. If we tiptoe politely around this reality, then we betray every teacher, guru and philosopher—including Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha both—who ever sought to resolve the most human of all problems: How then should we live?”

You can read Douthat’s interesting piece, “Let’s Talk About Faith,” here. I recommend it to you.

Thomas H. Kean and John Farmer Jr., the co-chairman and senior counsel of the 9/11 commission bring some sane reflection on what the Christmas bomb attempt implies for what the U.S. must do to enhance security.

There are procedural fixes worth undertaking, of course, like mandating enhanced screening, or installing body scanning technology, or coordinating the software used by intelligence agencies, or instructing State Department personnel to query the visa status of any person reported to be suspicious. Reforming the no-fly list procedures, as President Obama has proposed, is certainly overdue. But in our view the problem runs deeper, and requires a searching look at the structure of government itself.

Despite the best efforts of the 9/11 commission and other intelligence reformers, budgetary authority over intelligence remains unaligned with substantive responsibility. Turf battles persist among intelligence agencies. Power is sought while responsibility is deflected. The drift toward inertia continues.

Government agencies are most likely to succeed when structure matches mission. With its many jurisdictional boundaries and its persistent bureaucratic fault lines, our current system, although greatly improved since 9/11, affords too many opportunities to let information slip, too many occasions for human frailty to assert itself.

Their piece, “How 12/25 Was Like 9/11,” published as in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times (January 5, 2010) can be read here.

Over the years I have grieved that most of the time when an “evangelical spokesperson” is quoted in the media, it is someone I do not want speaking for me. Some are famous simply for having large congregations, or for being an inspiring speaker. Some have gained attention through their popularity on religious media, addressing topics for which they have developed no true expertise over years of careful thought and disciplined service. Some are far more consistent as commentators for political ideologies like conservatism, or Christian Zionism than they are for biblical orthodoxy or a clear application of the gospel of grace to the things of life. (I appreciate the fact that some journalists understand my dilemma here; Read David Brooks' New York Times column, "Who is John Stott?" here.)

He is retired from public ministry now, after a lifetime of faithful service, but one person I have always tried to listen to with care is John Stott. His voice is marked by wisdom, shaped by the Scriptures, moderated by the long tradition of orthodox belief and practice in the church, and never in service of some political ideology. Listen to this from Rev Stott at the beginning of a new year, a new decade, and let it hone your prayers today:

Our blind spot

It is easy to criticize our Christian forebears for their blindness. It is much harder to discover our own. What will posterity see as the chief Christian blind spot of the last quarter of the twentieth century? I do not know. But I suspect it will have something to do with the economic oppression of the Third World and the readiness with which western Christians tolerate it, and even acquiesce in it. Only slowly is our Christian conscience being aroused to the gross economic inequalities between the countries of the North Atlantic and the southern world of Latin America, Africa and most parts of Asia. Total egalitarianism may not be a biblical ideal. But must we not roundly declare that luxury and extravagance are indefensible evils, while much of the world is undernourished and underprivileged? Many more Christians should gain the economic and political qualifications to join in the quest for justice in the world community. And meanwhile, the development of a less affluent lifestyle, in whatever terms we may define it, is surely an obligation that Scripture lays on us in compassionate solidarity with the poor. Of course we can resist these things and even use (misuse) the Bible to defend our resistance. The horror of the situation is that our affluent culture has drugged us; we no longer feel the pain of other people's deprivations. Yet the first step toward the recovery of our Christian integrity is to be aware that our culture blinds, deafens and dopes us. Then we shall begin to cry to God to open our eyes, unstop our ears and stab our dull consciences awake, until we see, hear and feel what through his Word he has been saying to us all the time. Then we shall take action.

[From Culture and the Bible by John Stott (Downers Grove: IVP, 1981), p. 36.]

Every morning an email, Langham Partnership Daily Thought, arrives in my inbox, a brief excerpt from the voluminous writings of John Stott. This one arrived this morning, January 6, 2010, and as usual, I was glad to read it. The emails are free, and you can subscribe here.

I recommend subscribing, but be warned: wisdom shaped by biblical orthodoxy is far more bracing than the vacuous sound bites produced by media pundits who serve one ideology or another.

It’s that time again, and as Bono, activist for justice and frontman for U2 notes, the lists—of resolutions and best and worst—have proliferated wildly.

If we have overindulged in anything these past several days, it is neither holiday ham nor American football; it is Top 10 lists. We have been stuffed full of them. Even in these self-restrained pages, it has been impossible to avoid the end-of-the-decade accountings of the 10 best such-and-suches and the 10 worst fill-in-the-blanks.

And so, in the spirit of rock star excess, I offer yet another.

Bono’s list is worth some reflection, and can be read here.