those poor, unenlightened, scientific peoples

Future peoples will look back on what is today called the “scientific worldview” and feel that same mixture of benevolent pity and gentle mockery with which we currently look back and view the medieval worldview with its guardian angels and demons. I don’t mean that they’ll muse at how far behind our scientific information was, when compared to theirs. Everyone already expects that they will have learned more science by then and wouldn’t be surprised to time travel and confirm that that has been the case. I mean that future peoples will laugh at and mock our scientific worldview, the assumption that science can provide a comprehensive mode and means of relating to one’s universe

Future peoples with future outlooks, future spiritualities, future ways of conceptualizing the divine, and the origins of it all will marvel that there was a time when science, a discipline that deals in that one very small aspect of reality which can be observed and measured, could have written this check that it can’t possibly cash.

In the same way that we laugh at wonder-drug, cure-alls that quack pharmacists used to pedal before modern medicine, future peoples will parody and jape at how, “as recently as the 21^st century,” many people actually believed that the very important but narrow field of science was a sort of panacea for every human question.  

Three groups in our time will be spared from these future jests:

1)    The least educated, who we’re never bothered much by science in the first place.

2)    People like my Mom, who know as much as any lay person should about popular science but who have enough common sense to know its limitations.

3)    And ironically enough, actual scientists, who know better than anybody the limitations of their discipline.

That leaves people who know enough science to be dangerous but not enough to know what they don’t know.

One of the podcasts that I listen to religiously is Pete Holmes’, “You Made It Weird,” where one time fundamentalist turned spiritual seeker, Pete, interviews other comedians. And always, toward the end of the show, he asks them a few questions about faith and spirituality. In the most recent interview, Adam Conover said something that was representative of a majority of the answers that come from these comedians, a disproportionate number of whom identify as agnostic or atheist.  

After Pete had described an experience of awe and wonder that he equated with “worship,” Conover responded that he had had similar experiences but “What you call worship, I call understanding.” He then went on to speak of how learning new facts about the world inspires in him feelings of awe.

What’s interesting is that Conover is not dumb. He’s very smart. Most successful comedians are. But to say something like “What you call worship, I call understanding,” one must fundamentally misunderstand what it means to worship, what it means to understand, or both.

This statement assumes that “worship” is what we do when we know less and “understand” is what we do when we know more. But anyone who has ever really both worshipped and understood knows that these two things are apples and oranges. There is no two dimensional continuum which allows us to travel from worship on the one end to understanding on the other.

But what Conover is really parroting is the popular notion, widely held and almost never analyzed in our time, that things like “worship” are old and outmoded and things like “understanding” are new and progressive.

Almost the opposite, I would say. What he calls “understanding” reflects a very datable notion that emerged in what we call the enlightenment. It’s the notion that knowing through human reason, informed by empirical observation, is the only type of knowing that has any value. And this isn’t new at all. It is actually a two or three century old notion that reached its shelf-life right around the time of Heisenberg and Einstein when the straightforward link between observation and knowing was shattered into trillions of trillions of illogical and unobservable little zips and flashes of energymatter and timespace.

But there is always a lag time between these paradigm shattering discoveries and their adoption in the popular worldview of a given age. Centuries sometimes.

But the more central point is that the general atheistic party line of this historical age called the enlightenment reflects, in philosophy speak, not an informational problem but an epistemological problem. Epistemology is the study not of what we know but of how we come to know what we know. When that great chapter in world history called the enlightenment—of which the somewhat hackneyed atheism of our day is a hangover—decided that reason was the only faculty by which we come to relate to our universe and the divine, it was like saying let’s all start boxing with our hands behind our back or go skiing with our eyes closed.  

If this will be seen by those future-lings as an epistemological deficit of this age, then what are those faculties that they will once again embrace?

That will be part 2 of this blog.

prophecy--it's not just fortune telling.

"The Nazis were bad" sounds like an obvious enough statement to most levelheaded adults in this day and age. But there was a time when it wasn't obvious at all. 

Because it was such a small handful of highly educated clergy, theologians, public officials, military officers and other leaders who were able to see what was happening early on and take the stand that everyone else should have been taking against Hitler, those who did, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth, and others, are sometimes spoken of as some sort of oracles or fortune tellers. For those with just a passing knowledge of that time, understand that the outcry of this small minority against the Nazi agenda started almost a full two decades before the whole world would know what had unfolded at Auschwitz or Treblinka.

Of course, the basic character of Nazi ideology should have been clear to everyone, even before the atrocities started in earnest: worship of power for its own sake, the Übermensch philosophy, which says that there is no truth other than what the strongest guy in the room says is true, suspicion of minorities and immigrants, disdain for the weak and feeble, glorification of war, and so on. But few saw or chose to see what was really going on. The party was not just introducing one more candidate to choose from on election day. They were subverting civilization and replacing it with tribalism and subverting sanity with fear. Among the many ways that those in the majority church justified their silence in the face of this movement was this old chestnut, which people frequently regurgitate when they want to enjoy their religious club and not be bothered by Jesus and his whole thing: “the church shouldn’t be involved in politics.”

The relationship between telling the truth about the world as it is and reading the writing on the wall for where the world is heading is about the oldest tradition we have. It begins with Amos and Isaiah, chronologically the oldest books in the Bible, and is picked up by Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, John of Patmos and several dozen others.

This is one reason why there is so much confusion now, among Christians, about the biblical job description of a prophet. Most assume it has something to do with predicting the future, magic 8-ball style, and that the sole job of the Old Testament prophets was to foreshadow Christmas (also assumed to be a safely non-political, religious event, all the poems about bringing “down the powerful from their thrones” and King Herod’s mad attempts to assassinate an infant, notwithstanding). Even if we accept the go to lines that Christians normally point to, this understanding of prophecy requires us to throw out 99.9% of what the prophets said--which is unfortunate because they said a lot that could really stand to be repeated today.

To be fair, the great prophets do often seem to blur the line between telling the truth about the present and telling the future, but that won’t seem like such a magical talent if we simply compare what they were doing to what Bonhoeffer was doing. If there is predictive power in what Isaiah or Jeremiah have to say, it’s not because they have some magical sixth sense about the future. It’s because the future is always a product of the truths of the present. To put it another way, if they seemed to have seen something coming that no one else saw, it wasn’t a matter of future-telling but of truth-telling.

And here is my point about Bonhoeffer. He was a very smart guy, but it didn’t take great intelligence to see what the Nazis were about. He was an incredibly well-educated guy, but there were lots of well-educated people who said nothing. He was a fastidiously moral person, but it didn’t take a moral giant to see that Hitler and his cronies were in the wrong.

Rather, what set Bonhoeffer apart was something that I call moral courage.

We can swirl a brandy around in a plushly upholstered arm chair and discuss the nature of morality until we’re blue in the face, and we’ll get hardly a little bit closer and maybe quite a lot farther from “the good” than any toddler who knows to share, talk nicely, don’t hurt, and so on. But someone with moral courage believes that right action is the only kind of right there is. They get antsy when they see our uniquely human capacity to ponder the good become an excuse not to do it, let alone when we use that same capacity to justify most any evil.

That you should “practice what you preach” sounds obvious enough. But I don’t believe that moral courage comes from just anywhere. It requires a profound confidence that our future well-being is not secured by any worldly attempts to stay safe, defend what we have, or “fly under the radar.” Death is the biggest guarantee in life, so keeping out of the fray rather than doing the right thing is no guarantee of safety, but it may well be a guarantee of a life not lived.

If the story of Jesus the Christ’s life, death, and resurrection gives us confidence that it’s finally God who gives, redeems, and then saves our lives, it also broadens the scope of our concerns. To no longer fear death is to see that there is more to live for than just getting by. It is to yearn for the kingdom of God more than the preservation of self.  

And to discover the kingdom of God is not to discover a moral or an ethic at all. It is to discover grace.

"I damn you to hell," we said to God

A long time ago, an ingenious theologian with a chronically guilty conscience and a neurotic suspicion of his own sexuality started writing about the book of Genesis.  He said many things that still frame the worldview of Christians and, unwittingly, “post-Christendom” culture. But maybe the most influential of his ideas is the concept of “the fall.”

It’s not that the Adam and Eve story doesn’t genuinely contain insights into things like human pride, idolatry, and moral self-deception, which all leave the human creature in need of redemption. And more conservative theologians are absolutely right to protect against wishy-washy-ness on such matters (though, I don’t tend to point my finger in the same direction as they, when I’m coming up with modern day examples of each).

But when reading the Bible, we need to always remember that the ancient Hebrews tended to speak in story rather than dogma. They probably held this narrative with a light grip, intending it to open up conversation about the human situation rather than shut it down. It was old, “concupiscent” St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) who calcified this heavily mythological language into a pseudo-scientific explanation of the genetically transmitted disease called “original sin.”

Since then the equation in most Christian minds has looked like this:

God – Jesus = Angry God.

So deep has this assumption run for the majority of Christians that anyone who would question it is immediately accused of being liberal or loosey-goosey in their interpretation of scripture (read: their interpretation of Genesis 2-3 and not the hundreds of stories that suggest something else). So the burden of proof seems to always be on any theologian who would show how Jesus was able to persuade, cajole, or otherwise satiate God into no longer being angry.

In other words, the only remaining question on the table is to show how

God + Jesus = Happy God.

Many theories as to how Jesus “atones” for our God-angering ways have been suggested: Jesus as a ritual sacrifice for our sin, Jesus as a ransom (in the sense of a payment for the release of slaves) for our sin, Jesus as substitute or surrogate for the punishment we deserve, Jesus as payment to the devil, Jesus as trick played on the devil, and subtle variations of the same. Since it seems we’re all agreed that God is angry in the first place, the common thread in all of this is that some sort of transaction needs to take place in order for God to ease off.

Like the idea of “the fall,” not one of these “atonement theories” is totally unbiblical. But they all ossify what is intended to be a loosely gripped metaphor or image into bone-hard dogma. They put a white-knuckled stranglehold around something that should be held lightly. It’s as if the women weeping at the foot of the cross looked at each other with the self-evident realization, “Ah, yes. Clearly this gruesome death is payment to God for the sins of humanity.” 

But in the 16^th century, there was another ingenious theologian with a chronically guilty conscience and a neurotic suspicion of his own sexuality. Driven nearly mad by his own self-loathing and resentful of a God who would create a flawed humanity only to punish them for being what they are, he began to ask a different kind of question:

What if Jesus isn’t a sort of burnt offering that we give to God? Instead, what if it is he who reveals how God is to us? What if the cross is not where Jesus satisfies God’s thirst for bloody, retributive justice? What if the cross is where Jesus shows us how God responds to our bloody, retributive justice? 

If all previous theories were like pieces added to the atonement puzzle, Martin Luther was sweeping all the pieces off the table. He was not tacking one more atonement theory onto an already overgrown list but was turning the whole way in which we think about atonement on its head. He saw clearly that, rather than let Jesus inform how we see God, most “atonement” theology had actually been one big effort to protect our core assumption about God from being contradicted by the actual Jesus—what he actually reveals, if we take incarnation seriously.

What actually happened is we put Jesus to death, and he died saying, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” We found a clever way to twist that into yet another story about God being the wrathful one. That is to say, Luther realized that most Christian theology was being done sans Christ. It’s as if Jesus became human, talked, healed, was crucified, was risen, and we all paused for a second, stroked our beard a couple times, and said, “Huh, that was weird.” Then we went right back to speculating on how to turn God-in-the-clouds’ frown upside down just as we had been doing before.

 At one point, Luther called any theory that would make Christ’s death into a satisfaction that God demands for our sin the “beginning, origin, door, and entrance to all the abominations” (WA 51:487, 29). Satisfaction, he said, “Should be done to humans but not to God…otherwise Christ would have stayed with his entire satisfaction for us in heaven” (WA 302:291, 34ff.).

In other words, if it were God who’s anger needed to be appeased the whole crucifixion could have taken place up in the clouds. There would be no need play out the drama on earth and make us, at best, third party spectators. Jesus’ suffering and death as a flesh and blood human would only be necessary if it was we who demanded it.

Suddenly Luther’s world, Bible, and Trinity made sense in a way they never had before: if Christ is not the handler of God but the revelation of God, then one need only look around at the plain facts at the foot of the cross to see that it is not God who requires Jesus’ death, it is humanity. Putting all speculation aside about what God must be thinking up “in the heavens,” these are the plain facts on the “hill of the skull,” if we take Jesus seriously: we are the angry ones, God is being gracious; we are the violent ones, God is refusing to retaliate; we are the grudge-holders, God is being forgiving; we are the ones who refuse to drop it, God is saying, “It is finished.”

The irony that gradually became clear to Luther was that, for all of their talk about the seriousness of human sin, the atonement theories of the medieval theologians all had a subtle way of insinuating that God was the problem. Not us. It’s as if they were all saying, “Hey, man, don’t look at us. We all want to forgive and forget. It’s God who won’t let it go until someone suffers.”  

But the fact remains that Jesus’ death does not seem to placate an angry God. It seems to placate an angry us.

Notice how other atonement theories imply that God is inconsistent at best, a mad tyrant at worst. God creates humanity somewhat shoddily and then gets mad at them for being what they are. Rather than just fix the problem, God requires the one good one be tortured to death so that all the bad ones can be forgiven, and this is called “justice.” 

But Luther’s new paradigm preserves God’s integrity. God has been consistent all along. God created the world and loved it. The Word came into the world as flesh and loved it. The world put him to death, he responded by loving it. On the third day, God raised him for the sake of the world because he loved it.

We try to ignore God, we try to distort God, we try to mock God, we try to put God to death, and through it all, God just goes on “[making] his sun rise on both the evil and the good” (Mt. 5:45).

That’s the only “Good News” that can really be called either “new” or “good.”

Alleluia!

the comma between Jesus birth and death

In the word-frugal cadence of an aging man speaking in a second language, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann said this in a recent interview: “Between the birth and death of Christ there is a fairly emphasized comma.”

The legendary thinker was quipping on the habit that Christians have had, dating back to the authors of the Apostles’ Creed, of embellishing the importance of the last few chapters of our gospel stories and forgetting the rest of them. Perhaps the culmination of this 18 century trend is the tagline in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ which reads, “He was born in order to die.”

What we’re left with when we drop that “comma” is the three day narrative on that back end of Holy Week. What’s missing is any clue from Jesus himself as to why these three days might have any significance for us. The knee-jerk responses—“he died as punishment for my sins,” “he is risen so that I might be risen too”—are little help. Thought through critically, these are interpretations of these events that later generations have handed onto us, and if they appear self-evident now, it’s only due to sheer repetition. They were self-evident to no one standing before either cross or gravesite during those strange days. These first witnesses had neither Augustine’s 4^th and 5th century writings nor Anselm’s 11^th century writings to inform them. They were left to scratch their heads and look back across their memories of Jesus’ life, asking, “What does this mean?”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Christians would make this <.02% of Jesus’ life story into the main thing. The death and resurrection by themselves are theologically far more malleable than that “fairly emphasized comma.” They are not as demanding as the Sermon on the Mount, as confusing as the parable of the dishonest land manager, or as upsetting as the whole fiasco with the money changing stations in the temple.

If we subtly brush all those other events to the side, then the meaning of death and resurrection can be shaped as we please. They can ease whatever existential worries we might have, while, conveniently, asking very little of us or the status quos of our world during this lifetime. Baptism becomes fire insurance, life becomes a comfortable waiting room, and “what happens when you die?” is promoted to the only meaningful theological question.

But there is a tradeoff for this kind of easy existential satisfaction (Bonhoeffer called this “cheap grace,” though not, as some believe he meant it, to simply reinstate legalism). What we give up is any kind of purpose for which the Gospel might call us to strive, any call to embrace this world for all of its warts, and any of the joy of Zaccheus when Jesus told him, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” In short, all we give up in order to have just our death and resurrection cake is everything that Jesus lived and died for in the first place. The risk and the hard work of incarnation is undone, and God can once become scarce as a disembodied abstraction up in the clouds, perhaps just leaving some paperwork to guarantee us an afterlife at the end of the day. And we can get back to whiling away our time in entertainment and consumer distraction until our number is called.

But assuming Jesus wasn’t just yammering uselessly before fulfilling his Gibson-given purpose to die, what else could that “comma” have to show us?

Well, to name a few things:

All but one of our gods will abandon us. Take, for instance, our primary god, money. Turns out, we’ve been worshipping, fretting for, and fixating on a god that can’t even stand up to some moths and rust, let alone preserve our lives.

All social hierarchies and stratifications will be flipped on their heads. It’s been lost on generations of Christians, but Mary apparently intuited it even before her first morning sickness (Luke 1:46-55). Status and influence are a hoax, hierarchy is doomed, most of the titles and honors that we’ve been working so hard to achieve will be forgotten, and the only meaningful association will be association with an itinerate carpenter’s son.

Our private moral status no longer matters. All the times we’ve turned down a potential friendship with someone for fear that they might “drag us down to their level,” all the times we’ve patted ourselves on the back for the vices that we don’t have, all the times we’ve frantically dusted the windowsills before receiving company because “cleanliness is next to godliness;” too bad. No one cares.

Life is not fair. You want to beat yourself up? You want to receive the “forty lashes minus one” for some terrible thing you did? You want to skulk about with your tail between your legs because you can never forgive yourself? You want to punish others for the same reason? Tough. Our heavenly father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 5:45).

Safety is not the overriding concern. Of all these things, this one feels the most heretical to even write in the post 9/11 world and the age of the “helicopter parent,” but the gospel narratives read almost exclusively as a series of dangerous binds that Jesus gets himself into, essentially for loving the wrong people and not saluting the right institutions. This ultimately leads to his own shameful demise, just before which, he tells his disciples, “…And you can too.” As a theology professor of my alma mater is noted for saying, “There is more to do with our lives now than simply to preserve them.”

Our religions don’t matter…Yes…Even that one! Jesus didn’t come into a world that was split between Christians and non-Christians and tell the former that they would be saved. Neither did he ever even hint that he would be establishing new doctrinal thoughts or holy institutions to which we must ascribe in order for his work to become activated for us. Rather he came into a world of stoic philosophers and neo-Platonists, of resurrection believing Jews and non-resurrection believing Jews, of Greek pagans and Roman pagans, of pious old ladies and iconoclastic young men. He was rejected by them all, he died at the hands of them all, and he was raised for them all. He asked for none of their permission to do this.

Hallelujah.