The Imperial Prosperity Story

Continuing my discussion of David Korten's Alternative Radio speech based on The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Communities....

Toward the end of his talk Korten emphasizes that the core of his ideas represent values shared by a super-majority of Americans. They are, he says, neither specifically conservative nor specifically liberal values. I think this is true, but his economic perspective tends to undermine whatever support he might hope to find among conservatives.

I read somewhere that liberalism is entirely based on ignorance of basic economic facts. This is, of course, untrue. It would be more to the point to say that liberals just aren't willing to subjugate all of our values to these basic economic facts. And this is one of Korten's main points.

Unfortunately, Korten's views fall under the broad label of Malthusian economics, and in many circles this means that once the label is applied, these views can be openly mocked without actually being engaged.

In particular, a lot of Korten's doomsaying turns on the assumption that the world is about to run out of cheap oil and that as it does the infrastructure of our economy will be broken as long haul transports become infeasible and our Walmarts and similar businesses become "stranded assets" as we no longer have cars to take us to them.

This is the particularly Malthusian bit, and it exhibits the classic Malthusian weakness -- it underestimates the progress of technology. As I write, the technology behind renewable energy sources is stepping up to the challenge of eliminating oil dependency without requiring changes to our patterns of behavior. Ever increasingly efficient wind farms and solar energy plants are making other technologies like hydrogen cell vehicles suddenly practical.

But this is relatively incidental to Korten's critique of "the imperial prosperity story." The suggestion that the machine is destined to wear itself out is only brought up to give urgency to the need for change. The fact is the real problem is with the intrinsic injustice of the economic system.

Korten's view are largely the product of his experience working in developing nations, initially working to bring the gospel of capitalism to these nations, but then changed as he saw the effects of American consumerism on people in other lands. "It is axiomatic once you think about it," Korten says, "for a few to be on the top, the many must be on the bottom." Pushing the point even further he says, "conventional economic growth indicators too often measure the rate at which productive resources of the poor are being appropriated by the rich and converted to garbage."

So here we've reached the point where economic theory slams into ethics. Is it really true that everyone eventually benefits from a growing economy, or does free market capitalism necessarily involve a group of people somewhere being crushed beneath the wheel?

Honestly, I don't know. There's compelling evidence on both sides. I feel like a better economic model is needed.

Telling Stories

Since I've probably already put myself on some double-secret CIA watchlist by visiting the Alternative Radio website, there's probably no further harm in blogging about it. The Alternative Radio program last week featured David Korten talking about some ideas from his book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Communities (see also, this excerpt). It intrigued me enough that I bought the MP3 version and have been trying to digest it over the past few days. As much to clarify my own thoughts about it as anything, I'm going to post a series of reflections on this speech.

One idea really caught my attention. After describing the pressing problems facing America today (consumerism, imperialism, environmental destruction, etc.), Korten makes the bold claim that the key to changing all this is changing the stories by which we define ourselves. Korten identifies three main "stories" that collectively form the foundation of our current "Empire" self-understanding. These are:

1. The imperial prosperity story -- The financial prosperity of our society relies on wealthy investors having enough free cash to finance the enterprises that create our jobs. As these investors seek to maximize their own gains, the "invisible hand" of the market translates this to the prosperity of us all. We, therefore, must relieve the wealthy of regulations and tax burdens that slow this process. Furthermore, we must eliminate welfare programs which confine the poor to poverty by denying them the motivation to be productive members of society.


2. The imperial security story -- The world is full of criminals, terrorists and enemies. Our security relies on a powerful military and police force to control the chaos.


3. The imperial meaning story -- God tells us to go forth and establish dominion over the earth. This God favors the righteous with wealth and power, while the poor justly suffer divine wrath for their sins. "We may not know what those sins were, but they must indeed have been horrendous." Meaning is found in obedience to God and to his appointed representatives.

"These imperial stories," Korten says, "all affirm the legitimacy of economic inequality, the use of physical force to impose the will of rulers, and the special righteousness of the rich and powerful." He then adds, "Although it may seem absurdly simple, the key to changing the course of the human future is to change the stories by which we live."

You can probably guess that it was the "imperial meaning story" that really grabbed me. I had the initial, red-blooded American, "who is this godless communist attacking religion" reaction, but it was quickly followed by the evangelical realization that this change of stories is precisely what the message of Jesus is all about. The "story" that Korten asks for isn't a new story, it's an "old, old story" but one that we Christians seem to habitually forget.

Over the next few days I intend to look at these imperial stories that Korten presents and offer my own personal responses, which I hope will largely be specificly Christian responses.

First Communion

My youngest daughter (6 years old) received her first communion today. It was unplanned -- spontaneous even.

My congregation doesn't have a specific process for first communion. It's left more or less to the parents' discretion. I've been planning to wait until I thought she'd have some appreciation for it, at which time I would sit her down and explain the basic concepts and so on, and then the following Sunday we'd make a big deal of it. But apparently God had other plans.

Today my two daughters and I were standing at the altar steps waiting to receive the sacrament. The oldest and I were standing reverently with our hands cupped to receive the bread. My youngest, seeing that this is how it's done, did likewise. I was about to make her stop it, but I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't contradict everything I planned to tell her about communion. When the pastor came to us, he handed her the bread without hesitation.

Tonight we're going to be reading Daniel Erlander's excellent book, A Place for You, and celebrating the occassion.

Thought and Being

As I read St. Augustine's Enchiridion recently, I noticed a parallel with Descartes' famous dictum, cogito ergo sum. Augustine writes:

It is a question whether we ought to argue with those who profess themselves ignorant not only about the eternity yet to come but also about their present existence, for they [the Academics] even argue that they do not know what they cannot help knowing. For no one can "not know" that he himself is alive. If he is not alive, he cannot "not know" about it or anything else at all, because either to know or to "not know" implies a living subject.
-Enchiridion, VII, 20

Now, obviously I'm not the first to notice this. Today, having returned to Thomas Martin's book on Augustinian spirituality, Our Restless Hearts, I read Martin's account of the parallel, which was commented upon by Descartes' contemporaries, particularly his supporters. There are also parallels, I'm told, in Augustine's On Free Will and City of God. Apparently Descartes himself denied any direct dependency on Augustine. But Martin observes, "An irreparable breach would have been created in his argument by suggesting that he discovered the principle elsewhere than in the 'thinking self,' Descartes' thinking self, of course."

This is a really fascinating idea. I've always been pursuaded by Descartes' argument, but if the thought that "I am" comes from outside the self, then perhaps I am not, or at least the "I" that is may be much bigger than "I" think.

I'm quite curious about the concept of collective intelligence, and I may write more about this soon. The evidence seems quite strong that our thoughts are heavily conditioned by our experience and even our seemingly original thoughts are constructed from prior materials. All of which leads me to ponder what is truly fundamental to reality.

Augustine, addressing God, answers in the Confessions:

We, therefore, see these things which You made, because they are, but they are because You see them.

Food for the Journey

A story on NPR this morning discussed the "growing problem" of obesity among the French. Apparently, the French are breaking with their traditional meal practices and moving toward fast food. One researcher lamented the loss of the three traditional benefits of eating: nutrition, pleasure and community. Apparently, you lose all three with fast food.

I was particularly taken with the idea that the French (and obviously Americans too) are losing the benefit of eating as community. You hear a lot about the deterioration of the family caused by a lack of family meals, but even the family meal (which usually means nuclear family) is itself a potential enemy of the community meal. How often do modern familes invite others over for dinner anymore? My experience is that it just doesn't happen.

The gospel of Luke is famously replete with scenes of eating, but eating as a form of community is rapidly disappearing. We often joke about the Lutheran predilection for potlucks, but it seems to me we could do with a few more of them.

Greek Treasure

A short time ago I added Zack Hubert's Greek Verse of the Day script to my sidebar. I can't remember where I came across it. I put it there mainly to give myself a little Greek to practice with as I try to learn the grammar. At the time, when I clicked through to Zack's site, it came out formatted strangley with the text scrolled off the screen at the bottom and I didn't really give it a lot of thought.

Today I happened to click through and WOW! I don't know how many of the features are new. Maybe he just fixed the formatting and all of this has been there all along. But it's new to me and WOW!

Clicking on the Greek Verse of the Day link takes you in to a page that has a longer passage displayed with every word hyperlinked, giving a pop-up that shows the lexical form of the word, a basic definition and parsing information. That alone would make this site a treasure, whether you're learning Biblical Greek or just want to know what's behind the English translation for a particular passage. The site has basic passage lookup, so you can view any passage you like with the above features.

It also has a feature that lets you generate a vocabularly list, according to frequency of occurance, for any book of the Bible or range of passages. For instance, it will tell me all the words that occur 5 times or more in the book of James (58 of them), so I can hone my vocabulary before trying to read the book in Greek. I can't tell you how nice I think this feature is.

There are a number of other goodies that I haven't played with much, like a flashcard generator, a concordance (by Greek word!), and an analysis feature that shows, for instance, what percentage of a book uses the indicative voice.

I've just got to say I'm really impressed with this site, and can't believe how much I've apparently been overlooking.

Augustine, Man and Creation

There's a patristic wind flowing through the blogosphere these days. Derek at Haligweorc posted a plan for reading the Fathers and it inspired Lee to inaugurate his new blog with a series on St. Augustine's Enchiridion. I meanwhile, had already been reading Thomas Martin's book on Augustinian spirituality, Our Restless Heart, and feeling prodded by Lee's work and a comment that Annie made on Derek's blog about "digested history", I decided to also pull my copy of the Enchiridion off the shelf and go ad fontes as they say.

St. Augustine gets a really bad rap in certain circles, and I think that many times it's because of what people think he says more so than because of what he actually says. A popular position is to be against traditional Christianity because its doctrine of Original Sin devalues human dignity. Semi-informed people know enough to pin the blame for this one on Augustine.

In this light, I was very pleased with the section of the Enchiridion I read today. In approaching the problem of evil in humans, Augustine formulates a position that looks a lot like the traditional Lutheran simul iustus et peccator, except the saint ascribes goodness to the human as human before their meeting Christ.

We find this to be true in many, indeed in almost all contraries, that they cannot coexist in one thing simultaneously. But while nobody doubts that good and evil are contraries, not only can they exist simultaneously, but evils cannot exist at all without goods, and they can only exist in goods, although goods can exist without evils.

This is all Augustine's doctrine of creation and of evil as corruption of good. What is created is good simply because it was created by the supremely good God. But listen to how he deals with the question of human evil.

But what is an evil man if not an evil being, since man is a being? Moreover, if man is something good because he is a being, what is an evil man but an evil good? But when we make a distinction we find that he is not an evil because he is a man, nor is he a good because he is wicked, but he is a good because he is a man and an evil because he is wicked.

List to that again, a wicked man "is a good because he is a man and an evil because he is wicked."

The humanists who grumble about the doctrine of Original Sin tend to have a sort of romantic notion of the inherent goodness of humans. We are good because of the great and noble things of which we are capable. There's a "spark" of goodness at the core of our being. Augustine, though he might recognize a partial truth in the "spark," locates our goodness in God. We are good, essentially good, because we are God's creation. As long as we exist, this goodness remains. And yet Augustine's view allows full responsibility for our actions. Though remaining always good, we are also evil when we behave wickedly.

Verbal Abuse

When I was younger I had a theory that you can't really learn a foreign language past the age of ten. Then one of my cousins learned a foreign language to prove me wrong. Now I've revised my theory to I can't learn a foreign language past the age of ten.

As you may know, I'm trying to teach myself Koine Greek. I was doing well until summer vacation, which set me back nearly to where I started. I made another go at it and was back on track until Christmas vacation tripped me up again, though not as bad as summer.

Now picking it up again, I've discovered why Bill Mounce puts verbs off until chapter 18 of his book. If he had started with verbs, I would have given up right away! Different roots in different tenses, key letters dropping out between vowels, rules getting treated more like guidelines.... Whose idea was this stuff anyway?

I'm sure if I had grown up speaking Koine Greek this would all make sense, like the irregularities in English do. As it is, it's making me nuts.

On the Road?

I just happened to notice that I've had three (now four) completely unrelated posts that I titled "On the Road" in the past year. I guess I just can't quite get Kerouac to leave my brain.

Significance

The universe, it has been observed, is a very, very, very big place. Cyberspace, though not a place in the strictest sense, is also fairly large. When you perform a search on Google, for instance, it searches something in the neighborhood of 20 billion web pages. This is a fairly staggering figure if you think about it. Web pages outnumber people on the earth by about three-to-one.

Given that figure, it might seem that any given corner of cyberspace would be fairly insignificant. And yet.... And yet, it appears that random people keep coming across my blog (and I assume everyone with a blog sees this same thing). Mostly, they seem to come here from Google. This never ceases to fascinate me. I've posted on this before, but I came across something today that surprised me enough that I just have to share it.

As of today, if you perform a Google search for What's wrong with the four spiritual laws, the number one result in the list is an entry from my blog. That's not a blog search -- it's a straight search of the entire Internet. Now, strangley, this top result is a post on Lutheranism, with my actual post entitled "What's Wrong with the Four Spiritual Laws?" listed as a sub-result, but there it is.

Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." In my experience, their results tend to weight blogs too heavily (probably because of the tendency of bloggers to crosslink to one another, which plays into Google's search algorithm) so we could perhaps equivocate over the definition of "information." Nevertheless, it's an extraordinary result. I, "poor stinking bag of maggots that I am," post my idiosyncratic opinion on a well-established pillar of conservative evangelism, and, thanks to Google, several people a week find it.

It's just weird.

How Lutheran Are You?

I came across this in a post by Brobrooz on Beliefnet. I expect it will spread quickly.

You are 93% Lutheran! This is most certainly true.

Nicely done! Martin would be proud of you! You may or may not have room for growth in understanding Lutheran terminology and culture. Good thing Salvation is by Grace and not by merit. We can add nothing to what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. But it never hurts to learn a little more about the church on earth. Thanks for taking the quiz!

How Lutheran Are You?
Create a Quiz

I was born on Reformation Day, I have a press-on of Luther's rose on my car's rear windshield, and the ringtone on my phone is "Patrem Omnipotentem" from Bach's Mass in B Minor, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to see that I rated very, very Lutheran.

The Church Repentant

I was thinking today about the metaphors of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. These ideas have fallen into disfavor in many circles for basically sound reasons, but I think we lose something if we just toss them aside without replacing them.

The primary problem with the Church Militant metaphor is that somewhere along the line we forgot who we were fighting and what we were fighting for. The strength of the metaphor is that it emphasizes the fact that the Christian life is a struggle, not just individually but also corporately. While the Church may be a city on a hill, it isn't just basking in the sunshine. Christ calls us to hard work. The weakness of the metaphor is that it too easily gives way to them false notion that the purpose of the struggle is to conquer the world for Christ. It gives the impression that we (the insiders) are "the good guys" and everyone else (the outsiders) are "the bad guys." The Church Militant starts to look like the Church Triumphant-in-Many-Places-and-Working-on-the-Rest. That is, in our scope of influence we've already won (contra Phillipians 3:13).

Following the Reformation, Protestants offered the idea of ecclesia semper reformanda, the Church is always reforming. This is good in as much as it reminds us of our constant need for self-examination. The danger, however, is that it presumes an ideal state of the Church. In fact, the implicit suggestion is often that the only reason the Church is always in need of reforming is that we need to fix the things we have broken and get back to some previous state when everything was right. Though posing as a dynamic view of the Church, semper reformanda too easily becomes a slogan of ideally static ecclesiology.

I would like to suggest the metaphor of the Church Repentant. It's been used before, but not much and perhaps not in the sense I mean. Thesis number one of Luther's 95 Theses was this: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent!' he meant for the Christians whole life to be one of repentance." Lutherans have generally taken this to mean not the stopping of individual infractions (and hence a return to some hypothetical perfect state) but rather a constant turning toward God. The Benedictine idea of conversatio morum, the commitment to being open to change and growth, is useful here.

These ideas of repentance and conversatio are typically applied to the individual, but I think we need to grow them and apply them to the Church as a whole. We need an ecclesiology in which the Church itself makes a commitment to growth and change in Christ. Our calling is not to maintain or return to a state of glorious perfection but to move forward and to be open to what God would have us be today.

On the Road

"If we don't know where we are going, any road will get us there."
-Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in 10,000 Places

The saying above is probably best considered proverbial, but I attribute it to Eugene Peterson because of the context he provides for it in the introduction to his book, Christ Plays in 10,000 Places.

The saying, as applied to spirituality, leads me immediately to think of that class of people who are "spiritual but not religious." There are a handful of ideas that just bounce around in my mind like flies that won't go away no matter how many times I swat at them, and the idea of being "spiritual but not religious" is one of them. My natural inclination is to try to find a way to get a handle on them so I can properly squash them. The challenge is to resist that tendency and instead seek a better understanding. The above saying in Peterson's book gave me a sort of skeleton key that I could use for either purpose.

It's quite easy to apply the saying derisively to those who reject any formal religion, and this is probably in line with the proverbial spirit of the saying. The "spiritual but not religious" are a bunch of blind wanderers who are going nowhere and this saying is another club I can bash them with.

But the saying subtly offers more than that. Viewed positively, the road will get us "there." Where? Well, who knows...but somewhere. It's about the journey not the destination. You have to appreciate the importance of the trip. When I drove my family across the country this summer, I kept telling them, "We aren't going somewhere; we are somewhere." And this is a point easily missed with regard to the spiritual journey.

As Peterson observes, despite the declining popularity of religion, we live in a time in which there is enormous interest in spirituality. I don't think this can really be considered a bad thing. Obviously, I'm not about to become "spiritual but not religious" myself, nor do I think it's the best course for anyone else. (I haven't yet tamed the annoying fly.) But there's good in it. I might even, grudgingly, say it's good.

It seems to me that the best thing the Church can do in this age of freelance spirituality is to stay faithful to our traditions, to remain available while continuing to offer what we've always offered. I suggested somewhere that we may be entering a time when Christian congregations play a role in society similar to that played by monasteries in the early middle ages -- an example and a guide in the midst of chaos.

Our culture is determined to explore the spiritual landscape. That's not such a bad thing. When I was 20, I did the same and eventually found my way back to the Church. I ended up on the right road, but I took the scenic route -- and I learned some interesting things along the way.

More Majestic than the Mountains

Glorious are you, more majestic than the everlasting mountains.
-Psalm 76:4

I was reflecting last night on Psalm 76, and it led me to wonder whether anyone has ever really been an animist in the primitive sense we imagine worshipping trees and wind and mountains and so on. The verse above from Psalm 76 really speaks to me. I know God in the way of which this verse speaks.

I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains in western Maryland, and these mountains always had a special draw for me. They were home. When coming back from a trip to Baltimore, the cut at Sidling Hill always felt like the gateway to where I lived. Before that pass, I was away and the mountains were in front of me. After that pass, I was home and the mountains were all around me, surrounding me as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.

Then in my 20's I moved to Oregon, and I got a whole new picture of what is meant by "majestic mountains." If you've never lived in a city near a mountain like Mt. Hood, I'm not sure I can really convey what it's like. You'll be driving down the street like you would any day, and then you turn a corner and suddenly, as if it appeared out of nowhere, there is an 11,000 foot mountain right in front of you, dominating the landscape. And the beauty of this mountain is glorious. Pristine and pure, serene, unmoveable. It's easy to see how the early inhabitants of these lands could have personified the mountains. There's certainly something numinous about its all-seeing presence.

And here, at the numinous quality of nature, is where Psalm 76 meets the language of animism. It's been said that God is invisible, but it simply isn't true. I see God all the time. Often, I see God when I look at the sky. The sky is God, but only some days. Frequently, I see God in a lone tree in the middle of a field. The tree is God, but not always. And the mountains.... "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." (Ps. 121:1, KJV)

Obviously, I don't really think the sky or a tree or a mountain is God, but quite often when I look at them I see God. I know I am seeing God because I am seeing more than sky or tree or mountain. I am seeing God, who is more majestic than the everlasting mountains.

Calling

Regular readers of this blog (and maybe even some of you who are irregular) may recall that I have an ongoing struggle with the idea of vocation. I can't help feeling that the traditional Lutheran teaching on vocation is too easily co-opted to support the status quo. As frequently expressed, it seems to come down to "whatever job you happen to be doing, that's your vocation." Yes, a baker helps answer our prayer for daily bread, but what about someone in a marketing position whose job is simply to convince people to buy company A's product instead of that of company B? How does that figure in the Kingdom of God?

Last night I got some help in this area from Brian Taylor's book Spirituality for Everyday Living: An Adaptation of the Rule of St. Benedict. Taylor uses the example of an artist who works as a waiter to pay the bills.

When asked what they do, one may find the reply: "I wait on tables for a living, but my 'work' [vocation] is painting." Vocation is a matter of our identity in God. It is who we are called to be in Christ. It is the activity through which God is made manifest. We are all created in the image of God, and each of us presents one facet of God's infinity. ... If one has a sense of personal vocation, then why not join the painter as a waiter in order to make ends meet?

The reason that I always struggle with vocation is that I can never see how my job contributes anything to either the Kingdom of God or to human society, and I don't feel "called" to it in any way. On the other hand, there are things to which I have a very strong sense of calling. So why not join the painter as a waiter (or software engineer, as the case may be)?

St. Nicholas (a day late)

I was out of town yesterday and so missed St. Nicholas' Day. I suggested to a co-worker recently that Santa Claus has long since escaped from Christmas, thus making him a safe character for pluralistic settings, but really he still has a lot of potential as a proclaimer of the Christian message, besides which the historical St. Nicholas is a really neat guy.

A couple of years ago I was in Russia on a business trip. One of my Russian co-workers, Eugene (Evgeny), took a group of us around town to visit various tacky knick-knack shops and such things. After visiting a number of stores I noticed that there was one particular icon that I kept seeing. I asked Eugene who it was. Eugene, who is Christian, took a glance and said, "Oh, that's probably Holy Nicholas." I about fell over. It was the middle of June and Santa Claus was all over Russia.

But in America, the good bishop has what I would consider a bit of an image problem. Every year the horrid claymation story purporting to tell children Santa Claus' origins gets under my skin. St. Nicholas has a really interesting history. Why did the makers of the wretched "Santa Claus is Comin' To Town" feel the need to invent a new history? Was is because they wanted to help Santa escape from Christmas?

This year, I got some unexpected help bringing Santa back into the Christian fold for my family. My wife has been looking for a Christmas puzzle. Yesterday, she picked up a puzzle called St. Nicholas in His Study. The picture has a fairly American Santa, but he's surrounded by images linking him to the saint of Christian tradition. The back of the box relates the story of St. Nicholas, explaining the various symbols.

Union with God

In my previous post I mentioned some ideas on union with God that I found a while ago in Lawrence Kushner's book God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know. I went back and re-read this section in Kushner's book. It's very good stuff.

The rabbi he references is Kabbalah expert Moshe Idel and the Hebrew term Idel uses to describe the mystical union is devekut. He gives three types of union: cognitive devekut, devekut of behavior and devekut of prayer. Kushner summarizes this way:

We don't want just to read about what God wants. We don't want someone else telling us what God wants either. We don't even want God telling us what God wants. We want our eyes to be God's eyes so we can see the world the way God sees it. We want our teaching to be God's Torah. We want our hands to do God's work. We want our prayers to be God's prayers. We want what God wants. Devekut: being one with God. At last the "little i, Anochi," and the "Great I, Anochi, of All creation" are one.

That's not too much to ask, is it?

It reminded me of what St. Augustine said of his conversion experience: "This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed and to will what you willed." (Confessions, Book 9, Chapter 1)

Praise God

I confess, I have a bit of a problem with praising God in prayer. Not that I don't think it's right, for it is indeed right and salutary that we should at all times and in all places offer thanksgiving and praise. But what I mean can be seen by my use of a traditional quotation in the previous sentence. Namely, it just doesn't come naturally to me to speak this way.

When I try to say a prayer of praise, it comes out sounding like the prayer from Monty Python's Meaning of Life:

O Lord, you are so big...so absolutely huge. We're all really impressed down here I can tell you. Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery.

And, while I'm at it, contemporary praise songs like "Our God is an Awesome God" sound like that to me too. I'm forced to rule it out, based on prayer advice I've heard attributed to Martin Luther: "Don't lie when you pray."

That is, I'm not going to pray "O Lord, you are so big..." if that's not what's on my heart.

But something occurred to me recently that put me at ease about this, which I'd like to share with you. Some time ago, I was exposed to a sermon series on Gary Chapman's book, The Five Love Languages. At the time, I was appalled to be attending a church that would do such a heinous thing, but now, unexpectedly, a seed from that time has come to bloom. Chapman's idea is that different people express love in different ways, and if we want good relationships we need to learn to recognize each other's love languages. Some people show love verbally, others physically, others by service, and so on.

The thing that occurred to me this week is that if people can learn to recognize and respect each other's love languages, surely God will do at least that. Words of praise just aren't my love language, and they aren't likely to become so. But God knows not just what's in my heart but what my various actions mean.

I once heard an interview with the arch-heretic John Domminic Crossan. Asked if he prays, Crossan said that he doesn't understand the difference between prayer and study. For him, when he studies that is prayer. I was shocked to realize that I knew exactly what he meant. While I'm not so bold as Crossan to give up traditional forms of prayer, I think I could say, and this may scandalize both prayer-oriented spiritualists and service-oriented spiritualists, that study is the primary medium by which I experience God's presence.

Lawrence Kushner, in his book God Was In This Place and I, i Did Not Know tells of a revered Rabbi who taught that there are three ways to union with God: prayer, service and intellect. This maps directly, I think, to the three Hindu margas of bhakti (devotion), karma (service) and jnana (intellect). I think it's a fine example of something Christians can learn from people of other faiths. And it came together for me this week as I reflected on how I love God.

Afterthought: To what extent do the theological virtues of faith, hope and love correspond to these three paths of intellect, prayer and service? Is the correspondance more than superficial?

Birthday Meme

Via LutherPunk

The Rules:
1) Go to Wikipedia
2) In the search box, type your birth month and day but not the year.
3) List three events that happened on your birthday
4) List two important birthdays and one death
5) One holiday or observance (if any)

Here are my answers:

Three events that (may or may not have) happened on my birthday are:
1) 445 BC - Ezra reads the Book of the Law to the Israelites in Jerusalem
2) 1517 - Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther posts his 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg
3) 1892 - Arthur Conan Doyle publishes The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Two important birthdays and one death:
1) 1887 - Chiang Kai-shek, Nationalist Chinese leader, former Republic of China president (d. 1975)
2) 1963 - Fred McGriff, baseball player
Death:
1) 1926 - Harry Houdini, Hungarian-born magician (b. 1874)

Holidays and observances
1) Reformation Day

Christ the King

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answered, "Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?" Pilate replied, "I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?" Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here." Pilate asked him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." Pilate asked him, "What is truth?"
-John 18:33-38

My wife read an essay on Fundamentalism today. One of the five main points of Christian Fundamentalism is belief in a 1000 year reign of Christ on earth with the saints following the second coming. She sent me an e-mail at work asking, "Do you believe in the 1000 year reign."

Of course, I couldn't give a simple answer like "no" to this but had to go into my understanding of the symbolism of revelation, the apocalyptic imagination of the Old Testament prophets and the meaning of the kingdom of God. Valiantly wading through all this, she pressed the question, "So in what way are we reigning now?"

I gave her my thoughts on the hiddenness of the kingdom and the lordship of Christ, but I have to admit that it's not a simple question. Then while I was at lunch it dawned on me that this Sunday is Christ the King Sunday. So many of you have probably also been contemplating this topic, right?

So, how do you view the reign of Christ, present and future?

On the Basis of the Breads

As I've been trying to learn Greek, one of the things I've been doing is trying to regularly read a passage from the New Testament. To this point I've been doing this just to get comfortable pronouncing the Greek, since I hadn't had either the grammar or the vocabulary to quite make out what I've been reading. But slowly, the lights are starting to come on. According to the text book I'm using, I ought to know about 70 percent of the words now.

Last night as I was reading I came across the phrase "epi tois artois". Since epi is a word that's been giving me trouble, I slowed down to figure out what that was saying. So I parsed it out, "epi followed by a dative is...'on the basis of'". And then I looked, "on the basis of the breads"??? I try not to pay attention to what passage I'm reading, but here I looked it up.

"for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened"
-Mark 6:52

Strange book, the Bible.

The New and Living Way

I started listening to Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book today. Thirty minutes in, I'm finding it to be full of great insights, the first of which came together with this week's lectionary texts for me.

Peterson begins his book with a story about his grandson Hans. Seven-year-old Hans had just been given a New Testament as a first communion gift. Though he couldn't read, he sat and looked at the book reverently. He was, Peterson says, "honoring in a most precious way this book but without awareness that it has anything to do with either the lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich he has just eaten or the museum he is about to visit, oblivious to his grandmother next to him: Hans 'reading' his Bible. A parable."

I listened to this shortly after having read this week's lectionary texts. I was wondering very curiously what my pastor will do with this week's texts. Having recently studied the book of Daniel, and apocalyptic texts more generally, I felt like I knew pretty well what these readings were about, what tied them together, but it's not the kind of thing you hear very often in a Sunday sermon.

But how deep was my understanding?

From Daniel 12:1 ("At that time Michael, the great prince, the protector of your people, shall arise."), I was summoned into the apocalyptic imagination. I've become convinced recently that the Gospel is intrinsically apocalyptic. It's all about God breaking in to the world to bring history to it fulfillment.

So as I read the text from Hebrews, I was looking for this message. It begins with some teaching about Christ as our high priest and moves on to an exhortation to enter by "the new and living way he opened for us". With enough force I could stretch that into the apocalyptic message I was looking for, but it wasn't quite natural. Then, there it was, in 10:25, "and all the more as you see the Day approaching." Check.

And, of course, the gospel reading this week is Mark's little apocalypse. So I was confident that I had grasped the meaning of the texts, but I couldn't imagine my pastor preaching an apocalyptic sermon.

But when I listened to Eugene Peterson's "parable" it hit me. In my "understanding" of the week's texts I hadn't really asked myself what it had to do with the lettuce sandwich I had just eaten or the museum I was about to visit.

So I went back to the texts, and there it was. Earlier I had read the Hebrews passage as saying, "Yada yada yada ... and all the more as you see the Day approaching." But the "yada yada yada" was the important part. It was telling me what all of this message about the inbreaking kingdom of God has to do with the lettuce sandwhich and the museum.

Therefore, my friends,...let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

This is the meat of the text, to be savored and taught by.

I'm always very suscpicious of people who are quick to say that Christianity isn't about doctrine or even proclamation but about the way we live with one another. I think it sells Christianity short. But if the doctrine and the proclamation aren't leading us to this new way of living with one another, they are nothing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Bible to eat.

Evidence and Existence

Yesterday on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" one of the topics was "evidence for and against the existence of Bigfoot." "Bigfoot" wasn't at all what I was expecting to follow that introductory phrase. Forgetting that it was "Science Friday" I expected to hear "evidence for and against the existence of God" though I would have probably been annoyed. It got me thinking about that.

Generally, I think that there can be NO evidence for or against the existence of God. As a matter of principle, there can be no "evidence against" the existence of anything, including Bigfoot. But what about evidence for existence? The idea of "evidence" for the existence of God seems to me to involve either a misunderstand of who God is or a misunderstanding of what evidence is, at least as applied to existence.

Evidence as applied to existence is an inherently scientific construct. It is based on the physical -- examining the physical to see what has effected it physically. God on the other hand is other than physical. I don't mean to say that God is "supernatural" and thereby divorce God from the physical world, but rather to say that God acts in the physical world in non-physical ways (though perhaps sometimes through the physical and with the Incarnation as an obvious exception).

An analogy.... This summer as I was driving around the country, I came across a sign that said "high winds may exist". I remarked to my wife what a delightfully philosophic statement this was. I mean, in what way can you say that winds exist? Can you look closely and find wind? Can you hold it? If you examine the air in the presence of wind all you'll find is the particles of air that were there before the wind came, and they're not even all moving in the direction of the wind. So does wind exist?

This analogy breaks down quickly, of course, because while wind is a secondary effect of the physical, I would say that the physical is a secondary effect of God, but it kind of captures what I was thinking. People are far too ready to see physical explanations of what God does as evidence against God's existence.

Prayer and Life

Tonight I learned what very well may be the most important thing I've ever learned about prayer, and I learned it in one sentence. I'll give you two for context.

We pray from the same base as we live. Our prayer reflects the way in which we respond to life itself, and so our prayer can only be as good as the way we live.
-Esther de Waal, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

I'd be a bit surprised if this hit you the way it hit me, but for me this was one of those things that as soon as I read the first sentence above I said to myself, "Of course! That's what I've been overlooking."

I tend to struggle with prayer, by which I mean the oratory kind of prayer. I can't sit myself down and speak to God. It just doesn't go well. And from what I gather, this is a common experience. If Esther de Waal's insight is correct, and I think it is, this is likely because we (those of us with this struggle) live a life relatively free of God for 23 hours and then expect to be able to sit down and commune with God in the other hour.

Actually, that's not quite my problem (and probably not quite anyone else's either). I possibly spend more time thinking about God than anyone I know. What I fail to do, or at least fail to do consistently, is relate my "secular" activities to God. Take cooking for example. I like to cook, but I don't think about God while I'm cooking. Yet if you think about it there's a really deep connection there.

And so I have this result. Lectio divina really clicks for me as a form of prayer. I open the Bible. I listen for God's voice. I "hear God's voice" (I'm reluctant to say that too strongly). I respond. This works for me. But I have trouble integrating my personal life into prayer. Trouble is, I've been approaching prayer "from above".

20 Books

Ben Myers at Faith and Theology started a tidal wave by posting a list of the 20 books that have most influenced his theology. I can't pass up a chance to make a list of books.

Whne I read some of the other lists I thought, "Man, some of these guys are pretentious." Then I made my own list, and I had to think, "Man, this guy is pretentious too, but perhaps not as well read as the others." Anyway, here's my list:

20. The Kabir Books translated by Robert Bly
19. On Earth as in Heaven by Dorothee Soelle
18. Confessions by St. Augustine
17. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
16. God For Us by Catherine Mowry Lacugna
15. Eyes Remade for Wonder by Lawrence Kushner
14. A Christological Catechism by Joseph Fitzmyer
13. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky
12. Christus Victor by Gustaf Aulen
11. The Rule of St. Benedict
10. Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
9. The Nature of Doctrine by George Lindbeck
8. Lutheranism by Eric Gritsch and Robert Jenson
7. On Being a Theologian of the Cross by Gerhard Forde
6. Mysterium Paschale by Hans urs von Balthasar
5. Lectures on Galatians by Martin Luther
4. For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann
3. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
2. Getting to Know Jesus by George MacDonald
1. Baptized, We Live by Daniel Erlander

Listening

Last week's Speaking of Faith radio program featured Jacob Needleman talking about the religious roots of American Democracy. One part that I found particularly interesting was his idea that freedom implies duty. Needleman says,

A democratic citizen is not a citizen who can do anything he wants. It's a citizen who has an obligation at the same time. And just to give you an example, if I may, the freedom of speech, what is the duty associated with it? Well, if you ponder that a little bit, you'll come to the conclusion very clearly that the right of free speech implies the duty of allowing others to speak. If I have the right to speak, I have the duty to let you speak. Now, that's not so simple. It doesn't mean just to stop my talking and wait till you're finished and then come in and get you. It means I have an obligation inwardly — and that's what we're speaking about, is the inner dimension. Inwardly, I have to work at listening to you. That means I don't have to agree with you, but I have to let your thought into my mind in order to have a real democratic exchange between us.

This is really powerful. The idea of freedom is really cheapened if we see at as freedom from everyone around us. And the idea that freedom of speech implies the responsibility to listen to what others are saying is very good. I suspect some people wouldn't say half of what they do if they were listening to others.

As it turns out, I heard this the same day I began reading Esther de Waal's Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. As de Waal spoke of the importance of listening in Benedictine spirituality, I couldn't miss the connection. One of the core foundations of Benedict's rule is that members of the community must listen to one another and in this listening they hear the voice of God.

Speaking of listening, this week's guest on Speaking of Faith is going to be Martin Marty.

Back on the horse

After a four month hiatus, I've finally picked up my study of Greek again. I had retained most of what I learned earlier from the opening chapters, but at around chapter 10 it's looking like I need to re-read carefully.

I'm at the point now where I can read Greek about the way archeologists in movies read obscure ancient languages...dusting off the ancient inscription I say slowly, "It says something about 'the Son of Man.'" Looking more closely, I add, "Ah yes, here it is ... he's going to be betrayed," followed by a dramatic silence as the non-scholars standing by ponder what this might mean.

Redemptive Suffering

Many Roman Catholics speak of Mary as Co-Redemptrix. I've always had a really hard time with that. In fact, I've had a hard time with many Catholic attitudes toward Mary, but I've discovered that in many instances if I substitute "Church" where they're saying "Mary" it makes sense to me and I think there's probably a road back to the Catholic faith from there.

My proposed substitution still doesn't work for a lot of people because they see the Church as an institution trying to tell them what they can or can't do or even believe. I've never seen the Church that way. To me, the Church is us.

All of this is a very long introduction to my encounter with this' week's lectionary texts. I think this week's text picture the Church, each of us individually and all of us collectively, as co-redeemers with Christ.

The Old Testament lesson is the servant song from Isaiah 53. I don't think any Christian can hear this and not think of Christ, yet the scholars tell us not to, or at least to think exclusively of Christ. Perhaps Isaiah means Israel, perhaps himself, perhaps another.

I'm intrigued by the handling of this in the discussion between Philip and the Ethopian eunuch in Acts 8. "About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" the eunuch asks. And then the book of Acts does something amazing. It leaves the question open. It reports, "Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus."

Now a lot of people read into that that Philip simply explained that it refers to Jesus, but the actual text allows for a much bigger interpretation. Suppose the prophet means himself AND someone else AND the people of Israel AND Jesus Christ AND the Christian people of God. Suppose we all bear one another's iniquity and by this we are healed.

The psalm for the week includes the passage Satan tries to use to tempt Jesus in the desert: "he will command his angels concerning you." The whole passage does tempt us to look for glory instead of suffering. It speaks of protection and deliverance. Yet the New Testament's use of this text shows us something deeper in it. The line that jumps out at me is this: "I will be with them in trouble." This is God's plan for our protection. He doesn't keep us out of trouble. He is with us in the trouble.

In the New Testament lesson the author of Hebrews expounds on Christ's high priesthood. Speaking first of every high priest chosen from among mortals he says, "He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness." O that all our leaders were so. Then Jesus in the days of his flesh became our high priest. "Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered." The mortal high priest is able to deal gently with others because he shares their weakness. Jesus is able to redeem us because he shares our suffering.

So far it may not seem like I have much of a case for my co-redeemer reading of these texts, but I think it comes together in the gospel reading.

James and John come to Jesus and ask for places beside him in glory. Jesus asks, "Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?" The beautiful little fools respond, "We are able."

Jesus tells them that they will, but he goes on to explain "whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant," and the basis for this teaching is in Christ himself, "For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." As the master came to serve, so the disciples will serve.

So how are we co-redeemers? I certainly don't mean that our suffering makes atonement for others or that we somehow accumulate merit for others. Those theologically loaded ideas of redemption obscure the depth of the gospel and block us from seeing our involvement in the gospel. But if we view the gospel in terms of God breaking into the world, then each of us can be agents of redemption.

When we server one another and bear one another's iniquities in the name of Christ, we are certainly a means of grace to one another, as surely as when we preach the gospel or administer the sacraments. And so I don't think it is a stretch to put any Christian into Isaiah's servant song and say, "upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed."

You know the commandments

This week's gospel reading is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking how he may inherit eternal life. The opening verse portrays a sense of urgency in the man's request. Jesus was setting out on a journey when the man "ran up and knelt before him."

Barbara Rossing points out how much this looks like a healing story. This is the way they begin. Someone comes to Jesus and falls at his feet, begging for his help. See, for example, the stories of the leper in Mark 1:40, Jairus in Mark 5:22, and the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:25. They all come before Jesus, kneel and ask for his help.

In this context, the action of this rich young man is something I can relate to. He doesn't need physical healing but spiritual healing, and he knows it. So he comes to Jesus, kneels and says, "Help me, Lord. What must I do?" He wants to be holy.

Jesus' response is blunt: "You know the commandments." This is the tragedy of trying to live a spiritual life. If it were just a matter of not knowing what must be done, we could imagine that if only we knew, we could do it. But we do know. As Moses says, "The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe." (Dt. 30:14)

At this point, I'm still hearing this story as an individual. But I want to turn now to receive it in a bigger context. The Old Testment lesson this week is from the prophet Amos. Amos is one of those prophets we Americans very much need right now. Amos speaks to those who "trample on the poor and take from them levies of grain" (Amos 5:11), those "who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate" (5:12).

I don't believe there are people (or at least not many people) in this country who intentionally and knowingly trample the poor. And yet by our actions, by our policies, we do just this. And we do it because we have many posessions. We would love to help the poor. We just aren't willing to jeopardize our own financial standing to do so.

And I don't think this just applies to Republicans. I suspect all of us who have many possessions know exactly how this feels. I am a bleeding heart liberal. I desperately want to help the poor. But I don't want to risk my own family's comfort to do it.

John Henry Newman once said, "the aim of most men esteemed conscientious and religious, or who are what is called honourable, upright men, is, to all appearance, not how to please God, but how to please themselves without displeasing Him." And that is why Amos stings. That is why when we say to Jesus, "Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth," we know it's not enough as well as he does.

But the good news, the Gospel in this week's gospel reading, is that when the young man said this, "Jesus, looking at him, loved him." The young man went away grieving. The disciples were astonished at all that happened and asked, "Then who can be saved?" But Jesus told them, "for God all things are possible," which leads me to this week's New Testament lesson: "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword."

This week's readings cut me. They showed me a failing in myself and in my country. But it's a good cut. We don't know how the story of the rich young man ends. Maybe Jesus' words lead him to life. God kills and he makes alive. He strikes and he heals. He casts down and raises up. Through his Word we receive new life.

The Evangelizing Church

Picture a time when although most people are nominally Christian, the large majority of them have a confused idea of the basic message of Christianity. The Bible isn't much read and the preaching in churches is often about anything but the Gospel. Despair and hopelessness are widespread. Many people think they can secure their hapiness by buying things.

It's present-day America, right? Or is it sixteenth century Europe?

This juxtaposition of the problems of the Reformation era and the problems of modern America is from the second chapter of The Evangelizing Church: A Lutheran Contribution. The authors (primarily Kelly Fryer for this chapter) offer a fresh look at the power of Lutheranism. What if rather than seeing the Reformation as a correction of bad doctrine, we see it instead as a revival movement where the Gospel was spoken with power and the Church was renewed not by a return to better theology but by the impulse to spread the Gospel? Does that look anything like the Lutheran churches we know?

I've aired my reservations about evangelism here before. And yet it's a problem that just won't go away. As much as I'd like to, I can't get around the Great Commission.

The authors of The Evangelizing Church identify three typical Lutheran stances toward evangelism:

1) Skepitcal

In this stance, the whole enterprise of evangelism is viewed with suspicion. In as much as evangelism is proselytizing, it is seen as a bad thing. In as much as it is a holdover from colonialism, it is seen as something for which the Church needs to repent. And in as much as we live in a pluralistic society, evangelism shows disrespect for those of other religions. All of this lets us sidestep the call to evangelize.

2) Pragmatic

Fully embracing the call to evangelize, the pragmatic approach looks around at other denominations and borrows whatever they are doing. And so we have Lutherans embracing the Four Spiritual Laws and Evangelism Explosion and the Purpose Driven Life and whatever else is popular in the wider church culture without worrying about the question of whether these methods are faithful to our Lutheran traditions.

3) Romantic

This stance views everything the Church does as evangelism. It loves the slogan, "Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words if necessary." But in general it never feels words are necessary. And so we feed the poor and clothe the naked, but we never actually verbally express the Gospel to anyone.


Seeing these position before me, I was able to easily identify myself as an adherent of the first position. When pressed with the necessity of evangelizing, I might be willing to fall back on the third position, but I hate the second position with the fury of a thousand suns. But, of course, I do see that all three positions are tragically flawed.

The authors of The Evangelizing Church promise a way forward. And so I'm reading on with great hope. I'll let you know what I find.

Economics of Immigration

The Republican candidate for governor in Oregon is running television ads proudly proclaiming that he thinks "illegal means illegal" and so if elected he will crack down on illegal immigrants.

As I've indicated in previous posts, I'm rather radical when it comes to immigration. I think the problem with "illegal immigrants" is with the "illegal" not with the immigrants. To me, closing our borders (literally!) to immigrant workers is just another way for the rich to oppress the poor.

It probably wouldn't change my opinion, but I'd like to at least know what the economic trade-offs are. I know very little about economics, but it seems to me that welcoming immigrants should be good for our economy in the long run. If our wealth as a nation is based on what we produce then increasing the number of workers should increase our overall wealth, right? That is, of course, assuming that the incoming workers don't simply displace existing workers.

According to the aforementioned ad, there are 175,000 illegal immigrants living in Oregon. I can't imagine that we'd be helped by running them out of town. I strongly suspect that our economy depends on the work they do. So why does this Republican want to "get tough" with them?

My sense is that conservative politicians don't really care about this issue and are just using it to maintain the inexplicable support they have from blue collar workers who are afraid that their jobs and/or wages will be hurt by immigration. But what if this fear is well-founded? I don't want to be just another knee-jerk liberal who is unwittingly hurting one group of working class people in the name of helping another.

Does anybody have a good source explaining the actual economic issues involved?

The Word of God in the Bible

I've dropped the ball on my investigation of the authority of God in the Bible, and I may just give it up as I don't think I'm going to have time to do it right any time soon, but I did have occasion to investigate the use of the idea of "word of God" in the Bible.

In the NRSV, the phrase "word of God" appears only three times in the Old Testament, but the phrase "word of the Lord" appears 238 times. Because of the volume, I won't treat each passage individually.

What I will say is that in the overwhelming majority of cases (and arguably all) where these two phrases are used in the Old Testament they are being used to reference something other than Scripture. Specifically, in most cases these phrases refer to a sort of power by which God influences the world. Most specifically, more than half of the instances refer to the power of God coming to or speaking through prophets.

In 109 instance, the use is of the form "the word of the Lord came to X." An additional 34 times someone speaking says something of the form "hear...the word of the Lord." Another 27 times, something happens "according to the word of the Lord" often in fulfillment of a prophetic announcement. And 10 times, something is said to be done "by the word of the Lord." That's 180 of the 241 uses just with those specific formulas. The other uses are generally also of this sort, including people keeping the word of the Lord and other people rebelling against the word of the Lord.


In the New Testament, the phrase "word of God" is much more common, but once again it rarely refers to Scripture. The phrase "word of the Lord" occurs 15 times in the NRSV New Testament, the phrase "word of God" occurs 37 times and the phrase "word of Christ" occurs twice.

I have gone through these occurences and classified them according to what they refer to.

I find only one verse which I think can be argued to directly refer to Scripture using the phrase "word of God", Mark 7:13, "thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this." This verse is clearly referring to what God has commanded. That could, quite reasonably, be understood as meaning scripture.

In two more cases (Lk 8:21 and Lk 11:28) the phrase "word of God" refers to the will of God that is heard. Again, this could arguably be understood as Scripture, but only in a limited sense. When Jesus speaks of "those who hear the word of God and do it" this cannot be a general reference to Scripture, for not everything in the Bible can be done as such.

In one case (Rev. 19:13) the term "Word of God" refers to Jesus Christ himself. In one more (Lk 5:1) "word of God" refers to what Jesus is saying. In two cases (Lk 22:61 and Acts 11:16) the phrase "word of the Lord" refers to something specific Jesus had said.

In five instances (Lk 3:2, 1Co 14:36, Col 1:25, 1Th 4:15, Rev 1:2) "word of God" seems to refer to the prophetic concept, as in "the word of God came unto John". In two cases (Heb 11:3, 2Pe 3:5) "word of God" refers to the creative word of God, as in God spoke and it was so.

In three significant cases (Ac 6:7, Ac 12:24 and Ac 19:20) "the word of God" or "word of the Lord" is described as something apparently insubstantial that spreads, advances and even grows as the Gospel is spread.

The overwhelming majority of the cases in the New Testament (31 occurences) are those in which "word of God" or "word of the Lord" refers to preaching or otherwise bearing witness to Christ. These include cases where people "praised" the word of the Lord (Acts 13:48) that they have heard, cases where the word of God is "received", a case (1Pe 1:23) which speaks of "the living and enduring word of God" by which people are born anew and another (1Pe 1:25) in the same context which says that "the word of the Lord endures for ever" and, lest we be confused, says "That word is the good news that was announced to you."

The full list which I have classified as cases of preaching or witness is:
Ac 4:31, Ac 6:2, Ac 8:14, Ac 8:25, Ac 11:1, Ac 13:5, Ac 13:7, Ac 13:44, Ac 13:46, Ac 13:48, Ac 13:49, Ac 15:35, Ac 15:36, Ac 16:32, Ac 17:13, Ac 18:11, Ac 19:10, Ro 9:6, Ro 10:17, 1Th 1:8, 1Th 2:13, 2Th 3:1, 2Ti 2:9, Tit 2:5, Heb 6:5, Heb 13:7, 1Pe 1:23, 1Pe 1:25, Re 1:9, Re 6:9, Re 20:4


That leaves the following six verses, which I have classified as debatable. It could be argued that these are references to Scripture, but I think, in light of the above analysis and the principle that Scripture interprets Scripture, that it makes far more sense to understand these all as the powerful presence by and through which God achieves his will in the world.

Lk 8:11
Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.

Joh 10:35
If those to whom the word of God came were called 'gods'—and the scripture cannot be annulled—

Eph 6:17
Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Col 3:16
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God.

Heb 4:12
Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

1Jo 2:14
I write to you, children, because you know the Father. I write to you, fathers, because you know him who is from the beginning. I write to you, young people, because you are strong and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one.

Transendence and Immanence

I recently started reading Paul Laughlin's book, Getting Oriented: What Every Christian Should Know about Eastern Religions but Probably Doesn't. I picked this up because I had previously read Laughlin's Remedial Christianity and found it a good mental exercise. I disagreed with a lot, but he worked through some good topics. I came into this book expecting more of the same.

The thing that had bugged me most in Remedial Christianity was Laughlin's rather uninspired exploration of the ideas of transcendence and immanence. And, to my chagrin, I got more of the same in Getting Oriented -- exactly the same.

I think it would be fair to say that one of the things Laughlin is dissatisfied with about traditional Christianity is that it has too much transcendence and not enough immanence. He wants to reinvent Christianity to fix that.

But I think the real problem is that Laughlin's insistence on rigid categories blocks him from seeing the immanence of God that is proclaimed in the Christian tradition.

Laughlin offers two definitions each for transcendence and immanence. He defines "high octane" immanence as a view wherein God (or Ultimate Reality) permeates, saturates or infuses everything and everyone "as their very essence" while "high octane" transcendence is a view wherein God is wholly Other. He complements these definitions with a "low octane" immanence that is God present in the world "but only in a manner of speaking: as an agent acting upon it" and "low octane" transcendence as a God (or Ultimate Reality) that is beyond comprehension. Using these definitions Laughlin claims that Christianity offers a view of God that involves high octane transcendence but low octane immanence.

He says the traditional Western God "must impact the Universe from beyond it through creative acts, rather than as an abiding, inherent, indwelling, intelligence" (his emphases). I don't think this is right. I think traditional (and especially pre-Enlightenment) Christianity describes God precisely as an abiding presence in the world.

After describing the high octane versions, Laughlin says, "In a perfect world, that would be that: 'transcendence' and 'immanence' would each have a single, univocal meaning...." I think this statement reveals more than he would like. He allows that this being an imperfect world they each have a "second" meaning. What he doesn't seem to allow is that they each have ranges and shades and subtleties.

Laughlin's conclusions about Christianity seem to follow from Christianity's firm and non-negotiable insistence on the ontological difference between God and Creation. Combine that with his narrow categories, and you can't conclude other than he does. But throw out the categories, and we have all kinds of possibilities. What is needed, I suggest, is an acceptance of the fact that Christianity wants to proclaim both high octane transcendence and high octane immanence, even if we lack the terminology to do so simultaneously.

Laughlin dismisses Christian mysticism as an insignificant minority report, but I wonder if he realizes he is throwing all of Orthodox Christianity in that statement along with some very deep and influential streams in the West.

He says the "weaker sort of immanence does not allow for God to become the world or anything in it." Now you would think that statement alone disqualifies Christianity for this type of immanence. But Laughlin kind of dismisses it as "the exception that proves the rule, perhaps" and in any event says Christians "would not see it as a theological compromise, simply because of its unique, once-and-for-all character." In other words, we're committed to transcendence over against immanence and aren't going to let the Incarnation distract us from that.

Now here's where he really gets my goat. He says, "every other Christian theological issue and topic including the understanding and treatment of the cosmos, time and humanity, must begin with [the insistence on God's ontological transcendence] and continue to honor it, in order to maintain the basic monotheistic framework of the faith, at least as it is traditionally understood" Ummm, Dr. Laughlin, that was the boat. You just missed it.

In point of fact, I would maintain to the contrary that every other Christian theological issue and topic, including our ideas about God's immanence and transcendence, must, absolutely must, follow from the Christian proclamation of the Incarnation.

Traditions in Christian Spirituality

I was browsing around on Amazon today and I stumbled on to the book series I've been dreaming about. Orbis Books has been publishing (for several years now apparently) a series called "Traditions in Christian Spirituality".

Click here to check it out.

Even nerdier than I thought

Hat tip to Lutherpunk

The Office

I generally tend to espouse the philosophy that time is an illusion, for strictly pragmatic reasons -- namely, if I can convince everyone around me that time is an illusion then it won't matter so much that I can't keep a schedule. For this reason, my attempts to adopt the habit of praying the daily office have generally not been successful.

But I'm giving it another try.

I recently picked up the Glenstal Book of Prayer which has morning and evening prayers for each day of the week and fairly short "prayer stops" for mid-morning, noon, afternoon and compline. Five days in I'm doing well. Having a simple book with psalms and scripture readings inline helps a lot.

How does anyone find their way through the Book of Common Prayer?

Hitchhiker's Guide to Lutheranism

I was reading the Lutheran Handbook's hagiography of Hypatia of Alexadria today (p. 62) and the subsequent demonization of Pelagius, when I was struck by a parallel between the Lutheran Handbook and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the guide itself as described in the book, not the book). Check it out:

"In many of the more relaxed congregations of the Western Church, the Lutheran Handbook has supplanted the great Catechism of the Catholic Church as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many ommisions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least widly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words HERE WE STAND inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."

(Note: Those who haven't read Douglas Adams' book may not get this.)

Chronicles

My study of God's authority in the Bible is bogged down. It was going well until I hit Deuteronomy, but I balked there knowing that it's the most important reference point so far. If I have any hope of finishing this I'm going to have to rescope the project to limit myself just to the use of scripture within the Bible. My original scope was too ambitious for a short study. Hopefully with that in mind, I'll be able to return to Deuteronomy next Monday.

Why next Monday? The other reason I've made no progress in this study is that I've been tied up studying 1 & 2 Chronicles in preparation for a session I'm leading in a Crossways Bible study this Sunday. You might think the Chronicles are boring. I did before I started this. I basically saw these books as stripped down versions of Samuel and Kings with a few hundred genealogies and descriptions of the Temple thrown in. Show me just what the Chronicler has brought that was new, and there you will find things only boring and tedious.

But, O, not so. That's just the shell. As I've dug into it I've discovered a deep message of hope to people returning from exile. Right now I'm at Hezekiah's passover celebration. Far from being just a notice that "Hezekiah followed the rules," it paints a beautiful picture of a king rallying the Jewish people (both Israel and Judah) around the hope of God's deliverance that is the deep message of Passover even while the people face the imminent threat of destruction by Sennecherib (who has by this time conquered Israel but not yet invaded Judah).

It's a well known fact that the Bible repays serious study, but it always surprises me to find that that's even true of the dusty old books like Chronicles.

Sadly, missing the point

In college I had a favorite professor who had once trained to be a priest. He left the seminary and Christianity because of the absurdities he found in Christianity. The example he typically gave was the question of eating meat on Friday. As the story goes, he asked if someone would go to hell for swallowing a piece of meat on Friday that had been stuck in their teeth from Thursday's dinner. He was told, if it's more than an ounce yes, if it's less than an ounce no. I always just chalked this up to pre-Vatican II Catholicism gone wrong.

Of course, even in the rigidity of pre-Vatican II the question would not have been whether one would go to hell, but rather whether one needed to go to confession, but the point is basically the same.

This story came to mind this weekend as I was dividing up some hamburger to freeze in 1-pound blocks. I had never really thought before about just how big an ounce of meat is. It's nearly the size of a golf ball. So what my professor had been told was, if you have a piece of meat about the size of a golf ball stuck in your teeth Thursday night, and then you eat it during Friday's fast, you need to go to confession!

I have to wonder...did he really miss the point that badly?

In Search Of....

One of the odd joys of writing a blog is seeing what kind of search terms lead people here. I check my sitemeter regularly to see this fascinating quirk of the internet. Of the last 100 visits to this blog as of this writing, 29 have come through search hits. Here's what people were searching for:

hiddush
penultimate truth
Makeover + Culture
when did we see you
carl braaten
freshman ideas embarrassment
parable of the just judge
jewish story
problems with the 4 spiritual laws
gods civil law
carl braaten
a house built upon a rock
moses burning bush kushner
boldly
Walther Law and Gospel Lecture
C.S. Lewis, quote, conversion to Christianity
urban legends - mother theresa - people are unreasonable
"four spiritual laws" problems
sinning fish
the temptation of st. anthony biblical meaning
lectio divina lutheran
four spiritual laws plan, problem, provision
ECCLISIOLOGY
lutherans and st. francis of assisi
quarterflash
Melancthon
neo-lutheranism
moses sucks
crime and punishment george guidall

No doubt this post will generate all kinds of strange search hits. I think "Carl Braaten" and "Four Spiritual Laws" are the top two things people search for that bring them here.

The Carl Braaten thing is a bit of an oddity, and frankly I'm a little sad about it. It yields a scary insight into the nature of internet-driven information. Braaten has been an influential and faithful theologian in the Church for many years, but if you Google his name, the top six hits are all commentary on the open letter he wrote last year to Mark Hanson. I'm number four, having been edged out by Al Kimmel (the Pontificator) and two articles from Ed Schroeder. Hopefully, over time this will fade.

Exodus through Numbers

The dominant mode of God's authority in Exodus through Numbers is obviously the giving of the Law. Since the authority of the Law bears direct analogy to the authority of scripture as a whole, the details here will be very useful to the theme of my study.

When God is telling Moses to have the people prepare for God's coming on Mount Sinai, God says to Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after" (Ex. 19:9). This is very interesting. The point isn't for the people to hear what God says but rather simply for them to hear that God is speaking to Moses. This is very good since they are afraid to listen (20:19). The people yield authority to Moses.

This is ambiguous for our current situation. Is the authority to be understood as being with Moses (the text) or leaders of the people? Obviously I have some opinions about this, but I'm going to defer the question for now and see what comes up.

The description of the tabernacle and its building has a bit of the character of "God said...and there was..." from Genesis 1, but the two events being separated by the incident of the golden calf adds a fascinating twist to this. God forgives his reprobate people, and they follow his commands precisely.

The incident of Korah's rebellion is nearly enough to make a Catholic of me. Korah's complaint -- "All the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them" (Numbers 16:3) -- sounds an awful lot like the priesthood of all believers. Against this God affirms the authority of Moses.

But perhaps this is relevant not to a three-tiered church, but to my earlier question about the authority of Moses (i.e. in the text), in opposition to the authority of the people of God simply as people of God. In that context, it could be an argument against experience as a source of authority. That is, the people of God do not have their own authority simply because they are people of God. They are still subject to God's appointed authority whether that be Moses or scripture (or, I have to add as at least a possibility for discussion, the Church).

Corruption of Scripture: An Aside

As a sidebar to my investigation of the Bible's portayal of God's authority, I wanted to think a bit about the idea of the corruption of scripture.

Bart Ehrman has a book titled The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. This is obviously a polemical title. It appeals to a paranoia in our culture. This idea of the orthodox corruption of scripture popped into my head tonight as I was reading Richard Nelson's The Historical Books. In the section I was reading, Nelson was talking about the historical development of biblical texts. Our modern idea of authorship is that of a single person sitting down and writing a book. But biblical books, Nelson says, tend to be products of a community over time. The text is tinkered with as needed before it reaches its canonical form. For most scholars, I take it, this is a commonplace.

So here's the thing. The title of Ehrman's book says that early orthodox Christians corrupted the scriptures. But I would claim that the orthodox community produced the scriptures. This is the way biblical books are "written", right? The community has a book that they use in their life of faith. Something isn't quite as the community believes it should be, so they fix it.

If we look at the biblical book, whatever it may be, as a book of faith meant to serve a community of faith then there is absolutely nothing wrong with the community tailoring that book to match its teaching. It's what we would expect. To say that the book was "corrupted" would seem to imply that there was an earlier time when an author produced a book that was flawless (dare I say "inerrant") in its portrayal of the earlier faith, and a later community with different faith changed it (thus introducing error).

The problem, I suspect, is that Ehrman wants to use the Bible as a historical source to establish facts about the early Christians, whereas the early Christians wanted to use it as a book of faith.

Obviously, if we were to start editing the Bible today to make it say what we wanted it to say, that would be a bit suspect. But at some point the process of redacting was not only permissible, but was in fact necessary to produce the optimal product. The question, I suppose, is what is the statute of limitations on making changes to Holy Scripture?

But I suspect this is a wrong approach to the question. More important is the intent. Is the Bible being changed to make it a more suitable source for winning an argument? (I think this is what Ehrman actually claims.) Or is it being tidied up to make it a more accurate reflection of the faith of the community?

God's Authority in the Exodus

Well, at this rate I should be through the Bible within a few years. Anyway...

In the story of the Exodus the whole theme of human action versus the will of God breaks into open conflict. In the first couple of chapters, we get more of what we saw in Genesis. God promises the increase of Israel. Pharaoh decrees that they be kept in check. Not only does God prevail (in part due to faithful human actions), but Pharaoh's very decree leads to the positioning of Moses for his future calling.

Fast forward to Moses in the desert and we see a different mode of God's authority -- one that I passed over with Abraham when God wanted to destroy Sodom and Gommorah -- dialogue! God wants Moses to go to Pharaoh to deliver God's people. Moses doesn't want to. But rather than imposing his will (as he will with Pharaoh) God talks to Moses about it. Ultimately, Moses (like Abraham before him) gets a concession.

Then Moses goes and speaks to Pharaoh. There we learn that God's people talking to unbelievers isn't the way God exerts authority over them -- at least not in this case. So now the behind-the-scenes God of the Joseph story steps forward for an all-out smackdown.

In the Passover narrative, we get for the first time a hint of scripture making a self-reference. I've been studiously avoiding consideration of the implication of the author writing with the intention of having authority, because I wanted to wait and consider what the text itself says about itself. Exodus 12 doesn't quite give the people scripture but there is the first explicit reference to future generations being told of the things that are happening.

So, in what way does the tradition established mean to exercise authority? It says, "when your children ask, 'What do you mean by this observance?' you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice of the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" (Ex. 12:26-27) So, the intended use of the tradition is to cause future generations to remember the story of what happened. The next sentence is interesting. Moses has just finished speaking, giving instructions for the establishment of this tradition. As soon as he finishes speaking the next word of the text is this: "And the people bowed down and worshipped."

As the exodus proper comes to a close, I see this pattern developing: God's authority among the people of God is exercised primarily through God's words, whereas God's authority among the other peoples of the world is exercised primarily through what happens. This isn't always the way it works. God's authority among the sons of Jacob in the Joseph sequence is exercised through providence, and God's authority against Moses is asserted in word as well as deed. But it seems like a general trend.

God's words to the people have so far had the following basic forms: teaching (Adam and Cain), promise (Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph), dialogue (Abraham and Moses), and narrative. Of these, the narrative is the form most explicitly intended to influence future generations, and the intended influence is simply remembering of the story.

The Stories of the Patriarchs

The stories of the partriarchs are somewhat less mythical in quality than the stories in Genesis 1-11, though the people involved are in many ways personification of later Israel (Jacob explicitly so). Curiously, they get precious little that could be characterized as "teaching" from God. Instead, the operative mode of God's authority in these stories is promise, though again with generous portions of providence.

The promises of God given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob aren't just information sprinkled into the narrative, they create the action. They are a means by which God brings his will to pass. I tend to think of Abraham as someone who heard from God all the time, but the text doesn't actually support this. Abraham only gets a few brief visits from God over the course of about 10 years and the few words he recieves must guide him.

But God isn't absent in between these theophanies. When Abram goes to Egypt and hands Sarai over to Pharaoh, God intervenes. I want to say "silently" but Pharaoh somehow knows why he suffered plagues. Likewise, when Abraham sends his servant to get a wife for Isaac, God acts without appearing.

The working out of Jacob's story is fasinating to me. While he's still in the womb, God gives Rebekah a promise concerning Jacob. Then Rebekah and Jacob lie, cheat and steal to bring about what God promised. Jacob's relationship with God is summed up in the incident where he wrestles to get a blessing. It seems to me God was determined to bless him either way, but at times the wrestling seems to unwittingly play into the will of God.

This theme finally bursts fully into view in the Joseph sequence. God reveals his will to Joseph in a dream. Everything in Joseph's life conspires against God's disclosed intentions, and it turns out all of it has turned out to bring about God's will.

So my conclusion is that in Genesis 12-50, the authority of God is exercised in two ways: divine promise and divine providence. As in chapters 1-11, God's authority in the world is seen primarily through direct action which come to pass regardless of human effort for or against them, but God's will enters individual lives through God's word.

The Authority of Scripture

I've just begun reading N.T. Wright's The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture. So far I've taken away from it two basic ideas:

1. The phrase "the authority of scripture" must be understood as shorthand for "the authority of God exercised through scripture."


2. A properly developed understanding of the authority of scripture must be based in scripture.

Because Wright intended this as a short book, he does not go through his usual meticulous effort of showing the work he did to arrive at his conclusions. It seems to me, therefore, that it might be an interesting exercise for me, in the sort of sloppy and off-hand way befitting a blog, to think through the Biblical texts a bit and reflect on what I see there with regard to how God's authority is exercised, and particularly with regard to scripture. I ask the reader to kindly participate in this experiment by questioning my evaluations and offering additional perspective.

With that I'll begin...

God's Authority in Genesis 1-11

I am of the school that sees Genesis 1-11 as a sort of overture to the rest of the Bible, and my view of these chapters will be colored accordingly. I see these stories as more or less idealized settings intended to isolate certain aspects of the God-human relationship.

If I were a scholar I suppose I might separately investigate the views presented by J,E,D, and P and so on, but instead I'm a blog writer so I'll cavalierly lump them all together. But I digress....

Genesis 1 presents a perfect view of God's authority. God said, "Let there be light" and there was light. In chapter 2, a sublty is introduced, namely creation's dependence on God, "no herb of the field had yet sprung up—-for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth." So what happens happens by God's word, and nothing happens without God's word.

Here also we get a first image of God's authority exercised with respect to man. God's authority is exercised in the form of a command given to the man. Reading this through the lens of Israel's later worldview, I'm inclined to view this as God giving torah to the man, not strictly a command but rather teaching (still an insufficient word to replace torah). And when the man and the woman disregard this torah, God exercises authority through consequences. In chapter 4, Cain also receives a kind of torah from God (verses 6 and 7). Cain disregards the torah and God resorts to consequences.

With less thorough examination, I'll conclude that in chapter's 5 through 11 God continues to exercise authority over creation rather indirectly through what happens to the people. I'm not quite ready to start building a four-legged stool by saying that these people find God's authority through experience. Rather God's authority is exercised more or less independently of the people's perception of it. For instance, God wants the people to fill the earth (9:1). When the people in Babel build their tower "so that we do not get scattered all over the world" (11:4) God acts directly to cause their scattering.

This last conclusion may seem irrelevant to understanding how we can perceive and respond to God's authority, but perhaps that's the wrong way to approach the question. What I'm really seeking is an understanding of how God's authority is actually exercised and what the role of scripture might be within that.

Obviously, we have no scripture yet present to the people of Genesis 1-11, but I'm noting the torah given to Adam and Cain as a potential model for God exercising authority through scripture.