One of the things we do is explore the symbolic meaning in our churches liturgy, rites, and songs.  I was thoroughly amused when they decided to take this practice into the confirmation service during the children’s time by explaining to the congregation the theological brilliance of one of the children’s favorite songs...Every Move I Make (lyrics here).

Here’s what my budding theology nerd of a youth said…

There is no better way to learn something than to put it in to action.  SO..the children are going to help us lead you in some action and by that I mean dancing and singing.  But first I wanted to point out the brilliance of the song ‘every move I make’ and just what concepts you are putting in to practice as you participate.  How many of you have asked the question, “How is God related to the world?  Where is God?  Who is God?  How can one image God in the light of the scriptures and the scientific picturing of an emerging and evolving world?”  I know…who hasn’t.

Any way, this catchy ditty is a panenthesitic think piece.  It takes literally Paul’s affirmation when speaking to the philosophers in Athens that “God is where we live, move and have our being.”  Panentheism insists that God is in the world but NOT to be equated with the world as in pantheism.  All is IN God but not All is God.  Likewise, the transcendence of the Creator God over God’s creation is not such that God is ever absent, distant, and requiring the rejection of creation’s integrity to act.

So as we sing “every move I make, I make in you, you make me move Jesus” We are evoking the prologue of John in which Jesus is identified as the Word of God – the creativity and logic of creation – in the flesh. It’s as if we are saying that the Word of God that brought creation into being, continues to create to this day, and was incarnate in Jesus, is in each movement and moment of our lives calling us to give flesh to God’s word of love.  Wow…I know y’all would have caught that but it just gets me so excited.

Another Youth Chimes In... What do you make of all the ‘na na na’s’

That’s easy. We are often tempted in our lives to act in less than loving ways.  In those moments of temptation just say “na! na! na! until the temptation passes

Now may you go and rock the motions with wild abandon!

1. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t Biblical, as in it isn’t in the Bible. If you read through the Bible you will not find the affirmation that God created the world out of nothing. It’s just not in there. In fact, even Biblical scholars who in the end want to affirm the doctrine for theological reasons will not point to the idea being present in the Bible. Just re-read Genesis 1 and ask yourself ‘where did the darkness and waters come from?’ They weren’t created but were there when God began to create.
2. Creation Out of Nothing isn’t a part of the Biblical Imagination. Not only is the doctrine absent in scripture but in the quite robust doctrine of Creation in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures you don’t even see an interest in the question itself. There is plenty of interest in the goodness of Creation, God’s on-going relationship with Creation, Creation’s role in God’s on-going mission, the Cosmic Christ’s relationship to Creation, Creation’s groaning and it’s worship of God but not an affirmation that it came from nothing. It seems odd to me to insist on a doctrinal nuance that isn’t in scripture or even asked. Sure you can hold it but if no author of scripture thought about asking, relax with the dogmatism.
3. Early Church Fathers didn’t sweat Creation out of ‘something.’ Both the Hellenistic tradition via Platonism and Judaism assumed that God created out of some unoriginate matter. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria all explicitly affirm the doctrine. In one of his apologies to Greek philosophers Justin martyr insists that Plato stole the idea from Genesis! If Creation out of Nothing was necessary to preserve Monotheism or the Biblical doctrine of Creation then someone needs to call Justin.
4. Creation out of Nothing was a Theological Over Reaction to Gnostic Dualism. Creation out of Nothing developed as a response to Marcion’s insistence that the material world and its Creator were evil. Clearly insisting that everything came from a Good God eliminates Marcion’s dualism but it isn’t necessary to go that far. Both Plato and Genesis have no problem envisioning pre-existent matter as lacking qualities that God’s creativity comes to give shape. This idea wasn’t seen as a threat to God’s goodness at all. In fact one wonders that if the insistence of Creation out of Nothing doesn’t itself bring more problems than it solves – namely the problem of evil. If God’s creative activity isn’t a relational one all the way down then is God not in some way the author of evil?

Since the middle of the second century those theologians who came to be seen in retrospect as ‘orthodox’ unquestionably adhered to Creation out of Nothing as if it were a necessary doctrine from scripture and for the Christian faith. There are of course a bunch of theological ways around the problems created by the doctrine, like Augustine’s insistence that evil doesn’t actually exist or that 2 Maccabees 7:28 is the (inter-testimental) affirmation of the doctrine. My concern is that fear of Marcion has led the church to overrate the importance of the doctrine and continuing to do so isn’t necessary…or Biblical!

If anyone is interested in pursuing the Biblical doctrine of Creation check out Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil. For the early church development of the doctrine see Gerhard May’s Creatio ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of ‘Creation out of Nothing’ in Early Christian Thought. May actually affirms the doctrine but affirms the development I sketched briefly above. A brief summary of the theological side of the argument can be found by David Ray Griffin’s article “Creation out of Nothing, Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil” in Encountering Evil. All good Homebrewed Deacons will be familiar with John Caputo’s The Weakness of God and Catherine Keller’s The Face of the Deep.

As an Episcopalian my sense is that the real issue of same sex marriage rights is but a deeper reflection of something that is even more pertinent to the now of life in broader society and the church. My sense, driven by the Prayer book, the essence of community, and the ever declining dualism in culture, remains that those in symbolic and literal places of leadership in communities of faith (regardless of their kind) must rise up to lead a counter-cultural revolution of being. Christians leaders (and those of other faiths) must begin to say out loud, and in unison, that which is most controversial, prophetic, and radical of all; namely, that the image of God and the experience of the holy (and beautiful and good and true) is to be found in every situation, encounter, and relationship all the time.

Now I must be confessional: what has shaped my deepest sense of this is not simply my experience or growing up as white male in the storied South, or my experience at the Candler School of Theology, but my living into the life and prayers of the 1979 Episcopal Prayer Book. As a work of incomplete genius, and the church, the 1979 Episcopal Prayer Book has been reshaping the imagination of those in the Episcopal church for a generation. It is no wonder for me that people who have agreed to be shaped by its prayers and rituals would not in some way already be formed to love the imago dei in the every.

Don’t be mistaken, radical theology is preceded by radical practice not the other way around. The reason I do not believe, as Bo Sanders, that the church in N.America will always be as it has been, is because I believe that the church alive in this historical moment is awake to the extent to which praying (or practice) shapes belief. While there are monoliths in each of the mainline denominations, the most innovative of leadership are asking the important question: what does our methodology of practice say about the what that we believe.

No longer does belief go unchecked in the face of how belief gets formed.

Here again (and where I agree with Bo) I should note that I believe more than uniformity, the Bible canonizes diversity. As a community gathered around it, our essence is that of plurality, not necessarily that of uniformity. This is directly related to the current debate about same sex marriages: because our prayers and practice shape what we believe chiefly, the acceptance of the other in religious practice, rooted in belief, trumps literalism and overturns any ism that the church may face.

Let me conclude this short introit, by saying this: I do not expect that everyone should believe just as I do. There are many who hold different literal and symbolic views of scripture. What is more, if what Bo Sanders hold is true, that “the church in N.America will never change,” then hardest part of practicing transformational encounter with “the other” is resisting the industrialized tendency to make you like me.

This is the greatest challenge to the dualism of modernity: that the holy is to be met not in likeness, but in the discomfort that comes with accepting contrast as ingredient to holiness.

Pastors, priests, theologians, prophets, all: lead in praxis not merely in pronouncement. The holy abounds, waiting to not simply be discovered, but witnessed to. Or, as M. Ward put it, let us seek to be able to say: “finally I found you, without ever knowing how to, by putting my right foot in front of the left.”

Go. See. Be. Live. Look.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Between President Obama’s evolution on gay marriage, North Carolina’s new Amendment banning gay marriage (again), and the United Methodist’s church decision to not admit disagreement on the issue this month’s ‘theology uncorked’ topic is rather timely.  Theology UnCokred is a theological discussion group hosted by Neighborhood Church UCC (where I serve) and Manhattan Beach Community Church UCC (where my friend Erin serves).  Any local people are welcome to join us Thursday May 24th at the Friends of the Vine in Redondo Beach from 7-9 for the conversation.  We will enjoy wine while sounding like Christians as we chat about a controversial topic.

In preparation for the conversation check out Erin and I’s podcast here where we discuss the Bible, the tradition, our own experiences, concerns, and story.  You may also want to check out some of these online resources.

* Biblical Scholar Walter Wink’s “Biblical Perspectives on Homosexuality“

* Theologian Michael Westmoreland Series on GLTB Persons and the Church

*4 different perspectives summarized 1)Rejection of God’s Design 2)Welcoming but not Affirming 3)Welcoming and Accommodating 4) Welcoming & Celebrating

* Ben Witherington gives the conservative perspective in summary

* Tony Jones 99c eBook on Same-Sex Marriage

* Clobber-Passage Bible info

Remember that those who are coming can send in your questions/topics/etc for discussion so that we make sure everyone’s interest and voice is part of the conversation.

I’d like to follow up on the claim of Žižek and others that the God revealed in Jesus is not a God of tidy prose logic but a God who celebrates reality’s “loose ends.” Last time I suggested that this lesson of so-called “Christian atheism” should dispossess us of the proverb that “everything happens for a reason,” a proverb that turns out to be more evasive of suffering than it is truly consoling.

This time I’d like to suggest that the appeal to a God of “reasons” is at work not only in common Christian responses to grief, but also in contemporary Christian objections to environmental ethics. One of the guiding questions here, then, is whether a shift away from the idea of a God who secures life’s “logic” can open us up to a properly ethical embrace of non-human nature.

Recently the Cornwall Alliance, a conservative Christian group, produced a DVD series urging their fellow Christians to object mightily to any agenda remotely smacking of environmentalism. Earth care, they argue in the videos, is fundamentally opposed to the Gospel of Christ, and the promotion of such care is a most insidious threat to our children, whose supple minds are especially susceptible to the temptations of idols. Not surprisingly, the Cornwall Alliance titled its series “Resisting the Green Dragon.”

Similar sentiments to those expressed in this series surfaced in a more broadly palatable form during Rick Santorum‘s recent campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. One of the things that made Santorum so attractive to evangelical Christians was the character of his opposition to government-enforced environmental protections. All the candidates shared this opposition, of course, but what Santorum added to the requisite I’ll-cut-all-government-agencies pitch was a theological justification. Barack Obama’s environmental policies, Santorum said, are not only fiscally unsound and politically overreaching, they are based on a “phony theology.”

Immediately Santorum came under fire for intimating that Obama is not really a Christian, and thus appearing to support those unfounded but still-popular claims that he is a secret Muslim. This, Santorum assured us, was far from his intention, whether such a suggestion played well with his base or not (it did). What he really meant, as he told CBS News the next morning, was that Obama doesn’t seem to have a Biblical understanding of human beings’ unique status in the universe. He meant that Obama’s policies don’t appear to respect the Biblical idea that human beings have “dominion” over the rest of creation.

What dominion means, Santorum stated confidently, is that human beings ought never to be “subservient” to non-human nature. In other words, in the (commonplace) event of a conflict between human economic goals and the continued thriving of non-human ecosystems (read: Alberta tar sands), the Bible says human considerations always hold the trump card. On this understanding, to “care” for the environment apart from the weighing of potential human costs and benefits is to subscribe to a “phony theology.”

On the surface, the shared concern in these examples of Christian resistance to environmentalism is that of avoiding idolatry (worshipping the creature instead of the creator). Yet their common effect is the aggrandizement of the human, to the point where their appeals to “dominion” seem out of step with any lordship discernibly modeled on Christ, who was among us “as one who serves.” What is at the root of this need to be so emphatic about human dominion that one all but ignores concrete Biblical models of authority? Is it possible that we try to assert a monarchical dominion over non-human nature because we have discovered something true but also troubling about creation? Have we perhaps discovered that creation is less tidily explicable than the human need for reasons can handle? By extension, do we dominate the non-human other because it’s our Biblically-justified, “God-given right,” or because we don’t like the idea that meeting God in his good creation might require developing a love for wilderness of all kinds?

Consider what Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about what the “second book” of revelation (nature) reveals about its maker:

The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz. (139)

The question is, do we love pizzazz? Is the world’s wild freedom, its extravagant perpetuation of the new, is all this given to us that we might “master” it? Does living up to our dominion mean straightening nature’s tangles, turning an apparently personal, albeit wild, power into something humanly profitable?

Francis Bacon certainly thought so. He justified the violence of his new scientific method by appealing to his contemporaries’ interest in dominion, rooted in fear of nature’s extravagance and “femininity” (which for patriarchy amount to the same thing):

For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art than when left to herself. (Bacon, “De Dignitate,” Works vol. 4, 298.)

In other words, if you want to relate to non-human nature in the way God intended, you cannot respect its (chaotic) agency, but must transform it, even violently, into an instrument of the human will. Thus do boreal forests become “oil reserves.”

Is there a warranted Christian response to the discovery that non-human nature is characterized more by extravagance than by efficiency which is not so Baconian? In other words, does Christianity encourage us toward a more sympathetic relationship with nature’s wildness than the fear which leads to oppressive dominion?

In Ecology at the Heart of Faith, Catholic theologian Denis Edwards offers a helpful summary of how Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit have always pushed in the direction of hospitality toward creation’s extravagance, instead of fear of the same. The Spirit of God is depicted in the Bible as the life-giving breath which animates all creatures. Thus Edwards suggests that in the ongoing process of creation, the Spirit is the agent of the radical newness (the baffling pizzazz) that we can see all around us in an emergent universe. God as Trinity so loves communion among differences that in the person of the Spirit he creates ever more surprising differences to mediate in what amounts to a wildly extravagant love.

It seems appropriate, then, that in the Bible the Spirit is not given a human face: “the Biblical images for the Spirit tend to come from the natural world. . . . These images preserve the otherness of the Spirit of God and resist the human tendency to domesticate the Spirit” (45). And yet, Edwards goes on, this refusal of domestication, this critique of anthropocentrism, does not make God as Spirit remote, for “it points to the otherness of nonhuman creatures as a place of God.” The breath of God in the world is a wild wind, and yet this ought not to lead us to fearful tactics of domination, but instead “to a new respect for what is wild and beyond human domestication” (46).

The imperative resulting from this view seems to be this: don’t imagine you can love or serve only where you see a human face, or that you forsake your properly human role when you transgress that boundary. For the Trinitarian God’s creative love does not wish to establish you as a static sovereign, safe within your border as “human” against the “non-human.” Instead, the Spirit’s love seeks to form you according to the model of “ecstatic” personhood that is the very life of God. To prefer self-possessed anthropocentrism is to reject the personhood/life at the core of reality. If we seek our true dominion, if we seek to model the only truly “authoritative” form of life in the universe, then we must seek to be initiated into this way of personhood; we must seek to be inspired to hospitality rather than fear by the excesses of creaturely difference. This would not mean inviting tigers into our homes, but it should mean resisting political decisions whose preservation of human “benefits” at the expense of non-human nature is really to our detriment as persons being formed by the wildly hospitable Spirit.

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

This is straight up, real deal, John Cobb at his best.  John has written one of the best Christologies, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, and is here to unpack a bit of it for you.

Deacon Dan, thanks for the call.  Here’s John Cobb talking about Process and Prayer & here’s the Theology Nerd Throwdown episode on prayer.

Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here and the Question & Answer session that followed this podcast.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast. Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology? Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger. Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out! The iTunes subscription is below.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

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Don’t forget to check out the first session from the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here.

John Cobb has been on the podcast a number of times; Prayer and Process, and the special 101st episode, earth day, and Incarnation-cast.  Tom Oord visited on two previous occasions; The Open-Relational Gospel and the Science of Love!

Want more Process theology?  Check out my video bibliography here! Tom Oord is a sweet blogger.  Cobb will answer your questions.

Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

Click To Subscribe in iTunes...this SHOW is going SOLO!!!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

You see for those who pay attention to how he has served as President we already knew what he thought.  He has been actively supporting the recognition of equal rights for the gay community throughout his first term.  Obama was never evolving personally in the White House.  What has happened is Obama finally let his conscious speak on an issue that is divided and contentious because it was becoming humorous to here again that his mind is ‘evolving’ while acting like his mind was settled.  Yet there is something powerful about the one occupying the White House to believe it out loud!  I wonder if the same wouldn’t be true if more Christian leaders stopped evolving and started speaking.

Obama’s situation is not much different than many Christian leaders throughout the country whose jobs and personal security necessitate keeping the mysterious ‘independents’ and ‘moderates’ more happy with you than the other options.  The number of influential pastors of large churches, seminary professors, and denominational leaders who have been walking the ‘evolving’ tight-rope around gay marriage in the church are huge.  Just from personal conversations I can think of 15 well known church leaders who would loose their jobs if their actual conviction as a Christian was known.  If you ask these individuals who have dedicated their lives to the service of the church what they really believe they are open and affirming to the full inclusion of the LGTBQ community into the church and yet their public stance is ‘evolving.’

Just this past week a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship minister from North Carolina said regarding Amendment One, “It’s sad that the only three people at the church voting against the amendment are the three ordained ministers and the congregation will never know.”  That is a sad but all too frequent decision by many.

It is my hope that my Brother in Christ Obama’s risky move to make his personal convictions known will inspire the silent ‘evolving’ leaders in the church to do the same.  Maybe then we can end the culture war that is costing the church its integrity with a generation and communicating hatred toward our gay brothers and sisters.

Why NOT the Avengers Case?

They are names of heroes, superheroes even. Superman, Wonderwoman, Lone Ranger, the Incredibles and even Captain Planet. They were all people who, though having normal lives in one moment, possessed the uncanny ability to transform into a different person when a need or opportunity to help emerged.

What all of these heroes have is common is not simply that they fought for justice, for what was right in the world, but that in their everyday lives they were open to the opportunities to do good where ever it was needed most, right then, in that moment; even if it meant flying across the city to make it happen or spending nights looking up at the sky.

"And heart!"

Look, it took me a long while to realize that many of gospel texts that seem to be about cosmic judgment aren’t really about some cosmic-epic judgment at all. They are really about how it is that we live our lives in the day to day. Stories like that of Christ the king who sits on throne and who draws a line between those who do good wherever they see it, and those who do good when they think others will see it, is not something that should startle us.

Rather, this parable really puts doing good for others back on us. Like many of the other stories that we read in our communities of faith throughout the calendar year, the feasts and festivals that the church holds as part of what it means to do life together shapes us to see the world with a different set of eyes and to hear with a different set of ears.

The parable of Christ the King, one often read as far more judging than calling, beckons us like the batman symbol cast across the Gotham skyline to see justice not as something that will get enacted out in the future, but rather as something that we enact every day, in every moment, with every choice. Or, as Tony Jones suggests at the intersection of our ongoing journey with others.

Look, in a sense, what our Christian readings, prayers, and our table fellowship call us to today, is to dress up in justice and to play our part in the reign of God that exists always before us. And this reign, is not something that happens in one place of creation and not in another. The rule of God always covers us all. The rule of God, the reign of God, is more like the ground of all being that gets glimpsed and tied into than simply put in place when the right people are in power. Rule of God is always happening though not always enacted.

What the church enacts through its readings, liturgies, and prayers, is a calling of  Christians (and all who participate in them) to be in the rule of God and to Look (for the good in others, for the good in self); to search for the opportunities and places where we can help the other, where we can do justice in the world, where can do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

When we do this, when we put on the eyes of faith, we come to see that Jesus doesn’t want us to do things in this world because he told us to. Jesus wants us do justice (to do good) in this world because as we do justice, as we do good in the world, we bring a little bit of hope to those that need it most. We bring a little more of that which is sacred to the forefront of people’s experience and vision.

And, if I’m guessing, as we do unto others as we would have done unto us, and as we share our talents with one another, as we gather rather than divide, bind those that are injured, see someone crying and offer a shoulder or help, see someone that is hungry and give them food, see the thirsty and give them water, see those that are cold and give them a jacket; as we imitate the saints living and present among us…we might just figure out that there are a few more heroes out there in the world, and in our communities of faith than we thought.

And that my friends, is pretty super.

Look.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Joshua on Twitter & Joshua on Facebook

This is the FIRST TNT episode NOT in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like this, the upcoming Philip Clayton 3-D podcast, Bo and I Nerding Out!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Jack is Back… and this time we are discussing radical theology!  John Jack Caputo is a living legend and top notch philosopher of religion.  He comes with faith of Derrida and the Catholic mystical deferral.  Today you get to experience a live 3-D event, “Christianity UnCorked.”

This episode is sponsored by Dr. Laurel Schneider.  Thank You Laurel!  We appreciate the support!  If you missed Laurel’s visit to the podcast go check it out NOW!

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

Click To Subscribe in iTunes...this SHOW is going SOLO!!!

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Both Caputo’s first,  second, and third visit rocked the podcast. Then we shared his main-stage fun from Soularize and the 3D event with Philip Clayton, Jay Bakker, and Peter Rollins.  Even more exciting are these class lectures Caputo is sharing here at HBC.  These lectures are free theological cat nip for theology nerds. Enjoy.

Here’s Elizabeth Johnson’s 1st and 2nd visit to the podcast.  She is the Catholic theologian Jack mentions as the one who got in trouble for attempting to counter the patriarchy in Classical theology.

This is the testimony of a young woman I met last week on my trip to Tijuana with Centro Romero. She was extremely courageous to share her story with us. The transcript below is translated from her Spanish:

“I was sold to a gentleman from the U.S. by my sister when I was 13 years old. I already had a baby. In the exchange, I was sold under the agreement that he would help me out with my kid because my baby was ill. I ended up being trafficked to Anchorage, Alaska. He basically kidnapped my baby away from me and didn’t allow me to see him. I was in prison, not able to see anyone for a long, long time. At that time, I was forced to have sex with men and women. Obviously, I was aware that my baby was not getting the care that we were promised. Our diet was basically rice and beans and nothing else. At the main market, at least in my case, I was 14, about to be 15, I was sold to have sex with other women.

“So, unfortunately my baby’s condition got worse. He never allowed me to see my baby and my baby was never provided with the medical care he needed, even when he was in the process of dying, he never thought about providing care for my baby. My baby had leukemia at the time, but of course I didn’t know that.

“Probably because of my mothering instinct, one day I decided that I didn’t care what happened, I needed to take care of my baby. So I found a way to escape and to take my baby to a place in which I was pretty sure that he would get the care that he needed. But the problem was that I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know the area or the town or even where I was. And unfortunately my baby passed away.

“When I ended up getting to a place, before my baby passed away, the people that received me didn’t want to take care of my baby. After the baby passed away, due to the lack of care, I noticed that I suddenly started receiving gifts. As I think about it now, I think they were probably trying to keep my mouth shut because they didn’t want me to denounce them or anything like that.

“After my baby passed away, instead of burying him, they invited me to cremate my baby. It was a tough situation for me because I was only 15, so I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. After my baby was cremated, the only thing that I had to be in touch with what I felt was a part of me was the ashes. Unfortunately, he basically kidnapped the ashes and I was recaptured and put out to have sex once again. I used to cry, just asking him to allow me to touch the ashes of my baby, but he never allowed me to do that.

“One time, after the cremation of my baby, I was forced to have sex with a woman and him, and he was so involved with what was happening that I was able to escape through a window. I was able to make contact with a policeman and they took me to a place where they used to take minors who are in trouble. Because I didn’t know any English, they kept asking me where I was from. They kept me in the shelter for minors for a few months.

“I found out that the man who bought me was 33 years-old, that he had a criminal record as a sex offender, and had been involved with minors in the past. But he, as a predator, kept looking for me. After a few months in the care of the police department, I realized that I was once again pregnant.

“He showed up, presenting himself as a relative. He promised me that he would be gentle with me if I came back to his place. Without the support of the police department, being 15, I didn’t have any option other than to believe in him again. At least during my pregnancy he was very loving. But, after the birth of my baby, as soon as my baby was born, he put me under the “care” of the immigration officers. He told them that I didn’t have the capacity to care for my baby and that my first baby had passed away because I physically abused him.

“I was deported from Anchorage to Tijuana. Even under those conditions, I started working at a bar in Tijuana because I wanted to put some money together for airfare in order to go back to Alaska for my baby. And I ended up going back to Alaska. I was looking for my baby and then my abuser kept telling me not to leave him because he was finally in love with me. He was getting government support because he was a single father. He asked the government to facilitate the process of getting a house for the family in San Diego county. Two months after that, we got a house in San Diego and he moved himself to San Diego, but without me because I had to come back to Tijuana. He promised that he would bring my baby girl to Tijuana so I could see my daughter. But, if I wanted to see her, I had to pay him $100.

“My pain and suffering was just too much, so I decided to give up and think that my baby was dead in the same way that I lost my first child. I decided to stay away from him. Even though being apart from him would hurt me a lot because of my child, I knew that it was the best thing that I could do for me and for her.”

At this point she was overcome and unable to continue the story.

I’ve struggled with what to say to close this post. The hell on earth that this precious young woman experienced is devastating. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution to the problem of sex trafficking. It is a global and complex problem. But I want to issue a challenge to men: We are the primary source of the demand for sex trafficking and we must begin to challenge the male-culture that says that putting others down makes us feel better about ourselves. Every single time that we make a joke about rape, call a girl a slut or a whore, or objectify women through pornography, we contribute to a culture that makes possible the stories like the one above. The fact that we are unaware that there are literally millions of stories like the one above shows how desperately we try to suppress them. If we want to end sex trafficking, we must start with ourselves.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

1. School Debt is Vocational Slavery. When you have a student loan payment of 300 dollars a month a bunch of jobs are off the table. It shouldn’t be a surprise that working for and with ‘the least of these’ are rarely financially lucrative. For example, if you just finished law school and gotta start payments you don’t get to advocate for immigrants or work for environmental justice, you gotta pay the bills.
2. School Debt Kills Tithing. I know the math is obvious BUT if you are writing a big check every month for your student loans until you are 45 years old that is a bunch of money that previous generations had available to give to the church and its ministries. When fewer and fewer people have money available to give to a church certain people and their needs get priority and internally focused expenditures get priority over externally focused spending.
3. School Debt Tames Prophets. You can have a conviction, a calling, and a platform but if you don’t have economic security for you and your family you can stay quiet, vague, and distracted from your convictions. In this past year I have received over 20 emails from ministers who said “I wish I was in a situation financially where I could say and work towards X.” X = some social justice issue God says we should care about. What is their main burden? Student loans and health care.
4. School Debt Destroys Community. If you have to get a job that supports your family and your loans then you are more likely to have your check dictate where you move, when you work, and how long you work. This extra financial burden has led many of my friends to move away from their family and faith communities and take a job they hate at hours that eliminate growing new relationships in a new town. As a church this type of relational oppression is problematic and shouldn’t be accepted as part of the ‘game.’  The saddest part about this is our students are already indentured to the system before they are aware of what they are choosing.
5. Student Debt Squelches Ecclesial Entrepreneurship. What stops a gifted and called minister from taking the risk and planting a new missional community? Purchasing her own health insurance and having to write student loan checks. When taking the risk of starting a community that connects and serves the generations most impacted by student debt it doesn’t help the church for both the planters and the congregants to be riddled with exorbitant student loans. If you are deciding between a risky entrepreneurial move and jumping through the hoops of your denominational superstructure for a benefit secure job it’s easy to see how student debt could turn the tide away from ecclesial entrepreneurship.

 This is the LAST TNT episode in the Homebrewed Podcast Feed!  Subscribe HERE to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast so you will continue to get the goodness like next week’s episode with John Caputo!  The iTunes subscription is below.

Why are people leaving Church?  Rachel Held Evans blogged it, Bo shared it, and now we discuss it.  Andrew Sullivan’s post that got the conversation started ‘Christianity in Crisis.’  In this conversation Tripp discusses three good reasons people are leaving the church

1. Majoring in the Minors
2. Lack of Intellectual Integrity
3. Lack of Ethical Integrity

and then questions the impact of age programed ministry through college on the decline of the church.  Why does Tripp have gay friends at Acts 29 churches?

Then we move on to discussing Jesus and his disciples packing heat.  Bo previously blogged all the verses where Jesus mentions swords and then he ‘Walter Wink’s it’ by discussing turn the other cheek. Tripp then wonders about metaphysical violence and Process philosophy.  We concluded by getting a little sermonic about the Biblical logic for universalism!

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Any way, my home state of North Carolina is being completely ridiculous and attempting to coerce people though the power of the state to comply with a particular religious vision for the home.  That vision isn’t normative in scripture but don’t tell hetrosexist Christians it’s not, they got hermenutical skills no one can match.  I use to think I had heard every contrived way of explaining the Bible failing to speak consistently on behalf of God’s favorite relation math equation, One Man + One Woman = Marriage, BUT THEN I posted a link to Protect All NC Families on my facebook wall saying that I wished I was still in North Carolina to vote against it.

I got a few negative comments, a number of HBC Deacons saying they would vote on my behalf, and then this masterpiece of Biblical exegesis.  One of my former youth dropped a Bible verse and all hermenutical hilarity broke loose.  I learned something.  The patriarchs like Abraham should have just married and reproduced with one woman.  Because Abraham failed to live up to Biblical marriage God cursed him and so Islam was born. That is disgusting.  I hope this isn’t an idea gaining popularity. I had no idea what to say but a College Friend did.  Check out this conversation and see some masterful facebook hermenutics in action.

• FORMER YOUTH Genesis 2:23-24

• COLLEGE FRIEND Former Youth – Unfortunately, The Bible is not an ally in the fight for such legislation, but rather a liability. If “one man & one woman” is the only definition of a legal marriage then – without venturing out of the book (Genesis) you’ve chosen to cite – the following men were breaking the law: Abram/Abraham (16:3), Esau (26:34), Jacob (29:23, 28; 30:4, 9), and Nahor (22:20-24). There are plenty more examples outside of Genesis that refute the notion that 1 Man + 1 Woman = “Biblical Marriage.”

• FORMER YOUTH You are correct in saying that those men broke the law, and they suffered serious consequences because of it. Because of Abraham’s actions, it distorted his image of God, eventually leading to the creation of Islam.Just because men did these things in the Bible does not mean they were following God’s will in doing so. Judas was one of Jesus disciples, yet he betrayed him. Just because Judas had been a follower of Jesus does not mean he was doing God’s will in this instance. Jesus supported the Law of Moses (Lev 18:22 & Lev 20:13). Also, in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Paul says “Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
• COLLEGE FRIEND It’s interesting that you have no evidence to back up your claim that these four men “suffered serious consequences” other than the fact that one of them was used as the foundation of an alternate religion, which is – in your opinion only – the serious consequence 1 of the 4 listed suffered (centuries after his death). I see nothing regarding polygamy in any of the verses you cited, and yet I see polygamists in the Bible who, unless you can show me evidence to the contrary, suffered no rebuke from God for living a polygamist lifestyle. What was Davids punishment? Moses’? Saul’s? Solomon’s? Caleb’s?

• FORMER YOUTH Although Romans 6:23 says “For the wages of sin is death” I would say that Isiah 59:2 is also is a pretty severe consequence of sin of which we all suffer: “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.” I am not as well knowlegded about the Old Testament as I would like to be and I am sorry that I do not have answers to all of your questions. But I do pray that in time the Lord will answer them. I therefore encourage you: that the power of prayer is enormous: Matthew 7:7 ”Ask, and it will be given to you seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”
• COLLEGE FRIEND Former Youth, it appears now you’ve taken to simply firing off Scripture that has no application here. The wages of sin may, in fact, be death, but we’ve yet to establish that polygamy is a sin. To the contrary, I’ve provided several unchallenged Biblical examples of Godly men who had multiple wives and God never chose to chide them for it. In closing, two things…

  Firstly, and with all due respect, if you are admittedly ignorant of the Old Testament (OT) (and I give you tremendous credit for your humble admission of this), yet choose to use select passages from it to inform your decisions regarding your political voice, then I would encourage you to become more familiar with it. In doing so, you will find that the many commands regarding how to treat one’s slave(s) are not being put to their full use in today’s America and perhaps could spearhead a petition or legislation to re-introduce OT-based slavery in NC/America… or any one of the other categories of OT laws that are currently being ignored by our government: dietary, parenting, haircuts, clothing, etc.

  Secondly, do pray that the Lord will clear up for you the confusion between “Love your [heterosexual, monogamous] neighbor as yourself,” and “the wages of [what I perceive to be] sin is death [and legislation to deny you man-made government/legal benefits].” Also, while we’re on prayer, I would encourage you, if you truly feel that “the power of prayer is enormous,” to act on that conviction (and encourage others to do likewise), by staying home from the polls on May 8th and, instead of voting against the Marriage Amendment, do something much more powerful: pray against it.

  Tripp – apologies for rambling on your page; much love and respect to you for standing up for love & equality in this world. Peace.

• SARCASTIC MINISTER These comments have been such a blessing in my life, thank you! I always knew Islam was a lie! May the Truth of Jess Christ win the hearts of those who are under the devils grip.

• SARCASTIC PHD STUDENT If there was such a thing as biblical marriage, it would include sexual hospitality, i.e. giving one’s wife/wives or daughters to establish social and political connections. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it would be good to read the bible.
• NICE MINISTER LADY Former Youth, the Corinthians verse you quote above is also talking about having sex as a form of worship to a plethora of Roman deities. In this case, it was about the Corinthian cult of Venus who required worshippers to participate in orgies and things to supply worship. The scriptures have a long history of saying that sex in order to please God is a no-no. Sex as a worship and appreciation of what God made, on the other hand, is the subject of an entire Book (Song of Songs) and is lauded! Whenever Paul forbids LGBT stuff, he’s usually either talking about ritual sex or prostitution (usually boys prostituting themselves to men). There aren’t a lot of words to translate this super well, as the context of the culture the verse was written in is what makes it important. We’re not dealing with many of these issues today, so the verse is irrelevant. Also, Paul’s words are not the words of Jesus, and so many seem to forget that. Jesus doesn’t talk about LGBT stuff… except for that verse when he talks about how being transgendered is totally fine (Matt 19:12) and he DOES forbid divorce. We seem to have a narrow minded definition of what defends families in NC.

  
  

Monica A. Coleman is Assc. Professor of Constructive Theology and African American Religions at Claremont School of Theology and is your guide into Process Theology!

She is the author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Innovations: African American Religious Thought), The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence, and a contributor to the new Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought.

There are a couple videos from the EVTC from Monica.  She discusses Life After Death & Creative Transformation.  Check them out and share them!

You can follow her blog and all the other media projects that she does at http://monicaacoleman.com/.

She is indeed a master tweeter and Patheos Progressive Christian Blogger.

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A large number of victims are taken from communities of extreme poverty in places like Honduras and Guatemala. Traffickers go down into these communities and identify potential children. They approach the mother of the child and say “That’s a beautiful daughter, can I buy her for $100?” Because of the extreme poverty, lack of education, and the dire needs of their large families, the mothers often agree to sell their children (often with the added incentive of violence). Once the traffickers have purchsed the children, they are moved to port towns and then on to warehouses in Chiapas (southern Mexico). In these huge warehouses, there are rows and rows of children with signs hung around their neck with prices. Brothel owners, pimps, and other traffickers go to the warehouse to purchase the children for approximately $200-500. They are then moved from southern Mexico up to border towns like Tijuana. At this point, the children are sold again for $500-2000. In Tijuana, a girl on the street can be propositioned by U.S. “sex tourists” for 10 minutes for $40. A very young girl will go for $200-500, virgins for even higher. Pratically anything you want, if you have the money, you can get. The girls are sold to 10-15 times a day.

Some of the girls are moved from town to town to keep their profits high. Others are moved across the border. Traffickers may connect with Americans and pay them to use their children’s birth certificates to move the trafficked child into America. Once in America, they are sold for approximately $15,000.

This whole process can occur in 15-30 days. Throughout the process, the children are raped and their spirits are broken. They are manipulated into believing that they are worthless. Pictures of their brothers and sisters are shown to them and they are told that If they ever speak out to anyone, their family will be attacked.

The Mexican government estimates that 137,000 children, women, and men are currently caught in this chain. In reality, that number is probably much, much higher.

* This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

She is the author of Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Innovations: African American Religious Thought), The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence, and a contributor to the new Creating Women’s Theology: A Movement Engaging Process Thought.

There are a couple videos from the EVTC from Monica.  She discusses Life After Death & Creative Transformation.  Check them out and share them!

You can follow her blog and all the other media projects that she does at http://monicaacoleman.com/.

She is indeed a master tweeter and Patheos Progressive Christian Blogger.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

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If you’re like me, sex trafficking is something that you may have heard of but are not aware of the extent of the problem. The immersion program at the Romero Center focuses on sexual exploitation on both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the border. We learned today about how the problem of trafficking is shockingly huge. Estimates vary, but anywhere from 12-45 million people are victims of human trafficking each year worldwide. That’s almost 1 person in modern-day slavery for every 1,000 people on the planet. Women, men, and children are trafficked from or within almost every country.

So what is human trafficking? In short, it is the recruiting, harboring, and/or moving of people. Traffickers use force, fraud, or violence to obtain their victims. There are a number of purposes that people are trafficked for, including: involuntary servitude, debt bondage, slavery, and sex. Human trafficking is the third most profitable illegal industry behind the trafficking of drugs and weapons. This is not just a problem “out there” in the ‘third-world’ but it is something that we are tied up in. After Germany, the U.S. is the second largest destination/market for sex slavery in the world. But it’s not just sex, many of the products that we buy in our stories are the result of slave labor (take the slavery footprint quiz).

We have a hard time imagining that there could be such a huge problem, especially within our own borders. Partly, this is because we have bought into the ideology of progress which says that our system is the most efficient that the world has ever seen and things are better than they have ever been. These ideas have been shaken a bit in recent years by the economic downturn, but regardless of how true or untrue our belief in progress is, it makes it very difficult to recognize that slavery is not over. We have a culture-wide denial of the real problems that vulnerable people in our world face.

As people of faith, this should be deeply troubling to us. The book of Amos, one of the prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, begins with a list of nations that God will soon judge, all enemies of the Israelites. It is easy to imagine myself in the crowd as the prophet proclaimed the message. “Yeah God, go get those evil people! All of our enemies are going down!” I cry as Amos lists off offence after offence. As the crowd moves into a frenzy of judgment and condemnation of the pagans, Amos turns the tables: “God says: For the sins of Israel, I will not hold back punishment; because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” (2:6) With our insatiable desire for cheap food, cheap clothes, and cheap sex, we have sold the needy for a pair of sandals. How long must the victims wait for us to change our ways?

———-

Tomorrow we’ll be heading into Tijuana to meet and speak to both victims and local activists. Check back in to the blog for more updates and tweet me @stephenmk if you have any questions.  This is a guest post from Stephen Keating who is covering this sex trafficking conference for HBC.  Thanks to Stephen for sharing what he’s learning with us!

In recent weeks Driscoll was awkwardly on The View and many of us watched painfully as he and his wife answered questions about “Christian sex”. Christian, that is, in his view of it (pun intended). And then there were the facial expressions of Whoppi Goldberg and other hosts: horrified, perplexed, and unsure if they could actually trust this man.

Then it happened, without a moments notice Driscoll parroted sections from his newest book (Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, & Life Together) where he claims that while the Bible says nothing bad about masturbation or oral sex, he is certain of what it says about homosexuality. Namely, that it is wrong. Godly sex, Driscoll holds, is meant to be performed only between a man and a woman, married. He also noted, and I’m not kidding, that the Biblical model for Christian marriage is all about friendship. He was, as he put it, “a Biblical Christian” and Christian sex means friends first (according to the Bible) and then becoming devoted husband and wife second (according to the New Testament). Verse? Passage? Seriously?

The quickest way for me to get to the point is to just say it: not only is Mark Driscoll’s reading of Scripture shallow and off point, he is not a Biblical Christian. Rather, like a child given a hand-me-down iphone to play with, Driscoll neither fully understands nor utilizes the technology of Scripture in ways that are consonant with its design or intent. In fact, in some ways, one might wonder if his use of Scripture is more a kin to giving a child a loaded gun rather than a iphone.

Biblical Christianity holds the capacity of the living Scriptures to shape the faith of the community at a higher value than the authority Scripture to normatively dictate moral behavior. While traditions model and even shape behavior, the stories of Scripture narrate values and open up faith beyond singular interpretations.

Biblical Christianity attempt to listen to the writers of the Bible in their local context and in our present one. Tradition, reason, science, and real time community must provide the context in which Scripture is read and lived today. For Driscoll, who believes that certain parts of the Bible are frozen in time like Han Solo in the chambers of Jabba the Hut, the narratives of Scripture are clear about some things more than others. My issue is, these narratives are neither stuck in time, nor seeking to speak normatively for all time. If they were, then Driscoll should not have been wearing the jacket that he wore any more than he should eat shrimp, or pork, or allow his wife to speak to with authority, head uncovered.

Biblical Christianity holds all the teachings and stories of Scripture, the good and bad, the random and silly, the bloody and romantic in the context of our story as a people of faith today. The Bible itself can not be reduced to a singular theme. As hard as ethicists, theologians, and scholars have tried to reduce the message of the book to that of a single nature, by its very design it resists the capacity to be reduced. As Adolf Harnack would have us to consider, you can not separate the corn from the husk. And, while even Andrew Sullivan has suggested that Thomas Jefferson’s Jesus is more worthy of following than that of the faith of the church, Biblical Christianity can not be abstracted from its practice in community (the Church) any more than Jesus can be followed outside the tension of the whole of his remembered words.

At the end of the day we need to be very clear: there is a difference between Biblical Christianity and Christianity that uses (or abuses) the Bible to its own ends by claiming that it has clear cut answers to very complex issues that Christians face. Biblical Christianity, indeed Biblical faith, is not concerned with whether or not answers are made simple or questions are ever answered. Biblical faith recognizes what Luke Timothy Johnson so often points out to his students: that by its very design, the Bible canonizes a diversity of voices, opinions, and perspectives on how to follow the Risen Lord.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Joshua on Twitter & Joshua on Facebook

As for Noah, Bill Leonard asks a bunch of questions – good ones.  Be wise.  Listen to his awesome visit to the podcast & go check out his post on Noah.

When did the people of Noah’s day finally realize that what was happening to them was more than just a stationary front? Why do some religious folks take the Noah story literally but resist the possibility of a contemporary global catastrophe, one essentially of human creation?

Is biblical literalism clearer for the past than the present? How many glaciers must collapse and heat waves smolder before we literally read the “signs of the times?”

Wouldn’t it be weird if “secularists” turned out to be the ones who discerned earth’s impending judgment on our lives and lifestyles? What if global warming is true and we don’t have sense enough to see the planet itself as ark?

Like Noah, we still could labor together to find “grace in the eyes of the Lord.” Or just turn up the church air conditioning.

If you wondered exactly what our modern day Noah has to say check out Paul Gilding’s recent TED talk ‘the earth is full.’

Laurel Schneider is Professor of Theology, Ethics, and Culture at the Chicago School of Theology.  If you are wise you have surely gotten yourself a copy of Laurel’s edited volume Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation since both Catherine Keller and John Thatamanil have discussed it on previous episodes.  Now you just got check out Laurel’s Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity.

Check out Lauerl’s “It Gets Better” video here.

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Prof. Paul Capetz & Deacon Stephen Keating join Bo and I in the Homebrewed Christianity HQ in Redondo Beach on a rainy St. Patrick’s Day morning for a podcast.  We had a blast! You will enjoy this podcast…if you are into philosophy, history, political ranting, Tillich’s theology or existentialism hitting the pews then this is the podcast for you.

Paul is an amazing historical theologian, Presbyterian minister, my favorite Calvinist, and dear friend.  He was on the podcast for Calvin’s 500th birthday, joined John Cobb for our special 101st episode, and explained how a Calvinist gets pumped about Process Theology.

AMAZING BOOK for $6.72 on KINDLE!!!

THANK YOU…”Secret Deacon” who had JR Cigars deliver some yummy sticks to me.  That was awesome.  I love it when the Deacons call in and I love it when they donate on PayPal but this ‘secret deacon’ invented a new form of encouragement – mailing me GOOD cigars.  To whomever sent them THANKS A MILLION!

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Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

“It is not the proper duty of Christianity to form leaders- that is, builders of the temporal, although a legion of Christian leaders is infinitely desirable. Christianity must generate saints-that is, witnesses to the eternal. The efficacy of the saint is not that of the leader. The saint does not have to bring about great temporal achievements; he is one who succeeds in giving us at least a glimpse of eternity despite the thick opacity of time.”
~ Dorothy Day

Recently I’ve come to realize that there are parts of my Episcopal tribe that simply do not make sense to me. While I, like Rachel Held-Evans, have my reasons for having left and returned to the church, there remains language, expectations, and even myths that I think are preventing many mainline communities from being church…all the time. In fact, I think that these myths are silently killing (robbing the life of) churches all over the country from the inside-out.

Of particular note for me as of late has been discussion around the scheduling of events and activities during what are typically called “low Sundays.” While the Episcopal church does the liturgical calendar very well (seriously, its why I am Episcopalian), what follows these narratively epic events and seasons is the expectation that once people have done that much church, there will be a lull in participation. The myth goes that: people just do not want to do that much church or God or religion.

This myth is killing the church, and it is simply wrong.

In our language, these peak and valley days have come to be called “high Sundays and low Sundays”. While the language itself is likely a naming of that which is true in the experience of many clergy in the institution, it’s ongoing effect over the life of the church has made it such that the clergy and staff themselves expect less not more from those in their communities in the aftermath of significant religious experience (aka Holy days). And let’s face it, in most of the Biblical narratives, in the aftermath of religious experience (or God) people became more dedicated, more engaged, more devoted, more convicted to live in the experience of God…not less!

Isaiah, Saul, Peter, and even Jesus were all compelled to a life of deeper, more communal, more public faith with God after their divine experience than they were before. Isaiah’s call story left him not only speechless, but then a prophet among the people. Saul’s experience of the great light, led him to change his ways and become of the principle voices in a movement he once opposed. Jesus, simply put: baptized, recognized and and crucified (did I miss something?).

So if the narratives of our faith tradition narrate an expectation that experience with God leads to more participation not less, why does the high Sunday, low Sunday myth persist? Why do we in the mainline community let religious and spiritual people off the hook? Is it because in our excitement over “who was here” we forget to remind people that “here” is nothing more than a sign and symbol of what ought be going on “out there” all the time? Do people actually experience God in our events? Do we or they interpret them as emblematic of shifting personal responsibility from passive to active? Or, do our experiences simply leave people as having ticked another box?

Because we leaders have bought into the “high Sunday, low Sunday” myth, it is killing the church from the inside-out. And yet, by my read, not only does it fail to represent what has always been true of Biblical experience with God (that experience with God- in the other, on the way, or in a religious service- always leads to deeper more public engage with personal faith) it fails to challenge people to live fully into their Christian vocation; a vocation which is not something that comes in merely in days high and low, but that gets enacted every moment of everyday all the time.

Guest Post From…

Joshua Case is an Episcopal blogger, creative, and public theologian. He is a graduate of the University of Alabama and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Known as “Josh” of The Nick & Josh Podcast, Joshua currently works at Holy Innocent’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta. When not curating things religious and cultural Joshua works as a professional golf instructor.

Step One with James Cone

The finality of Jesus lies in the totality of his existence in complete freedom as the Oppressed One who reveals through his death and resurrection that God is present in all dimensions of human liberation…As long as Oppressors can be sure that the gospel does not threaten their social, economic, and political security, they can enslave others in the name of Jesus Christ (A Black Theology of Liberation, 117-118)

Why is it that I desired to cover up the blood of Jesus, to deny it theological power?  Mostly it had to do with the image of a blood requiring Father who fulfilled the requirement through Jesus.  I have no interest in articulating a theology where there is a dichotomy of character and intention between the Fatherly Mother and her eternal Son.  God was either as good as Jesus said God was or I could just as well join Jesus and Job’s protest.  IF Jesus was in fact the image of the invisible God, if the Son who was sent shared and communicated the heart of God, then it was theologically problematic to let a bad atonement theory introduce an ethical dichotomy between the two.  I believed that (and still do) so I got rid of the blood. But what if the blood needs to stay for another reason, one that coheres with the ministry and message of Jesus as well as God’s desire for more just creation?

It was James Cone who impressed that quest upon me.  During lent of 2009 I decided to take up reading only African American theologians and by the time I was done I began to see that in running away from the blood of Jesus I was running away from a symbolically powerful place for the Black church and, more importantly for a white-straight-middle class-dude like me, the ever-present reminder of God’s cross-bearing, blood spilling confrontation with with cross-building powers of this world.  In silencing the blood of Jesus I was not just avoiding a problematic atonement theory but God’s demand for justice that streamed from the body of my Lord.

Step Two with Paul Tillich

The sign bears no necessary relation to that to which it points, the symbol participates in the reality for which it stands.  The sign can be changed arbitrarily according to the demands of expediency, but the symbol grows and dies according to the correlation between that which is symbolized and the persons who receive the symbol.  Therefore, the religious symbol, the symbol which points to the divine, can be a true symbol only if it participates in the power of the divine to which it points…A symbol has truth: it is adequate to the revelation it expresses. A symbol is true: it is the expression of a true revelation. (Systematic Theology I:239-240)

Trying to figure out exactly how I could theologically reclaim the blood of Jesus wasn’t easy.  Paul Tillich’s differentiation between signs and symbols became an extremely helpful tool.   For Tillich religion expresses itself in symbols, they are contextual and finite.  A symbol lives where it serves to breakthrough the conditioned reality of the religious community and confront its inherited assumption about the world.  A symbol is a living symbol as long as it continues to participate in the Unconditioned and rupturous reality which gave it life.

For me the blood of Jesus became a sign, it didn’t participate in my own experience of God but pointed to a rather depressing image of a God I couldn’t worship, and so I let it go.  After engaging Cone, the blood of Jesus began to speak to me again – it confronted many of my own practices, my assumptions about the world, my unexamined privilege, and the coercive system that preserved them.  Cone had pricked my imagination and what use to be a sign pointing to a depraved atonement theory became a symbol for the power-threatening gospel of the crucified one.

Step Three with Andrew Sung Park (do yourself a favor and check out our discussion of this HERE on the podcast @44:40)

For the oppressed, Jesus’ blood as a symbol participates in the agony of their suffering under the unjust persecution, exploitation, oppression, and violence…his blood signifies the intermingling of God’s woundedness, sorrow, grief, and God’s never-ending hope for the downtrodden. Jesus’ blood represents God’s pierced heart for the sinned-against.

To the oppressors, Jesus’ blood symbolizes the protest, confrontation, and challenge of the oppressed and of God.  It participates in the outcries of the victims.  Like Abel’s blood, Jesus’ blood cries out from the ground until its voice is heard.  It has the extraordinary strength to open up the cruelty of injustice, violence, vice, and evil – to unlock oppressors’ hearts of stone.  (Triune Atonement: Christ’s Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation, 35-36)

It was Andrew Sung Park who helped me piece everything together, it was his work on atonement that took this retrieved and revived symbol and made it sing.  Park was able to expand the symbolic power of the blood to all creation, adding an ecological flare, but he was also rather brilliant at pointing out the conflicted nature of ourselves.

We are all both oppressed and oppressors.  Not in the same way or even symmetrically but it was Park who insisted that the blood of Jesus is for all creation’s wounds – including mine – and a protest to all of our wounding – including those I participate in structurally and those I inflict upon others.  The blood of Jesus insists on God’s Holy Justice, God’s participation and sharing in the wounds of all, God’s protest with and on behalf of the wounded, God’s promise but not yet accomplished healing, God’s insistence on a fleshly and material Gospel, and God’s decision to take the side of the wounded – the wounded in all of us.  The blood of Jesus is a symbol of the God who is for us, beside us, and working through us to bring healing.

Today is Good Friday & thanks to this little theological journey of mine I will sit down tonight after everyone is asleep, smoke a delicious cigar and listen to Gavin Bryars & Tom Waits ‘Jesus Blood Never Failed me Yet.’  Check out the story of the recording here.

Here’s a little Easter egg for all the Homebrewed Christianity Deacons to pop open!  It’s a little 3-d experience…a bootlegged version of the Homebrewed Christianity 3-D event at Soularize.  Since we couldn’t get access to the sound board we couldn’t get a better recording but thanks be to Bo who has edited the event down an hour and EQ-ed the speakers so you can make out what they are saying. If you want more 3-D excitement just get ready for Jack Caputo’s ‘what is radical theology?’ 3-D experience & Philip Clayton’s ‘Predicament of Belief’ show.  Both of those WE ran the sound system and they sound like gold!  IN ORDER TO GET THEM you need to subscribe to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast feed (iTunes link in the Logo below) which will be separate from the Homebrewed Christianity Podcast feed in two weeks.

This podcast begins with Jack Caputo & Philip Clayton wrestling with religion and Christainity.  Then Peter Rollins starts to insurrect things and Jay Bakker helps us get our preaching legs underneath us. The podcast ends with the music we used to begin the live event…Jesus and my favorite song writer….BILL MALLONEE.

* SUPPORT the podcast by just getting anything on AMAZON through THIS LINK.  We really appreciate your assistance in covering all the hosting fees which went up 20 bucks a month due to the growing Deaconate!

Click To Subscribe in iTunes...this SHOW is going SOLO!!!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

As Good Friday approaches more people will be thinking about ‘Why Jesus was killed?’  There are a bunch of reasons and probably more than one historical one too, but I think Woody Guthrie gets at least one of them right in his song ‘Jesus Christ’ so I decided to record it and share it with y’all.  Plus it might as well be the new American song for Occupy Wall Street Christians.  So Enjoy!

If you are wise then check out my favorite box set of Guthire.  It makes me smile.

Jesus Christ
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
A hard-working man and brave
He said to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,”
But they laid Jesus Christ in His grave

Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in His Grave

He went to the preacher, He went to the sheriff
He told them all the same
“Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the poor,”
And they laid Jesus Christ in His grave.

When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed Him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

And the people held their breath when they heard about his death
Everybody wondered why
It was the big landlord and the soldiers that they hired
To nail Jesus Christ in the sky

This song was written in New York City
Of rich man, preacher, and slave
If Jesus was to preach what He preached in Galilee,
They would lay poor Jesus in His grave.

Off the top of my head I can think of at least four forms of ‘Christian’ resistance to the Resurrection. I would really enjoy your feed back and additional forms of ‘Christian’ resistance.  Send them and Daniel Kirk and I can discuss them in our LIVE STREAMING resurrection podcast Wednesday night!

1. The resurrection of Jesus is a denial of the one true democracy – death.  The only thing promised to all human beings is death and yet for many Christians the resurrection is the theological means by which the church evades death or denies it. BUT should one locate the resurrection as a metaphorical reality then perhaps the resurrection (deflated to an existential horizon) can be preserved.  By taking this move the resurrection becomes the means by which one faces their finitude with grace.

2. The resurrection of Jesus is a theological justification for turning our attention upwards towards a heavenly realm.  This kind of other-worldly notion of fulfillment is the best pacifier for a church called to act for justice and likely a projection by a community of people who know that they too may die.  The passion of Jesus that led him to the events of Passion week cannot be forsaken for a story about an eternal security blanket.  BUT should one locate the resurrection within the community of disciples then perhaps the resurrection can be preserved as the poetic way of articulating the death of the transcendent God and the resurrection discovery of the grassroots deity preserving and vitalizing the communal passion of Jesus.

3. The resurrection of Jesus is an enormous theological distraction and misguidedly attempts to tie up all truth’s loose ends.  Talk of ‘the resurrection of Christ’ ends up swallowing the attention as Christians we need to put towards other issues such as discipleship, ethics, community witness, the demands of love, mission of God, and so on.  In the end the resurrection is turned into a slogan that is substituted for genuine critical reflection about life, faith, love, and justice and needs to be dethroned from theological prominence.

4. The resurrection of Jesus reeks of triumphalism.  The proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection ends up reversing, denying, or trivializing the suffering of Jesus on the cross.  If Christ’s suffering is only behind him, overcome, and undone then its as if the cross has been displaced! It not only makes the event of crucifixion a passing and transitional moment of suffering yet to be conquered but the trivialization of Jesus’ cross trivializes all the crosses, real and metaphorical, throughout history.  If the resurrection of Jesus is the relegation of the moment he most identifies with world’s suffering and serves to hide its reality for so many then it needs to be dethroned theologically.

Don’t forget to check out Philip Clayton’s ‘resurrection’ podcast!

It was a real pleasure to talk with Ehrman and we hope you enjoy it and share the Brew!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all. April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference. Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

I reviewed the book HERE as part of this blog-book tour. The other stops are….

Tuesday, March 20th: Shuck and Jive

Monday, March 26th: Broken Teepee

Tuesday, March 27th: Homebrewed Christianity

Wednesday, March 28th: Jeff Keuss

Thursday, March 29th: Life is Short. Read Fast. 

Tuesday, April 3rd: Crazy Liberals … and Conservatives

Wednesday, April 4th: The Liberal Spirit

Thursday, April 5th: Greg Laden’s Blog

Friday, April 6th: Butterflies and Wheels

Tuesday, April 10th: Fallen From Grace

Wednesday, April 11th: The Gods Are Bored

TBD: The X Blog

TBD: Richard Carrier Blogs

TBD: Exploring Our Matrix

Wednesday night the Theology Nerd Throwdown will live stream a special episode with New Testament Scholar Daniel Kirk!  @8pm pst we will start a Resurrection-cast and begin tackling the topic from a bunch of angles… history… Bible… philosophy… hermenutics… theology… and answering any questions y’all send in.  SO bookmark the Homebrewed Mixlr page where the audio will be LIVE and the message board open.

Send us your questions and we will answer them live (and post the audio later).  Sure you can leave them as a comment BUT it’s much cooler to use your real voice HERE.

YOU CAN BE THE STUDIO AUDIENCE! I have 5 seats in the Redondo Beach podcast studio for 5 local HBC Deacons.  If you want to reserve one of these 5 seats just email me tripp (at) homebrewedchristianity (dot) com and I will give you details.  Yes there will be plenty of brew for the podcast.  The resurrection goes down better lubricated!

PS…you should subscribe to the TNT iTunes podcast now & review it kindly! Why? It will be its own podcast in just a couple episodes so just subscribing to the Homebrewed Feed will NOT get you all the TNT awesomeness including the upcoming Jack Caputo 3-D experience!

eBooks

This March was the month of the eBook!  Over the course of the month I have plowed through some awesome eBooks so if you kindle you need to download at least one of these for your brain.  Personally I am thrilled about the advent of eBook theology.  It is sure to create a market that gets better theology to a wider audience. Bo and I discuss this with Tony Jones in the newest TNT podcast.  Now for some eBooks!

Brian McLaren‘s return to fiction in The Word of the Lord to Democrats ($2.99) is flat out AWESOME. Imagine God getting a new prophet to speak a word to the Democratic party in our present political situation…oh yeah…and God wants the Democrats to stop being wusses and be an actually Left party.  That’s what happens.  I laughed out loud, said AMEN, & remembered how much I like McLaren’s fictional conversations.

James McGrath gives an outstanding introduction to historical criticism and the Gospel in The Burial of Jesus: What Does History Have to Do with Faith? ($2.99)  Not only is the book easy to read given the density of the scholarship being presented, McGrath also demonstrates a genuine liberal Christian stance towards critical scholarship and faith.  A perfect way to get your foot in New Testament scholarship.

Tony Jones  discusses the cross in A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin ($2.99) and Julie Clawson gets cinematic in The Hunger Games and the Gospel: Bread, Circuses, and the Kingdom of God ($4.99). For more on either book just check out our interviews with the authors on the TNT podcast.

Books with Pages

For something PRACTICAL and USEFUL check out Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath.  These two brothers examine the traits of ideas that stick, those that have impactful staying power.  The book is perfect for those who have a stack of learning, a powerful idea, or a real big dream but wonder how best to communicate it for your audience then this book is a must read.  It is based on a bunch of social scientific research and full of great examples and stories.  So if you are a teacher, preacher, or communicator of any kind this book is worth checking out.

For something PHILOSOPHICAL that is a nerd’s personal LIBRARY NECESSITY click over to Anthony Kenny’s A New History of Western Philosophy.  It is the newest history of philosophy and after a couple interactions with it I have put it on the same shelf as W.T.Jones and Frederick Copleston…which is a big deal compliment. Kenny is not only a world famous philosopher but he is also a Knight…a real one via the Queen.  I bought the four volumes put in this single volume as they came out.  I love them.  They give a summary of the period of history where the big figures and movements are discussed.  Then the second half covers the major topics and their development. Get it and nerd out.

 For something BIBLICAL and PHILOSOPHICAL get on to Keith Ward‘s newest book The Philosopher and the Gospels: Jesus Through the Lens of Philosophy.  I love Keith Ward.  In this super sweet book Keith gets all philosophical on the Gospels.  If you are interested in what Open Theism would sound like if you got to open theism via idealist philosophy and conversations with science then this is it.

Tunes!

Best album of the year thus far…Ben Kweller’s Go Fly A Kite.  This is a real deal Rock & Roll record.  Amazing melodies, great arrangements, and Ben’s perfect pop sensibilities shine throughout.  The album covers a bunch of emotions, tells some awesome stories, and keeps you humming all day long.

Most anticipated album in my world…Counting Crows’ Underwater Sunshine (or What We Did On Our Summer Vacation).  This is the Counting Crows’ first indie release and on April 10th you can expect me to go old school and purchase the physical CD and listen to it repeatedly while smoking a fine cigar.  The most exciting thing about this album is the Crows are finally recording all the cover songs uber-fans like me have enjoyed live and never had on our iPods.  When the Crows cover a song they don’t just play it, they retell it and often they own it.  And if the album wasn’t enough on April 17th Alecia and I will be seeing them LIVE here in LA.  It shall be amazing!

In the sermon I tell the story of the painting.  Hope you enjoy it.  LISTEN HERE (right click & save as to download)

To be Christian is to be human in a new way – to be fully human -  and it requires a decision to give oneself to the way of Jesus.  This decision is something only the individual can make.  It can’t be done for us and it costs all of us.  It requires us to take our own existence as seriously as God does.

Go check out my blog were I say….

The problem is that the world can’t take another 100 years where the followers of Jesus put more faith in the ‘as is’ political, economic, and ecological arrangement than our inherited religious beliefs. Yes there are many Christians who use their faith therapeutically as a security blanket and need to be honest about their genuine doubts; Yes too many leaders just say what everyone wants to hear, performing belief on the behalf of others, so that serious questions never get raised; Yes much religion has become a marketable means to comfort and console human beings looking to ignore suffering, responsibility and the absence of meaning. But underneath the hidden doubts the ‘postmodern’ and ‘progressive’ types are letting come up for air are some strong and unquestioned beliefs about the finality of our human and ecological relations. Perhaps the most problematic belief in Christianity isn’t the inerrancy of scripture, strict Calvinism, religious exclusivism or ‘open but not affirming.’ What if the future of life on our planet is most threatened by our unconscious blind faith to the ‘as is’ assumptions integral to therapeutic Christianity? More importantly, what if Christianity freed from its role atop the symbolic chain of Being can take another form that doesn’t assume the ‘as is’ structures of our suicidal machine are final and is even more Jesuanic (that is a nerdy form of Jesusy!)?

Go Read the Entire Post….and post comments there.

• how a historian operates with all the evidence, data, & texts (confessional and not) to make claims about Jesus’ historicity and his place in 1st century Judaism
• Ehrman’s compelling and concise account of the historical Jesus as an Apocalyptic Prophet
• the history of the mythicist movement in scholarship print and culture
• the mythicist thesis presented and then deconstructed like it was Harold Camping’s end times chart

Did Jesus Exist? The answer of the academic guild is YES and it takes Ehrman just a couple sentences to let you.  Like Dan Brown’s conspiracy in the Davinci Code or that weird notion that Jesus spent ‘the silent years’ in India studying with gurus, these type of non-academic and sensationalist stories passed off as history rarely get the attention of actual scholars.  The lack of attention is not because of a lack of answers but the sheer incomprehensibility of these ideas themselves and yet as a minister I constantly answer these questions over and over again.  I say Jesus did not go to India, Dan Brown is bad fiction and Non-fiction, and that Jesus most certainly existed.  In these conversations people end up asking how I know these things and where they can get some type of ‘evidence’ or a book I can point them too.  I use to just say “that question is so absurd no one who knows what we as the academic community knows would dignify it with a response.”  That use to be my answer but it isn’t any more and I am glad!

Thank you Bart for writing this book.

So if you were wondering….

  Are there reliable sources for the historical Jesus? The answer is YES.  There are actually more for him than Pilate! Isn’t the Jesus story an appropriation of other dying and rising God stories? The answer is NO.  There isn’t actually evidence of a dying and rising story for the early Christians to appropriate.  How can you be sure Jesus existed? First, if he didn’t his brother James (for whom there is plenty of evidence) would have known.   Secondly, the early church would have had no reason to construct the idea of a cross-dead but risen Messiah which did NOT exist prior to Jesus (who did exist…in history…but didn’t go to India or have a kid with Mary Magdalene).

Check out his personal webpage.

This is part of the blog-book tour.  The other stops are….

Tuesday, March 20th: Shuck and Jive

Monday, March 26th: Broken Teepee

Tuesday, March 27th: Homebrewed Christian

Wednesday, March 28th: Jeff Keuss

Thursday, March 29th: Life is Short. Read Fast. 

Tuesday, April 3rd: Crazy Liberals … and Conservatives

Wednesday, April 4th: The Liberal Spirit

Thursday, April 5th: Greg Laden’s Blog

Friday, April 6th: Butterflies and Wheels

Tuesday, April 10th: Fallen From Grace

Wednesday, April 11th: The Gods Are Bored

TBD: The X Blog

TBD: Richard Carrier Blogs

TBD: Exploring Our Matrix

Diana has an online home, blogs at Patheos, the Huffington Post and is a regular tweeter.

A bunch of different bloggers in my RSS reader are digging DBB’s book…you will too!

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

This episode is brought to you by the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, a progressive, interdenominational graduate school that’s rooted in the integration of theology, psychology and culture. We value mission, relationality, praxis, and creativity and this is seen in the students training to be therapists, pastors, leaders and artists that innovate and excel in their calling and career.

Join Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Bernice Powell Jackson, Myself, & others as we explore the connection of ecology, incarnation and the interconnectedness of all.  April 19-20 in St. Petersburg, Florida for the A Sustainable Faith Conference.  Join me the day before for a cigar, brew, convo. on Hell, & a discount for the event. Sunday I will be preaching at the Missio Dei.

Messiah College’s Jenell Williams Paris recently published The End of Sexuality: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Areand is here to chat about it.  We got word of the book from our favorite publisher rep. Adrianna Wright!

This episode is brought to you by the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, a progressive, interdenominational graduate school that’s rooted in the integration of theology, psychology and culture. We value mission, relationality, praxis, and creativity and this is seen in the students training to be therapists, pastors, leaders and artists that innovate and excel in their calling and career.

*Jenell tells you why NOT to facebook friend old flames.

* For my identity politics rant at Two Friars and a Fool go here…watch the second half please.

* Join me at “A Sustainable Faith Conference” where I will keynote, do a breakout with Brian McLaren, and have a cigar & brew theological throwdown the night before.

 Guest post from…

Last winter, after a rather intense week-long bout with the flu that I was still struggling to overcome, I piled into a car with four friends and made the hour plus drive from Claremont to Malibu, where we were all registered to attend a two-day interfaith dialogue event that brought together students from Protestant, Catholic and Jewish schools throughout the Los Angeles area. In my current self-pitying state, still toting a box of Kleenex with me and feeling easily fatigued, traveling to this particular event was about the least fun way that I could envision spending my weekend. That evening, after the first set of dialogues and dinner had been completed, two friends and I bundled ourselves up and tromped down to a nearby beach.

We clambered over rocks until we reached the sand, where we took our shoes off and waded out into the clear, cold ocean water. In the darkness, as our feet slowly turned numb from the cold and we stood looking out, hypnotized by the horizon where the moon-lit sky bled into the water, my friend Nelda began to sing the first verse of the familiar hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Slowly, I found myself, unwittingly, perhaps mostly by habit, harmonizing alongside her. After we had finished singing, we fell silent, and Nelda began to pray, or rather to speak directly to God. “God, I have not felt you near in a damn long time. But just now, there you were again, creeping in.” She went on to pray a prayer of gratitude, but I was struck by her honesty with God, by the surroundings, and by the surprising places where an encounter with God becomes possible.

Too often, in these last few years at graduate school, where the academic “hermeneutic of suspicion” has grown stronger within me, I have found myself unable to attend church or read spiritual memoirs without feeling the inward desire to dissect the theological underpinnings and political correctness of each anecdote or example that is given. Is this feminist enough? Does it represent and acknowledge a diversity of opinions? And this list could go on. These are all good questions, but sometimes I have wondered whether or not it is time to begin cultivating my own hermeneutic of retrieval (as one of my professors so aptly named it) alongside all this deconstruction. So as I sat down to read Lauren Winner’s new book, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, I found within myself a fear that I would not be able to engage the material without feeling the need to turn this reading experience into an exegetical study.  
But Winner’s writing proved a pleasant surprise. Throughout her book, I found that Winner offered small glimpses of grace, without moving too far beyond these glimpses into a neat and tidy resolution. In the wake of a marriage that did not proceed or end as planned, Winner confronts her own crisis of faith, and struggles to sort out who and what she believes in. In a style that holds traces of Anne Lamott, Winner interweaves personal anecdotes, church history, spiritual practice, poetry, and myriad literary references into a meandering book about the journey with faith: whether one is in the joyful throes of a new conversion or stuck in the middle somewhere having somehow grown apart from God.

In my own experience, the journey with faith is messy, and not cleanly or easily resolved, and I appreciated Winner’s willingness to live with this mess.

In her short recommendation for the book, Phyllis Tickle suggests that Winner’s writing is “as breathtaking as it is rugged and beautiful.” I resonated with the simplicity with which Winner approached conversations about faith, resisting the temptation to intellectualize away the emotional elements of stories, while also pulling in source material ranging from Emily Dickinson to the desert monastics to more recent theologians like N.T. Wright. Winner spends much time exploring and unpacking the significance of the “middle” or the “in-between.” This is perhaps not a full-on “dark night of the soul” but rather a time marked by reinvention, distance, and perhaps even what Winner calls boredom with God and church. Although her book does show a movement from depression and crisis towards a new awareness of God, Winner does not suggest that the new openness she reaches is in any way an end, but suggests that perhaps this new openness is another middle phase, which will be reinvented or reimagined again.

Mennonite theologian Gordon Kaufman writes that, “…true faith in God is not living with a conviction that everything is going to be okay in the end because we know that our heavenly father is taking care of us. It is, rather, acknowledging and accepting the ultimate mystery of things, and precisely in the face of that mystery, going out like Abraham, not really knowing where we are going, but nevertheless moving forward creatively and with confidence…” Perhaps the challenge inherent in Winner’s book, and Kaufman’s thought, is to embrace and move forward within the nebulous middle, and to embrace the encounters with surprising creativity and grace when they come, along the way.

Great Intro Text for $9.99 on Kindle!

spirituality?  Is it an asset to Christian Theology?

In this amazing video series Christian theologian and philosopher of science Philip Clayton tells scientific story of emergent evolution and invites the viewer into an evolutionary spirituality.  The video series was produced by Travis from The Work of the People \ Alter Video Magazine and recorded during the Emergent Village Theological Conversation at Claremont School of Theology.

Video #1 (Origins of the Universe)

It used to be that science was thought to have nothing to do with us. In this first of five videos
on “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton explains how we are in fact part of the
grander story of the universe. This brief history of the cosmos shows how we belong to the narrative of
continual emergence that is the history of the cosmos. Understanding the physics of the universe’s birth
helps one to see how humanity fits into the universal story. (And what about life on other planets?)

Video #2 (Origins of Life)

Is life the result of a miraculous divine intervention, or is it an inevitable byproduct of the laws of physics
and chemistry — or both? In this second video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,”
Philip Clayton describes current scientific thinking about the origins of life on earth. We see how life is
influenced from the beginning by natural selection, which produces increasingly complex organisms over
time. Can this process be seen as the means for generating increasing levels of spiritual possibility?

Video #3 (Symbiosis versus Competition)

We are often taught that evolution requires the concept of “competition” to be at its very core. In this
third video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton talks about recent
scientific discoveries that show how organisms work together symbiotically to create ever new forms
of cooperation. More than just being “red in tooth and claw,” nature seems to act in powerful ways
through cooperation across a vast variety of ecosystems. It appears that some scientists have projected
their own (materialist, sexist, or atheist) values onto the data that they are seeking to interpret.

Video #4 (The Coevolution of Biology and Culture)

Could it be that more than just biology is involved in the evolutionary process? In this fourth video of
the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton shares the concept of coevolution,
the idea that cultural and biological forces both play a role in determining the broader trajectory of
living organisms. Through the phenomenon of social learning—that is, being taught new skills by friends
and relatives that are not genetically programmed—we begin to see that evolution includes social and
cultural influences as well. Genes and cells are apparently not the only determiners of who we and the
other animals become; agency and intentions play central roles as well.

Video #5 (Evolution, Spirit, and Spirituality)

In the centuries after Newton, science was held not only to exclude “spirit” but also to disprove its
existence. In this final video of the series “Emergent Evolution, Spirituality and God,” Philip Clayton
argues that recent changes in the interpretation of science actually invite the non-material back into
the conversation. The question confronting us now becomes whether we think of the universe as
functioning only reductively—with all true explanations lying ultimately at the level of physics—or as
full of possibility, with newness emerging from sources all around us. If the universe is really “upwardly
open” in this way, science and religion may serve as partners in addressing life’s deepest questions:
what is the meaning of life? What matters; what is of value? And what does it all point to in the end?

In preparation for the party I got some fun linkage for you…

Here’s Philip’s friend, co-author, and President of George Washington University giving an introduction to the book and the intellectual quest these two friends took together over the past 25 years.  Watch it & share it!

Go listen to Philip give his account of the Resurrection, Trinity, and Eschatology on the podcast!

Check out Bo Eberle’s first post on the book were he discusses the size of mustaches and states provocatively that

The invaluable nature of this book, for me, is the the redemption of the engagement of science and faith, that does not necessarily forfeit realism claims about the universe, or “ultimate reality,” rather than engaging in religious discourse exclusively on the level of theo-poetics (which I am still entirely for!) which tends to focus on the interpretation of subjective experience…I hope this book can open up space for deconstructionists to do a bit of old-fashioned metaphysics, perhaps it can ask new questions of those who accept purely naturalistic/reductionistic scientific world-views, and it can challenge those who may be a bit too self-assured in their dogmatic faith claims.

There was a good summary and lack-luster critique here.  Robert Cornwall reviews the book but wants more Easter bells. Scott Jones doesn’t know why you need a rational account of the faith. Ryne Beddard is less optimistic that Philip about Christian Minimalism working in faith communities but intrigued by Philip’s move from a ‘Mind-Like Ultimate Reality’ to the God of Abraham.

It is taken from William Jennings Bryan‘s attack on ‘modernist’ religion which he believed was undermining the foundations of society.  As much fear as it is sure to put in your hearts, when you get done repenting for listening in biology class I would love to hear what you think about updating the stairs of descent.  What are the stairs labeled today? Should they even be stairs? Should they being going down?

This descent is how Bryan understood the Modernist decent into religious, moral, and cultural relativity.

I have some theology books and Homebrewed stickers to giveaway for those who help me come up with a new rendering! So Deacons lend us your creativity.

Now for a word from Mr. Bryan….

Is the Bible true’? That is the great issue in the world today, surpassing in importance all national and international questions. The Bible is either true or false it is either the Word of God or the work of man. If  the Bible is false, it is the greatest impostor that the world has ever known . . . .

As there can be no civilization without morals, and as morals rest upon religion, and religion upon God, the question whether the Bible is true or false is the supreme issue among men. As the Bible is the only book known to the Christian world whose authority depends upon inspiration, the degradation of the Bible leaves the Christian world without a standard of morals other than that upon which men can agree. As men’s reasons do not lead them to the same conclusion, and as greed and self-interest often overthrow the reason, the fixing of any moral standard by agreement is impossible. If the Bible is overthrown, Christ ceases to he a Divine character, and His words, instead of being binding upon the conscience, can followed or discarded according as the individuals convenience may dictate.

"Everything Happens For A Reason"

by Justin D. Klassen

Greetings, fellow fans and imbibers of Homebrewed Christianity! I am grateful to Tripp and Bo for giving me space here to pursue some reflections on the shattering implications of contemporary materialist or atheist uses of Christianity.

The question guiding these reflections could be stated as follows: What can believing Christians learn about their own tradition from that tradition’s most controversial fans, especially from those who don’t believe in God, for supposedly “Christian” reasons? In a future post, I’d like to direct this question toward popular conversations about environmental ethics. But today it makes sense to begin more generally, by identifying what a materialist use of Christianity might criticize in popular thinking about God.

Let’s begin, not with God as such, but with a contemporary American proverb that often stands in for God: “Everything Happens For A Reason.” The sentiment of this proverb has been deployed widely in response to the destructive storms that ripped through my neck of the woods this past weekend. I call it an American rather than a specifically Christian proverb because its expression is common to a range of meaning-seekers wide enough to include both John Piper and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, if a quick Google image search is to be believed, people are having this phrase tattooed on their bodies with increasing regularity. Many others of us seem at least to have it tattooed on our hearts. What is so compelling about the idea captured in these words?

Perhaps some illumination can be found by reflecting on when we tend to pull these words out of our hats. My sense is that we don’t use them when life is going according to plan. Nor do we trot them out when we experience interruptions that are only minor. So my muffler fell out of the bottom of my rusted car recently, and it messed up my day. I had to throw my bike in the car and pedal-commute from the shop to work in the morning. I don’t think anyone would be inclined to say that this “happened for a reason,” unless they meant simply that the muffler failure had a proximate cause (the salt of too many northern winters acted as a catalyst of oxidation—but no one would get a tattoo about that “reason”). So when do we feel the need to write these words on our hearts, or to deliver them to the hearts of others?

It would seem that we need them in times of deep, shattering interruption—like when a relationship is broken, when we lose a job we thought defined us, or when someone dies. If this is the case, then we can conclude that we find these words most useful precisely when we cannot believe them to be true. I know my muffler failed “for a reason,” so I don’t have to point to my tattoo in that case. But in those moments when I am at a real loss to explain an event, for myself or for some fellow sufferer, then, oddly, I am inclined to insist that there is an explanation. The moment when I really don’t know any reasons is strangely the same moment when I must claim so strongly to know them that getting a tattoo to this effect begins to sound like a good idea.

Slavoj Žižek describes this desired recourse to reasons as the ideological function of religion. By this he means simply that religion (in which our “American proverb” can be included) allows us to deal with the trauma of experience by telling ourselves the lie that it’s not traumatic. We get to be close to suffering, we get to mention people experiencing trauma in our prayers and sermons (which I’m sure many of us heard this past Sunday), precisely by refusing to experience even these worst of events as traumatic. In other words, just when the trauma or shock of life is about to sink in, people like John Piper come along and explain it away, under the guise of dealing with it.

A key difference between Žižek’s critique of religion and other forms of atheism is that Žižek calls his atheism “Christian.” Homebrewed readers and listeners may recognize this tactic from their familiarity with the work of Peter Rollins and others. Žižek argues that the paradigmatically Christian experience is the experience of dereliction, not completion. It’s the experience of having that ink needle slapped out of your hand at the moment you think you most need its solace. And it’s the transformation of our anguish over the absence of reasons into a new kind of freedom. As Žižek puts it, the Spirit of Christianity heals the wound of experience, “not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound has been cut.”

A life in fidelity to the derelict one, then, would be a life lived with eyes open to the reasonlessness of experience, but where the absence of reasons is not felt as a lack in relation to some fantasy of “completion,” but as the gift of loose ends. Life as such, in Christian terms, is a superabundance of loose ends. And if Jesus is affirmed as divine, then it is divine not to tie life’s loose ends into a tidy knot but to celebrate them, and sometimes, to weep over them.

It is no secret that Žižek gets the substance of his approach to Christianity (not to mention his sense of the traumatic nature of experience) from the work of G. K. Chesterton. In the second chapter of Orthodoxy, Chesterton suggests that a “poetic” disposition is better suited to the infinite sea of reality than a “logical” one (one that needs everything to happen for a reason). The logician’s disposition may connect all the loose ends, but the resulting knot binds both the world and the person into shrunken forms of their true selves. Sometimes we attribute the failure to articulate clear explanations of life’s uncertainties to a “lack of imagination.” Žižek and Chesterton both would have us reverse this relationship, and say that it’s wherever life cannot be abided without being explicated, wherever suffering cannot be shared without being explained, that our imagination is failing the world, and we are failing our fellow travelers.

All this is to say that what Žižek’s Christian atheism shows believing Christians is that it is possible to imagine fidelity to the God affirmed in Jesus as militant against the God of “reasons,” the God who cannot stomach life as human beings really experience it— as the locus of inexplicable joys and sufferings that may be shared, and may even be expressed, poetically, but may never be “explained.”

Justin D. Klassen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. He is the
author of the recent book, The Paradox of Hope: Theology and the Problem of Nihilism (Cascade, 2011), and co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Charles Taylor’s account of modern secularity. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Melissa, their two daughters, Clara and Gracie, and their dog, Eloise.

Homebrewed Christianity is thrilled to share the first piece of audio from the Emergent Village theological conversation with philosopher and theologian Philip Clayton.  Even more than that we are pumped to announce our first Homebrewed Christianity Theo-nerd Book Party March 15th! 

BUT FIRST… you can’t imagine how thought provoking this podcast is.  Philip Clayton gives his first public talk about his newest book The Predicament of Belief which he recently published with friend and President of George Washington University Steven Knapp.  As conference coordinators Bo and I challenged Phil to press Process Theology to address those three theological concepts that make most liberals run – the Resurrection, the Trinity, and Eschatology – and he agreed! Not only is the presentation engaging and provocative but the challenge to speak credibly about our faith is a challenge Philip and Steven see impacting the church.  Here’s how they put it in the book…

When church leaders can no longer presuppose a securely shared fabric of beliefs, they rely increasingly on extrinsic motivations: professional musicians, high-tech services, attractive social programs, and the like.  The trouble is that reflective persons recognize that such initiatives are no longer tied to compelling and persuasive beliefs about what is ultimately the case.  When those beliefs become merely metaphorical or poetic–or worse, when one finds oneself using language one no longer believes but vaguely feels that one ought to believe–one begins to wonder about the raison d’etre of the entire institution and its practices.  Is it surprising that many have the sense that (in John Cobb’s words) “what we do and say does not seem to be terribly important.” (HT: Scot)

Since this was a live event the beginning of the podcast may be hard to follow as Phil is commenting on a collection of rather humorous pictures of Jesus but at minute 14 to the end it is straight out theologizing.  In this podcast you will hear Philip address…

* Divine Action, the Jesus Seminar, Peter Rollins and the Resurrection

* Christological uniqueness, particularity, kenosis, and adoptionism

* Religious Language, the reality of God, and spectrum of certainty

* Self-giving love and feminism

* Religious Pluralism

There was a good summary and lack-luster critique here.  Robert Cornwall reviews the book but wants more Easter bells.  Thomas Jay Oord is reading the book & you should too as part of the Theo-nerd Book Party.  Here’s the deal.  I mailed out copies to a number of Deacons who signed up to blog about the book and will sharing those posts when they come in.  But even if you didn’t get a copy (too much demand!) you can still participate in the fun! How? (glad you asked)

1) Read the book, blogs, kindle it, and of course listen to the podcast.

2) Call-in or Email us your questions for Philip! (JUST CLICK THE Mic IMAGE on the RIGHT SIDE OF THE HOMEPAGE & TALK)

3) Attend the Theo-nerd Book Party March 15th.  We will host this LIVE & STREAMED event at Philip’s house in Claremont, CA.  We will post the info and stream on the Homebrewed Christianity Facebook Page so ‘like’ it and get ready!

During those 40 days leading up to Easter our deepest need for change won’t be addressed by eating fish on Fridays instead of cow flesh or giving up chocolate until Easter. Perhaps what we need is something like the watchfulness Jesus encouraged — or what Gandhi called Experiments in Truth: practices that respect the bodily nature of human spirituality and transformation. (Check out his freshest book for more details)

In this special episode you will hear Mark Scandrette lay down the challenge.  It was recorded live at my home in preparation for some Lenten experiments with some friends and my high schoolers in confirmation.  Just among my friends there are some taking a fast from all critical speaking (including self-directed criticism), meat & alcohol (I’m one of these), gossiping (I would have linked to them but…), and all media (which means they will be behind in the podcast episodes come Easter).  Just this past week’s time of sharing was pretty powerful example of how much one can learn and change in the right type of community.  Any way, I’m sure you can imagine when you hear the conversation.

Be sure to check out some VIDEO from Mark’s visit here. For more audiological Scandrette check out his first and second visit to the podcast.  Then there is the Homebrewed 3D event with Philip Clayton and Daniel Kirk we recorded in Mark’s house.

Here’s the PODCAST!

One could answer the question by saying that Jesus knew he was going to die and rise so he could forgive with the future known and certain, or possibly that Jesus’ divine identity gave him the ability to forgive sin at will, or one could even suggest that if forgiveness could be given before the cross, then the cross may not have been necessary.

It is important to recognize that in forgiving sins Jesus is acting on behalf of God and was one of the reasons Jesus was opposed by the religious leaders, thus forcing one to explain how Jesus’ identity is tied to that of God. To understand this I have found it helpful to see how Paul re-imagined the sacrificial system in light of Christ’s work.

Traditionally an act of sacrifice began with the sinner transferring their identity to the animal through an act of consecration. Afterward the animal was killed so that the person was reincorporated into the people of God. Paul reverses the process so that the process begins with Christ identifying with us and ends with the consecration, us identifying with that which is sacrificed.

In a sense Paul sees, in Christ, God coming to put an end to sacrifice by turning it upside down and beginning with God’s coming to sinner with Good News. From this perspective it would make sense that Jesus could forgive sin without having died because God had come in Christ to consecrate the world as God’s beloved.

For me what was being sacrificed in Christ is God being God without creation.  The activity with the youth was fun and getting share their favorite responses to a stack of questions in Christian’s book was even better.  You can check out a couple other author’s answers here and of course get the book here.

Forgive us for hiding our doubts
accepting easy and trite answers
and letting others give us knowledge of you
as if you were an object to hold and not an illusive subject -
as if you were a mountain and not a fire.

If you will, like your three disciples on the mountain,
transfigure our vision of you – terrify us with newness
rupture the stories we tell ourselves that keep us from loving our world as it is
free us from the bondage of finality,
finality in our understanding, our forgiving, our justice, our living

If you will, take us up the mountain
transfigure our entire reality
and give us the courage to follow Christ
down the mountain
and into the world transfigured by the God we know not yet
but discover along the way

Here’s my prayer for this Transfiguration Sunday.  The lectionary text is Mark 9:2-9.

This is the challenge Mark Scandrette dropped at the Homebrewed Christianity Head Quarters this Wednesday.  I thought I would post this clip from the gathering to entice a few Deacons into grabbing some friends for some experimenting in the way of Jesus this Lent. Check out the Homebrewed visit to Mark’s house in San Fran here and his last interview on the podcast here.

An Experiment in Truth from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

You can watch the whole video on his page or Download the MP3 HERE for your iPod.

Here’s Chris’ summary of what we talk about….

Synopsis:
No more playing golf with Pharaoh, says Tripp Fuller – who’s convinced that if progressives would care less about being politically correct and more about the radical discipleship Jesus taught, then the North American Church would look much, much different. Here are my notes from the interview:

Filling the Gap
Tripp believes there’s a big gap for progressives to fill in American Christianity, where people are looking for a more moderate, inclusive, and less confrontational way of being in Christian community. He says if progressives can get over their laryngitis, the harvest is ready.

Therapeutic vs. Prophetic
We all want to be taken care of – and that makes taking care of others very tough. Tripp reminds us that Jesus didn’t come into the world to make us happy, but to do the prophetic work of reconciling the world to God.

Understanding Today’s Young Adults
Saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in school debt, economically forced to live far from home, today’s young people are more about time and talent than treasure. The church of the future will likely see less paid clergy and more lay ownership/involvement to make things work.

Yesterday I had the honor of giving a lecture for the Center for Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology.  My goal was to show how one theologically sensitive youth minister under the influence of Process theology would think through the task of youth ministry.  Most of what I proposed does not necessitate one being committed to Process theology but you will hopefully see how the ideas come out of my own theological framework.  If you are interested in more conversations like this then come next week to the Emergent Village Theological Conversation here in sunny SoCal for some more Process inspired conversations.

If you have responses, questions, and such post them.  Bo and I are going to do a Theology Nerd Throwdown in the near future on youth ministry and we would love your input.

The ooShirt website is easy to use and you can either design your shirt their or upload your design.  The only complaint I could have is that during the design process you don’t see how what you are doing design wise is impacting the actual cost per shirt.  Other than that the experience was great.  The shirts were high quality Tees and the graphics are much more legit than the glorified iron on graphics at Cafe Press. If you are on the look out for a cool gift, a way to promote your blog\podcast, or sweet youth retreat T shirt supplier check out the good people at ooShirts for your custom shirt needs.