The Proletariat of God

On Obama's Religion: Part 2

2008-11-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an essay about a speech Barack Obama gave on religion in democracy. Posted here is another paragraph of that speech, where Barack Obama gives us an exposition of what the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac means theologically, and what it means (by contrast) politically. His distinction is very indicative:

"We all know the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is ordered by God to offer up his only son, and without argument, he takes Isaac to the mountaintop, binds him to an altar, and raises his knife, prepared to act as God has commanded. Of course, in the end God sends down an angel to intercede at the very last minute, and Abraham passes God’s test of devotion. But it’s fair to say that if any of us leaving this church saw Abraham on a roof of a building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police and expect the Department of Children and Family Services to take Isaac away from Abraham."

Abraham will have arrived at that place, on the roof of a building (or mountain), raising a knife to his son, by remaining silent, Kierkegaard says. He will have allowed himself to speak of any other possible thing: "He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say that—that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it—then he is not speaking." In other words, if the one thing Abraham cannot speak to Sarah, or to Eliezer, or to Isaac himself is the one thing that could eliminate the terrifying void of anxiety and fear he faces in violating universal ethics: "I'm going to kill my son because God is telling me to," then everything else he could say enacts nothing of any substance. Nothing else can reduce his anxiety except the one thing he cannot say. Kierkegaard says, "At every moment, Abraham can stop; he can repent of the whole thing as a spiritual trial; then he can speak out, and everybody will be able to understand him—but then he is no longer Abraham." But that is precisely where we approach Abraham's experience without feeling his fear and anxiety. We know killing your son is supposed to be wrong, so we believe that God would never have really let Abraham go through with it. But if Abraham knows that, then his entire experience is absurd and immoral.

Barack Obama here is focused on that moment where Abraham's anxiety is eliminated, just as most of us are. He says "of course." Of course God intercedes. Of course Abraham does not violate the universal. Of course the test of devotion would never have included this. That is the "of course" of a member of the civic religion, who believes only in the values of faith that can be universalized. He appeals to our desire to tame God, to believe that God has a belief system, that he has rules. To Barack Obama, one individual encountering God himself above the universal is the highest abnegation of the civic religion. To us, there should be no scintilla of our faith that is not particular, that does not express the audacity of hoping for true communion with God no matter what anyone else values.

This is why Barack Obama is right about democracy and right about religion. We cannot bring faith in a God who transcends everything we hold in common as good and noble into the congregation of democracy. We cannot create laws to express the anxiety of God calling us into a relationship that defies all reason or force of law. An absurd leap, the kind a person makes when falling in love, or that a woman makes if she risks her own life to give birth to a child, or that any Christian makes in believing a man rose from the dead, has no place in democracy. In the midst of the temptations we face, where the vicissitudes of a relationship with a God who inhabits us with a spirit we cannot fathom clash with the ossified ethical structures of society, our best chance at imitating Christ remains a willingness to be terrified. We must be terrified by the prospect of an all-loving God asking us to depict his love against all we are asked to hold dear by that grasp at control we call 'society'. That terror has no place in this society, and so we really are left with a choice. Will we believe in a suffering Christ, believe in a resurrected Christ, against the lack of value suffering holds in American life, or against any proof that resurrection of the dead actually happens? Will we defy the most deeply cherished values of American society because God has invited us to? Or will we be looking up from the open doors of the church, calling the police, because a man is about to murder his son?

An Interesting Challenge to the "Tradition-less"

2008-11-19T17:53:00.001-08:00

A quote from Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, on the practice of "getting back to the Bible":

"We must learn from the experience alike of Judaism and Christianity that Scripture without an interpretive tradition is dumb and useless. This does not mean that any old tradition will do, but that it is a delusion to imagine (as apparently some of the Reformers did) that Scripture is self-interpreting. Some element of tradition, some theological presuppositions are essential if we are to succeed in interpreting Scripture at all."

Evangelicalism is a tradition that believes it is unencumbered by tradition. Some evangelicals believe that "theology" is something that gets in the way of "the Bible," as if the Bible is not theological, not written by theologians, and not translated into English by....theologians. I've grown up as an evangelical, I know what our traditions are, and I know the valid range of interpretations for the Bible that evangelicals accept. I recently read a book about a high view of Scripture for evangelicals. It had nowhere to go except to conclude that the Bible needs a community of believers to interpret it, and that community must be linked to past generations of believers. I agree with Hanson, that it doesn't mean that any old tradition will do, which is why I don't think it necessarily follows when a person decides tradition is essential for Scripture for him to become Catholic or Orthodox.

Pontifex Maximus

2008-11-06T15:18:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, after the election, I was reminded of a speech Barack Obama gave some months ago, a portion of which I had tucked away in the drafts waiting to be posted on my very taciturn blog. I pulled it out today because it is apt for those Christians who've been caught up in the fervor of Obama's victory:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason…Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing."

This is a perfect exposition of the central doctrine of the religion that William Herberg called "The American Way of Life" and what Reinhold Neibuhr called "the civil religion of America." That religion in one word is "democracy." Obama's novel augmentation of this concept becomes clear when we remember what President Eisenhower said: "Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is." What Obama is making explicit here is what Herberg believes is the shift from "religions of democracy" to "democracy as religion." No longer is religion conceived as a necessary symbiote with which the natural tenets of a democratic society co-exist. Though we still believe that "to have faith" can properly have no object in America, what Barack Obama has advanced here is the permutation we have anticipated since our founding. Here, religion only has value as it can be universalized according to American values. This must inevitably lead to a leveling of the distinctions between religions that ultimately vitiates all religions. If all religious beliefs must conform to democratic principles, then religion has not constructed our democracy's values, democracy is our religion. Freedom of religion need never be challenged; the religious have abrogated religion in service to democracy.

Barack Obama has positioned himself as the most perfect expression of the hero of American civil religion. The American way of life is itself the common belief of Americans in idealism. We form a spiritual structure around the ideals we cling to in a way no other people group does. We apply this idealism to everything: free speech, home ownership, getting a raise, educating children, eating a hamburger (or not), etc. Everything in an American's life has a moral value, and because that creates enormous pressure on us as individuals, we gravitate toward symbols of our idealism to reduce our cognitive dissonance. And because we are so idealistic, "[we] tend to confuse espousing an ideal with fulfilling it and are always tempted to regard [our]selves as good as the ideals [we] entertain." Though not a quixotic individual (despite what his detractors say), the force of our president-elect's rhetoric has appealed primarily to our ideals for what America should mean and what a president should look like. The panegyrical frenzy of this post-election day is an expression of the religious ecstasy enrapturing the denizens of the civil religion, the parochial qualities of our formal religions adumbrated by the refulgent catholicity of the personified ideal. And lest I appear partisan, suffice it to say that McCain was not an anti-hero, but simply a rival for the same seat.

We have separated church and state so successfully that the state is now a church. A nation desires unity in what it values most deeply, and a system that functions both to organize those beliefs into a coherent rubric and to disseminate a sanctioned constellation of valid actions. Democracy is that system, not the aggregate of our variegated religions. Even if parts of Christianity were allowed into the public realm (as they ostensibly are), we would be allowed only the disembodied ethic and not the theology driving the ethic. More importantly, the supremely sanctioned act, the most cherished sacrament of democracy which needs no other religion's support, is exercising the right to vote. The sanguine glow on the faces of Obama supporters these days is the radiance of a common desire to realize our ideals compressed into that single, cathartic act of voting.

So why didn't I vote? Quite simply, because my religion is specific. A peculiar God chose one man, Abraham, to form a people he would favor above all others, with whom he would have direct contact. He nurtured personal encounters with only a few of them, episodic theophanies giving way to a sustained revelation of his presence in Jesus Christ. Jesus chose twelve men to confide in, three were his closest friends. He died once, in an obscure corner of an empire that has been gone for centuries, in an age where the only way of documenting such a life was word of mouth and papyrus. For centuries, people have had ineluctable encounters with his Spirit, often unable to explain or translate what they experienced. And this same group of people, serving the same God, is being asked to universalize their beliefs by abandoning the experiences that created them?

Democracy has demanded an impossible thing from us.

Messiah: Surely He Hath Borne our Griefs

2008-03-05T07:56:00.000-08:00

"Surely, he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him."
(Isaiah 53 : 4-5)

This text is actually a conflation of these two verses, which are given here in the NIV:

Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

This chorus carries the theme of derision from the alto air before it (He Was Despised), and of course the haunting "Behold the Lamb of God" before the air. This chorus is once again a troubled one, with the strings driving forcefully against the chorus' sustained minor progressions.
I find this chorus very a propos given my study of the nature of Christ in his humanity and divinity for my doctoral seminar. Athanasius points out in his Contra Arianos that Christ did not "cure our diseases" but that he "took up our infirmities." He says, "He became human. He did not enter into a human being." Christ's suffering was our suffering because he took on our humanity as his own. The manner of his restoration of creation, of the healing of our sins and wounds was to be punished for them in his very being. It is rather en vogue these days to deride the penal substitutionary view of atonement, but I think it can be a rather apt and very biblical way of describing what Christ accomplished for us on the cross, especially in this case. "The punishment that brought us peace was upon him."

Messiah: Behold the Lamb of God

2008-02-28T13:25:00.001-08:00

"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." This is a dark, majestic, weighty chorus. At once, it conjures the image of John's proclamation of Jesus' salvific mission as he approached the waters of the Jordan, and the spectacle of his death on the cross. The mystery of Jesus' divine union with our humanity was displayed as the Holy Spirit descended on his baptism and as he hung dying as our sacrifice. There have been, over the years, several depictions in film of Jesus' crucifixion. What struck me about all of them, as I look back, is how much of a hurry they seem to be in. Granted, Jesus' crucifixion was novel in terms of Roman practice. Crucifixion was supposed to be not only a slow death, but a humiliating one, as the person often took several days to die. That Jesus and the thieves who hung beside him were cut down the same day was abnormal. Still, what is missing from all of the film depictions I have seen of Jesus' death on the cross is how brutal and lonely it must have been. He hung there for hours, and though he uttered several important things while on the cross, most likely he said nothing most of the time. Crucifixion is like drowning just inches below the surface of the water. Contemplate his stark, unendurable time on the cross as you listen to this chorus.

Messiah Revisited

2008-02-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

In 2005 I wrote a series of posts on Handel's Messiah as a way of avoiding the usual humbuggery I engage in at Christmastime. My friend Eva invited me to a performance of the Messiah in two weeks, and as part of the excitement, I thought I would repost those old blogs and perhaps add some new ones (I say "perhaps" because I'm very busy with a doctoral seminar at the moment and can't make any promises). So here are the hyper links for them, in order from top to bottom oldest to newest:

Introduction to the Messiah
Comfort Ye
And the Glory of the Lord
And He Shall Purify
O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion
Behold, Darkness Shall Cover the Earth
For Unto Us a Child is Born
Glory to God in the Highest
He Shall Feed His Flock

The Death of a Meme

2008-02-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

I know that memes are supposed to be community-builders and networking devices, but in my case it will be sad testament to the fact that I have let my blog lie fallow for too long. *a single tear seeping from the corner of my eye...

The meme is to pick up the book nearest you, go to page 123, find the fifth sentence and share the next three sentences. You should go look at Mark's, because his was interesting, and if you really want to see a meme go somewhere, that's another reason to look at Mark's. Here's mine, which is going to be very apt:

"It is no wonder that the Corinthians understood Paul's language about the resurrection of the body to refer to the crass resuscitation of a corpse. For one thing, as I have shown above, that would be the most obvious interpretation of the term he employs. Moreover, that is apparently just what many Jews and Christians thought when they considered the resurrection of the body."

--from The Corinthian Body, by Dale Martin

Embarcation to the Land of the Turks

2008-01-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I will board a flying aero-vessel that will transport me across the mighty Atlantic Ocean to the land of the Turks. The Turcoman is swarthy (I am told), with a long, spindly black beard and colorful robes. He is taken to wild dancing and military exhibitions with the scimitar and composite bow, all the while demonstrating remarkable flexibility with his athletic feats. I have adopted the customs of these fearsome Ottomans, allowing my face-hair to grow in bushy swaths and donning pointy shoes and a sequined vest. I assume that, barring any serious language difficulties, I will be accepted as one of them within moments.

I will be gone from tomorrow, January 9th, to January 19th. During that time I will be traveling to Istanbul, to another city whose name escapes me, and through the countryside of these exotic Mohammedans. I will return with the sweet attar of foreign customs still wafting in my nostrils, having only recently also chewed some of their most excellent and non-heinous food. Be excellent to each other while I am gone, and I will post further developments in my adventure as occasion to visit the telegraph station permits.

Elimination of Suffering, Part II

2007-10-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

As I said in my last post (which was quite a while ago), the modern effort to eliminate entirely a societal phenomenon because it is considered wholly and irrevocably evil (poverty, war, hunger, taxes?) is not only so ideologically implausible as to render practical efforts based on it futile, but at odds necessarily with the Christian tradition of a nuanced view of suffering. That is, of course, not to say that we as Christians do not have it as our charge to embrace suffering, to care for the poor, to foster peace instead of violence and conflict, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. This our Savior has given us as a clear mandate. What I object to, in addition to the "suffering is evil" ideology upon which these efforts are based, is the lack of particularity, the amorphous moral generality that makes such efforts possible.

Here's what I mean. When you tell me you want to eliminate poverty, you're not telling me you want to begin with eliminating the lack of resources of a particular person. You're telling me you mean to commence your effort by skipping right to your ultimate end, which is that no particular person will have the status of "poor" because you have eliminated the state of poverty itself. Your efforts will quite necessarily involve broad, sweeping changes on the societal level, or at least favor methods that will eliminate the phenomenon of poverty not by addressing individuals but by addressing groups. Yours is a sociological approach, one that is not entirely without merit but is understandably a requisite for the ideology you're seeking to enact.

Once again, when I read the Scriptures, I am struck by a sharp contrast. I am presented with a particular God, who approaches individual humans, elects a nation above all others, sends his only Son to die for that elected people, a Son who choses twelve men above all others to follow him, whose church is composed of small groups, spread by extraordinary, life-changing encounters between ordinary believers. Though we serve a God who loves all people infinitely, whose Son died on behalf of the sins of the whole world, whose purposes are to restore every hidden corner of his vast creation to unity with Him, it is this same God who has consistently encountered us particularly, in the burning bush, in the belly of a whale, in transforming a shepherd into a king, on the lonely cross. Though it may seem, by modern standards, a tremendous waste of time and resources, it is only through the particular that we can hope to save the peoples of the world. It will not come just through addressing a certain state of existence within which suffering individuals can be categorized (though there may be room for systemic change in just about any category), but by addressing, in particular, individuals who suffer under such a state. That is the imitation of Christ, the one who saves many.

A Good Ol' Fashioned Rant

2007-10-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

I looked back on some old posts today. There were some real duds in there; I'll admit it. I've really gotten out of the habit of blogging about the thoughts that go through my head, the occurrences that give me pause enough to stir some new idea or challenge.

Here it is. I was reading someone's blog, I don't remember whose, and the person started by saying, "I'm sure we can all agree that most Christians are concerned with eliminating poverty." I didn't even read the rest of the article, so remiss was I to concede that eliminating poverty is our concern. It's not that I think poverty is a good thing, or that its elimination wouldn't provide some good to the world. It's, quite honestly, that the idea of eliminating poverty is simply ridiculous. It's not even ridiculous in that noble, idealistic kind of ridiculous way that noble, idealistic ideas are. It's just implausible.

Still, there seems to be this effort amongst modern societies to eliminate entirely the existence of a state of being that is considered a state of suffering. There are copious examples of efforts by organizations or movements to eliminate war, or eliminate hunger, or poverty, or even suffering itself. What strikes me as the thoroughly un-Christian ideological pith of these approaches is that suffering is evil. Suffering should be eliminated. What it has given rise to, among other things, is the ethic I mentioned in my last post (pointed out by Dr. Leon Kass), that it is acceptable to eliminate suffering even by eliminating the existence of a suffering person (i.e., aborting a genetically defective fetus). When suffering is a moral evil, its elimination becomes the ultimate end.

Read 1 Peter, or 1 Thessalonians, or the Gospel of John, and you will be given a picture of a purposeful suffering, of a God who embraces suffering to an eschatological end. This portrait of a suffering God is at odds with the idea that suffering is evil. Suffering cannot be both redemptive and evil. That is not to say that suffering is good, or at all times redemptive. But how can, for example, poverty be so evil that the only intercourse we have with it becomes how to eliminate this state of being, when the biblical message is that the poor are somehow mystically blessed, if only, as Gregory Nazianzus says, because we are all poor and serve a God who clothed his Son in the poverty of human existence?

The first biblical antidote to this ridiculous philosophy, then, is to remember that suffering is morally complex in the Christian tradition, a purposeful, potentially redemptive phenomenon within which we must discover what it means to shed these fleshy cloaks to reveal our true, heavenly bodies. In these efforts to eliminate societal woes we will not find an iota of what we seek on our path as Christians.

The City on a Hill

2007-10-17T21:48:00.000-07:00

Tonight I was reading Isaiah 60 and was struck by the beautiful vision of Israel the writer created. I thought I would share some of it with you.

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.
For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
and thick darkness the peoples;
but the LORD will arise upon you,
and his glory will be seen upon you.
And nations shall come to your light,
and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Lift up your eyes all around, and see;
they all gather together, they come to you;
your sons shall come from afar,
and your daughters shall be carried on the hip.
Then you shall see and be radiant;
your heart shall thrill and exult,
because the abundance of the sea shall be turned to you,
the wealth of the nations shall come to you...
they shall come up with acceptance on my altar,
and I will beautify my beautiful house.

Foreigners shall build up your walls,
and their kings shall minister to you;
for in my wrath I struck you,
but in my favor I have had mercy on you.
Your gates shall be open continually;
day and night they shall not be shut,
that people may bring to you the wealth of the nations,
with their kings led in procession...
The sons of those who afflicted you
shall come bending low to you,
and all who despised you
shall bow down at your feet;
they shall call you the City of the LORD,
the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated,
with no one passing through,
I will make you majestic forever,
a joy from age to age.
You shall suck the milk of nations;
you shall nurse at the breast of kings;
and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior
and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob...
I will make your overseers peace
and your taskmasters righteousness.
Violence shall no more be heard in your land,
devastation or destruction within your borders;
you shall call your walls Salvation,
and your gates Praise.

The sun shall be no more
your light by day,
nor for brightness shall the moon
give you light;
but the LORD will be your everlasting light,
and your God will be your glory.
Your sun shall no more go down,
nor your moon withdraw itself;
for the LORD will be your everlasting light,
and your days of mourning shall be ended.
Your people shall all be righteous;
they shall possess the land forever,
the branch of my planting, the work of my hands,
that I might be glorified.
The least one shall become a clan,
and the smallest one a mighty nation;
I am the LORD;
in its time I will hasten it.

There are those extraordinary people who I have had the spiritual honor of meeting, who work tirelessly under the assumption that this shining city, where God is our everlasting light and his justice radiates out, the city to which nations gather from the darkness, is so bright that we cannot fail to gather what light we see streaming from it in the future toward us, to live as people who hope in it. Don't despair. In his time, the Lord will hasten it.

Unworthy to be born=unworthy to live

2007-10-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

I was looking back over some old posts and realized I had this great post that never surfaced because the audio I was going to showcase was too long. I found a way to shorten it and link to it for all of you, so here goes. The link will take you to my Facebook page. Click on "download" and then open the file or save it to your computer.

The audio link here is from the Princeton University Podcasts series for the James Madison lectures. The featured scholar is Dr. Leon Kass, who has written extensively on bioethics. His lecture was over an hour long, but in the question and answer section, he took a question from a woman who struggle with his condemnation of abortion for reasons of defect or disability. The argument is simple. If we do a pre-natal screening for a disease or defect in a fetus, we can and maybe even should eliminate that fetus to ensure that child doesn't suffer. This is exactly the argument the woman in this audio advances. If we can prevent disability or defect, shouldn't we do so? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Dr. Kass replies that abortion for genetic defect falls under the category of preventive medicine (whether you agree that it should or not), but this is the first proposal for preventing a disease by preventing the existence of the one who suffers it!

When I was at Bethel and taking Christian Social Ethics, I butted heads with a fellow student who said she could understand abortion being justified in cases where a woman did not have the financial stability to raise a child, because the child would suffer irrevocable cognitive damage from growing up in poverty (this is if the woman did not see adoption as viable). I pointed out that this was the same argument Dr. Kass is objecting to here, that she was making a judgment on the worth of a human life based on some pre-natal condition, physical or social. This fellow student objected to abortion for physical defect, but I insisted that she could not make such a judgment with social criteria and not also logically extend it to physical criteria.

What Dr. Kass also argues in this case and what I wish I had also had the perspicuity to apply with my fellow student is that whatever disqualifies a fetus from being born also disqualifies the future person from continuing to live. In other words, if an unborn child is disqualified from life because he will have Down's syndrome, there is no reason if by some chance he is allowed to be born that he shouldn't then be killed. If an unborn child is unworthy to be born, he is unworthy to live. The criteria can't magically change just because a person thinks infanticide is wrong and abortion is okay. Dr. Kass points out that if that's what you believe, then you don't need the "extra" reason that the child will have a defect to abort it. You can abort it because you think abortion is okay and that's good enough.

This, I think, also has strong implications for those who consider rape cases to be a viable ethical exception for abortions. In that case, the way in which the child was conceived disqualifies her future life. Ultimately, many people's pro-choice stance rests on these exceptions and not on a coherent and comprehensive ethical rubric for abortion, so when we can show how illogical such exceptions are unless you self-evidently condone abortion, I think we come closer to shifting the public debate.

Embracing the Enemy

2007-09-24T16:02:00.000-07:00

I just read an incredible article in Fast Company magazine that you can find online here. It details the hiring of Adam Werbach, the youngest president of the Sierra Club and a member of the newest generation of fiery evangelists of environmentalism to the sustainability project recently launched by Wal-Mart. Overnight, Werbach became a pariah amongst the environmentalist community for selling his soul to the most evil corporation in America. The article is sympathetic to Werbach, something that compelled me to think more generally about the larger phenomenon I believe is occurring here.

It's really easy to hate Wal-Mart. Though I work for a company that probably rivals Wal-Mart in terms of wages and labor practices, it is Wal-Mart that gets plastered by labor advocacy groups more than any other corporation. Home Depot has a reputation as a green company because of its "no old growth" forestry practices, but Wal-Mart gets mocked for its efforts at reducing waste and creating sustainable retail stores (even though Home Depot probably uses just as much juice as a Wal-Mart does). All of this adds up to what I believe is a common social practice for group identity formation. Identification of a clear enemy is conducive to solidifying the opposing group's identity. In other words, environmentalists have a better sense of who they are if they have an enemy like Wal-Mart to identify. If you read the article I referenced, you'll see that many of Werbach's detractors would clearly rather see Wal-Mart continue its poor environmental practices and fight to destroy the company than see it become a sustainable company.

This way of thinking is so rampant in the Church that I wonder if we might be the experts at doing this. How many little churches who naturally foster a sense of intimacy and familiarity would sacrifice their right to scoff at mega-churches struggling to maintain closeness to see those mega-churches develop strong interconnectedness? One church on Sunday mornings is a sea of white hair and bald heads with almost no children present, while another church doesn't have a single member above 40 years old. Can they learn from each other, or would they rather see each other as too traditional or too contemporary to bother interacting with?

On a personal level, am I allowing a rich Catholic or a hard-line Calvinist or a liberal Lutheran pastor to show me why the way they express God is important? I sat across from a guy my age at a Bible study yesterday that just returned from Iraq. Am I going to tell him why he's not living his faith right, or why the choices he made to roll down the streets of Baghdad were wrong? That certainly would be easier than struggling through the difficult task of understanding how he's living his life for God and making tough choices I haven't had to make yet (or may never make). I instinctually know that the more people I decide are on the side of the enemy, the easier it will be to decide who's on the "right" side with me. But not only will I grow increasingly lonely as more and more people fill the ranks of the enemy, I will destroy the identity I've fought so hard to crystallize. As I said in a previous post, I much prefer to the evangelical interpretation of Jesus' outstretched arms on the cross (that he loved me personally "that much") the idea that Athanasius advanced, that Jesus died with arms outstretched to show how wide and how deep and to what an infinite measure his desire extends to save the whole world. Faced with that identity, who can remain our enemy for long?

An American's Translation of Matthew 5:13

2007-08-12T20:31:00.000-07:00

Certain interpretations of the New Testament text arise for us not because of a poor understanding of the text, but from a poor rendering of the concept into its roughest equivalent in our own language. Matthew 5:13 has been almost without exception translated in such a manner:

"You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet."

The slip up comes in our conception of what salt is for. We put salt in food. We don't have any other every day uses for it. So to us, the "saltiness" of salt must refer to taste. This is how all the English translations understand the text, even The Message.

Most Western Christians have heard the explanation that salt was used as currency in the ancient world, most notably to pay soldiers in the Roman army. As a resource it was easily transported, did not rot, was not easily diluted or modified (unlike metal currency), and could be traded as a real commodity. Especially in the declining years of the Roman Empire, people became suspicious of coinage, and rightly so. Instances of devaluation, dilution, and inflation in metal currency leading to massive famine were all too common. There was something lasting about salt, both in its capacity to preserve and in its consistent value:

After this he says, “On every gift you shall offer salt,” by which he signifies, as I have said before, complete permanence. Salt acts as a preservative to bodies, ranking in this as second in honor to the life-principle. For just as the life-principle causes bodies to escape corruption, so does salt, which more than anything else keeps them together and makes them in a sense immortal." (Philo, De Sanctificantibus)

The salt of the earth, then, aren't just the people who make life tasty. That is a surprisingly diluted concept from the ancient value placed on salt. I suggest two different routes on this passage for a more dynamic translation. The first is to use the roughest equivalent substance to salt in our world, which is gold. The second is to forego a substantial view altogether in favor of a conceptual one.

"You are the gold of the earth. But if the gold loses its value, how can it become valuable again? It is nothing more than a rock, fit only to be thrown away."

Or the translation I favor:

"You are the universal and international currency. If that currency loses its value utterly, how can it regain that value? It is only a piece of paper, a bit of metal, or a series of numbers in a computer: meaningless to anyone."

We are the incorruptible measure of life, the universal currency of heaven, and in some mystical way we are meant to communicate the immortality of the age to come. Indeed, if we lose that quality, what value do we have left? We are no longer fit to preserve this world in preparation for the coming of the Lord.

Book Review: God is Not Great

2007-07-24T11:20:00.000-07:00

A fundamentalist, however affable or well-deported in public discourse, betrays himself as such in subjecting to the scathing-hot iron of criticism all but a very exactingly well-chiseled core of self-evident belief. God is not Great is written by a fundamentalist atheist named Christopher Hitchens, who provides another pillar to support the edifice that is fundamentalist atheism, joining Richard Dawkins and others in providing poorly reasoned, effusive vitriole against "religion," a concept that is amorphous not because of its vagueries as they would have us believe, but because in every multifarious expression it is precisely not any of the other expressions.

I will level a single charge against Mr. Hitchens that will hold up under any reader's scrutiny, uniting his subject matter under a rubric even he was not so successful to discover. This book is utterly illogical. In fact, I redound to say that it would benefit the student of logic to read along with his logical fallacies primer a copy of this book. This defiance of logic is not, against intuition, the necessary mark of a fundamentalist. Though it is probably quite rare, I feel safe in contending that a fundamentalist is fulsomely capable of using logic successfully in his critique of anything save his own beliefs. But far from being a profound disappointment, this book was such well-written and consistent exposition of fundamentalism from a man whose purported goal was ultimately to defend rational empiricism from the denizens of "religion" (read: irrational, delusional, idiotic hate-mongers) that the irony alone is worth a casual glance.

2 Enoch

2007-05-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

From the Slavonic text of Enoch:

Walk, my children,

in long-suffering,
in meekness,
in affliction
in distress
in faithfulness
in truth
in hope
in weakness
in derision
in assaults
in temptation
in deprivation
in nakedness

having love for one another, until you go out from this age of suffering.

Take This, Jesse Jackson!

2007-03-03T17:47:00.000-08:00

Copy of an Imperial Letter of Constantine to a local governor, after the legalization of Christianity

Since there is a lot of evidence that it appears that devaluing divine worship...has brought great danger on public affairs, and that its lawful restoration and preservation have given the greatest good fortune to the Roman name and singular prosperity on all the affairs of mankind...it has seemed good that those men who, with due holiness and constant observance of this law, give their services on the performance of divine worship [bishops], should receive the rewards of their own labors. So it is my wish that those persons who, within the province committed to you, in the Catholic Church over which Caecilian presides [at Carthage], give their service on this holy worship--those whom they are accustomed to call clerics--should once for all be kept absolutely free from all the public offices, that they be not drawn away by any error or sacrilegious fault from the worship which they owe to the Divinity, but rather without any hindrance serve to the utmost their own law. For when they render supreme service to the Deity, it seems that they confer incalculable benefit on the affairs of the State."

The English translation is a little hard to follow, but Constantine is relieving all bishops from also being ask to fill public offices because such responsibilities would cause them to shirk their duties as ministers.

Union Means Rich and Poor Together

2007-02-23T16:56:00.000-08:00

"We can't be divided against each another, because we are neglecting ourselves. “For no one ever hates his own body, but nourishes and cherishes it.” And therefore God has given us only one home, this earth. He's distributed all things equally. He's given one sun to burn for us, has built above us one roof, the sky. He's set one table, the earth, with food for us, and another table he's given us, far better than this. Yet that one is also one. He's given us one way of birth, to us all a spiritual birth. We all have one country, heaven. We all drink the same cup. He hasn't not bestowed on the rich a more abundant and more honorable gift, nor on the poor one more stingy and sparse, but He's called all of us to the same. He's given earthly things with equal regard to all, and spiritual things too. So how can it be that we are so unequal then? It's because of the greed and the pride of the wealthy. But please no, brothers, no! Don't let this be any longer! When the affairs of the universe, which are the most urgent, bring us together, don't let us be divided by these earthly and insignificant things: I mean, by wealth and poverty, by the human way of relating, either by enemies or friends. These things are not the real thing. They're darker than shadow to those who possess the bond of love from above. Let's preserve this unbroken love, and none of those evil spirits will be able to enter in, who cause division in such perfect union. We can all, rich and poor, attain it by the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom and with whom, to the Father and the Holy Ghost, be glory, now and ever, and world without end. Amen."

This will probably be the last quote I give from John Chrysostom, since I'm already on to Augustine. Living together in love starts in the church and nowhere else. Until we can prove we love each other, what proof can we offer the world of God?

Baptism and Grace

2007-02-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

"For even in these mystical blessings, it is, on the one hand, God’s part, to give the grace, on the other, man’s to supply faith; and in after time there needs for what remains much earnestness. In order to preserve our purity, it is not sufficient for us merely to have been baptized and to have believed, but we must if we will continually enjoy this brightness, display a life worthy of it. This then is God’s work in us. To have been born the mystical Birth, and to have been cleansed from all our former sins, comes from Baptism; but to remain for the future pure, never again after this to admit any stain belongs to our own power and diligence."

John Chrysostom said this. Doesn't that seem remarkable? He's saying here that baptism doesn't matter a single bit if afterward you don't lead a life that shows you know what it meant for you to be baptized. Quite a line for a 4th-5th century Catholic bishop to tow.

Fresh Mint

2007-02-18T14:20:00.000-08:00

"...as the element of fire, when it meets with ore from the mine, straightway of earth makes it gold, even so and much more Baptism makes those who are washed to be of gold instead of clay; the Spirit at that time falling like fire into our souls, burning up the “image of the earthy”, and producing “the image of the heavenly,” fresh coined, bright and glittering, as from the furnace-mould."

This is from John Chrysostom's homilies on the Gospel of John. I don't have anything to say about it, I just thought it was a beautiful idea.

Miserable Infant

2007-02-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

When I was at Bethel and in Christian Social Ethics class, I heard an argument from a fellow student that was what I would term a provisionally pro-choice Christian position. She said that she didn't know how she could ask a single woman living in poverty to bring her pregnancy to term when the child would almost certainly grow up in destitute poverty. Permanent cognitive distress would await such a child; better to allow the expecting mother a chance to spare her child such pain.

I'm going to be careful not to engage in moral equivalence while still connecting a kernel of the following account from Eusebius to my fellow student's ethical argument. When Titus was given charge by his father Vespasian of succeeding in the siege of Jerusalem, he inherited an army surrounding a desperately starving Jerusalem populace. There was a certain rich woman named Mary from a neighboring village who had been caught in the siege and during the course of the ensuing famine in the city was robbed mercilessly by her fellow starving inhabitants. She was so enraged by these robbers that she began trying to conduce them to murder her whenever she was being robbed. No one obliged her. Finally, destitute and racked with famine, she took her infant son and said, "Miserable infant, amid war, famine, and rebellion for what am I keeping you? Slavery among the Roman faces us if they give us our lives; famine is overtaking slavery; the rebels are worse than both. Come, be food for me, an avenging fury to the rebels, and the one story still lacking to the sufferings of the Jews to be told to the world." This woman killed her infant son, cooked him and ate half of him.

Now, certainly it is one thing to abort an unborn child, and quite another to kill an infant and eat him. But notice that the same moral justification by which my classmate would find some abortions ethical is the same used by this starving, deranged woman during the siege of Jerusalem. What is being effected is a judgment on the worth of a life before the anticipated distress has been actuated. In both cases, worth is assigned based on a projection of anticipated suffering. There is implicitly also a judgment being made about any comparable future joy or happiness. Not only will the suffering of the child be too great to allow him to live, any joy he finds in life will not outweigh that suffering. Such a imbalance is impossible for even the responsible guardian of a child to predict.

Stuff God Thinks About

2007-01-30T14:47:00.000-08:00

A quote from Karl Barth:

"There is above this warped and weakened will of yours and mine, above this absurd and senseless will of the world, another which is straight and pure, and which, when it once prevails, must have other, wholly other, issues than these we see today."

I think I'd like to remember what Barth has said the next time I ask God a question, thinking I know what designs he has on the answers, or even imagine I know what his answer will be, or that I have asked a question with a divine answer.

Love and Lessons Learned

2007-01-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

From Fear and Trembling:

"...no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than at the beginning, no later generation has a more abridged task then the previous one, and if someone desires to go further and not stop with loving as the previous generation did, this is foolish and idle talk."

It is fashionable in our age just as it was in Kierkegaard's to believe that we are getting better. We have less poverty and more nobility to our humanity than before. We have educated ourselves; the gaps in our knowledge will soon sumptuously be filled. We will end hunger and war, bidding a long farewell to pestilence and greed.

But set before each generation is not to grasp that gleaming baton of social progress, no matter which finish line we believe lies in the distance: humanity's evolution or Christ's return. To us has been given the same flowering of the spirit of God on earth. So each generation sees Christ conquer corruption anew. His past victories he allows to fade from humanity's memory so that we as infinitely as the next can fall in love again.

Of Wealth and Wesley

2007-01-25T15:46:00.000-08:00

Two ideas I found when I did a study of the economical ethics of the early church fathers, were (1) that wealth is inevitably dangerous for the Christian life because it is likely to be accompanied by greed and pride, and (2) that despite this danger, the most blessed position in the church is not the man who has voluntarily taken on poverty by unthinkingly giving away everything he possesses, but the wealthy man who retains his wealth but is very generous. Imagine my surprise as I read some John Wesley today to see him expressing the same two ideas:

"Religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches."

"We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and save all they can--this is, in effect, to grow rich. What way, then, can we take, that our money may not sink us into the nethermost hell? There is one way, and there is no other way under heaven. If those who gain all they can, save all they can, will likewise give all they can, then the more they gain, the more they grow in grace, and the more treasure they lay up in heaven."

What a dangerous endeavor to be wealthy! Not just because wealth holds within it the danger to become its servant but because it is paradoxically pregnant with possibility for redemptive generosity should we approach such an endeavor with sober care.

Circle the Wagons!

2007-01-23T11:26:00.000-08:00

I'm in my J-Term at school this month, and my class is Modern Church in Europe and America. What has been the most fascinating phenomenon in studying this era (a time I knew almost nothing of before now) is the way in which Christianity has always spread in this country.

At the founding of this country (1776), Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans were by far the largest denominations in America. Catholics were almost non-existent, and Methodists hadn't hit the scene yet as a denomination. But already, Baptists had begun an ascendancy on the coast. By the end of the first Great Awakening, Baptists had become the largest group and Anglicans/Episcopalians almost didn't exist anymore. By 1850, Methodists had dwarfed every other denomination in membership through their successful circuit riding on the frontier.

Less than 25 years later, Catholics, through massive immigration, had become the most populous denomination in America. At the end of the 19th century, evangelical and free church movements sprang up. Decades later, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements blew through and gathered millions of adherents.

When we look at the pattern of religious growth in our country since its founding, uniform growth across denominations almost never happens. Instead, we have always seen a pattern of an underdog denomination or movement becoming the "golden boy" of American Christianity. This is the way Christianity has grown from a religion that 17% of the American population in 1776 adhered to through regular church attendance, to one that over 2/3 of Americans now embrace.

In each case, the denominations that had previously enjoyed dominance can usually be seen to "clamp down" or "hunker down" in an effort to preserve dominance and stamp out opposition. For example, the Anglican church became the state church of North and South Carolina and Georgia long after the Baptists had grown to outnumber Anglicans exponentially. Despite a majority of Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and Quakers in Maryland (Catholics only accounted for 3% of the population of that colony), the Anglicans secured establishment in 1702. Yet another example was the Plan of Union in 1801 that united Congregationalists and Presbyterians in missions strategy. They agreed not to fish in each other's ponds (New England was Congregationalist, everything South in the old colonies was Presbyterian). But while they were agreeing not to poach from each other's forests, the Methodists were almost singlehandedly converting thousands on the American frontier with no regard to what denomination from which they may have come.

Be open-handed. That may be the best lesson we can learn from American religious history. The tighter you clench your fist around the members you have in response to the perceived threat of another denomination's success, the more inevitably they will slip through your fingers and into the hands of your perceived enemy. Religion at its very core in America is voluntary.

Moveable Womb

2007-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

Read this article at BBC news to see the latest in organ transplant. I suppose it was only a matter of time, but wombs if successfully transplanted will become the first transplanting of an organ not necessary for the life of the patient.

If the average evangelical Protestant is distressed by this, s/he ought to take a good look at why this sort of thinking has flourished. Having disconnected the natural processes of sex, pregnancy, birth, and childrearing from each other, allowing each to exist exclusively from each other, we've created a disjunctive sexuality. People use birth control to separate the reproductive purpose of sex from the emotional and physical pleasure (or, to be more spiritual about it, the "unitive" purpose is separated from the reproductive purpose). Pregnancy can be created without sex through artificial insemination, and perhaps someday through cloning, pregnancy need not be the conduit for the gestation of a human fetus at all. The pregnancy and birth of a child can be separated from who rears the child through surrogacy. When all of these processes are thus divided from each other, why should it be any wonder that medical science has been recruited into the service of this division?

God's grace is given through the nature of our bodies. Through the design of our bodies, we are shown God's purposes. Any disruption or circumvention of these natural processes risks not just a disunion of our sexual ethic, but of our very psyches. The sexual ethic based on the nature of our bodies and on holy Scripture as laid out by the last several Popes, most notably in Donum Vitae, is the solution for a united and consistent sexual ethic.

God's Country

2007-01-19T13:54:00.000-08:00

Believe or not, I went running this morning. I got the itch to put my running shoes last night, and this morning I miraculously still had it. I'm living in Brandon's apartment, which is in Northeast near the intersection of University and Broadway. I started running east, toward St. Anthony, on 4th street.

To my left as I ran, I see two churches crowding the corners of the intersection. The first is white-washed wood and red brick, spired with a Byzantine cross. The American and Ukrainian flags fly in front of a smaller brick building to the right, clearly a newer addition. This is St. Michael's and St. George's Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It was founded in 1925 as far as I can tell. Apparently there's a small museum inside with artifacts from the Ukraine.

Across the street I see All Saints Church. This church is lighter brown brick with a large square tower finishing in a plain cross. It appears to be Catholic, but I don't see any national designators on it.

Glancing to the right briefly as I approach these churches, I see a brightly colored mosaic dome crowned with Greek lettering. I round the block and get a better look at St. Constantine's Ukrainian Catholic Church. This church was built in 1913 according to the cornerstone, and it too flies the American and Ukrainian flags.

I turned my gaze across the street and saw the Maronite Catholic Church of St. Maron's. This is a longer church of very light brown stone with a polished copper dome. It flied the Lebanese flag, the American flag, and another flag I didn't recognize. Over the doorway to its main door is Psalm 104 about the cedars of Lebanon being well watered. I run a little farther and see what looks like an older church of dark stone with colorful tiles around its entrances and windows. St. Boniface Catholic. It has a huge vaulted entrance with three huge doors. St. Matthew is above the left one, St. John above the right.

Last, I cross the street and see on the other corner the great old St. Anthony of Padua Catholic church. There's an elder care center built next to it now, but the church itself is clearly over a century old. Magnificent.

If you know, you'd be guessing right to imagine that I can't run very far before I'm wheezing like a broken bagpipe. But I saw all of these churches in the short run I had this morning, and that doesn't include the spires I spotted in the distance as I touched St. Anthony and looked back toward the river. Just a testament to the rich history of this part of Northeast. After the Civil War, when millions of new immigrants flooded our shores, some of them made their way up to the town of St. Anthony to work at the mills there (eventually St. Anthony became part of Minneapolis). They brought their mostly Catholic and Orthodox faith with them and spent their last pennies building beautiful sanctuaries. The mills are now in ruins, but the churches still stand. Every one of them is amazing.

Once upon a time church buildings were beautiful. Now they look like Menard's. Sad...just sad.

St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church

Moving to the Back

2007-01-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

Did anyone notice I started blogging again? I hardly noticed either. I was actually on the verge of shutting it down, but I decided that in the moment when I'm the busiest at school, I ought to add something to distract me. As if podcasts weren't enough.

A few days after Martin Luther King Day, I thought I would tell a story. There are shining moments in the life of the Church in America, moments we look back on proudly as part of our heritage. The Methodists have no shortage of these moments, especially when it comes to Christianity's relationship to black Americans. While Anglicans were still maintaining the view that blacks could not be baptized because they were not human enough, Methodist circuit riders and missionaries were reaching out to black Americans, slave and free alike. Methodists had some of the only mixed raced congregations in the country, and many (though not all) were along with the Quakers early advocates of the abolition of slavery.

Unfortunately, our story is not a shining moment for the Methodists. The year was 1787, and the city was Philadelphia. On Sunday morning, during the worship service at St. George's Methodist Church, white church trustees stood up and asked Absalom Jones, Richard Allen, and other black members of the congregation to give up their seats near the front of the sanctuary and move to the back. After conferring briefly with each other, every black member of the church moved to the back of the church and continued out the door. Richard Allen went on to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1955, this time in Montgomery, a black woman was asked to give up her seat on the bus for a white passenger. Rosa Parks refused, however, and the rest is history. When we remember the moment that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped propel Martin Luther King, Jr. to the front of the civil rights movement, we ought to remember that how far back history goes. In the very city where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the US Constitution was drafted, we had the opportunity to enact brotherly love. Instead, a heartless act by white congregants alienated and excluded their black brothers and sisters. Before we had bus seats, we were segregating our pews, and that was just in the congregations where blacks were even allowed to mix with whites.

What a Beautiful View of the End!

2007-01-17T12:21:00.000-08:00

A hymn that we listened to today in class:

"Like Noah's weary dove

That soared the earth around

But not a resting place above the cheerless waters found

O Cease my wandering soul

On restless wing to roam

All the wide world to either pole

Has not for thee a home

There safe thou shalt abide

There sweet shall be thy rest

And every longing satisfied

With full salvation blessed

And when the waves of ire

Again the earth shall fill

The Ark shall ride the sea of fire

Then rest on Zion's hill"

With all the activity many American Christians believe we'll be engaged in for eternity (one long church service?? This view often advanced by pastors! Aren't they tired of organizing those things?), it's so refreshing to hear a vision of life eternal as blessed rest from striving.

More to Give Away

2006-11-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

I was reading Origen today, and I came upon this passage in an address he wrote to two of his friends. One of his friends, Ambrose (not of Milan) was rather wealthy (as was Origen eventually). Here's what Origen says to Ambrose:

"'...everyone that has left...brothers or sisters or parents or children or land or property for my sake will receive many times more and will possess eternal life.' In view of these words I myself would like to possess all the earthly goods that you possess or even more, and be a martyr to God in Christ so as to receive many times more."

Basically, Origen is telling his friend: "I wish I were wealthier than you so that I would have more to lose if I were martyred." That's an interesting thought, and I just thought I would share that with all of you.

Beard pics may soon make an appearance.

New Book!!

2006-10-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

My good friend and brother Mark has proposed a book to a publishing company and received word back that they are interested in his proposal. Check out the details at this link.

Beard update: my beard is now officially at the point of no return. It would be foolish now to destroy the two weeks of hair growth I have hanging from my face. It is now officially a "beard," in the sense that it is not "stubble." I may or may not post images of my beard in the coming weeks, depending on how much my beard pleases me. Regardless of whether or not I do post images of my beard, however, I anticipate my beard pleasing me a great deal. A very great deal.

Beard Opener

2006-10-16T01:10:00.000-07:00

I will now grow a beard.

Wait for it...

There! Oh wait. A beard takes months to grow. I will have to make sure to carefully neglect the bothersome activity of face-shaving for long weeks in a row. Very well. I will muster all of the lethargy I have within me to this task. I will not do something for as many days in a row as it takes. That's the beauty of a beard! It signals complete inaction on the part of a man (or careful and freakish activity on the part of a woman). Here are a few dudes who grow some pretty awesome beards in my opinion:

I think that Saddam grew a pretty awesome scraggely beard while hiding in an underground hovel from US Forces. You can't say the man wasn't keeping himself occupied. Two US presidents that grew good beards (pictured above): James Garfield and Rutherford B Hayes. I'd also like to point out that Zachary Taylor grew some pretty weird looking sideburns.
Say what you will about Karl Marx's political views, he committed to beard-growing for many years, clearly. By the way, the beards of the members of ZZ Top? Not cool. I want those beards to go away. Happy beard-growing fellas!!

His Outstretched Arms

2006-10-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

Athanasius is an important person. Every Christian should know who Athanasius is. His epitaph was Athanasius contra mundum, "Athanasius against the world." He wasn't a stubbornly individualistic man. By this he meant that he stood up for the truth of God even when it wasn't popular. During his lifetime it was at times intensely unpopular to imagine Jesus as an eternal God-man. He persevered and upheld orthodoxy, and we have to thank him for his battle.

Why specifically did Jesus die on a cross? Why wasn't he hung or burned alive? It's true that there was something exquisitely painful and evil about crucifixion, but surely there were even worse ways to die. Why the cross? Athanasius answers:

"How could he have called us if He had not been crucified? For it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched. Once again, we see the appropriateness of His death and those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself."

Quite simply, he died on the cross so that for every generation to come, our race would know a savior whose arms were outstretched to receive the whole world. To such a desire has God's heart been eternally set.

Father, through the outstretched arms of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, you embraced the whole world. Jesus, thank you for the gift of your suffering and death on the cross. Spirit, teach us to embrace the suffering of the world and imitate your loving Triune presence. Amen.

Further up and Further in!

2006-10-07T01:03:00.000-07:00

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Cappadocians who lived in the 4th century, said that all humanity was constantly changing. God is perfect and will never change as we do. We change constantly, whether we like it or not. But rather than despair in that, Gregory of Nyssa decided that "a person who never rightly struggles in a contest cannot be crowned."

It's true that the essence of our beings will never cease to change. And so, holiness is striving to experience union with God, to throw a lasso around his limitless perfection. But Gregory says it better than I do:

"What seems frightening (that we are always changing) can give us wing for flight to better things, because it is a shame if we can't change for the better. No one should lament that she is constantly changing. Instead, by always being changed for the better, being transformed from glory to glory, so let her be changed. By daily growth she always becomes better and better, always being perfected but never fully perfect. Perfection consists in never ceasing to grow toward goodness and never limiting perfection."

Father Almighty, your love never fails, your power is boundless, your faithfulness endures forever. From glory to glory, so let me be changed! What sweet perfection to be eternally perfected toward you! Change me for the better today through Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday and today and forever. Amen.

Hold Fast to God

2006-10-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

Paraphrased from the Martyrdom of St. Marinus:

During a relatively peaceful time in the life of the early church, there was a soldier in the Roman army named Marinus, who lived in Caesarea. The position of centurion fell vacant, and it seemed that Marinus would soon be nominated to fill it. On the point of receiving it, he was accused by a rival of being a Christian, and therefore unable to sacrifice to the gods. Questioned by the magistrate, Marinus confessed that he was a Christian. Not desiring to execute such a qualified soldier, the magistrate gave Marinus three hours to reconsider. During that time, he received a visit from the bishop of Caesarea.

The bishop, Theotecnus, took Marinus by the hand into the church, placing him in front of the altar. The bishop brought a copy of the Gospels to Marinus, and drawing aside the soldier's cloak, he pointed to Marinus' sword saying, "Which do you prefer, Marinus?"

Without pause, Marinus put out his right hand and took the Gospels.

"Hold fast, then!," said Theotecnus. "Hold fast to God as he gives you the strength to obtain what you just chose. And so walk in peace."

Just as Marinus returned, he was summoned to court, because his time was up. Marinus presented himself to the judge and showed even greater faith than before. Just as he was, he was led off to find in his death completion.

Jesus, our only king,

When our time is up, and we have been summoned to the world's tribunal, the better judges of our faith show us the divide that we in our complacency so often seek to ignore: the loyalty we confess to the world against our greater loyalty to you, our Lord. May we hold fast to the sword of the Spirit, conduct ourselves as peacemakers, and carry that loyalty alone. You deserve the whole strength of our hearts to obtain what you have chosen for us, life everlasting, by which we are truly complete. Amen.

Till We Find Rest in You

2006-10-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

Taken from the first stanza of St. Augustine's Confessions, from my humble efforts to translate Latin:

You are magnificent Lord! To praise you is an amazing thing! You have amazing power, and your wisdom is limitless! A man or woman who is part of your creation really does want to praise you. Even surrounded by our mortality, along with the testimony of our sin and the testimony that you resist the proud, yet this part of your creation desires to praise you! For you move us deeply to find delight in praising you. You have made us toward you, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in you!"

The West has unfortunately remembered Augustine for his thoughts on original sin, that common condition of sinfulness in every person, while forgetting his equally important emphasis that every person is meant to praise God! This is the design of every person ever created; it is what God has created each of us to do. There is Latin word ad, which can mean on behalf of ("You have made us for you"), meaning that God has made us on his own behalf, for his pleasure. Or it can mean toward, a translation I think fits much better.

From the very moment we are created, we are in motion toward God, having been created to be redeemed. To be in his eternal and loving presence is that desire that moves us. All people long for that, no matter how fallen and sinful they are. This should be a call to us as Christians never to give up on anyone, no matter how many mistakes they have made. After all, God desires that all people be saved. Shouldn't that be our desire too?

Almighty Father, who loves every person infinitely, thank you for creating each one of us toward you. I know that I was meant to be with you forever, to know you and be truly known. From the moment my journey began on earth, you filled me with longing for you. Thank you for putting that restlessness in every person, so that no heart should find the Gospel foreign to its deepest desire. In your name, merciful Lord Jesus. In you my journey ends. Holy Spirit, please don't rest until I find rest in you. Amen.

The Sideshow

2006-09-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

Tertullian of Carthage was the first church father to write in Latin. He wrote in a heavily legal form, addressing most of his treatises in the way a lawyer would. This suited his rigorous and categorical mind, but it has given him a centuries-old reputation for being a bit too unyielding. But we ought to pay attention to those voices in the Church who call us to envision ourselves as we will be in heaven, pure and holy.

In Tertullian's day, the Roman entertainment system, including gladiator shows, horse-racing, drama, and athletic contests, was the main form of entertainment. For several reasons, the most profound of which being that fellow Christians were being slaughtered as entertainment, Tertullian condemned Christian attendance at these events. Though we are no longer a society that generally allows violence resulting in death as a form of entertainment, we do depict violent acts quite routinely in television and film. In addition, we also depict both actual and simulated sexual acts in many different kinds of media. Ultimately, the same sickness Tertullian recognized in the hearts of saints who found these sinful acts entertaining is the same disease we suffer from today. We may not have the Coliseum any longer, but we are its spectators in our hearts. So, Tertullian still speaks to us:

"Even so, if you really want to find pleasure in this life, how can you be so ungrateful not to consider the many exquisite pleasures God has granted you to be sufficient? What is more delightful than to have peace with God the Father and our Lord, to know the truth, to confess and receive pardon for the countless sins of your former life? ...true freedom, a pure conscience, a contented life, and freedom from all fear of death...these are the spectacles that suit Christians--holy, everlasting and free. Consider these your circus games, fix your eyes on the courses of the world...Do you really want to see a fight? Watch purity defeat impurity, faithfulness defeat betrayal, cruelty stricken by compassion, arrogance knocked out by humility: these are the contests we have among us, and in these we win our crowns. Do you really want blood? You have Christ's."

Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered as a spectacle for us on the cross, fix our eyes on that heavenly stage where your divine drama plays, as we act our parts for the whole world to see. Let us thank the academy of the saints for awarding us our crowns if only we take our direction from your Holy Spirit. Let every turn of phrase and cue befit their noble troupe, until we join their company in perfection. And teach us to disregard the Devil's sideshow, which only delights in violence and destruction. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

An Inheritance Without Hindrance

2006-09-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

Ignatius of Antioch was martyred in the great amphitheater of Rome in 110 AD, under Trajan. On his way from Antioch to Rome, he wrote seven letters to churches in Asia and to Rome. In his letter to Rome, he addressed one issue in particular. The Roman Christians intended to follow through on a plan to break Ignatius out of prison before he could be fed to wild beasts in the coliseum. In the minds of most of us modern American Christians, this is a very appropriate response. Why stand by and let injustice be done when a fellow Christian could be saved from suffering? Ignatius' response shows us just how far we have strayed from the ancient Christian understanding of what it means to suffer for Christ:

"Grant me no more than that you let my blood be spilled in sacrifice to God, while yet there is an altar ready.

You should form a choir of love and sing a song to the Father through Jesus Christ, because God has graciously summoned the bishop of Syria to come from the rising of the sun to the setting...

Allow me to be the food of wild beasts, which are the means of making my way to God. I am God's wheat, and I am to be ground up by wild beasts' teeth so that I may prove to be Christ's pure bread...

Permit me to be an imitator of my suffering God."

A Prayer for the Martyrs, Whose Voices Speak Loudest and Best:

Almighty Father, whose Son suffered willingly for us on the blessed cross, grant me a place in the choir of love, and I will praise the favor you have lavished on those who suffer for you. Or if it is your will, grant that where there is an altar ready, you would join my body to Christ's tortured flesh. To my brothers and sister who suffer on that altar throughout the world, I ask that you give strength and courage. Thank you for their example; through them we see the image of your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever, Amen.

What a Splendid Business!

2006-09-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

I'm back in school now at Luther Seminary, and dedicating my heart and soul to the study of the fathers. I find it a terrible shame that these men aren't studied more, even by some of the mainline churches who trace their tradition back to them. They were tremendous men. They lived humble lives, they loved powerfully, they died with jewels in their crowns. I thought since I haven't written in a while, I would write a series of posts displaying some of the more beautiful passages I have found in the fathers, and offering a simple prayer based on each passage. It will get me back into the habit of writing, and I hope they will touch all of you as deeply as they have me.

My first homily is of Clement of Alexandria, that man who has constantly been accused of being an early apologist for the rich, but who crafted a Christian stance on wealth and poverty that I find beautiful. The wealthy bought their own incorruption (immortality) by loving the poor into the Church:

"What splendid trading! What divine business! You buy incorruption with money. You give the perishing things of the world and receive in exchange for them an eternal abode in heaven. Set sail, rich man, for this market, if you are wise. Compass the whole earth if need be. Spare not dangers or toils, that here you may buy a heavenly kingdom."

Extravagant Father, have mercy on me, a wealthy man. Accept for purchase the rags of my worldly wealth for immortal robes, the dinginess of my earthly home for that shining city, and perishing food that never satisfies for your eternal wedding feast. Count me among the blessed, who buy passage to the ends of the world if only to save just one of your poor. In Jesus' name, who clothed himself in our poverty that we might all be rich by his blood, and through the Holy Spirit, that proof of the opulence of the kingdom of heaven. Amen.

Tagalicious

2006-08-14T14:01:00.000-07:00

Van S has book-tagged me, so here it is. It's so unfair to limit a person to one book answers in each of these questions. Kind of like asking a parent to choose one child over another.

1. One book that changed your life:
Jesus and the Victory of God by NT Wright

2. One book you’ve read more than once:
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius

4. One book that made you laugh:
Survivor by Chuck Pahlaniuk

5. One book that made you cry:
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

6. One book you wish had been written:
A Description of the Collected Works of the Library at Alexandria by Philo

7. One book you wish had never been written:
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

8. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox

10. Now tag 5 people:
My sister Gina, Jesse Gavin, and three lurkers (because I can't think of anyone else that hasn't already been tagged).

Home from Singapore

2006-08-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

I'm back from the Garden City, the Accidental Nation, the land of cleanliness and commensurately reduced civil rights. I spit out my gum twice and spit on the ground several times. I jaywalked. In short, with the utmost bravado I could muster, I defied the laws of Singapore. By the end of the three weeks, however, I had come to identify myself with Singapore so much that in an encounter with some loud southern Americans, I wished very much that a strong bout of jet lag would suddenly strike all of them, causing them to return to their hotels and sleep for the duration of their trip, regardless of its length.

I enjoyed many things about Singapore. Highway traffic has a slower top speed than America's, but moves on average more smoothly and quicker. The traffic laws are enforced; they enforce tolls on the roads with a machine attached to every cars dash that automatically deducts fares. The number of cars on the roads are regulated by the tax on buying a new vehicle. Overall, I enjoyed their no nonsense approach to regulation of public life. I didn't feel oppressed. I felt the laws they had made in this regard were fair and well-enforced.

Though 90% of 4 million people live in high-rise apartments, the island was green, lush, and beautiful. There were several very spacious parks there, and several national wildlife preserves. The national zoo was impressive.

There were some things I didn't enjoy about Singapore. Shopkeepers had a habit of being a little too eager for the sale. Especially if a person were Chinese, he would follow you around the store and ask repeatedly if he could help. He would frequently pick an item up in front of me and show me why I ought to buy it. The amusing incarnation of this was Indian tailors in Chinatown. The tactic was to sneer at what I was wearing (usually nothing very impressive in the fashion dept.), and then use that opportunity to ask me into the store (for the remedy of a newly tailored suit).

I didn't like the heat. There, I said it. The nice thing about a nice hot day is having the sun out so that a person can enjoy it properly. But most days in Singapore were overcast, humid, and hot. So, yes, I did return with nearly as glimmeringly white skin as I had before I left. But I got used to the weather, whether it was cloudy or sunny. I pledge a blog post of the caliber you have come to expect from me in the next few days (perhaps even tomorrow!)

New Site for Pictures

2006-07-21T21:16:00.000-07:00

To facilitate a more aesthetically pleasing display of our pictures (we've produced an enormous volume--over 200 so far!!!), Erik used an album display program to display all of them. We will still regale you with our adventures at Brennas in Singapore, but to see the pictures in full, go to this link. For the first two days, click on "Days 1 & 2". Enjoy!!

Singapore, Here I Come!

2006-07-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

Well, folks, I'm making final preparations to board the plane bound for Changi Singpore Int'l Airport by way of Tokyo at about 3:00 this afternoon. It all came so fast, I feel somewhat unprepared to leave Minnesota. But of course, I'm anxious to see the family and to experience a very unique part of the Far East.

To handle the enormous volume of pictures we will be snapping, and to handle the enormous amount of requests for pictures, I've decided to create a blog for posting photos, to which you are all invited!

Here it is: Brennas in Singapore

I will most likely post something here on this blog of my experiences there, but check the other site routinely for postings. WARNING: I shaved my head for this trip. I have revealed to the world the quality of my widow's peak. Take caution.

To those of you who will feel the dull ache of my absence here in Minnesota, I quote to you Nero's final words: Qualis artifex pereo. "What a showman the world is losing!"

Spiritus Sanctus ex Patre solo procedit

2006-07-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

Recently, I wrote a very short breviary for Missio Dei, and in it, I included for one of the daily readings the Nicene Creed. One from among us pointed out that I had excluded the filioque clause from the copy. Everyone who knew what we were talking about (two or three of us) chuckled softly at the exclusion, but candidly and completely seriously I said, "I left it out because it's not part of the creed."

Here's the issue. In the Nicene Creed's article on the Holy Spirit, there is the following line:

"We believe...in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father..."

Sometime in the 5th century, in Spain, to deal with Visigothic Arianism (Arianism is the believe that Jesus is not eternal and was created), the local churches there added "and the Son" (in Latin filioque) to the Nicene Creed. They did this to elucidate the divine status of Jesus Christ as coeternal with the Father.

The filioque clause is historically, creedally, biblically, and theologically incorrect and should not be recited with the creed.

First, historically, the filioque clause is a clear interpolation. It was not added by the Pope, or by any council or synod, but by overzealous local officials in Spain. It spread de facto through the Western church. The first pope to address filioque was Leo III, reigning in the late 8th century. He denounced filioque as heretical and had special silver plates engraved with the Nicene Creed without the filioque. Despite Leo's insistence, the filioque persisted and was used politically in later centuries to contribute to the schism of the Western and Eastern churches.

Second, creedally, it is illegitimate. The final form of the Nicene Creed was created at the Second Ecumenical council in 381, and later councils affirmed that the creed had reached its final form and could not be amended. The Roman Catholic Church affirmed all of the decisions of the seven ecumenical councils, including the final form of the creed. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI wrote an encyclical where he left out the filioque. Being the brilliant theologian he is, I think the Pope has come to understand that he must accept all the deliberations of the councils, not just in the creation of the creed but in the final ratification of it.

Third, biblically, filioque is unfounded. John 15:26 is the basis for the creed: "When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me..." Nowhere in the New Testament is the Spirit said to proceed from the Son. The Son is also said to have received the Spirit (Acts 2:33). How could the Son receive what proceeds from Him? What the Bible does say is that the Spirit is given from the Father through the Son (Titus 3:5-6). That is distinctly NOT the same as the Spirit proceeding from the Son.

Last, theologically filioque makes no sense. The Orthodox church responded to Arianism in a completely different but equally effective way than the West. Instead of performing unnecessary surgery on the creed, they simply affirmed the deity of Christ. Much more direct and satisfying. It is my own position that if you believe the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, then the Son is no longer begotten. The Triune relationship is one of eternal and endless (with no beginning) giving. This giving is ultimate and almighty (there is nothing held back). In the same way that we say that the Son is eternally begotten, we say that the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father. That is, the sending of the Spirit eternally originates from the Father. The Son sends that Spirit through himself to the world, as well as returning it to the Father, but from him it does not proceed. Were it to proceed from him, he would be the Father, not the Son, and not begotten. He is the Son because he is begotten. He is the Father because he is the Source. We musn't confuse the uniqueness of the persons, which is what we do when we add filioque.

Remember that the Nicene Creed is not the invention of man, but the inspiration of God. It is not one of many valid descriptions of God. It is what God has given us through our limited human language to describe who he really is. We cannot add or subtract from it.

All that said, I think the sensibility that people try to uphold when using filioque is valid. It is heresy to speak the filioque with the creed, but who isn't a heretic? It may just be a matter of semantics (maybe that's all it ever should have been), but better to discuss it outside the confines of the creed than to allow its existence within it.

Imitatio Supes

2006-07-03T12:43:00.000-07:00

Is Superman a Christ figure?

My final answer: no, he is not.

Three things might initially be attractive about a "Superman Christology," a theme made woefully apparent in this latest superhero installment: Superman Returns.

First, Superman seems to care about humanity because he believes they are worth saving. This idea comes out in the teaser trailer for Superman Returns, where Jor-El's voice tells Superman, "They're a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be..." It is the very idea that humanity, despite all its flaws, has inherent worth. This is an aspect of Superman's character that echoes Christ's clear concern for humanity as worthy to be saved. It's a beautiful idea: it was not because God's honor had been sullied by our worthlessness that Jesus came to vindicate God. Rather, it was and is our inherent infinite worth to God for which Jesus came to save us.
Secondly, Superman understands that the world needs a savior even when the world doesn't understand that. Lois Lane's character (poorly portrayed by Kate Bosworth) at one point says, "The world doesn't need a savior..." In that moment, I think the creators of the movie perfectly captured the state of postmodern thought. Postmodernism's hero myths nearly always expose an anti-hero; postmoderns have no room for "perfection." When Superman is placed in our postmodern milieu, he must rely on his own confident belief that what he does as a hero matters to the world, even if the world hasn't the category to appreciate it. See the gospel of John for Christological comparisons.
Last, though Superman sometimes seems to doubt himself, he draws from his powers to effect the good. Properly interpreted, the Superman myth portrays him as a Man of Steel: his physical AND moral courage are founded in his physical prowess and determination. When faithfully told, we need never doubt that Superman will really succeed, not just because his seemingly limitless power renders him impervious to failure, but because in it, he finds the strength to establish an invulnerable ethic.

In the end, I must conclude that the Superman as Christ metaphor falls apart. Soteriology (how we are saved) is indelibly linked to Christology. If we were to establish a soteriology for Superman, it would clearly be that theory of atonement which lies somewhere between ethical example and union. Again, in the teaser trailer for Superman Returns, Jor-El says that it is only that they (humanity) "lack the light to show the way" that we dwell in such depravity. Clearly, then, Superman saves us by illuminating the endlessly refined morality that is so parsimonious with his limitless strength.
But that is precisely the problem with a Superman Christology. Superman's ethical example is rooted in his invulnerability. Humanity is then trapped in a relationship with a savior in whom they find a tremendous ethical example but with whom they have nothing in common and from whom they do not also receive any sort of symbiotic power to succeed. We can admire Superman, but we cannot imitate him. The quality of the Christian life that is the
imitation of Christ is what gives us the hope of glory. We follow Christ's example because, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we find in us the strength to accomplish it. The absence of any commensurate pneumatology in the Superman myth makes a Christology of Superman impossible.

The Death of Superman

2006-07-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

When I went to Superman Returns on Friday, I hoped to watch a movie with a storyline given imagery that was open to interpretation, and instead I was bludgeoned over the head repeatedly with the Christ-figure metaphor. In the opening scenes, I heard Jor-El, Superman's father, telling him that "the father becomes the son, the son becomes the father..." I saw Superman flying like he was being crucified. I saw him repeatedly referred to in some rite as the savior of the world. By the end of the movie, I had no choice. Bryan Singer FORCED me to see Superman as Christ, and to see Christ the way HE sees him. Ultimately, my critique today will not be of Superman Returns and the atrocious lack of imagination it displayed, but of the people for whom I believe this movie was given its unique tenor: evangelical Christians.

Evangelical Christians seem to have no imaginations. They appear utterly incapable of allowing a piece of art to exist that is open to interpretations they might find unsatisfactory. When it comes to art and evangelicalism, there must be one-to-one correlations between what a thing appears to be and what it is. Theological metaphors must be exactingly precise, and cannot lack any clarity. Subtletly is apparently a sin to evangelicals, nuance and refinement are simply unacceptable. If you are going to create a piece of art (music, literature, movies, poetry, etc.), it must clearly reference Jesus Christ, and it must explain theologically precise aspects of who he is.

When evangelicals and their allies come out with their own art, it is painfully monolithic and stark. Christian music artists sing very direct and specific things about Jesus and God in every song, and if an artist doesn't, he is accused of "losing his faith." Christian ethical literature must totally casuistic; there can be no ambiguous situations. Christian fiction must clearly tie the story to an obvious theological truth. Ultimately, all Christian art: movies, music, TV, and literature, seem to have one rule: what the artist intends to say about God must be as obvious as possible.

When evangelicals interpret the art of others, it is even more painful. The book of Revelation is an incredibly complex, beautiful work of art with soaring imagery that begs to be interpreted endlessly in all its many facets. But the evangelical interpretation of this book, The Left Behind series, establishes its one interpretation as theologically binding. The Chronicles of Narnia have been interpreted for decades in ways that CS Lewis never intended for them, and the movie suffered greatly because of the insistance on interpreting the symbols of the story as exclusively Christian symbols.

So when others from outside Christianity interpret art to entice evangelicals into consuming it, is it any wonder that art appears monolithic? The entertainment industry looks at these particular kinds of Christians and asked, "How can we market our product to them?" Simple. Create clear Christ figures in movies, art, literature, wherever else, so that evangelicals buy our product in droves, and create movie guides and bible studies and sermon preparation manuals devoted solely to explaining what is already painfully obvious to the rest of the world. But it is because evangelicals seem to lack any subtlety that this all works so perfectly.

The Superman myth suffered from the terribly overt Christ-metaphor present in Superman Returns. At one point, Superman swoons in the hospital and appears to die, evoking a clear reference to Jesus' death. I think back on that moment with frustration and anger, because it is so indicative. It indicates that the tradition I grew up in and that I still honor in many ways is the tradition that is squelching true art and beauty in American culture, because its desire to preserve truth combined with its newfound ability throw its weight around is motivating the entertainment industry toward moments like that. But true beauty never violates truth, and vice versa, and though art can exist in capitalist societies, it cannot thrive when a powerful group is willing to pay for its destruction.

Here's What I Look Like!

2006-05-16T19:04:00.000-07:00

Here's a conversation I had with a fellow student tonight:

Student: Do you ever watch Law and Order: Criminal Intent?
Me: No, but are you going to say that I look like Vincent D'onofrio?
Student: Yeah, do you get that a lot?
Me: Yeah I frequently do.
Student: You were saying something last week and I was trying to think why you looked familiar, and then I realized you look like Vincent D'onofrio. You even have similar mannerisms. If you get into that kind of show, you should watch it.
Me: I don't really like shows that are serious like that. Thanks anyway, I'll take it as a compliment.

I've never liked shows about crime or hospitals. So that eliminates about 75% of the shows on TV. But anyway, people say I look like Vincent D'onofrio, which I generally take as a compliment. He seems like he's pretty average looking, so it's just that I enjoy being compared to a celebrity. When I was younger and much thinner and wore a goatee, I was often compared to Ethan Hawke. That was a bit more flattering than Vincent D'onofrio. Presently, I am also sometimes told I look like Joaquin Phoenix, but this is a minority view. Maybe if I were a little trimmer and had more hair.

How I Wish...

2006-05-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

When a person aspires to make a contribution someday in a particular field of scholarship, he has daydreams (nerdy daydreams) about meeting certain people who have had a profound influence on him. I have a "dream team" in my head of who I would like to meet someday. I daydream that I could have a conversation with one of these people. I imagine thinking of just the right things to say so that they will be impressed with me and offer me an e-mail address or something. I imagine eventually being asked to write articles for books dedicated to those I admire most. I acknowledge this as extremely odd.

I have met one person on my "dream team" thus far. Last year at SBL, I met Judith Lieu, which was a tremendous honor. It's quite likely she doesn't remember the encounter at all, but I remember the encounter even now quite vividly, because I said something with which she really resonated. I can only hope the homing beacon I attached to the base of her skull remains intact for years to come; it comforts me to look at my ScholarTracker 9000 every night before retiring and be able to see exactly where she is.

Anyway, when asked the biblical scholar celebrity question, the answer EVERYONE gives of who they would like to meet is NT Wright, who is something of a superstar in the world of biblical theology. My encounter with NT Wright took place in the lobby of the Philadelphia Marriott with a friend named Ken, right before we went to dinner one night at SBL. It went like this:

Ken: Don't look now, but NT Wright is standing right behind you.
Chris: Really? Where?
Ken: Right there. Do you want to meet him?
Chris: [short pause] No...are we going to Chili's or Applebee's?

I also had a chance to meet James Dunn, but I had to go to the bathroom. I asked the friend with me who had pointed James Dunn out to please extract a core sample from James Dunn's brain when he wasn't looking, and I would split the knowledge we gleaned from that sample with him later. I guess he forgot to do that.

I have also met a few people with whom it was pleasant to converse, and about whom I am glad I can brag that I have met. I met Mark Goodacre, if that means anything to anybody. I also met Elaine Pagels, which was interesting, because she was presenting a paper on just the subject I had written an article about two years earlier (could she have?...no, of course not). Now when I see her praising Gnosticism and the Gospel of Judas on the National Geographic Channel, I wish I had clubbed her when I had the chance. Just kidding.

I met Miroslav Wolf, which was simply awkward to the point of being almost painful; Brandon can attest to that. He was leaving the party we were at, and we had been hunting him together all night. When we finally mustered the courage to approach him, it was clear he just wanted to leave. Perhaps the only way it might have been more awkward is if we had tried to herd him into a large cage. Meeting his wife was actually a very pleasant surprise, however. I met Chris Rice, who along with Spencer Perkins wrote "More Than Equals." Better than that, I met Spencer's father John Perkins, which was quite an honor.

So why am I bringing up the idea of meeting these sorts of people?

Two days ago, the person I would perhaps most liked to have met in the whole world passed on to be with the Lord. I used to think about what I would say to this person if I ever met him. I imagined what I would thank him for, which of his works I would praise, what singular thought he had stimulated in my brain that inspired me. But he's gone now, and he's left me without that chance. Now all I can do is eulogize him briefly:

For teaching me why we need the creeds,

For making the church fathers come alive in my presence,

For imbuing the Bible with the tremendous authority of the ancient Orthdox church,

For heaping the glorious weight of centuries of tradition on my own impoverished American soul,

For planting the seeds of an historian in me,

I thank you, and rest in peace, Jaroslav Pelikan.

Reponses to Hell

2006-05-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

I don't have Internet access as readily as I have in the past, so you'll forgive me if I wasn't able to respond to the many comments from my last post.

Elizabeth-- Thank you for posting, I'm always quite happy when I hear of someone having read my blog over a period of time and only just now having commented. When I get my new blog template up with my links section, I'll link to your blog. :)

Graham-- I think we're absolutely on the same page, you and I. I'm not sold on the EO view either, it's just the most attractive framing of the hell debate I've heard yet. I still VERY much hold a provisional Christian univeralism, though I see it as more of a hope than a belief. I HOPE with all my being that every person will be brought into the eternal love relationship of the Triune God, and I don't see any reason to abandon that hope, even if it seems untenable theologically to some. I also still really find the idea of purgation tempting, because it at least counteracts the tendency to see heaven and hell as eternal "states" and not as changeable, dynamic existences.

Brandon-- I certainly think that the idea that one chooses an eternal destiny once and for all isn't necessary, which leaves open the possibility that hell is a "continual choosing." The difficulty arises when a person must continually choose to exit hell, unless you see heaven as a once and for all choice and hell as a continual one. The whole idea of taking a roughly worldy view of volition into the eternal and unadulterated presence of God is troublesome to me, which is probably why I might disagree with Lewis, as I do with him on many things.

Gina-- The view you expressed is implicit in the annihilationist view. For us to be completely separated from the presence of God, we would have to cease to exist. God grants our being by his divine presence, and our creational being is necessarily good. To imagine the absence of God would be to imagine non-being. Here's another problem you encounter when you talk about the "absence" of God. If God is not present in a place (hell), then he is not omnipresent. If there is a place where God is not, then God is no longer God. Do you see what I mean?

Daniel-- I didn't understand what you were saying most of the time, I'll talk to you in person.

Hellafied Remix

2006-05-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have to direct your attention to three things in order for you all to have the same basis for discussion of this issue that I have acquired. First, you must look at Graham's blog to see the issue being raised. Basically, Graham confronts the Eastern Orthodox view of hell, which is intensely attractive to me, and for which I would like to make a case. Next, read Why We Need Hell and Heaven and Hell in the Afterlife, According to the Bible, both articles referenced by Graham in his post.

For my part, I would first to explain the Eastern Orthodox view of hell as I understand it, explain why this alleviates my previous need to embrace universalism (gasp!) in light of the Western views of hell, and to offer some exegesis of the Greek text in the passage referenced by Graham as the one possible biblical objection to the Eastern Orthodox view of hell.

First, what is the Eastern Orthodox view of hell? Quite simply, hell and heaven are the same thing. Being in God's presence is glorious for the saints, because it was they have all longed for on earth. To those who have disobeyed God, his presence is a bitter and consuming fire. The picture of the hellbound unbeliever is the picture of someone being scourged and tormented by the love of Christ as it relates to the decision to reject that love.

There are three major Western views of hell that, prior to my knowledge of this Eastern Orthodox view, were all I had been offered growing up as an evangelical. It is no secret to some of you previous to this post and no secret to any of you now: rejection of these three views had caused me to embrace universalism to this point. The three views:

1. Eternal Torment: God's wrath, somehow connected to justice and in a twisted way, to his love, would ensure eternal torment for the damned. The most violent, unbelievably grotesque acts would be performed on the damned in this hell, which would be administered by Satan and his demons. Basically, hell in this view is just a really poorly run eternal prison. There are so many things wrong with this view, I don't know where to begin. First, it's not justice to consign people to evil. Violence, torment, and pain are part of the fallenness of our world. To imagine God establishing that fallenness and evil as part of his justice forever gives me a picture of a God who has not acheived total victory in his creation. It's also simply not very loving, to be honest. And last, despite the best efforts of evangelical and fundamentalist theologians, it's just not in the Bible.
2. Annihilation: What better punishment for someone who has chosen eternal separation from God than to cease to exist? This is the annihilationist view. There are some Bible passages that seem to suggest this view (notably 2 Thessalonians 1.9, which I will exegete below). One problem this view does solve is that God achieves a more complete victory over his creation. Even the most fallen, evil people have been graciously given existence. Our very being connects us to God. Thus, for us to be completely and totally separated from God, maybe we just need to cease to exist? The major problem with this view for me is the idea of God annihilating something. I happen to believe that creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) is an heretical view, and that we ought to conceive of God having created ex se (from himself). To my mind, there is no such thing as "nothing." For God to annihilate something, he would have to "uncreate" something, to alter forever the nature of the universe and perhaps his very being. I don't think that's possible.
3. Purgation: I have a professor at my school who holds this view. Basically, it is still an unacceptable view for me, but it is the least unacceptable. The idea is that sin will be purged from those who dwell in hell. If sin were fat, then a purgative hell is simply a weight-loss program. In other words, hell is purgatory. You might be surprised to see how much scriptural support can be gathered for this view. In the end, though, hell is depicted in the Bible usually as eternal, and that is what makes this view difficult for me to accept.

What I was left with after rejecting all these views was Christian univeralism: somehow, mysteriously, Christ will save all people by his blood. I don't find this view tenable, but it was the most tenable view after rejecting all these views of hell.

I have to say that since having heard of the Eastern Orthodox view of hell, I'm ready to give it serious consideration.

Finally, a word about 2 Thessalonians 1.9. Any translation involves theology. That's just a plain fact. Bible translators are theologians, whether they have been trained as such or not. Most English translators' theological interpretation of 2 Thessalonians are annihilationist. Thus the Worldwise English translation renders the Greek: "They will be destroyed for ever. That will be their punishment. They will be for ever separated from the Lord and from his great and wonderful power". But as Graham points out, a rendering of one of the Greek words apo can yield a translation with an opposing meaning. Thus the NKJV: "These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power." I would like to point out two things from the Greek that are missed in this passage, and then explain why I think translations that mimic the NKJV or KJV are the best translations. The word here translated "destruction" is an odd word, and here, I don't think I would translate it as such. There are others words that would convey a sub-text of annihilation much better, most notably phthora. This word (olethros) is used elsewhere in the NT, and its usage in 1 Corinthians 5.5 is interesting: "I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction (olethros) of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." I would translate this "pestilence." It is not destruction itself but what causes destruction. Taking the Eastern Orthodox view of hell to meet 2 Thessalonians 1.9, God's glorious presence is like a plague to the unrepentant sinner. He suffers not annihilation nor necessarily purgation, but pestilence. What does everyone think?

Nostalgia and Dreaming

2006-05-10T11:16:00.000-07:00

I am still dissatisfied with my blog template, which is still causing me to not want to post. But I was looking back over my entries and have found a few drafts that I never published. One of them I'm going to save to be the first post when the new template arrives, but this one is interesting enough, and was written in January:

So, I take a certain amount of pride in saying that my StrengthsFinder is probably one of the most unique of any of the combinations out there that I've seen thus far. I have a few "regular" looking strengths, but have such an odd combination of them that it made me stand out from the rest of the class, literally. When I took the test at Bethel, nobody else in the room had the combinations I had. That part sounds cool, but it was actually really discouraging at the time, because it launched me into the process of realizing I would make a terrible pastor. So here it is:

1. Input--basically, this means I like "collecting" facts. This, along with one other strength, is probably compelling me to be a historian.
2. Ideation--the same as Input, only not facts, but collecting ideas. I don't judge ideas to be invalid until I've explored them, and even then, I often allow ideas to exist even if they are implausible or fanciful and impossible.
3. Restorative--I like to fix things. That can mean that I like to fix broken mechanical devices (which I'm horrible at), or it can also mean fixing systems (like the church).
4. Context--I love the past, and I dwell in it often, because I consider it valuable. I always want to consult the past before I make a decision or judgment about the present.
5. Futuristic--I love the future, and I dwell in it often, because I consider it valuable. I have the ability to project a current trajectory in the present to a point in the future, which means I love dreaming of new changes in the present that will effect the future.

Ephesians 1.3-14

2006-03-09T18:00:00.000-08:00

A translation of one of the most difficult passages to translate in the New Testament, masterfully made simple by yours truly:

"God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who poured out all of the blessings of heaven on us through Christ, is glorious, because before the creation of the world, he chose us to become holy and blameless for him. Because he loves us, he made it our destiny to be adopted as his children through sending Jesus Christ. He did this because he knew nothing else would bring him more pleasure, which points to how glorious his grace is. He gave graciously through his Beloved, whose blood is the adoption fee, which is the forgiveness of sins! In all his wisdom and care, the riches of his grace overflow in us.
He showed us everything he has ever wanted for us by publicly displaying Christ Jesus as the plan to bring everything in heaven and on earth together just in the nick of time. Again, he did this because of how much pleasure it gave him! And according to this plan, by a God who always carries out his plans, we were chosen so that as the first to hope in Christ, we would glorify him. When you heard the undeniable truth, that tremendous news that you are saved, and you believed in Christ, you were marked with a seal. The seal is the Holy Spirit, who is the payment as the first installation of our limitless inheritance. But the seal is also a bill of sale, because now you belong to God."

An Open Letter to Christians Concerned with the Environment

2006-03-05T18:29:00.000-08:00

When I was little, I was a member of the National Wildlife Federation. I received their magazine, and I was very interested in nature. I frequently took trips to the nature center in my town, and loved to explore large open spaces. My parents cultivated this tendency in me with approval; they saw my love of nature and the environment as a good thing (I'm quite sure they still do). Granted, this passion for the environment faded as I grew into my early teens, but this has more to do with how fickle teenage boys are than with anything else.

I point this out because I grew up as a conservative. Conservatives find it acceptable to care about nature and the environment. Conservatives don't want the environment to suffer. Conservatives are concerned about global environmental issues.

I want to say that into cyberspace, because I believe it to be true. I say it for two reasons.

I say it first for the sake of conservative Christians, by which I mean Christians who are politically conservative and vote for Republicans or conservative candidates. You care about what happens to the earth. But you have been coerced into thinking that you must oppose environmental measures proposed by liberals or Democrats, because you have been conditioned to oppose anything proposed by liberals or Democrats. You've also been fed the lie that other issues sometimes overwhelm environmental concerns, and that caring about the environment somehow puts your conservatism in danger. When scientific evidence is presented to the public proving that the Earth is warming, that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are rising, that the ice caps are melting, that we are experienced more severe meteorological events, that our wetlands are receding, and that our rainforests are being burned, you are taught either to deny the validity of the evidence, or reject the idea that humans have a part in what happens to the Earth. You uncritically accept the conservative position of insouciance toward the environment because the conservative position as a whole is important enough for you to do so.
In some cases, you have overtly accepted a theology to justify this called "dominion theology." It is the idea that since God told us to be fruitful and multiply, and to subdue the Earth and have dominion over it, you don't have to worry about damaging the environment. Some of you have even bought into the mistaken theology that we ought to help God along with Armaggedon by purposely raping the Earth. This theology was not created by Christians; no Christian would consider destruction redemptive.
I urge you to use the political process to make caring about the environment and thoroughly Christian thing. I urge you to object to the idea that it is our sacred duty to damage the Earth. I urge you to support measures and issues that help protect and preserve the environment.

I say this secondly for the sake of liberal Christians who vote for Democrats. You have seen the importance of protecting the environment, but in the process you have supported a movement that uncritically accepts almost any measure ostensibly meant to protect the environment. A whole government-funded industrial complex has formed around the Democratic party, not for the purpose of actually protecting the environment, but so that Democrats will be assured your vote if they support environmental action. Democrats don't truly want Republicans to be known as lovers of the environment; they want to corner the market on that reputation. I admire your concern for protecting the Earth, and your love of it is a most Christian endeavor. But support your conservative brothers and sisters in this love. Draw them into it; stop making them the enemy (afterall, that just what the Democrats want you to do). If Christians can be united across political lines (God I pray we can be united in all things someday), then we can be a force of people that makes sure America is part of the solution.

Support measures designed to protect the environment that actually do what they say they will do. Support environmental action groups that are concerned with protecting the Earth and not just handing money to the Democrats. Support the movement of the whole country toward better environmental awareness. And parents, teach your children to love the Earth.

The Commons

2006-03-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Everyone know what eminent domain is? It's the right of the government to compensate you for your home, farm, or business (anything you put on your land), and then build whatever they want on your land (now their land) as long as it is for the common good.

Considering most of this nation sleeps through most political events, I'm willing to buy the idea that no one realized that eminent domain was just recently created. I finally saw a billboard tonight that shows evidence that people are concerned that the gov't could take anyone's land at any moment in the name of a concept that can have almost limitless meanings.

The common good. Nothing is more insidious a concept to the Christian Church than this, and it comes directly from socialism by way of progressive liberalism. This is, of course, no reason to become a libertarian or a conservative (there are still no good reasons to be either), but rather a reason to be very, very wary. The common good is dangerous precisely because it is so fluid a concept. It can mean just about anything that sounds vaguely altruistic. And when gov't gets a hold of this concept, we see the results with things like eminent domain.

On a theological level, the common good is (this may be a surprise to some of you) not the Church's concern. For some reason, there are large sectors of the Church in America stuck on the idea that the Church's job is to win the "humanitarian of the year" award. We're meant to be some sort of gargantuan, omnipresent social service agency that does so much for the common good that people are led in droves to the doorsteps of our churches. Sometimes "evidence" is cited that the early church was the "welfare" of a city in the early years.

The Church in the first two centuries actually did little for the "common good." Had they tried to win the "humanitarian of the year" award, they would have lost by a long shot to the Roman government. Rome was capable and quite willing to perform acts of "common goodness" that dwarfed anything the early church would have been able to come up with, and if not Rome, then the local magistrate, or a rich citizen eager for recognition. The common good was taken care of quite nicely by plenty of other people, and almost never by Christians.

So what was so extraordinary about them, and why did the ancient world marvel enough to say, "Behold, how they love each other?" It was precisely that. They loved each other well. The extraordinary thing about Christians wasn't that they were generally very generous people, but that within their own communities, they were tremendously generous, and anyone could be part of their communities. They were almost exclusively generous to each other, but they were inclusive of everyone who wanted to share in their communal life.

We are miserly to each other. We bicker and argue, we don't share resources freely. We attach strings to our gifts, we expect things in return. We are divided. Meanwhile, we still make vague attempts at trying to be an institution that serves the common good. This concept, whatever it is (if it is anything at all) is simply that: common and vulgar. Such a common good can never compete with the uncommon, extraordinary goodness of God, which we are meant to share with each other, inviting whoever wants to come to Jesus and partake in his life.

Two New Terms

2006-02-26T09:35:00.000-08:00

I ought to start compiling a new dictionary soon. I wanted to put two new terms out there, one that has been used for a while at missio dei, and one that I tried to use as a word this morning, but that Word told me is not a word. I investigated, and it is not a word, but it should be.

Gi-de-on-ize-- (t.v.) 1. to purposely compel uncommitted people in a group to leave 2. to make a situation or environment uncomfortable to those who had formerly found comfort in it for the expressed purpose of revealing who is committed and who is not. (Gideonizing, Gideonized)

This has been a useful term in talking about what big mega-churches ought to be doing (which is the exact opposite of what they do). In an era where success is measured by the ability to gather a crowd, Gideonizing one's church is counter-intuitive but necessary for the life of the community. Instead of looking for transfer growth, churches should purposely eschew it. Incidentally, it is my belief that recent events at missio dei were not an example of Gideonizing. We recognized two different but equally committed groups, which is not the same as getting uncommitted people to leave.

un-der-think-- (t.v. & i.v.) 1. to stop short in the process of thinking or rethinking about a process, event, memory, or situation 2. underanalyze (also not a word); to judge the process of analyzing something or someone as finished or complete before it is truly so (underthought, underthinking)

I thought underanalyze was a word, but it is also not a word. I needed this word to describe when people think they have re-thought something sufficiently, but they (from my perspective) clearly have not. I was commenting on a situation given in an article I was reading on missions. The author spoke of an indigenous movement of churches that grew so fast they didn't have enough pastors to lead the people. He lamented this fact, but pointed out that trying to "consolidate" and turning people away until they trained enough leading was stomping on the Holy Spirit's work. I agree with him on that point, but believed he had "underthought" the situation. If the churches were growing too fast to be lead by pastors, maybe it was the case that they didn't need pastors...

Two Homonymous Terms

2006-02-22T08:17:00.000-08:00

Mark and I came up with two terms this morning. The first term Mark came up with and explained the meaning of to me. The second term was born out of the fact that I misunderstood what he was saying, and thought he was saying the second term. So here they are, the first one Mark's, the second one mine.

fortress of Paulitude-- 1. the vigorous resistance offered by conservative reformed thinkers (and others) against the New Perspective. 2. refusal to carefully examine the tenants of the New Perspective

fortress of politude-- 1. refusal to carefully examine one's own theological views on church polity and government. 2. ignorance of the existence of diversity in church polity. 3. the phenomenon of using biblical texts to create unyielding structures of church polity (e.g., churches with "New Testament" elders and deacons). 4. any dogmatic defense of one's own church polity as self-evident.

Lexica Nove Addendum

2006-02-16T10:06:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about this one in the shower today, and I thought I would add it before I forget:

a-gor-a-cen-trism- 1. belief in the superiority of the market system of exchange among peoples. 2. overriding concern for the existence of a market system in a culture. (origin: Gk. agora (market) + center) a-gor-a-cen-tri-cal-ly ; a-gor-a-cen-tric-i-ty ; a-gor-a-cen-tric

I thought of this one because I'm reading through the Cultural Anthropology book I was supposed to read two weeks ago, and I just got to the part about exchange and economic systems. This series of words conjures up an image for me of the defiantly capitalist American who believes that free markets and the market system are the cat's pajamas. I find this word especially useful in talking about American Christians who have swallowed whole the belief that free markets are actually good for the church, or at least better than reciprocity or redistribution (don't get me started on Christians who think governmental redistribution is actually called for in the Old Testament).

Lexica Nova

2006-02-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

The other day Mark pointed out how many words I have made up. I enjoy making up words, though I have only recently begun the endeavor. I hope to make up a good deal more in the near future, culminating in the creation of a Brennaean dictionary shortly after my death. I hereby release these words with their official definitions into the ether of cyberspace, with the hope that they be taken up into the popular vernacular of Western society (or at least cause some amusement).

di-das-ca-lar-chy-1. government by teachers or a teacher, especially by a small faction of teachers in a local church setting that stifle other church practices. 2. those making up such a government. 3. A local church governed by teaching to the detriment of all other practices. (origin: Gk. didaskalos (teacher) + -arches (ruler))

Mark and I came up with this one when we were pow-wowing before we planted the church. Specifically, we meant it to refer to a church where professors or people with advanced degrees are given the seat of honor, and where teaching is given precedent over things like music, art, prayer, acts of services, etc. This can also be a church where everything seems to revolve around the sermon and the preaching pastor.

E-mer-gent-si-a-1. an elite group enjoying superior intellectual and theological status in the emerging church movement. 2. a class among the emerging church population claiming intellectual dominion over particular aspects of the movement. 3. those of the emerging movement responsible for its intellectual and theological foundations.

This one I came up with a couple weeks ago at dinner. It came to me after a friend incorrectly said the Spanish word for "emergency." There's no need for anyone in the emerging movement to take offense at this definition, it's a good thing to be part of the elite, and whether any of the Emergentsia are willing to admit it, there is an Emergentsia.

sought-er-(derived from seeker) 1. one who is being approached by one who is sent. 2. one who is being inquired of by a seeker. 3. a person who is being endeavored upon.

I just need this word because I want an analogous feeling to the word in comparison to "seeker." I want to be able to talk about "soughter-sensitive" churches, that is, churches that focus on sending people out to find the lost instead of enticing them in to church.

sun-oikos or syn-oikos- 1. a geographical place other than a residence that fulfills cultural values of family or kinship. 2. a person who defines such a place as home because of the presence of his or her family or kinship group. 3. the phenomenon of a place taking on the cultural characteristics of a residence from the presence of a family or kinship group that defines it as such. (origin: Gk. sun (together) + -oikos (house))

I needed Mark to remind me how I defined this word. I came up with this word when we were in Ohio at a house church conference. It gets at the fact that lots of people now don't express the value of family when they are in their homes. Frequently, homes are seen as little more than a place to sleep, and not a place for gathering or celebrating. Restaurants, coffee shops, bars, movie theaters, etc. now fill the role of expressing "home" because the people who gather there define family by celebrating it with a surrogate kinship group in that location.

di-Ca-pri-ate-(di-Ca-pri-at-ed) 1. an event or action which causes an ordinarily masculine man to be given the sensitive and slightly effeminate quality of Leonardo diCaprio. 2. the action of viewing the film Titanic.

Ba-ku-lize-1. to transform any person, place, or object into something akin to, resembling, or suitable for use by Scott Bakula. 2. to be "beamed" aboard a ship in the Star Trek universe by Scott Bakula, along with Scott Bakula, or the action of beaming Scott Bakula. 3. to be slaughtered by Scott Bakula. (I'd also like to suggest that any civilization organized around the worship of and ruled by Scott Bakula be named "Bakulon," and that all vampire movies be standardized to the vampire lore depicted in a government-sanctioned film starring Scott Bakula and called "Count Bakula."

I also need to credit Mark with providing the conversation necessary to generate the words didascalarchy, soughter, and sunoikos. Count on me to create more unnecessary words with scrupulous regularity as the days pass.

Here They Come!

2006-02-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

I live in an apartment that has extremely high ceilings. I would guess that I have 12-14 foot ceilings. This means that much of the structure of the apartment is oriented toward using this extra space. If I were ambitious (and strange) I would build a system of lofts nine feet up from the ground. Then I would put out an add for a midget roommate, or a very resourceful six-year-old. Anyway, I have two built-in ladders in my apartment. One is in my bedroom and one is in a closet. The closet goes all the way to the ceiling, so a ladder was built on the inside wall to reach things at the top of the closet. The other ladder is in my bedroom and leads to the loft where my bed resides. The loft is very large, big enough for a full-sized mattress and box spring.

So when I climb up into my bed at night, I frequently climb in a very dedicated and particular manner, and this music goes through my head. For those of you who don't know what that is, well it's the music from when the Millennium Falcon is fleeing the Death Star and Luke and Han have to climb these ladders (in space?) to get to a different part of the ship. It's cool. Anyway, after I lay on my back for a while and think about how cool that is, I fall asleep.

Down with Helping!!

2006-02-05T13:35:00.000-08:00

I am now completely moved in to my new apartment deep in the bowels of the West Bank area, and have warmed up to it a bit. Loki is still very distraught and barks and whines the whole time I am gone (this I know because I already got my first complaint from my neighbor). I'm committing to spending lots of time at home, and bringing him along whenever I can to events that will tolerate a dog (like for example, Tuesday night house? Mark? Do you mind?)

Anyway, I was walking the god of mischief today and saw an announcement written in chalk for a free soup kitchen. I don't want to defame this group, so I won't tell you what it said. But seeing that made me think of what Christianity has been reduced to: a set of actions that indicate Christianity as a whole, but which as parts amount to very little. In other words, Christianity is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts, but its parts are poorly added together.

The part of Christianity that's been watered down or corrupted in this case is generosity. Christ gave unconditionally, without reserve, because giving is the eternal beauty of the Trinity. Three persons in being together, constantly giving totally of themselves to each other in a cosmic love relationship. This is the beauty of Christ, that he gave completely of himself on the cross so that we could share in the life of the Triune God. He did not do this because he expected results. Had none of us been saved through his sacrifice, he would have died for us. He would have done this for us because the giving quality of God is meaningful in itself. This is truly unconditional giving; expecting results would be conditional.

In the life of the Christian community, generosity must have this unconditional quality. It must not expect a certain result. This summer I was driving along with a friend of mine and we passed a homeless man with a sign asking for money. She said, "I always feel like I should give someone like that some money, but I'm afraid he might go buy liquor with it." I said to her, "What if he did? Would that alter the goodness of your act? Is your giving only good if the gift is used to assign value to something you consider good?" My point is not to encourage alcoholism in homeless people, but to try to return our ethical thinking from the trap of teleology (the end result makes the act good). Giving is good, because goodness is God's action in the world, and the quality of God's action is giving.

Back to the sidewalk chalk. There's nothing to say that this crowd of Christians expects nothing to happen from this ministry of theirs. But there's an awfully good chance that they expect to use this food handout as a way of leading people to Christ. This is a results-based way of looking at giving. The whole idea is that you give people things, and they (1) appreciate it so much that they want to know about you as a person (allowing you to share your faith), and (2) you display the love of Christ and show that you are obedient to him.

Here's the deal. Having worked in a homeless shelter, having met a lot of poor people and knowing many now, people actually DON'T care who you are if you give them something. If you give someone something for free, they just take it, it's that simple. You don't want to know about the life of a supermarket worker who gives you a free sample. If someone came up to me on the street and said, "Here's a coke." I would say "thanks," take it, and walk off. Even if they said, "Here's a coke, Jesus loves you," and I weren't a Christian, I would still say, "Thanks," and walk away. It's a myth that people care who you are or even why you are giving them something for free. When the Communist Revolution hit China in the early decades of the 20th century, the Christian church quickly crumbled (what little presence there was in China). A Catholic priest and a Communist Chinese officer met, and the officer said to the priest, "Do you know why Communism has succeeded here? When you arrived in a Chinese village, you built free hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, and social service agencies. When we arrived, we brought pamphlets explaining Communism. In a few short years, we have succeeded in doing what you failed to do in centuries."

Giving really cannot be a means to share the Gospel. Giving IS the Gospel. Giving of a certain sort, giving that does not expect results or has ulterior motives or hidden purposes, constitutes the life of the Christian Church and turns it into an image of the Trinity. The spoken word, the message of the Gospel, testifies to this, not the other way around. That is, giving does not point to the message of the Gospel, the Gospel explains the generous life of the Church. We need to stop simply helping people for some amorphous reason, especially as a way to lure people in to explain the Gospel to them.

Book Review: Life of Pi

2006-01-30T22:26:00.000-08:00

I just devoured this book, it was absolutely excellent. The night I finished it, I barely got to the end before falling asleep. I had two dreams that night that I want to tell you about, and then I'm going to talk a little about belief. If you think the dreams and the conversation are interesting, you'll want to read this book.

In the first dream, I was actually just sleeping in my basement. I don't know if anyone has ever had a dream like this, but it involves dreaming while half awake. I have had a problem in my adult life with nighttime illusions, many of them having frightened me more deeply than anything else in my life. This particular night, I was dreaming I was in my bed (which I was), and my dog Loki was sleeping on the bed with me. Loki saw a mouse suddenly scurrying around on the bed. It wiggled its way under the covers. It was at this point that I woke up and found a mouse really in my bed. I could feel the warmth of its body as I tried to grasp it frantically. Loki leapt off the bed and scrambled up the stairs (he's a total wimp). Mice are surprisingly fast, however, and it somehow eluded me. I crouched on my hands and knees, panting and shaking with adrenaline for a few moments, listening for scratching noises that would give away the mouse's location. There was nothing. I tentatively lay back down on my side and brought the covers over me again. I fell back to sleep quickly enough.

In the next dream, I was in a boat stranded in the Pacific Ocean with Loki and an alligator. The alligator was dead, and Loki was eating its head (gross!) I was fishing. I could hear the grinding of his teeth against the bone of the alligator skull. I drifted slowly out of the dream and back to consciousness, but the sound followed me. It was that distinctive sound of canines careening rhythmically off the sides of a bony surface. I lay in bed listening to it for a few moments, wondering where it was coming from and why. Abruptly it stopped.

There are any number of things that could have actually happened that night. Would you believe me if I told you there really was a mouse in my bed, and that I found it dead the next morning? And would you believe me if I said that Loki really was chewing on a small alligator head when I awoke and turned on the light? You might be inclined to believe me if you found me trustworthy. I could be leaving things out though, or telling you I had two dreams when I had only one, or none at all. In addition, I might really believe that there was a mouse in my bed, and that Loki was chewing on the head of an alligator, but it may not have actually happened. Maybe Loki was chewing on his favorite bone, like he is as I am writing this. Maybe the mouse was simply another nighttime illusion, something you know that I have experienced in the past.

You just can't know what the real story is, and in a way, there is no real story. There's only my story, and you can take it or leave it. You can make it into a different story and cause violence to my telling, because I have no rights over the experiences, even though my perception of them helped me create my story. You can believe my story happened exactly as it did, or you can chose only to believe that I believe my own story, even if it didn't happen as I tell it.

There is such tremendous and glorious ambiguity in the creation and retelling of a story, because it invites us to a holy risk. Do you dare take my story in to your psyche, letting it foment in your identity until it becomes surety? Why take such a leap, when there may never have been a corresponding reality anchoring my story to the fabric of the universe? How similar to your understanding of "reality" must a story be for you to consider it "non-fiction" instead of "fiction"?

The real predicament in life comes because belief is hard. "The Case for Christ," "Evidence that Demands a Verdict," these books send us the message that belief in Jesus Christ at least is quite simple. Reality, it seems, is quite clearly laid out for us, all we need to do is examine the story of Jesus, and we will see how easy belief is. Some Christians even try to equate belief with knowledge. They say, "I don't just believe in Jesus, I KNOW Jesus exists." Such a bid on reality is an insulting, infantile epistemology. Belief is hard. It involves risk and pain and loss.

A quote from "Life of Pi," to whet your appetite:
"Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"

The "Teacher" Reaction

2006-01-20T22:51:00.000-08:00

I have lots of involuntary physiological reactions to things that excite me that are unique to particular situations. For example, my hands get clammy if I have to compete in an athletic event. When I ran track in high school, my hands would get cold and clammy before I ran. If I am embarrassed, which rarely happens, the back of my neck gets really warm. If I eat something too spicy, I get the hiccups. I'm serious, I get the hiccups.

But those are all unpleasant reactions. I have really delightful reactions to things too. When I see a girl I like, my heart sometimes has been known to skip a beat. I get animated and excited, and my eyebrows raise when I'm talking about something important to me. When I used to fence (which I loved more than anything in the world) I would get this strange and delightful tingling all through my torso right before a bout. I used to be an extremely nervous speaker, and it was the kind of nervousness that made me uncomfortable. Lately, however, when I have had to give a sermon or a public speech, I've had the most amazing charge of energy that my speaking style has become extremely forceful. I now love the feeling that comes over me right before I get up to speak.

But nothing would have prepared me for the physiological reaction I had to my first "class" as a "teacher." I put those two words in quotes because I'm not really an instructor of a course, I'm kind of a glorified teaching assistant. Every week, I teach a small group of students beginning Hebrew over the phone as a distance course. Today was my first session. I really enjoyed it, and I wasn't nervous at all. I found myself taking quite naturally to it, though I of course still have a lot of work to do. I took the call at the seminary, so I was in a professor's office for the hour. When I came down and started for home, the secretary at the seminary commented, "Your cheeks are rosy." I mumbled something and then ran to the bathroom. She was right. My cheeks had a scarlet flush to them, as if I had just been outside on a cold day for many hours. As I walked out to my car, I chuckled to myself, thinking about an eventual teaching job where I may quite possibly be known as "Professor Rosy Face."

But just this small experience of teaching today was absolutely wonderful. I knew as I taught my students today that this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing, because it fills me with exhiliration, contentment, and a number of indescribable feelings all at the same time. Anyway, thought you might all get a kick out of that.

The At-one-ment and the Third Side of the Cross

2006-01-16T19:52:00.000-08:00

There is a discussion among theologians about the "two sides of the cross." I know that this phrase has been used to describe aspects of Christ's sacrifice in many different ways. For example, I know that some people talk about "what Christ did for us" and "what Christ does in us." But I am referring to the two sides of the cross that are the answer to the question, "What did Christ do for us on the cross?" Or more simply, "What is the Atonement?"

All Western Christians know what the first side of the cross is. What we know better than anything about what Christ did for us was that he paid for our sins. To a fair number of people in America, this is ALL he did for us; there is nothing more he could have done or should have done. The entirety of the Gospel for these people is that Jesus forgives sins. So, when a person who only sees this side of the cross presents the Gospel to a non-Christian, his first step naturally must be to establish the sinfulness of the person. The steps for evangelism proceed from there: convict the person of his sin, convince him that Jesus paid for his sins, then convince him that he needs to believe in Jesus to be saved from his sins. There are many Christians who have come to the cross in this way, and have never and may never encounter the other side of the cross.

Jesus does forgive our sins through his atonement, this is true. But he also heals our wounds. To someone who is suffering terribly under an unjust system, or by an abusive relationship, or is bound by pain, or enslaved to a cruel master, this is Good News. This is the second side of the cross. In the discussions I have had at seminary about this, we have found that most people neglect one side in favor of the other. It is context, however, that compels people to do this. For a wealthy American Christian, who is not beset by pain or suffering, who feel no significant agony that he cannot use his money to fix, the idea that Jesus forgives him for his sins is a welcome thought. To a person who is suffering in poverty, has no way of relieving his suffering, cannot escape an oppressive situation or person, it is Jesus healing power that is needed most. We must all recognize as Christians our need for all that Christ has atoned for.

The people I come in contact with don't feel bad about themselves. Most of my friends consider themselves good people. They're all trying to lead good lives, and for me to try to convince them that they are sinful would be very difficult. It would also be extremely hard to convince them that they need healing from wounds. They can probably make a healthy list of people that have wronged them, but they have learned to cope with that pain, just as they have learned to cope with their fallenness. So what is it about what Jesus Christ did for them on the cross that will convince them that what he did was really just for THEM?

I think, in a way, there is a third side to the cross. Jesus forgives our sins, and he heals our wounds. But I think he also fills our longing. Sometimes we long for such simple things, or such dismal things. I long for that promotion at work, or I long for the big house on the hill. I long for her to notice me, or I long for him to finally ask me to marry him. I long for a son of my own, or I long for a daughter who will become all the things I couldn't be. I spend my whole life running after the things I long for, and when I get them, I find a new longing. But Jesus fills us with his Spirit, gives us his piece of heaven in our hearts, and teaches us what it means to partake in his life. This is something I can tell the people I see everyday. I can show them a life where I long only for the life of Christ, who fills my cup to overflowing. For such a life, longing turns into hope, and hope does not disappoint.

Heavenly Peace, Divinest Comfort

2006-01-14T09:08:00.000-08:00

Over the past year, I've made a lot of major decisions that God led me through that were difficult for me to accept. If I could go through the laundry list of decisions that have seemed imprudent, unwise, or just plain stupid, I would bore all of you to death. I've felt a lot of resentment toward God, and I've tried my best at times to sabotage the decisions through which he's guided me.

Now I am faced with yet another situation where I feel God calling me to something that I find really ridiculous. There are dozens of places for me to live all around the city of Minneapolis that would be suitable for Loki and me. I have had offers to live in houses with fenced in yards and two-car garages. I've had an offer in the neighborhood I'm in, with everything I would need. I had an offer in a Christian cooperative situation, something I've dreamed of living in for years.

But as I've prayed about it, I've gotten the very clear message from God that he wants me to live in the West Bank area, and not outside of it. I look at the Riverside Towers, with their faded multi-color tiles and crumbling concrete walls and my heart strains in my chest. I walk along Cedar Avenue and I smell the grim and dirt, and I feel I am walking where Jesus walks. But there aren't a lot of options in the West Bank for a guy with a dog. I've looked at spaces that would have been perfect for me, and then inevitably had to squeeze out the question, "Do you accept dogs?" and been crestfallen when they said no.

This morning I looked at an apartment above a business on Cedar, with a view of the towers from the window. I could walk across the street and be at the door of those apartments. The rent, however, was cost prohibitive. I would need another roommate, and even then it would be a little more than I had expected to pay. But the landlord will accept dogs, it has parking, and there's a park nearby for Loki and me. I came home feeling really conflicted and angry. Why would you ask me to try to do such an impossible thing, Lord? What's the difference between living here and living somewhere even a mile away? Why are you leading me into situations I don't want to be in?!!

I'm reading Genesis 1-37 today, and as I read the stories it contains, I remember that God is faithful. When it seemed that the earth was ready to be totally destroyed, God was faithful to Noah and his sons to bring them through the flood. When God took Abraham out of his own country and promised him a country of his own, God was faithful to bring him to it. When Sarah lay barren until she was old, God was faithful to make her womb dance with life. When Jacob fled with Esau's birthright, God was faithful to Jacob, and blessed him, and he was reconciled to his brother. I see a lot of people making implausible, unwise, even stupid decisions in the book of Genesis, because they are counting on God's faithfulness.

This morning I am reminded of the hymn by Fanny Crosby that Rich Mullins sang on one of his albums:

"All the way my Savior leads me
What have I to ask beside?
Can I doubt His faithful mercies
Who through life has been my guide?
Heavenly peace, divinest comfort
ere by faith in Him to dwell
for I know whate'er fall me
Jesus doeth all things well

All of the way my Savior leads me
and He cheers each winding path I tread
gives me strength for every trial
and He feeds me with the living bread
and though my weary steps may falter
and my soul a thirst may be
gushing from a rock before me
lo, a spring of joy I see!

And all the way my Savior leads me
oh the fullness of His love
perfect rest in me is promised
in my Father's house above
when my spirit clothed immortal
wings its flight to realms of day
this my song through endless ages
Jesus led me all the way"

James says to confess your sins to the community, to gather the leaders around you and let them pray for you. "And the prayer offered by the faithful person works as he constantly prays." Could you all pray for me, that I could trust where Jesus is leading me, and not doubt his faithfulness to me?

Count Us Worthy To Suffer

2006-01-13T18:38:00.000-08:00

I remember about this time last year, I was heavily engaged in a look back my own life, as we are all wont to do when the year turns. I offer prayers for the coming year, that I will become something through Christ with which the Father is pleased. I am offering a prayer now for all of us, as Americans, that I am compelled to offer after having read Hebrews today. Hebrews is the most overlooked book of the New Testament besides 2 Peter, and it is quite a shame. We need this book, now more than ever. Here it reads in the 13th chapter:

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever...We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat. For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come."

In this country, what we need more than anything is people who are willing to suffer outside the camp, where filth and mire sink deep into the bodies of rotting carcasses and garbage, the putrescence of corruption draping its cloak over the destitute and poor. But we have a great high priest, who, after becoming our sacrifice with his own blood, purified us through humble suffering. This is my prayer for us:

"Lord Jesus Christ, you have made us your priests forever, by suffering outside the camp for us, in shame and pain, only to triumph over corruption on the third day. We have no lasting city, but we look forward to your New Jerusalem. Until then, teach us to live outside the gate of wealth and fortune, amongst the poor who are piled like carcasses in the center of our cities. Most of all, dear Lord, count us worthy to suffer abuse as you did, to take on corruption as you have, to endure until the end. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit."

Place

2006-01-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

I'm leaving my house at the end of the month. I moved everything upstairs, so I could live on the first floor and not in the creepy basement anymore. I still have my bed down there, and my books, but my desk is comically situated in the kitchen, and my old bedroom is now the home of our shrine to the commercialist god (TV). We got rid of an old couch, a few chairs, a desk. Now I'm sitting here, looking at the woodwork. One thing I'll never forget about this house is the woodwork. There's something so pleasing about an abundance of wood. There are wood floors, wooden wainscoting, a built in liquor cabinet and wine rack, a beautiful little wooden bay window looking south. This house is so cozy, and I will miss many things about it. I'll miss the way that Loki frantically scrambled down the stairs after coming in from being outside, and the sound it made. I'll miss the wooden doors that stood in front of the garage, that had to be unlatched every time I wanted to leave. I'll miss the fact that I had 15 (yes, 15) trees on my property, which meant the sun was an elusive friend that we saw only occasionally. I'll miss feeling like a homeowner, but not owning a home (despite the rumors!) I'll miss the many different kinds of bugs and insects that kept us company, and the spiders who hunted them. I guess I'll miss a lot of things.

Most of all, though, I have memories here. What an extraordinary thing to say! I have MEMORIES HERE. How can we say such a thing? How can a memory exist in a place? How does it attach itself, blend into the woodwork, seep into the cracks of the floors and blend into the colors of the walls? It's just a house, I don't care about it. I care about what I leave behind in it. I could pull up the floorboards, tear holes in the walls, wrench the wood from its pinings, but I can only take a piece of what I leave behind.

Where and when did I develop this sense of place? Why would I do such a thing when I know how often my places will change? I wonder if there are people with no sense of place, that don't tie themselves to where they are. Or I wonder if it's just a human thing...

Messiah: He Shall Feed His Flock

2005-12-31T12:53:00.000-08:00

This is my favorite part of the entire oratorio. Whenever I find that I have been proud and arrogant about how capable I am of handling my own life, even as my world spins out of control, I listen to this piece:

"He shall feed his flock like a shepherd,
and He shall gether the lambs with his arm,
and carry them in His bosom, and gently lead
those that are with young.
Come unto Him, all ye that labour,
that are heavy laden, and He will give you rest.
Take His yoke upon you, and learn of Him,
for he is meek and lowly of heart,
and ye shall find rest unto your souls."

The libretto beautifully combines the first verse of Isaiah 40 with Matthew 19 (I think). Jesus is our tender shepherd, our comforter and protector. It is in the times when I feel most proud of myself that this message humbles me and reminds me to take rest in his gentle arms.

Messiah: Glory to God in the Highest

2005-12-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

I trust you all enjoyed a marvelous Christmas holiday, and since it is still Christmastide, I gladly resume my task of commenting on Handel's Messiah.

After the Pifa: a gentle, pleasant quid pro quo to the following soprano recitative and accompanying chorus. This is the story of the shepherds, who are all too often given very little stage time in our pageants, given very little recognition in our collective memory, denied the importance that is due them.

Shepherds of the kind mentioned in the Gospels had poor reputations in the first century. Some of the most important figures in the Old Testament were shepherds: Abraham, Isaac, David, etc. David, for example, tended his father's sheep. It is indeed probably that some sheep in the first century were tended by their owners or by the owners' sons, but most likely, they were tended by hired hands. Since most shepherds were hirelings, they weren't the most trustworthy people. They were often suspected of theft and trespassing, and since they were away for long periods of time from the owners, they could sell parts of the produce of the flocks for themselves.

The glory of heaven was revealed to these unsavory characters on a quiet night as they guarded the flocks of their employers. The Greek text conveys a vividness that may be lost for us. The glory of God is blinding and unbearable, and this imagery of heaven's celebration of the birth of the Savior left the shepherds speechless and afraid. The text:

"Glory to God in the highest, and peace on earth, good will towards men."

The shepherds rush to spread the news of what they have seen and heard. And thus the shepherds become the first of a long line of a certain kind of messenger from God. Christ's messengers and followers were unique from most other messengers, but a very homogenous bunch overall. They were mostly outcasts, misfits, people of low reputation, those not to be trusted, and those with little outward beauty or nobility. Yet God chose to display his glory to them.

Messiah: Unto Us a Child is Born

2005-12-22T23:25:00.000-08:00

"For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given,
and the government shall be upon His shoulder,
and His name shall be called Wonderful,
Counselor, the mighty God,
the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace."

I had the great opportunity to sing this in a choir at the Lourdes chapel at St. Francis of Assisi convent in Rochester, MN when I was a high schooler. It was truly glorious.

This chorus, along with the Hallelujah chorus, encapsulates the distinct form of political theology that I now espouse better than any of the other pieces in the Messiah. I think, again, this is another piece most Western Christians will find perplexing. At the very least, they will find themselves glossing over the phrase "the government shall be upon his shoulders." Most American Christians would have very little to say about this phrase, other than, if it is to be applied to Jesus, it must mean the government of the Church.

I think that this passage does represent Christ, and that when it says the government will be upon his shoulders, it actually means the human political government we usually leave out of the Christian experience. God's reign extends through Christ to the political structures of humanity's creation. Americans' views of government are so profoundly warped by the American political system, that we have no category for understanding Christ as our political leader. To be that, our government must either be a theocracy or a massive social democracy under natural law. Christ must either actively reign over all, or reign passively through a just social system. Either way, we have missed the point of what it means for God to have the government on his shoulders, probably because instead of having our theology inform our politics, it's the other way around.

Excursus: The Death of Music Savvy Chris Brenna

2005-12-21T22:03:00.000-08:00

I'm moving again, at the end of January. I'm sad, because I've loved living in this house. In the end, my landlords decided they wanted to sell the house, so I'm looking for something new. In some ways it's an opportunity, because I really want to find something actually in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood this time. I'll settle for Seward or St. Anthony Main or Marcy-Holmes, or Elliot Park. I don't think I could bring myself to live in Dinkytown.

Anyway, as part of the moving process, I'm divesting myself of many of my possessions. I'm selling books, CDs, and DVDs. It's really ridiculous to me how many books I have, now that I'm selling some of them. I'm basically getting rid of the ones I don't have a special relationship with. With most of my books, I can remember where I lived, what I was doing at the time, and what I liked about each of them. Some of them I can flip to a page I remember loving. So I got rid of the ones that I wasn't REALLY looking forward to reading.

The CDs I took all at once to a music store the other day. Without sounding too melodramatic, it was painful. First of all, it had been a while since I'd been in a music store. I was struck by the smell, and the atmosphere, and the people. I took my CDs up to the counter, and the girl there said it would take a while to value all of them. I strolled around the store, and felt all sorts of emotions.

I saw the new Sigur Ros, probably one of my favorite bands. The Doves have a new live CD out. I don't even have the latest U2 album, and Travis has a new album. As I looked around, I also saw CDs for bands I've really gotten into lately because of the Current, or because I've heard them on a friends' player. The albums for several bands looked tempting: Polyphonic Spree, Ulrich Schnauss, The Notwist, Death Cab, etc. And of course, I saw all the "back log" albums. Birthday Party, Manic Street Preachers, Joy Division, New Order, Depeche Mode, etc. These were albums of bands I knew I liked, but were before my time.

I could have walked out of that store with 20 CDs I would listen to and love. I could have walked out of there with 100 CDs I would keep on my shelves for years. I walked out with 0. It was incredibly hard to do, and I realized as I left that it was because I was leaving part of my identity behind. I've decided not to buy CDs anymore. I haven't bought a CD in about two years anyway, but this really solidified things.

I grew up with music as a big part of my life. Most of my early teenage years involved making wild stabs in the dark for what I thought I might like. These were the BMG years, where I listened to the Eagles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, Blues Traveler, and lots and lots of Christian rock.

As I reached high school, I started to refine my tastes. I think Pearl Jam is an incredible band, but when I began to learn how to recognize what I was really attracted to musically, I realized that I didn't really like them. It wasn't enough to like what my friends liked, or what I thought I should like. I started really finding bands I knew I liked.

My high school years had a soundtrack. Chris and Johnny narrated my love life, grunge was part of what helped me believe I was really rebellious. Music had meaning, and I used it to express my own identity. It mattered where I got my music, what my CD collection had in it, and how I arranged that music and put it into my life.

The music store was a kind of temple for me. There really was nothing like getting a nod from the clerk when you bought a good CD. It was exhilirating to buy an import, or a rare B-side of the band I really loved. I got the right posters to express exactly which bands were really meaningful to me.

It also mattered to me what happened to the musicians to whom I listened; it mattered what they believed. Thom Yorke had the same defiant, critical view of modern society I thought I had. Bono had the same expansive, hopeful view of the future, Dave Matthews had the same carefree, passionate lust for life. They say misery loves company: I would say misery loved Elliott Smith for company. All of these musicians had a function, a purpose in my life that I couldn't escape. When I remember the smell, taste, sights, and feelings of the most stark and meaningful moments in my life, I can remember exactly when each line of every song came.

I wrapped my life around music that I loved, music that made me. It was beautiful, and it still is, because music is beautiful. But what I had to do to possess that beauty was not necessarily beautiful. Every week or so, from when I was a young teenager until only recently, I would walk into a music store and leave with one or more CDs, each priced between $9.99 and $15.99. This was the price I paid; this was the tax I paid on my identity.

In this simple way, they got me. Music production companies don't just want me to buy the CD. They want my identity to be wrapped up in what the CD represents. I can't just be a consumer of music albums; I have to be a denizen of the music industry. I didn't by CDs, I bought an identity. This week, I finally sold it.

Messiah: Behold, Darkness Shall Cover the Earth...

2005-12-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

Make sure you read "O Thou that Tellest Good Tidings to Zion," because I posted these two in quick succession.

"For behold, darkness shall cover the earth,
and gross darkness the people:
but the Lord shall arise upon thee,
and His glory shall be seen upon thee.
And the Gentiles shall come to thy light,
and kings to the brightness of thy rising."
Isaiah 60:2-3

"The people that walked in darkness
have seen a great light, and they that dwell
in the land of the shadow of death,
upon them hath the light shined."
Isaiah 9

I couldn't wait to get to this bass recitative! I love this recitative; it's one of my favorites. I regularly weep when I listen to this piece, because it sounds so desperate and hopeful, and as a Gentile Christian, it is about me.

Through the priests, God mediated his presence to Israel. Through Israel, God mediates his presence to the world. Israel was always supposed to display the glory of the Lord, that has always been its purpose. And so as darkness fell on the earth, Israel displayed God's glorious light of salvation (the light that is restored when Zion tells good news to the cities of Judah). We Gentiles were doomed, groping about in the darkness, blind and stumbling in our sin and depravity. What hope did we have? What chance in the world?

The recitative starts in the lowest registers of the baritone's voice to convey our sense of helplessness, our utter lack of hope. Then come the words, "But the Lord shall arise upon thee." You can feel the hope pour out of this development, the overwhelming sense of grace. When he sings later, "The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light," the lyric rises slowly from the lower registers to a powerful note of triumphant, desperate hope. Thank God that though we lived in darkness, he sent Jesus, the new Israel, to save us.

Messiah: O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion

2005-12-21T12:33:00.000-08:00

This might be another one that kind of puzzles Westerners. What's the big deal with Zion? What does it represent? And what does this mean?

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion,
get thee up into the high mountain;
O thou that tellest good tidings to
Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength;
lift it up, be not afraid;
say unto the cities of Judah:
Behold your God! Arise, shine,
for thy light is come,
and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee."

This is an amazing text! Unfortunately, in my opinion, it has been translated here incorrectly. There is "a bearer of good tidings" and "Zion." But the bearer of good tidings isn't telling them to Zion. The bearer of good tidings IS Zion!

Who is Zion? This is what 2 Kings says about Zion: "The surviving remnant of the house of Judah will again take root downward and bear fruit upward. 'For out of Jerusalem will go forth a remnant, and out of Mount Zion survivors. The zeal of the LORD will perform this." This is quoted again in Isaiah 37.32, just a few chapters before the libretto's text. When the people of Israel were defeated and taken into exile, they were utterly scattered. When they began to restore the nation upon their return from exile, they began in Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem, they began on Mount Zion. Zion represents the turning of the tide, when exile and turmoil cease and God's glory is restored. Psalm 14.6-8 and 53.6 say, "Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion! When the LORD restores His captive people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad."

So, this part of Isaiah is saying to the remnant, "Go up to the highest part of the mountain and shout as loud as you can!" What they shout is a glorious thing, what Israel has hoped for: "Behold, your God!"

The libretto suddenly jumps to Isaiah 60.1: "Arise, shine for your light has come." Why the jump? One reason is to connect this piece with the next recitative from Isaiah 60. The other reason is because of what comes immediately before 60.1. Isaiah 59.20 says, ""A Redeemer will come to Zion, and to those who turn from transgression in Jacob," declares the LORD." Therefore, the function of Israel as the light to the nations has been restored, because the redeemer has come to Zion.

This is a really light, joyful piece which I really love. Definitely one of the highlights of the oratorio.

Messiah: And He Shall Purify

2005-12-17T11:29:00.000-08:00

I am skipping a bass recitative and air to get to this chorus. A soprano just got done singing Malachi 3.2:

"But who may abide the day of His coming?
And who shall stand when He appeareth?
For He is like a refiner's fire."

This sets up the chorus, "And He Shall Purify," which is one of my favorite choruses. The libretto reads:

"And He shall purify the sons of Levi,
that they may offer unto the Lord
an offering in righteousness."

This is the next verse in Malachi, and probably is immediately perplexing to a Western, modern Christian. What does purifying the sons of Levi have to do with Jesus Christ? The answer is quite meaningful.

"The sons of Levi" is a poetic way of saying the Levitical priesthood. In Jesus' time, the Levitical priesthood was a joke. The high priests were basically puppets of the Roman government, sometimes not even from the tribe of Levi. On occasion, the high priesthood had been bought, and under the Maccabean dynasty, the priesthood was equated with monarchy.

Understandably, many Judeans saw the priesthood as corrupt, and had varying reactions to it. Some tried to reform the priesthood, others denied its authenticity, and some even created their own priesthood outside of Jerusalem, like at Qumran. Christians have a harder time seeing why it really matters if a spiritual leader is corrupt. Usually, if a pastor is suddenly caught in a sexual scandal or something, we don't question the authenticity of the faith of his church.

For Jews, though, it mattered who mediated God to you. It mattered that the person stepping into the holy of holies was himself holy, set apart. He must be purified.

Malachi's imagery for the sons of Levi and their purification is the imagery of the refining of precious metal, like silver and gold. When a precious metal contains other metals (like lead or tin), it is "debased." The refinement process separates the precious metal from other metals through fire. This is the image we get then:

1. Fire: he is like a refiner's fire. Remember that John says that Jesus will baptize with water and fire. Fire represents judgment. We don't like that word, it has bad connotations for us. But judgment is a good thing in the Torah. It brings justice/righteousness and God's reign.
2. Separation: the refinement process separates the precious from the base. God's refining will set his precious ones apart.
3. Purification: refining creates purity. Pure gold and silver shines more beautifully than the impure.

So, God through Christ has judges us, set us apart, and made us pure. We are the new priests of creation, what the sons of Levi were always meant to be but would never become.

Listen to this chorus for the way Handel uses the vocal parts to convey purification by fire. Like flames dancing, the vocal parts trickle down from high to low. Really masterfully done.

Messiah: And the Glory of the Lord

2005-12-16T00:46:00.000-08:00

This was the first chorus I ever sang of the Messiah, and I love it. One of the big reasons I love it is because the tenor part starts out on a high G. I really enjoyed training my voice to be prepared to sing this chorus. I sang it in the city choir when I was in high school. We sang it in the sanctuary of the convent in my hometown (yes, my town has a Carmelite convent). It really was glorious.

"And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together:
for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Isaiah 40.5, simply the next verse after the first four in the recitative. I don't have much to say about this one, except that if you ever get a chance to see this or sing it in a choir, don't miss it.

Messiah: Comfort Ye

2005-12-15T12:24:00.000-08:00

The Messiah starts with an overture, which is pretty standard. It's a nice overture, really. Overtures are basically a way for the orchestra to showcase their abilities and warm up a little. It's a short piece with no participation from the chorus. The Messiah's is quite nice.

The choral work starts with a recitative and an air. A recitative is a piece of music where orchestral accompaniment is minimal, and the singer seems almost to be speaking words in a sing-song voice rather than singing. What's funny is that R. Kelly had this series of videos last year where he kind of did a recitative the whole time, only it hurts my ears when he does it. This first recitative of the Messiah is the best of all of them in my opinion. The libretto is this:

"Comfort ye, my people, saith your God;
speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished,
that her iniquity is pardoned.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness:
Prepare ye the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill made low:
the crooked straght and the rough places plain."

This is a beautiful way to start out the great narrative of Handel's work. This is Isaiah 40.1-4, the beginning of passages in this book dealing with the "Suffering Servant." The message of this passage gets obscured for English speakers (in my opinion), because our word "comfort" doesn't quite get the idea across. God is saying to his people, "Rest your souls. You don't have to fight anymore." His comfort comes because he has forgiven the sins of his people, and their punishment is over. Ultimately, God is saying, "Rest. Your striving is over. Someone is preparing the way, because I am coming to you myself."

The long, sustained notes that the tenor holds in this song are quite beautiful, and they convey the message of peace and comfort. I really love this piece.

Messiah: Truth According to Beauty

2005-12-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

As promised, instead of being a humbug this Christmas, I'm going to dwell on one of my favorite pieces of music ever written, Handel's Messiah. A little history: Georg Frederick Handel lived in the 17th and 18th centuries, composed music, and played a mean harpsicord. He wrote the Messiah toward the end of his life (1740), and first performed it in Dublin as a benefit concert. Handel had suffered a stroke by this time in his life, and his reputation as a composer was not as strong as it had been for him in other years. Amazingly, he wrote the Messiah in 21 days. Despite the extraordinary effort and the exquisite piece of work this oratorio is now seen as, it was received with mixed reviews. In fact, the only time the Messiah was ever played after its initial performances was by Handel, once a year at Easter, to benefit his favorite charity.

I think it's odd that the Messiah has become so intimately associated with Christmas, when, if it belongs as a performance for any holiday, it should be played at Easter. While it is about Christ's birth, it is about so much more than that. It is an epic poem retelling the grand narrative story of our faith, told through beautiful recitatives, sinfonias, and choruses. It is beauty's retelling of truth, or rather, truth according to beauty. I weep when I hear "Comfort Ye, My People" or "He Shall Feed His Flock." I am filled with the most tremendous sense of joy and hope when I hear "Hallelujah" or "And the Glory of the Lord." It is a sublime work, and it should be known by all.

Every time I post, I'll post about a part of the Messiah. I will go roughly in order of the oratorio, but I'm going to skip some of the pieces and maybe rearrange a couple. I'm going to share a combination of my thoughts and feelings on each piece. I have been listening to this work since I was a young teenager, so I have lots of emotion and thought tied to this.

Reading about Handel's Messiah is like reading about skydiving. It sounds great, but until you experience it, you won't know what you're reading about. Pick up a nice copy of the Messiah if you don't have one. For as many performances of the Messiah that exist on CD, that is how many different ways it is performed. Each performance will interpret the music differently, or play it in the Baroque (more trills and grace notes, small number of chorus members, period instruments) v. Romantic style (straighter measures, large, often gargantuan orchestras and choruses, modern interpretation and instruments). I have always been partial to a recording I have of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, recorded in 1976. If you poke around on Amazon, you can find it. Also, any recording by the London Philharmonic is good, although one of them omits #34-37, which includes "And He Shall Purify," which I'm going to blog on.

There is also a free music site that has really sub-par performances by the St. Petersburg State Orchestra. You'll get the idea, but I don't recommend it. You have to sign up as a free user here, and Handel's Messiah is here. Enjoy!

Working for Peanuts

2005-12-07T15:00:00.000-08:00

For those of you who read my blog last year at about this time, you may be bracing yourself for Uncle Scrooge to make a reappearance. I have decided, however, that if you would like to know my rather strong views on the Christmas season, you can simply read the posts from last year on the subject. This year, I am going to limit myself to only one post concerning the aspects of Christmas I was so outspoken about last year. This year I have decided to write a series of posts on one of my favorite classical works, Handel's Messiah. I'm going to go through each of those parts of the Messiah that are especially meaningful to me, and hopefully that will provide a little Christmas cheer.

Last night, the Charlie Brown Christmas special aired on ABC for the 40th year in a row. This special was created under a mild bit of controversy back in the mid-60s. Adjusted for inflation, the special cost about $150,000 to make. The Charlie Brown Christmas story itself is overtly Christian, quoting the Christmas passage from the gospel of Luke. The ultimate message of the special is that the really important thing about Christmas is that it is a gift, that we are meant to love one another during this time, and that it doesn't revolve around grand displays of wealth and materialism, but rather on humility and peace.

This year, a 30-second spot during the Christmas special cost $200,000, more than the adjusted cost it took to make the film. Since it has aired, ABC has made about $50 million dollars from advertising and sales.

So as the over 13 million Americans sat down to watch the Christmas special last night, they felt their hearts cheered by the idea that Christmas involves genuine love, peace, and humility, and doesn't revolve around materialism, consumerism, and commericialism. At the same time, advertisers paid millions of dollars to make sure that these same people ignore the central message of the film and buy as much as they possibly can this holiday season. Given the amount of money they paid, it is a good bet that advertisers will get what they paid for.

Ultimately, the people who preach the message of Christmas to us from the pulpits of our churches know less about us than the people who SELL their own message of Christmas. Christmas is a paradigm for Americans, because it signifies our deepest held value: the freedom to believe one thing and do another. We are better than any other culture in the world at maintaining this incredible dissonance between what we say and what we do. We will light the advent wreaths, sing carols about peace and goodwill, put our pennies in the red buckets, and carefully arrange our nativity scenes. We will believe the message of Christmas. And then we will spend. We will run up credit cards and deplete savings. We'll overeat, overspend, and overextend our lives for a solid month. And we will see absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Thus, I step down from my soap box for the rest of the Christmas season, and promise to start as soon as possible on the Messiah series.

Worrying and Longing

2005-12-03T09:48:00.000-08:00

Today I was praying, asking Jesus to make his will known to me. I examined myself, I started to see all of the worry in my heart. I worry so much! Lately, I have more to worry about than usual. But, I found myself also praying for a longing to do God's will. I do have that longing, and as I prayed, I found that my worry and my longing were at odds with each other. God doesn't worry, but has longing. He longs for us to trust him, to be faithful to him, to know and be known by him. Yet worrying and longing are akin to each other. Worry comes from a feeling of lack. I lack control, I lack security, I lack peace. So I allow worry to fill that lack in my spirit. Longing comes from lack as well. I lack a full knowledge of God, I lack the ability to fully accomplish his will in every moment, I lack the weight of his glory. So I long for him, and that longing is filled by his spirit, the powerful spirit of his very nature. I would much rather long for him that worry for myself.

Firstfruits and leftovers

2005-12-02T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hope you all found your way over from the old address, I finally changed the URL for the blog, though the title has been changed for a while. Here's the last half of a post written by my friend Michelle:

"In 1916, Protestants were giving 2.9% of their incomes to their churches. In 1933, the depth of the Great Depression, it was 3.2%. In 1955, just after affluence began spreading through our culture, it was still 3.2%. By 2000, when Americans were over 450% richer, after taxes and inflation, than in the Great Depression, Protestants were giving 2.6% of their incomes to their churches.

I think Michelle is actually quoting from a book by John Piper (a raving Calvinist). To be fair, this common statistic sounds terrible, but there are LOTS of variables that skew the statistic. Children in a local church don't give. Some people are counted as members of a church but never attend, and some regular attenders or visitors give money to a church but aren't members. Many church-goers give to organizations outside the church, or give extra to building projects or youth mission trips. All that to say: this statistic does not imply that the average income-generating, regularly attending member of a church gives 2-3% of his/her income to the local church and does not give anything else away.

That said, Americans still don't give that much, even with all the caveats. We're stuck on percentages, because many American Christians hold to the "tithe" as a spiritual principle. The concept itself is found nowhere in the New Testament, and Jesus never implies the idea of tithing. What really matters is the way that Americans give.

Most Americans pay one thing before they pay anything else: rent or mortgage. They pay utility bills next, and usually buy essentials after that: gas, groceries, household items, etc. They may put a chunk in a regular investment next, or buy entertainment items or dine out. The point is, most Americans get around to giving AFTER several financial responsibilities. That is, they give "off the top." Now, it's true that many American Christians consistently give a similar amount every month to the local church. This may have more to do with good budgeting behavior than anything. I don't blame American Christians for treating giving this way; I don't think we just need to be taught to be more generous. I think the system we live in has taught us to give this way.

When there is a bump in the road financially, most Americans also have enough sense to spend less of their income to compensate for an emergency/unforseen expense. Things like rent/mortgage, gas, groceries, household items, car payments, etc. do not suffer. Discretionary spending suffers.

And that's a significant issue: giving is discretionary in America. Giving is not about firstfruits, it is about leftovers. I'm not sickened by the low percentage of American income that goes to the church. I'm sickened by the priorities of Americans that have been developed through merchantilistic capitalism. Pastors can deliver sermons on generosity from the pulpit until they are blue in the face, organizations can ask for money all they want, and the average Christian could start giving 10, 20 even 30 percent of his/her income away, but it won't make a shred of difference until Christians restructure their economic life together in such a way that giving is not part of the system of currency they use, but giving IS their currency. Giving cannot be the discretionary, individual- or family-based economic phenomenon it manifests itself as now in the church. Giving must be the unit of exchange in a community-based economy that negotiates sacrificial lifestyles for its members.

Loki and Odin

2005-11-28T22:59:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have not had the somewhat dubious pleasure of meeting my dog, I'm going to describe him to you. I wish I had a photo of him, but I can't find one that looks good. He's a very cute, 1-year old cocker spaniel puppy. He is almost pure black, but has interesting brown coloring on his legs. When he gets shaggy (as he is now) he looks like a wookie (or the kind of dog a wookie might have). He is probably the biggest cocker spaniel you will ever see. He dwarfs my parents' female cocker spaniel, Cinders. He's a burly little fella, but he's extremly mischievous. I knew this from the moment I got him as a pet, which is why I named him Loki.

Loki is the Norse god of mischief. He is the trickster god, and never has their been a more apt name for a dog. I call him Loki, the dog of mischief. At first, his unruly behavior was kind of cute to me. It has gradually progressed to being unmanageable, however. He is now very aggressive with people, and especially with other dogs. He barks at them viciously, and when I took him to the dog park about a month ago, he almost took a chunk out of a samoyed.

So I took him to an animal trainer for a personal evaluation (funds provided courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law, thank you!) Right when we walked in, there was another dog in the room, and Loki went nuts of course. He settled down with the trainer, who proceeded to tell me all of the reasons Loki does what he does.

Loki is afraid. He needs a leader, and he knows he's not the leader. But he also isn't sure if I'm the leader. So when he gets in a situation that's stressful, he goes absolutely berserk. So all of the exercises the trainer gave me to do with Loki are aimed at settling the debate in his mind once and for all. I have to hand feed him for the next two weeks, to remind him of how dependent he is on me for his number one resource. And I have to train him to look at my face whenever I command him to, so that when he is stressed out, I can get him to focus on me.

When he learns that I'm definitely his leader, he'll look to me to know how to react. If another dog is approaching and I seem fine with it, he will be relaxed. All of this now makes sense to me as I explain it, but I think my instincts have been screwed up, quite frankly, because I'm American. Americans are generally of the mind that nobody should submit to anyone for anything unless they have a good reason. We don't do well with submission or authority as Americans. So I was thinking of Loki as a buddy, as a partner on equal footing with me.

The problem is, in the dog world, there are no equals. You either lead or you are lead. And since I'm like a big dog that walks on his back legs (in Loki's opinion), I'm either his leader or his follower. The trainer instructed me that Loki will be happiest as the follower. In fact, the happiest dogs are the ones who are taught that they are the lowest member of the pack. This goes against all my sensibilities. But I want Loki to be happy, so I will play the part of Odin to make sure he is.

Faith Like a Child

2005-11-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

Were whole households baptized in the early church, including children? I've often heard that question asked, and people predictably fall on their respective sides of the issue. Infant baptism advocates often say yes, "believer's" baptism advocates say no. It's never mattered much to me, maybe because I grew up in the Covenant.

This weekend in Philadelphia, I was at a session where a person had examined ostraca, funereal inscriptions, and tombs from the Eastern church. A survey had been done in previous years of mostly Western archaeological finds, and the conclusion they had reached is that, in relation to the Greco-Roman world, Christians in the first few centuries seemed to (1) view the death of a child with less emotion, and (2) emphasize the innocence of the child. In the Western finds, the fact that the child had been baptized was often emphasized.

The survey of the Eastern finds showed that the Eastern church (1) also had a stoic view of the death of their children, often with little emotion, and (2) emphasized the BEAUTY of the child over innocence, and often did not mention any baptism.

We might draw conclusions from this that salvific baptism of children simply didn't exist or wasn't important before Augustine. But I think the important thing to note is that the cause of all these stoic reactions on the part of Christian parents wasn't insoucience, but a calm faith in the ultimate fate of the child. They confidently placed their children's existence in heaven, in the East, based on the intrinsic beauty of the child related to his or her holiness. Interesting...

Metamorphosis

2005-11-17T14:55:00.000-08:00

All of the posts from The Proletariat of God have been transferred over to this blog; only one remains to be posted. I will post it some time next week. In the meantime, the look is different, and the title of the blog appears as The Proletariat of God, even though the web address remains Gladiator of the Porte. I will soon change the web address to The Proletariat of God, move everything over from here, and the transformation will be complete. This is the last time I'm going to change my blog, I swear!

Exchange and Currency

2005-11-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

Yet another important discipline that has not been used to examine Christian ecclesiology enough is psychology, specifically social psychology and communications theory. Taking as an exercise the basic premise of social exchange theory, we can say this about all societies:

The exchange of social and material resources is a fundamental form of human interaction.

All humans, according to social exchange theory, have subjectively codified resources according to the culture within which they reside. Bargaining takes place, where actors in a culture mutually agree on the value of goods or services. They are able to compare the value of these goods and exchange resources. Currency is technology that refines that process, bringing the agreed upon values of resources under a more culturally universal rubric. Currency is defined by the economy of the regime within which the culture is located. The stage is set in Western capitalist cultures for currency to not only be created and assigned meaning by political regimes, but also to be consituted by the culture itself.

Currency in a capitalist society creates capitalistic foundations for Western social exchange. Profit is, for example, a basis for exchange in these societies where an actor seeks to secure more resources through exchange than he used to produce or secure the item. This basis for material exchange can influence social exchange by creating a similar concept for social interactions. If the actor comes to expect profit from his material exchanges, he may come to expect similar results for his social interactions.

Some modern ecclesiologists have picked up on how capitalism as a powerful influence for social exchange theory in Western society has led to commodification, which the process whereby all social interactions become commodities in the same way as material goods. Within the church, social interaction has certainly been commodified, where the priestly, clerical duties are commodities that are "purchased" by parishoners.

Most of those who have correctly identified commodification as a problem in Western churches have offered solutions that attack the results of commodification. Challenging the structures of hierarchy, a distinction between professional clergy and laity, and church services with low levels of human interaction is quite necessary, but if that is the extent to which we are willing to go to establish a wholly different culture for Christ, we are only pruning the branches of a tree that must be cut down at the root.

The roots of commodification are found in capitalism and the glorification of exchange. When capitalism influences the way its citizens define social interaction, it causes them to interact relationally in the same way that they view their own currency. Challenging the effect of commodification which capitalism has produced is an uphill battle, because capitalism will survive to breed new strains of commodification, which will inevitably reinfect the Church.

The economy of the Christian culture must challenge not just capitalism, but the conception of exchange itself. The basis for social interaction in the body of Christ is not exchange, but sacrifice. Giving with no thought of receiving is the currency of heaven. This challenges the very heart of the concept of exchange, and certainly does not allow for an economic theory such as capitalism to survive within the culture of the Church.

Happy Birthday!

2005-11-10T21:03:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to shoot a post out today before I go off to bed to ask everyone who called today to wish me a happy birthday to be patient with me in getting back to you. So many people called today, and I was working tonight, so I wasn't able to answer the phone for many of you. Sis, I got your message, if you called again tomorrow night (your morning?) I will be able to answer.

All those in the Twin Cities Area are invited to join Brandon and I for our joint birthday bash at the infamous Moscow on the Hill, starting at around 6-ish. I cannot divulge the agenda for the night, as I have never been to this establishment. I am sure that feasting, singing, and general raucousness will ensue, though I can't confirm whether or not any other activities will occur (when in Moscow...)

Thanks to everyone for reminding me how much closer to 30 I'm getting!

The Prophets

2005-11-07T21:27:00.000-08:00

Something my professor said tonight really got my annoyed. He characterized prophets in one of the two ways I hate to hear them characterized.

He contrasted speaking a "gracious" word with speaking a "prophetic" word. It was clear from the way that he was talking about prophecy, he conceived of it as simply being really blunt. I hate that conception of prophecy, especially when it's contrasted with "speaking the truth in love." The impression most modern Christians seem to have is that prophets are people who say things with almost no tact, are really blunt, but tell you something you really needed to hear. Prophets bring news that's difficult to swallow.

Looking at the prophetic books, I see two things wrong with that view. First, prophets are not blunt. On the contrary, they are quite masterful poets that create stark images of life without God. And while their messages are often quite difficult to swallow, it is not the primary function of a prophet to bear bad news. Ultimately, prophets bring GOOD news, because they bring God's view of what's happening to His people. God's view, in that case, is always good news, because he never gives up on his people. Judgment often comes through the prophets, to be sure, but God's judgment always includes a way to return to being faithful to him.

The other way prophets are often characterized that really gets me is that they are really trendy and politically progressive. Prophets are simply people who see the next good thing around the corner in contemporary culture. I've heard people who are fighting for reproductive rights for women, or for ordination of homosexual priests or pastors, or for some other political cause describe themselves as "prophetic." Prophets, however, don't call people forward to some new more libertine reality, they call people back to a reality they never should have left behind. Prophets were usually speaking against the things we might call progressive in our society as part of the reason the people of God had gone astray.

Prophets are speakers of God's judgment, which always includes good news. They speak as a way for God's people to return to God, which often involves rejection of what is considered "progressive" in culture.

Behold!

2005-11-03T14:09:00.000-08:00

A classical historian famously wrote concerning the early Christians: "Behold, how they love each other!"

And when the Spaniards arrived on Cuba in 1511, they found chief Hatuey, who had fled Hispaniola with some of his followers to escape the arrival of Europeans. As Hatuey told his people what the Spaniards were like, he held up a basket full of gold and jewels and said, "Behold, the God of the Christians."

Sometimes, the way the world sees us speaks more about who we are than how we see ourselves.

How do they behold us now?

The Design of a Church

2005-10-31T08:00:00.000-08:00

Another post from the other site. Don't worry, not too many of these left...

"Architectural ecclesiology is probably, by comparison, the single most neglected discussion in the history of the Church, and one of the most important to the matter of ecclesiology. The architecture of the Church says volumes to the world. We must ask ourselves when we build our churches as Christians what those buildings are saying.

What does it say to the world and to the Christian community to build a cathedral, for example? Cathedrals were named for the 'cathedra' from which a bishop could pronounce spiritually authoritative statements for his see. The Pope, in fact, may still pronounce things "ex cathedra," or "from the chair" (though he rarely does).

The presence of an altar in a church speaks volumes about its ecclesiology. Whether it has a nave, or a narthex, or a rectory attached to it...all of these things are ways for the architecture to tacitly pronounce ecclesiology.

The very existence of a church building in the form of a sanctuary pronounces the world of the Church to be located somewhere outside the normal lives of its citizens, but derivative of the faith those citizens profess.

You might be able to guess already that I am willing to reject outright some forms of architectural ecclesiology. Church buildings with pews, altars, choir lofts, lobbies, massive organs, stained glass, whatever... These I reject totally, not only as enacting inaccurate theological speech acts, but as demonstrating crystallization and stagnation in the Christian Church to the world.

The architecture of most Protestant American churches sacrifices form for function by investing less in aesthetics and more in functional additions or attachments to the sanctuary. Mega-churches resemble convention centers more than any other kind of architecture. The ecclesiology this expresses is one that reflects these congregations: church life given professional distinction through the addition of programming by a professional ecclesial administration.

If we reject these architectures, what then is left? We start to see that there are few options for architectural ecclesiology left. The house church, for all that it says, seems to offer the alternative to these dark age and medieval, outdated forms of architectural ecclesiological structures.

But the house church says something in the language of architectural ecclesiology that I cannot totally affirm either. It's true, locating the presence of the church within the architecture of a single-family dwelling enacts an ecclesiology grounded more in the concept of family than anything else. This ecclesiology has become en vogue of late, perhaps because it seems to communicate this familial metaphor of the Church so well, and because it seems to have been the model for much of the early church.

However, to be precise, families do not MEET in homes, they LIVE in them together. To say that I am planning to meet in my home tomorrow night is not nearly as precise as saying that I will be coming home from work tomorrow. If we are going to attempt to take the metaphor of church as family seriously, we must live together.

But not only must we live together, we must alter the architecture of our "churches" to reflect our ecclesiology. The architecture of a single-family unit home has laden in its beams the concept of the centrality of the nuclear family as defined by the wider culture. But it is not a nuclear family we are attempting to create in the family of God. Consequently, using a single-family unit home as a Christian communal living environment is not theologically precise. New forms of architecture must be created to express the extended, Christ-centered, kinship-based family structure that will send the precise message to the world that we need. If that seems daunting, I suggest the reader simply scour the Web for some well-photographed cathedrals as proof of the ability of Christians to create something beautiful. In this case, however, I suggest something that is not beautiful for how it pleases the eyes, but beautifully true in what it expresses about God's family."

The Commonwealth of Heaven

2005-10-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

More leftover posts from The Proletariat of God:

What is political ecclesiology? I have tipped my hand that I think the most appropriate economic theory of ecclesiology for the West in the 21st century is communism, but what is the most appropriate political structure to describe the Church?
I believe the Church should be a provisionary, autonomous, anarchic, self-contained network of cells operating according to tacit agreement for mutual benefit of the common good. By "provisionary," I mean that the political entity of the Church exists under certain provisions which when altered will change the nature of that government. By "autonomous," I mean that the Church ought to operate without the need for outside political structures (like secular governments). By "anarchic," I mean that the governmental structure ought to operate free of a restrictive polity of organized leadership (leadership must also fall under the rubric of "provisionary"). By "self-contained," I mean that it does not extend its political boundaries beyond its own cultural borders. And by "common good," I mean that which the Spirit compels the Body of Christ to enact.
It is really a commonwealth I am describing. The local churches must retain the form of government suitable to the provisions under which they currently operate. No hierarchical structure is needed if it will only prove cumbersome to the polity of any individual church. Yet, these local bodies must operate under a sense of cooperative unity with every other body in the network. Efforts that include potentially all of the churches in the network are fully possible and indeed expected in this polity.
The church governments of most Protestant churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox churches are neither provisionary, nor anarchic, nor self-contained networks of cells. Some of them are, admittedly, fairly autonomous. But overwhelmingly so, they are not organized as commonwealths, but as corporations. Local bodies exist as companies that benefit the larger entity. Diversity of local governance is almost entirely stifled, and hierarchical roles are strictly maintained and well-defined, even in some of the freest of Protestant denominations.
In contrast, some of the more organic, "simple" expressions of the Christian church are often provisionary, autonomous, anarchic, and self-contained. However, just as often they are not part of a network of cells operating under tacit agreement for mutual benefit of the common good. The sense of covenantal unity often does not exist outside of the local body, or is spiritualized beyond practical recognition. A commonwealth is what must replace both the stagnant, unyielding mainline churches as well as the undisciplined, underdeveloped, simpler expressions of church.

The Promised One

2005-10-25T18:30:00.000-07:00

What then, is the goal of Christianity? It is not just the restoration of humanity to what it was, but the teleological thrust into the very being of God. This is our "way out." All of the promises of God find their end in the Promised One, Jesus Christ. It is he who acheives our perfection, in ways that begin on the simplest of our days.

This is an important supposition as well. To know that perfection is our God-ordained passion, the zenith of our ontology, such a thing propels us toward a certain life. Acknowledging this gives us the sure foundation to begin to make assertions about what the Church ought to be.

The Chosen Race

2005-10-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

The first of many posts that will be transferred from The Proletariat of God:

When Christ breathes his Spirit upon her, a Christian becomes a new creation. This is not just a spiritual, ethereal change that remains almost wholly in the inner fiber of her psyche. It is a profound, eternal acting upon her entire self by God. The death, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus Christ is, taken together, the seventh day of creation, whereby God himself has completed completion, and perfected perfection itself. For a Christian to participate in this life, she must be ushered into the citizenry of an utterly new order of creation.

What this means is that taken together as a group, Christians do not just emulate the Triune life, they are caught up in its creational power. The redemptive community of God is made up of an entirely new race of people.

This community must move and act in the world with all of the creational force of God himself if they are to manifest the kingdom of God. This reality must have implications for every facet of humanity's existence in culture. That is, politics, art, economics, anthropology, sociology, history, and the host of disciplines within which humanity has described itself must be usurped by this new humanity and expressed as God expresses it.

Crisis and Catharsis: the Cultural Revolution of the Apocalypse

2005-10-10T22:09:00.000-07:00

Revelation's Greek title is Apocalypse. We have named an entire genre of literature after this book: apocalyptic. The book of Daniel is the only other book considered to be apocalyptic in the Bible, though parts of other books (e.g. Isaiah) are considered apocalyptic in nature.

Aside from calling Revelation apocalyptic, it can also be referred to as prophecy. A case has been made for it being a book of worship, and a professor of mine insists that it is epistolary; it's just a letter.

It may be all of those things, but in my opinion, Revelation is a manifesto. It's the propaganda of God. It is a manual for starting a cultural revolution in any culture. Let me emphasize that: in ANY culture. All worldly cultures are outside the culture of the Church. All cultures are set against God as adversaries. The process of challenging Roman culture is the object-lesson of Revelation, but the principles are the same for every generation of every Christian in any culture. The fact that Revelation uses images from Ezekiel, Daniel, and other prophecies against empires like Persia/Media, Assyria, and Babylon shows that God's struggle to free his creation has universal cultural principles. The struggle against Rome is the struggle against every empire, no matter how benign any one empire appears to be.

Preterists are right, the book of Revelation is about Rome. An historicist like Luther is right when he says that Revelation is about the medieval Catholic church. Futurists are right that Revelation is about future empires that will set themselves up against the majesty of God. And idealists are right: the struggle in Revelation is a cosmic struggle.

The millenium, then, is God's reign on earth. It is his inbreaking revolutionary presence in the world of humankind, bringing lasting peace and unadulterated joy. In a certain sense, I'm a post-millenialist, because I believe it is the cultural task of the Christian church to bring about the millenium on earth. Our great reward in this is to suffer through the tribulation, where righteous and unrighteous alike will be judged through suffering. When we have participated in this revolution, we will receive our reward in Christ: the new Jerusalem will descend from heaven. This process is a cultural process; it is the life of the revolutionary movement of God. I believe in a final consummation, but not one that doesn't reflect the present reality of this process within our world right now and throughout history.

I hope someday to write a book on the cultural anthropology of Revelation. This subject and view have already been explored by others, but I feel I have something new to offer. If I weren't already planning to do doctoral work in something else, I think I would very much like to delve into this more.

Revelation views

2005-10-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Brief run-downs of the views of how to interpret Revelation:

Preterist-- understand Revelation almost exclusively in its original setting: the first century. Most or all of the events have already taken place.

Historicist-- see the book as laid over the centuries of history since it was written until now (or until "now" for whichever time any particular historicist lived). These are the people who try to identify signs in current events that particular things are happening from Revelation.

Futurist-- the Left Behind people, for the most part. Place the events in the book almost entirely in the future, and speak of the "end times" as a future time (that may now be starting).

Idealist-- take the symbolic pictures of the book and translate them into cosmic Christian truths. It's not that there is an actual "beast," it's that the beast symbolizes something that is part of human existence.

And there is one more distinction people make in the study of Revelation. It divides people into when they believe Christians will be "raptured."

Pre-millenialists--before the millenium. Jesus will come to take his followers from the earth, and after certain events, Jesus will establish a 1,000-year reign. This is the category into which the Left Behind people fall, even believing in an actual literal rapture (sans clothing).
Post-millenialists--after the millenium. There aren't many openly-professing post-millenialists around anymore. There was a brand of this belief in the 19th century that believed that it was the work of Christians to bring about the millenium by the reign of the Church, and then Christ would come.
Amillenialists--literally "not a millenium." This is sometimes a catch-all category for those who don't believe there will be a literal millenium (especially preterists and idealists), people who believe there are many symbolic "milleniums," or people who just don't buy the idea of millenialism.

If I were to exposit my beliefs on Revelation to a person who is steeped in these categories, s/he would probably call me an idealist and a post-millenialist or an amillenialist. In my next post, I'll explain why I don't think I'm an idealist necessarily, and why I would term myself a polymillenialist. Tipping my hand a bit, I believe that the best way to understand Revelation as literature is as a Christian primer on Christian cultural anthropology.

Ethics: Miscellany

2005-10-08T22:37:00.000-07:00

I want to make sure I directly address my sister's questions, because I didn't in the last post.

"You said this isn't a void of moral standards because God has desires for us, but what about for the society at large? Does he have desires for them? And how would they know that? In other words, how would we as believers communicate the standard of a holy God if God's desire for us is so individual as you seem to be saying?"

I think that God does have desires for the society at large, and he communicates those desires. How they know that is by God's people drawing those outside the community into a Spirit-led life. I think I would need you to explain what you mean by "the standard of a holy God," because I might take that to mean something very different from what you mean.

"what about people in places where they don't have community? Are they unable to know God's will?"

I wouldn't go so far as to say that. I think that people in places without community are not fully imaging Christ, because the community of God is the image of the Triune God. If a person is alone in her culture, where is the person that led her to Christ?

"You still have not addressed how this view incorporates the word into life. So do you simply disregard anything that is said in the word about how to live?"

First of all, I have to call a halt to you calling the Bible "the word." It's theologically imprecise, and I can't answer any questions you ask that refer to the Bible that way. I agree with Karl Barth that there are three forms of the word: Jesus Christ (John 1), the Scriptures, and the Church. If the question is "do you simply disregard anything that is said in the Scriptures about how to live?," my answer is yes. First of all, I disregard anything in the Bible, Old Testament or New, as prescriptive. I'd also like to point out that every Christian I've ever met that's treated any part of the Bible as prescriptive has not treated all of it as prescriptive. One reason is because it's impossible to treat certain parts of it as prescriptive, because large chunks of it are not conducive to prescription. Another reason is because it's extremely unclear which parts are prescriptive sometimes. The Scriptures reveal God, because they are the word of God. But the word of God is revealed in through Christ Jesus and in the Church. Therefore, though my attitude appears to be that I feel we don't need the Scriptures, in reality I believe that we don't need JUST the Scriptures, and we need the Scriptures in a very different way than we need Christ.

"If there is no moral standard, then what is sin?"

Sin is anything in thought, word, or deed that separates us from God. (I remember my catechism). But does that definition mean that sin is a category of universal behaviors that are always wrong? Not necessarily. Part of repentence means recognizing one's sinfulness, I agree. But rather than make someone aware of his sinfulness by pointing out specific behaviors in his life, I think what is much more appropriate is to point out that he is not obeying God's will. This is a qualitative judgment on someone's life. Repentence then becomes bringing his will into line with God's will, rather than repenting of certain behaviors on God's behalf.

CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, starts out his book talking about Natural Law or Moral Law. He says that the moment someone distinguishes between something as Right or Wrong, he has established something outside of those things, a scale or judge that allows him to define Right and Wrong. Now, if that scale or judge is something that never changes, that is eternal, then that judge has become something. We might identify that something with God, but then we would have a hard time making sense of the Bible, a book which defines Right and Wrong differently in different situations. It would make more sense to identify that judge as something that God uses rather than something that is equated with God. But then a problem arises that God is using something, a tool to decide what is wrong or right (much the same way we might use the Bible).

I think that CS Lewis argument is a good one, but I would identify the source of Right and Wrong not as a system or standard of judgment that God uses, but that Right and Wrong, or more broadly, good and evil, are not things that God defines, but rather whatever God does or does not do. We desire things, and we do not do these things. We desire not to do things, but we do them. The connection between our desires and our behavior is imperfect. God always does what he desires, and his desire is always action. God's desire is goodness, and what he does not desire is evil. We must locate goodness and evil in the activity of God himself, rather than in activities that God defines as good or evil. When we do that, the definition of sin becomes whatever is not part of what God is doing.

Ethics Series: the nature of the good

2005-10-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

There's a distinction in ethics between deontological and teleological (consequentialist) ethics. Teleological ethicists care about the end result. Can someone use evil means to accomplish a good end? Teleological ethicists would say that the means aren't evil if the end is good. Deontological ethicists say that the means of an action are where the morality lies. It might not matter what the result is if the means are good.

I use this as an example to say yes, it does matter why you do something, how you do it, and what you feel the results should be.

This is a vital point. I can't stress that enough.

It's vital because if we feel that certain actions are intrinsically good (meaning that they are what God wants), then you don't have to be a Christian to do God's will. Further more, we no longer need to make a distinction between what the family of God does and what the society of the world does. People can simply do things for the "common good." Helping the poor, then, is always good, no matter who does it.

However, identifying a group of good behaviors and saying that whoever does them is doing God's will is putting the cart before the horse. Goodness is derived from God's will, it does not constitute it. Something is good because God's wills it, not the other way around. I do believe that non-Christians can do God's will, but not because there are universally good actions that they may happen to do. God compels people to accomplish his will, often regardless of belief.

Our task, then, is not to know the good as a universal, eternal culture. Our task is to develop a culture around God's will, which is goodness. This can't take place outside of community. Knowing God's will is not the task of an individual. It is worked out in the spiritual body of Christ. Those outside the body can be drawn into this life, and they may accomplish pieces of God's will on behalf of that body. But until their beings are transformed by the renewing of their minds, they cannot accomplish God's will as true workers in the kingdom.

Situationism in Community

2005-10-06T22:38:00.000-07:00

My sister is one of the most probing question-askers I know. She really has an excellent mind, extremely sharp and quite thorough. I reserve the right to blatantly compliment my own kin to an extreme degree.

What makes murder wrong in any circumstance? That's a good question. The short answer is nothing, necessarily. The long answer, according to my last post, is that I have never, in my own personal relationship with the Spirit, ever experienced a time where murder was right. I don't anticipate that my relationship with the Spirit will change. But I refuse to make "Do not murder" the guiding principle in my life over what the Spirit tells me in any situation, even if the Spirit never tells me to murder. That may sound precarious, but, as I said in my last post, so is the creation of moral absolutes.

This view is different from antinomianism, which is a step off into the deep end. Antinomianism is simply an abandonment of any system of morality. It is a complete denial of the existence of Romans 6, and a mockery of God. God does have desires for us, that we obey his commands and follow his will. Just clearing that up.

Is there ever a situation where adultery would be good? Even if there were such a case, is that a good reason to disregard the will of God in favor of an external commandment or rule? We can say we follow the Ten Commandments, for example (even though most Americans don't properly follow the command to obey the Sabbath and keep it holy). But if we follow the Ten Commandments, aren't we in a sense leaving something in our lives independent of Christ's rule? If Christ, for example, did not exist, wouldn't we still be able to follow the Ten Commandments? Things that seem clear in God's word ethically are applied unevenly by evangelicals and by the broader Christian community. Christ fulfilled the law through the presence of his Spirit in our lives. That is a substantial, very real implication for how we make ethical decisions.

Which leads me to my final point. Spirit-led decisions belong most properly in community with other believers. This is not a case of hedging our bets against not having been able to hear the Spirit of God properly as individuals. This is the communal imaging of the Trinity. We shew forth the Triune nature of God when we consult each other as a community in the Spirit for ethical decisions. In this process, we come to learn that God doesn't value a series of attributes: life, love, goodness, holiness, etc. Those things are what he is. He IS life, love, goodness, and holiness. When they are part of God's essence, rather than a part of what God shows to the world in what he does, it changes the implications for how we relate to him and move and act in the world as ethical beings.

Situationism/Contextualism and Ordering Dinner for your spouse

2005-10-06T12:58:00.000-07:00

I have a lot to squeeze into this post, so I'll just launch in. Read the last post and all four views expressed there. I'm the last one, a situationist. Absolutism establishes something intolerable to me, which is the idea that God has a belief system and that it is our job to figure it out. An absolute is nothing more than a personal opinion of God. We are left trying to figure out what God's position is on issues, not asking what God's will is for our own lives. God's ethics, God's goodness, is specific to you and your situation. That is the heart of a situationist ethic.

Does that mean anybody can do pretty much whatever they want and call it "God's will"? Well, it means that they could, but it won't mean that they are really following God's will (just like anybody could label anything an absolute, but it doesn't mean it's one of God's absolutes). What situationism really means is that I have to have a substantial relationship with my Creator, where I allow him in to my live not just to guide my decisions but to fulfill my deepest longings and needs. It is, is some ways, surprisingly similar to a human relationship.

That is another strength that situationism holds. The ethical facing toward God bears remarkable resemblance to the way we rightly face others. Do people have ethical absolutes with each other? Sometimes, but that hopefully never defines how two people relate to one another.

The important part of ethics for an absolutist is the moral conundrum (casuistry). Most absolutists define their ethics on the fringes of life, those wild situations where ambiguity sets in and a decision must be made. But most people don't deal with moral dilemmas such as "You're hiding Jews in your basement..." every day. But, the most frightening situations we deal with aren't the ones where there doesn't appear to be a good choice, but the ones where there seem to be lots of good choices. Where should I go to school? Which job should I take? Should I fall in love? Should I get married? Should we adopt or have natural children? These are the situations we need powerful ethics for. I'm not saying that when those really ambiguous situations come up, we shouldn't be prepared, I'm just proposing that we be prepared not with a clearly defined list of absolutes, but rather with a profound connection to the Spirit of the Living God.

Most of the time, I agreed with my non-conflicting absolutist professor on ethics, surprisingly. Because believe it or not, I think situationism leaves a great deal of room for descriptive ethics that seem prescriptive. For me, though, it's not about what I know God wants, but what I've come to expect from him in our relationship.

Husbands, when you go to a restaurant with your wife, has she ever told you to order for her while she goes to the bathroom? Uh oh! What are you going to do? Well, she may have a "usual" if it's a place you go to often. You could order that for her, but then again, maybe she's sick of the usual. You might know what she definitely doesn't like, so that narrows it down a little bit. Ultimately, you just can't be sure you'll order what she really wanted. You might be confident that you ordered something she'll at least settle for, but who knows?

The longer you live with a person, the more you come to know who she is and what she would never do, or what she always wants. You know this because you know who she is. The great thing about how you know all this stuff about her is because you relate to her. Most of the time, you don't have to guess what she wants, because you can simply ask her. How much more is that true of an ever-present God, who never intended for us to ask what Jesus WOULD do, when Jesus himself dwells in our midst? You can come to know things about Christ because his Spirit cries out within you. You can understand Jesus as a person, and know what he will never ask of you, or the things that he always wants for you. These things are a kind of absolute, but they do not govern our ethic of the Spirit-led life. The Spirit leads us in everything, even in the things that don't ever seem to change. That is what will allow me to make some of the assertions I will make in the posts to follow. There are certain things the Spirit has never asked me to do, and that I don't anticipate she will ask me to do.

Ethics Series: Four views explained

2005-10-05T21:16:00.000-07:00

I just thought it would be fun to explain how I reason through all my own personal ethical views in light of the recent controversy of two women marrying one man in Holland, and the recently revived controversy of physician-assisted euthanasia.

I'm going to explain four different ways of conceiving of Christian ethics, and in the next post, I'll tip my hand as to which camp I fall into. Three of them are "absolutist" views, and the last one is called situationism. There are other ways of conceiving of ethics and ways of making distinctions (deontological v. teleological, e.g.), so if some other students of ethics out there want to bring up an important view I left out, please comment on it.

The first kind of absolutism is non-conflicting absolutism. I was taught ethics by a man who holds this view, and to his credit, he was quite consistent in his views. Non-conflicting absolutism says that ethical absolutes never conflict if properly understood; there are no exceptions. Ethicists sometimes engage in casuistry, which is the exposition of a certain ethical view by applying it to a moral dilemma. The classic moral dilemma is the case of a person hiding Jews in his home in Nazi Germany. So the SS comes to the home of a non-conflicting absolutist and asks him if he is hiding Jews. What will he do? Will he lie to the SS and save the lives of the Jews? Or will he tell the truth and allow them to be discovered, condemning them to almost certain death? In this case, a non-conflicting absolutist will not lie, because lying is a sin. But that's not to say he is committing murder, because the Jews might survive whatever fate awaits them. It's important also to remember that there are ways to not lie but not give the SS what they want. My professor in this situation might say, "I'm sorry, I can't help you gentlemen." The important thing for a non-conflicting absolutist in this situation is to remember God's unchanging absolutes and have faith that obeying is God's will.

Next up: the ideal absolutists! I honestly can't imagine being an ideal absolutist, because I fear I would be constantly riddled with guilt. Ideal absolutists acknowledge that sometimes, doing evil is unavoidable, in which case one must choose the lesser of two evils. When the SS shows up to the home of the ideal absolutist, he boldly lies to their faces. He regrets that he must do so, indeed, he humbly asks God's forgiveness for what he has done. But the sin of lying is less of a sin than potentially condemning people under your protection to almost certainly horrible deaths. They still believe in the same system of absolutes that non-conflicting absolutists do, they just disagree on how humans interact with these absolutes.

Graded absolutists are also called hierarchicalists (say THAT five times fast). Graded absolutists will probably end up doing the same thing as the ideal absolutists in just about every situation, they will just conceive of what they have done differently. You see, graded absolutists don't see it as choosing the lesser of two evils, they see it as choosing the greatest good. In our moral dilemma, the graded absolutist would also boldly lie to the SS, but he would not consider it sinful. He will have confidence that he has done the greatest good by saving his Jewish friends from the gas chambers.

Lastly, situationism. Situationists are unique to the other three ethical views, because they reject the concept of moral absolutes altogether. It's not that they haven't got any ethics at all. Quite the contrary, oftentimes the situationist's view, while less clear than an absolutist's, is more complex in its explanation. Situationists ground their ethic in a particular attribute of God: his will, or the love of God, for example. They will sometimes talk about principles, but most often they will stay away from making definite ethical statements, as these might be construed as absolutes. So what does the situationist do in our moral dilemma? Well, if he's never been in the situation, he can't tell you. It's not that he's avoiding the question, it's just that if he were to tell you what he would do, he is not following God's will for his life, but rather following a set of pre-defined principles that he attributes to God. Would he lie? Would he tell the truth? What would he do? Press him for answers all you like, you won't get a situationist to engage in casuistry.

Those are the four ethical views I chose to explain, can any fellow theology students think of any other important ones (besides all of the forms of relativism or anti-nomianism?)

Addiction to Justice

2005-09-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

If you don't have cable or satellite television, you know how dismal network programming is during the day. Every once in a while, if I'm eating breakfast or lunch, I'll turn on the television. I know this is an exercise in futility. I know nothing's on. But this week, for some reason, I've turned on the TV a little more often than usual during the day, and I suddenly realized how many shows there are that depict civil court cases. I counted them all up and here they are: Judge Mathis, Judge Hatchett, Divorce Court, the People's Court, Texas Justice, Judge Joe Brown, Judge Judy, and Judge Alex. If you wanted to, you could watch a civil court case show from about 10:00 am until 6:00 pm. There's a continuous stream of them.

Then I started thinking about all of the programs that show clips of police videos or follow policeman around. World's Wildest Police Chases, Police Videos, Cops, etc.

Then there are all of the shows that center around lawyers or criminal investigators (including FBI agents, local criminal investigators, forensics experts, detectives, etc.) Curiously enough, these shows don't usually mix the two professions. They are either about lawyers or about criminal investigators. Watch a show the centers around criminal investigators, and see if a witness or a suspect ever calls in his lawyer. And if he does, watch to see whether the lawyer actually does anything. And watch a show about lawyers, see how often they actually talk to or have contact with a criminal investigator. It's weird. But here's a short list of shows with lawyers or criminal investigators: CSI: Criminal Intent, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, Boston Legal, Law and Order, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Without a Trace, Bones.

And who can forget the shows that fall into one of these categories that are running in syndication on some channel at nearly any time of day: The Practice, Cagny and Lacey, Matlock, Magnum P.I., Walker: Texas Ranger, etc., etc.

When you add up all the TV programming that is devoted to any show that depicts or actually shows enforcement of the law, interpretation of the law, investigation of or prosecution of crime, and basically anything else to do with the criminal and civil justice system in America, there isn't much programming left. People talk about reality shows being ubiquitous, but when you consider that you can watch "justice-centered" programming for virtually 24 hours straight, reality shows pale in comparison.

I have absolutely no idea why this is. I could not, to save my life, come up with a good theory for why this phenomenon occurs. The best I'm able to do is recognize that it must say something really profound about American culture, and I don't know what that is. Any thoughts?

Baptism In the Early Church

2005-09-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

(nerd noises, whining, pushing up thick-rimmed glasses) um...time for a history lesson (more geek noises, fixing pocket protector, clicking mechanical pencil).

Alright, I'm ready. Baptism in the ancient world. Purification for sin? Yes! Consecration of a holy person? Yes! Ritual drowning? Maybe. Baptism meant different things to different people. For the Jewish Sadducean sect, it signified a sinner's decision to be purged of sin. This is the "baptism unto repentance" or "baptism for the forgiveness (or remittance) of sins" of the New Testament. The Essenes seemed to have seen baptism as not the washing of a sinful person, but the consecration of a righteous person. On some level, either idea could be said to have seeped into the New Testament theology of baptism.

I offer an interpretation of baptism that a professor of mine has offered in a some what chevalier manner (as he often offers his interpretations), and I give you all a picture of what a baptism might have looked like in the early church, or at least how I would like a baptism in my own church to look like.

Baptism, more than purification or consecration, is about death. It signifies death above all things, because baptism as a concept is about something being completely drenched. The verb was used to mean something soaked in wine, for example. But it was also used in some sources as indicating a drowning, especially in cases at sea. It could in fact signify a violent drowning. Now, it's clear that such an interpretation wouldn't encompass the full theological meaning expressed throughout the entire New Testament. But taking a look at Ephesians 5 yields something interesting.

Imagine a group of Christians gathered around a new catachumen (a candidate for baptism). The man stands in water to his knees, next to a bishop or leader in the church. He confesses his sin before the community and asks for Christ's forgiveness. The leader pushes the catechumen underwater, submerging him in the baptistry (or a local river or lake). He baptizes him three times, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As he comes up out of the water, the leader speaks the formula found in Eph. 5.14: "Wake up, O Sleeper! And rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." It could have been, in my opinion, quite dramatic. It could have signified not the washing of a sinner of all his sins, but the death of a sinner, as he participates in the death of Christ, rising from his sleep to a new life in Christ as a new creation. The theological distinction may be subtle, but in my opinion, it is powerful. Just an idea.

Women in Ministry: part 4

2005-09-26T11:03:00.000-07:00

Leadership in the early church. What did it look like? Who lead and in what capacity? What did leaders do, and what were their "job descriptions"? There are lots of questions about leadership in the early church, and I thought since I recently wrote a 41-page research paper on the subject, I would try to say some definitive things about leadership.

The early church had various "titles" for leaders in the local churches, and throughout the wider church. Elder, deacon, bishop, apostle, teacher, prophet, evangelist, etc. were designations used variously of lots of different kinds of people. These roles were not well established or well defined in the early church.

From city to city, churches had different combinations of these roles. Some churches had a group of elders (a presbytery), others may have had a single bishop assisted by deacons very early on (though probably not from the founding of the church). Some churches may not have had any permanent leadership, but would have had leadership centered around the itinerant ministry of apostles and prophets.

The roles themselves were vaguely defined, at least in early Christian literature. Apostles were alternately defined as someone who had witnessed Jesus' ministry from John's baptism to the death of Christ. Other times it was someone who had witnessed the risen Christ. The earliest definition seems to have been of someone who bears the official message of the person they represent (in the case of Christians, the message of the gospel). There are also questions about whether bishop and elder were the same "office." The terms are used synonymously enough that no conclusive decision can be made.

In addition, the very nature of these roles is still under debate. Were these "offices" as we would consider the word, involving formal election or ordination? Or were they, as a certain debate has framed the issue, "charisms"? In most cases during my research, it seemed that the conclusions any one scholar came to had more to do with how he hoped for the nature of leadership roles rather than what the evidence seemed to show.

Leadership, then, was in flux for the early church. Part of the reason for this seems to have stemmed from the expectation of Christ's imminent return. Some have painted a picture of increasing crystallization of church leadership as this expectation grew dimmer. But if this is true (that leadership was diverse and changing), and if we are going to base our theology of leadership on the early church's model, how is it that we feel we can have such confidence in making assertions about the roles of women in the church as regards leadership, when we cannot really be very sure what that model was?

I suggest that we take only one thing from the early church in regard to leadership. There were elders in the Jewish synagogue system, and in the culture of Judaism for centuries before the early church. The category of "overseer" (bishop) was one taken from Graeco-Roman society. Apostle was not a made up word; it referred to a delegate having official recognition from the one s/he represented. The idea of a prophet was not a foreign idea for Jews or Greeks. Though all of these roles took on a distinctly new identity in the early church, this much is clear: the early Christians looked to the world around them for cues on how to lead each other, because it was a natural thing to do. In fact, the only assertion about early church leadership I feel I could make is that it was natural.

So my suggestion is to try to make leadership natural, just like the early church. What will that mean? First, it means ceasing all attempts to reproduce the early church model of leadership. We don't live in the first or second century Mediterranean world, so why do we feel our leadership structure ought to look anything like theirs? Second, it means dropping not just the early church leadership roles like "elder" or "deacon" (that have no natural origin in our own lives), but also dropping the church roles we have now that are equally unnatural. Pastors have no counterpart in the world outside the church. Of course, I do not propose mimicking the culture in regard to leadership (though pastors do function more like managers and CEOs more than anything else). I propose making leadership more natural, like the way we lead ourselves outside the church.

So what would that mean for women? How do women lead outside the church? What titles and offices do they take and hold? Do titles or offices even matter? How do we recognize when women are leading? How does it feel to be led by a woman? How do women lead differently than men? We could all have a very clear discussion around these kind of questions, because we have natural ways of thinking about how women lead. So why not take those natural ways of thinking and let them be the mechanism for restructuring our churches?