Wings and Claws

It was a foregone conclusion after the recent election that the rich were going to get to keep their tax cuts. Under the circumstances I think Obama got the best bargain he could get, although I welcome the righteous anger coming from the left. I just wish they - congressional dems - had more spine when it really mattered last summer, but they never brought up the tax cut bill then.

In any case the most organized and influential group in Washington these days are the rich, which include a majority of our legislators. So it is no surprise that they got their tax cuts. But I came across this passage from Walter Rauschenbush's The Theology for the Social Gospel this morning and it seemed apropos:

Ordinary sin is an act of weakness and side-stepping, followed by shame the next day. But when it is a source of prolific income, it is no longer a shame-faced vagabond slinking through the dark, but an army with banners, entrenched and defiant. The bigger the dividends, the stiffer the resistance against anything that would cut them down. When fed with money, sin grows wings and claws. (p.66)

Abundant Life Here and Now

I am currently reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love for This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. The authors begin with the observation that images of the crucified Christ don't appear in early Christian art for nearly a thousand years after the time of Jesus; then they become predominant. Why is this? What changes within Christianity bring it about?

The first Christian art from the catacombs through the building of worship spaces emphasized the restoration of paradise on earth as a result of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Images of loaves and fishes, water and wine, the rivers of life, trees and animals were used in Christian art to created the sensation of paradise restored. In the same way icons brought the heavenly paradise down to earth for those who touched and prayed to them. To become a Christian brought not only the promise of a future paradise but life in paradise now as part of a community that was attuned through spiritual disciplines to see and participate in paradise and to make it a reality through the practice of what the authors call ethical grace.

They suggest that this same spirit animates much of the New Testament. For example here is what they have to say about John 3:16:

Today this passage is invariably interpreted to mean that God placed Jesus in the world to die on the cross, but at no point does this story mention death. It does not use the Greek word paradidomai, the word that John's Gospel specifically uses to describe the action of those who "gave" or "handed over" Jesus to be crucified. John 19:16 makes it clear that Pilate, not God, "handed him over to them to be crucified." Jesus' words to Nicodemus are about birth and life, not death and afterlife. They reiterate the themes of Creation and the power to be born of God that we spoke of in Chapter 1. God loves the world, the kosmos, and loves the Son, to who he gives "the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34).

In John's Gospel Jesus incarnates wisdom, turns water into wine, feeds the multitudes, demonstrating in various ways that he has come to restore paradise, abundant life, to this life.

Unfortunately, the authors say, paradise is eventually replaced with images of the suffering and tortured Jesus. When and why that happens in a future post.

The thesis of this book reminds me of my trip to Rome several years ago. As we visited the catacombs and churches and the Vatican Art Museum to see early Christian art our guide, Grady Snyder, kept asking us "what are you not seeing here?" There were no crosses anywhere to be found. The promise of new life not a focus on Jesus' suffering and death was what attracted converts to Christianity.

It seems to me that this is or should be one of the predominant themes of progressive Christianity. I think we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

On Being a Good Example

Yesterday I started reading Philip Gulley's If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus. In his opening chapter he tells the story of being a young person in church hearing a preacher say "Some people will tell you Jesus is only an example for how we should live. But anyone can be an example."

Thirty years later Gulley says he knows better than ever that this isn't true. Living the kind of virtuous life that makes one a worthy example for others to follow is very difficult. To say that it somehow diminishes the story of Jesus if he is 'only' a moral example is to ignore the simple fact that we rarely encounter individuals who so embody the qualities associated with Godly virtue. In our lifetimes we are fortunate if we come under the influence of a few who come close.

If Jesus was one of these rare individuals - and I suspect he was - it is not hard to understand why he would have attracted both followers and enemies. Authentic individuals who actually live by the highest values attract company. We want to be in their presence. We want to learn from them. We want to be like them.

They also attract enemies because they have authentic power, not supernatural power or power obtained through violence, wealth or stealth, but the kind of power that comes naturally from becoming during their life-times a brighter and clearer light, the kind of light that stands in sharp contrast to and exposes the corruption and dishonesty and violence that so often are the tools of those who are in power.

It has been my experience that taking Jesus off the Only Son of God pedestal and making him fully human actually makes it much for difficult to be a follower. What we are being called to do as followers is not to believe in him but to live as he lived. Imagine what the world would be like if Christians simply lived more simply, or forswore the use of violence of any kind. The world as we know it today would truly be turned upside down. We would say the kingdom of God has come on earth.

Am I asking too much? The world is fallen and we need the grace of God to save us? Then we are looking for the easy way out - or up. Making Jesus into our ticket to heaven is cheap grace. Letting him be an uncommonly virtuous son of God who challenges the rest of us sons and daughters of God by word and example to live as he lived calls us to a lifetime of growth and transformation.

Oh, that Jesus would 'just' be an example that we spent our lifetimes emulating.

How Diverse Can a Church Be?

James McGrath asks this question on his blog: how diverse can a church be? I think there are couple of ways of thinking about an answer. One is that it depends a lot on the emotional health an intelligence of the people in leadership at the church. Emotionally healthy people have clearly self-defined values and boundaries and are not threatened by people who have different beliefs. If the leadership is healthy they can model healthy dialogue and conflict and the congregation can tolerate, perhaps even welcome, a certain amount of diversity. On the other hand if the leadership isn't emotionally healthy then they will probably be threatened by diversity and seek to enforce adherence to a more narrow theology or doctrinal position. (And this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative theology; it is true across the spectrum. Emotionally healthy leadership seems to attract more diversity of thought and opinion around whatever the spiritual orientation is.)

Another way to think about it is what I learned from evangelical church planters whose training I attended nearly 20 years ago. At the time there was no training available for liberal church planters, at least not that I was aware of. The one teaching that was driven home over and over was that the group of people planting the church must all agree on essential matters of theology and doctrine. Therefore, I was taught, it was very important to hammer out a set of core values that clearly define where you stand on how you read scripture, understand Jesus, think about culture-war issues like homosexuality, etc. The leadership needs to agree on these issues and then when the church gets underway new members also need to be in essential agreement. It is better to say to someone "You know there is another church down the road that might better meet your needs" rather than be so desperate for new people that you welcome those who have fundamental disagreements about core issues. I heard these trainers say that there would be more than enough diversity to deal with even among those who are in agreement on core values.

For the most part we followed this advise as we started Open Circle. I knew starting the church that there were certain issues that were important to me that I no longer wanted to have to be fighting about in a congregation: gays would be welcome, I would not be interpreting scripture in a literal way, and Christianity was not the only valid spiritual path. I was clear about these issues as I talked to potential members and those who stayed were in agreement on these issues. When we had enough of a core group we worked out a set of core values and then we clearly published these in all of our literature. We still do.

In some ways our congregation is not very diverse. We are mostly white, theologically and politically liberal. In other ways we are quite diverse. We have a lot diversity in religious background: Catholic, many flavors of Protestant, pagan, atheist, Jewish. We have a growing diversity in age. We started out with mostly boomer individuals and families; now we run the gamut from young families to seniors, singles, cohabitating and married couple with and without children, gay and straight. We have city dwellers, suburbanites and folks coming from small towns and the country, some driving 30 miles to get to church.

I have found it to be true that even with clearly defined core values there is plenty of diversity that presents continuing opportunities for dialogue and challenges for the congregation as we chart our way forward. We have constant conversations around the issues like these: what does it mean to be a Christian or a follower of Jesus today; how do we relate to our denomination, The Church of the Brethren; how do we best deploy our people resources to serve church and community? We have some strong differences of opinion in the congregation about these issues.

I wish we were more racially diverse than we are and interestingly enough, we were more racially diverse when we started than we are now 17 years later. I am not sure why that is but I would guess that part of it has to do with the fact that I do not have great cross-cultural skills and it is not one of the passions that drives me as a pastor, like say being welcoming to glbt folk does.

It is interesting to note that my answer to this question doesn't even touch on some of the issues found in this response.

Atheist Delusions

I have been reading David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. Hart is taking on the so-called New Atheists who argue that Christian history is marked by its violence, ignorance, and opposition to science. I am only about half-way in but I find Hart making some good points.

One is that the Christian way of life was a marked upgrade from the pagan way of life that preceded it. He makes basically the same point here that Rodney Stark makes when Stark talks about how the Christians and pagans responded so differently when the Roman empire was visited by the plagues. The pagans fled for the hills, including the pagan doctors. The Christians stayed and took care of the sick. The result was that many of the pagans who survived converted to Christianity. It was a better way of living.

Why did the Christians stay and take care of the sick? Because at the heart of the Christian story there is a suffering God. On the surface it sounds like a terrible marketing strategy: my God gets hung on a cross, suffers and dies; how great can he be? It is a stumbling block. But in practice it leads to care for the suffering because this is where God is present. So widows are cared for, orphans are cared for, sick people are cared for. Christians are to stop supporting the games where humans suffer and die for sport. Christianity treats humans with more dignity; human consciousness evolves thanks to Christianity.

Christian culture brings us not only hospitals and better care for the suffering but a flourishing of the arts: literature, music, painting and sculpture. Creativity is encouraged; beauty is valued. And so the argument goes. The end of the pagan era was not the end of a golden era replaced by a thousand years of night until the enlightenment once again lit the mind on fire. The Christian era was in many ways a huge step up for humanity.

Another point, on Christian opposition to science, Hart essentially asks this question: in what culture did Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to name just a few history-making scientists, make their history? Christian culture. Where did they do their work? In universities created and funded by Christian institutions. Where they had remarkable freedom to study and write as they pleased. Hart talks at some length about Galileo's silencing at the hands of Pope Urban VIII over the issue Galileo's support of Copernicus' heliocentric theory. Hart repeats an argument I have read before that Galileo's problem was not in holding a view of the earth's place in the universe that the church found threatening. His problem was that he was a pompous ass who needlessly offended his erstwhile friend and patron the Pope. Even then his punishment was very mild. The pope and the church were not anti-science.

Hart acknowledges the reality of violence at the hands of Christians against Jews, witches, and Muslims, and he discusses the causes and consequences of the "dark ages" in western Christianity after the fall of the Roman empire. He notes, though, that Christian culture thrived in the East, and that this was gifted to the Muslims in their conquests and expansions. He traces the movement of ancient literature and learning back to the West during the Crusades. And that is as far as I have gotten.

One thing I will say for Hart and I am not sure this is a complement, he can match Dawkins and Hitchens snark for snark. The cultured despisers have no monopoly on the ability to hurl witty epithets at opponents.

Although I haven't finished the book my hunch is that Hart is worried about our future as we move into a post-Christian world that is losing its grounding in Christianity's great idea that charity and self-less love is the heart of God and the heart of a better way of living. I don't know the answer to that. Are we falling backward or are we evolving into a better future? I would say there is no way of knowing.

I wonder, though, if it is possible to be a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian and keep hope alive. The theology of Christianity doesn't work so well for me anymore, at least if that theology includes some kind of belief in a supernatural world, but the incarnational side that has God becoming human (in us all) and more particularly God being present in suffering and our calling to respond to that with love and service, that works for me. It is enough for me but is it enough for Christianity and for our culture?

I wonder to what hope there is when so many Christians identify their Christianity with militarism and capitalism. Christianity was once a better idea. It might still be but how would we know when you can't tell Christians apart from anyone else?

Disbelief in the Pulpit

Via James McGrath I want to call attention to this interesting discussion in the Washington Post based on this article: Preachers who are not Believers. I don't have time today but I plan on commenting on it soon.

God's Presence in a Good Cigar

Norman Lear on where he finds God:

I consider myself deeply religious. I was born a Jew and I love my people and our culture. I could not be prouder of what, in our long history, we have brought to the world. But that is not what makes me religious.

What makes me religious is the way I experience life and the way I try to live it. In his book "Edith the Good," Spencer Marsh's thesis was that, although she never spoke of it per se, Edith Bunker's every reflexive reaction to any situation was what the writers thought Jesus' reaction would be. Marsh had it right; that is the way Edith was conceived. I'm not in that league by any means - Lyn and our children will certify that - but everything tells me that the world would be an exquisite place to live if we were all able to respond to life as Jesus did.

That is "mamaloshen," a Yiddish word describing the understanding that comes when one's common sense derives as much from the soul as the mind. The Sermon on the Mount is simple mama-loshen. And anything that ain't mama-loshen doesn't square with my religious sensibilities.

Of course, to most religionists these observations are dismissible. To them my words lack scriptural, theological and ecclesiastical weight. Still, ever since my early 20s when I smoked my first good cigar, I have felt that if there was no other reason to believe in God, Havana leaf would suffice. I've had similar epiphanies while biting into a ripe peach, a just-ready piece of Crenshaw melon or a great ear of corn.

Pot Calling Kettle

Dunker Journal links approvingly to these comments by Peter J. Leithart in Touchstone Magazine:

Gender-neutral names for God look so innocuous. What could be wrong with baptizing in the name of “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”?

As Paul would say, much in every way. To name the First Person as “Creator” is to name him in relation to the world, and so too with “Redeemer” and “Sanctifier” for the Second and Third Person. But God isn’t defined by the creation. He’s defined by himself, which is why the First Person must be named in relation to One who is also God.

Gender-neutral names deny the freedom of God; they attack the God-ness of God, and as such, they are idolatrous.

Huh?

Pantheism

Ross Douthat comments today on the pantheistic message of Avatar and of Hollywood movies in general. I haven't seen Avatar so I can't comment on it's message. I tend to see the veneration of nature as displayed in Disney movies from the days of Bambi right up to the more recent Lion King and Pocohantas as useful popular corrections to the usual commercial propaganda that progress and technology and capitalism will save us. I am not sure they really make a dent against this omnipresent propaganda, but I appreciate the efforts to plant the seed of a different kind of message in young minds.

But I want to take a little issue with this comment by Douthat:

At the same time, pantheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.

I don't think this is quite right. Pantheism isn't really for anyone who "pines for transcendence." Pantheism collapses the transcendent into everything around us. For the pantheist God is in everything and there is nothing more, nothing transcendent.

For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, there is panentheism, which holds that the everything is holy but the holy is not defined by everything. There is something more - transcendence - even if that something more is not a personal God of the Bible who exists "wholly outside our world but intervenes with some regularity.

It's a small but important distinction.

Apparently there are those who are attracted to Orthodox traditions because of its panentheism. For those of us who don't find the bells and whistles of Orthodoxy meaningful, there is another panentheistic alternative. It is called liberal Christianity.

Beauty Everywhere We Look

A few weeks ago in a Sunday message about the contingency of life and living life with gratitude I made reference to Jonathan Edwards' most famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I don't share Edward's view that we sinners are in essence being dangled by God above the fiery furnace and at any moment God could justly let us drop. I do, however, think that when we ponder the contingency of life it feels something like being thusly dangled.

In any case a post by Rod Dreher about beauty (and how the aim of artistic expression with regards to beauty as a value or goal has changed over time) got me to thinking about Edwards again.

Beauty was everywhere we look in Edwards' worldview. God was beautiful, love was beautiful, nature was beautiful, the virtuous life was beautiful. Beauty was, for Edwards, both an ontological reality and the ultimate goal of the spiritual life.

What I really liked about Edwards' take on beauty was the way the creation was a spilling-out or overflowing of God's beauty into the world so that the divine beauty was reflected everywhere. God's beauty was the animating force in the universe.

While Edwards could preach hell-fire and brimstone, fear was not what motivated him and he hoped it was not what motivated others to live virtuously. It was the beauty of God that drew us to Him (as he would have said it), a beauty that was always all around us if we have eyes to see.

This was Edwards at his most sublime.

American Evangelicals Are Different

Michael Bird is an Australian-born evangelical who teaches New Testament in Scotland. He talks about the difference between evangelicals in America and around the world:

...my dear friends in North America have to learn that outside of North America the things that they regard as badges of evangelicalism may not necessarily be badges elsewhere. For example, nowhere outside of the USA is "inerrancy" the single defining issue for evangelicals. The UCCF statement of faith in the UK refers to the Scriptures as "infallible" not inerrant. At the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem where an international group of Evangelical Anglicans met together, their statement of faith referred to the "sufficiency" of the Scriptures, but there was no reference to inerrancy or infallibility. Ironically, these are people who are besieged by real liberals (not N.T. Wright, Peter Enns, Norman Shepherd, or those Federal Vision chaps, I mean real liberals!) and they do not associate an orthodox view of Scripture with pledging one's allegiance to the Chicago Statement or to B.B. Warfield. Now, if you ask the average non-American evangelical what they believe about Scripture, I think you'll find that they regard it as "true and trustworthy" in every meaningful sense, but without necessarily resorting to the well-worn mantra of the "inerrant autographa" (though I imagine that they might just as well affirm it even if it's not their default setting). In other words, American evangelicals (reformed or otherwise) need to try understand themselves as being one small fish in a much bigger ocean and not expect non-Americans to line up with their own parochial theological proclivities. Moreover, there are also some things about North American evangelicals that Christians outside of North American cannot comprehend: 1. Only north american evangelicals oppose measures to stem global warming, 2. Only north american evangelicals oppose universal health care, and 3. Only north american evangelicals support the Iraq War. Now, to Christians in the rest of the world this is somewhere between strange, funny, and frightening. Why is it that only north american evangelicals support these things? Are the rest of us stupid? It makes many of us suspicious that our North American evangelical friends have merged their theology with GOP economic policy, raised patriotism to an almost idolatrous level, and have a naive belief in the divinely given right of American hegemony. North Americans would do well to take the North-Americanism out of their evangelicalism and try to see Jesus through the eyes of Christians in other lands.

Chaos in the Garden

The Steele gardens are in full bloom right now. Roses, Joe Pye, phlox, nepeta, sedum, cone flowers, clethra, butterfly bush, annuals and lots more are flowering. The hummingbirds and songbirds and bees and dragonflies are visiting. You are welcome to stop over and take a look too.

But don't look too close. It has been a challenging year. Another summer has come and nearly gone with too little water. Plants are stressed. Some are diseased. The weeds, of course, are thriving. Everywhere I look there are weeds. Some days I walk through the gardens and spot a 2-foot weed and wonder how I missed it before and how it grew so fast.

Keeping a garden alive and healthy requires requires regular tending and more than a little help from Mother Nature. Left to run its natural course, the untended plants would die out or grow out of proportion to their space, the weeds would take over and the result would be chaos. Chaos is the natural course of things in the garden.

I am reminded of an article I read recently about the ancient Hebrew worldview that gave us the creation myth. While the Christian understanding of this story was heavily influenced by Greek thought and hence, some have this silly notion that the biblical story is about creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, that is not what the story says. It says that in the beginning the earth was a formless waste. There was chaos.

This was very much the experience of peoples in the ancient, pre-scientific world. Chaos was always lurking at the door. With no tractors, chemicals, genetically modified seeds, fencing to keep out intruders, pressurized sources of water, gun powder to smote the wild things, nothing but rudimentary tools and hand labor, it was a constant struggle to keep a small space cleared enough to eke out an existence. The edge of that small space marked a dangerous border where wild things lived and the forces of chaos constantly worked their magic to bring back the jungle.

In order to create a space where humans could live, God brought order out of the chaos. The waters of the deep were contained. Night followed day; the rains came and went; plants and animals found a place to live. But the threat of chaos was ever-present. It was the task of humans to do what God did, to bring some order out of the formless wasteland. To use your imagination and enter that worldview, and then to read later in that story that God gave to humans "dominion" over the earth is to realize that this was their dream, their wildest fantasy, that a day might come when they would be able to tame nature and bring order out of chaos.

We, of course, live in that fantasy. We have tamed the forests and the fields and the wild animals, and our technologically super-charged ability to bring order out of chaos is now putting the planet in peril. In some ways we have come full circle; the threat of biblical-style chaos may be more real than ever today.

Which brings me back to my garden, and yours, to my lawn and yours. We all want our own slice of the Garden of Eden, our well-manicured lawns and beautiful gardens, a space where the forces of chaos are kept at bay. There is nothing wrong with this; the biblical story suggests to us that this is the way we were created; it is in our DNA. It's the way we do it that is the problem. We overuse chemicals, we waste water, we plant things that don't belong, we fail to distinguish between chaos and a healthy diversity (does our lawn really need to be free of all weeds?). There are big problems and big decisions looming as we face the reality of global warming. But step out into your lawn or garden and you will see that you and I have some smaller, but important decisions to make too. The forces of chaos are lurking there amidst the ordered beauty. How we work to keep those forces at bay does matter.

The Love of God

Do Muslims and Christians have a different perspective on God's love? Christianity Today reports on the first full day of the “Loving God and Neighbor” conference that is bringing together Christian, Muslim, and (a few) Jewish leaders on the campus of Yale University.

One of the Muslim speakers was Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia:

Dr. Ceric preached the value of forgiveness. Having witnessed the terror and brutality of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, he has had much to forgive. He told the Yale gathering of Muslims and Christians that “the human being has the right to ‘an eye for an eye.’” But the right to revenge is balanced by Islamic teaching: “If you forgive, you will be forgiven in the world to come, and [here my notes are a bit shaky] it will be your propitiation.”

But Ceric startled several evangelical listeners when he suggested that not everyone was worthy of love all the time. While he talked about love for widows and orphans, for example, he named “the arrogant” as an example of those who should not be loved. This contrasts sharply with Christian notions of love, in which we are called to love unconditionally “because he first loved us.” And the difference between the two notions of love became a point of discussion.

Yale theologian Miroslav Volf made a point of explaining the Christian view of love in his panel presentation just before lunch. Contrasting with another Muslim cleric’s assertion that we cannot speak of love as being of the essence of God, but only of love as God’s actions, Volf read the locus classicus from 1 John 4:7-21, with its famous sentence, “God is love.” Because God loves (among the persons of the Trinity) before the world comes into existence, said Volf, God’s love is not reactive, but is of his essence.

Nothing to comment on, just an interesting point of difference.