By Tuesday night this North Carolina pastor was showing up all over Facebook and Twitter. By Wednesday morning he was the ‘most popular’ link on all of Yahoo! world homepage.

If you have not seen this video, be warned. It is in no way understated. Here is the link:  NC Pastor 

 I have 3 main thoughts about this:

1. I know tons of people who are not for ‘same sex marriage’ who would not speak of electric fences. Anytime you are suggesting some tactic that the Germans used in WWII you may want to take note.
2. This is a different TYPE of Christianity – one that is the concerned with governing morals. We going to have to address why the church is even doing State sanctioned marriage in the first place. So often we try to have the second conversation without the first – no wonder it doesn’t go anywhere.
3. My church and 50 others that I know of and communicate with on a regular basis do kind things and say loving words all the time and no one press covers it. That is the nature of the modern media. Deal with it.

Nothing thus far is that surprising – save the actual sermon by the NC Pastor. Here is my concern:

• At what point is some pastor so deep in the Constantinian compromise that he is more Roman than Christ-like? At some point do we say ‘that is not even Christian’ ?
• OR is this just one branch of Christianity and it is our obligation to treat this man as a brother who has simply lost his way?
• OR is this Preacher doing more harm than good and actually crippling the gospel message – and in that sense he is an enemy of our cause?  And at that point, what do we do with Jesus’ admonition to love our enemy?

Admission: I have been re-reading Stuart Murray’s Post-Christendom and … while that is admittedly probably not the best idea … I have to admit that this whole ‘legislating civil unions and marriages’ thing in North Carolina could not come at a worse time for me.

For what it is worth, here is my 2 cents.

1. This is not Christianity. Well, it might be Christendom but it is not whatever Jesus was after.
2. This guy is my brother (in humanity even if not christianity) and has simply lost his way.
3. Whether he is my crazy cousin or my enemy – Christ compels me to love and respect him as a person even as I wholly (and holy) disagree with his inhuman and immoral speech.

I’m not really sure what other course of action I have in this situation. I spent last week in the woods with no technology and unless I want to perpetually retreat away from all this ugliness, I have got to address this kind of craziness at some level. What else is there in the face of hate except to love?

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.

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.

Discussions of debt quickly turn into moral arguments and because we have forgotten that interest was a technology created by humans, we forget that there is nothing natural about it. Other cultures have rejected the idea of interest, as shown by the following funny story of the Sufi philosopher Nasruddin:

One day Nasruddin’s neighbor, a notorious miser, came by to announce he was throwing a party for some friends. Could he borrow some of Nasruddin’s pots? Nasruddin didn’t have many but said he was happy to lend whatever he had. The next day the miser returned, carry Nasruddin’s three pots, and one tiny additional one. “What’s that? asked Nasruddin. “Oh, that’s the offspring of the pots. They reproduced during the time they were with me.” Nasruddin shrugged and accepted them, and the miser left happy that he had established a principle of interest. A month later, Nasruddin was throwing a party, and he went over to borrow a dozen pieces of his neighbor’s much more luxurious crockery.  The miser complied. Then he waited a day. And then another… On the third day, the miser came by and asked what had happened to his pots. “Oh, them?” Nasurddin said sadly. “It was a terrible tragedy. They died.” ~Quoted from Debt

Why does the morality of debt repayment focus solely on the debtor? Graeber argues that we have a double theology of debt, one for the creditors and one for the debtors. The proponents of this double theology use the economic term “supply-side economics.” This theology/economic theory was taught to me in my Economics 101 class in college and is championed by the religious right. You may balk at the linking of economic theory and theology, but examine this stunning example summarized from George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty:

Gilder’s argument was that those who felt that money could not simply be created were mired in an old-fashioned, godless materialism that did not realize that just as God could create something out of nothing, His greatest gift to humanity was creativity itself, which proceeded in exactly the same way. Investors can indeed create value out of nothing by their willingness to accept the risk entailed in placing their faith in others’ creativity. Rather than seeing the imitation of God’s powers of creation ex nihilo as hubris, Gilder argued that it was precisely what God intended: the creation of money was a gift, a blessing, a channeling of grace; a promise, yes, but not one that can be fulfilled, even if the bonds are contually rolled over, because through faith (in “God we trust” again) their value becomes reality.

With reflections like these, supply-side economics became the de facto theological ideology of the religious right, with Pat Robertson going so far as to declare it as “the first truly divine theory of money-creation.” Within this theology, it is imperative that the debtors must always repay. While the creditors are lauded as God’s instrument for the ex nihilo creation of endless wealth. The “job creators/risk takers” are the saints, while those in debt are the wretched sinners. This theology is so widespread that it has been naturalized in our thinking. It doesn’t even occur to the new atheists to challenge it.

But how did we get to here? This perverse reversal of theology into a means of perpetual bondage for debtors could not be any farther from the liberative texts of the bible. They are unanimous and univocal in their condemnation of all forms interest and differentiating wealth. Jose Porofino Miranda, in Communism and the Bible, says the condemnation of differentiating wealth in the Bible is “so obvious and abundant that it will show us the prodigies of tergiversation (the evasion of clarity) and voluntary blindness that the theologians and exegetes, and even the translators of the Bible, have had to deploy in order to muffle a book whose solitary intent was the change the world and eliminate injustice.”

In that book, Miranda undertakes a detailed examination of the texts, but I want to highlight one important point. Without a single exception, every time that the word for interest is used in the Bible, it is condemned. Deuteronomy 23:19 condemns it three times “You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent.” The universal condemnation of usury is not isolated to Liberation Theologians, but was well-known to the early church. Take for example this excerpt from a sermon by St. Basil from 365 CE:

The Lord gave His own injunction quite plainly in the words, “from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.” But what of the money lover? He sees before him a man under stress of necessity bent to the ground in supplication. He sees him hesitating at no act, no words, of humiliation. He sees him suffering undeserved misfortune, but he is merciless. He does not reckon that he is a fellow-creature. He does not give in to his entreaties. He stands stiff and sour. He is moved by no prayers; his resolution is broken by no tears. He persists in refusal. Then the suppliant mentions interest, and utters the word security. All is changed. The frown is relaxed; with a genial smile he recalls old family connection. Now it is “my friend.” (emphasis added)

Notice how Basil’s moralizing is the direct opposite of today’s, he condemns the one who lends. It only took a short while after the cross-bearers became allied with the cross-builders for the theology to change. The theology of the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the rest of the bible is one-way: the way of liberation. Interest isn’t natural. It’s evil.

One Click to the Homebrewed Hotline!

Two of the podcast’s best friends have published E-books in last month and they are both here for a Theology Nerd Throwdown!

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

First up, Bo chats with Julie Clawson about the book she wrote about the Hunger Games. (you can find her first podcast appearance here)

Then Tripp and Bo skype with the self-appointed Sr. Deacon – the Doctor! – Tony Jones about a Better Atonement. (you can find his most recent visit here)

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.

Tripp & Bo are really excited about reading Beyond the Spirit of Empire & Tony Jones is digging The Predicament of Belief by Philip Clayton.

1. My theater is one block from UCLA and I appeared to be the oldest person in the theatre.
2. LA is wonderful for diversity. This was the most eclectic group of folks I have watched an opening night movie with since I watched the Waterboy in New York  (1998)
3. I have intentionally not watched a single preview or read anything about the movie whatsoever. I hate how previews ruin the narrative experience for me.

In short I will simply say this for the movie:

• It was better than advertised.
• The DeColonial themes in the first half of the movie were incredible (I will write more about this next week).
• If you are contemplating going, you should go.

That being said, I left the theatre with three quotes running though my head. The first relates to a scene where a young person (on the badteam) is killed and the crowd I was with … cheered. Now, up to that point violence had been a very bad thing and an unwanted/inevitable element of oppression and Imperial spectacle. I’m not even focusing on the violence against women angle here – just the violence alone. Chris Hedges talk of war movies the same way:

“They turn war into porn. Soldiers and Marines, especially those who have never seen war, buy cases of beer and watch movies like Platoon, movies meant to denounce war, and as they do, they revel in the destructive power of weaponry. The reality of violence is different. Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief, and destruction.” -  Death of the Liberal Class (p. 55).

As a Christian I am always amazed by an ever-present paradox.Often in my circles, folks who have air-tight orthodoxy cred and are in complete alignment with the Creedal formulations … have an openness to violence and a willingness for militarism the betrays the very story of the Jesus that they so passionately proclaim.  Then they run into somebody like John Caputo who’s orthodoxy & ontology are surely suspect by who gets Jesus right:

 “The kingdom of God is the rule of weak forces like patience and forgiveness, which, instead of forcibly exacting payment for an offense, release and let go. The kingdom is found whenever war and aggression are met with an offer of peace. The kingdom is a way of living, not in eternity, but in time, a way of living without why, living for the day, like the lilies of the field – figures of weak forces – as opposed to mastering and programming time, calculating the future, containing and managing risk. The kingdom reigns wherever the least and most undesirable are favored while the best and most powerful are put on the defensive. The powerless power of the kingdom prevails whenever the one is preferred to the ninety-nine, whenever one loves one’s enemies and hates one’s father and mother while the world, which believes in power, counsels us to fend off our enemies and keep the circle of kin and kind, of family and friends, fortified and tightly drawn.” -The Weakness of God, p. 15

I think I would rather be with Caputo and get Jesus right than to have the right Christology and miss the whole point with Jesus. The final quote comes from Franz Fannon in the Wretched of the Earth:

 ”The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength. The exploited man sees that his liberation implies the use of all means, and that of force first and foremost … (it) will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” (48)

I watched the movie tonight and drove home with these three quotes in my head. What do we do with movies meant to expose the Imperial spectacle of violence and end up glorifying it? Is this a case where the medium is the message and if violence is on a screen it can not communicate the badness of violence but exalts all violence? How do we as Christians navigate the spectacle of violence from our friends watching MMA to our congregants applauding war, electric chairs, drone attacks and torture? What if they have better Christology, Ontololgy, and Creedal subscription than we do … but get the violence question wrong and miss the whole point of Jesus’ life and death? And how do we who occupy the privileged place, the place of power, and the dominant  narrative recognize that violence in support of the hegemonic status quo is not the same as violence against and in revolt of it?  That what is good for the goose is not necessarily what is good for the gander if the goose is the only one armed to the teeth?

Post Script: I loved this conversation and am so grateful for the insightful and sincere responses. I am thankful for intelligent exchange without disrespectful or snarky dismissiveness.  As I have watched the conversation evolve, it has become clear that something else is needed in the post. So I want to add it for future clarity.

Empire is a particular formation of government and power and, given its pretence to be global, generates a ‘collective spirit’, an anthropological construction, that allows and approves of certain behaviours, reactions, feelings, and attitudes of the social and political actors, that shapes a certain logic and way of conceiving life, and that imposes and translates itself into values and a hegemonic Weltanschauung (ethos).[1]

To understand the profound impact of Liberalism’s demise, it helps to make sure one understands the difference between Classical Liberalism and it’s contemporary milquetoast descent that slinks around in straw-man form on our 24 hours news cycle.

Hedges explains (pp. 6-7) “Classical liberalism was formulated largely as a response to the dissolution of feudalism and church authoritarianism. … (It) has, the philosopher John Gray writes, four principle features, or perspectives, which give it a recognizable identity. It is :

• individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against any collectivity;
• egalitarian, in that it confers on all human beings the same basic moral status;
• universalist, affirming the moral unity of the species;
• and meliorist, in that it asserts the openended improvability, by use of critical reason, of human life

Both John Cobb (Mainline)  and Clayton Crockett (Radical Political Theology) use very similar formulations in their recent Homebrewed  podcasts. Cobb, by focusing on the demise of the Mainline and Crocket, by focusing on the Evangelical and Religious Right, articulate the monumental shift in the religious-political landscape in the past century.

The Mainline denominations are in a collapse narrative and it makes perfect sense why when one examines both the way liberal thought partnered with power in the 20th Century and the way that conducted itself (largely) within the shifting landscape of post-war realities at home and globalization abroad.

“In a traditional democracy, the liberal class functions as a safety valve. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. It offers hope for change and proposes gradual steps toward greater equality. It endows the state and the mechanisms of power with virtue. It also serves as an attack dog that discredits radical social movements, making the liberal class a useful component within the power elite. But the assault by the corporate state on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims…

The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality. It has lent its voice to hollow acts of political theater, and the pretense that democratic debate and choice continue to exist.”  (pp. 9-10)

We talked yesterday about the fictitious nature of the supposed Left-Right spectrum.  For those of us who participate in christ centered communities and organizations, what does this mean?  While incomplete, here is my little experiment to come up with a game-plan for a start.

1. We stop using the label ‘Liberal’ generically for anything that is not Conservative… especially to be dismissive.  Liberal is a very specific ethical  framework and it takes quite a commitment to liberal. It is not a default position.
2. We disavow the left-right , conservative-liberal split as farcical. It doesn’t exist. Obama is a Centrist Democrat. Romney is a Centrist Republican. Any idea that Obama is a radical is ridiculous.* We repent of lazy language & thought.
3. We wake up as the church that the role the Liberals used to play in the system does not function. There is no moderating or buffering presence to bring a corrective to the system. Thus, participating in the system as-it-now-exists will not fix the system. The corporate hold over every aspect of our political system is pervasive.
4. We step up as the church in the revelation that government is not going to fulfill the expectation to

• bring good news to the poor (Economy)
• restore sight to the blind (Medical)
• release to the captive  (Legal)
• lift up the broken hearted (Compassion)

The church can do these things! We have deferred to the political system for too long. We have outsourced our responsibility to society but now live with the remains of the bloated carcass Christendom. With the death of the liberal class resistance to corporate rule and unchecked consumerism is impotent. The Citizen’s United ruling is just one step on long trail … but we know where it leads.

There are churches in every community and there may be no greater existing potential than us! **  I know it sounds dreamy, but in the rest of this series I want to flesh it out. By the end, it might not seem as far-fetched as it does right now.

- Bo Sanders

*Wall Street campaign funding, legalizing assassination, and Guantanamo Bay are your first 3 hints.
**  The danger of course is that we keep voting based on two issues while turning a blind eye to  corporate rule, environmental deregulation, and perpetual war.

For those who don’t know, Jeremy Lin is a point-guard for the NY Knicks basketball team. He was a surprising star in college having received no scholarship offers to play after highschool.  He then went undrafted in the Pros and only recently, in his 2nd year, got an opportunity to play because of teammate’s  injuries. He surprised everybody by leading his team in incredible ways and scoring more points in his first series of starts than any superstar.  He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated for two consecutive weeks and even made the cover of Time.

He has gained notoriety for some amazing play, for being the first Asian-american superstar in the NBA  and now for being a “New kind of Christian”  (according to CNN). *

Lin, who is of Taiwanese descent,  has also triggered some racial insensitivity with both ESPN and Ben & Jerry’s committing blunders 

 I am hoping that three things come can potentially come  out of the Jeremy Lin meteoric rise

1. There is no such thing as Asia – not in the way that it gets used to describe so many diverse cultures and peoples under a generic geographical term. Edward Said has changed the way I think about Orientalism and ‘other-ing’.

Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

Though Said was not addressing ‘Asia’ specifically, it is this romantic creation of the other that is so rooted in our mentality and needs to be addressed for the 21st century. All projections point to there being no white majority in the USA by 2050. Race will be one of the biggest issue in my lifetime.

 2. There are many ways to be a Christian (or religious) athlete. Not everyone is treated like Tim Tebow was. Tebow is both vocal and demonstrative about his faith – but what the evangelical fans did with it was nearly frenzied. In the CNN article it is clear that Lin goes about his faith a little differently than Tebow. It will be interesting to watch as his popularity grows, how he handles his faith, his fame, and his image.

3.  There is really something significant about immigrant communities, generational gaps, and how they practice faith. The CNN article introduced it well, but there is so much more to be examined.

I grew up outside Chicago then my family moved to Saskatchewan Canada where my dad worked at a Seminary with a missionary denomination. He has been in NY for the last 20 years at a sister school and I am now studying in Southern California. It might be my affiliation with seminaries that has thrown off my perception but I was shocked to hear that just 5% of the population is of Asian descent.

I have met so many Vietnamese, Hmong, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Cambodian, Laotian, Thai, and Malaysian believers who have incredible stories about generation differences, immigration and how those two things affect faith communities and language.

I know that Lin is just a basketball player – but in the hyperreal world of modern TV and sports it is conceivable that he will play an important role in awareness that there is an issue to be addressed.

*The phrase really caught my attention because I am a big fan of Brian McLaren’s book  A New Kind of Christianity. 

This whole controversy gets to me at two deep levels:

•  I used to say those things. Just 4 short years ago I was an evangelical church-planter who regularly contrasted Jesus’ message to ‘religion’.
•  I am shocked at how dismissive so many educated and/or mainline folks are being to Bethke’s poem.

I have heard many people just brush aside his use of ‘religion’ as ignorant, immature, stupid, uneducated, silly, shallow, un-historic, and false. The thing that I want to yell is

“YOU FOOLS – like it or not, that is how people use the word religion in our culture.”

If you asked A) people under 40 and B) evangelicals to define religion you would get a picture that is almost identical to Bethke’s .

I now hang out with mainline folks and people who read books on theology. They are  quick to say

• that shows a poor understanding of religion
• that is a silly/stupid/shallow definition of religion
• that shows little historical perspective on the role that religion has played

Like it or not – this is the definition that many young people are using for religion. When they say (increasingly) that they are spiritual-but-not-religious , this is what they mean.

I am pursuing a PhD in the field of Practical Theology for the very reason that I want to engage how people live out their faith – practice it – in particular communities. The two things that I am willing to concede up front are that

• Many North American Christians and most Evangelicals utilize simple dualism (Physical v. Spiritual, Natural v. Supernatural, Temporal v. Eternal, Secular v. Sacred, Old v. New Testament, Law v. Grace). This is how they think.
• Religion is conceptualized as the man-made structures that attempt to facilitate, replicate, and falsely imitate the real thing that God does/wants-to-do in the world.

It is popular to say in these circles “Religion is man’s attempt to connect with God. Jesus is God’s attempt to connect with man.” *

I know that there are many good attempts to connect with religious tradition. I have heard many addresses regarding the root of the word religion and how the ‘lig’ is the same as ligament or ‘binding’ and how it is an attempt to bind us together – not to have us bound up in rules! My question is this: Are you willing to engage this dualistic and uniformed populist definition of religion that is in place OR would your rather hold to your enlightened and informed historical perspective and allow a conversation to happen without you because you are above it? **

I know that it can be frustrating to circle back and entertain naive perspectives. But if the alternative is to let the conversation happen without a historically informed perspective, then I think we have no choice but to concede the initial conditions of the dialogue in an attempt to express an informed/educated alternative.

*   there are alternatives like “Religion is our attempt to connect with God, Christianity is God’s connecting with us.” 
**  I have intentionally provided two alternatives to honor the dualistic nature of this mentality. 

When reading his last book What Would Google Do? I decided I would intentionally be more open about my core convictions, life experiences, and challenges.  Jarvis articulated rather clearly how the growing openness of our lives via social media is in fact making us a more honest and gracious people.  Being open went against most of the advice I have received from other ministers and in theological education about one’s status as a minister and cultivating appropriate boundaries.  I am all for boundaries around integrity issues but if it leads to the creation of a minister who doesn’t have genuine convictions, political leanings, vices (like delicious cigars), attraction to all things Kevin Smith (he made Dogma,  the best movie of 2011 Red State, & the coolest podcast network), suggestive yard games like cornhole, and over tweeting then I would rather pass.  I have found that for every person who is uncomfortable knowing that their minister is a real human many more people, within my congregation and outside of it, are grateful to know my ordination didn’t undo my humanity.  I am not saying Paul really meant for us to “tweet our sins one to another,” but I have also found that in sharing struggles and asking questions publicly I can be blessed in ways that would not have been possible if I kept old school ‘ministerial distance.’

Last week in the ‘Becoming a Public Scholar‘ class I am teaching with Monica Coleman we watched this video where Jarvis discusses the benefits he had in sharing info about his private parts in public (yes it is what you are thinking but not for dirty reasons).  The conversation lacked consensus but it was clear the topic had some heat bound up in it.  I have no idea what the correct answer is but I have decided to err on the side of over sharing because I just feel dirty trying to keep up with multiple versions of myself for multiple audiences.  While I don’t have any final answers I will say that Jarvis has the most helpful way of framing the choices we have to make by differentiating between privacy and sharing.  He says that our “privacy is an ethic made by the recipients of someone’s information.  Publicness is an ethic governing the choices made by the creator of one’s information..Privacy is an ethic of knowing and publicness is an ethic of sharing.” Ministers are likely some of the best people to ask about an ethic of privacy since we end up being the ones people share the most difficult parts of the stories with.  So what advice would you give to those thinking about their ethic of privacy?  What ‘private parts’ of a minister do you think should go public and which should stay off line?

Check out this interview with Jarvis to get a feel for the book.

Also check out Jeff Jarvis’ visit to the ‘theology after google’ conference where he told us what google would do if they got hold of a church.

Here’s what happened in this week’s episode: The CEO of Diamond Resorts puts on a (really bad) disguise and pretends to be a new hire at various jobs in the company. He works alongside receptionists, plumbers, etc. At the end of the show, he reveals to the people he worked with that he’s the CEO and then he gives the workers that he worked alongside a big bonus, like paying off their mortgage or a new truck. Super generous of him right!? I don’t think so, and here’s how Karl Marx showed me why:

Ok, let’s look at the idea of work more generally first. If we look around we can see that in every society there are people that work and people that don’t work (this isn’t necessarily bad, some of the people that don’t work are children, the elderly, etc.). In order to take care of the people that don’t work, the workers have to produce more than they need for themselves. The word that Marx used for that “more” is “surplus.” Surplus is the extra stuff that the workers produce that goes to take care of needs/wants that are not their own. 

For example: let’s say I have a small shoemaking business and at home I have a baby. In order to take care of the baby (who obviously can’t work), I have to make some shoes to sell to take care of myself and I have to keep making more shoes so that I can take care of my baby. Part of the money that I make from my labor of making shoes goes to me and part of it goes to my baby. Any of the money that comes from my labor that doesn’t go to me is called surplus (obviously, the surplus that goes to my baby is good!).

In the shoemaker example, I make the shoes and I choose to make extra shoes (in Marxist terms: I choose to produce surplus) so that I can take care of my baby. Notice, and this is key: As self-employed person, I’m in charge of my own surplus. 

Now, let’s say that I apply for a job at McDonald’s. Like everyone else, I want to “get paid what I’m worth!” But here’s the rub: we all know that McDonald’s will only pay me $10/hour as long as I am producing more than $10/hour worth of Big Macs to sell. If McDonald’s doesn’t make more than $10 off of my labor, then I’ll get laid off. This is true in all businesses that are organized in what Marx called a capitalist business structure. In other words: in a capitalist business, the worker does not get all the surplus from their labor. Capitalism is not a way of organizing government, it’s a way of organizing labor relationships in a business.

So McDonald’s makes money off of my labor, i.e., they get to keep part of my surplus and I have no say in what happens to it. Marx called this “exploitation.” Now, stick with me because it sounds inflammatory, but all it means is that in capitalism, the worker does not have control of their surplus. The caplitalist business keeps the worker’s surplus. It doesn’t matter if the worker is aware of this, or if you have a really nice boss with good intentions that pays you the “market rate.” It simply means that the worker doesn’t have any say over the surplus of their labor. In US corporations, it is the board of directors who decide what happens to the surplus (keep in mind the workers have no say in electing the board!). Thus, in capitalism, there is a built-in tension between the workers and the people who get the surplus. They must continually argue about how much or how little of the worker’s surplus that the owners keep. For example, every time you ask for a raise, you’re in essence asking to keep more of the surplus from your labor.

“The poll, published Wednesday, found that while Americans overall tend to oppose socialism by a strong margin — 60 percent say they have a negative view of it, versus just 31 percent who say they have a positive view — socialism has more fans than opponents among the 18-29 crowd. Forty-nine percent of people in that age bracket say they have a positive view of socialism; only 43 percent say they have a negative view.”

So ‘socialism’ being popular among young Americans doesn’t mean they have any clue what it means.  Surely some do but I think it may be the fact that for most young Americans we know our lives – regardless of our hard work – will not as a whole be as good or better than our parents.  So if ‘socialism’ is the word for a different way of organizing our economic relationships as a country why not say ‘positive’ when asked because ‘capitalism’ has broken the promise of the American dream.

 Perhaps another reason ‘socialism’ is growing in popularity is thanks to our growing outlandish political Right in the country.  I thought of this when a high school student told me he was a socialist and I said “What? Do you have any idea what that means or would mean for your family?”  He said, “Yeah, you want college to be affordable, healthcare available to all, and to go back to Clinton era taxes.  I mean that’s why everyone is upset at Obama and he’s a socialist.”  What if our hyper-polarizing rhetoric in America and in particular the socialist name calling on the Right is actually making an audience for the very idea they abhor?

Two theological asides.

1) If you look at just the poor and non-white stats our country is significantly critical of capitalism.  Should those on the underside of our system get a hearing from the church about the effects of our system on their lives and family?

2) ‘Progressive‘ is way more popular than ‘Liberal.’

Public reactions to the word progressive are far more favorable than to the word liberal; two-thirds have a positive reaction to the former compared with just half for the latter. There is very little difference among Democrats – who view both terms favorably.  The largest difference is among Republicans most (55%) of whom have a positive reaction to the word progressive, and a negative (70%) reaction to the word liberal. (link)

Does that mean liberal Christians should use progressive?  And why didn’t they ask about ‘Incarnational Christians?’

I will be teaching this fun four weekend intensive class with a seriously amazing mentor Monica A. Coleman.  If you are in the SoCal area and want to gain the tools and hone your voice to speak in public square then think about joining us.  For a local who just wants the knowledge, conversation, and community of the class and not the degree seeking credit it is only 300 bucks.  So check it out and feel free to holla if you are interested or have questions.

 For those of you who don’t know her, Julie Clawson is the author of Everyday Justice, a pastor, blogger, Emergent leader and former podcast guest. She is one of the conversation partners at the upcoming Emergent Village Theological Conversation at the end of January. (www.ProcessTheology.org). Her blog is in my top 10. 

Background: I love going to the movies. As a student, I usually only go the theatre on Summer break (blockbuster action films + air-conditioning = awesome) and on Winter break (tired brain + Christmas money = fantastic).

Last week I saw two movies and was quite intrigued by a pattern that I noticed during the trailers: women being tough guys. The three trailers were for Underword: Awakening with Kate Beckinsdale, Haywire with Gina Carano (both action films) and The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher.

I have read enough feminist literature to know that there is a principle (which Thatcher made famous) that “In a man’s world …” a women often has to out ‘man’ the guys in order to break into the boys club and be taken seriously.

In a system where we have been socially conditioned to see certain behaviors and attributes as ‘leadership’ or ‘strength’ – or in the church as ‘anointing’ – then women must over-do it in order to overcome the intrinsic biases and gain credibility in a system geared to evaluate by masculine expectations. (people point to Joyce Meyer as a Christian example)

This is a real problem.

THEN I was reading your blog this week and you bring up the Lego Ads making their way around Facebook and tie it into both modesty and obesity. As a youth pastor I have read everything from Reviving Ophelia to Queen Bees and Wannabes ,that explains why girls treat each other the way that they do, and I recognize that there are deep underlying issues. Let’s be honest, these deep issues will not be solved by quoting some Bible verses or ‘going back to the way things were in the Bible’.

So here are my questions: 

1. What do we do with the karate-chopping drop-kicking gun-shooting heroines of violence on the silver screen these days? On one hand, it is nice to women getting these big-deal leading roles in major films… on the other hand, are they real portrayals of women-ness or is it the bad kind of mimicry -  like ‘Girls Gone Wild’ as a picture of sexual liberation or power.

Here are the top 11 blogs of Homebrewed Christianity in 2011  :

1. Theology Nerd Book Survey 

2. That’s “Too Gay” – Brian Ammons’ Banned Chapter from Baptimergent

3. Your First Steps into Biblical Universalism…

4. 31 Reasons I Left Evangelicalism and Became a Progressive But Not a Liberal by Michael Camp

5. God Takes Sides….or When Karl Barth Was Right

6. Defining the Secular: Charles Taylor (pt. 3) by Deacon Hall

7. Rob Bell Wins 

8. The classic ‘Footprints in the Sand’ poem revisited

9. Are you a Bellian or Piperian?

10. a big difference between Christianity and Islam 

11. Goosing Emergents into the Mainline

Thank you all for your amazing participation and feedback – that was a wonderful year of conversation and theological brewing!

Let us know if you had a favorite that didn’t make the list.

From Chad, Tripp, and Bo – thanks for a great year, Brew On!  and don’t forget to share the brew.

I understand people’s reaction to his abrasive, condescending, and bombastic style. His attacks on religion were vicious behind his stunning wit and comprehensive recall of material.

Those who were big critics of his rightly pointed out that he was in some sense just a reverse fundamentalist. He had conceded that the God of Jerry Falwell, the suicide bombers, and Israeli occupation was the God up for debate and he simply didn’t believe in that God.

Here is the thing: I don’t believe in that god either! Hitchens helped me by rabidly critiquing that false god of Empire and cutting open the giant bloated carcass of Christendom with razor-sharp clarity. 

This morning Julie Clawson tweeted

“To everyone posting “Hitchens no longer exists – God”, 1- I doubt that’s actually your theology. 2- It’s not witty or cute, just jerky”

and she is right.  How could any believer think that he no longer exists? That is just a stupid thing to say! Of course Hitchens still exists – he just doesn’t have a body anymore. What are we physicalists now?  Its that kind of unthinking that he was pointing out.

The real question is where does he exist now?  The fundamentalist he hated so much would say that he went straight to hell. That of course is ridiculous and completely not Biblical. In that framework there is a holding area (like Abraham’s Bosom) and then the Great White Throne Judgement.

The ‘all we are is dust in the wind‘ crowd thinks that this is the end of the story and the he lives on in legacy and memories.

The Love Wins crowd thinks that he is with God and they are having a little talk about ultimate reality and some other fun stuff. I like the imagery of reconciling souls.

That will all take care of itself but one thing I am sure of is that Hitchens helped me think through some crazy crap I had inherited and some messed up ways of thinking that had been passed down to me. He unintentionally challenged me to streamline my faith by stripping away gobs of baggage that has gotten attached to the simple Galilean vision.

For that, I am thankful for Hitchens. I obvious don’t believe what he believed. But his critique of the established order with its crumbling foundation and rotting rafters was something that propelled me to re-think my approach to some pretty central issues.

Tim Tebow is a phenomenon is the media these days. His Denver Broncos football team is on a 6 game winning streak and he is 7-1 as their starting Quaterback. Despite his apparent limitations (skills) he has orchestrated a series of amazing comebacks during the winning streak.  That is a big deal! Any fan would love to have their team on this kind of a roller coaster – come from behind – frenzy.

That, however, is not what makes this news.

This past week the Broncos beat my beloved Chicago Bears in overtime after a miraculous set of circumstances turned the game around in the 4th quarter. The Tebow’s teammate picks up the story there: 

“Tebow came to me and said, ‘Don’t worry about a thing,’ because God has spoken to him,” Woodyard told The Denver Post this week.

It was Woodyard who then stripped Bears running back Marion Barber to hand the football — and the game — back to Denver.

For Tebow, just another day at the office.

“I believe in a big God and special things can happen,” he said, after he erased a 10-0 deficit against Chicago in the final 2:08 of regulation. “It’s not necessarily prophesying, but sometimes you can feel God has a big plan.”

Woodyard, for one, has no lingering doubts: “For all the Tebow haters: You better start believing.”

I want to be clear this before I say anything else: I am not hating Tebow. In fact, I like him. I like how he uses his summers to serve needy people in other countries. I like that he works so hard. I like that he is unorthodox in his throwing motion and scrabbling technique. I like that he is so sincere and transparent about his faith.

Some people get upset that he is always cramming his faith in their face. That is not what concerns me. It is his brand of faith that concerns me.

I have been very forthright that A) this is the camp of evangelical-charismatic zeal that I was raised in and emerged from B) that the epistemology behind ‘hearing from God’ … and the interventionist assumptions behind a ‘super’ natural worldview are antiquated relics of a pre-modern understanding and are untenable in the 21st century. If you want a more nuanced explanation, listen to “Pentecost for Progressives” [here] - starting in  minute 55 OR read the summary [here].  

This is the season of Advent and we do tell the story of God speaking to Mary. That is not what I am contesting. 

I try to never-ever play this next card… but the cards that I have been dealt has forced my hand:

Are you under the impression that God cares who wins a football game and intervenes to bring it about but doesn’t care enough about the thousands of children who are starving to do something about it?

Are you telling me that god knows but doesn’t care, or that God cares but doesn’t know, or that god could do something but won’t or that god would do something but can’t?

Look, I am not an either-or guy. I hate binaries, dualisms, and us vs. them mentalities. But when someone says that this is how God is… sometimes it forces you to say that I believe this God to be a false creation of human imagination – nothing more than an athropomophic projection.  

______

Three things for clarification:

1. I could be wrong. He keeps winning and people say ‘If Joel Osteen wasn’t doing something right, he wouldn’t have 37,000 people who go to his church.”  In America, success = correct.
2. The Calvinists could be right. God chooses whom ‘He’ wants to. I don’t want to be one of those people who say “If God is not the way I believe they-she-he  is, the I am not going to worship them-her-him.” I will worship God no matter what way God turns out to be… but I happen to really like the Jesus of the 4 canonical gospels… just sayin’.
3. Tim Tebow himself has hinted in the past that he does not believe in an interventionist god. Bob Costas alluded to this to in his amazing speech.  It’s not Tebow that concern me – its Tebow’s fans.

FYI…Tripp was giggling with glee that Steve Taylor was in the room.  I am pretty sure he just stared at him for an hour and a half, hoping he could start singing Meltdown At Madame Tussade’s.

 A few weeks ago Joerg Rieger cautioned about a type of Christianity that was a cheerleader for the system, that reinforced the status quo, and participated in society in way that strengthened Empire.

I have said before I come from a background where this type of thinking is not just disorienting but alienating. The focus is on individuals – with little mention of anything systemic. The goal is the salvation of souls for the afterlife – with no address of collective issues.

It was reading Walter Wink  “the Powers the Be” that radically impacted the way I could see this. I have since encountered other writings and teachers who have opened the subject even further.

Now, it is odd to look at the central figure of our faith and ask how did Jesus ever get portrayed as a guy who basically told people to be nice and obey the rules? Cornell West would talk about him be sanitized, deodorized, and neutralized. Someone else might call this being a chaplain to the empire.

Tripp and I have a theme that shows up in our personal conversations on a fairly regular basis. It revolves around the idea that variable X or Y may be changed or tweaked, but the outcome of the equation is never in doubt. A specific issue may be protested, but the machine itself in never in danger. Certain areas can be challenged or  even overhauled, but the system itself is never in jeopardy.

This is not limited to Empire. It goes beyond hegemony. It is not limited to Capitalism.

The powers that be, or the system, or the machine (as you prefer) is an omnibus. It can absorb – incorporate – and co-op any variation, deviation, or even challenge … and in the end the structure is nearly unchanged. The system is never in danger. The machine doesn’t even slow down. The Powers are never in jeopardy. It eats new ideas with barely a burp – let alone beginning to buckle.

 We could talk about an anarchist musical band that signs a record contract, or a retail store that sells Buddhist trinkets from ‘the far east’, or a seminar on Native American spirituality that meets in a university classroom… but I don’t want to get sidelined.  

Benjamin Barber in his book Jihad vs. McWorld talks about the market in such a way that sketched a picture (for me) of a machine that needs to be fueled by new authentic-indigenous expressions, otherwise it runs dry and burns out on it’s own the boredom of its generic repetitions and knock-offs.

“McWorld cannot then do without Jihad: it needs cultural parochialism to feed its endless appetites. Yet neither can Jihad do without that world: for where would culture be without a commercial producers who market it and the information and communication systems that make it known?”  

We have talked with Joerge Rieger (ep. 116) about a theological look at global economics. We have talked with Graham E. Fuller (ep. 117) about a historical perspective on East-West relations.

I am curious about the theological address of some revolutionary response to the machine. We talk about Jesus and Empire. We talk about the Constantinian compromise. We have the Hauerwasian response that gets interpreted as withdrawal & testimony. Cornell West wants us to be Prophetic.

What is the theological answer to the question that the machine is asking? Certainly, like Tripp is fond of saying, we have to be about more than a slightly kinder gentler empire. Jesus challenged the status quo of his day – economic, militaristic, racial, gender, and religious. How does a follower of Jesus address a system of oppression, domination, invasion and economic disparity?  Thoughts?

Tripp and Bo take on three topics in the news from a progressive Christian perspective with an eye toward the theological.

1. Did 9/11 really change us? You can read the initial blog here.

2. The crows at the Republican Presidential debates are telling us something. We think that something is bad.

3. Claremont Lincoln University had it’s convocation ceremony this week. That seemed significant in light of story 1 and 2 above.

In this hour-long show these two theology nerds reference several books – including but not limited to :

The Powers the Be by Walter Wink

 Simply Christian by N.T. Wright

Theology and the Kingdom by Wolfhart Pannenberg

No Rising Tide by Joerge Rieger

The views expressed are not necessarily those of Claremont School of Theology or Claremont Lincoln University. 

1. We put our the interview with Graham E. Fuller this past Friday.
2. I heard an interview and read an article with a New York author who was asking a tough a question. “Did 9/11 really change us all that much?”
3. Tony Jones wrote a blog that pointed out the danger of ‘memorials’ for history and our collective memory .
4. The Republican Presidential Debates.
5. Getting ready to start a new weekly radio show for Claremont School of Theology where this will be one of our first  questions.

I lived in New York state when the attacks happened. I drove home from the conference I was at to be with my congregation. That weekend I preached to the fullest auditorium I have ever seen and I preached the most prophetic message I have ever attempted. The following week I lost some of my congregants and that next weekend preached to a half-full auditorium.

As a student in religion at a University that is partnering with an Islamic and a Jewish center for study, the events of ten years ago are continuously on my mind. As a friend and brother to people who take seriously the critiques of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett … I am confronted daily by the effects of bad religion on our world.

 SO  I wanted to throw out some questions and get some feedback. Here are my questions:

• As a country, are we less combative than we were before 9/11? Because we see the effects of violence?
• Are our politics less contentious? Has it brought more unity?
• Are we less Imperialistic? Making fewer enemies and giving less fuel to the terrorists?
• Are we less consumeristic? Now that we see what really matters?
• Do we have a deeper appreciation for people of other faiths? we have read their scriptures and visited their gatherings because we no longer want to alienated from the ‘other’? 
• Do we know more about other faith traditions?
• For those who believe that this is a ‘Christian Nation’, are we more sincere about following the way of Jesus? Those who proclaim the name of Christ have revisited and thus radically altered their previous posture? 

It seems to me that the answer to every one of these questions – however broad they may be – is overwhelming ‘no’. We have not changed. We are not a different country. We have not gone a different way. I am left to wonder if 9/11 changed us at all. One could make the case the we have continued of the same trajectory of Argument Culture politics, militaristic foreign policy, consumeristic capitalism, overspending both personally and in government, contentious religion and combative media coverage. I am not sure that much has changed at all since September 10, 2001.

My question in preparation for the radio conversation is twofold:

Am I wrong? Is there something I am not seeing?

Am I asking the right questions? If not, what are better questions?

Tripp and I had some fun recording a Theology Nerd Throw-down (TNT) last week where we discussed Tony’s suggestions for replacing Emergent-Liberal-Progressive as unhelpful and antiquated terms that are unclear and carry too much baggage.

But none of that responded to Brandon’s actual concerns and questions. I appreciate and respect Brandon’s position and involvement  – SO since we are on the same team – I wanted to honor his questions with an honest attempt to dialogue about it.

Question 1: Why haven’t Emergent folks joined the mainline denominations?

Response: The simple answer is – because they are doing two different things. People emerge out of something-somewhere. Those backgrounds are varied and diverse, but primarily they emerge into a more open, less institutional, more casual, less hierarchical expression. It doesn’t have to be a full fledged movement (sorry Dr. Olson) for there to be both an appeal and an organizational framework. It is providing a communal and spiritual environment that nurtures and facilitates a less defined- more adaptable entity (expression) in the post-colonial, post-christendom ecosystem.

To me, the better question is “Why WOULD emergent folks join mainline denominations?”   They are going two different directions. I mean, except for some behaviors and convictions (ordaining women, justice work, etc.) the mainline is a historical-institutional behemoth that one would only want to take on if there was a significant impetuous. Otherwise the decentralized- organic-contextual capacity of emergence spirituality and practice are much more attractive than the albs & stoles, acolytes and adjudicatories, the liturgy and lectionary of the Mainline.

Why would an emergent type volunteer to take on all of that plus the Bishoprics and Books of common practice?

I want to ask you: what are you picturing when you say something like this?    [it is an honest question since I do not know you and do not know what you are picturing when you say 'mainline' and what exactly it is that you think would appeal to an emergent type?]

I think the reason that your post has gotten the response that it has and your questions have not been answered is that you must be picturing something when you ask the question that seem outlandish to those of us who are not in your head. Have you had a different experience of the mainline that we have? What aspect of mainline did you think WOULD appeal to emergent types?

Question 2: Why have the negatives of evangelicalism been so easy to describe and virulently rebuke, while the negatives of the mainline denominations have barely shown up in Emergent concerns?

Response: I think this comes down to two quick thoughts:

1. most emergents have either emerged from an evangelical background or against an evangelical background. It is the reality of our era. TV preachers, mega churches, Christian bookstore chains and the Religious Right have made it so.
2. The mainline has it’s endowed seminaries and publishing houses to document it’s slow decline. It is neither the primary drive nor the main attraction for most theologically charged conversations.

Question 3:  Another way to ask this question would be: Why hasn’t the Emergent critique of evangelicalism’s involvement with the American nation-state and it’s tendency toward creating theologically exclusive boundaries not found root in a critique of mainline denominations, whose political interests also conflate the church with nation-state interests?

Response: I hate to oversimplify it, but it seems really clear. If mainliners are theologically over-aware (maybe even hyper-aware in some cases) then their involvement in the political system may tend toward liberation, justice, and equality. Whereas those movements who are newly energized toward “Theo” heavy themes may tend toward conserving romantic ideals of past formulations without consideration (or awareness) or their capacity and tendency toward institutional hegemony.

So those are my genuine, non-cheeky, responses to your honest questions. I would love to hear your and other people’s thoughts in order to dialogue about this. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sojourners, Identity Politics, & Justice: RATT 3 from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

* To be clear I am Welcoming and Embracing of all people and Rachel has NOT said the same thing as me.

Rachel & Tripp Talking 2 from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

Rachel & Tripp Talking 1 from tripp fuller on Vimeo.

1. Sexy Title…if your title doesn’t pop then your total eye count won’t either.  Convince me to click out of my RSS reader or from facebook to your blog.  You can make a title sexy in a variety ways….hyperbolize your spin or tell me I’ll learn something I want to learn or ask a good question or well you get the idea.
2. Word Count Matters! If it is less than 300 words then you should post it on facebook or tweet it but DON’T blog it.  Consistent wussy posts make me unsubscribe.  If it’s over 500 words you should cut it, divide it, get a book deal, or blow my mind…otherwise I am not gonna finish reading it.
3. Keep it Speedable. Speedable = Speed+Readable.  Please make it easy for me to quickly hear what you want me to hear.  There a bunch of ways….short paragraphs, bullet points, numbered thoughts, bold\underlining, short quotes, and maybe a flashing arrow at your thesis statement.
4. Own Your Voice. I come to your blog to hear you, so let me. Tell me what you think and say it with strength. If I want to know what a bunch of other people think about something I will google it. Mention\summarize someone else only if necessary. Otherwise convince me, excite me or irritate me with what you think today.  The post is dated and you can change your mind tomorrow.
5. Remember the Conversation. No blogger is an island… at least not good one.  Don’t finish the conversation but join it.  Do NOT claim the last word in your post or on a topic.  Conversation, even controversy, can be good but being a butt-hole is not.  Don’t forget to respond to comments, comment elsewhere, and link to other posts.
6. You Tell me….. I want 10 commandments for not sucking @blogging.  I will add five more, revise above, and then post the 10 up again later. SO HELP ME OUT!

These fellas are not just minor voices who should be ignored but essential for the develop of the doctrine of the Trinity (ps…it’s a big deal doctrine). I will avoid a discussion of the Trinity and their brilliant philosophical modification of Platonism to simply say that the nature of divine love articulated in the Trinity led them toward affirming God’s universalism. (1) But more than the Trinity it was the Bible that got’em!

Don’t believe me? Then try it out! Remember these three things and read some Bible to see if Biblical universalism is jiving with you.

Here are some of these three fellas favorite Bible passages…John 12:32; Acts 3:21; Romans 5:18-21, 11:25-26a, 32; 1 Corinthians 3:12-15; 15:22-28; 2 Corinthians 5:19; Ephesians 1:10; Philippians 2:9-11; Colossians 1:20; 1 Timothy 2:4; Titus 2:11; 2 Peter 3:9; 1 John 2:2. For serious play-by-play through these Church Fathers’ readings of the Bible see Steve Harmon‘s book Every Knee Should Bow: Biblical Rationales for Universal Salvation in Early Christian Thought. (2) But before you read them check out these three features of Biblical Universalism and see if they help frame your Bible reading.

1) God is Love….this means that there is nothing about God, in God, or comes from God that is not love. Love is not something God occasionally does or engages in but is the very essence of God. To say ‘God is Love’ is to say that the great mystery of God is a mystery in which every depth that is yet to be understood or revealed is another depth of love. God is love. Love known and unknown but nothing but love.

2) Love requires freedom…..this means that God’s actual goal for creation, to bring it to fruition within the divine love (Paul’s ‘all-in-all’), requires creation to have genuine freedom. Even Calvinists pretend its true in their daily lives. For example, when two lovers consummate their marriage in a passionate act of sweet love making, freedom, vulnerability, and risk is what made the actual act – intercourse – making love and not rape. The freedom to give oneself to another and to receive the other as other is not a human contaminant to love but essential. Because the God who is Love desires to love the whole world and genuine love involves freedom, the creatures of the Creator have received the gift of freedom to love God as a result of God’s own free decision to create and love.

3) Love Wins….God’s love wins. Why? Because the God who is Love is the one and only true God. The infinite Creator of all the universe who is love, is infinitely committed to loving and living in love with the world. This finite world and every finite person within it will remain for all eternity an object of the pure divine love. So both the Creator and creature’s freedom can never be compromised for premature victory. This means a). No one can or ever will be forced into loving God for the very love God desires requires freedom & b) Nothing, including one’s death or present state of response, can force the infinite God of Love to quit pursuing any and every part of God’s creation.

I hope you can see how this is NOT universalism of the blank check variety. The only thing universal here is the scope and reservoir of God’s love. The eschatological optimism is not about anyone, anything, or any action other than the God revealed in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. It is precisely that very particular vision of God that can lead one to be optimistic, hopeful, and excited about the future. Why? because the world’s future is God.

1. The Trinity still opens one’s theological imagination in an eschatologically optimistic direction. There is of course Karl Barth but a Greek Orthodox Priest who is a friend told me he saw all these ‘love wins’ posts on facebook and read enough quotes from the book to think it sounds like a pretty normal idea in Orthodox circles.

2. This book is really excellent and was personally transformative for me in undergrad!

Here are  my two quick thoughts on it:

1. We are not having this conversation in a vacuum
2. Rob Bell is up to something

We are not in a vacuum and the context of this conversation is post-enlightenment / post-christendom. That means a couple of things:
a) everyone has their own bible
b) most people can read it
c) evangelicals do not have Popes or councils to make decisions on this kind of stuff
d) for Reformed folks (Piper, Driscol, Keller, etc) the bible just doesn’t say what they need it to say for this thing to be air tight.

SO – we have a couple of issues!
The biggest issue is that we take passages like Matthew 7 (which one of the white women in Rob’s audience asked about) where Jesus says “wide is the road that leads to destruction” and we THINK that it is about Hell. It is not. We have been taught to read the Bible wrong. We trade one word for another all the time.  I wrote about that here.

Then – some one like Rob comes along and calls that into question (he is up to something) and people FREAK out.

Matthew 7 isn’t about hell. But we got so comfortable thinking that it was … now we are uncomfortable with how comfortable we were.

I’ll give you another example: Paul never mentions hell. In any of sermons (Acts) or letters. It is not there.  I wrote about its absence here.

Here is another one: Revelation – which is not to be read literally – teaches (even to those who DO think it is literal) that hell is not eternal. Even in that scenario hell is temporary and is emptied into the lake of fire. They are not the same place or for the same purpose.  read Revelation 20:14-15.

But since many don’t know that… we end up asking “wait! if there is no hell … then why are we even doing evangelism or missions“. The answer is that we were doing them for the wrong reason. Some of it was colonial … some of it was worse.

We should do evangelism and we should do mission – but not because of this understanding of hell.

So – I am not saying that Rob Bell is right. I am not saying that everyone will be saved. But the reality is that many have not taken these passage seriously.  Passages such as:

Colossians 1:20 “and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”

Romans 5:10 “For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”

2 Corinthians 5:18 “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation”

That’s my 2 cents.  What did you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miracle Whip

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

Ipod Nano

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

Seasonique

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

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

Jeff Jarvis of ‘Buzz Machine‘ fame was gracious enough to join the ‘theology after google‘ event last week for a conversation about taking his book ‘What Would Google Do?’ into the church.  I have heard tons of positive responses and a couple asked for audio of the talk so they could put it on their iPod, SO you can download a clear and loud audio file of Jarvis here.  Share it. Spread it. Dig it.

(Right click, Save as on the link to download it.)

One could call it providence as Daniel Dennett is coming to Claremont to give a lecture February 16, and it just so happens that Philip Clayton, philosopher and theologian, is a tenured professor there.  Why is this intersection so intriguing?  Well A few months ago at Cambridge University’s celebration of Darwin, Daniel Dennett attended a session on evolution and religion in which Philip Clayton was a presenter.  Afterward Dennett ended up blogging about Clayton’s presentation on Richard Dawkins’ blog and concluding that, ‘in short Clayton is an atheist who won’t admit it.’  While calling him an ‘anonymous atheist’ is a clever way to avoid actually having a substantive conversation, it also assumes that Dennett gets to define Christianity and determine who truly belongs in it (a popular New Atheist tactic).  This time Clayton is revealed to be an atheist because he doesn’t hold to all the traditional divine attributes such as divine omnipotence (of course there are plenty of Christians, including rather conservative ones, who recognize the origin of these omni-divine attributes being Hellenistic philosophy rather than anything specifically Christian).  After Dennett blogged on the disturbing experience of attending a session where people believe and think differently than him, Clayton posted his paper online and noted that:

I do find it a bit surprising that Dan chose not to mention any of the philosophical questions that we debated. Clearly his rhetoric style here plays to the usual readers of Richard Dawkins’ website who, as one can see, are lapping up his words. But it is a bit of a pity that Dan neglected to mention the call to dialogue, which was the central point of my paper and of our public debate. In fact, isn’t his choice of rhetoric instead of argument an instance of exactly what he is accusing theologians of doing? One can’t help but see some signs of a philosopher who has rather lost interest in philosophical debate.

Well maybe Dennett can get out from behind his pulpit and have a serious philosophical debate.  If he is right about Clayton being an atheist, then he may not only win the debate, but get Philip run out of his job, one focused on teaching theology to future ministers.  Of course Dennett can always do what he did last time…move on and rant online about it later.

Here‘s Philip’s blog invite!

Theology After Google: Leveraging New Technologies and Networks for Transformative Ministry

We invite you to join us March 10-12, 2010 in Claremont, Calif., for a first-of-its-kind national conference, “Theology After Google.” Thanks to a generous grant from the Ford Foundation, we are able to keep registration costs low, as in 99 bucks.

Who is coming?

Tony Jones, Spencer Burke, John Franke, Helene Slessarev-Jamir, Adam Walker Cleaveland Bob Cornwall, Dwight Friesen , Jon Irvine, Glen Stassen, Philip Clayton, Tripp Fuller, Ryan Parker, Bruce Epperly, Barry Taylor

Why “theology after Google”?

Progressive Christian theologians have some vitally important things to say, things that both the church and society desperately need to hear. The trouble is, we tend to deliver our message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg: books, academic articles, sermons, and so forth. We aren’t making effective use of the new technologies, social media, and social networking. When it comes to effective communication of message, the Religious Right is running circles around us.

Hence the urgent need for a conference to empower pastors, laypeople, and the up-and-coming theologians of the next generation to do “theology after Google,” theology for a Google-shaped world. Thanks to the Ford funding, we’ve been able to assemble a stellar team of cultural creatives and experts in the new modes of communication.

Why should you come?

Over the three days you will…

• Discover the impacts of our Google-world on theology
• Gain new tools for your church and ministry
• Attend break out sessions around your interest (ex. youth ministry or creative artist)
• Get to hang out with the presenters (and compete in a Corn-Hole Bean-bag tournament)
• Enjoy the 70 and Sunny SoCal weather
• You want to answer the question, ‘Is your theology googlicious?’ with a resounding YES!
  

For more info and to register visit Transforming Theology.

This is the first book we are reading\blogging through in the theology after google class (and conference you can come to!!!).  As part of the class at Claremont I am kicking off the blog discussion of the book and the other class members, along with any of you readers, will be discussing the ideas in the book over the week. The book itself is organized into two parts.  In section one Jarvis lays out the results of his investigation in a series of rules that illuminate the shape and nature of a Googlely organization.  For example, in his chapter on the New Relationship he charges us to ‘give people control and we will use it’ and part of the New Economy is being ‘post-scarcity.’  By moving between lucid descriptions and well framed stories the reader not only comes to understand these new Google Rules and the world they describe but begins to dream with them.  That is one challenge for the class (and anyone else who wants to play along).  Dream with a couple rules and then share your dream of transformation for your own church OR the Church.  In class I just may throw the WWGD slide show up on the screen and get you all to start using it like you were making a presentation to a group of denomination heads at the National Council of Churches…hmmm that would be fun!!!

In part two of the book Jarvis takes the rules and puts them to work in a variety of industries.  I have to say that as he moved through chapters I would have expected like the music industry to Detroit and health care, I kept being amazed at how pertinent his collection of Google Rules continued to be.  At the end of section two he discusses ‘God’ for a minute, but I know there is much more going on in the church to report on and rip on.  At the beginning of the section he says ‘there are two ways to attack the problems of these industries: to reform the incumbents or to destroy them.’  I want to know which you believe is true about your own community of faith.  How would you outline an additional chapter on the church in America?  What stories, examples, etc would you link to as examples of a Googlely feast? What lessons do we have to learn from other industries that Jarvis tells?  I hope you are thinking about a cool blog entry now!

At the very end of the book Jarvis closes with a reflection on ‘Generation G,‘ those who grew up digital. It is radically impacting our relationships, privacy, connectedness, problem solving, expectations, etc, etc, etc.  How do you respond to the questions he raises?  What to they mean theologically? Anthropologically? Ecclesiologically?  Where would you begin a conversation on these issues philosophically? What new ethical questions will your kids need answers for that we haven’t even started talking about?

If you haven’t read the book get it or just dive in to one of the many links and videos below.  I will update the post over the week to link to the other bloggers who join in

• Jarvis’ 5 tips for a Googlier you
• Google’s 10 Things We Know to be True
• Jarvis gets the church as ‘network of niches’ from Chuck here and then blogged it in ‘What Would God Do’ (A Post the Theology After Google class should read!!) Maybe you could blog an answer like Ron Smith?
• Pastor Stu asks a great question in response to Jarvis, ‘Is your church a Google or Yahoo church?’
• How Googley is your Church? Now you have a question for the next Deacons’ meeting.
• Bill Thompson’s review is great
• Next Week Mike Morrell and Steve Knight will be coming to our class (via skype), so check out their blogs.
• PS….CLASS….when your professor publishes an article online that has the same name as your class you should read it, blog it, tweet it, share it, and comment on it.  You know, in the words of Jarvis, give Philip some Google-juice!!

Did I mention it is only 99 bucks and there will be break out sessions for youth ministers, pastors, Christian educators, artists, and web peeps?  That means you should use your ‘development’ money to come to this awesome and cheap conference.  Ohhh and it is in LA.

Tony Jones says come…

Spencer Burke says come….

Truth is dangerous business.  Truth is really dangerous when it comes to religion.  It is definitely not a fashionable topic to bring up at the dinner table and yet there is something about being human that makes us ask the question, ‘What is truth?’  Often the reason the question of truth is skirted is because it assumes the discussion is related to absolute truth.  Absolute truth or universal truth focuses on truths that correspond to reality regardless of the context, time, place, situation, etc.  Clearly if one had access or possession of an absolute truth it would really silence the conversation at the dinner table.  The only options for those hearing the truth would be to accept it or face the consequences.  The history of Christianity is full of moments where individuals or groups thought they had possession of truth wrapped up tight in their hands and went out on behalf of the truth of God to share it and compel people to accept it.  On occasion, they even did this in very violent ways.  Between the inquisitions, witch trials, crusades, colonizing, and abortion clinic attacks, it is safe to say we should definitely be suspect of  those who think they possess truth absolutely.

“Never swallow anything whole. We live perforce by half-truths and get along fairly well as long as we do not mistake them for whole-truths, but when we do mistake them, they raise the devil with us.”, Alfred North Whitehead

If we are to reject the absolutism of truth how can we answer the question what is truth?  In avoiding the discussion altogether we are tempted to resort to a strong form of relativism and not for bad reasons.  We know just from personal experience alone that there is a plurality of truth.  We know people who live beautiful and gracious lives in a diversity of religious traditions, and it is their own understanding of truth for them that compels them.  To live with open eyes today is to live in a plurality of truth claims, be it from other Christians, a Jewish co-worker, or agnostic neighbor.  Many of us have a felt desire to affirm the goodness of their life, their experience, and their truth because of its effects on their lives.  If we want to affirm the plurality of truth, recognize its relativity, and reject absolutizing truth, how are we to talk about truth?  What is truth?  Can we answer the question as a person of faith without crossing our fingers? After all, it would seem that any affirmative answer neglects what we want to affirm in the lives of our neighbors.  At the same time we also really want to reject some understandings of truth.  We want to say no, genocide is wrong, Hitler Germany was immoral and we want to say it with the same passion that we celebrate the saintliness of people from many faiths.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts., Isaiah 55: 8-9

Luckily the possession of truth is not native to the Christian faith.  Sure we can know God and even have some confidence about who we are relating to, but that is a ways away from possessing the truth ourselves.  Being known by the Truth and knowing the truth are very different.  Only God can possess the truth (thank God) and we are in the business of beautiful approximations, or as Paul said concluding his famous reflection on love, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12).  Notice Paul’s use of first and second person.  The communal ‘we’ sees, albeit dimly, while the individual ‘I’ knows only a partitioned piece. If truth is not something we have but something God has then it makes sense that we will know more of the truth together.  When we bring the diversity of our experiences, insights, and stories together there is a better chance of ‘seeing’ the truth.  In a very real sense we get closer to the truth by expanding the conversation, not limiting it.  This is not a leap into blind relativism, but the recognition that the God we desire to know exists on and beyond the boundaries within which we so often attempt to put the Creator in.  It follows that to be open to discovering God on the other side of our boundaries is part of recognizing the universal nature of the God who issues the call to ‘follow me’ into every particular context.

‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’, John 14:6

When it comes to religion, truth often gets thrown around as a way of disregarding people of other faiths.  The refrain from the Gospel of John has become a particular mantra for many conservative Christians in their dismissal of other faith traditions.  The problem with using the text that way is that it makes the text an answer to a question Jesus was not asked.  In the gospel, Jesus, surrounded by his disciples, is asked by Thomas, “we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  The point of Jesus’ answer is not the distribution of some special knowledge that leads to eternal salvation or some particular theological doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and what was accomplished on the cross,  In this conversation Jesus is making clear that truth is tied up in a form of life.  Both here and after the resurrection Thomas wanted to know things objectively, he wanted to touch the risen Jesus and here he asks for a detailed map and itinerary for union with God, when all the while Jesus was already bringing it to them through their relationships.  As Jesus says in the following verse, “If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”  The truth Jesus gets at is a way of living into the reality of God’s grace in the world.  Tom Reynolds refers to this as the “Truth-Effect.”  When we come to understand truth as a living into grace then it becomes easy to understand talk about the ‘way’ and ‘life.’  When Jesus tells his disciples that he is that the way, the truth, and life to the Father and then that they have seen the Father by being his disciple, he is giving a rich description of the relational nature of truth.  The truth is the way of Jesus, the life-giving way of Jesus.  When you hear this text as part of a community of Jesus followers it becomes clear that when Thomas wanted a destination Jesus turned him towards the community and when Thomas wanted directions Jesus gave him a call to gracious living.  The effect of truth is not the means to excluded others from God, but the call to live a life shaped by the truth, the life-giving way of Jesus.

As long as we consider truth something we possess and can grasp it, it ends up taking the shape of our hands, it has our fingerprints all over it.  Jesus was wise enough to redirect the disciples from seeking objective truth about God.  Objective truth is God’s business which we can attempt beautiful approximations of.  God is Truth; so no truth is alien to God or forbidden to the believer and yet to realize we cannot possess the truth frees us to seek the truth.  After becoming a disciple, Jesus directs us towards our neighbor and expects truth to be discovered through committed living in the way of Jesus.  The nature of truth in the life of faith is in this sense subjective.  As Helene Russell describes, subjective truth is the form of one’s mind and soul in relation to that which is most important, ones commitments, and way of engaging others, the world, and God.  For a Christian to ask the question, what is truth subjectively is to think through how one’s awareness, experience, and living in the world can come to cohere with that of God revealed in Christ.  In the words of Paul, what does it mean to let the same mind (subjectivity) be in you that was in Christ Jesus?  This means there is much more to truth than coming to know something, truth is coming to embody something.  To say Jesus is the truth is to say that in his life and in his way the God who is love was embodied among us and for us.

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death…
even death on a cross. , Phil.2:5-8

As Christians we too come to participate in God and God comes to shape our subjectivity.  God begins to make us true.  Through prayer, art, worship, reflection, friendship, service, and many other practices we are shaping our subjectivity and letting the mind of Christ take root in us.  Helene describes the subjectivity of one who knows the truth as one who sees all people as ‘loved and loveable’.  In this simple phrase a sensitivity to the good news is expressed for if we look at anyone, regardless of difference, as loved and lovable then we relate to them without trying to erase their difference.  They are not changed by us but our own subjectivity, our experience and understanding of the truth, is transformed as we emoby the truth, way, and life revealed in Jesus.  To see truth through this lens connects well with Paul’s description of the mind of Christ in the Philippians hymn (2:5-11).  Christian truth is misunderstood if it is grasped and exploited, instead it compels us to become a servant of all and even become vulnerable because there is no one in who is not loved and lovable.

The story of Jesus is full of examples where truth is understood and embodied in relationships.  In fact a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry is his identification with the marginalized, ignored, and oppressed.  The mind of Christ, the truth of Christ, is intrinsically tied to solidarity with the marginalized.  There are many forms of marginalization, economic, societal, cultural, religious, ethnic, and for handicaps.  To be marginalized seeing things from a different perspective, often from the underside or dark side of the culture dominant understanding of ‘truth.’  To be shaped by the experience and perspective of the marginalized can change your understanding of the truth about a subject, even a religious one.  Joreg Rieger pointed out that this was what Jesus was doing in the conflicts over Sabbath healing.  In the Gospel of Luke Jesus heals a woman’s arm that had been crippled for 18 years on the Sabbath.  The religious leaders quote Jesus the Bible in order to demonstrate his infidelity to the truth, ‘There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.’  Their hypocrisy and presumptive leveling of God’s truth at him ignited Jesus’ and he replied, “ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?”  So what is the truth about the Sabbath?  Can you work? Can you give your animals water? Can you heal a woman?  Can you set her free from bondage?  The conflict between Jesus and the religious elites is not a conflict over the a Bible passage, but the nature of the truth to which it points.  Is the Sabbath an objective truth that all people are subject to or is the truth of the Sabbath the people?

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

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

An Interview with Del Brown from J. Ryan Parker on Vimeo.

I hope you enjoy listening to the audio and more than that I pray that Cobb’s voice will help inspire more of us to participate in the change we need.

Is it too late? Earth Day 2009 with John Cobb (Click to stream audio OR right-click and save-as to download the MP3)