Month: March 2017

Into the Woods: North Chickamauga Creek Gorge

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After a rather lackluster (or, for the cold-natured among us, pleasant) winter, the Tennessee Valley is in the full throes of spring. This means it’s high time to spend every dry weekend outside before heat, copperheads, spiders, and poison ivy tempt me to retreat to more air-conditioned environs. Fortunately, the area affords many such opportunities within a short drive.

Today’s entry was a spot that I’ve not explored much before, despite it being less than half an hour from home. North Chickamauga Creek Gorge State IMG_6089Natural Area is just a couple of miles off a major highway, and bordered by subdivisions. In the midst of expanding suburbia, this 7,000+ acre preserve is quite the breath of fresh air.

It’s water rather than air, though, that defines the space here. Unlike where I grew up in Western North Carolina, water isn’t as ubiquitous here, even with over 50″ of rain in an average year. It’s plentiful enough during winter and spring, but long, dry summers snatch up surface water, keeping the forests around here much drier than in the main spine of the Appalachians (or even the western side of the Cumberland Plateau). The gorge floor in August is almost a dry riverbed, but in March it is a clear, cold, forceful stream. In fact, we had to cut our walk short because the water was too high to ford safely where the main trail crosses the creek.

North Chick was until 2006 one of several “Pocket Wilderness” sites tucked into cracks in the plateau and set aside for public access and recreation by the former Bowater paper company. This gesture of goodwill was not as altruistic as it seems, as the Pockets’ steep, rocky terrain made them as useless for pulpwood harvesting as they were good for recreation. Most of the former Pockets have been transferred to state or federal conservation agencies, with most (this one included) roped in to the Cumberland Trail network.

Of the hike itself, I don’t have much to say. It was a pretty day and the grandparents had the kids, so most of our visit consisted of sitting on a rock by the creek talking. Aside from the main trail, we ventured a bit up the lower Hogskin Loop.IMG_6096 It’s very rocky, but nothing too hard. We simply weren’t in the mood for strenuous hiking today.

Like most creek bottoms, the relative preponderance of water means more vegetation than the slopes above. Given the seasonal pattern of moisture as well, spring is the best time to see the most unique and fleeting plant life. The best wildflower blooms are still a few weeks off, but many are already breaking through the leaf cover. Delicate trilliums, geraniums, and others soak up as much light as they can in the few weeks between last frost and the full leafing of the forest canopy. This was a very healthy forest, for whatever reason spared the underbrush takeover by invasive bush honeysuckle and privet that characterizes so much of the region. Native understory shrubs like mountain laurel, catawba rhododendron, mapleleaf viburnum, and red buckeye are here in abundance.

This little nook of our county is quite a spot, and a good reminder that sometimes a long way away can be right around the corner. Every metro area needs a little wilderness to spice it up, and Chattanooga certainly has these in spades.

 

 

 

 

The Way of the Righteous: Psalm 1

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In 2011, I wrote a short series on selected Psalms for Disciple Magazine. A few of these are now showing back up here with slight updates.

My goal in writing and teaching on Scripture is usually explore it expositionally with an eye toward application. That is, opening the Bible, and seeing what the text in its context has to say about our belief and practice as Christians. This is in contrast to what I’ll call exploring the Word prescriptively—approaching selected texts in answer to a question or problem. Both expositional and topical Bible studies can be valuable in shaping our understanding the Word, but I try to stick to exposition to keep myself grounded.

Why Psalms?
Expositing the Psalms is not as clear-cut as studying the more logically structured, largely straightforward style of a New Testament epistle or a book of history. This is a book of songs and poetry meant to stir the people of God to worship and contemplation of the Lord and His Law, not necessarily of narrative or instruction. It does not lend itself easily to a verse-by-verse study; in fact, to break it down that far often distracts from the important themes and imagery the Psalmists develop through poetic structure and musical cadence.

These difficulties, however, should not discourage us from studying the Psalms. Rather, they should draw us in and guide our approach to the book. Here are a few suggested “ground rules” for interpreting and applying these hymns of worship.

1) Psalms are lyrical, not always literal. This does not mean that the poetry here is somehow exempt from inerrancy, but that it is filled with word pictures and illustrations that should be read as such. Over-analyzing the wording in a metaphor (instead of its message) misses its power to move us to worship and repentance, and will almost certainly lead to an interpretation that ventures far afield from what the author intended.

2) Most Psalms focus primarily on God’s character and our response to Him. In short, they’re about worship. When we approach the Psalms for insights into God’s character, man’s sinfulness, and what a repentant and righteous heart looks like, we find a treasure-trove. Specific commands, specific behaviors, specific prophecies, and specific history, though present, make up far less of the content here. They are more often implied and alluded to than explicitly stated.

3) Psalms (like all Scripture) need to be studied in context. To read the Psalms without ever having read the history of Creation, the people of Israel, and their covenantal relationship with God (i.e. the rest of the Old Testament) will breed confusion and frustration. Sometimes, even specific Psalms cannot be fully understood without a background of their specific history (such as Ps. 51 in light of the narrative of 2 Sam. 11-12). Even though they are rooted in the old sacrificial system and a world before Christ, the Psalms teach us about the unchanging character of God. There is a reason He has preserved them for us today, and the truths He reveals through these songs are not for one time and one people only. 
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Considering Our Options: Reviewing Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option

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The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher, 2017, New York, Sentinel.*

Jeremiads against the corrupt culture of the surrounding world are nothing new in Christianity. The looming collapse of the social order has been forecast time and again, with a standard of accuracy that would make meteorologists into clairvoyants by comparison. Why, then, consider the subject again? What value could there possibly be in stirring up despair and provoking jeers from those outside the faith?

For one thing, the Jeremiad has fallen out of favor, within the church as much as without. We in the West don’t want to see the problem. Rather than wringing our hands waiting for the apocalypse, we are often twiddling our thumbs and trying to get the most out of our comfortable lives here and now. In this sense, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is not a Jeremiad at all, but more akin to the work of another prophet: “A voice of one calling: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD….‘” (Isa. 40:3).

There is a plenty in the book that weeps for the state of our culture, but Dreher focuses his criticisms and prescriptions on the Western church—namely our unwillingness to see how the ground beneath our feet has shifted. The time has come, he argues, to look around, make a strategic retreat from the familiar battlefields of the culture war, and shore up our homes, churches, and institutions against the quicksand of what he calls “liquid modernity.” We can no longer “fight the last war,” attempting to persuade non-Christians through politics and preaching to return with us to the (largely fictitious) halcyon good old days. The majority has turned against the teachings of Scripture, and we must instead build a case for the truth and goodness of Christ and His church, as well as the structures and commitment to live that out.

Dreher’s approach here is neither new nor untried, and he engages in the text with several contemporary authors (Russell Moore, Yuval Levin, James K. A. Smith, and others) sounding similar themes. He has several advantages in this space, though. As a journalist rather than a professional theologian, he has taken the time to observe culture from a more critical remove, seeing the flood rising across denominational and regional lines, and finding stories of silver linings in unlikely places. As an Eastern Orthodox Christian, he has been steeped neither in the culture of hyper-spiritual gnosticism that so often has infected fundamentalists nor the individualism and over-emphasis on relevance that has often hollowed out the mainstream American evangelical worldview. As somewhat of a political “crank”, broadly conservative but standing outside of either major party, his ideas push well past political solutions to the problems he identifies. His even-handed, ecumenical tone acknowledges the divides between the various constituenciesbenedict-option_w-copy he addresses while calling attention to the divide that runs through each of them: their relative unwillingness to acknowledge the dissolution of the faith taking place under their collective noses.

Because Dreher has been talking about these themes in public (largely through his blog at The American Conservative) for many years, The Benedict Option as a book is a chance for him to clarify (and answer critics) of the Benedict Option as a concept. It is rare for a work to come to an audience who have so many settled opinions on it (see here and here for a couple of recent examples), and Dreher’s good-faith effort to make his case here has been broadly successful. In just 244 pages, Rod manages to distill a decade of blog posts, seminars, and conversations into an adroit summation that covers vast ground with earnest clarity while avoiding undue simplification.

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