Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Interesting post on the subject of "Johnny Cash, God and America" by Douglas Wilson at BLOG and MABLOG discussing the dualism between "Saturday night" and "Sunday morning" in Southern culture and Country Music.

Not all inconsistency is high-handed hypocrisy. A man who does not believe in Christ at all, and who joins the biggest church in town because that is the best place for business contacts is a hypocrite simpliciter. Someone like Jerry Lee Lewis, who believed in the truth of Christianity with all his might, and who was also driven and possessed by great balls of fire. Someone like Johnny Cash, who knew himself to be a sinner and who repented his great failings, did so as someone who believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and he believed this from the beginning of Saturday night to the end of it.

Sometimes, in the effort to be spiritual, or to follow evangelical sub-culture ideas of holiness, Christians can be practical gnostics.

Those who want their loyalties to be "just to Christ" are not integrationists -- they are upper story gnostics. Those who want their loyalties to remain entirely here below are functional atheists. Integrationism means that our loyalties indwell one another in a perichoretic fashion. When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun -- I will still be a man, I will still be an American, I will still be a Wilson, I will still be white, still descended from the Scots, and, if my luck holds, I will still be a presbyterian. Or, if Frank Turk is right, I will be a baptist once again.

In the resurrection, nothing good is lost. Christ redeemed it all. He did not do this so that all of us would then be identical -- no, He did it because He is going to unify all things in heaven and on earth. And unifying them is not the same thing as annihilating them.

I find listening to country music helps keep me grounded, whole and in touch with real life. Wilson quotes a line from the song "Boondocks" by Little Big Town, one of my favorite country bands: "Five card poker on Saturday night, church on Sunday morning." Sounds good to me- but I'm no good at poker.