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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• FORMER YOUTH Genesis 2:23-24

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  
  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In Numbers chpt 20, Miriam passes away. She had been a prophetess for the people and had challenged Moses’ authority on occasion. Immediately after her passing (this will become important) the people realize that there is no water and press Moses and Aaron for solutions. Moses and Aaron step away from the people to seek God and receive instruction to “take the staff and speak to the rock – it will pour out water before their eyes”.

Moses, as you may remember, doesn’t follow instructions to the ‘T’. He ad libs a little bit.  He does indeed gather the people but then he veers from the plan. He chastises the people and then strikes the rock. Two things happen:

• water does indeed come out
• God is displeased with Moses and will not let him enter the land that is promised.

I have preached this passage many times and have read lots of treatments. I am intrigued by this passage and have always been unsettled by one detail in the story, which I have never been able to resolve:

why does the Lord tell Moses to take the staff if he is just going to speak to the rock? Why even mention the staff?

Here is where Honig and Rosenzweig bring a unique reading. The staff represent something magical like sorcery – or the miraculous for the early 20th century. This is a political theology and what is at stake in the suspension of law in emergency conditions. Can a sovereign power suspend law in the same way that  God suspends the laws of physics in order to preform miracles? Leaders, being empowered by God, the thinking goes, could suspend ‘normal’ activity if they determined an exceptional circumstance.

In Honig and Rosenzweig’s hermeneutic the dispersed empowerment of the people (multitude) is the location for God’s will and is intended to be home to the will/voice of the Lord. But, as we know, this responsibility had been too overwhelming and was resisted by the people in selecting Moses as a king type who would speak to God for/instead of them (Exodus 20:19). This was an abdication by the people of what the Lord had desired for them as a people – to be prophets all.

This resistance is reinforced when the voice of the people rises in the absence of water, and Moses (along with his brother Aaron) turn away from the ‘stiff necked people’ and receive instruction to speak to the rock. Moses then, probably importing the top-down authoritarianism of his Egyptian upbringing, disobeys the command to speak and instead, chastises the people and strikes the rock with his staff in an act of magical sorcery. God, though it produces water, reprimands this act, and Moses is disallowed from entering the promised-land with the people.

This event is placed within the historical context, earlier in the passage, where Miriam passed away and immediately the people realized that they had no water and held a council against Moses and Aaron. Miriam’s name alludes to water and she was the sister who placed Moses in the Nile’s water when he was an infant. She had been the only one to challenge Moses’ authoritarian ways and she provided, as a prophetess, a check to Moses’ power. Without her, this reading states, Moses proved he will give the people … “not authentic prophecy, but sorcery.” In not recognizing the predictive prophecy of the people (and Miriam), Moses loses his leadership of the people.

Honig utilizes Rosenzweig’s two types of prayer – one that spontaneously arises in a situational moment, and another that is used by the community and creates an openness or receptivity – to analyze the judicial deliberation surrounding the Bush v. Gore presidential ruling. By imagining that the people could have risen up in expectation of a serious effort to count valuable democratic votes instead of waiting for a Schmittian top-down rule from the authorities. The sovereign power might have been within the people prepared for and receptive to the sign instead of what came from above it – a rupture from beyond them. This expectation is foreshadowed within the Mosaic tradition that one day all of the people would be prophets (like Miriam).

Honig asks if this metaphorical reading (which it expressly is)  is a good model for democratic politics and a comparison of the  “state of legal exception to the divine rule of god”. The people, she says, when bound together can give to themselves the powers of state and can again decide to suspend them when, as a multitude, they are oriented and receptive (having been prepared) to the consequences of such action and what they point toward as a sign.

This, in the end, is the problem with magical thinking! We abdicate our power as the people – to be receptive to and bring forward the voice and will of God – in favor of looking to magically empowered leaders to suspend the rules that govern due to exceptional (or emergency) circumstances and hand down solution (metaphorically) through sorcery.

It makes sense then why the Lord even mentions the staff if Moses is ultimately to speak to the rock. It is a metaphor (symbol) of concentrated power that is present but to be resisted in lue of the prophetic possibility of speaking. In that speaking, which is to be located in the people (multitude) prepared by prayer, that a sign is revealed that points to a greater reality. We never hear that voice if a receptive people continually abdicate that potential to exceptional leaders who are expected to provide magical results.

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

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

Jesus Christ
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I read the book The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen more than a decade ago and said out loud “Oh! So THAT is why I bristle at the either/or, Republican/Democrat, Right/Left dichotomy! – now it makes sense.”

I reject the spectrum at every turn … but recently I have begun to make an exception in regards to the spectrum. The spectrum is only applicable for someone who thinks that there is a spectrum. I will only try to get them to see that not everyone exists on a spectrum nor are they accounted for by a right-left binary. I no longer try to dislodge them of the notion as a whole – I only try to introduce that a spectrum is incomplete and insufficient.

Lately I have been overwhelmed – probably because it is an election year – by binary language and dualistic thinking. In these conversations I have discovered that it can be quite effective to introduce a simple word play. Spectrums are not straight lines – like light, they bend. 

You may think that this sounds overly simplistic but just think about the rise of the Tea-Party and the emergence of the Occupy movement coming in roughly the same window of time. Now those two groups would say that they stand for completely different things. To an outside observer, however, for all the minor distinctions they share a ‘Major’ concern: the system is broken and we can’t trust our leaders to fix it. 

This week, I am starting a series on my personal blog working though the Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges. He begins the book with a 25 year old former Marine walking along a highway in Upstate NY that I driven. He is disillusioned with the economic and political systems and is getting ready to do something about it. At one point the young vet says:

“I could see there was no difference between the two main political parties. There is a false left/right paradigm which diverts the working class from the real reasons for their hardships.”

I am looking forward to the series in the exact inverse proportion to how much I am dreading this election cycle.* I have lots of Tea Party types in my life and many Occupy sympathizers as friends. I hear them both saying that the system is not working and that those in charge are not capable of fixing it, that we the people need to be more hands on.

Chris Hedges analyzes the crisis and articulates the root causes better than anyone I have found. The slant of the series will revolve around one simple question “If Hedges is right about the world – how then should we do theology? 

The Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, the global economic crisis and the ongoing wars are telling us something … and it is not about the End of Days. Doing theology in this environment will inherently have some continuity with historical approaches but it will require some tools that may not be familiar to us as well as some necessary innovations.

 The left and right think that they are far apart, but in a bent system they are closer than they would believe. At some point on an arc the far right and the far left almost touch. 

I end the way Hedges begins, with a quote from George Orwell:

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.  “Freedom of the Press”

* Tavis Smiley has been saying for quite a while that this will be the ugliest and most racist election in modern times. 

The “Inverse Theology” that is referenced is from Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno.

Also referenced is the popular blog from last month “Undercover Boss” by Stephen Keating 

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?’

1) The Pope: Gay marriage threatens humanity’s future

2) Pastor Joel Osteen to Oprah: Homosexuality Is Sin — But Gay People Will Get Into Heaven

3) Rick Santorum: A Straight Dad In Prison Is Better Than Two Gay Dads Who Aren’t

4) Pastor Mark Driscoll’s book on Marriage hits the shelves

It is interesting that all four of these stories have come to my attention in the past week. What most people will focus on is whether there is a Bible verse to back up what they are saying or not.

What needs to be stated before that is two-fold:

• All four are white males. Somebody may ask “are you implying that their gender or race somehow diminishes their right to speak with authority?” and I would answer “No – I just think that it is worth pointing it out in case later we wanted to examine how people come to power and in what ways authority is constructed, bestowed, or recognized.”
• When you have the leader of all the world’s catholics, a guy who is renowned for not speaking up about anything or coming down on anyone, a presidential candidate, and one of the most influential evangelical pastors in America saying the same thing… one of a couple of things has to cross your mind.

Either
a) they are all sticking up for the truth or
b) they are all sticking up for an antiquated perspective of the past

The reason that this issue has grabbed my attention is that many are calling it ‘The Last Taboo”. In the past 2 centuries, the issues of race (civil rights) and gender (women’s lib) have advanced to the point the if anyone held an opinion from a century ago about either issue – the people around them would say “what is wrong with you?” or “wake up man, its the 21st century.”

I asked Tony Jones, Lauren Winner and Phyllis Tickle about this issues last year.  Only Phyllis was willing to tackle it.

No matter which side of this thing you are on, it is worth noting that the ‘last taboo’ is predicted to be the worst and most vicious. The problem with the last of anything is that when it is over … it is really over.  We tackled the race issue, we overcame the gender barrier, and now the sexuality issue is front and center.  We can’t go back. This is the last taboo. Once we have dealt with this, there are no more big ones to fall. This is kinda it.* 

I just think that it is worth noting A) who is framing the conversation and B) who is charge of the information and how the process is to be handled.  There might be more going on here than simply the rightness or the wrongness of any given issue or the interpretation of 6 bible verses. 

This will most likely be decided in our lifetime. Denominations will split over it. The future of the faith will be challenged because of it. Like race and gender before it, history will evaluate how we participate in it.  

* somebody might say ‘economics’ or some form of disparity, but that is not really in the same category as it is not inherently value laden .

For those who don’t read atheist political philosophy…Paul is back, popular, and getting all sorts of attention.  In our conversation we play out a number of these Pauline insights and then tackle a bunch of questions being asked in the church today.  If you are interested in the philosophical discussion there is no better place to begin than St. Paul Among the Philosophers which is introduced and edited by Jack Caputo.  It includes chapters by Zizek and Badiou (philosophers) and then responses form Christian scholars from across the disciplines.

Stuff We Discuss…Paul, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Pete’s new book, Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, Kester Brewin, Occupy Wall Street condoms and T-Shirts, the Crisis of Capitalism, Red Letter Christianity, the End of History, Identity Politics, Missional Progressive Christianity, why we aren’t ‘making disciples’ in church, and if the church should still gather after the Death of the Big Other God.

Since this was recorded live in a room with a Keg of Dale Brothers Beer there are the occasional bumps from me pumping the keg. I put some soft jams underneath to help cut down the noise from the note taking audience.

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.

They wander through theological frameworks, eschatological expectations and process potential for a greater engagement.

Translation: Tripp sings and then they talk about the meaning of the song … along with the week’s news through a theological lens.

Marc Ellis is widely regarded as a prophetic voice and an original thinker. He is a Professor of History at Baylor University and the Director of the Center for Jewish Studies. He has authored many books including:

• Encountering the Jewish Future
• Judiasm does not equal Israel: the Rebirth of the Jewish Prophetic  
• Toward a Jewish Liberation Theology
• Practicing Exile 

He is also under a cloud of controversy right now! Please go to this website:  https://www.change.org/petitions/ken-starr-president-of-baylor-university-stop-persecution-against-prof-marc-ellis and sign the petition to protect his job and his right to speak freely! 

In this episode we reference (among others) books by

• Andrew Sung-Park
• Douglas Ottati
• Elizabeth Johnson
• Brian McLaren
• Peter Rollins
• and the famous Incarnation podcast with John Cobb 

In the Clayton Crockett podcast (Radical Theology), many names come to the surface. Who do you think had the greatest impact of the 20th Century theologians that were named (or another who was not)

you can pick 2 if you must .  Feel free to  leave a comment and let me know of any oversights!

Clayton Crockett is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. His work focuses on postmodern theology, Continental philosophy of religion, psychoanalytic theory and theoretical issues concerning religion and politics.

In the 1960s, the strict opposition between the religious and the secular began to break down, blurring the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. This collapse contributed to the decline of modern liberalism, which supported a neutral, value-free space for capitalism. It also deeply unsettled political, religious, and philosophical realms, forced to confront the conceptual stakes of a return to religion. (from the book description)

In this conversation with Tripp Fuller, politics, history and religion are evaluated from thoroughly theological lens. His book  Radical Political Theology : Religion and Politics after Liberalism is available from Amazon in hardcover and Kindle editions.

Don’t forget to sign up for the 2012 Emergent Village Theological Conversation in Claremont, CA January 31-February 2.

The topic of gender, femininity, and sexuality were the touch points.  I am going to highlight 3 controversial blogs from this week … but first I want to acknowledge that it mirrored (albeit in a much smaller way) something happening in the larger culture that we are embedded in.

This was also a week that saw the Penn State football sexual abuse scandal rock the nation, the Herman Cain sexual harassment allegations, and several other national news story related to discrimination, abuse, and harassment.

These three christian conversations that follow are not happening in a vacuum – perhaps that is why they illicit such a heated response and so much attention. It impacts all of us.

Post 1:  from Stuff that Christians Like – a post called ‘Girls with a Past’ was a little test (written by a man) that women could take to see if one qualified as intriguing or not.  It was satire (which not everyone gets or likes) and it pointed out a real problem. Now, some people were offended and took it out on the author. I just want to say that the situation is infuriating but we can’t take it out on the person who illustrates the problem, Jon was articulating a severe inconsistency between what we say and what we do in the ‘church’.

Here is his post: http://www.jonacuff.com/stuffchristianslike/2011/11/stuff-christians-guys-like-girls-that-have-a-past/ let me know what you think.  It got over 500 responses.

Post 2: Rachel Held Evans (one of my favorite bloggers) put up a post called “13 things that make me a bad feminist”. It is part of a series that she does from time to time – she has also admitted to being a bad ‘evangelical’ and ‘progressive’.  This post went over like a lead-balloon . This led to a guest-post the following day.

Here is the post: http://rachelheldevans.com/13-things-lousy-feminist . It got 149 responses.

Post 3: my co-host Tripp Fuller came out of the closet as not being ‘open and affirming’ on a video from Two Friars and a Fool. His contention was that affirming letters – whether L, B, G, Q, T, I or any other dash or asterisk – is an inherently limited response. It has two great dangers:

1. it makes us feel like what have really done something, when all we have really done is 
2. conceded the initial ground rules to the entrenched system.

The problem is that the system is capitalism and that means that ‘acceptance’ is becoming both something to market and a new group to be marketed to.

Tripp’s point of contention is that the gospel of Jesus calls the whole system into account. We can’t concede the rules of the game and then think that we are going to bring about the best-of-all-possibilities. The structure itself must be contested. The system can not be catered to – it must be undermined and subverted. People are too valuable to God to be classified by their genitalia or the genitalia of who they are attracted to. This was not received too well for the most part.

Here is the post: http://twofriarsandafool.com/2011/11/identity-politics-are-not-the-gospel/ it got 84 responses.

___

My take:

• The 3,000 year old gender roles in the oldest parts of the Bible merely reflect that culture’s understanding and are not the last word on ‘natural’ design.
• The 2,000 year old gender roles in the New Testament were written in context where women were basically property. They need to be revisited and revised.
• The idea of ‘original sin’ is a constructed idea and not biblical. What it is addressing, however, is real and I think we all acknowledge that. It needs to be addressed in better ways without pre-modern understandings imposed upon it.  
• Until we address these three subject the conversation will always circle around and around in endless and unhelpful loops of misunderstanding: 1) social conditioning 2) constructed reality 3) biological implications of being mammals.

I would be very excited to enter into this conversation if we did not live in such a contentious and acidic ‘Argument Culture‘.  Thoughts? 

 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?

We talk about Israel, Turkey, Russia, Bosnia,  Malaysia, Indonesia and America.  We also go back in history – past the Crusades – to the roots of the East/West split and the relevance of those tensions for us today.

Graham E. Fuller is author of A World Without Islam  . He is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, a former senior political scientist at RAND, and a current adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of numerous books about the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam. He has lived and worked in the Muslim world for nearly two decades.

Rieger is the Wendland-Cook Endowed Professor of Constructive Theology at Perkins School of Theology (SMU), prolific author, regular speaker, motorcycle enthusiast, and just plain awesome dude.  In the podcast we discuss the relationship of politics, power, the economy, and our present crisis from a theological and biblical perspective.  We move from the abstract to the practical and along the way I hope it’s clear we both had a good bit of fun.

 Join Us @Soularize Oct 18-20!

Rieger is author of many books including:

No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future  (Kindle $9.99)

Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times

and Globalization and Theology ($8.80 Kindle, $9.80 paperback)

Check out his amazing website for great resources!

Thanks to Ellie Haugsby at the Chautauquan Daily for the sweet pic of Rieger in action.

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!

Over the last few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important and dangerous issue we face as a society is education. There are multiple reasons for this, but perhaps the most compelling is that there is no difference between education and democracy.  What I mean by that is the same thing that educational philosopher John Dewey argued in his seminal work ‘Democracy and Education’ – which is that the major aim of education should be to promote self-aware, critical thinkers who understand their interdependence with and responsibility to the society in which they live.

If you believe the major premise of Dewey’s argument – that democracy and education are so intertwined they literally cannot be separated – then it is immediately obvious why a vibrant education is the most important thing in the country. More important, even, than national defense, the economic outlook, etc…

Now the tragedy is that our current educational discourse presents two equally terrible options: either our legislators are silent on the issue of education (i.e. they just don’t care), or they are vocal and hold a terribly mistaken understanding of what education is, and its goals. I believe that, unless the current trajectory of education is changed, it will ultimately collapse our already thinning democracy. I’m quite serious about this.

In a nutshell, neoliberalism is the idea that everything in society should be measured by a market-driven approach. It assumes not only are those with ‘business experience’ more capable and qualified to oversee any system of policymaking or administration, but that all things essentially boil down to business analytics and standards.

I don’t want to harp on this point too much, but the short version of the story is this: this assumption is not only dead wrong, it going to end up destroying our democracy and our way of life. It is fueled by a McCarthy-era fear of economic globalization, meaning that the US will no longer be the economic bully it once was. It is grounded in a number of hugely mistaken philosophical ideas about the nature of human existence, knowing and learning (which I don’t bore you with, but will happy to discuss at a later date). It has made itself manifest across all sectors of society, but the one I, personally, most interested in is education for the aforementioned reasons.

What it’s meant in terms of education is the absolutely ludicrous claim that the ultimate aim of education is economics. It extends this premise into the argument that business methods and mindsets (based on a completely naive understanding of knowing, teaching and learning) are best suited to the education system: training models, comparable performance measures, efficiencies of scale, standardization. Viola! Education has now become big business.(FYI: Obama’s policies on education are more destructive and terrifying than George W. Bush’s)

This neoliberal disease has reached near fever pitch. Here’s a good example: the Wake County School System (traditionally considered a model of public education in moderately urban environments) hired retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony J. Tata to run its system. His credentials? A 12-month training program at a big business education training facility. In any other field, this would be considered absolute lunacy. Could you imagine taking a one-year course in medicine and then being hired to run Duke Medical Center? Well, the people of Wake County decided that was not only acceptable, it was preferable to alternatives like, say, taking the best a brightest in the field of education as a leader for the system.

“The Market As God” by Harvey Cox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first item was a post as part of a series at Pangea (on Patheos). This one was reeling over the evangelical credibility of C.S. Lewis. Apparently his views on the subject of hell were a little too open-ended and remind some self-proclaimed watchdogs of the views in a recent controversy surrounding you know who and his book.

Over the past decades there has been an increasingly contentious debate about the invisible boundary of evangelicalism. Apparently some have become so concerned that even historical figures who were previously safe (even adored) are in danger if their views are found to be too loose for the contemporary conservative backlash.

I was only mildly concerned by this whole line of reasoning. Then, I found out that this past Sunday, the NY Times called Michelle Bachmann the evangelical candidate in the Republican primary pool.

So my question is:

• what are the criteria that we are using for this public label of evangelical whereby the quintessential embodiment from the past century (C.S. Lewis) is out and tea-party candidate Michelle Bachmann is in?
• who is in change of making these determinations?
• what are the demarcations that signify whether someone is “in” or “out”?

This is something that I care deeply about as a Methodist minister (UMC) who is the son of a Methodist minister (Free Methodist) we are both proudly Wesleyan in theology. I think that whatever definition we use it should at least be inclusive of our most historical marquee figures and flagship franchises.

I like to use the definition from British Historian David Bebbington as a starting point. We should at least establish a historical framework. [here is an interview with evangelical scholar Mark Noll where he talks about it]

The four keys are:

conversionism: new birth and a new life with God

biblicism: reliance on the Bible as ultimate religious authority

activism: concern for sharing the faith

crucentrism: focus on Christ’s redeeming work on the cross

Admittedly, those four emphasis take on a different tone and tenor in each generation. They take on different manifestations in each generation. The presence of these four however is a stabilizing theme that runs through the many historical maturations through the centuries and around the globe. These four themes also hold together whether ones utilizes a bounded-set mentality for marking boundaries or a center-set framework to encourage a shared focus.

I celebrate these four themes and find them even amongst my more progressive friends. They could say these four things with confidence:

• Relationship with God changes you personally (internal) and your relationships (external) .
• The Bible is central as the Christian Scripture and sets both the agenda and the example.
• One’s faith should both be shared (relationally) and will consequently impact the world around you.
• God’s work in Christ is what illuminates and inspires the life of the Christian – Christ revealed God is a unique and significant way. Jesus’ way is to be our way.

This kind of faith is something that I am inspired by and find deep fulfillment by participating in. I am nervous that a reactionary period of retrenchment by the religious right , moral majority, or other politicized conservative groups would see evangelicals like myself and C.S. Lewis pushed out and figures like Michelle Bachmann made central.

The reason this is so important is that these three religions are not the same. They are not simply three expressions of a common understanding. They are vastly and distinctly different from each other. Of course there is commonality and overlap – for instance all three are a covenantal people and point to a covenant they have with God. I am interested to hear how each of the three groups reflects on and lives into their particular understanding.

Many Christians seem to think that the big difference between Christianity and both Islam and Judaism is what they believe about Christ. I do not think that views on Jesus is the biggest difference between the three. In fact, I am suspicious that any Christian willingness to revisit a wooden-literal reading of passages like John 14:6 or reexamine the language and meta-physics of the creedal formulations would easily result in an understanding that did not violate the Quranic understanding that God has no children. Vocabularies of ‘how God was present in Christ’ are already being worked out by followers of the prophet Isa (Jesus) in Muslim countries. [Link: an article on c-6 contextualization]

In my mind, there is a much bigger difference between the three religions than an understanding of Jesus’ identity. It has to do with the earth.

Christianity is primarily time based. While the Christian gospel is one of incarnation, ironically, Christianity has become something that is not place-based and especially not land-based. This is easily illustrated by looking at some Muslim practices and noticing their absence or contrast in Christianity.

• Prayer Direction: When Muslim pray, they face Mecca. This is a directional earth-relative orientation. Christianity lacks this orientation.
• Pilgrimage: Once in their lives Muslims are expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. This is an intentional journey to a specific location on the surface of the earth that holds special meaning. Christianity has no such thing.
• Sunset: Certain holy days are marked as beginning at “sundown” or when a specific phase of the moon first appears as observed in a set location. This shows an awareness of the seasons, the sun, and the moon. Christian holy days and holidays are based on a calendar and clock.
• Language: If you want to read the Quran you need to learn Arabic. The Christian gospel is not only translatable into any language – Christians believe that it should be translated into every language. The Gospel is equally valid in any and every language.

In his book Whose Religion is Christianity?: the Gospel beyond the West, Lamin Sanneh puts it this way:

Being that the original scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament Gospels are translated versions of the message of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their scriptures well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark … Christianity  seems unique in being the only world religion that is transmitted without the language or originating culture of its founder (p. 97-98)

I have several more examples of difference (including names of God and views of “holy” land) but I simply wanted to illustrate that these are three covenantal religions that all point to Abraham, they are significantly different from each other in practice and understanding. That is why I am excited to hear what they each bring to the table and what we might be able to learn from each other… because we bring such unique, distinct, and particular expressions to the conversation.

I was talking to an adult member of my church yesterday about the fight over the debt limit.  At some point I said “well God has already taken sides and I am not sure it is being voiced.”  I went on to say I have no divinely ordained policy prescriptions but scripture is clear descriptively about what God celebrates and abhors in a nation.  The conversation was a bunch of fun and at the end of my Baptist Bible-flippin tour of justice she said, “Wow I had no idea. You should preach that sometime.”  After that I decided I should at least post a blog and say explicitly….God takes sides.

God takes the side of the oppressed, marginalized, impoverished and excluded. God is for them.  God is also against the oppressors, violators, full and power wielders.  Pharaoh knows this to be the case, the Prophets proclaimed, and Jesus’ Mom put it to song.  A little attention to scripture and one quickly sees that the actual material reality of people is a preoccupation of God.  In fact God did not mind legislating the redistribution of land, forgiveness of debt, and imposing upon Israel’s elite the necessity of a social safety net.  There was even this dude named Jesus who told a crazy parable about God judging nations for failing to take these national obligations seriously while getting the religious vocabulary correct.

I know we don’t like the idea of God taking sides.  It gets most people who go to most churches mad, at least in America, because we know we are likely among the most full, wealthy, and powerful people this planet has ever seen.  Yet the church and its leaders often edit, soft pedal, and nuance their way around these divine calls for material transformation.  People like me are scared to say something because we know we usually suck at changing our own patterns and feel powerless to change the suicidal system we were born into but for those who spend their life studying the Christian faith this call is pretty clear.

Now I could go on a good rant now about how the present economic showdown demonstrates how economism has become the one true religion of the state that binds both political parties together or how the American church is so impotent that demonstrating less regard for the poor is a means to securing their support….but then I might get out of hand fast. So instead here are two quotes from the 20th century’s most famous orthodox theologians….not progressive, liberal, social gospelers, feminist, or liberation theologians….Barth and Bonhoeffer were not interested in those games, loved some Trinity, didn’t need to put a word between Jesus Christ (ex. Jesus as the Christ), and had no trouble lecturing on eschatology.  Hope you get the idea – the 20th century’s orthodox articulators knew the God of Israel who was incarnate in Jesus took sides and I think they could help us out today…..and of course they can’t get run out of town.

God always takes His stand unconditionally and passionately on this side and on this side alone: against the lofty and on behalf of the lowly; against those who already enjoy right and privilege and on behalf of those who are denied it and deprived of it….The Command of God is a call for the championing of the weak against every kind of encroachment on the part of the strong. – Karl Barth

Bonhoeffer here describes the place from which the church should examine and assess a situation, the place from which one can come to see reality as a Christian…

It remains an experience of unmatched value that we have learned to see the great events of history from the underside, from the perspective of the eliminated, the suspect, the abused, the powerless, the oppressed, and the ridiculed, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.

How would our present economic impasse and the conflict and conversations around it be different if this divine command was on our hearts?  How would the budget negotiations, taxes, spending, and debt appear from the perspective of America’s underside?

What would it take for the church and its leaders to admit we really to suck at being faithful both in our own material existence and in our fidelity to God’s dream for the world in our church leadership?

“Freedom isn’t free”. You see on T-shirts, bumper stickers and hear it is discussions about past wars. I get it. I see what is behind the saying.
No, freedom isn’t free – not in this world of selfish sin (on a small scale) and dominating Empire (on a big scale) but I think that it is important to make two clarifications about this saying.

Freedom is not solely the result of our military – and freedom is not all our military does.

• The first one is important to clarify because in our Military Industrial Complex (Dwight Eisenhower warned of it and those who profit from it in his farewell speech), our the freedom that we enjoy is not bestowed  by military action. That is not the source of our freedoms.
• The second one is important to clarify because freedom is not the only business that America’s foreign policy participates in. The US involvement in S. America, Asia, Africa and Europe is not simply explained as a ‘force for freedom’. There is a lot more going on than just a heart for global democracy.

I think this is appropriate to address on occasions like Memorial Day. It is not dishonoring to those who served and died to use our freedoms in order to call for accountability for America’s addiction to militarism or to examine America’s foreign policy.

In fact, seen from my point of view – it is downright honoring to utilize my freedom this way and it demonstrates an appreciation for the exact freedom that allows me to spend time on this day off to do so.

It seems more essential than ever in the current budget crisis.

Gareth Higgins said in his interview (Homebrewed  102) that looking at the budget and not accounting for the (untouchable) military expenditure is like being on weight watcher and not counting any of the points of an unhealthy breakfast and wondering why the program isn’t working.

It is one thing to say that our freedom comes at a price. No one is debating that. But to not count the cost and then wonder why we are flirting with bankruptcy is just foolishness disguised as patriotism.

On this Memorial Day, I am already dreading September 11th – the Ten year celebrations and the unquestioned, unchallenged national story.

What we need is theological examination of where freedom comes from and what is the real price.

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.

So related to this, I’ve been reading Joerg Rieger’s book Christ and Empire, and in the preface he makes an interesting differentiation between what he, Rieger, is concerned about, and what Richard Niebuhr was discussing in his classic work, Christ and Culture, which was published about 60 years ago.  According to Rieger, Niebuhr assumes that culture is the overarching term that incorporates other specific developments in the world.  In other words, Niebuhr doesn’t address the central role of power.

Now to be fair, Rieger is obviously not the first person to bring up the topic of empire.  Great contemporary thinkers interviewed right here on Homebrewed like John Dominic Crossan and Walter Brueggemann, or the Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis, are good examples of many others who write about it.

And of course Niebuhr was writing with a different aim, so Rieger’s point is not to discredit Niebuhr, but rather to stress that the full impact of Jesus’ ministry surely cannot be grasped without paying serious attention to the Roman context and Jesus’ politically subversive actions therein – actions that were not merely incidental for achieving the greater purpose of his crucifixion, as might often be assumed, but actions that some have argued are the greater purpose for which the crucifixion itself was merely incidental![i]

But one doesn’t have to live in the wake of postcolonial theory and feminist theologies to grasp the importance of politics for faith and discipleship.  Perhaps no one in recent history demonstrated this better than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who willingly assumed leadership of an underground seminary and a politically resistant Christian community in hostile Nazi Germany – instead of remaining in the safety of the U.S. where he was offered the chance to use his gifts as a scholar and teacher.

For those of us who are counted among the “privileged” in some way or another, we are challenged by stories and witnesses like this to reflect on and listen to how God might be asking for fiercer protest and bolder kenotic living.  And as Rieger warns, we must not be deceived when the “Empire displays strong tendencies to domesticate Christ and anything else that poses a challenge to its powers.”[iii] Whether these powers are expressed in terms of global financial capital, cheap labor, “free” trade or militarism, empire today is subtle but not less real.  Under its shadow, can there really be a “neutral” position?  It seems Jesus really forces us to count the cost of this “peace and security.”

On a more pragmatic level, and to get back to the first question about church, how would the church look, think, spend money, and worship differently if this question was brought up more often?  For anyone interested, I’ve also written some about this lately on a blog post here and on the Relevant Magazine Church Blog.

[ii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Second Printing. (Harper & Row, 1954), 13.

[iii] Joerg Rieger, Christ & Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2007), 3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no clash of civilisations between Christianity and Islam, because both faiths take on, and have historically taken on, the form of the civilisations in which they exist. In the process, they modify those civilisations to a greater or less extent, and one way in which they do so is by introducing belief in objective moral obligation and purpose into human affairs. Diversity and change are intrinsic to religious faith, but faith adds an orientation to transcendent goodness that is its enduring contribution to human culture.

Acceptance of freedom of belief, the right of informed and open criticism, and an insistence that moral rules must subserve universal human welfare, are moral advances that have been made in the modern world through struggle, and that must not be relinquished. Both Christianity and Islam can internalise such values, and find resources in their own traditions for promoting them. Working apart and without reference to these values, the faiths will both become more marginalised and culturally isolated. Working together, they can become major forces for social harmony and altruistic action. Modern Europe offers a social context, not for a clash of civilisations, but for a new integration of religious faith and moral action, in which Islam and Christianity can both be revitalised in a context which can enable them to escape from old antipathies and forge new mature, creative and humanising forms of faith for the modern world. Such a course requires patience and courage, but it is a positive and real possibility for the Europe of the future, and one that is well worth striving for.

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

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

U.S. Constitutional Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Christian Faith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Segovia’s reflection on twentieth century biblical criticism focuses on the shift from seeing the text as a means, an entry point to reach back to the historical locus from which the text originated, and the text as a medium in which the literary communicative act between author and receiver is the primary focus of study.  He tells the story of the development of historical criticism and its loss of field dominance by the advent of literary and cultural criticism.  At the turn of the century Segovia is able to exegete the new pluralism of interpretive methods as the coming of a new liberated and decolonized form of biblical criticism that transcends the limitations of any one form of discourse, but includes them in conversation where everyone is free to speak authentically in their own tongue (33).

Historical criticism sprung up early in the Enlightenment and has been the normative scholarly discourse about biblical texts until the 70’s.  Here the texts become a means to gain access to the time of its composition.  In archeological fashion the text becomes the tool for attempting to uncover the world from which it came the the intention of the author.  The reader was understood to be a neutral, informed and objective critic who was able to wade through the evidence and establish the meaning of a text. This methodology has a theological orientation in that, consciously or not, it was assumed that when the original meaning of the text was established it would function authoritatively for the present.  In this sense the text was a means to more than a historical insight but was latent with power, a power that has come under threat.

The first alternative interpretative community of discourse that developed was that of literary criticism.  It is far from a homogenous form of criticism, but as Segovia points out they share a shift to seeing the text as a medium where the aesthetic and artistic character of the communication is the focus.  Instead of a vertical reading that seeks to go beneath or behind the the text, the literary critic takes a horizontal reading which reads the text from beginning to end as a whole piece of literature.  In its rejection of the historicist’s atomism the text was assumed to have a coherent structure with a unified meaning.  The reader, who remained faceless, still sought the meaning of the text and in the end the plurality of interpretations it made possible were determined by the constraints of the text ‘properly understood.’
For Segovia there are striking differences between seeing the text as either a means or a medium, but what they share in common is essential for understanding his criticism of both and their mutual deconstruction.  Despite methodological differences the reader is understood to occupy a position that if successfully occupied leads to a universal and objective conclusion.  As the reader became aware of numerous interpretive models and eventually those cultural criticisms that called the reader into question , this assumed objectivity and universality was revealed to be an operative myth of the scholarly community.  It was the advance of cultural criticism, the third interpretative method discussed, that revealed the latent power at play in any text.  At first the cultural critics focused on the the relationship present within the situation of the text, its author, readers, community, and various relationships at play in the discourse.  As interest turned to the function of a particular reading in the present with the help of the neo-Marxist critics a concern for the politics of interpretation came to the foreground.  For the cultural critic the text was both a means and a medium and for Segovia the end of an era.  The future of biblical interpretation offered by Segovia is one beyond the various attempts for a universal and informed reader that often amounted to an educated european.  Instead, his cultural approach sees the texts as a construction.  As such one is able to engage in many different critical methods while recognizing that one cannot move beyond one’s own location.  Not only can you not move beyond one’s location, but you would not want to for it is there that Segovia envisions the possibility of everyone owning and sharing their own voice in a liberated and decolonized conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too bad we’ve focused on the Bishops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the American Academy of Religion I was able to join LeRon Shults, Philip Clayton, and Stephen Knapp for a discussion about how theology finds traction in the world.  Other than being slightly out of place being paired with these three theological super stars, I believe something happened that was worth sharing.  Enjoy!

HT: Transforming Theology

On ‘townhall.com’ Chuck posted a little editorial on the health care debate titled ‘What if Mother Mary Had Obamacare?’  Now that is an interesting question.  I am sure that Chuck, a public figure very forward about his Christian faith, would not use the pregnancy of Mary, the Mother of God, as a political tool… I might be wrong.  Chucky writes,

Lastly, as we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have happened if Mother Mary had been covered by Obamacare? What if that young, poor and uninsured teenage woman had been provided the federal funds (via Obamacare) and facilities (via Planned Parenthood, etc.) to avoid the ridicule, ostracizing, persecution and possible stoning because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy? Imagine all the great souls who could have been erased from history and the influence of mankind if their parents had been as progressive as Washington’s wise men and women! Will Obamacare morph into Herodcare for the unborn?

Here’s my guess about what would have happened.  Mary would still have been ‘highly favored by God.’  This is a statement about Mary’s character. So I imagine upon hearing that she was to be the Mother of one who would ‘reign over the house of Jacob for ever,  whose kingdom there will be no end, be born Holy, and be called Son of God,’ she would not say ‘that sounds nice Gabriel but this doesn’t really fit my life plan.’  I bet she would still respond by saying ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ God didn’t pick Mary randomly.  God didn’t force her into the deal.  Christians have long affirmed that God gifted her with a singularly unique role in God’s redemptive work in history and is to be an example of the faith for us today.

I know the Texas Ranger is scared of Obama’s political power, but I don’t think he needs to worry about Obama orchestrating the abortion of God. What concerns me the most is that it was OK for him to be so haphazard with Mary, her character, and the Bible just to score a point for his ‘townhall’ team.  I am not saying Mary does not do things that can have political consequences, but this application seems ridiculous.  Mary was the type of woman, like her Son, who remains faithful to God regardless of the situation.  To suggest otherwise is to go against the Bible’s testimony to her character.

Now as for Mary’s real political statement, her song for God’s justice (Luke 1:45-55).  This one was applicable for Herod and calls Obama and the rest of us to respond today.  Scot McKnight comments on this passage….

What was God about to do through Mary’s son? Here are the five main points:
*    Scatter the proud
*    Strip rulers from their unjust thrones
*    Stand the humble up with confidence
*    Satisfy the hungry with food
*    Send the rich away empty

Which means these are the problems:
*    Pride
*    Unjust rulers and injustice
*    Oppression of the humble
*    Hunger
*    Oppression by the rich through accumulation

You can all draw your own conclusions, but for me I can’t imagine Mary loosing her faithfulness because more people are getting health care.

* Check out this related post over at 220 South ‘Chuck Norris Kicks Logic in the Face’

‘Is capitalism a sin?’ I go on to ask, ‘Would Jesus be a capitalist?’ Would he belong to a hedge fund? Would he sell short? Would he approve of a system that has allowed the richest 1 percent to have more financial wealth than the 95 percent under them combined?

All the great religions are clear about one thing: It is evil to take the majority of the pie and leave what’s left for everyone to fight over. Jesus said that the rich man would have a very hard time getting into heaven. He told us that we had to be our brother’s and sister’s keepers and that the riches that did exist were to be divided fairly. He said that if you failed to house the homeless and feed the hungry, you’d have a hard time finding the pin code to the pearly gates.

Here’s an interview where Moore discusses his own religious convictions a bit more.  Personally I am not sure that ‘capitalism’ in general should be the target, but the particular form we currently have.  Well I’ll talk about that more later.  Any one seen the movie?  What did you think of the article?