Base-Jumping and the Revolutionary War: Passion and the Taking of Risks

Written by Michael R. Walker

Saturday, 24 February 2007 18:00

I rarely take the time to watch TV news (with the exception of recording and watching the major stories of the 'evening news'), but tonight was an exception. I had the privilege - well, at least the occasion - to watch John Stossel on ABC's 20/20, with some family members who are visiting from out of town.

Stossel did a segment on risk-taking and the American fascination with danger, as part of his larger "Worry in America" series. During this segment he interviewed a psychologist who defended risk-taking and argued that experiencing danger was vital to our humanity. The segment argued that, from being a soldier in combat to base-jumping and various extreme sports, from firefighting to the exploits of "Jack Ass," it's all part of the human need to take risks in order to feel alive, complete, etc. It puts us in touch with a part of ourselves and even reality that we otherwise couldn't experience. (Foucault called these "limit experiences," but that didn't make it onto 20/20.) After showing a clip of a man jumping from the Eiffel Tower with a parachute, they showed pictures of the Revolutionary War, noting that this was all part of a great American tradition of taking risks and feeling good about it. It's the American way of life, they argued.

This is, of course, a little ridiculous. There is more than a slight difference between taking risks because one believes he is fighting for the freedom of his people -- or any principle that transcends oneself -- on the one hand, and just taking risks for the hell of it -- to feel better about myself -- on the other. Even if you wish we were still English colonies, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that the soldiers in the Revolutionary War were fighting simply in order to experience an adrenaline rush. I guess in a sensate culture, which is motivated by the need for more and more cycles of extreme elation and relaxed comfort, we are prone to interpret the aims and actions of previous eras in the same vein.

If we do this consistently, we'll make history as boring and void of meaning as our own lives often are -- the very condition that often leads to the extreme risk-taking and search for the adrenaline rush. I'm not an antiquarian longing for the good 'ole days, but I'd prefer to have a past that can speak a word of hope and passion and self-transcending belief into the solipsism of the present.

(Another great irony in all this is that, as I understand it, one of Stossel's aims in the show is to argue that Americans are too afraid, too worried about too many of the wrong things. This is true, of course. But it's true because we're afraid of those things that can interrupt our cycles of elation and comfort. Giving people statisical information about why they shouldn't fear the things they are fearing will only shift the earthly object feared (e.g. a bike accident instead of a terrorist). It's a problem with the soul. People worry too much because they are too turned in upon themselves, not because they don't have good enough information about what dangers to avoid. As long our hopes are set on a pain free, adrenaline-infused existence, we'll have morbid fear of anything that can take that away.)

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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