Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

Chair, Division of Biblical Studies & Theology,

Bob Jones University

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Freak Out Thou Not. This Means You.

January 8, 2018 by Dan Olinger 10 Comments

What to do?! What to do?!

Everything’s just awful! Worse than ever before!

If you’re conservative, then the Deep State is trying to overthrow a duly elected president, and the country’s going broke, and sexual mores are all being redefined, and what has happened to our country?!

And if you’re liberal, well, do we even need to say? We have an idiot in the White House, who watches TV all day, and he’s going to start a nuclear war, and even his entire staff thinks he’s unfit for office. Roll out the 25th and stop this madman.

It’s awful. Just awful.

I’m not suggesting that the world’s problems aren’t serious, or that evil people aren’t up to something. But I’d like to suggest that we don’t have to panic—in fact, that as a moral matter we ought not to panic.

A few observations.

One of the benefits of being an old codger is that, if your long-term memory is still working, you have some history by which to evaluate the present. I can testify that this kind of apocalyptic talk has been going on for as long as I’ve been alive—and longer than that (because I was actually taught history in school, back in the day).

When I was born, VP Richard Nixon was going to jail everybody who disagreed with him, because of that awful Senator McCarthy and the military-industrial complex, or something. Then JFK was going to start a nuclear war with the USSR over a few pictures from an inconsequential island. Then the Commies were going to destroy our society with forced integration, and with that take over the whole bloomin’ country by 1973. Then LBJ was going to kill all our boys in Vietnam—he was so unpopular with his own party that he couldn’t run for reelection in 1968. Then MLK and RFK were gunned down right before our eyes. Then Nixon—well, Nixon—do we even have to talk about him? End-of-the-world stuff. Then Carter couldn’t get our hostages out of Iran, and then Reagan was going to start World War III (“we begin bombing in five minutes!”), and then Clinton was, well, inattentive to his presidential duties because of, um, distractions, and there was that whole impeachment thing, which was just about sex, and who cares about that? and then Bush stole the whole country from Gore and blew up the Middle East by lying about WMDs, and then Obama wasn’t even born here, and was just an undercover Muslim (did you know his real name is Soetero?!), and threw the whole country away, and now Trump’s gonna destroy everything for sure.

I mean it when I say that I’m not mocking past fears or trivializing serious issues in the US and the world. But I can’t help noticing that none of the fears were realized. None of them. Sure, there are problems today, many of which have their roots in those earlier times. But we’re still here, and the great majority of us live better than millionaires did a hundred years ago (sometime study the history of sewage systems), and the fears were all overblown. All of them.

Political opponents have always exaggerated the fears. The current election has always been the Most Important One Ever, and the opponent has always been the Worst Person in the World. Now even the weather is worse than ever; every storm is the Storm of the Century, or the Snowpocalypse, or the Polar Vortex, or the Bomb Cyclone.

We need to get over our addiction to adrenaline. We need to see things as they really are, and then we need to just calm down.

This is particularly true of Christians. There is a God in heaven, who raises up kings—all of them—and in his good time sets them down again (Dan 2.21). Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton are no longer any threat.

Further, they were never any threat to the plan of God, even when they were in office. They were, in fact, part of his plan. As is Donald Trump, love him or hate him, and Barack Obama before him. Our times are in the hands of a God who is both great and good, and whose intentions for his people are good to the infinite extreme.

What are seekers to think when God’s people act as though none of that is true? When they express dismay, or rage, or outright panic in their public proclamations or in private? When they evidence that for them, love of God has not cast out fear? When we show no evidence of grace, mercy, and peace?

Sure, the world’s a difficult and dangerous place. And when we see problems, they should get our attention, and we should act to solve them. We should fight injustice. We should demand truth and righteousness from our elected leaders. But we cannot act strategically, wisely, when we’re in panic mode. We need to be calm, rational, deliberate, trusting in the providential care of Almighty God, as we seek to bring light and hope to a badly broken world.

#freakoutthounot

 

Filed Under: Culture, Politics, Theology Tagged With: freakoutthounot

Amateur Thoughts on a Theatrical Experience

November 20, 2017 by Dan Olinger 1 Comment

Last week I had the pleasure of performing in a minor role in BJU’s Classic Players production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. I’ve enjoyed being able to act in a few other productions as well for the past couple of decades. (My first real acting experience, beyond the occasional skit, was in my 40s, when a friend offered me the role of Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew. I knew nothing about acting, and he kindly and patiently directed me to the point where I wouldn’t make a complete fool of myself—and him. Thanks, Ron.) This one was directed by my long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Lonnie Polson (“Rehearsal is not where I tell you what to do; it’s where you show me what you have already done”).

I love everything about the experience. The rehearsal hours are long and sometimes tedious, but that’s the price of getting to the point where you don’t fear complete chaos on opening night. And in those rehearsals I get to watch real actors work, experimenting with different ways to say their lines and deciding what kinds of body language and business make the role genuine. Then there’s the work of the crew, including costumers who make an idea real and attentively see that the costume fits the actor in such a way that he can do what he needs to do on stage; makeup artists, who spend significant time creating art that’s going to last for just a couple of hours, but in the meantime transform actors into exactly the people they need to be; and wig & hair artists, who complete what the makeup artists have begun with what amounts to the cherry on top. And during performance, the crew is standing in the wings, ready to fix anything that goes wrong in their area of responsibility.

And we’re just getting started. There’s the audio crew, who see that we’re all fitted with working microphones, which the aforementioned wig folks hide in our hair relatively painlessly; and the lighting crew, who have labored for hours to design and implement scores of lighting cues, checking angles and colors and lumens so that the stage comes alive for each scene; and not least, the stage crew, who do the hardest physical work in a precisely choreographed dance while working diligently to be completely invisible.

I love all of them, and all of it. I love the smell of the stage (though not necessarily “the smell of the crowd”), the smoothness of the scene changes, the arc of the story, the magic of the make-believe world.

Story-telling—dramatic performance art—is a powerful thing. Ask Ezekiel.

It’s worth the effort.

And its benefits are far greater than just the entertainment value or the moral of the story.

A couple of examples.

First, there’s a character benefit to the cast. You can’t cram for a role; for a live show, the lines, and the business, and the blocking all have to be ingrained in your long-term memory, so that you can include in your attention the vagaries of live performance. In one of our performances, the Dogberry character, a professional-level actor, started his line “I give your worship leave to depart” as “I give your leaship ….” In a split second, he had to decide whether to restart the line, which the audience would obviously notice, or press on with an ad lib. And in that split second, he realized that the line would work perfectly if he continued, “word to depart.” So he did. And, in my opinion, he actually improved on Shakespeare’s original—if you know Dogberry.

Now, if the character is going to be that deeply a part of you, you have to discipline yourself to review your lines and visualize your role every day; that degree of memorization comes from regular, spaced repetition. It requires character and commitment. It’s always seemed odd to me that some stage actors, whose work requires that level of solid character, seem to have such undisciplined lives offstage.

Second, there’s a benefit to the entire cast and crew from working as a team. You can’t mount a production of any magnitude by yourself; even if you know everything about acting and electricity and carpentry and costume design and makeup and hair and music and lumens, you simply can’t do all that work yourself, because you’re not omnipresent, and the show lasts only so long. You need your fellow cast members, if there are any, to execute their lines and blocking; for a rapid costume change between scenes, you need costumers, perhaps several of them, to get you out of one and into another; if the wig adhesive lets go during a fight scene, you need the wigmaster in the wings to fix that right now; you need the phone to ring at precisely the right time; you need the set pieces to be at the right place for every scene, and sometimes you need them to move while you’re delivering a particular line; you need the choreographer not to run you into a statue—or the second row of seats.

Everybody needs to be focused on his responsibilities, and he needs to execute them correctly.

And you need to trust all of them with the kind of trust that comes from working hard together over time.

That’s a recipe for success in the real world just as certainly as in the magical one.

Photo by Peter Lewicki on Unsplash

Filed Under: Culture Tagged With: fine arts, relationship

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