Let me first of all start off by admitting that I cannot defend the whole enterprise called systematic theology. That is, I cannot defend it as some absolute set of propositions each of which relate to another in an eternal unified whole. I think that this point stands in two important sense. First, for those who would defend such a view of systematics, I don’t believe that they’re defending systematics as a whole but, generally, their own systematic positions, which is a power move to the utmost degree (conscientiously advocated or not). Systematics is and must remain open both in terms of the fallibility of human knowing and in terms of the flow of being in its becoming. Our propositions and understandings of God do, will, and must change. Neither can I defend the general hubris by means of which systematic theologians have upheld this discipline in the past.  Systematic theology is not an end in itself, which it has too often been taken to be, but a means toward the proclamation of the Word in thought, word, and deed.

For now, I want to focus on the critique that I believe is taking place tonight that academic theology is “impractical,” unable to do anything about the contemporary situation. To that I say, precisely.

Let me be clear, here: we must act within our world and open paths in this world toward peace, justice, and love. I will never decry the importance of something like “action,” often expressed as “activism.” However, activism acts on a worldview that it believes to be true, if not absolutely, then certainly with a great degree of probability. This is where disciplines like systematic theology come in.

Systematics and other academic-theological disciplines are, for one, activities in their own right. They are analyses of the world or past worlds as the are and have been such that in these worlds. The difference is, however, between the activity of thinking in systematic or academic theological terms and other activities (or activisms)is that thought is a manner of activity that opens up new interpretive possibilities–new ways of understanding the complex web of beings-in-relation that forms our world.

In this regard, the focus of systematic theology is not found in ensconcing a particular actuality (a possibility come to fruition through, say, bodily activity); it is found in opening up ever greater interpretive possibilities–interpretive possibilities that expose the complexities of the world in which we live at least enough to yield some humility in the theologian and activist alike. Systematics, then, brings nuance to a world that we too often want to interpret in the blacks and whites of “absolutely right” and “absolutely wrong,” which usually yields the violent logic of “me against them.” Systematics, then, holds a critical function (in the strict sense of critical), positing space between a overriding desire to act directly and the need to think that action through.

In saying this, however, I would contend that the proof of my argument is in the pudding. Thus, I want, secondly, to challenge skeptics of this idea to a task. For 30 days, read someone–an op-ed columnist, perhaps–with whom you greatly disagree. (I make my critical thinking students do something like this, by the way.) Come to know their thought and be able to think their thought after them to such a degree that you’re able to predict how they would be able to approach specific questions. Get into the intelligibility of what they say. I believe that you will have a simultaneous experience. You will be freed not from your disagreement of the person but of your desire to belittle them. This is no small step as too often it is our desire to belittle that deprives from basic understandings of opposing positions. You will also become freed, however, to see through holes in your previous worldview such that, even if you’re still not open to this particular person’s thought in and of itself, you are open to new positions and new possibilities from other persons with competing worldviews.

Take all that and apply it to the attempt to illuminate a basic theological worldview, and you’ll hopefully see the importance of systematic theology and its practice. Systematic theology illuminates new possibilities for the expression of faith for the activist and theologian alike such that neithers’ expression could remain absolute in its contextuality.

Does this, by the way,  mean that the activist must stop her work? Absolutely not! It simply reminds the activist that it takes more than their work to open the possibility of their work in the first place. Her work will open up new grounds by means of which to think through world, for sure; but it also rests on the illumination of worldviews that both she and others have opened up through theological and philosophical exploration in the first place.

• Why haven’t Emergent folks joined the mainline denominations?
• Why have the negatives of evangelicalism been so easy to describe and virulently rebuke, while the negatives of the mainline denominations have barely shown up in Emergent concerns?
• Why hasn’t the Emergent critique of evangelicalism’s involvement with the American nation-state and its tendency toward creating theologically exclusive boundaries not found root in a critique of mainline denominations, whose political interests also conflate the church with nation-state interests?

I do not need to recap Deacon Bo’s responses, but I’m especially fond of the way he answers the third question. I’d highly suggest reading it. That said, I’d like to respond to Deacon Bo and Brandon Morgan alike concerning the first question asked: Why haven’t Emergent folks joined the mainline denominations? I want to respond with another question: why would we mainliners want emergent folk to join our churches? I’ll proceed by proposing and rejecting a few possible answers. (Note the caveats at the end.)**

One reason for a mainliner to suggest this move is that, indeed, the mainline side of this debate is in material decline and has been for some time. (I want to be absolutely clear, here, I’m speaking hypothetically, here, not at all of Morgan’s intentions.)  As Deacon Bo rightly points this fact out, the mainline churches are dying. “Death,” however, is a subtle, spiritually loaded term thrown around by emergent folk too often (again, not by Bo in his post), and it signifies that, somehow, God has rejected us and our stubborn, recalcitrant ways. I doubt it—at least not the God to whom I pray. In fact, this death may be little more than the consolidation of over-extended parishes, which will occur over the next 7-15 years. After such a consolidation, there will probably be a critical mass able to sustain each parish, Diocese, and affiliated publishing companies.

But after such a consolidation, I would still want to ask, so what? Why would we want persons to come and join our parishes who do not value the same facets of the Christian faith that we value? This need not mean we reject anyone who does not want to be a part of the parishes that we currently run, nor does it mean that we ought to devalue their persons. However, I would certainly question the wisdom of making any overarching attempt at appeasing such persons and trying to get them to join this particular club. Indeed, there’s plenty of space in the US and, frankly, in the Kingdom of God for various expressions of Christ to co-exist (prayerful aside: Dear God help me for just quoting the corniest bumper-sticker ever made) through a variety of structures. Thus, I again ask in response to both emergent and mainline folk alike who want emergent folk to join mainliners: why does there need to be a hegemony of Christian values or structures, either mainline or emergent? Why must we two room together when, in fact, we could simply be friendly neighbors?

Of course, I also offer the same question to emergent folk who, at times, wrongly seem to believe that there is no room for mainliners within the Kingdom. Thus, I can put the above re-phrasal of the above question in another way, too, one more explicitly directed to emergent folk: other than what I perceive as valid critiques of the mainline church’s over-politicization of its institutional structures to the end of often forgetting the importance of the proclamation of the Gospel, when I hear critiques from emergent folk of the things that Mainline folk tend generally to value—tradition and historical lineage, liturgical and unvaried worship style, community-church orientation—I always think to myself that those are precisely the reasons that I attend, and live within, the Episcopal Church and its structures. I want mainline churches, in fact, to get out of their over-politicization (as Bo mentions) and remember their dedication to their traditions–theological and liturgical–as important out-flowings of the Spirit! That said, I think Bishops are important spiritually, historically, and functionally (with the Lutherans, however, I affirm the absolute equality of ALL believers and give Bishops no “ontological” priority); I want a liturgy that I know, and trust, that allows me to ground my week in the constancy of the God’s loving Spirit; I value the creedal expressions and interpretations of a faith that have outlasted any critique of them, that give voice in a way far more profound than they gain credit for these days in expressing  God as Emanuel; and I greatly value the communities who center themselves in service and worship around precisely these things. Indeed, were those things changed, I would go to a different church!

Let me offer up, however, what are perhaps the two most important reasons I would question any attempt at trying to draw emergent folk into the Mainline. First, and on a very critical note, there is for me a dangerous trend in emergent circles that I believe they have appropriated from their previous Evangelical circles–it is a trend, at any rate, I try to leave behind in my past life. They are far too reliant on big personalities to ensure their success as communities of worshippers for me to be comfortable with. I don’t want to be a part of a church that points to a person in the form of a pastor or a spiritual leader; I want a church whose leader deflects attention by pointing to Christ himself and the love he exuded. For whatever failures one can attribute to the mainline, including being anti-entrepreneurial (a critique that I often hear and very much agree with), its peoples do not rely on cults of personality. They rely on structures that, yes, are sometimes all too absent personality but nonetheless able to point toward God, through Christ and his proclamation, despite the person “in charge” of them. (Whether the will continue to do so is a different question.) Unless these facets of emergent life are left behind, I don’t actually want emergent folks in mainline churches, even if I’m happy to worship beside them and appreciate the fullness of their Christian faith despite them not existing within my structures.

Second, and on a far friendlier note, I ultimately think that Deacon Bo is right: generally, emergent folk don’t want to be here. They find spiritual fulfillment and divine love elsewhere. Why should I want to detract from their experience by trying to right them and bring them forcibly “for their own good” into my community? Despite even my harshest critique above, emergent folk are doing fine, and I have no wish to take away from what they have found.

**I completely understand that certain emergent folk do, in fact, reside within the mainline church structures and want to remain there. But, it seems to me, such emergent persons are often “ignored” within the emergent community itself. One questions that I have, then, is whether there are several “senses” to the word emergent, including who fits where and why. Those to whom I’m responding in this blog probably would not include emergent “sympathizers,” for lack of a better term, already within mainline church structures. It would be those who think mainline structure are either (a) meaningless or (b) pointless.

The New York Times just published a storyabout a cadre of Bishops  in Alabama suing the state over the passage of a new and tough immigration law. They (rightly) claim that this law is so ambiguously written that it could disallow them the right to act toward immigrants as they claim Christians are commanded: as good Samaritans. I don’t pretend to know what the right answer for immigration reform is in the US; I tend to think that the way that each side often looks at the current issue is, on the right, xenophobic and, on the left, unsustainable. However, I’m not trying to conjure another simplistic debate one way or the other in this post. (I’m implicating my above views in this st

atement.) What I would like to say is that I’m in complete solidarity with my own Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, and the Roman Catholic Church of Alabama on this matter and that they and their suit will be in my prayers.

Perhaps more importantly from a theological-political level, however, the issue raises for me the importance of the separation of Church and State in the U.S. and the tension that exists between the ultimate allegences of each institution. On the one hand, the Church stands always and forever for a Kingdom that we cannot bring but must do our best to imitate in the here and now; they are right to see this as a “Kingdom issue,” for lack of a better term. In this Kingdom, there is neither Jew or Greek, man or woman. All tribalisms die. On the other hand, the State necessarily stands for the collective interests of its people, protecting them and their material and legal well-being first. (I’m not claiming that’s what the State of Alabama is actually doing, by the way; I’d probably believe just the opposite. I won’t doubt that the State is trying to protect its citizens, however.) This means the state is a tribal formation grounded in the idea of common-law and heritage.

However these tensions between Church and State ought to play themselves out within individuals and institutions, the beauty of this particular issue is how it exemplifies the impossibility of the situation: that these two institutions do and will butt heads. If they don’t, one of the two institutions is doing something wrong!

As the old saying goes, “when it rains, it pours.” And somehow, the world has been pouring spirituality down on me as of late! I have to admit, I’ve rather enjoyed it.

Despite this pouring out of spirituality in my life, I’ve noticed a theme emerge in these spiritual formation courses and opportunities that need not be there. Often times, spiritual organizations “market” (for honest lack of a better term) themselves in such a way that they will help you to get “deeper” into the divine than any silly dogmatic, doctrinal, or intellectual statement could ever bring you; they’ll help you to enter into God more personally. While the latter clause certainly presents a good goal, I simply wonder whether the former method—getting beyond doctrinal statements and properly reflective thinking—is necessary to it.

The unfortunate view that we moderns and “post-moderns” have adopted with regard to intellectuality is that we tend to think of it as somehow “neutral,” “unaffected by the world around it,” “objective,” and after truths for which we have no feeling. (“Postmoderns,” if this word means anything in particular, would generally deny that we are neutral but tend to uphold neutrality as something like an ideal for perfected reason). So we conceive of the height of intellect in terms of calculative procedures: hypothesizing, experimenting, verifying, and tabulating. We’ve defined thinking, in other words, by the empirical method that emerges from the Enlightenment and its focus on the natural sciences. I actually don’t think this is such a bad view of intellect in certain situations, but I do think it constitutes a reduction of the intellect and its ideality such that, with this notion in mind, it is no wonder that talk of getting beyond intellect for getting deeper into the divine emerges in this context.

Yet, intellectualism has not always been thought of in this way. Take Plato. For Plato, the intellect is something like another desire. That is, in the same way that a hungry stomach desires food, the intellect desires truth. Indeed, for Plato, the intellect is given over to an erotic drive to reach the Truth, the entirety of which I need not get into. The point being thus: the intellect is far from a neutral observer of things that merely convey s ideas through words to a detached mind. The intellect is passionate, directed, and “in love.” The intellect is our movement through the real to God in God’s self, at least for Plato.

We can see this Platonic principle at work, too, in a myriad of Christian mystics and thinkers, namely, the idea that the intellect does not merely hinder our relationship with the divine, but is a properly spiritual avenue for expressing that relationship. Such an understanding has been generally called “faith seeking understanding.” One need not go any further than Anselm, the founder of this saying, to understand the true context of this saying. His Monologion especially is an intellectual appropriation of a prior faith given to him by the spirit and expressed in words. It is a prayer, or an intellectual reflection on his prayers, that grasps at doctrines such as the nature of God’s Trinitarian being and Goodness, among other things.

This isn’t to say that Anselm believes himself to understood or thought through his faith fully, which is why there is a sense in which “going beyond intellect” holds some sway in spirituality. Rather than “getting beyond” intellect, I think the better way to think through the issue is in the following ways. On the one hand, one cannot properly think through the being of God without being centered in God’s being pre-cognitively; on the other hand, if one is brought into the being of God pre-cognitively, then thinking is a perfect expression of one’s spirituality and one of the major means through which we come to, worship, and exist in relationship to God.

In other words, thinking through doctrine such as the nature of the being of the God-man, the Trinity, the idea of salvation, etc., is anything but a hindrance to entering into a deeper spiritual relationship with God. I would at least claim that, as a Christian, thoughtful reflection on precisely these doctrines allow us to draw ever nearer to the divine and the divine’s love for us, found for us on all sides of the cross. The key, then, is to simply not accept the statements dogmatically—as calculative beliefs that, should we ascent to them, allow us entrance into heaven or, should we reject them, send us straight to hell. Nor should we accept such doctrines as somehow objectively and empirically verifiable, able to be found without God bringing us specifically into God’s own being such that these become meaningful doctrines in the first place. Rather, these latter two types of thinking are the ones that today’s spirituality promises to get us beyond—and rightly so!

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Doctrinal statement is already a part of spirituality, for one can only write it and utter it with any form of seriousness by already being within the spirit.

All this said, I’m working through these spiritual disciplines and books, and I will definitely continue to do so. I’ve benefitted greatly from them. However, I would also like the chance to more deeply engage in a spirituality of the Cross, a spirituality of the Resurrection, a spirituality of Trinitarian relations or of the Spirit intimately involved with all these movements and events, even known only as such in and through them. Obviously, such spiritualities are out there, and it would probably, at most, take some light googling to find spiritual exercises focused in such doctrines. But it is worth noting that, however such spiritualities and spiritual formation courses would be put together with such an emphasis, they would need to retain a deep intellectual content to them—a content that neither takes one away from doctrinal formulation nor from spiritual depth but pushes one deeper into both.

Such spiritualities would require that we change our manner of thinking about what thinking is and is supposed to do. Rather, we would need to take seriously the statement found in the picture at the beginning of this post—a saying of Heidegger’s posted at the beginning of a trail in the Black Forest dedicated to him. The sign says something like, “in thinking is each thing long and slow.” That’s probably good spiritual advice.

(Semi-spoiler alert.) The movie started out as a series of semi-separate, boring stories that, out of nowhere, converge into a chaotic mess of (quirky) murder and mayhem. Amidst this mayhem, literally no one is in control and no one can take control. The CIA operatives in the movie don’t even know what to take from the chaos. Accordingly, a bunch of people die and no one has much to say about why.

I soon realized, however, that the reason the movie depressed me so much was because this “phenomenon” is far closer to real life and how we experience life than it’s often comfortable to admit. Not that people are constantly dying violent deaths in my world, but there are certainly places where this threat is very real even. More importantly, the movie drew out through its somewhat lighthearted approach to this chaos the blithely uncaring nature and meaninglessness of life itself when viewed in this manner. The Coen Brothers, in other words, would really make great French existentialists!

Having given the movie a couple days to sink in, what it has solidified in my mind is something very important: that, whether they mean to be or not, the Coen Brothers are two of the greatest modern interpreters of sin that I can think of. The reason I say this is because they constantly show, it seems, in each movie that they make that the conditions of the world are such that what I want to call “sin” is inevitable, built into our being, and lightheartedly uncaring about our involvement with it. Sin, in this regard, is not found in individual acts—though it is there, too—but in the very conditions of the world that allow us to act or force us to act. We can’t get out of it, around it, or through it because the conditions of the world are fundamentally skewed.  Of course, I have no clue whether they would or could express the insight as such (sin is, after all, an inherently religious concept), but certainly this is the interpretive possibility I take from it.

If I left the story here, I would need to go get some more ice-cream. However, I still think that Luther was correct when he posited that the recognition of sin also allows for the recognition of the Gospel: that, actually, things need not be how they currently are—no matter how strong the grips of sin in the world currently seem—and that, though we are powerless against the corrupting conditions of sin, God is not and does not stand idly by allowing sin a full rule of the world. God, rather, plunges into sin, taking up the chaos and nothingness of death into God’s self on the cross. So there’s that, too.

The main point, however, is that I still think “Burn after Reading” is one of the least enjoyable films I’ve ever seen. Then again, most philosophy and theology books are completely un-enjoyable, too, but I’ve learned to enjoy the fruits that come from reflecting on them. So it is with “Burn after Reading.” I never want to step near the film again, but the Coen Brothers, in this movie, pushed me into a series of thoughts that, while difficult, have allowed me to re-appropriate myself and my world in what I believe is a more fruitful mann

I personally think, however, that the whole debate is smitten with a series of category mistakes, which I’d like to  address. I’ll begin by  briefly reconstructing two of the more audacious positions on the matter. First via atheistic evolutionary-biologists, evolution is taken not only to be a true account of human biology, but it is taken to absolutely negate the factual existence of God based on the fact that God is not necessary for evolution. Second, and via creationists, evolution is taken to be untrue precisely because it negates the factual existence of God, the Bibilical accounts of which must be given precedence as that are incommensurate with a evolutionary world. These debates, then, make two category mistakes.

First, God is not, I don’t think, an object among other objects or a “fact” among other “facts,” as I use the term above. That is, if one looks around the room, one has an experience of different objects in the room; one experiences the chairs, knowing in these experiences the functionality and usefulness of the chairs; one experiences the cushions under one’s bottoms, understanding that without them, one would sit on something far more hard. But one does not have an experience of God in this way precisely because God’s being is absolutely distinct from those empirical objects that give themselves over to our perceptions in their uses and qualities.

God, rather, is “invisible,” as the old term goes, which cannot be taken to mean, again, an object in the room that’s unseen, but something utterly different than objects that surround us. That is, when we talk of God, I don’t believe we talk about a direct experience but about what could be called a re-orientation of our experiences. That is, we are addressed by that which is completely other than ourselves in such a way that our previous ways of experiencing are brought into question and formed anew. Paul calls this new experience of the world given by God an experience of the world in terms of faith, hope, and love. I take this to mean that we can no longer experience the world solely in terms of its usefulness for us, especially other people, but in terms of what God intended and intends for it—that what is now the case need not always be so!

In this way, it is silly to try and attest to God’s being by way of factuality and as a fact among other facts. This is a categorically mistaken way of thinking about God’s being, which cannot be proved or disproved as such.

Second, what evolution has more precisely to do with God depends entirely on whether one already stands conscientiously re-oriented within the being of God and, thus, how one interprets the meaning of any worldly fact, including evolution. That is, both sides are wrong to think that evolution says anything necessary about God prior to a belief in God. Rather, one can only interpret the meaning of evolution based on one’s assumption that there is or is not a God. Thus, Christians, for instance, can and do not only affirm the factuality of evolution but can also very specifically interpret evolution as God’s working out of salvation history! Atheists, likewise, can see that, by means of evolution, we do not need to posit a God, which they are absolutely right about even in Christian terms; after all, God is always a gift and never a necessity, which is why the language of emanation has been dropped for the language of grace.

The truth of the matter, then, is that evolution can (and does) stand as a factually demonstrable way to interpret the so called natural history of humanity and the earth while, at the same time, saying absolutely nothing necessary about God, especially in terms of God being interpreted as a fact among other facts. Either way, one can rightly affirm the factuality of evolutionary processes, which really shouldn’t be up for debate.

The only matters that ought to be up for debate are evolution’s interpretive possibilities.

The first point to recognize is that, after the market crash of 2008, the economic situation around the world, including the US, has significantly changed. Fulltime jobs with benefits and retirements are becoming a long-lost reality to some of us. Rather, a host of persons are recognizing that the only way in which to make money during this dismal economic state is to work several jobs at once, some through traditional means and some through entrepreneurial means. In neither case, however, are health insurance benefits a built in provision. Individuals, rather, must be able to buy these benefits on their own. Herein lies the first rub.

One can really only gain access to health insurance right now if one has a job through which one can gain a bargaining position against insurance companies; this tends especially to be the case if one has a pre-existing conditions (which many, if not most, persons do according to insurance standards). My wife and I are fortunate; she has a good, fulltime, benefitted job, and I am able to buy into her insurance program through her work. Before that, however, I had no insurance. This was not for a lack of trying to gain insurance nor an unwillingness to pay an insurance premium. It so happens that I have a pre-existing condition called asthma, which means that I was rejected from several insurance packages, even the large-deductible, low-pay insurance plans called “catastrophic insurance.” In other words, hard-working, entrepeneurial people who are willing to pay for insurance packages cannot even gain access to such packages if they want to, not without a federal mandate forcing insurance companies to offer insurance packages to such persons.

Second, I must admit to personally seeing some benefits to the new economic situation outlined in the second paragraph. Old and dying institutions—their structures and their modes of compensation—may finally get a chance to do just that: rest in peace. Moreover, an entire order built around them and their demands may itself teeter. Why is this possibly a good thing (and one can only be hopeful without being dogmatic that things will turn out “better”)? When one works several jobs at once, entrepreneurially piecing together several partial jobs into a living, there is a certain amount of freedom one can gain, especially from the traditional demands of managers, work-weeks, and work-places. These demands will, of course, be replaced by other demands, but, with some luck, hopefully more based on the values and schedule of the entrepreneur, who can now choose to work mostly from home, set aside time to spend with one’s children, etc. In other words, there may be new economic opportunities that allow an entrepreneur to live a more fulfilling family life while still contributing to the overall economy.

I happen to know several persons who are thinking in precisely this way and want to take a chance and step out entrepreneurally into this new economy and stake a small claim. Presumably, too, this is the kind of creative self-expropriation that conservatives who despise Obamacare concern themselves. What, however, is the main reason that persons do not in fact jump out into this new economy and try to develop their nascent but burgeoning ideas? They don’t want to subject their children to the possibility of losing the health benefits attached to their current jobs—health benefits that, again, they can gain in no other way than through such jobs. Herein arises a concrete contradiction on the right: Obamacare would, for all its faults, encourage entrepreneurship by allowing persons who want to separate themselves from dying corporate institutions to do just that while retaining the main benefit of working at older institutions: access to health insurance.

With these points made, I don’t try to offer anything particularly new or innovative here, and readers probably have a myriad of other reasons for both accepting and rejecting the proposals. However, I’ve simply wanted to offer a couple of thoughts on why conservative opposition to Obamacare on economic grounds is absolutely misplaced. Just the opposite: Obamacare will help hard-working, entrepreneurial people to continue to add economic strength and vitality to a dying economy.

In my next political post, I’ll give you my reasons for deciphering my political positions not by party but by joint opposition to the US Chamber of Commerce and the AARP.

1. Socially-conscious but not reductionist: I generally affirm Christian progressivism’s forays into fights for gay-rights, its support of ecological responsibility, and its dedication to helping the underprivileged. After all, I find all of these issues of utmost contemporary social importance and believe that, to no small degree, the Gospel helps us to address social problems prophetically. There is a huge difficulty, however, when progressives confuse these principles of their social morality with the Gospel itself; they too often implicitly believe not that God came to save the world as a whole but to ensure that we drive hybrids and vote Democrat. The Gospel, however, is and must be grounded in something beyond social issues and progressive answers to them or else the Gospel would provide no means for actually assessing such issues; rather, the Gospel would become a piece of propaganda defined by these social issues and our answers to them. I personally would have no interest in such a Gospel.

2. Christianity is not a gateway religion: I’m afraid that I’m not onboard with my progressive, mystical buddies who think that, by affirming some ultimate reality beyond the Christian faith, they are engaging in some deeper and more coherent form of faith. I’m Christian, rather, in the sense that, as a Christian, I’ve found myself able to love because God has first loved me. God is, after all, love; and when I say this, I don’t mean that we can throw away the term God in its Christian form and retain the term love. I mean that love only makes sense in the prior and cross-bound form of God as Trinity. My desire to communicate with persons, for instance, of “other faiths” (for a total lack of a better term) does not reflect my desire to overcome old Christian dogmatic statements (pursuit of the truth allows me that luxury) but stems from the self-expropriations pushed for, and demanded by, the dynamic persons of the Godhead. God, as Trinity, is always moving toward “the other,” including us.

3. Yes, sin is social…and still original. The talk of original sin in the neo-Calvinistic forms gets old; but so, too, does the talk of something like the intrinsic goodness of humanity in progressive circles. The benefits of the latter group, however, is that it has rightly recognized something like a proper “ontology of sin”: the fact that sin is not simply a matter of whether I myself am good or bad but that my self—intrinsically relational as it is—is bound to sin because the cosmos (yes, even so-called nature) as a whole is bound to the violence of sin. However, there is a certain lack of recognition, sometimes, that Progressive solutions to the problem of sin are as bound to sin as the rest of the cosmos. Progressives too often think that they’ve found the right set of issues and answers .If the world as a whole, however, is bound to sin, so, too, are the progressives who try to contain it, and the benefit of admitting to this fact is twofold. First, we can recognize that there is only so much that we human person can do to set things right and that we ultimately need God, who comes to us on a cross, to set thing right. Second, we can recognize that even our attempts to set things right are bound to a certain amount of failure: they will advocate in some manner not God’s will and intentions for the world but our own as we try to re-orient that which we call “Good” to our own positions. Knowing this allows us to rightly settle for “better” rather than “best” with the full recognition that our own understanding of what is both “better” and “best” are, for now, intrinsically skewed.

Let me be clear, here: there is a place where universalism can go wrong, a point that our buddy Tripp, through Steve Harmon, has already made. That is, when it takes a stance that turns into is something like a demand that God save all. We ought not and need not go there. Rather, God—his eating with tax-collectors and prostitutes—seems to speak enough to the possibility of universal salvation that we need not demand it of God. Let God be whom God is, and if the God reveals God’s self in Christ, I trust God fully with both my, and everyone else’, ultimate fate. So let universalism reject any demand that God fulfill our hopes and desires for such. Let it affirm, however, that God just may be the one who, in God’s love for the whole world as revealed in Christ, gave us such hopes and desires in faith.

On the other hand, let us universalists also take to the offense, lovingly reminding those who would sneer at this possibility both of God’s love and of God’s freedom. Indeed, those who a priori reject universalism, it seems, can only do so by denying God a possibility. To deny God a possibility, however, is to attempt force God’s hand in a way that it ought not be forced: in accordance with my demands and recognition of what I believe ought to be the case. In other words, it is to set up an idol not in the image of a calf but in the image of myself and my demands on how God ought to be. I might remind the reader, however, that this very move is what many , including Augustine and Luther, interpret original sin to be.

For instance, one of my favorite anti-universalist arguments in this regard is based in the notion of double-predestination. Because God has offered salvation to some, God must deny salvation to others; that is, a yes to some means a no to others. How absurd! Since when is a yes to some a no to others? If I bought one child an ice-cream cone am I denying another an ice-cream cone? I suppose it depends on how many ice-cream cones I have, and if I’m the God who creates out of nothing, I should have plenty. The notion of double-predestination is an attempt, then, to unleash a finite logic onto the infinite God, and it demands far more than a universalist, who only ever affirms the possibility of universal salvation, ever could.

I write this, then, only as a platform to give universalists some confidence. The position, when it does not demand of God something that we cannot demand, seems more in accordance to me with self-expression of God in Christ than the alternative. In other words, I want here to give a universalist call to arms. By a call to arms, however, I mean a call to open our arms to the degree that we can to all those whom God can, just may, and I hope will save, including those who would have us sent to hell for such a position.

A Christian hipster dressed ironically

I’d like to make something clear upfront, here. I’m not completely orthodox. I have some beliefs that don’t mix well with older forms of Christian thought, even if they’re often times congruent with some of the oldest forms (for instance, I’m a universalist). I’m not saying this, however, in order to earn your accolades; I’m saying it because, generally, if I want much of today’s American church–at least Mainline and Emergent–to take me seriously, I feel I have to make such a profession of heresy. Heresy has become the new orthodoxy.

I don’t blame anybody for this transference of orthodoxy. I think it’s relatively natural. It’s a reaction to the strict Evangelical moralism and Five-Point Calvinism (if these could ever even be considered orthodox in their own right) that held tight grips over the U.S. for so many years, and under which some persons, congregations, and denominations place the whole of their intellectual stock still. Indeed, this type of intellectual movement–from “orthodoxy” to “heresy”–is precisely the type of movement that Hegel, in a much more metaphysically oriented manner, explicates in, well, the whole of his thought. Out of every position develops a counter-position, especially when that original position’s “common sense” seems to become “common non-sense.”

The good part of this type of position is that it has at least nominally rejected of old labels, namely, of who is necessarily included and excluded from the church based on the particularities of their belief. Even if the development of orthodoxy, however, was vital in many ways to the cohesiveness and development of the ancient church, it has long been unnecessarily divisive, a way in which to exclude (i.e. hang or burn) those for whom one has, say, political problems. It often remains this way today, albeit, we usually don’t burn each other anymore. Accordingly, I fully support the rejection of orthodoxy, strictly speaking, as the criterion for inclusion in or exclusion from the Church or as a means of doing a violence at all. I’ll further add that creativity (which all orthodox positions were as they emerged) in theology is itself very helpful.

Heretics then...

...and heretics now. I'll go ahead and take this one.

However, I think this new position also has some real problems. First, as I’ve already insinuated, this non-orthodox position can itself become an orthodoxy, both in upholding the trueness of its rejection of orthodoxy, but also in its rejection of those who still buy into orthodoxy. The first of these points results in the neglect of historically orthodox thought, namely, a study of the doctrines that people have found orthodox and why they have found them orthodox. This lack of study simply leads to a watering down of one’s identity as a Christian, whether one buys into the historical tenets of orthodoxy (whatever the period of study’s orthodoxy might be, because they have changed) or not.

Accordingly, it might be good to know that, for instance, Athanasius saw the necessity of Trinitarian thought for being able to posit any sense of salvation that Christ might offer humans, not simply or necessarily because he hated Arians (which he did). Everything rested for him upon affirming the divinity of Christ, whose union with humanity (Athanasius does not yet have the vocabulary of Chalcedon) makes possible the salvation of humanity—its deification—and therefore the meaningfulness of Christ at all. Take again someone like Luther (one of my all time favorite theologians) who demands, as part of the Protestant tenants, justification by faith alone. This doctrine was a freeing doctrine for him. That is, since it is only God who can give faith and, through it salvation, Luther was freed from the torments of sin found in his conscience which (rightly) told him always and forever that he was not good enough, not able enough, not faithful enough. Because of this doctrine, Luther found freedom to actually love, rather than despise, God for the first time. This list could go on.

The point, however, is that this knowledge of orthodoxy is important in understanding oneself as a Christian regardless of how one ultimately interprets these doctrines or understands their truth value; in other words, orthodox beliefs need not—rather, ought not—be rejected out of hand without some sympathetic understanding of the doctrines’ origins, meaning, and continuing relevance. To fail to understand these traditional and orthodox beliefs is to fail to understand the history, orthodox or not, of the church, which is to fail to understand oneself as a Christian. Granted, you probably won’t find yourself in the bowels of hell for such neglect (you probably won’t anyways, according to my interpretation), but certainly this point ought to be of concern to self-professed “Christian theologians,” lay or professional (I actually wouldn’t say that such concern is necessary for Christians uninterested in theology). At least part of the Christian’s identity is gained historically in the promulgation, reinterpretation, and repetition (a word that I’m using in Kierkegaard’s sense) of ancient beliefs.

The second point made above was that we, claiming orthodoxy in our heresy, end up rejecting the “older” more “primitive” believers in their continued value of orthodoxy as a criterion of church inclusion; I’ll withhold most of my comment. I think Dr. Phillip Clayton and the bearded Tripp Fuller are empirically testing the waters of what inclusion means and how far it goes in their Big Tent Christianity project. I tend to think that we draw lines of inclusion and exclusion somewhere (after all, we heretics tend to be intolerant of intolerance, exclude the excluders, and despise those who despise persons beyond their own group, etc.), but I don’t know where, and I won’t say that we do so necessarily…or at least not quite. What I do know is that we can allow our own proclivity toward factually excluding persons–that we are always already excluding in some form– to humble us heretically orthodox, refraining  by means of this knowledge from the false belief that we are universally inclusive and tolerant (words made of gold for this particular brand of orthodoxy). At least this way, we do not merely pay lip-service to our desires for inclusion, we are simply honest with our inability to achieve such inclusion on our own.

Of course, this admission gives us over to an important Christian suggestion: that we don’t simply want God to help us but, in our sin, absolutely need God to help us. This statement, however, ought to make us all feel a bit uncomfortable because I can’t think of a more historically definitive and orthodox Christian stance.

Really, the only part that lost me was Stewart’s concluding speech. It wasn’t bad, and I had no particular problem with what he said, except maybe that I think he and a lot of left-leaning individuals tend to underestimate a lot of peoples’ motivations for being “unreasonable” in the first place. Rather, it was the fact that he gave the speech at all. I kind of imagined it like this: Maya Angelou recites one of her beautiful poems as only she can do, only to be immediately followed on stage by an interpreter who then tries to explain the poem. They had already accomplished what they needed to accomplish…which was what?

To join the swaths of pundits, what I thought and hoped Stewart and Colbert needed to accomplish was a break in contemporary political discourse; they needed to offer a stop, like a dam to a river, to the torrent of commentators that keep mouthing and jawing in the 24 hour news cycle. In this regard, I thought comedy a perfect apparatus to do such; comedy can take people off guard, allow what is seemingly sensible to be seen as less sensible under a new light. Take, for instance, the late Mitch Hedberg’s line, “Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.” The statement takes a perfectly normal (and delicious) food and just sort of sees through it, breaks our previous relationship with it. I think that’s what I wanted and partially received from Stewart and Colbert.

This idea, however, got me thinking that maybe what I expected of Stewart and Colbert was not necessarily their job at all. I say this because I wonder if such explicit disruption isn’t one of jobs of the Church? As a Christian, I take it as a given that Jesus of Nazareth was united to God as God’s revelatory self-expression, enough so that Jesus as a person was definitively divine—nothing particularly new, here. I also take it that, in the New Testament witness of Jesus, we can, among other things, understand Jesus as a moral example without reducing him to one—again, nothing new here. Among the seemingly infinite lessons to learn from this God-man, then, was that he was constantly disruptive: from reinterpreting his own scriptures, telling his mother whom his “real” brothers and sisters are, expressing parabolic ideas about the kingdom of God, performing miracles, driving the money-changers from the Temple, to his taking on the cross and resurrecting. In fact, these latter two disruptions (the cross and the resurrection), Paul interprets as having disrupted the greatest scourge of creation death itself. The Gospel is at least, then, a Gospel of God’s disruption in this world, in almost all aspects of what it means to be a world.

To push this point further, it seems to me, in fact, that many influential church leaders have taken just such a clue from the Gospel. Martin Luther-King Jr. comes immediately to mind, whose disruptive voice helped to usher in civil rights legislation in the U.S., for instance. Or, take again, Martin Luther who, love him or hate him, ushered a poignant critique against the corruption of the Church of his day while reinterpreting one of the core tenants of Christian belief, Justification; or take again Thomas Aquinas, whose brilliant synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine made the church leaders of his day definitively uncomfortable, to the point that he was accused of and had to defend himself against heresy; the list could go on.

Perhaps we can take something from both the original disruption and the exemplary repetitions of this disruption, even if only imperfectly, as each situation demands, and without having to believe that any disruption we enact is even as terribly effective or as important as our predecessors’. In other words, if God has broken into and interrupted our lives for the better, couldn’t we at least attempt, even if we utterly failure, to do the same in any number of our contemporary situations and regarding any number of contemporary issues?

Maybe, then, the U.S. Church could stand on the coattails of Stewart and Colbert, who, attempting to explicitly do so or not, have brought at least a partial disruption to U.S. political dialogue, especially the provocateurs who inhibit if not only from developing but beginning at all. The Church need not address or stand for any particular standpoint in this case; it really might need to just stand as the Church at all, disrupting the situation as it stands

At any rate, taking a cue from Stewart and Colbert, I’d love for churches from around the U.S. to also hold a rally in D.C. at the mall under a banner of something like “Rally to Eat Nachos.” It’s neither overtly Christian nor particularly political, but it need not be; as Saint Francis tells us in what I think are mutually interpreting statements: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love” and “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” Even if such a rally didn’t directly do terribly much, it would be both funny and very disruptive in its own Christian way. By offering, if not for only a couple hours, what is basically a big church picnic on the steps of the capital (one where we eat the greatest food that God offers to creation), such a rally might continue to offer just enough of a break in the current political situation to ripple its way through the political atmosphere. It would be a subtle but perhaps poignant protest against the altogether absurdity of our current political climate. Such a rally doesn’t fix the economic outlook or directly help the many individuals and families currently in despair (which, of course, we ought to be doing, too), but maybe it’s a piece of a larger pie that can help instigate dialogue that can more definitively help.

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This paper, or at least the beginnings of it, stem from year and a half of wrestling with the now well know Radically Orthodox theologians, especially John Milbank. With a certain amount of sympathy to much of the project—which, in many ways, I would consider to be argumentation for the reinstitution of a sort of a, loosely put, post-modern neo-platonic social order—I have come down on the side of a definitive “no” to their overall goals. I have many theological reasons for this rejection—most notably, I don’t think the Radically Orthodox have a robust enough idea of sin. But perhaps the reason that has become most pertinent to my own decision was a pragmatic one, namely, that I came to see that the conditions for the possibility of my own and others’ religious freedom and, in general, the overall quality of my relatively free life as stemming from the basic structures of my own countries Constitutional and liberal democracy.  This point is not to deny the destructive force such social orders can have, especially when its citizens become irresponsible and selfish. So, Churchill is right when he says “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Of course, I believe this same man is also right when he says that “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

That said, as a Christian, I do believe that my own faith can play, perhaps must by means of its often times prophetic self-definition play, an important role in the social order, even if not under the auspices of direct legal social control. And though I will not here make any pretense of defining this social role, my general thoughts have led me to the type of paper that have written for today. In it, I am concerned with what I think is an interesting paradox: that though the Christian faith has room to express its values and concerns in a liberal democracy and to do so in whatever terms it sees fit, that to express such concerns in specifically theological terms would be unbeneficial to both it and the social order as a whole. To shed some light on this point, I will therefore give a brief interpretation of what liberality has come to mean in the U.S. social order in the first half of the paper, namely, that liberality stands solely for the freedom of expression of the citizenry without a priori excluding any expression; this freedom includes those of the Christian faith.  However, because the believability of the Christian faith and any rationale stemming from it is only open to those who have traditionally been called “the elect,” I argue that Christians ought not attempt to influence the social order directly, offering a hint of what I believe to be a good alternative.

U.S. Constitutional Order

Accordingly, the first goal must be to define and outline the place of religious discourse, if any, in the U.S. Social order, which will take something of an interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and its meaning. In the scholarship, both legal and non-, one will find little consensus on the intention, nature, and meaning of the U.S. Constitution. I do not propose to solve this particular problem by offering a comprehensive solution. I will simply offer what I think is a short but fitting philosophical interpretation of the document as I believe it has come to be culturally appropriated by U.S. Citizens. The emphasis, here, is on come to be appropriated as the Document has been severely reinterpreted based on our historical situations, a point with which I have no a priori problem.

In this regard, I posit that the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, much of the U.S. social order is now defined by its Bill of Rights. I cannot say and do not need to say that this orientation constitutes part of the original intention of the Document. Originally, the Bill of Rights seems to be an add-on (several “Amendments”) by the Anti-Federalists against the Federalists wishes; its purpose ensured that the small and growing nation-states that constituted the Federation would have a large degree of independence from the newly developing Federal power. However, for what I believe is very good reason, in1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Bill of Rights, which has become definitive in extending the Bill of Rights to the people as a whole; and when the Bill of Rights protects the people of the Federation as a while, it ensures that all individuals receive the protection defined in most of these Amendments against the tyrannies of certain states. I will also theorize, here, that this move solidified the Bill of Rights as focal point of the Constitution, defining the role of the Federal government as one that would protect individual liberties against both intrusions of states and itself, which is what the “people” of the U.S. has come to expect.

The Bill of Rights, then, is quite important. It protects the social order that the U.S. as a whole, for better or worse, has come to stand for: negative freedom. And in this order, negative freedom means, ideally, that neither the Federation nor the state can define a common good apart from the individual goods of the people. And the individual goods of the people can only be worked out according to their individual lives and the values they gain therein. I believe this principle signifies another important point.

Just as the Bill of Rights has developed into the focal point of the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment has also become the ordering point of the Bill of Rights. This famous Amendment thus reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” And what the Amendment symbolizes is a near absolute right of U.S. Citizens to engage in what Rorty calls their “projects of self-creation,” which means their individual “working out” of what they find valuable.

Perhaps more importantly, however, this Amendment symbolizes and protects both the manner and source of civil discourse in the States. The manner of civil discourse in the U.S. is defined by its freedom from most lawful and governmental constraints, the exceptions being something like Mills’ “harm principle” and, perhaps, certain attempts to overturn the U.S. Constitution itself. This manner of social discourse therefore allows that the people themselves openly become the source of social discourse, all of whom contribute their individually and communally developed voices, which themselves are developed based on the values that the people have a near absolute right to work out for themselves.

I think these points are extremely important when it comes to understanding the role of religious discourse in the States.  For one, what comes to be unique about this social order and its civil discourse is that almost no one is, legally, either included or excluded from engaging in discourse.  (Naturally, fact is often different than principle). And whether one is factually included in this discourse rests not on whether one ought to be included in some legal sense, but in whether one can make one’s voice convincingly heard so that it is factually included—which, for better or worse, usually takes both money and education. This principle of non-exclusion (not necessarily inclusion) includes religious voices.

For the sake of this paper, then, I will define religion in a functional sense, understanding it not necessarily in terms of, say, various world religions, though these might be included. But, I try to define it more sociologically. As such, I believe it useful for social and Constitutional matters to define “religion” as a way of life oriented toward and defined by some interpretation (implicit or explicit) of some sort of ultimacy. I think that such a definition can only work at a legal level, but it is what I use for now.

With a very basic interpretation of both the meaning of the term “religious” as I am using it and the meaning and this principle of non-exclusion defined by the U.S. Constitution, it is possible to define the role of public religions in the U.S. Social order. There follows two important principles for engaging in public religion in the U.S. social order. Negatively, religious organization have no right to call into question or attempt to alter the conditions which make their free participation in civil discourse possible in the first place, namely, the pragmatic contract established in and through the Constitution. There is no room for theocratic law—Christian, Islamic or any other. There is simply the pragmatic law of negative freedom ascribed to by the citizens—to mutually and gladly leave one another alone despite disagreements over ultimate ends. And in this realm, when religious organization try to make legal changes such that the U.S. is, say, officially recognized as a “Christian Country” or to impose religiously inspired laws on those outside of any particular groups’ religious belief, critics are both right and duty-bound to protest. Religion itself has no legal standing at a Federal level, and it no longer has a legal standing at a state level.

Positively, however, religious institutions and organization most certainly do have every right to engage in the civil discourse of the United States and attempt to shape the flow of public discourse, policy, and non-legally binding sets of values. The First Amendment’s sole purpose is to protect individual liberties from both Federal and state governments alike. The government, then, is in the business solely of regulating civil dialogue without setting down any legal obligations concerning what topics, ideas, reasons are proper to that dialogue—the only exception being, perhaps, that the Constitution itself cannot be overturned (though such overturning can be discussed) and that dialogue that causes direct harm is disallowed.  Religious persons and organizations are as much welcome to the discussion as are their detractors.

Believability

I have so far tried to bring some definition to the legal possibilities of public religion in the States: that public religiosity is welcome in the same manner that any public voice is welcome, but that the resulting shapes and movements of the public for or against any such voices are legally non-binding. Religious persons and organizations can include themselves in the Federation’s social discourse and can include themselves as they see fit. However, I now want to approach what, for me, is the more important question: how to actually influence the social order as such?

For the second part of my paper, I must admit that I’ve gotten myself into somewhat of a bind. What I will attempt to argue for is the non-translatability of Christian rationale into social orders that extend beyond the bounds of believers. Such is the social order in the U.S., at least in principle and probably in fact. The basic idea is simple: the condition for the possibility of belief in Christian ideas is not something beyond the faith, but contained within it. That is, there is no natural, rational way to make the truths of faith believable; therefore, there is no way to use, say, a direct line of Christian rationale to convince others in a civil discourse to agree.

What is even trickier is the fact that, to even claim that my argumentation is the least bit believable, I must make a move akin to Barth, Jungel, and other such theologians; lest I be caught in a retortion argument, I must claim my own argument itself to be an attempt to unfold revelation within revelation, a point that ipso facto must only believable within the strictures of revelation, which itself is a statement that is only believable within the strictures of revelation, and so on ad infinitum. In some very real sense, my claims are non-grounded, at least at a publicly exoteric manner, though neither would I claim them to be private in the strict sense of the term.

Accordingly, my strategy, here, will not to be to convince anyone in the sense of “move them toward belief” of my position unless they are, of course, a part of the Christian Faith; but I hope to make my thoughts interesting, nonetheless. So, I want to make a very important distinction between, say, the intelligibility of certain arguments and the believability of those arguments. What I mean is quite simple: arguments can be intelligible, interesting, even conditionally believable without being actually believable to the one who understands that argument. Such, for instance, is the point the Athenians indirectly understood when they accused Socrates of “making the weaker argument the stronger” and when Callicles admits to Socrates that he “admits but does not agree that the Tyrant is worse off than the slave.” The believability of certain propositions and ideas are different than either their intelligibility or even truth; I hope to make an intelligible, perhaps even an interesting case for why, at an analytic level of the content of Christian belief itself, the believability of the Christian faith cannot be transferred to a non-Christian social order.

That said, the notion of believability is also my point of departure for this argument. And the way I am attempting to use the term believability is much in the same way that William James, for instance, uses the term “live hypothesis.” James defines this notion as “a hypothesis which appeals as a real possibility to whom it is proposed (James, The Will to Believe, 3).” Accordingly, the liveness or deadness of the hypothesis are not “intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker;” and the “reality” of this possibility are defined by the thinkers’ “willingness or unwillingness to act.” Believability signifies something like the ability or willingness to assent to a proposition or set of propositions that seemingly or possibly describes or captures the truth (which could be taken in either the Heideggerian or more tradition correspondent notion) of a situation. More definitely, I want to use believability in the sense of trust; that when we come to believe a proposition, we trust that it is adequately descriptive. The question is what makes certain intellectual elucidations believable at all?

It is common, at this point, to assert that cultural practice and the linguistic horizons stemming from it defines the basic categories through which persons think and express themselves. So, Richard Dreyfus, states in the Preface to Carol White’s Time and Death, that

Sociologists point out that mothers in different cultures handle their babies differently and so inculcate them into different styles of coping with themselves, people, and things…. [Without claiming this account to be correct or complete], Let us suppose, as we are told by the sociologists, that American mothers tend to put babies in their cribs on their stomachs, which encourages the babies to move around effectively, while Japanese mothers tend to put babies on their backs so they will lie still, lulled by the mothers’ songs….The babies, of course, imitate the style of nurturing to which they are exposed…[and so] starting with style, various practices will make sense ad become dominant, and others will either become subordinate or will be ignored altogether.

The style then determines how the baby encounters himself or herself, other people or things. So, for example, no bare rattle is ever encountered. For the American baby, a rattle is an object to make expressive noise…. A Japanese baby may treat a rattle-thing this way more or less by accident, but generally we might suppose that a rattle-thing is encountered as soothing….

Once, [therefore] we see that a style governs how anything can show up as anything, we can see that the style of a culture does not govern only babies. The adults in each culture are shaped by the it as they respond to things in the way they show up for them (Richard Dreyfus in Preface to Time and Death by Carol White, xi).

Intrinsic to this notion of cultural development, style defines more than simply the intellectual possibilities that we can intellectual “see,” however. I also grounds the believability of accounts concerning culturally defined objects, making such propositions possible as live hypothesis in the first place. So, sticking with the example Dreyfus tries to develop, the proposition “that a rattle is a toy usable for self-expression,” may find itself only believable in a culture where self-expression is valued as such. Accordingly, in terms of the style learned by each of the above babies, they learned not only possible thought categories, but came to trust such categories, which themselves ground the development of further possible categories and entities.

The Christian Faith

At any rate, there is much to be said on these specific issue. However, I want now to take up the specifically Christian notion of believability, which is here caught in a difficult spot. At least some Christians claim that the believability of its rationale—that God Incarnates in Jesus of Nazereth, dying, resurrecting, and making new a sinful humanity—is not simply a matter of human tradition, but revelation in the sense that it brings something absolutely new to the human being, something that was not there before. Of course, empirically speaking, there is a Christian tradition that has grown out of certain western strands of thought, has interacted and been influenced by some of its greatest thinkers, and is bound in expression to the best thought-structures of its day. My point is not to deny this point. I hope only to say that the continuing condition for the possibility of this historical tradition is not the tradition qua tradition itself, but the event in which the tradition is grounded and trying explore.

On the one hand, then, it is certainly possible and philosophically legitimate to argue that the believer believes because he has been inculcated into the tradition. Believers are believers because their history and cultural background have made the Gospel believable. On the other hand, the content of the Gospel denies this explanation as adequate because contained in the content of this traditional expression is the notion of salvation and revelation.

The first of these categories, salvation, means that we are made into something new, something that was not here before; man who was sinful is given new life, in grace, in Jesus the Christ. At least historically, and I’m inclined to think logically, too, to say that something genuinely and authentically novel is not brought in is to fall into certain Peligian strands, at least somewhat dismissive of the need for the Gospel event.  However, this concept of novelty may be the topic, I’m beginning to think, of another paper, one that clarifies the nature of novelty and the novel content of the Christian faith. That said, the second of these categories as I use it—revelation—is the epistemic correlate of the first, namely, that we come to know that we are made anew so that we may make this newnewess our ownmost. Either way, if this content presupposes newness of being and the newness of its revelation, we can move with the logic outlined by Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus in his Philosophical Fragments.

New creation, if it is actually new creation, must move beyond the Socratic, which is defined purely and solely by anamnesis. That is, Socrates considers himself merely a midwife for ideas already contained within human possibility as humans currently stand. Accordingly, in order for the teaching to be actually new, it cannot be merely a historical tradition accessible on its own. There must be a teacher who brings to what is old—history—the “teaching” about the newness of creation and who is therefore himself new. While, therefore, the teaching of this teacher is achieved in history and becomes historical in its appropriation, the teaching itself is irreducible to the history that occasions its teaching.

What this point of newness also signifies is that there exists no old standard for measuring the truth of this teaching and whether it is believable. There is nothing in human tradition that could possibly testify to the believability of what is new without the new teaching itself becoming old. Therefore, if the old standards of believability were applicable to the new teaching, then the new teaching would be a product of anamnesis and, therefore, nothing really new. The new teaching, then, is its own justification, its own standard bringing with it its own conditions of believability given in the teaching itself.

As such, the new teaching only makes itself believable by enacting itself, plucking the old from the old and bringing it into the new. Therefore, the active “bringing into new creation” by the teacher grounds the believability of this new teaching as new; nothing else can do so. Without this “having been brought,” the believer must seem at best, hopelessly arrogant and, at worst, absurd. Or, at least this point must seem true from the old standard, which must claim that the teaching stems, as all other teachings, from human tradition.

It follows that only those who have received this new teaching have the ability to believe this teaching as new. But whom the teacher chooses to teach is not a matter of our discretion but the teachers.’ Accordingly, only those whom the teacher elects to teach, both in terms of the content of the teaching and the standard that makes the new teaching believable at all, have the ability to hear the message as believable at all.

Conclusion

I have suggested, therefore, that the believability of the Christian faith, for the Christian, is not subject to the same modes and rules of believability that we’ve come to define for other propositions. These propositions are based in human culture and practice alone and not in the teaching of the teacher, who makes by his teaching his teaching believable. This point further suggests that, a priori, ethics, social-standards, and … developed within the context of this new teaching are non-transferable in their believability, a point that directly affects the means by which the church can try to affect the liberal democratic social order.

If the church and its members takes seriously the notion of a liberal democratic social order, it cannot work with the pretense that it can influence the civil discourse in that order by means of either a directly Christian notion of social responsibility—for instance, that Jesus says or stands for X and, therefore, so should everyone else (to make a crude example). In fact, it may be the case that there is no direct point of interaction between the old and the new, and that the social order as it stands, contained as it is within the old, must be dealt with in its own terms. I have not definitive suggestion as to how, positively, to begin dealing with such social orders, but I do think that, for instance, Rudi Hayward has something to say on this topic. I don’t know much about the project as of yet, but the project is taking up the question of what it could mean to produce art as a Christian without producing Christian art; and, as the project seems well aware, such thinking can be applied beyond art itself to any number of social spheres, including the civil and the development of its social discourse.

Extending these crises more deeply, we have no clue whom we can trust anymore to help bring about long-term solutions. Whom do we go to in order to find plausible answers to these troubling questions? Every politician is in the pocket of someone or something dubious, at least to some extent. So called ‘experts,’ at least of the economic variety (and I would be willing to extend it beyond them) give us imperatives on par with divine commands; yet these ‘experts’ end up being wrong more often than they’re right. On top of that, to combat a myth currently circulating in Tea-party (and really all populist) circles, the ‘people’ aren’t to be a priori trusted either. ‘We’ are as shortsighted as anyone else, demanding oil and jobs at any cost. And, we keep our politicians fearful when they attempt to look at longer-term problems because (1) we honestly don’t trust them, and (2) we often times don’t honestly want them to change the status quo.

That said, the U.S. democracy is operating in a climate of absolute distrust, where everyone thinks that everyone else is actively conspiring against the other (and this belief might be held for good reason, frankly). I’m the first to admit that a certain amount of mistrust is necessary in a democracy, namely, that anyone who claims to act benevolently and without particularized interests in mind is the one to be least trusted. I’ll even make a theological point of this: to claim that one’s motives are pure, for the good of all, universal, is to claim a will on par with God’s, that we can actually will, as individuals, what is best not merely for ourselves but for everyone. This is self-idolization, in my book, and frankly this is the one place that Tea-partying anti-government arguments work; governments, which are made up of individual persons with individual wills, do not necessarily and really seek a common good and must be held to account.

However, mistrust (as I’m using it) also has the connotation of some active trust. That is, we may know that everyone skews the good and the just by means of self-interested ends (conscious or unconscious), but we can also trust that they’re doing their damnedest not to. That makes a huge difference, I think; it at least puts a pragmatic program in place to use mistrust as a way to hold open public dialogue for democratically acting on real solutions to our long-term problems.

The reason I bring this point up today is the following. I am a vestry member in my congregation (for those of you unfamiliar with Episcopalese, it means something like a board of Deacons), and we had our monthly meeting yesterday.  Toward the end of it, our rector brought up the fact that the Diocese of Los Angeles has been pestering parishes to contribute to our new Bishops’ ordination ceremony coming up this May. Why? Because they want to have the “proper vestments” (including robes and rings), entertainment, and arena (we’ve rented the Long Beach Arena) for the occasion. Among other thoughts, I wondered for a moment if our leadership was stealing from the playbook of either Michael Steele or Lloyd Blankfein.

All of us were annoyed by this strong request; like many congregations, ours is running a deficit right now which we are only able to cover based on church investments…investments, mind you, that will be gone within a year.  In fact, what such requests signify to me is that the leadership in the Episcopal church (and this may or may not stand with other mainline churches) is clueless. At a time the church is beginning to cave in on itself, they want to spend money on pomp and circumstance.  Of course, such a move is, (to be rather explicit), rather masturbatory and self-congratulatory. After all, the church is relatively irrelevant as it stands in most other parts of today’s social fabric, meaning, the church won’t receive any congratulation except from itself.  Forget, then, about spending money on proactive ministries like planting new churches and supporting a vibrant college ministry (ministries that could help to make the church, even if not the Episcopal, more relevant again) when we can have a party.

So, dear Episcopal leadership, allow me to remind you of some of the basics of which I, a parishoner and vestry-member, would expect you to have some cognizance.

1. We are all currently in a financial crisis, and we already give you 12% of our church income right now for, in my mind, blessing oil and water that God can probably manage to bless without you. Such insensitivity to the needs of your parishes signifies that you’re uninterested in your parishes.  This just might be a problem since most people under the age of fifty stay in the Episcopal church, not because they received Bishop-blessed oil on their foreheads on special occasions, but because their parishes are filled with good, loving, Christian people.

2. In a similar manner, most persons within the Episcopal church (again, usually under fifty) have absolutely no a priori commitment to the Episcopal church as the Episcopal church. Again, these people are here because (1) they are committed to a stance of faith and (2) desire to enact those stances within particular congregations and parishes they find life in. Of course, that’s not to say that log-books of Bishops “proving” Apostolic lineage aren’t important; they are at a (purely) symbolic level.  It’s just to say that they are not and cannot be the priority.

3. On top of all of this, I would like to remind the Bishops of their actual place in the church.  You are pastors–or really pastors of pastors (2 Timothy 2:1-7). Nothing more; nothing less. In this regard, too, I would remind you that your sole purpose is to serve the rectors who serve the concrete parishes, that is, the parishes where the true life of the church manifests itself. If you don’t believe me, just look in the Book of Common Prayer and the order of who’s named last in the ordination ceremonies.  Also, (God forbid this), you might look in the scriptures.

4.  Finally, and with reference to this thought of looking in scriptures, I might remind you that, in our beginnings, we decided that the only compulsory acts we engage in are those found in scripture, though we’re certainly free to add any niceties, including robes and rings, if and only if we so desire and are able. When you are ordained for this position, then, you deserve the laying on of hands  (Acts 6:6; 1 Timothy 5:22…depending on the version you read). However, you by no means deserve a ceremony that will come one step closer to breaking the bank of your flock.

With all that in mind, some of you might be wondering why I would desire to be a part of the Episcopal church. And it’s a fair enough question (as, certainly, right now, I sound far more on the emergent side of things).  The truth is that I, too, have no a priori commitment to this ‘brand’ of church, even if I am firm in my faith and promise to serve in some congregation. However, I do think that the Episcopal church has something important to offer if it would open its eyes and ears to the truth of its own identity. That is, the Episcopal church, in continuity with its Anglican upbringing, has no absolute creedal code (the thirty-nine articles no longer function in this manner); rather, the church is held together, most obviously, through a commitment to a common liturgy.  But what this lack of commitment to an exact creedal code  need not signify is a dearth of intellectual movement (which is, unfortunately, where much, though certainly not all, of our current leadership is caught).  Just the opposite…it can be a vibrant commitment to engage in open dialogue about the meaning of our a priori commitments to Christ (the sine qua non I’ve already expressed in a prior blog), all of which are brought together in a common liturgy where we worship with one another. In many ways, the insights of many emergent thinkers and more recent movements toward “big tent” Christianity are already nascently presupposed in the Episcopal identity.

Too bad we’ve focused on the Bishops.

In this regard, I’d like to begin with a reflection on a not terribly popular theologian these days: Luther. In his On Christian Freedom, Luther makes what I think are two excellent point on the nature of a Christian ethic.  On the one hand, he demeans those preachers who simply preach on the moral niceties of Jesus that we ought to follow. According to Luther, no external works free us from the bondages of sin; no external works can put us back into a right relationship with God.  God’s work alone saves us, meaning any attempts to save ourselves through our work is already a sign of our sinfulness.

On the other hand, Luther is adamant that the elect (and, yes, he unfortunately has a notion of double-predestination) ought to enact the salvation they’ve already received by imitating God in Christ. He rightly interprets this point as being one of service to our neighbor, saying that, ’just as our neighbor is in want, and has need of our abundance, so we too in the sight of God were in want, and had need of His mercy.  And as our heavenly Father has helped us in Christ, so ought we to freely help our neighbor by our body and works, and each should become to the other a sort of Christ, so that we may be mutually Christs, and that the same Christ may be in all of us….’

In general, I don’t think Luther needs to be taken at face value (even if I would hope he could be approached with intellectual and spiritual sympathy).  But I do think that he illustrates an important point that I’m willing to uphold and apply to the numerous positions we find…liberal and conservative…in American Christianity.

First, I need to make a point that is a bit difficult for me personally to make since I fall pretty squarely (though not entirely) on one of these sides.  Both liberal and conservative Christians can refer to something like Biblical precedent for their main concerns. To characterize these concerns entirely and unfairly, the conservatives have concern for something like personal and moral purity (especially in sexual terms), and the liberals tend (the side onto which I tend to fall) to concern themselves  with systemic issues and social justice.  That said, I don’t want to start an argument about which is the more important part; I simply want to acknowledge the Biblical precedent of both.

On top of this point, I could also say (as the new atheists are prone to parody) that there’s some precedent for genocide and other violent acts in scripture, meaning that, despite Christian desires to derive an ethic wholly and explicitly from the Bible, it may not be possible to do so. At least it is impossible to deny our use and dependence on extra-Biblical sources through which we comb-through the scriptures, accepting some portions and rejecting others.  In this regard, conservatives, it might be said, are concerned with the Platonic tradition (especially his Phaedo) as applied to portions of Paul, namely, as living a life of personal moral purity; liberals, on the other hand, have taken certain sociological critiques and applied them to the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

Thirdly, what this above point means is that, Biblically speaking, we cannot take a lot of particulars on how to live and act. Really, the two most concrete commands are those preached by Jesus in the beginning of his sermon, namely, to love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.  As with Luther, I will take these commands to mean most generally that love of God impels one to serve one’s neighbor, and in serving one’s neighbor one acts out one’s love for God that has been given by God.

Fourthly, then, this point might mean that the absolute command given to Christians by God is quite simply to serve. But, at such a general level, any number of Biblical and extra-Biblical precedents can be, are, and must be, read into this command.  I’ve outlined two characterizations above.

Finally, if we take Luther’s view with any seriousness, neither of the above ethical precedents can be engaged in in such a way that one is able to earn one’s salvation. Salvation is God’s job, which I take God to be enacting in Christ through the Holy Spirit, daily.  God is bringing this cosmos, which is in a state of violence, entropy, and decay, to that vision pronounced in Isaiah 9; God is bringing the world and we in it through death into resurrection.  Our works, then, are a response to, and a sign of the salvation that we (and I will go so far as to say all persons) have received, not that we earn.

What does this point mean?  It means that we cannot turn the Biblical narrative and the God to whom it is connected into a propaganda; we cannot absolutize either of the above two ethical interpretations, even if we must do our best to interpret, follow, and argue for that command that seems Biblically unequivocal: to serve. Our particular interpretations of this command, then, do not bring us salvation; they are responses to the salvation we have already received.  But this also means that, while there may be plenty of debate over which interpretation is the better, (which one is the better signifier and contributor to the salvation of the cosmos), neither our, nor our opponents’, nor this world’s salvation is up for grabs in this debate.

That said, to argue against the possibility of big-tent Christianity often implies one arguing for the absoluteness of one’s own position to such a degree that one must believe that one’s own position becomes the position to which all are called and upon which salvation rests.  Drop that belief and the doors of the big tent are wide open.

Funnily enough, I’m not terribly sure that anyone could ever accuse me of being a great defender of Christian orthodoxy, at least not for its own sake.  I do tend to think that, in the United States, theologians, pastors, and lay-persons alike have neglected the history and development of our tradition so that they might push their own agendas; but it turns out that these agendas are sometimes good, rightly calling into question previous Christian interpretations of what were once considered fundamental and irreproachable Christian doctrines. Then I read a blog today by Peter Laarman, both a very nice and intelligent man who is also the executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting; unfortunately, the blog signified for me precisely where current discussions of Christian identity, especially in the context of “progressive Christianity,’ have gone entirely wrong. I would like to take say a little about this.

First, Laarman’s blog has me questioning precisely what something like “progressive Christianity”  has come to mean. If it means no longer confessing as a Christian, count me out. If it means confessing as a Christian…in the basic trust of God in Christ…to the best of one’s ability, arguing all the while that God doesn’t damn Muslims, homosexuals, and adulterers, and that God cares for the poor, then I’m in.   So, I propose a basic terminological distinction between “progressive Christianity” (what Laarman calls his stance) and “progressive religiosity” (what I believe it actually is).  I can affirm the first, but I’ve no interest in, as a faith stance, the latter.  To confuse these two terms is a category mistake that demonstrates on the part of ‘progressive religionists’ two things: a lack of understanding of the basic Christian faith (and its intellectual reflection in theology) and, frankly, a degree of arrogance when it comes to (re)defining that faith.*

Laarman makes several points, which, in an entirely non even-handed manner, I’ll sum up as follows: “the Christian interpretation of God is merely one possible projection of human thought into God such that, if we were honest with ourselves, we could see through and reject to no small degree.  We could then find solidarity with all other religious traditions by trading symbols and lies with one another about God, choosing for ourselves those projections which makes us feel the most progressive.”  The basic trajectory of the blog, then, is to reduce Christian identity to a non-identity, annihilating the basic belief and trust that persons do not first come to believe by means of intellectual articulation, but that they already find themselves in a state of belief and, in some real manner, have no basic ability to stop believing even if they wanted to do so (and I’ve tried).

First, then, progressive religiosity rejects Jesus the Christ** as a, even the, unique expression of God. To put this statement into a broader context, I can fully buy into the blog that Philip Clayton wrote last week, which essentially claimed that there are several types of Christianity, none of which need be mutually exclusive of the others.  I would add this simple point to Clayton’s reflections, one which I was gratefully able to tell Clayton myself: there is a sine qua non of the faith, a ground and affirmation that I can’t imagine doing away with and still calling myself Christian. What is that affirmation?  An absolutely basic trust that God has definitively saved this world in Christ.  I call it a trust because it is not even primarily a conscientious “belief,” an intellectual assent. One is passive in the original movement, which is a movement of God.  Trust, rather, is quite simply a change of the heart by God such that God, in Christ, becomes the fount of all one’s activities…beliefs, knowings, and actions.  We become (without importing necessarily the moral vocabulary) justified.

But it is important to affirm this basic trust in Christ, for if one reflects on it, it is precisely this trust in Christ that becomes important to the Christian.  Whatever Christ may mean…however we might interpret him…God has acted definitively in him. All intellectual reflection on what this might mean, however important, is truly secondary to the trust we find ourselves to have through this bare and basic turning.  Now, to be clear, this point need not mean that all intellectual interpretations of this basic point are co-equal.  (Word Christology, in my mind, is far superior to spirit Christology, and hermeneutic Christology trumps both.) But there is much room for debate on these issues, so long as they’re issues taken seriously in the first place.

Secondly, progressive religiosity rejects the intellectual soundness of human belief in the nonsense that Christ is the unique expression of God. The basic point, then, is that progressive religionists cannot take this primordial and unwilled (at least by the person) trust in God through Christ seriously (I know I should add the Holy Spirit in here, too).  And, if one does not take the Christian trust in God through Christ seriously, that’s okay; one does not need to do so, but certainly one is not Christian either. Neither can I fathom why one would want so ardently to hang onto the absurdities of our faith if one has no basic trust in God through Christ, unless for one of two reasons.  (1) Progressives see Christianity as purely a tool for moving forward some sort of political agenda; but then “faith” becomes the worst form of political propaganda with no ties to that original trust which makes the whole thing viable as a political stance in the first place!  (2) Progressives maybe secretly fear that, if they don’t admit nominally to being Christian, God will condemn them to eternal hellfire, and they want to ward off this possibility.  Fear not, my friends, a good chunk of us believe God to be more just than this; plus, I suppose if you’re going, I’m probably going, too!

Tripp, I’m counting on you to come out as a Progressive Christian now, too.  You’re up!

*On the other hand, I don’t doubt for a minute this is what my more fundamentalist friends say of me!

**When I say Christ, I mean the cross-dead Jesus and the resurrected one.

To begin with, I’d like to make a statement about my last post.  My basic premise in that post is quite simple: whatever the advertising world latches onto and uses for selling consumer goods sheds light on the ways in which that culture thinks and values. Because, in these previous commercials, advertisers latch onto a desire in our culture to form what we would consider “authentic” identities, we must take seriously as both a philosophical and theological category the notion of “authentic identity-formation,” or what I will simply call “authenticity” from here on out.

In this regard, I have been doing a lot of studies in Charles Taylor (the philosopher not the dictator) who takes up this notion of authenticity from a cultural and philosophical perspective.  According to Taylor, the ideal of authenticity as a contemporary ethical standard has emerged from several historical idea sources, all of which have been taken over and setup as standards in their own right.  So, the invention of individualism, the development of what will be called by Rousseau the ‘inner-voice of nature,’ and emergence of Romantic understandings of originality (none of which I will try to do justice to here) have all grounded the idea of authenticity.  So, for Taylor, the idea of authenticity is latently understood and lived by us as drive to become an original expression of humanity through our making explicit what is potentially within us. To put it a bit differently, we’ve all been imbued with different and unique “talents,” and the ethic of authenticity moves us to strive to make actual these talents, both becoming and forming for ourselves what we already are to some degree.

At a properly philosophical level, Taylor develops this idea in an interesting direction.  Philosophically, Taylor is highly critical of certain of our cultural appropriations of the idea of authenticity.  Our appropriations tend to be solipsistic, narcisstic, self-centered; persons who explicitly desire to become authentic often do so in such a way that they use others and the world surrounding them to make for themselves who they are and want to be.  But, according to Taylor, this appropriation of the ethic of authenticity is an aberrant one.  To become authentic is never to become such at the expense of the rest of the world, especially our fellow human beings; to become authentic rather, is to become so in light of, and in conversation, with the world and our fellow human beings (what Taylor calls our ‘dialogical horizons’), especially our direct communities and cultures.  To translate this critique in somewhat of the direction I want to take it, then, selfhood and the formation of individual identity depends on structures outside of the self that are irreducible to the self.  And to become truly authentic, for both Taylor and me, is to create oneself with a cognizance of these structures.

I will not move, here, into the possibility of all these structures; such a task would have to match Hegel’s attempts to unify knowledge and being in his Encyclopedia (a task that I think impossible in the first place).  But it is possible to say that there are certain of these structures that are contingent, for instance, that I was born in the Northwest of U.S. and was formed and formed myself in light of the possibilities afforded to me in that culture; There are, however, also such structures that are necessary (that if I’m born, I must die; death is a necessary structure in human existence).  The question I’m explicitly interested pertains to God and God’s necessity, namely, does God form a necessary identity structure such that, if I am not cognizant of God, I cannot be an authentic human being. For reasons that I will explain more later, I’m answering no: authenticity is possible without cognizance of God precisely because God must be understood as that which is more than necessary.

At any rate, I hope these cryptic statements are at least of some interest to you;  if not,  I’m afraid that conventional wisdom is right: that only my committee and one other person will ever actually read my dissertation

In this particular post, I want to ask a few simple questions: what does it mean to be authentic?, can a consumer product make you truly authentic?, how do advertisers use a desire to become authentic to create effective, even visually beautiful, advertisments? I’ve given three examples below and would love it if you could post some commercials with similar explanations in the comments section.

Miracle Whip

This first commercial is my personal favorite. It is a Miracle Whip commercial. By means of an extremely fun looking hipster party and lines like “don’t be so mayo,” Miracle Whip makes the case that its sandwich spread can summon and articulate the true you. As an aside, Stephen Colbert had a lot of fun toying with this commercial on the Colbert Report.

Ipod Nano

Using a quite catchy and appropriately titled song called “Bourgeois Shangri-la,” the second commercial advertises the new video-recording capability of the ipod nano. Especially notable are the dancers, each of whom are trendily dressed in colors similar to the ipods recording them and are dancing with distinctly free-spirited moves. The theme in this commercial is the same as the last: by buying the ipod with which you most closely identify, you will be able to express an important and “original” aspect of your identity.

Seasonique

While the first commercial is still my favorite, in many ways, the third commercial is the most interesting. The commercial is selling a birth-control pill that allows a woman to (cleverly) “re-punctuate” her life and menstruate only four times per year. The commercial evokes a very postmodern theme, namely, that identity is a social construction and that menstruation is too. The commercial is driven by the theme, “who says…,” the connotation of which is that you need not be anything that you do not want to be. Instead, be whom you are: someone who identifies less with your menstrual cycle.

With these commercials in mind, fire away! I’d love to find some more of these.

The question, then, is whether the emerging church is dying, or at least whether its influence is waning.  In order to answer this question in either of its forms, I first have to ask for something of a clarification.  What precisely is meant by the Emerging Church?  Until this question is answered, any attempt at answer the prior question is something of an equivocation; as it stands, I can think of at least two ways to understand the emerging church, each of which has utterly distinct consequences for the meaning of an answer.

First, there is the emerging church as a contemporary movement, the means through which I’m guessing a large number of emergent thinkers, leaders, and believers take root and identify themselves with the emerging church. This sense of the emergent church, then, signifies something like a particular set of leaders with a particular set of concerns living in a particular time under particular intellectual, political, economic conditions, making a theological statements and critiques within this cultural arena.  So, LePort identifies Brian McClaren, Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, Scott McKnight, etc., as some of the leaders, all of who have relationships to the Emergent Village and its thought trajectory.  I do not doubt, then, that the debate at hand is about this precisely this movement.

In this regard, if the question of whether this emerging church is waning, then the answer might be “yes.”  I honestly don’t really know, and I have no particular argument either way.  As I’ve already admitted, it’s never been my particular cup of tea, even if I have some sympathies and respect for some of the leaders.  Even if this movement is not waning now, however, I expect that it eventually will, which is fine.  Particular movements are bound to do just that, no matter how big or persuasive they are any given time. Neo-Aristotelianism and the theological formulations of Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were, after all, at one point considered a near heretical ideas precisely because of how cutting edge they were, because of how radical (a term I’ve noticed, for better or worse, is used quite a bit) they were.  The same can be said of the thought of old codgers such as Luther and Calvin, who were the equivalent of emerging church leaders in their own day. (Although, I gotta admit, I’m not yet inclined to consider today’s emerging church leaders Aquinas or Luthers yet.)  Movements are eventually formalized, institutionalized, and lose their original power of freshness, honesty, and novelty. In other words, the original expression eventually dies.

That said, I question whether the above formulation of the emerging church as a particular movement is proper formulation of what the emerging church ought to mean. I say this because, in some respect, the only Emerging Church is the Church Universal; and I would argue that one of the Church’s main characteristics is to emerge, making it properly the Emerging Church.  This idea is best formulated through Pauline terms (or at least Dunn’s and Pannenberg’s interpretations of Paul).

In the Incarnation (if that term can be definitively used with Paul), life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Paul notes that something definitive has taken place in the world.  God has decisively moved against sin and death, Rome and Babylon, for the sake of life and holiness.  God’s holy city was being rebuilt.  This in-breaking Kingdom, however, was not yet complete.  Just as the Israelites had really and decisively moved into the promised land without yet vanquishing all their foes, so, too, with God in Christ.  God had come, decisively acted, and set in motion the machinery that would bring from heaven to earth God’s recreation, eschatologically fulfilled in the resurrection. (Put these types of basic insights into whatever language you would like.)

If something like this idea holds, then what else can the Church be but the visible, temporal sign of, and response to, God’s in-breaking and new creation and the promise of the holy city?   In the Holy Spirit, the Church emerges from the ashes of death and decay, and will continue to emerge until the final victory of God, already secured in Christ,  is brought to completion.  As a temporal institution, however, the Church is constantly moving and evolving, reacting to each new situation as it must, bringing the Good News of God’s work in Christ with it wherever it might be called or forced to go.

For the Church to emerge is for it to be alive and well, for God of the Church to be alive and well, calling life from death and joy from despair. For the Church to emerge, then,  is for the Church to be what it is: the Church.   So, if the emerging church movement is dying now (and, again, I don’t know one way or another), that’s okay; we should simply ask, as LePort says, the following: ‘what did it teach us? What have we learned (positive and negative) from this experiment?’  If, however, the Emerging Church proper was to die, well, that would essentially mean that God has abandoned us.  I sincerely hope and bet that one’s wrong.

To understand what I’m talking about, you should listen to this whole series, namely, ‘Philosophy and Human Values.’  But this particular lecture on Kant (for which Roderick has a great explanation of the categorical imperative) and modern ethics in general is certainly worth your time.

First things first, the catechism is setup as follows: a series of sermons on the 10 Commandments, a series of sermons on the Apostle’s Creed, and a series of sermons on the “Our Father.”  In the first of these sections, Luther writes in a detailed manner on each commandment.  Often times, you can tell how important Luther thought the commandment by the sheer volume he writes on it.  And the 4th, honor thy father and mother, he spends much.

While much of the sermon on the 4th commandment forms the groundwork for temporal governance, this part does not concern me so much.  What’s more important is the following:

‘Notice how great, good, and holy a work is here assigned children, which is alas! utterly neglected and disregarded, and no one perceives that God has commanded it or that it is a holy, divine Word and doctrine. For if it had been regarded as such, every one could have inferred that they must be holy men who live according to these words. Thus there would have been no need of inventing monasticism nor spiritual orders, but every child would have abided by this commandment, and could have directed his conscience to God and said: ‘If I am to do good and holy works, I know of none better than to render all honor and obedience to my parents, because God has Himself commanded it. For what God commands must be much and far nobler than everything that we may devise ourselves, and since there is no higher or better teacher to be found than God, there can be no better doctrine, indeed, than He gives forth. Now, He teaches fully what we should do if we wish to perform truly good works, and by commanding them, He shows that they please Him. If, then, it is God who commands this, and who knows not how to appoint anything better, I will never improve upon it.’

Now, as a good progressive, Luther’s above paragraph has become too simple for me.  If the world and our knowledge of it was ever simple enough to capture all human ethical relationships in the phrase “honor they father and mother,” I don’t believe it is any longer.  Progressives, in their Protestant heritage, have rightly understood that the Kingdom of God comes in and through our own work and toil, is a product of our hard-fought battles for the Just (a point that Luther will not necessarily deny). So, we appropriately develop activist centers dedicated to any number of social rights and goods; we properly recognize that the Church is, by definition, no Church at all if it is not serving those who do not consciously exist within a vision of Isaiah 11.

I, for one, will stand by this vision and progressives’ dedication to it, and I will not claim that our work is anywhere near done.  (A glance at the front cover of any Newspaper will tell you that.)  But, I would also argue for two points.  First, there are times that we progressives get a bit too abstract. We fight for justice and equality, environmental protection and environmental responsibility.  However, I would argue that what we actually fight for is more concrete.  The work we do is work toward fullness of communion between us and God, each other, and the rest of creation.  We seek to be responsible and just not simply because these abstractions are goods in themselves (and they are), but because the concrete life they afford persons (as we have and want still to experience it) is a better life, both now and in the life to come.

Secondly, I would argue that we progressives get a bit too self-righteous, believing that the fate of the world rests on our shoulders and our shoulders alone. While certainly we have a share of responsibility for the sins of this world, there can be no more anthropomorphic belief than the above.  I know that what I’m going to say is not entirely fashionable these days, but the work of God is still God’s work, work in which we do and ought to participate.  But the in-breaking of New Creation is not grounded in our actions; our actions are grounded in it, as promulgators and co-creators.  However much responsibility we must take for this world, we cannot fall into a more or less pragmatic atheism, believing that all good things rest on our bringing them about.  And even if there is some danger  from a social-responsibility perspective for saying this: the resurrection of creation to the fullness of communion is ultimately God’s own responsibility, promised in the resurrection of the Son, to be fulfilled at the end of history.  In other words, God’s work does not rest on us and us alone.

Accordingly, I think that Luther’s sermon on the 4th Commandment reminds us of just such truths.  So, next time you forget what it is as a progressive Christian you’re fighting for, and next time you begin to fall sway to the belief that we humans are our own and only ultimate hope, call your father and mother.  Remind yourself what good communion is by getting them some dammed potatoes, say, next Thanksgiving with love and without complaining, and be humble enough to know that this work is as important as anything else you do. After all, communing with your father and mother was, for Luther, the beginning of all Good human relationship, a communion that might be extended by God with our help through all creation.

For my first resolution, I will try to find myself a virtual reality suit for this coming year (see 1:57 of this video).

For my second resolution, I will try to publicly agree more with both Bushes, or Cheney at this point (see 3:15 of this video)

As for my third, I resolve to refrain from selling my self to mass culture, losing my autonomy in a process of reverse psycho-analysis (see 4:59 of this video).

Those are my Crazy Texan resolutions this year.  Let me know if you have any in the comments below.

With that in mind, I’m mostly interested in the metaphysical and philosophical premises that often lie behind or within various religious traditions.  So it is  with that qualifier that I can answer the question what are the three most interesting religions.

1.  Okay, I know this one sounds like I’m trying to sound all Emo and hip, but Zoroastrianism is a truly fascinating religion, and one that I believe Christianity to be intrinsically dependent on (I believe it’s possible to give a Zoroastrian read to the New Testament).  Cosmologically speaking, it presupposes two main gods, one malicious the other benign.  The first, Angra Mainyu, is represented by chaos and ignorance; the second, Ahura Mazda, by order and wisdom.  The material world is more or less the stage for the cosmic battleground between the two.  What is most enlivening about this religion, however, is that it stood as a harsh critique to early Brahmanistic thought, denying against early forms of Brahmanism that death, disease, and decay were a part of the natural order of the world.  Zoroastrian thinkers believed these privations to be alien, part of Angra Mainyu’s assault on all things good and living; this critique and its rejection of evil in the natural order is, I believe, a quite hopeful one

2.  Again, I’ll risk trying to avoid sounding like I want to sound cool to say that Buddhism has greatly interested and does still interest me.  Philosophically speaking, I’ve read a great deal of a Kyoto thinker named Masao Abe, and, as I like to say, I believe that Abe in some ways “out Heideggers Heidegger.”  What I mean is that Abe gives a good account of the deep Nothingness to which the philosophical aspects of Buddhism are dedicated.  It’s a Nothing beyond all being and non-being; it is an ultimate nihilation that is truly empty of all identity, forming the metaphysical principle to which it seems to me all Buddhist monks aspire as they attempt to lose all forms of attachment.  I suppose the reason I find this insight interesting is that it seems plausible, even if my own faith must ultimately deny the ultimacy of this deep Nothingness.

3.  I suppose that the final religious standpoint I find fascinating is one that most persons don’t necessarily think of as such, that is, Platonism.  It’s hard to call this a religion of its own anymore, especially seeing that it had been so copiously amalgamated into the Christian faith.  But Eric Voeglin (here and here) has convinced me to no small degree that this way of thinking deserves to be called a religion unto itself.  Platonism more or less presupposes and ultimate orderedness to the cosmos, the highest order of which (at least as Neo-platonists such as Plotinus and Prophry talk about) is a Good beyond being.  This Good is ultimate unity, to the point that one cannot eve prescribe of this Good oneness or unity.  This Good is an overflowing activity that emanates the cosmos and the rest of nature eternally, of which all social and political orders are themselves a part.  Accordingly, Platonism is the attempt to achieve social order by means of establishing an analogical order to that of the cosmos.  This fact is interesting to me because early secularizing movements in the West (with which I’m highly sympathetic) attempted to break apart just such analogies.

There it is folks, in all its glory.

I don’t really have anyone in particular to further meme (if I can use that as a verb) on this one, so if you feel like sharing on this matter yourself, feel free to post your own thoughts below or provide a link to your own site in the comments section.  I’m also sure James McGrath would welcome your comments.

That said, Chad, I’ll one up you.  Here’s the Bible in 5 statements using the previously seen formula through 80s movies.  Don’t believe me? Check here .  I cheated a little on one; but, you know, articles and prepositions are real words only when you need them to be.

1.  Wizard of Speed and Time

2.  The Empire Strikes Back

3.  A Certain Sacrifice

4.  18 Again!

5.  Communion

I’d like to eventually add some commentary on the whole conference, especially Taylor and Habermas’ ideas.  Other than a couple introductory comments below, I’d say simply listen to these people for yourself.  I personally think that, as always, Charles Taylor and Cornel West are the most immediately accessible speakers, so perhaps listen to them first.

With regard to Taylor (always my favorite on this subject), he especially is interested in re-defining secularization.  He wants to forget about that understanding of the concept that holds that secularization is an, if not the, anti-religion.  Rather, as a good Democratic ethicist, he’s interested in breaking the external control of any power-structure, including anti-religions, and trying to give persons the rights and abilities to think by themselves for the common good.  This last point is especially important, not necessarily for this particular conversation, but for Taylor in general; his dedication to the common good and what it means to live the good life separate him always from the rest of the Democratic pack.