Friday, December 30, 2011

Ten Reasons Epiphany is Better than Christmas

10. Gives those of us too tired from Christmas craziness an excuse to wait on putting away the Christmas tree.
9. Allows theological re-education of decoration Nazis who demand that all greenery come down on December 26th.
8. Air travel is slightly less taxing and bothersome at Epiphany than during Christmas, or than traveling to Bethlehem 2000 years ago.
7. Plenty of leftover and discounted wrapping paper available for Epiphany presents.
8. No creepy Big-Brother-like Elf on the Shelf spying on kids for Epiphany.
5. Kids born on Christmas often get named Noel, Christian, or Nicholas. Kids born on Epiphany get bad-ass names like Gaspar, Melchior, or Balthasar. 
4. Gives Shakespeare fans an excuse to watch or re-read “Twelfth Night” which, depending on the production, may not be appropriate for the kiddies. 
3. With twelve drummers drumming, nobody notices if you are out of rhythm.
2. There are as yet no animated films of magical flying creatures who save Epiphany.
1. Nobody has to remind anyone of “the true meaning of Epiphany.”

Friday, December 23, 2011

Christmas Reflection

I’ve only once had the opportunity to look straight at a solar eclipse through polarized and darkened lenses. You cannot look directly at the sun without protection, of course, or you will risk permanent damage to your eyes. I had to share the lenses with other students, so I only had a few seconds to see the black disc of the moon blocking out the sun, and the corona that looked like liquid light seeping around its edges, its tendrils of superheated gas snaking around it. After I passed the sunglasses to another boy I had to go back to looking at the shoebox pinhole camera we had made in class to observe the eclipse, but looking at a feeble dot of light on the paper was nothing compared to that fleeting glimpse I had of the heavens. I couldn’t help sneaking furtive glances at the sun, trying to recapture that vision. It hurt my eyes and filled them with tears, but as I blinked at the ground I could see it there, the afterimage burned into my retinas. The image was everywhere I looked: on the grass, against the wall of the gym building, on the faces of my friends, but it was inverted. When I blinked I could see a white disc surrounded by a black sun. 

We were in the outfield of the baseball diamond, and the mid-day darkness was nothing like twilight. The sky was a uniformly dark blue-gray, and the cars in the parking lot seemed flat and two-dimensional. In my memory the voices of my fellow classmates come to me muffled, as though we were all underwater.

I’ve said before that I’m not a model Christian. I believe in God about eighty percent of the time. But on days when I believe in God the most, this is one of the images that comes to mind.

I’m going to ask you to put on a pair of glasses. Perhaps they work by magic or by some kind of alien technology. Like the specially polarized sunglasses, they allow you to see things that would be otherwise invisible or even harmful to you. Like the plastic glasses in a movie theater, when you slide them onto your face, blurry and nonsensical pictures snap into three dimensions, leaping off of the screen. Like microscopes and telescopes, they allow you to see objects on a scale that would otherwise be impossible to observe or comprehend. We won’t use these glasses to look at physical reality. We will use them to look at a spiritual one. 

A giant ball of light, many times larger than our own sun, burning with the intensity of a billion stars, hovers millimeters above a tiny, dark bubble. This super star is the love and grace of God, and it fills the entire sky. It looks less like the sun than the sea, stretching into infinity beyond the horizon, roiling and boiling in every direction, and our visible universe is a tiny ship on its surface. Our world is within a darkened bubble, a speck against God’s bright expanse.

Now zoom in to that bubble.

Living creatures walk about within the darkened sphere. They eat, make love, carry wood and water, wage wars, spoil their land, grieve deaths, celebrate holidays, and give birth largely unaware of the burning, passionate love and grace that surrounds them.

The liquid light that surrounds their bubble has only one desire: to know them and be made known by them. The very presence of God pushes against the sphere with intense pressure, but it is prevented from collapsing and crushing the bubble by its own restraint. If you listen closely you can hear groaning and creaking as of water pressing against the hull of a ship. If you listen even more closely, you hear that it is not mere groaning but actually words. You can distinguish a multitude of voices murmuring, “Not yet. Not just yet.”

Now zoom in further on one of the clusters of people walking about within the darkened bubble. A town wakes up in the thin light of their own dawn, and stumbles about their daily business of living. They eat breakfast, clean their homes, and read the news of the day that reinforces all their fears about money, violence, and each other. The light around each of them wavers. Sometimes what they see, hear, say, and do darkens the space around them. Sometimes they brighten it.

As you watch them, you notice that each of them seems to be trailing a thread, no thicker than a hair. They seem to be completely unaware of it. Tiny beads of light flow through this thread and into each person, and they give off a dim glow. In the glow of their light you catch glimpses of beauty you would otherwise miss in this darkened place.

The word for this kind of art is chiaroscuro. It’s the interplay of shadow and light. Seventeenth-century painters like Rembrandt and Rubens would use it to create some of the most memorable and dramatic paintings of their age. You feel sorry that most of them cannot see it.

Follow the thread and you see that it is actually a microscopic tube or channel. It stretches away from them up and out, to the very edges of the sky, and the liquid light flows from the ocean of grace high above into their very bodies. 

These channels of light are folded into another dimension, and if you tilt your head at just the right angle you can see across this other plane, like looking at a flat television screen from the side. From this angle you can see that the people within the bubble are not separated from the sea of grace at all, but that it presses up right against them, surrounds them, even buoys them up even while they are completely unaware of it. Grace seeps into them and into their world like water through a membrane. Again, they have no clue.

You notice that each person shines their light in a different way. Some of them radiate a steady warm glow, like a lightbulb, and others are drawn to their light for comfort. Some of them shine with a harsh intensity, and aim their light into dark places. Shadows and things that live in the dark flee from their presence. Some of them flicker, like a candle, sputtering somewhere between faith and doubt, but even in the darkest places the darkness cannot overcome their light. When these light-bearers come together they become like a campfire in a dark wood, and people gather there to swap stories and sing songs.

I doubt that this allegory needs much explaining, but I think it is a good image to help us understand the Christian faith. We feel alienated from God in a world damaged by sin. God is both far-off and close-at-hand. God invites us to be agents of grace and tells us, in the words of Jesus, that we are the light of the world, and that we should let our deeds shine before others so that they may see our good works and give glory to God (Matthew 5:14-16).

This picture isn’t new, of course, and it isn’t unique to Christianity. The Greek philosopher Plato lived four centuries before Christ, and every student of philosophy knows his Allegory of the Cave. Plato imagined that we were like prisoners who have grown up watching a shadow play on the wall of a dark cave. We mistake the shadows of this world for reality. When we are freed (by philosophical clear-thinking), we turn and are momentarily blinded by the flickering firelight in the cave. We recognize that the things we thought were real, the shadow-puppets, were only illusions. Struggling up and out of the cave, we are blinded again by the light of the real world. When our eyes adjust, we recognize that the shadow plays we’d grown up with were imitations of these real things, and the firelight an imitation of the light of the sun.

Plato even had a version of the “gospel,” which means “good news.” Plato said that newly freed prisoners would attempt to return to the cave and free their fellow prisoners with news about the outside world. Unfortunately, the freed prisoner would face disbelief from fellow prisoners, and even persecution. Sometimes people prefer the comfort of their chains to the dangerous freedom of the real world. One Biblical author makes the same observation: “...the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light” (John 3:19). 

One of the ways that Christianity differs from Plato’s philosophy, though, is that according to the Bible, we cannot free ourselves from our own chains by right thinking. Our intellectual philosophy is as corrupt and darkness-prone as our beliefs about money, or sex, or power. Reason itself can be corrupted to serve whatever power controls it. We can be freed only by the action of God’s own self. For early Jewish philosophers, this meant that God’s Law in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) was like the light of God entering into the world. In fact, the world was created for the very purpose of revealing Torah. This was the light by which humans should live.

This other reality, this divine order that the Torah pointed toward, had another Greek name. Logos. It is the Greek word for “word,” but it has more implications than merely something that you say. We can hear echoes of its meaning in words like biology (the study or philosophy of living things) or anthropology (the study or philosophy of human beings). The divine logos is something like the principle upon which everything exists. Jewish philosophers ate this language up. Their Bible began with the story of God creating the world by speaking, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3), and bringing order out of chaos. For them, Torah was the logos of God. When God spoke words to Moses on Mt. Sinai and gave him the commandments, God revealed God’s intention for how people should live and society should be ordered. When God speaks, God creates a new world and illuminates it. When God speaks, God creates a new human society with God’s Law. When God speaks, God creates order out of chaos.

When the Jewish philosophers considered their own history in the light of Greek philosophy, they understood being a light to the nations in a new way. By bringing the Torah to the world and being an example of a holy and just nation, Israel would become a marker of God’s mercy toward all of creation.

Christians used the same language for Jesus. It is not philosophy or Torah that bring the light of God into our darkened world, they said. It is Jesus himself. In the Bible, John 1:1 says that Jesus was the logos of God.* Jesus is the Word of God. He is not a passive set of instructions, or a way of thinking. He is a liberating, active being. The one who comes to free us from our chains in our darkened prison is not someone who has been freed by his own philosophizing about abstract things. He is light from beyond the sky, God’s own self acting in our world and in human history.

For Christians, Jesus reveals God’s intention for the world, which is to free all people and bring light to our darkened world. Before he is born, a relative says, “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet in the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). After he is born, an old man at the Temple takes him in his arms and says that the baby will be “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel” (Luke 2:32). When Jesus begins his ministry, he goes to his hometown of Nazareth and says he has come “to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19).** His own people chase him out of town, so he goes to settle on the north shore of Galilee in the town of Capernaum. Matthew says that this fulfills another prophecy: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned” (Matthew 4:16).*** In John’s gospel, Jesus flat out declares it: “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).

But it wasn’t enough for Jesus to simply show up and be the light of the world. His goal was to get his followers to continue his work bringing the light and grace of God into the world, advancing what he called “the kingdom” or reign of God. “Y’all are the light of the world,” he tells his disciples (Matthew 5:13).**** Paul later says that Jesus has given his followers “the ministry of reconciliation” between humans and God (2 Corinthians 5:18). Collectively, those who follow Jesus, who are light-bearers and agents of grace, are actually his physical presence, his broken-and-resurrected body walking in the world (1 Corinthians 12:12).

So in this season, at the darkest time of the year, we celebrate Christmas. We string lights on Christmas trees and share gifts and tell stories because we want to become channels of grace. We want to shine in the darkness, to bring more grace, more love, and more light into the world. What we experience of this broken, darkened world is not all there is. Eclipses end. Dawn breaks. The porous barrier between heaven and earth crumbles, and the light breaks in.

Thursday, December 08, 2011

Revolutionaries and Wannabes

It has become popular for Christians of all varieties to describe Jesus as “radical” or “revolutionary.” The popularity of this language stems in part from the tendency of young adults to be suspicious of the institutional church, and so its more entrepreneurial and adaptive leaders have appropriated the language of revolution to demonstrate solidarity with the generation who are largely missing from church pews. “We don’t like the institutional church, either!” we say. “Look how radical we are!”

My fear is that people will (and have) become cynical when they learn(ed) that this “radicalism” is simply the same theology repackaged. Jesus is “radical” in that he emphasizes the love of God, or forgiveness, or austere living, or strict personal morality and individual responsibility. The “Jesus revolution” means radically embracing the status quo. We reject “materialism,” as though there were a huge block of people who espoused it, or “hypocrisy,” as though we could ever tell if we were being hypocrites.

I think part of the reason is the way we read the gospels. Of course, the hero of any given gospel story is Jesus, and the bad guys are the stodgy Pharisees. Jesus, radically committed to the idea of a loving God that is bigger than religious regulations, heals people on the sabbath. The Pharisees, hypocrites that they are, go apoplectic.

But what if Jesus were deliberately provoking controversy? What if instead of just applying his religious philosophy, he actively sought out confrontations?

I heard Amy-Jill Levine point out that the people who Jesus healed were seldom emergency cases: a woman with a bad back, a man with a withered hand, a man born blind or lame for forty years or paralyzed. If any of us tried to make an appointment with a doctor for a Saturday, we’d be told the same thing the Pharisees told Jesus: do it after the weekend. These are chronic cases! Is there blood spurting from an open artery? Shortness of breath and pain in the chest? Weak pulse or high fever? No? Then it can wait. Except that Jesus wants an excuse to deliberately violate the sabbath. He is provoking controversy.

It happens again in Mark 11 when Jesus “cleanses” the temple. In the other gospels, Jesus just strolls in and starts flipping tables. In Mark, though, he arrives too late, after the crowds have gone home. So he goes away and comes back the next morning to stage his big demonstration. I think Matthew and Luke exclude this detail because they (and most Christians) don’t like the idea of Jesus being late to something—as if being late would cast doubt on his omniscience, and punctuality is a divine virtue that Christ simply MUST have. But Mark’s gospel makes it clear that his temple tantrum is a planned event. Jesus, again, seeks out controversy.

The parables he tells frequently poke fun at religious expectations that God would make Israel a great nation. Instead of a cedar, Jesus says the kingdom is like a mustard weed. Jesus compares God bringing in the kingdom to a woman polluting holy bread with leaven. When he told these parables, his listeners would have thought that he was being insufficiently patriotic (not to mention that he hung around with traitors and collaborators like tax collectors). He was blasphemous and treasonous. Imagine a preacher saying from the pulpit, “The Kingdom of God will appear and spread like a potent fart in silent a chapel. Judgment day will be like Bernie Madoff getting out of prison. If you want to follow me, be more like a devout good-hearted Muslim who prays five times a day. God is like your gay lover who welcomes you back even after you’ve slept around.” Can you hear the shouts of outrage? Can you see the faces twisted in fury? Is one of those faces yours?

As shocking as these statement might have been, and in spite of being, for Christians, the instigator of a “New Covenant,” most of what Jesus preached was consistent with everything the Pharisees already knew and believed: Love God and love your neighbor. He paraphrased a saying from Rabbi Hillel, who said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” So it wasn’t merely that Jesus was bringing in some new kind of radical theology. He chose to demonstrate it and promote it in radical ways. In the same way, the biggest obstacle for following Jesus today has little to do with theology. There’s plenty of excellent theology and philosophy of religion out there. It’s about what Christians are willing to do, the bullies they are willing to face, and the non-violent, non-coercive measures they are willing to take to proclaim their message.

Part of what makes Jesus “radical” or “revolutionary” is his method. He seeks out opportunities for conflict to make his religious points. He stages demonstrations. He is sarcastic and provocative, exactly the way both mainline and evangelical churches usually are not. In fact, I know plenty of conservative Christians who are incensed and irritated at Occupy Wall Street, who are easily offended by statements they consider blasphemous, who recoil from troublemakers and extremists, describing them as lazy, arrogant, entitled ne’er-do-wells. They want Jesus to be radical and revolutionary within the boundaries of acceptable social company. A Jesus who agitated for economic and religious reform by turning over tables in department stores during Black Friday would be arrested, and most Christians would look on with approval, because while it’s okay to talk about such things, there’s such a thing as going too far.

There are times, of course, when the church does actually look like the Body of Christ. When churches gather to protest injustice against those least able to resist. When they create counter-narratives and parables that resist the powers and principalities. When they raise objections that others consider treasonous and socially dangerous.

It wasn’t Jesus’ philosophy or religious ideas that were radical or revolutionary. It was his willingness to plunge headlong into the controversy, proclaiming the good news, knowing that ultimately he would have to interpose his very body. This is the difference between revolutionaries and the rest of us wannabes.

Saturday, December 03, 2011

Could Mary have been Executed?

Many preachers and theologians point out that according to the Law of Deuteronomy (22:20-24), Mary could have been stoned for adultery if it became general knowledge that she was pregnant out of wedlock. I think the reason people make this claim is to add to the dramatic tension in Matthew 1:19. In this telling, Joseph becomes a hero: he not only protects Mary from public embarrassment, he actually saves her life.

While it may have been technically legal to stone Mary for adultery, in actual practice such harsh application of the law was rare. For one thing, Roman rulers did not tend to approve of locals taking trials for capital crimes into their own hands. This is why Jesus was handed over to the Pilate for execution in John 18:31. If there was any killing to be done, the Roman officials preferred to do it themselves, and they did not take kindly to lynch mobs enforcing their own justice. This may be one reason the story of the adulterous woman in John 8:3-11 was such a political trap. If Jesus agreed with the fundamentalists, he would be put at odds with the Roman government. Her accusers were using her as bait.

The other reason execution was unlikely was that although Old Testament law may often sound harsh, in practice the Jewish courts gave huge benefits to the accused, such as requiring two eye-witnesses for any crime (Deuteronomy 19:15-20). Early Jewish writings say that courts who sentenced more than one person to death in seven years were condemned as “murderous.” I don’t know what adjective they would use to describe our own legal system. 

While it heightens the drama to suggest that Mary could have been killed, Matthew’s text is most plain. It says Joseph didn’t want her humiliated. I think this fact alone should be enough for him to be described as “righteous.”

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Handel’s Messiah

This could have come from an episode of Vicar of Dibley:

Saturday, November 19, 2011

An Open Letter On Literalism and Disputes Between Preachers

Someone emailed one of our Sunday school teachers this link, with a brief note complaining against Adam Hamilton’s “heresy.” This was my reply:

Hi, ________, and thanks for the link you sent me. I was especially interested to see Adam’s response to Rev. Rives, which I think is appropriate, well-reasoned, and gracious. Probably more gracious than I would be, because I hear in Rev. Rives’ words a resentment of the popularity of Adam Hamilton whose church, the campus of which is only 22 miles away, is doing amazing ministry in their area. (Here is a map).  I think what really chafes Rives is being in Hamilton’s shadow. I will confess that I myself am somewhat envious of David Platt, best-selling author and pastor of the Church at Brook Hills, who I disagree with theologically, but I would never suggest that he is not Christian or that he is a heretic. He’s doing great work, he loves Jesus, and I respect him for that. Although his view of the Bible is probably closer to Rev. Rives’ than to Adam Hamilton’s, and I disagree with him about the nature of salvation and the interpretation of the Bible, I recognize that a good tree produces good fruit. I wish Rev. Rives could see the same thing about his local “rival” mega-church pastor. Their approaches to the gospel are not going to reach the same populations of people. I am happy that people with a more literalist understanding of the Bible have places to go to church that will challenge them to live out the gospel.

As for Mr. Rives’ letter, I’ve written a rather lengthy rebuttal, some of which is material I use in my Bible class, but I hope you will find it useful when people insist to you that a literalist reading of the Bible is the only legitimately Christian approach.

First, questioning the theological perspective of the author of Deuteronomy does not mean questioning the inspiration of the Bible. Adam is questioning the theological perspective of the author of Deuteronomy. He is not advocating that the book be thrown out of the canon, or that it is not relevant to Christian life today. Jesus himself quotes Deuteronomy 6:4-5 as the most important commandment in the Bible.

But the author of Deuteronomy 28:68 says that a consequence of Israel’s idolatry would be that the Lord “will bring you back in ships to Egypt by a route I promised you would never see again.” A relevant question here would be, “Does God go back on God’s promises?” I think most people would say no, even though it says it there in black and white that God would do precisely that. In the same chapter, the author writes that God says the punishment that would fall upon disobedient Israelite cities was siege, famine, starvation, and cannibalism to the point that a refined gentlewoman would “begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter, begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she is eating them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns” (28:53-57). The author goes on, “…the Lord will take delight in bringing you to ruin and destruction” (28:63). Are we to take this literally, as timeless theological truths about God which we should accept uncritically? Moses and Abraham, heroes of the faith, both recoiled from this kind of indiscriminate punishment of entire populations of men, women, and children. Ezekiel likewise portrays God very differently: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live” (18:32). This is a very different attitude from taking delight in ruin and destruction. 

Jonah, on the other hand, like some of the more bloody-minded authors, eagerly desired to see such happen to Nineveh, yet God reprimanded him for his bloodthirstiness, especially considering the “one hundred twenty-thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (Jonah 4:11). God was appalled that Jonah didn’t even consider the children and cattle. So which is more reasonable: that human beings were using hyperbole to describe the wrath of God in Deuteronomy, or that this is an accurate picture of the God revealed in Jesus Christ (or the God revealed in Jonah)? Does this mean that God changed, or that human beings were using hyperbole, or that human beings’ understanding of God changed over time?

Thousands of years ago, Jewish scholars recognized that there is a theological conversation going on within the pages of the Bible. We can hear the conversation happening when Deuteronomy and Joshua forbid intermarriage, but the author of Ruth points out that foreigners can be more faithful than natives. Ezra commands a mass divorce of hundreds of foreign women, but Malachi judges this policy harshly when he says that “God hates divorce,” and Jesus does the same when he forbids divorce except in the case of adultery. First and second Chronicles attempts to soften David’s rougher edges and establish his religious bone fides (arguing that he helped build the temple, even if he didn’t actually complete it). In Mark, Jesus’ disciples are numbskulls, while in Matthew and John they say, “now we understand.” The authors, editors, and compilers of the Bible had no problem putting all of these contradictory stories in the Bible and calling them authoritative books of the canon. Even Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher and a contemporary of Jesus, recognized that in the Torah we have some stories which are clearly meant to be read not as history, but as allegories which expand our understanding of who God is. What we have canonized in our Bible is not one monolithic and entirely-consistent viewpoint, but a millennia-long conversation of a community that encounters God in powerful and startling ways.

People who try to argue for a literal interpretation of scripture are forced to do intellectual acrobatics to make these divergent points of view consistent. They do so because they believe they are being faithful to the Bible, but I believe that they are forcing the Bible to say what they think it should say, rather than letting the authors of the Bible speak for themselves. If I believe the authors are inspired by God – even the author of Deuteronomy 28 – should I not allow them to speak? The Deuteronomist and some other writers of the Torah clearly had a theology which believed that the wicked and the righteous are rewarded or punished for their deeds in this life, and that children and other people who are “collateral damage” are simply swept up in God’s wrath because God “punishes children for the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me.” That is what they believed, regardless of what I believe. For me to try to portray their belief as consistent with my own would be dishonest both to myself and to the authors.

Yet hundreds of years later, Jeremiah would say that God does not work this way, and that people will no longer say that children will be punished for the sins of their parents, but that “All shall die for their own sins” (31:29-30). Job spends more than 30 chapters disputing these theological perspectives. And hundreds of years after Jeremiah, Jesus would argue that even this view was too simplistic (Luke 13:1-9), but argued that all stand under judgment and any given misfortunes that happen to people are not necessarily because they are more wicked than anyone else. This is a radical change from the belief that children are punished for the sins of their parents, or that all are punished in this life for their sins by cataclysms and misfortunes.

Now, if someone wants to insist that God does punish cities by making women eat their own afterbirth and children, I guess that’s their business. Fred Phelps and those who picket soldiers’ funerals certainly believe along these lines. But I doubt even Rev. Rives would go there. So it is not the case that Adam Hamilton rejects the authority of the Hebrew Bible, or pits the Old Testament against the New. He, along with many other contemporary Biblical scholars, are simply not literalists. They perceive a conversational, nuanced picture of God emerging from God’s history with God’s people.

My second objection to Rives’ characterization of Adam Hamilton is that he mislabels this perspective I have outlined as Marcionite heresy. Marcion’s heresy was that the God of the Hebrew Bible and of creation was a different God than the one proclaimed by Jesus Christ. This is not what Adam Hamilton has claimed. He has instead claimed that the author(s) of Deuteronomy have some perspectives and ideas about God he does not share. He has not claimed there are two different Gods, or that the God who the Torah describes as having “steadfast love that endures forever” is not present in the Hebrew Bible. The God of Jesus Christ is clearly the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and we see in Jesus a continuation of the redemptive work that God has been doing since their time.

Marcion also could not abide the contradictions between the Gospel stories, so he streamlined them all into a modified version of Luke. In this way I would argue that Rev. Rives’ is more guilty of Marcionite heresy than Adam Hamilton is. Like most literalists, he wants to make the Bible consistent, and he will ignore the actual words of the text to do so. The Bible never says of itself that it is “totally true and trustworthy.” 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all (Hebrew) scripture is “God-breathed and useful” for teaching. It does not say inerrant, or infallible, or any variation of “true and trustworthy” (which is a phrase at the end of Revelation). These are man’s [sic] words about the Bible, not God’s. If we want to say “every word of the Bible is true,” then when we consider passages like Deuteronomy 28 we will need to ask, “true in what way?” Certainly it cannot all be literal truth. People who want to make the Bible the Word of God do so at the expense of the Gospel of John, who says that *Jesus* is the Word of God. It is this Jesus who is the lens through which we are to read the Bible, who is the proper interpreter and theological measuring-stick. By elevating the Bible to a place it never claimed for itself, they make the Bible into an idol, and replace the Word of God (Jesus Christ) with their own words about the Bible (the doctrine that it is true and trustworthy, inerrant or infallible as long as you interpret it in such-and-such a way).

I could press this point, and ask, “Who is the real false teacher here? Who is replacing the Word of God with the words of human beings?” But I will not do that. Instead, I will extend grace to such folks, and recognize that they are trying to be faithful to God. If they bear good fruit, that’s fine – I wish them well. But if they use the Bible to attack straw men, they had best be careful since the weapon they wield is “sharper than any two-edged sword,” and it cuts both ways. They had better be ready to use the actual text of the Bible instead of their generalizations and abstractions about it.

So, to sum up, those are my two objections to Rev. Rives’ letter to Adam Hamilton. First, Adam is not pitting “Old Testament against the New,” but intelligently applying Biblical scholarship to shape his congregation’s theological understanding of contemporary issues. Adam is faithfully engaging a millennia-long dialogue about who God is, a conversation begun in the Hebrew Bible between diverse authors and that continues into the New Testament, and he is using Jesus Christ as the interpretive lens through which he reads the Bible. And second, Adam’s view is not a kind of Marcionite heresy which amounts to a dangerous “false teaching.” It is completely consistent with scripture, tradition, reason, and experience, and thoroughly orthodox in that it affirms the Trinitarian nature of God and the centrality of Jesus Christ as the foundation of our faith. In this he is thoroughly Methodist, and I am glad that he is one of “our” pastors.

Again, thanks for the link. I hope what I’ve written is helpful.
Peace,
Dave
[edit] - A friend just tweeted this article by the amazing A.J. Levine and Doug Knight, which makes many similar points.

Monday, October 31, 2011

What We Believe

Many church websites have an “about us” menu, usually located at the top of the screen. Somewhere in this drop down menu will be something like “Our Beliefs” or “What We Believe” or “Our Statement of Faith.”

Here is the one from the National Association of Evangelicals. Note the order of the items.
Here is the one from Willow Creek. Again, note the order of the items.

You can click around various church and denomination websites, but the trend is pretty clear. Statements by independent or non-denominational churches go like this:
1. Bible
2. God
3. Jesus
4. Salvation (which will tend to mention something about the unsaved being resurrected unto eternal damnation, language popularized by Scofield).

I find it fascinating that usually the first thing on the list of beliefs is about the Bible. In the Articles of Faith of the Methodist Church and the Confession of the Evangelical United Brethren (which are here), the first item is “God.” This is generally true of most mainline denominations.

The order of these articles generally go:
1. God the Father
2. God the Son
3. God the Holy Spirit
4. Potluck suppers (just kidding)
5. The Bible

The Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, generally considered the measuring sticks of orthodox Christian belief, say nothing about the Bible.

There is some criticism that mainline denominations are fuzzy in their beliefs. I do not think this is generally true. If you look at the historic confessions, they are pretty specific. In fact, they are specifically against certain things which were probably very important to people in the 18th century. With the rise of fundamentalism in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, people saw historical-critical study of the Bible as a threat, and consequently newer statements of faith begin with defense of belief in the Bible.

For me, historical-critial method and other academic study of the Bible is a faith-builder, not a faith-destroyer. I am glad that there are multiple voices, theological opinions, and layers of the Bible. It makes it much more like real life. I like to think of the Bible the way Stanley Hauerwas describes in the following quotation, as a drama to be interpreted and lived out in community under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit:

Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance. - Stanley Hauerwas

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Bonhoeffer on Preaching and the Church

The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over… and that means the time of religion in general. How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presupposition of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak in a secular way about God?  (DB, Letters and Papers from Prison, April 1944)

Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christian today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. (DB, Letters and Papers from Prison, May 1944)

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 13:8-10)

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Sounds Like a Warning for the Heritage Foundation

For fools speak folly, and their minds plot iniquity:
to practice ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord,
to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied,
and to deprive the thirsty of drink.
The villainies of villains are evil;
they devise wicked devices to ruin the poor with lying words,
even when the plea of the needy is right.
Isaiah 32:6-7

We typically think of fools as people who do things that are impractical or silly, but for many Biblical authors, folly is immoral. Someone who is a fool has a flawed worldview; he lives only for himself. “A fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” says the Psalmist (14:1), which is less about intellectual atheism than it is about practical atheism. I know atheists who live with a profound sense of being part of something larger than themselves, who see a tragically unrealized nobility in humanity that we Christians call “the image of God.” I also know Christians who hold orthodox doctrines about Christianity who are practical atheists, who in their behavior act as though there is no God who liberates slaves and works justice for the poor. These are people “who utter error concerning the Lord,” such as “God helps those who help themselves” (which is not in the Bible). The specific practices Isaiah mentions are:

1) teaching wrong things about God (uttering error about the Lord)
2) depriving the hungry and thirsty of food and drink
3) using rhetorical sleight-of-hand to refuse justice to the poor (devices to ruin the poor with lying words).

I’m sure there are plenty of folks who believe that I teach wrong things about God. That may be so. I am sure that I am wrong about a great many things. But one thing I’m fairly certain of is that doing 2) and 3) to the poor, the hungry, and the thirsty, mean doing those things to Jesus (Matthew 25:31-46). I’m also fairly certain that being an apologist for wealth inequality and claiming that God isn’t concerned about such things qualifies as teaching wrong things about God.

I’m not quite as black-and-white as Isaiah about the identity of sinners and the righteous, but I think I take his point when he says:

The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling has seized the godless:
“Who among us can live with the devouring fire?
Who among us can live with everlasting flames?”
Those who walk righteously and speak uprightly,
who despise the gain of oppression,
who wave away a bribe instead of accepting it,
who stop their ears from hearing of bloodshed
and shut their eyes from looking on evil,
they will live on the heights; their refuge will be the fortress of rocks;
their food will be supplied, their water assured.
Isaiah 33:13-16

Again, the language used to describe those who oppress the poor, who seek bribes, who endorse bloodshed is “godless.” They are fools.

To those who dismiss Christian calls for social justice, who see no Biblical basis for critiquing our national economic, domestic, and foreign policies, I can only ask:
1) What is a bribe? Is it not the unhindered influence of money in politics and justice, in lobbyists who write legislation which then gets made into law?
2) What is oppression, and who gains from it? Clearly Isaiah believes there is such a thing as oppression, and that there are people who earn money from it. What would that look like, hypothetically? Isaiah and other Biblical writers seem to believe that the poor are easy marks for oppressors, and that oppressors can extort money from them not only with guns and steel but with words. How would that work? How do you oppress someone with words?
3) Why does Isaiah seem to link the oppression of the poor together with teaching wrong things about God? Again, what would that look like? How could someone’s theology lead to oppression of the poor?

The fool says these things are unrelated. There are no poor. There is no oppression. There are no oppressors. We’re not doing anything wrong. Isaiah says: that’s just damned foolishness.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Church Naming Strategies, Part 2

Awhile back I posted about church names. Naming a church or a new ministry venture these days is a tricky thing. It depends on how you want the name to function. Does it tell you something about the church? Is it purposefully traditional? Does it describe your theology or your community? Here are some real-life examples off the top of my head: Trinity. Lifechurch.tv. Church of Grace. Church of the Reconciler. Horizon Fellowship. Sacred Tapestry. Encounter God Ministries. St. Andrew’s. All-Saint’s. Community Church Without Walls. Church at Brook Hills. What do these names tell you? What images do they convey?

I’m interested in naming a church whose objective is to help post-Christian people (those who have been burned by or turned off to church) become followers of Jesus, whose worship will be expressed through art, music, and storytelling, but whose main expression of church life will be networked small groups. So I’m creating a twitter hash tag to brainstorm and collect ideas (#churchnames), whether they be good, bad, weird, or amusing. I’ll post a list here when I’ve collected some.

Jesus-Do

I’ve noticed that words like “revolutionary” and “radical” and “insurrection” get appropriated by companies whose business it is to sell advertising to churches. These days, everyone agrees that Jesus was a revolutionary, that he was interested in “the common people,” and that he resisted the status quo. In one way, this is a tremendous victory for Biblical scholars, theologians, and social activists who have been talking about this stuff for the last few decades. In another, it’s a sad example of the way religion gets twisted to serve the interests of the powerful: All you have to do is repackage the same tired old fundamentalist theology in a book and slap the word “revolution” on it, use some hip stock photography, and try to market yourself as edgy to a world that’s tired of your message: “Just believe in Jesus and try harder.”

You can try to reclaim the words, of course, and infuse them with different meaning. I often try to highlight the metaphorical power of words and breathe new life into words that have become cliche. But sometimes it is good to abandon a word for a while and explore how other languages approach the same subjects. For example, the word “Christianity” often becomes problematic to the people who believe and practice it. The Jesus movement of the first century just called it “The Way,” and some people prefer to think of their faith in these words.

I like the Korean and Japanese word “do,” as in Tae Kwon Do, or Judo. It shares the same word stem as “Tao,” which means “way,” but it denotes a thing that you practice, whether it is body movement or meditation or whatever. This is not just a set of beliefs, though there are beliefs that go along with the practice. It is an art and a way of life. Sometimes you go to a dojo (“place of the way”) to practice with others, but you also practice it on your own. Some people like to think of their church as a spiritual dojo, perhaps with or without the more combative connotations.

How would we think of Christian faith differently if we described it as “Jesus-do?” Practicing the way of Jesus?

Friday, September 23, 2011

Why I Am Against Capital Punishment

I was in an argument several years ago over the ethics of capital punishment. At the time, I was not fully convinced that executing criminals was wrong. Like most people, I couldn’t get over the idea that some crimes are unforgivable. I thought of monstrous people who had done brutal things to children. I thought that perhaps killing such a monstrous person would be a mercy, that some people are more like animals than human and should be put down out of a sense of dignity for the idea of what human beings should be. Yet I was on the fence about executing someone who had shown remorse and who was no longer a danger to others. The person I was arguing with asked me the question, “What if someone tortured and killed your family?”

Just a few nights earlier I had woken from a terrible nightmare. In my dream, I had lost my infant son in a bus station. I ran through the building looking for his baby seat, grabbing passers by and asking them if they had seen my son. I woke up because I couldn’t breathe. I felt tears on my face and could still hear my own panicked voice echoing in my ears. I staggered into the kitchen for a glass of water, and then went to his crib to look at him and make sure he was all right. I remember seeing his round head in the moonlight, and the way he made little sucking motions with his mouth as he slept. I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night because of the tightness in my chest, and every time I closed my eyes I felt the panic I had in my dream.

So when I heard the question, “What if someone tortured and killed your family?” I thought back to my dream. Some parents know that feeling for real, for the rest of their lives. I cannot imagine. I also knew that execution would never be enough. Watching someone die on a gurney or in an electric chair would not satisfy me. What I would really want would be 48 hours alone with the criminal in a locked room with a box of hand tools and dental implements. Forensic experts would have to invent new words to describe what I would do to that person.

...And that’s why we have laws: to protect society from people like me, and to protect me from myself. This kind of thing does not produce closure. There is no retributive balancing of some cosmic scale. My humanity is not enhanced by such things, the image of God is not restored, life is not affirmed, and no one is deterred from future violence. Why does our constitution forbid “cruel and unusual” punishment? Why do we not “go medieval” on terrible criminals, and bring back drawing and quartering, disemboweling, and so on? It is because doing so denigrates all of us who participate in such things. In the history of capital punishment, we have always tried to make it more and more humane. The guillotine was an improvement over the axe. The electric chair and the syringe were improvements over the noose, and executions moved out of the public square and into private rooms. We don’t do these things anymore because killing someone makes us all less humane. Like black-and-white photographs of families picnicking at lynchings from the 1900’s, it reveals something sinister and ugly about human beings and our complicity in evil. This is why we hide it now. 

There are many reasons I oppose capital punishment: Its application is racist and classist, we have most certainly executed innocent people, it is expensive, and it is not an effective deterrent. But I think the only thing that really keeps it going is that most people feel that some criminals just deserve to die, that it would somehow be wrong in a cosmic sense to some kinds of evil go unbalanced or unanswered. I think that’s just a basic misunderstanding of evil. Evil wants us to join it in diminishing the image of God stamped upon humanity. Grace gives us a way to turn our back on it and walk away.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Pastor Alert! Patronizing People is Bad Evangelism!

The text: “Pastor Alert! 59% of Americans and 40% of Born Again Christians believe that Christians and Muslims worship the same God!”

The above photo is the from the back of a catalog that sells church promotional materials (like banners and direct mail postcards) as well as curriculum. This advertisement directs you to this website which advertises a curriculum taught by several big names in evangelical circles.

Although I find the theology behind the sentence abhorrent, I think the sentence itself is a great example of one of the functions of language. Language communicates not only ideas but also group identity. What reaction do the advertisers believe you are supposed to have to that sentence?

“As a born-again Christian, I am appalled that so many of my group believe Christians and Muslims worship the same God!”
“As a Christian of some variety, I am confused. Don’t they worship the same God?”
“As a mainline Protestant non-born-again Christian, I am appalled that someone would think Christians and Muslims worship different gods.”
“What is a born-again Christian? Am I supposed to be one?”

I suspect that the people responsible for the advertisement would approve of any of the above reactions, because the function of the kind of Christianity they advocate is to identify what social group you fit in and to prescribe a set of conditions that move you from one social group to another. They might claim that their real concern is that people come to a saving knowledge or relationship with Jesus Christ, but since I already have such a relationship and my reaction most closely aligns with number 3, clearly their assumption is that I am deficient in some way: I mistakenly believe that the names Allah and Elohim, which both share the semitic stem El, represent a single God who is consistently identified in both religions as the God of Abraham, and which the teachings of Islam claim is the God revealed to Jews and Christians. It is not enough for me to further state that Muslims and Christians have differing theological beliefs about the character of this God, or what this God has done and how that God behaves. In order to be a proper “born-again” Christian (and American), I must also possess the correct belief that they are, in fact, two different gods. (Does my identity as an American have some relevance to my mistaken beliefs about these two different gods? Are there such people as Americans who are also Muslims? Is what they think relevant? Come on, we already know the real answers to these questions.)

Now, I recognize that the purpose of this business is to sell banners and curriculum, and that it may be a little much to read a consistent theological message from the products they advertise. After all, any catalog can advertise both “eco-friendly” products and products which pollute, or patriotic products aimed at both Republicans and Democrats. But I find it ironic that one of the other direct mail options advertised in the catalog is this one:

The text: “We admit it, we messed up. Heard it before? - “you’re going to hell”, “you’re not living the right life”, “you’re a sinner”. Maybe all you needed to hear was “I’m listening”. We at Your Church Name would like to take this opportunity to say we’re sorry. Sorry for the wrong approach, sorry for the cold shoulder, sorry for the hypocrisy. There are a lot of people that have been hurt by either the church or Christians. Please give us the opportunity to say we’re sorry.

Week 1: Sorry for Being Hypocritical and Non-relevant
Week 2: Sorry for Being Judgmental and Only Trying to Convert You”

I think these two advertisements encapsulate something troubling that I’ve been trying to put my finger on for some time: When some (mostly conservative evangelical) churches talk about negative images of Christianity, when they repent for injustices committed in the name of God, when they apologize for hating homosexuals or Jews or women or dancing or witches or pacifists, that their insincerity is jeopardizing the good news I preach.

Like many other readers, I was moved by Donald Miller’s story of the confession booth in Blue Like Jazz, where college-age hedonists stepped into the booth expecting to confess their partying sins to judgmental Christians, but found instead Christians confessing the sins of the church to people who had been hurt by Christianity. But after hearing more and more “evangelical” churches saying “we’re sorry,” I’ve become a bit cynical. It begins to sound more and more like “compassionate conservatism,” where Christians admit that instead of hating the sin and loving the sinner, they’ve been too liberal in their hatred. They won’t actually change their opinions, but they will be kinder and gentler in how they apply the criteria of who is out and who is in, who is a “born-again” Christian and who is not.

Notice in the “Sorry” mailing, there’s no actual repudiation of the ideas that a) you’re going to hell or b) you’re not living the right life and are a sinner, but there is a promise that we will do a better job listening. It’s not our theology that’s wrong, but our approach that has been ineffective and “non-relevant.” We’ll try to present our case in a more palatable way in the future. We won’t tell you that you’re going to hell. As long as you’re born-again. And not Muslim.

I suppose it is okay to apologize for being a jerk, because we have all spoken rashly or chosen our words poorly, but it takes real guts to admit that you were simply wrong. It is entirely probable that I am reading too much into it, but I suspect that I am not the only one who feels such apologies to be patronizing. It reminds me of politicians who apologize for their racist or sexist comments by saying things like, “I’m sorry that I did not choose my words better,” or “I’m sorry that I caused offense and that people misunderstood what I really meant.” In relationships, I am not inclined to maintain friendships with people who apologize in this way, or who apologize for my failure to understand their good intentions. These kinds of unhealthy people tend to be repeat offenders.

I sincerely believe in the Good News, and that the Good News of Jesus is Good News for everyone. The Good News is that God has acted decisively in Jesus Christ for the healing and renewal of the world, that the life and ministry and even the personality of Jesus best describes who God is. This means that God is a God who invites Samaritans, Gentiles, Muslims, women, LGBTQ folks, poor people, CEOs, gangsters, and even televangelists to the heavenly banquet, while the judgmental religionists pout or excuse themselves from the table. Good News, everybody! The Christians don’t own Jesus!

This is the gospel I believe some churches are undermining every time they try to re-brand themselves as hip and relevant using the rhetoric of apology. It’s a passive-aggressive theology that apologizes even as it mischaracterizes other religions and locks people out of the kingdom of heaven. 

Or maybe we just believe in two different gods.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Conversion and Social Justice

Some [people] are critical of evangelism that aims for the conversion of individuals, and instead, they make the alteration of political structures the main content of their sermons…

...I find it amazing that the very people who are critical of the conversion of the individual are often the ones who, so to speak, give an altar call for structures to be converted. Who can be converted, if not the individual? Social structures cannot be converted. They are not mysterious personal forces; they are created by people, and they can only be changed by people. And a preacher must address the people in the audience… and tell them how they can contribute to making the world a fairer place in the coming week, with the help of God and the support of the local church.

Christian Schwarz, Paradigm Shift in the Church, p. 204

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

It isn’t hard to fix the federal budget…

...unless you are in congress.

I wasn’t aware of how many of these budget simulators existed. Here are a few that I’ve found:

Marketplace’s Budget Hero: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/budget_hero/

NY Times Budget Puzzle: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html

Committee for a Responsible Budget: http://crfb.org/stabilizethedebt/

Nathan Newman: http://www.nathannewman.org/nbs/shortbudget06.html
  (Linked from the IRS site: http://www.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/whys/thm04/les01/ac4_thm04_les01.jsp)

All the media coverage about the deficit and the federal budget this summer makes it sound like an intractable problem, far over the heads of us normal Americans. It isn’t. We could fix this thing. Try it yourself. Do consider the likely effect your choices would have on employment, the environment, and so on, but tinker with the numbers and see what you come up with. Where do you think our national priorities should be? Then compare your choices with other people’s. You may be surprised.

Here’s one of my solutions
And here’s the NYT follow-up. I do hope they do a version 2.0 for this year.