jesus responds to violence by dying

As if the event itself weren't painful enough, little bits of theological lunacy always seem to cling to days like that of the Sandy Hook Massacre. I'm thinking of two right now, though there are always more. 

The first should be easily dispelled by any thinking person of faith. The second seems more difficult to shed.

Following a similarly dark day years ago, I can remember the date and time that I rejected this nonsense that “everything is part of God’s plan.” This blasphemy images God like some sort of callous puppet-master who manipulates the course of these horrific events in order to “teach a lesson” to some sinners whose lives are, apparently, more valuable than those sacrificed in order to teach them. The strength of this theological worldview is its convenience. Its weakness is its god. Any god for whom this constitutes a “plan” is not a god worth worshipping.

If you haven’t already done so, please dismiss any thought of this calculating, puppet-master god quickly and unceremoniously.  But when you do so make sure you have access to another image of God to fill the void. I fear that much of our culture has rightly shed the puppet-master god but at the expense of any thought of God whatsoever. It’s much easier to unthink God than to rethink God.

I say I fear this not because I’m silly enough to think that the “secularization” of our culture is the problem (whatever that means, exactly) or that all human brokenness could be fixed if we’d just “allow God in schools” by posting the ten-commandments in the hallway or some other nonsense. Such a sentiment assumes, in the most theologically naïve way, that the human heart can be changed by what, in Lutheran theology, we call Law. Most of the Bible’s thickness is devoted to the fact that this doesn’t work. The Law would be great if it truly cured what is ailing humanity, but it doesn’t. Something else is needed, namely Gospel…namely Jesus, God’s rash and irresponsible message of unconditional love to the world.

It’s because of Jesus that I’m only still learning, myself, to shed another common explanation for the perversity of human evil, one that is equally false but even more convenient and, for that reason, even more difficult to shed. A succinct version of it was given to me by a trusted elder at a time when I was younger and much more naïve. He said, “You know, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who litter and those who clean it up.”

I was quite attracted to this worldview. Who wouldn’t be? I, of course, must be one of the litter cleaner uppers, if not on a global average, then certainly when compared to some of the worst litterers that come to mind. Right?

And that’s why this explanation isn’t going away anytime soon, because it’s just so darned convenient. Bad things happen because that other half of humanity is bad. If I’m feeling optimistic, maybe the bad portion is just a small fraction of humanity and most of us are basically good. If pessimistic, maybe just me, “my church,” and a few of my closest family and friends are good while most of humanity is going to hell in a handbasket. The size of the groups doesn’t really matter. It only matters that this clever aphorism allows one group, mine, to distance itself from the other and avoid any implication in the darkness and violence that so obviously plagues the world.

It’s convenient to think that only the one or two most immediate culprits are to blame for such horrific days as we experienced last week—that, for instance, this event is completely disconnected from my support of an entertainment industry and media culture that cheapens life and glamorizes violence, or the laughable fraction of the money I earn that goes to the mental health system as compared with weapons development, or that I personally have spent a lifetime not reaching out and showing Christ’s love to individuals who are at risk for violent behavior.  

Of course, I can think through all of this in my head…but in my gut…before long, a few images from the last week flash before me once again, and here comes that visceral response I know so well. My face gets hot, my own blood-thirst wells up inside of me. Forgiveness is a nice thought. But this is real life. Forgiveness? Not for this. Not for this. For this, the only solution is the oldest law known to humanity, the rudiment of all Law. One eye for one eye. One tooth for one tooth. Show me the sicko. I’ll do it myself.

…And there it is. That darkness that has plagued humanity for millennia has crept into my very own soul. Of course, like Saul the murderer before he became Paul the preacher, I’ll try to confuse the issue. I’ll justify myself and continue to distance myself and will even convince many that my own inner violence is of a completely different kind, perhaps even an admirable kind. “Well, that monster is a cold blooded killer. I’m simply executing the wrath of God.”  

What eye for eye logic has going for it is at least the semblance of perfect justice. What could be more equitable than identical recompense for any violence committed? And, theoretically, it seems quite possible that the threat of equal and opposite retribution should deter future violence, right? What it has going against it is that it has never worked, and it never will. 

…

Jesus tried another option, one that is so stupid and so naïve that it wouldn’t even be worth trying except that the other thing we’ve tried hasn’t ever worked either. He abdicated the sensible solution that we all expected of a Messiah, using violence (judiciously and sensibly applied, of course) in order to make for less violence.

Instead, he died. Peter took out a sword and tried the “stand your ground” method. But not Jesus. He responded to our world’s violence by dying, dying by our very own hand…and, at the same time, dying with us like a husband who, sick of seeing his bride suffer from a chronic disease, would gladly take the disease onto himself. The shorthand for his ridiculous alternative to the sensible and just application of law is “the way of the cross.”

Of course, our societies reflexively feel threatened by “the way of the cross.” Predictably, someone will stand up at this point and say, “Here in the real world (apparently, not the one in which Jesus lived) having no means of punishing or retaliating will give criminals free reign. Just forgiving and turning the other cheek willy-nilly will cause whole societies to spin out uncontrollably into a violent chaos.”

On the other hand, the innocent one hanging there on the cross confronts us with the fact that perhaps we had already spun out uncontrollably into a violent chaos under our law. In fact, it was our law that crucified him.

Jesus was put to death because he had the audacity to claim that the deeper hitch in our otherwise reasonable logic—that if they, out there, are littering, then we, over here, have to clean it up—had little to do with the litter and had everything to do with the “we” and the “they.”

We were expecting a messiah who would come down hard on that bad half of humanity. Instead we got one who died. Free grace is a grossly unpopular idea. It always has been. People have been crucified for even suggesting it. The world can be a horrific place. We want eyes and teeth, dammit!

Once we realized what had happened, the sun went black. We bawled and mourned and, that following Saturday, we began looking for someone to blame. “They crucified him. They’re the litterers. The chaos won. Now let us take to arms and try no more naïve experiments with love.”

Such is the wisdom of Holy Saturday.

But the story doesn’t end there.

holidays ad absurdum

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”    – Luke 1:78-79.

This won’t surprise most of you who know me, but I’ve never really been the type of Christian to get all bent out of shape when people wish me ‘Happy Holidays’ around Christmas season. My feathers don’t go up at that phrase. People trampling each other in department stores in an orgy of greed? Yes. Spending stupid amounts of money on colorful crap in a world where Kwashiorkor’s Disease is a real thing? Yes. But the phrase, ‘happy holidays’? I let that one slide.

It’s not that this season isn’t sacred to me as a Christian. It’s not that I don’t value this time to anticipate and celebrate Christ’s coming. Actually, it’s because I do, that I’ve just never really measured the Christiness of Christmas by the sheer number of times that we can jam the word “Christ” into our interactions with one another. If it were only a matter of sheer volume, I’d think it impious to stop at “Merry Christmas.” While at “Frosty’s Boutique” the other day—an open bazaar of handcrafted doodads and trinkets held at a local middle school every year—I suggested to my wife that it should be called “Christ’s Boutique” and perhaps the nearby ATM, “Christ’s money-changing station”--you know, to keep Christ in Christmas, after all. But there’s the rub. Christ had one encounter with boutiques and moneychangers that we know about. It didn’t go well.

So I’m left to question whether simply saying something is of Christ really makes it so. Wouldn’t it make more sense, then, to call baseball Christball? You know, just to cover our bases? But then, “ball” is such a secular term, isn’t it? Maybe instead of Christball, we should go with Christchrist, just to be safe.  Does repeating Christ’s name as many times as possible really invoke his presence? If so, where’s the tipping point? If I say the word Christmas 10 times on my trip to the mall, will that be sufficient? What about 50? 100 times, maybe? Will it be a sufficiently Christian trip to the shopping mall, then? Either I’ve failed miserably at this Christian duty and the MLB has been perpetrating a 100 year war on Christball, or such things would be stupid because more of the word ‘Christ’ does not necessarily result in something more Christ-like. In fact, were I to join the crusade to follow this commandment that doesn't exist, "thou shalt constantly impose the words 'Merry Christmas' on thy unchurched brethren," I'd be in danger of breaking one that does, "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain."

In the 1950’s, European playwrights started the genre now known as “theater of the absurd.” As I understand it, what these plays all had in common was they sought to portray life as tragically meaninglessness and did so through devolving language—clichés used several times too many, words repeated, distorted, turned into their opposite and a smattering of illogic and general nonsense. That is to say, once words lost meaning, so too did the plays and with them the lives they portrayed.  

Isn’t this what we do when we seek endlessly to give the Christ name more airtime, tagging it to anything and everything no matter what the association? Is that not the conventional wisdom of every good marketer, flood the TV networks and billboards and internet news feeds with your brand name? Put it at the front of every consciousness so that the masses flock to you not so much by desire but by default, for lack of a more conscious choice. Need a used car? Come to CarMax. Looking for a religious celebration? Have you tried Christmas?

This insistence that everyone say “Merry Christmas” has nothing to do with Christ and everything to do with our culture of market-driven competition. Rather than celebrate the Christ who “brings the powerful from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly” (Lk. 1.52), today’s Christians have, I guess, decided to simply try to out compete the evil secularizers for cultural supremacy.

I’m astounded that there are still some who would equate piety with the sheer quantity of things with which they can associate Christ’s name, saying nothing of the quality. Did you watch to evening news on Black Friday? Shouldn't Christians want to dissociate our Lord from this annual theater of the absurd?

One of the things that the writers of the original, French theater of the absurd actually got right, was that after the communication breakdown, after words were twisted to mean their opposite or broke down or could only be repeated ironically, the play would end in silence.

That’s what I’m hoping for more of this Holiday season. Silence.

I’m fine with both the “Merry Christmas”-ers and the “Happy Holidays”-ers. I’m even alright with the too-cool-for-school “Happy Exotic Festival that I don’t actually observe, myself”-ers.  

But what I’m really interested in this Advent season, is silence. Silence without news pundits, silence without TV ads, silence without any internal voice that might otherwise gnaw at me to flood the airwaves with my Lord’s name because the gossamer thread of faith that links me to his birth feels so tenuous that it needs to be reinforced and validated by the whole society around me.

Just absolute silence. Well, maybe some Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby duets lightly filling the background as my beautiful wife and I set up our Christmas Tree and pray around the candles of our advent wreath in the warmth of the apartment that God has blessed us with. Silence, then, as we pray for those who are in the cold.

Anyhow, I doubt my own capacity to invoke Christ into being with the sheer volume of my words. I figure he pretty much does what he wants. What I would rather model is a quiet soul that “magnifies the Lord” and unclouded eyes, that we may see “the dawn from on high break upon us.” I encourage quiet tongues that Christ might “guide our feet into the way of peace.”

For an inspiring way to participate in what Christ’s birth actually means for the world, “to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” go to http://www.htflive.org/ and consider giving to the Haitian Timoun Foundation’s “It’s Not Your Birthday” campaign.

nudity, nakedness, nuts and bolts

It’s often pointed out, with considerable solemnity and an air of subtlety, that the Adam and Eve story has one character that’s a male and one that’s a female. The clever interpreters who stumble onto this fact will often go further and point out, with equal gravitas, which anatomical features one should look for in identifying such a distinction.  In this reading, the story’s sole purpose is to prove the rather mundane fact that some people are boys and some are girls. Its primary emphasis is that Adam and Eve were different from one another.

But examined a little more closely, a somewhat obvious lesson on the different sexes really doesn’t seem to be where the story wants to take us.

The story is set in motion by God’s statement (A): “It’s not good that the human should be alone” and wraps up with the summary (B): “And they were both naked and were not ashamed.” Point A sets up the problem, loneliness; part B sets up the solution, naked togetherness. Everything else must get us from point A to point B, and we’re going to need to follow whatever trajectory the story has chosen to get us there.

Now, Adam’s name is a play on the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “earth” or “ground” or “land.” God has brought Adam up from the adamah. But, at once, God recognizes that something is missing, a partner. So God starts forming other creatures from the adamah in an effort to find a suitable partner or helper for Adam. Don’t get caught up on implausibility of this exercise or God’s seeming incompetence, thinking that these animals will fulfill Adam’s need for companionship (in fairness, hindsight is 20/20). The point is that none of them are enough like the man to make a suitable partner (v. 20).

Finally, and this is key, God gets the idea to take a rib from the man’s side, a part of his own being, and forms the woman. Ironically, given how this story has been appropriated in recent history, the man exclaims, “This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” He’s not impressed with how different the woman is from himself, there were plenty of creatures that were different and none of them made for suitable partners. He’s impressed with how she’s the same! Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. Only because she’s enough like him to be a companion does she fulfill God’s initial concern, “it’s not good that the man should be alone.”

This story is boring and adds nothing to simple observation if all it’s about is the nuts and bolts of the different sexes. It becomes very profound, though, if its point is that humans will now forever be incomplete when they’re alone.

One continental philosopher called humanity a “being toward death” and what he meant by this was that we’re creatures whose primary occupation in life is death. We come preprogrammed with death on the horizon. That’s not really the biblical view. In scripture death is an accidental result of sin, not something fundamental to the creation. It would be more biblical to call us a “being toward relationship.” We come preprogrammed for relationship and we are incomplete, not whole persons, without it. 

The level of intimacy that exists between these two is shown in the last line that says, “They were both naked and were not ashamed.”   

If this is the ideal for human relationship, it seems also to point to what God yearns for in God’s relationship with us. That we be naked. That we be wholly vulnerable and intimate with nothing to hide.

Now, nudity is not the same thing as nakedness. There is some crossover (thankfully), but you can be nude without being naked (not sure if the reverse is true).

Nudity is fairly common in our society. The problem with nudity, in my opinion, is not its lack of clothes. God didn’t make our bodies so shamefully that they absolutely need to be covered up. The problem with nudity is that it’s too simple a thing. At its most vulgar, it substitutes voyeurism for intimacy. It reduces the incalculable value of a person’s soul, the gestalt of their mind, body, and spirit, to just their body. It reduces Adam to simple adamah. Voyeurism is the relational equivalent of philosophical materialism. To the voyeur the human being is no more valuable than the dust and earth from which it came.

Nakedness is very different than that. Nakedness means more than just lacking any clothes (probably, not less). The ability to be naked in the biblical sense is our ability to lay our souls bare before God and before each other. Biblically, that’s all that God really wants from us.  This is why repentance is so important. Repentance is how we become transparent, we become open books so that true intimacy can exist.

There is a clever play on words in the next part of the Adam and Eve story. The Hebrew word for naked, arum in v. 25 is contrasted with the word arom, “shrewd” or “conniving,” which describes the serpent in Gen. 3.1. I think we all know this from our everyday interactions with other people, the opposite of being naked is being guarded, wily, conniving, manipulative.

The serpent shows the humans how to be conniving, how to hide secrets, how to have backdoor conversations, how to make underhanded business dealings, how to present themselves publicly to make it look as if they have nothing but benevolent motives, then manipulate the rest of their community, exercising their own need to be in control. Worse, some of them will get so good at guarding and hiding that they themselves won’t even recognize that they’re doing it. They’ll “deceive [themselves] and the truth won’t be in [them].”

Sure enough, on a casual stroll through the Garden to check up on the humans, God is surprised and hurt to find out that the humans have covered themselves up. They’re ashamed to be seen naked.

Our world is filled with people who are bent on exposing someone else’s nudity but know next to nothing about nakedness. An all too common example is the religious or political loud mouth, who, like so many used cars, has traded in his or her spouse for a newer model, not once or twice but multiple times, and then wants to pontificate to the rest of us about the sanctity of marriage. But so few of us, in this world, have the courage to really confess our own brokenness, the ways we’ve breached and abused and neglected our own relationships. So few of us can really be naked to give ourselves over and experience true unguarded intimacy with another human being.   

I certainly struggle with nakedness. So for my part, it would be nice if we could reduce Jesus’ demanding teaching on divorce (Mark 10.1-12) to a simplistic statement on pomp and ceremony or nuts and bolts. It would be nice if the only relational issues that Jesus intended to comment on here were those that didn’t apply to me (a once-married, heterosexual).

The problem is that Jesus doesn’t know when to stop. He makes this broad sweeping statement about the brokenness of our human relationships that hits close to home for pretty much all of us. It’s all fun and games when Jesus comments on the relationships of people whose personal lives I happen to disapprove of. But if he’s going to go and equate divorce with adultery and adultery with simple lust, then, frankly, he’s starting to pry a little bit too much for this privatistic, North American.

Jesus, you would have the nerve to comment on our marriages of all things?

Jesus, you mean all the toxic words and the character assassination that go along with a divorce…you don’t want God’s children to suffer any of that?

Jesus, you mean you care about our relationships sometimes even more than we do?

Jesus, you mean you equate lust with adultery so that I can’t just point the finger at everyone else’s sexual immorality but have to point first to my own lustful, adulterous eyes?

Jesus, you mean that in all our attempts to guard and hide our flesh and our shame from one another, you would lay yourself bare and exposed on the cross and give dignity to nakedness?

The Pharisees, both past and present, are absolutely crazy if they really want to use this teaching, THIS TEACHING, on marriage and divorce and adultery, to point their finger and cast a judgment on someone else’s relationships. Really, this teaching? You want to hold to the letter of the law on this teaching? I guess if you’ve never even lusted after another human being, good job, you’re off the hook (though, I’d question how much you’ve really lived). The rest of us are indicted here.

But remember that in Mark 10.1-12, Jesus isn’t addressing a room full of public sinners, and lusters, and adulterers, and divorcees. They already know how messy their lives are. At no point in any of our Gospel’s, does Jesus ever take that group and rub their noses in their own stuff like this.

Actually, Jesus is talking to Pharisees, the hypocrites, the pious who made a big show of their purity, claiming always to have looked to the side when a pretty girl walked by on the sidewalk, implicitly casting the stone at everyone’s impurity but their own.

At the root of it all, Pharisees are people who try to solve the difficulties that come with human intimacy by cutting themselves off from it entirely.

Kind of missing the forest for the trees then, aren’t we? Intimacy isn’t the problem. Intimacy is the goal, God’s whole purpose in creating us.

Still, the Pharisees would likely be thrilled if Jesus’ hard teaching on divorce and adultery were the end of the story. It’s not.

The larger story is about the God who yearned for love, for real, intimate relationship with the creatures…the creatures that became ashamed of their own earthiness, the imperfections and eccentricities of their own flesh…the creatures who then became wily and duplicitous trying to hide their true selves from each other and from their God…the creatures that learned to point their fingers and expose another’s nakedness to make themselves feel better about their own…the one and only Son, who, instead of pointing his finger at another’s nakedness, laid himself bare on a cross, and through the glory of humiliation and the dignity of his own bareness, put an end to the shame and finger pointing…This is the story of the one and only Son who made it okay to be human.

the secret to getting rich...quick

When I asked the CEO how he came to own so much wealth, he told me, “Unlike some other overpaid exec, I had the idea and took the risk that made wealth possible.” When I asked the overpaid exec, she told me, “Unlike the yes-man in middle management, I create wealth through my vision and forecasting.” When I asked the yes-man in middle management, he told me, “Unlike the whiny foreman, I earn my living through cheerful dedication to the company.” When I asked the whiny foreman, he told me, “Unlike the lazy union worker, I don’t expect something for nothing.” When I asked the lazy union worker, she told me, “Unlike the welfare queen on food stamps, I have a job.” When I asked the welfare queen on food stamps, she told me, “Unlike the good-for-nothing homeless person, I go legitimately through the system and only take what I need to support my family.” When I asked the good-for-nothing beggar, he told me this:

“I own nothing. Everything I have is but a gift that God has entrusted me to use for the sake of the world. Please, give up everything that you own, and come experience my wealth.”

i bought a honda because i'm a patriot

I’m not really a “car guy,” so this is a strange topic for this blog (except insofar as anything we do with our money is intensely theological). But the experience of buying one this past week got me researching some things that I don’t normally.  Because my wife and I bought our 2010 Honda Insight used, the nationality of its make isn’t as relevant to the American economy except that we supported a dealership (Nissan) that employs American salespeople, accountants, and so on. And I guess, in some ambiguous way, we’re sending a message that we, as American consumers, prefer a car with higher fuel efficiency and a smaller carbon footprint.

While cars are a bit outside my comfort zone, the point I want to make here is actually fairly simple and is at least obliquely informed by my training in theology. I’m not so much commenting on the raw economic data as the attitudes and assumptions that cause people to interpret the data a certain way (something that we call “hermeneutics” in biblical study). Moreover, because of the church world that I inhabit, I’ve become quick to recognize it when self-proclaimed “traditionalists” are being anything but by refusing to join a longstanding tradition (whether religious or economic) of adapting to the world around them as it changes.  And to make this simple point, I’ve chosen for my foil, Clint Eastwood, of Republic National Convention notoriety.  Specifically, I’m thinking back to that inspiring and passionate Super Bowl ad for Chrysler in which he laid out the pervasive but misinformed notion that to buy a car with an American label is to invest in the American economy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PE5V4Uzobc

The problem with this (aside from its belligerently nationalistic tone) is that, basically, there is no such thing as an American car, and there hasn’t been for some time. Ford and Chevy send out parts for assembly all over the world. Toyota builds cars in Indiana, Kentucky, and Texas, Honda in Ohio and Alabama. Like them, Mazda is persistently trying to move more and more of its labor wing to America to capitalize on the exchange rate. Many of these cars are finally sold back in Japan with most of their labor dollars staying in the US (the exact reverse of what so many complain is happening with “American” products overseas). General Motors’ best known lines of SUVS are built in Mexico, and when parts, jobs, and sales, have all been accounted for, cars.com reports that “the most American-made car” is the Toyota Camry, followed closely by the Honda Accord, both of which companies are neck and neck with Ford for most American jobs created. You get the idea.

Of course, when politicians say they’re interested in “bringing jobs back to Detroit,” I assume they’re not unaware of how blurred the borders of auto-manufacturing have become. What they seem not to grasp is that globalization has happened/is happening and can’t be undone, ironically, due to the same “invisible hand” logic that they claim will reverse it. Economic globalization, as I see it, is nothing but the free market writ large across the Earth. Multinational corporations have no loyalty to any symbolic state or arbitrary geographical boundary. They will go wherever they can minimize costs and maximize revenues with the least amount of political interference.

This is why it’s the attitudes and assumptions that are the interesting part here, even when the raw data is straightforward to the point of uninteresting. I’m guessing that Clint Eastwood’s simplistic notion that an American label equals an American product is a holdover from post-WWII thinking when our manufactures could essentially come from a self-contained system of land, labor, and capital and then be exported as finished products to the world abroad. Simply put, what made this an import-export market versus a globalized market, was not that there was no spread of widgets and technologies across the globe—obviously there was—but that there was still a satisfactory (from the American’s standpoint) imbalance between nations, with high-end products mostly flowing one direction and profits mostly the other.

Of course, globalization doesn’t happen overnight (though it may seem like it), and America has been hiring out overseas for decades. But even as we began using low-skill assembly overseas, we could still maintain that this was basically how the world worked so long as the high-skill employment, and with it, the primary economic benefit came home at the end of the night. But as the education levels of those formerly “low-skill” peoples rises, and they begin competing with “high-skill” Americans for jobs or, horror of horrors, just starting competing companies of their own, there is a tipping point where it no longer behooves us to believe that we’re still the world’s designated manufacturers. We’re still welcome to tell ourselves that we are over against all factual observation but only at the steep cost of failing to learn where we now fit in a world that has changed.

My simple contention is that it’s not patriotic to deny the facts and try to regress back to the good ol’ days before globalization nor is it unpatriotic to admit that the world just doesn’t work the way it did 60 years ago. In fact, it’s quite the opposite for those of us who still need to figure out how to swim in these new waters.

But that brings me to another point: globalization is neither malicious nor benign. It just is. What we do with it is up to us. At the popular level of discourse (when mixed with political ideology), “globalization” is a word spoken, on the one end, with a sort of bleeding heart giddiness as if all the world’s most intractable social injustices are suddenly on the verge of solving themselves almost providentially, and on the other end, its rarely spoken at all and only then with much fear and trembling. But more dispassionate and thoughtful economists tend to speak of it as something value neutral. In other words, globalization in and of itself is neither good nor bad, it just is. That the industry of the give or take 195 sovereign nations of the world is now sufficiently interdependent to the point where, as Claude Smadje said it, “the resilience of the global economy is only as strong as the weakest of its components,”[1] is, I believe simply the raw data of where we are in history.

If that’s true, then Clint Eastwood has it exactly backwards when he growls, “This country can’t be knocked down with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do, the world is gonna hear the roar of our engines.” His tone seems to assume we’re in a sort of worldwide blood sport for import-export supremacy. I’m reminded of a line I recently read from Asian geopolitical commentator Kishore Mahbubani on Europe (read: the West), “According to European theory and practice, which has been distilled from 19^th-century European history when several new European powers emerged, there should always be rivalries and zero-sum competition among rising powers.”[2] 

The impasse between this worldview and Mahbubani's derives from a fundamental tenant of global thinking, one that I fear Americans will catch onto later rather than sooner. It's that this is not a "zero-sum competition." Success now goes to the best integrators rather than the best competitors. The correct question is not, “How can we turn back the clock, undo globalization, and get the drop on a certain export market?” Rather, it’s “Where do we fit into a world that rewards integrators?”

Eastwood, with his jingoistic disposition shared by far too many of our nationals, seems unlikely to make this paradigm shift. What’s required of us now, if we want to “fit” somewhere in this new world, is not just some decisions about what products to consume (though that hasn’t become unimportant) but a more basic decision about what kind of identity we need to dawn in this new epoch of human history.  

---

[1] Smadje, Claude, “The End of Complacency”, Foreign Policy, winter 1998-99, p. 67.

[2] Mahbubani, Kishore. Can Asian’s Think? (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish, 2009), 125.

how the 'emerging church' needs to emerge

I’m assuming, if you’re reading this, that you’re kind of a church nerd (like me) and have some familiarity with what I mean by “the emerging church.” If not, this description is as good as any:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_church

I would say I’m an outsider to the emerging “movement” but an insider in the “conversation.” These comments come not from a place of opposition but from my desire to see the movement continue so that it might help enrich and reform all expressions of the church in North America. I make hard critiques assuming that if Achilles could have been humbled, he might’ve thought to protect his heels.

11)      The emerging movement needs to stop defining itself as anti-institutional.

Institutions aren’t bad. Bad institutions are bad. So long as humans want to continue gathering with any level of organization (that is, by anything other than sheer randomness and happenstance), they’re going to form institutions. There is something anti-incarnational about this attitude. It says, “I’ll go along with this so long as it defies any known way that humans have ever learned to be human together.”

22)       The emerging movement needs to become less utopian.

This is a tough one to tackle since many emergents are extremely hesitant to call their movement anything more than a “conversation”—certainly they’ll say nothing of it being missional, attractional, evangelical, let alone that it begins with any clear endgame in sight. To save space, I’ll grant the last one. However, most emerging churches I’ve come across do build their purpose and theology around the needs of their immediate context (missional), they obviously appeal to a certain limited demographic or subculture (attractional), and in some way they’re trying to share the good news of Jesus Christ (evangelical).

Beyond semantics, though, the larger issue here is that when any group (and there are certain umbrellas underneath which emergents can be considered one group) defines itself in opposition to what came before, they start to emit an unstated but palpable arrogance that tacitly says, “we finally got it right.” Emergents aren’t the first to push back with a less defined, more open-ended, Spirit driven movement when the historical church has become too propositional, too self-assured and too institutionally rigid. Jan Huss did it. Philip Jakob Spener did it. Nikolaus von Zinzendorf did it. As the more informed emergents are aware, this is also the basic spirit that birthed the writings of the great mystics like Theresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, and ironically, it may have even been at the heart of early American revivalism (widely regarded as the predecessor to modern American Evangelicalism).

My point is that we’ve seen this movie before. The ending is always the same. Mel Gibson’s The Patriot was different in detail than Braveheart but we recognized the basic outline even before seeing it play out. It’s no different with church history. Over and over again (1) the church becomes too propositional, too self-assured, and too rigidly structured until it starts to look very much like any other hierarchical institution and very little like Jesus; (2) some honest disciples yearn for more and break off, in the process holding a mirror up to the parent institution (which, itself, begins to reform even after the discontented have left); but (3) over time, the trailblazers themselves who broke off, become too propositional, too self-assured, and too rigidly structured. They do this for the simple reason that they’re human, and that’s what humans do. Eugene Peterson nails it when he says, “In two thousand years of practice we haven’t gotten any better. You would think we would have, but we haven’t.”[1]

I’m thankful that this cycle continues. I’m thankful that there are groups who continue to yearn for a better church, and we’re all enriched when they act on this yearning. But if you’re an emergent, just acknowledge this larger history here, be humbled by it, chastened by it, and your movement will be better for it.

33)      The emerging movement needs always to recognize the beam in its own eye.

You’re seeing by now that these are all very nearly the same critique. To be sure, many emergent thinkers are sharp enough and careful enough to acknowledge the hidden irony in their own critiques of Mainline and conservative expressions of the church. If ever they aren’t, the results are tragic, because like any of us, they’re always one self-righteous remark away from becoming what they hate. Don’t become hypocritical when you point out the establishment’s hypocrisy. Don’t be triumphalistic about the fact that you’re not triumphalistic. Don’t become dogmatic about your avoidance of all dogma. That’s all.

44)       The emerging movement’s thinkers should spend at least as much (and probably more) time responding theologically to mainstream and more centrist Christians as they do to fundamentalists.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I love Peter Rollins. Seriously. So far unreciprocated, but I love Peter Rollins. Nonetheless, I’m guessing his words on the otherness or absolute subjectivity of God are little different in content (if, marketed better) than so many dissertations of  Karl Barth scholars sitting in dusty library storage rooms across the western world. Did I mention that I love Peter Rollins? But his words on doubt being a vital part of faith and discipleship say little that Douglas John Hall hasn’t been saying for forty years. My point is not that what they’ve said isn’t worth repeating. I just don’t see evidence, most of the time, that emergents are aware that some hoary old scholar buried away in some third story office of a mainstream seminary has been, for decades, saying the same “inflammatory” things that they are now saying. It just never caused quite the same stir before because those scholars didn’t think to market themselves to recovering fundamentalists. My suggestion for emergent thinkers: pay attention to what’s going on in mainstream academia. By all means, continue making these ideas accessible to people who otherwise would never encounter them. But don’t stop at the low-hanging fruit of mocking fundamentalism. Poke some holes in my own mainstream worldview so that I too can be enriched by your observations.

That’s all.

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[1] Peterson, Eugene. Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992)

Christian tribalism, part 2: the god who only loves his friends

I won’t do much summarizing of Part 1. Read it. It’s good. Basically, Christians often claim to have some special access to God’s salvation. But they really shouldn’t not just because it’s kind of mean or “close-minded” but, more importantly, because it defeats their whole purpose for existing.

To clarify what I mean by that, let me start by showing this brilliant clip from a lecture given by Peter Rollins at Rob Bell’s "Poets, Prophets, and Preachers" conference:

http://vimeo.com/19258866

What captivates me here is how it seems so much the opposite of the always louder, always arrogant “I got saved” theology that characterizes so much of North American Christianity. Not being a loud "I got saved" Christian, it hurts a little, and my internal critic goes kind of nutty, anytime someone says to me, “I like you because you're one of those calmer sorts of Christians, not like the Bible thumping religious freaks.” I get the sentiment and I have no plans of beating anyone over the head with an annotated NRSV anytime soon. But what hurts is the perception that the difference between me and those “religious freaks” is a difference of degree rather than kind, that they’re simply more intense about Jesus than I am but essentially believe the same things about him. 

They don’t.

And if there is a difference of degree—if one of us, said “religious freak” or myself, is more amped about God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ—I’d probably reverse that popular perception. The problem with “I got saved” theology isn’t that it makes too much of God’s salvation but that it makes far too little. It’s not that “religious freaks” are too excited that God is good. It’s that they’re excited about a god who isn’t nearly good enough.

If you haven’t already, watch the short clip above, and I’ll try to show you what I mean.

Anytime someone stands up and says proudly, “I know I’m saved, because I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” they’re unwittingly saying, “My god’s ability to save people is so weak and inert that it needs me to activate it through my mental assent.”

This is a far cry from the God of Jesus Christ who, out of radical grace, “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt. 5.45). Their petty, quibbling deity only loves those who love him, something that Jesus says even the craven tax collectors do (v. 46). It seems like this would raise an obvious question (though it never seems to): when Jesus asks us to love and forgive our enemies, is he asking us to actually be better than some small-minded, putz of a god that we worship? Or rather, is he telling us to love the unloveable because this is precisely how the real God is (v. 48)? I guess I'm whatever sort of Christian opts for the latter.

Notice the funny little ironies that occur when we compare the “I got saved” Christian above, who proudly claims, “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” to Pete Rollins, who claims, “I deny the resurrection.” The “I got saved” Christian, we might imagine, searches desperately day and night for the perfect apology (a logical explanation for a certain belief) with which he might beat down the arguments of his “secular” friends in order to persuade them (and himself) of the rightness of his thinking. But by making the truth of the resurrection depend so heavily on his own mental agreement—by making his own verbal confirmation the active ingredient in God’s love—he has a funny way of turning “the resurrection” into an outgrowth of his own ego, not an act of God that happened with or without anyone else’s consent. So it can't really save anyone, including himself.

No wonder so many in our culture become so belligerent and defensive when you question their version of “resurrection faith,” it veritably doesn’t exist outside the chemicals and movements of their mind. I don’t just mean that non-believers would see it this way. These "I got saved" Christians themselves seem wary that their doctrines, their worldview and even their god might just be hanging perilously by a neurological thread.

By way of contrast, Rollins, with his nonchalance about making a “case” for the resurrection but his adamancy about living into its implications (standing up for those who are on their knees, crying out for those whose tongues have been torn out, etc.), has a funny way of letting the resurrection have a reality outside himself.

I once read that the otherwise very pious theologian Karl Barth’s belief in the radical “otherness” of God, the gaping distance that separates God’s ways from humanity’s ways, was precisely what allowed him to have a carefree drink and a cigar in the parlor. Similarly, Rollin’s version of the resurrection story doesn’t seem to depend on him at all for its reality. So, yes, he's free to be a bit calmer about it at times. Yet, for that same reason, it can still be something real, revealed through him wherever and whenever he manages to live up to his discipleship calling.

Making no effort to prove his “orthodox” adherence to some bloodless doctrine about the resurrection, Rollins skips right to what resurrection living looks like. He paints a picture of resurrection’s beauty which we already recognize in our hearts when we see it, yet which happens outside of us and regardless of us.

When we learn of a God who made the decision to resurrect and reconcile the world unilaterally, that is, without consulting any of us, that will be the first and biggest step toward the end of Christian tribalism.

---

Christian tribalism, part 2: the god who only loves his friends

I won’t do much summarizing of Part 1. Read it. It’s good. Basically, Christians often claim to have some special access to God’s salvation. But they really shouldn’t not just because it’s kind of mean or “close-minded” but, more importantly, because it defeats their whole purpose for existing.

For several months, I’ve been revisiting and reflecting on this brilliant clip from a lecture given by Pete Rollins at Rob Bell’s Poets, Priests, and Prophets conference:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/19258866?portrait=0" width="400" height="300" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

I’m still trying to figure out all that has captivated me here, but I know it has to do, at least in part, with how it seems so much the opposite of the always arrogant “I got saved” theology that characterizes so much of North American Christianity.

I need to confess that it hurts a little, and my internal critic goes kind of nutty, anytime someone says to me, “I like you because your one of those calmer sorts of Christians, not like the Bible thumping religious freaks.” I get the sentiment and I have no plans of beating anyone over the head with an annotated NRSV anytime soon. But what hurts is the perception that the difference between me and those “religious freaks” is a difference of degree rather than kind, that they’re simply more intense about Jesus than I am but essentially believe the same things about him.

They don’t.

And if there is a difference of degree—if one of us, said “religious freak” or myself, is more amped about God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ—I’d probably reverse that popular perception. The problem with “I got saved” theology isn’t that it makes too much of God’s salvation but that it makes far too little. It’s not that “religious freaks” are too excited that God is good. It’s that they’re excited about a god who isn’t nearly good enough.

If you haven’t already, watch the short clip above, and I’ll try to show you what I mean.

Anytime someone stands up and says proudly, “I know I’m saved, because I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” they’re unwittingly saying, “My god’s ability to save people is so weak and inert that it needs me to activate it through my mental assent.”

This is a far cry from the God of Jesus Christ who, out of radical grace, “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Mt. 5.45). Their petty, quibbling deity only loves those who love him, something that Jesus says even the craven tax collectors do (v. 46). It seems like this would raise an obvious question: when Jesus asks us to love and forgive our enemies, is he asking us to be better than some small-minded, putz of a god? Or rather, is he telling us to love the unloveable because this is precisely how the real God is (v. 48)?  

Notice the little ironies that occur when we compare the “I got saved” Christian above, who proudly claims, “I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior,” to Pete Rollins, who claims, “I deny the resurrection.” The “I got saved” Christian, we might imagine, searches desperately day and night for the perfect apology (a rationalization or explanation for a certain belief or what Rollins calls a “power discourse”[1]) with which he might beat down the arguments of his “secular” friends in order to persuade them (and himself) of the rightness of his thinking. But by making the truth of the resurrection depend so heavily on his own mental agreement—by making his own verbal confirmation the active ingredient in God’s love—he has a funny way of turning “the resurrection” into an outgrowth of his own ego, not an act of God that happened with or without anyone else’s consent.

No wonder so many in our culture become so belligerent and defensive when you question their version of “resurrection faith,” it veritably doesn’t exist outside the chemicals and movements of their mind. I don’t just mean that non-believers would see it this way. These Christians themselves seem wary that their doctrines, their worldview and even their God might just be hanging perilously by a neurological thread.

By way of contrast, Rollins, with his nonchalance about making a “case” for the resurrection but his adamancy about living into its implications (standing up for those who are on their knees, crying out for those whose tongues have been torn out, etc.), has a funny way of letting the resurrection have a reality outside himself.

I once read that the otherwise very pious theologian Karl Barth’s belief in the radical “otherness” of God, the gaping distance that separates God’s ways from humanity’s ways, was precisely what allowed him to have a carefree drink and a cigar in the parlor. Similarly, Rollin’s version of the resurrection story doesn’t seem to depend on him at all for its reality. Yet it can be revealed wherever and whenever he manages to live up to his discipleship calling.

Making no effort to prove his “orthodox” adherence to some bloodless doctrine about the resurrection, Rollins skips right to what resurrection living looks like. He paints a picture of resurrection’s beauty which we already recognize in our hearts when we see it, yet which happens outside of us and regardless of us.

When we learn of a God who made the decision to resurrect and reconcile the world unilaterally, that is, without consulting any of us, that will be the first and biggest step toward the end of Christian tribalism.

Christian tribalism, part 1: the problem with “Matrix Christianity.”

I picked up a disturbing book today, the sort you would only find on a derelict, old bookshelf in a dusty, church library, written by…we’ll call him Ludwig Churchman. This book offered nothing new in the way of thought…or really, nothing in the way of thought. But because I spend most of my study time with books that are…umm, hi, uhh…good, I was appalled at how uncritically and effortlessly he was able to restate every stupid thing that has ever subverted the radicalness of the Christian faith. One passage in particular read:

Peter said, “There is salvation in no one else” (Acts 4.12). Is that true?...How about people who have never heard of Jesus? It is not up to us to decide their fate. God alone knows how to judge them. Even they, however, if they are saved, are saved because Jesus has won the battle and has paid the price for them.

What interests me here are not the stock answers that we’ve all heard out of the mouths of Christians at some point or another but the (don’t get thrown off by this one) metanarrative from which they predictably flow. A metanarrative is the biggest story around all the other stories by which we make sense of reality. It is so big and all-encompassing that we don’t even realize it’s there, just as a fish doesn’t realize that they’re swimming in water. So, for instance, one narrative or smaller story that many Americans are especially fond of is: “People that work hard will rise to the top.” This small story is often debated, of course, but the metanarrative, the story so big that most don’t even realize it’s there, let alone debate its validity, is: “The top (a place defined by high status, power, and wealth) is a desirable place to be.”  Many devote their entire lives to this big story, and for that very reason, don’t consider that it could be any other way. Americans may be especially worshipful toward this big story, but we didn’t invent it. Blogs don’t allow enough characters to cite all the places where Jesus challenged it in his own time. We’ll just say it’s almost all he ever talked about in our gospels.

So that’s a metanarrative, now, back to this stupid book. This passage may not strike anyone as the most belligerently tribalistic that they’ve ever heard. But (aside from the fact that it’s the first thing I turned to) I cite it because it’s precisely when Christians try to be this innocuous and non-committal that the tribalism of their metanarrative becomes the most powerful. Like when someone speaks with a passive aggressive tone, what’s really disturbing is that you agree with the words that they’re saying…except, you don’t. What I mean is, and this is really devilish, the whole passage can take on a completely different meaning depending on the assumptions the reader brings to it.

There is no shortage of stupidity here, and there isn’t time to cover it all, but the real shenanigans begin with the assumptions that almost definitely undergird Mr. Churchman’s words—that he unquestioningly assumes that salvation is something so simple and straightforward that we need not discuss it beyond who’s in and who’s out, that who’s in and who’s out is decided by fate (which would seem to contradict his other assumption that it actually matters with regard to salvation whether one is a Christian), that God keeps a ledger of all the sins of humanity and refuses to balance it until someone suffers (theologians call this “substitutionary atonement” and its image of God as a “divine child-abuser” doesn’t jive well with the concept of radical grace where God just throws the ledger out entirely)—but the metanarrative I want to focus on, that the author obviously takes for granted is that God’s salvation can somehow be tapped into by certain people, namely Christians. Like when that metal thing is inserted into the back of Neo’s head, and he is suddenly “plugged in” to “The Matrix,” this author takes for granted that something has clicked somehow in the minds of Christians, and they now have some sort of special access to salvation. 

For maximum irony, he’s commenting on the book of Acts which, looking at it as a whole rather than misusing one of its verses, could be summarized as the story of the Holy Spirit running roughshod over the entire world completely uninvited from “Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1.8). Salvation in this book is a unilateral movement of God’s Spirit. It sucks pious Pharisees and impious jail-keepers and Athenian philosophers and Roman centurions into its vortex willy-nilly. That anyone would claim any kind of special access to the Holy Spirits’ movements in Acts is absurd and unthinkable.

Just so there’s no confusion, the so-called “mainstream denominations” (Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc.) have subtle (and, of course, polite) ways of doing the same ledger-keeping that goes on in Evangelical circles with their more in-your-face litmus test, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and savior?” Frankly, while still very stupid, the in-your-face brand of exclusionism might be refreshing in congregations that have learned, institutionally, to demand the same thing but with a passive smile on their faces. For Lutherans, this is especially ironic since we talk so much about grace which, by definition, can’t coexist with any kind of litmus test.

This series of blogs starts with the assumption that God either saves the whole world and is therefore worthy of worship or doesn’t and isn’t. It’s intended to deconstruct this pervasive “big story” that is almost never questioned: that God’s salvation can be specially tapped into by some to the exclusion of others.