Assurance of Things Hoped For

Reading the Biblical texts for this week, I see the weakness of my faith. I want to look to "an unfailing treasure in heaven" and to "be dressed for action and have [my] lamp lit." But I more often find myself identifying with Abraham, saying, "O Lord God, what will you give me?" For I have not seen the promise.

Sometimes I'm not even sure what the promise is. I look to the God who says "See, I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5), but I don't see everything new. O Lord God, what will you give me, for the world crumbles around me?

I happen to have been reading something today from John Zizioulas where he talks about the tension between the historical and eschatological models of the Church. The Church is on a mission from God in history, but we live at the end of time. That helps me make sense of it all. We're in history and beyond history at the same time.

And this is what the readings for the week offer me. "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Need encouragement? Here's a list of people who lived in the promise and never saw what they were hoping for. Thanks. That helps a lot.

But it does, really. It shows me that I'm not doing this wrong. I'm not (necessarily) looking for the wrong things. It's not going to be easy. This is our calling.

Busy Doing Nothing

Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.
-Mark 4:7

You may have noticed that I haven't posted much lately. That's because I've mostly had not much to say. It's been a busy summer. Too busy. I haven't been busy with the traditional "cares of the world" (money, work, etc.) but with things like vacations, camping trips and so on that are supposed to bring balance. Yet they've thrown me out of my rhythm and my spiritual life has suffered. I've drifted away from God. Time to refocus.

Hall of Fame Weekend

I went to Cooperstown this weekend to see Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Me, Cal and 75,000 of our closest friends celebrated. It was magic.

I'm a life-long Orioles fan, and so even though it took me a train, two planes, a car and a minivan to get there, I didn't want to miss this. The Hall of Fame induction ceremony is one of rare events that takes place outside of time. In time -- during the baseball season -- I follow the Orioles; I complain about things like how lousy their relief pitching is and why firing Sam Perlozzo won't fix their problems; I watch to see if some happiness can be salvaged as they take two out of three from the Yankees; I suffer the indignity of watching them fall farther and farther out of the pennant race. But this Sunday for one shining day all of that was put aside. There was Cal. There was Earl Weaver. There was Jim Palmer. There was Eddie Murray. There was Brooks Robinson. There was Frank Robinson. For this one day, the Orioles were great again. Like I said, magic. And, oh yeah, there were 49 other members of the Hall of Fame there too.

A few other random notes on my trip:

• I felt sort of bad for Tony Gwynn. You only get inducted into the Hall of Fame once, and Gwynn was fairly overshadowed by all the attention on Cal, not least because of the Hall's proximity to Baltimore.


• Because of weather, Cal and Tony's induction was moved up to the beginning of the ceremony, ahead of a segment to honor long-time Hall of Famer Bobby Doerr, and the presentation of career achievement awards to Kansas City broadcaster Denny Matthews and St. Louis sportswriter Rick Hummel. Perhaps predictably, about two thirds of the crowd walked out after Cal was done giving his acceptance speech. It was quite disgraceful. I felt especially bad for Bobby Doerr, who was speaking while this mass exodus took place. I couldn't hear a word he said.


• On the way home, I had a layover in Charlotte, NC. The "Simply Books" bookstore at the Charlotte airport has quite a selection of Christian books, but I was more than a little flumoxxed by the fact that both Joel Osteen's Your Best Life Now and Jim Wallis' God's Politics showed up on their "recommended" shelf. I'm all for having a well-rounded perspective, but I can't imagine two books with more diametrically opposed visions of Christianity.

Judging the Word of God

So now I'm reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall. Through his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis, I was rather unimpressed. He had a couple of sharp ideas about knowing God as Creator vs. knowing God apart from creation, but a lot of it was very philosophical. It sort of reminded me of St. Augustine's theories of memory in the Confessions. That is, I couldn't make any sense of it.

But when he gets into the Yahwist material, his commentary really comes alive. This is the Bonhoeffer I've come to love. When he gets to the serpent's question to Eve ("Did God really say...?"), he is at the heart of discipleship. Here's what Bonhoeffer has to say about judging the concrete word of God:

What is the real evil in this question? It is not that a question as such is asked. It is that this question already contains the wrong answer. It is that with this question the basic attitude of the creature toward the Creator comes under attack. It requires humankind to sit in judgment on God's word instead of simply listening to it and doing it. And this is achieved by proposing that, on the basis of an idea, a principle, or some prior knowledge about God, humankind should now pass judgment on the concrete word of God. But where human beings use a principle, an idea of God, as a weapon to fight against the concrete word of God, there they are from the outset already right; at that point they have become God's master, they have left the path of obedience, they have withdrawn from being addressed by God.

This is brilliant. He exposes the human tendency to put ideas about God above God. My trouble is, what is this concrete word of God? Many would say it is obviously the Bible, but it seems to me that ideas about the inerrancy of the Bible can and do become precisely the sort of idea or principle that we use to judge God. Specifically, when anyone says they are strictly following the Bible as the word of God, they are almost always in the position that Bonhoeffer here describes as "from the outset already right." That is, their position is fixed, and the word of God becomes a prop to demonstrate the rightness of their position.

On the other hand, the liberal position which tends to take a principle like "love your neighbor as yourself" as the baseline for all Christian behavior fits directly in the pattern Bonhoeffer lays out. We take this position of knowing that God is love and use it as the standard by which we judge God. If God doesn't in our estimation meet this standard, then we put aside what God says, and "at that point [we] have become God's master."

This is where the story of Abraham and Isaac comes to the fore. Suppose Abraham had said, "Surely God would never ask me to kill Isaac. Therefore, I will not do what God seems to have asked of me." But Abraham is put forward as a model of faith precisely because he obeyed God rather than judging God's word. But notice that Abraham did not read this command in scripture.

So what does that leave us? Adam and Eve and Abraham in these examples have a direct word from God. It is precisely this sort of word that Abraham obeys and this sort of word that the serpent calls into question. But do we receive this sort of word from God? Certainly not in the literal Biblical sense, but I think we do receive leading from God. That is, I'm pretty sure from time to time God is leading me. But God doesn't lead me in such a way that I could set out a systematic ethics or set doctrinal policy. It's more a leading to a direct act like, "Help this person" or "listen to what she is saying."

And here, I think I've come into the problem of the institutional church. The institutional church necessarily sets policies and principles which we must abide by, but when the direction in which we are led to act comes into conflict with the leading we feel from God (I don't think I need to give anyone in the ELCA an example) then we must decide for ourselves whether it is right to obey God or obey men.

But what I get out of all of this is that while we do need guidelines and principles, we must be prepared to drop them at a moment's notice to obey the leading of God in any direction whatsoever.

Here's what Bonhoeffer says immediately following what I quoted above:

In other words, in this question what is possible is played off against what is reality, and what is possible undermines what is reality. In the relation of human beings to God, however, there are no possibilities: there is only reality. There is no "let me first..."; there is only the commandment and obedience.

So what do you think? Am I understanding this correctly?

God in History and in Creation

I was on vacation last week and did a lot of reading, so I've had more ideas rushing through my head than I've had time to blog. This post is a bit of compressed backlog.

Two books I read last week were Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath and J. Philip Newell's The Book of Creation. I paired them intentionally, as I thought they'd have a similar mood.

It's a bit odd reading a Jewish book on the Sabbath as a Christian, like an outsider looking in, but Heschel always has such brilliant insights that I'm willing to accept such a position to listen to what he has to say. Right from the prologue he blew me away with the idea that God exists in time moreso than in space. Listen:

Even religions are frequently dominated by the notion that the deity resides in space, with particular localities like mountains, forests, trees or stones, which are, therefore, singled out as holy places; the deity is bound to a particular land; holiness a quality associated with things of space, and the primary question is: Where is the god? There is much enthusiasm from the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit.

Then I read Newell's The Book of Creation, which happens to be precisely about finding God in nature. Newell's book is an introduction to Celtic spirituality by way of a meditation on the seven days of creation in Genesis 1:1-2:4. It's very good overall, but in the shadow of Heschel's book, it left me with a certain disatisfaction -- namely, the God that Newell finds in nature tends to be "God-in-general" and not particularly the God of Christianity. He mentions Christ occaissionally, and even points to the Incarnation, but it's not really central to his thought.

On the seventh day he says:

The seven days of Genesis, as we have noted, are not a chronological account of the emergence of the universe in the past but a meditation on the ever-present mytsery of creation. The life of creation is a theophany of God. It is a visible expression of the One who is essentially invisible, an intelligible sign of the One who is beyond knowledge. Just as the first day points to the light that is always at the heart of life, so the seventh reflects the stillness that is part of God's ongoing creativity.

I don't want to knock this too much. It's a very solid theology of nature, and in the end I do agree that nature points us to God. But Heschel convinced me that you can't really have the blessing of the seventh day without the God who blessed the seventh day. The blessing, the very God we are experiencing, is necessarily tied to the historical event. I don't mean to hereby embrace seven-day creationism (nor do I think Heschel does), but ultimately the creation story doesn't tell us anything about God-in-particular if it isn't telling us about God's historical act of creation.

At least that's what I think tonight.

Vatican Remains Catholic!

BBC World News had a headline today which read, "Vatican text angers Protestants". I generally like BBC News, but this is bare-faced sensationalism. A more appropriate headline might have been something like "Vatican Continues to Affirm Catholic Theology" but I suppose it would be hard to justify having a "news" story about that. It almost would have to follow, "Our top story tonight....Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

I read the full text of the Vatican document and there is absolutely nothing even remotely new about it. If this indeed "angers Protestants" then those Protestants ought to be lining up outside Catholic seminaries every day in protest, because this is strictly everyday Catholic ecclesiology.

In summary, "It is possible, according to Catholic doctrine, to affirm correctly that the Church of Christ is present and operative in the churches and ecclesial Communities not yet fully in communion with the Catholic Church, on account of the elements of sanctification and truth that are present in them...[but]...These ecclesial Communities which, specifically because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood, have not preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery cannot, according to Catholic doctrine, be called 'Churches' in the proper sense."

Shocking...absolutely shocking.

Mission and Adversity

Kelly Fryer wrote an excellent piece Friday on the need to remember our mission as a Church in the midst of distractions such as the Bradley Schmeling case and the related disputes. Kelly proposed what she calls the "Jan and Marcia" (JAM) plan to deal with this. Based on a Brady Bunch episode, her plan calls for metaphorically drawing a line down the middle of the ELCA and letting both sides go about their separate business with shared resources until they realize how much they need each other.

As I said in the comments there, this reminded me of a saying I heard a few years ago from David Tiede --"The Holy Spirit is a disruptive influence in the Church." Dr. Tiede developed this thesis based on his study of Acts, and I keep seeing that it's true. The Holy Spirit doesn't seem to like to let us get settled. And so we face adversity and the Holy Spirit works in the midst of the adversity to make amazing things happen.

I've been reading a biography of John Wesley. As late as 1789 Wesley was vigorously maintaining that he had no intention of separating from the Church of England. But as early as 1739 he was appointing lay people to preach and by 1784 he took it upon himself to ordain priests to send to America. His justification for these actions? It was necessary in order to spread the gospel.

Wesley's case provides an inspiring example of how setting mission ahead of ecclesiology can prepare the way for great works of the Holy Spirit. The actions of St. John's Lutheran Church in Atlanta as they continue to support Pastor Schmeling is also an inspiring example. In his July 5 statement to the press, Pastor Schmeling said, "The good news for today is that we can now return to the ministry and mission that we have been called to do." Good stuff -- get to work and let the chips fall where they may.

Community

One of the things I've become more aware of since I starting riding my bike to work is the layout of neighborhoods. I'm always looking for new routes to find flatter roads with less traffic and it leads me into places I wouldn't usually go. There's a lot of new housing along my route and the thing I've found is that new housing developments are specifically designed not to have through streets. You go in and find yourself in a maze of side streets and cul de sacs and more often than not end up having to come back out to the same place you went in.

At first I thought this must be some kind of metaphor for the individualistic isolationism of American society closing in the family unit while closing out everything else. But as I thought more about it (biking gives you a lot of time to think) and considered how it works in my own neighborhood, I changed my mind.

I don't live on a cul de sac, but my street does loop back to the street it starts on. No one has any reason to use this street unless they live there. But the effect is that I know more of my neighbors here than anywhere I've lived. We're closed in but we're closed in together, and it makes me wonder if perhaps borders are necessary for community.

Real Christians

One of the remarkable things I've come across in reading about the life of John Wesley is that, even while he still saw Methodism as a movement within the Anglican Church, Wesley was frequently criticized as "gathering churches out of churches." Wesley's reply was something along the lines of, "You don't really think all the people on the Church of England membership roles are Christians, do you?"

That is, Wesley saw his task as finding nominal Christians and prodding them on to becoming "real Christians" (his term).

There's a lot of bickering that goes on in many Christian circles over who is a "real Christian" and who isn't. Certain conservatives point fingers at liberals and say they aren't real Christians because they don't believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. Some liberals point fingers at conservatives and say they aren't real Christians because they don't put enough emphasis on compassion.

Wesley's idea of a "real Christian" probably seemed a lot like that to his contemporaries, but he had a very sound basis. For Wesley, a "real Christian" was someone who had been converted to saving faith by the work of the Holy Spirit.

A nominal Christian might be someone who tried to live a good and moral life. He might go to church and receive the sacraments regulary. He might even be very zealous in his practice and preaching of Christianity. But, said Wesley, if this person hadn't been the beneficiary of the work of the Holy Spirit converting him to faith, he wasn't yet a real Christian.

This is very sound in theory, though I can't imagine how it could be anything other than contentious in practice -- and it was. And yet there's something breathtaking, even in reading it as history, about someone being willing to stand up and say, not everything is right in our churches.

I've referred before to David Tiede's maxim that "The Holy Spirit is a disruptive influence in the Church," and I see this as yet another application of that truth.

Imagine if someone were to go around in your average Lutheran congregation suggesting that not everyone in the pews every week really knew Jesus. Such a person would quickly find themselves pointed toward the door. But wouldn't it be true?

I'm reminded of Kierkegaard's parable of a fire in a vaudeville theatre, where the only person who know about the fire is dressed in a clown suit, and the more frantically he tells people there's a fire, the more everyone laughs.

Justice

This may be the post where you conclude that I've lost my mind.

Following a theme from my last post, I've been contemplating the nature of justice. In American culture justice is generally understood as punishment for wrongdoing. Justice is found when the guilty receive equal retribution for what they have done. Not surprisingly we read this understanding of justice into the Bible, and hence we get theories of the atonement where "God's perfect justice" requires that there must be a punishment for sin. This, of course, is not a new development.

What is a relatively new development is the recognition in certain quarters that this isn't the predominant Biblical meaning of justice. It's easy to read the above meaning into the Bible, because it fits well in instances like "David administered justice and equity to all his people" (2 Sam. 8:15), but it's not such a good fit for other uses such as "seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow" (Isaiah 1:17). I'd like to say that the Biblical model of justice means relieving the poor and needy of the burden upon them, but it doesn't seem to be quite that simple -- almost, but not quite.

As a simple start, I did a search for the word "justice" in the Bible. I think that in every instance in this search, a case can be made that the idea of relieving oppression fits better than the idea of punishing guilt. But this could be a trick of the translation.

I tried to get into the Hebrew a little bit, because the concept appears primarily in the Old Testament, but I don't know any Hebrew and am completely reliant on language tools, so my conclusions will be very tentative.

It seems that the primary Hebrew word translated as "justice" is "mishpat". It's translated as "justice" more than any other single word, but this only accounts for 118 of the 419 occurances of this word in the Bible. So what does "mishpat" mean?

It apparently means "justice" but also "judgment" -- it's what the Israelites hoped for from God to vindicate them against their enemies. One interesting use is in Joshua 6:15 where it is translated as "manner" as in "[they] marched around the city in the same manner seven times." In Judges 13:12, it is used to ask about the "rule of life" intended for Samson. Often it is translated "ordinance". And so I get the sense that it means "the way things ought to be" or something like that.

This, of course, leads me right back to the ambiguity between justice as retribution and justice as vindication. Vindication for some people has harsh consequences for others.

The reason this troubles me is that if we approach things from the perspective of justice as providing help to those in need, then the American judicial system has the effect of being almost the exact opposite of justice. That is, it punishes the poor.

We tell ourselves that it's only the "bad people" who are punished, but this is a lie that we have bought into -- the lie that criminals are bad people and we are good people. Now I know that for the most part the people in our jails have done some very bad things. They've hurt people much more than the average sinner would even imagine doing. The problem is that socio-economic factors are just too good as predictors of criminal behavior.

At the beginning of The Great Gatsby, the narrator relates some advice he received from his father, "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." St. Francis of Assisi said, "If God had given the greatest criminal the graces He has given me, he would have used them to better advantage than I have done."

How far can I push this?

The Good Samaritan

The parable of the good Samaritan is one of the most loved stories of Christianity. It's well known that the story loses some of its edge because we don't feel the tension between Jews and Samaritans. What's not considered as often is the worthiness of the victim.

Ask most Christians, and I suspect you'd find that they have a sort of sentimentalized idea of the man who fell into the hands of robbers. He's an innocent victim, and so we have a soft spot for him. But what if he had been involved in a gang fight instead? Does that change the story?

I'm trying to get my head around the idea of grace and its relationship to the general human tendency to only want to see grace given to those who are worthy of it. I mentioned in a previous post that religious types like repentant sinners, but not sinners.

I think of the story of Jean Valjean and Monseigneur Myriel in Les Miserables as an exploration of the parable of the good Samaritan. Valjean is starving and sleeping on the street. Myriel takes him in. For many this would complete the parallel to the parable. But when Valjean steals Myriel's silverware, is caught and is returned to Myriel, Myriel covers his crime and gives him his candelesticks as well. This pushes the parable of the good Samaritan to the level of loving one's enemies and repaying good for evil. It shows, more than Walter Wink's nonsense about putting people in an awkward position, what it means to go the extra mile.

So trying to put this into my own life, suppose I'm riding my bike down the street and I come across a car pulled off to the side of the road. The driver yells a request for help. It's nothing extraordinary to stop and help him. It's the remnant of chivalry in our society that makes us want to help those in trouble. But now suppose that I discover that he's drunk and the reason he needs help is that he ran into a curb and blew out a tire. Do I still help him? Or do I call the police and report him for drunk driving? What does grace look like in this scenario? What would Jesus do?

Five Things I Dig About Jesus

David tagged me for the Five Things I Dig About Jesus meme. I found that I had to really put some effort into this to give my honest, personal response and not just the usual rhetoric. I seem to have ended up with some of the usual rhetoric anyway, but these really are things I dig about Jesus.

1. He hangs out with unpopular people. Growing up, I was one of those not-cool, not-rich, not-athletic, not-terribly-clean kids that nobody really wanted to talk to and a few people actively avoided. And I dig that Jesus doesn't have a problem with that.

2. He touches unclean people. Unclean people are a step beyond unpopular people. There's something about them that causes even good people to be afraid to come near them. I think people with HIV are probably the best example we've got today. If we say that Jesus was miraculously immune to their diseases, we miss the point. I dig that Jesus would touch the people no one else would come near.

3. He welcomes sinners. Lots of religious types are enthusiastic about welcoming repentant sinners, but I don't think Jesus made that distinction. I think he welcomed real sinners, active sinners. Again, if we rush ahead to where he changes their life, we're missing the point. I dig that Jesus isn't put off by sin.

4. He offends religious types. By religious types, I mean those people whose self-image is tied up in the fact that they've got this religion thing figured out and they're doing it right. It's hard to point out where they're wrong, because I'd have to have it figured out to do so. But I don't trust them, and I dig that Jesus rubs them the wrong way.

5. He isn't afraid of the government. I'm a long-time "question authority" advocate, though at times I've been doing it for the wrong reasons. Jesus does it for the right reasons. He sees that those who put themselves in places of authority aren't really the final authority. He doesn't go out of his way to flaunt this, but he knows it and lives it. I dig that about Jesus.

Immigration and Sacrifice

I visited a United Church of Christ congregation this week, and the sermon was almost entirely on the issue of immigration. The pastor said he had intended to give a feel good sermon about God as Father but the events of the week didn't allow for that.

Last week a Del Monte plant was raided in Portland. There were 167 illegal immigrants arrested and sent to a deportation facility. The incident led to a wide spread panic among immigrant workers in the community. For instance, schools were reporting abnormal absentee rates as immigrant parents were afraid to let their children leave home.

The pastor's sermon hit some of the usual points about how those of us present were all descended from immigrants and so on. He said he wasn't so naive as to think we could simply open our borders -- there were issues of civil order and economics which couldn't be ignored -- but he was hopeful that if we truly intend to we could work out a just solution. Overall, it was a pretty good sermon.

I'm much more naive than this pastor. I don't see why we can't just open our borders. I'm not suggesting we close down the customs department completely -- by all means keep asking people why they're coming into the country -- but I don't see why we need to turn away anyone who is coming here looking for work.

People say that it can't be done because of the impact it would have on our economy. The cost of social services is often mentioned. I don't doubt that it would cost us a great deal, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. What it comes down to is this, the people of our country are willing to offer help to the poor in neighboring countries, but only so long as it doesn't hurt.

I would like to suggest that the situation of the wealthy United States closing its borders to Mexico's poor is a direct acting out of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Lazarus lay at the rich man's gate and longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table. And I'm sure the rich man would have been happy to let Lazarus have what fell from the table -- just so he didn't have to give Lazarus something from his own plate.

Ghost Rider

I rented "Ghost Rider" this week. It's not a bad flick, if you like movies based on comic books, which I do. Ghost Rider was one of my favorites as a kid, but I had forgotten pretty much everything about his story.

It's not a bad back story. It might seem a bit cliche, but legends like this need to build on fundamental archetypes, so you ought to expect that. It's presented as a recurring myth -- a man sells his soul to the devil and as a result he's the devil's bounty hunter. OK, so this is cool, we get a little pseudo-theology in our comic book movie. Then one of these ghost riders decides not to do the devil's bidding. That's the back story.

The demonology of the movie is a little confused as there are some issues over the devil and his son having varying strengths and weaknesses, not to mention the son being a little more evil but for some reaosn being described as not having fallen. But all of that easily fits in the suspension of disbelief any movie asks of the viewer.

So the protagonist, after becoming the latest ghost rider, finds himself struggling with the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he can get a second chance, and he decides to use his powers for good. OK, so we've got a nice redemption/grace thing going there, but somehow the story can't avoid the vengence model of religion.

The Ghost Rider's greatest power is his "penance stare" -- as his opponent looks into his eyes, he feels the pain of all the innocent souls he has wounded and is reduced to a quivering mass and presumably remanded to hell.

In the final scene, when the devil is about to release him from his curse, he refuses, informing the devil that he intends to fight against him, saying that whenever innocent blood is spilled he'll be there fighting fire with fire.

So...the Ghost Rider will chase down the wicked with hellfire and damn them by revealing their sins to them. Excuse me? How is that different from the devil? It all seems to come down to the fact that people just aren't willing to go past the idea that God likes innocent people and wants to see bad people punished. A motorcycle named "Grace" isn't going to fix this storyline.

Summary: fun movie, bad theology.

Music Meme

Via Lutherpunk.

Disclaimer: My MP3 player has a lot of storage, and I went with a play list that includes everything I have on there for any reason. I can't be held responsible for the quality of these selections.

Why are you taking yet another shuffle quiz?
Song: But Anyway
Artist: Blues Traveler
Comment: Why not?

What’s currently in your fridge?
Song: Still Remains
Artist: Stone Temple Pilots
Comment: It's kind of green and fuzzy. Whatever it is, it's been in there for a long time.

Your biggest nightmare?
Song: T-R-O-U-B-L-E
Artist: Travis Tritt
Comment: I better not comment on this.

What place would you like to visit?
Song: Down In It
Composer: Nine Inch Nails
Comment: Actually, I'm not sure I would want to visit there.

A reason to commit suicide?
Song: Keep On Loving You
Artist: REO Speedwagon
Comment: It becomes publicly known that I have REO Speedwagon on my MP3 player.

Why are we here?
Song: The Approaching of the Disco Void
Composer: John Fahey
Comment: Someone has to stop disco.

Something you never dared to say to anyone…?
Song: Custard Pie
Artist: Led Zeppelin
Comment: OK, so when I actually said it it didn't really make any sense to anyone anyway.

One thing the world really doesn’t need?
Song: Hellhound On My Trail
Composer: Robert Johnson
Comment: No one needs a hellhound on their trail.

What’s your biggest unfulfilled wish?
Song: Daniel
Artist: Elton John
Comment: Clear all the sappy music off my MP3 player.

If you could invent something, what would it be?
Song: Cross-Eyed Mary
Composer: Jethro Tull
Comment: Rock and roll flute. Oh wait, someone's already done that.

The last thing you say before you die?
Song: Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon
Artist: Urge Overkill
Comment: Hopefully, I'll be saying this to an as yet unborn granddaughter or great-granddaughter, and not one of my daughters, who are growing up fast.

What’s your destiny?
Song: Never
Artist: Gravity Kills
Comment: I refuse to face destiny.

What do you do when you’re alone in an elevator?
Song: Strength Beyond Strength
Composer: Pantera
Comment: I marvel at the fact that I am the strongest man in the elevator.

Why do people go fishing?
Song: Baby Come Back
Artist: Player
Comment: It beats listening to 70's music compilations.

What would you do with your slaves?
Song: Watching You
Composer: Melissa Etheridge
Comment: You just can't trust those slaves.

Is there a man on the moon?
Song: Not Dark Yet
Artist: Bob Dylan
Comment: I'll look when it's dark, and then I'll know.

What does hell look like?
Song: Lil' Devil
Artist: The Cult
Comment: I swear, that's just what came up.

About what would you like to write a book?
Song: Cotton Eye Joe
Artist: Rednex
Comment: I'd write a book about sex and violins.

The best thing ever is…?
Song: So Alone
Artist: Offspring
Comment: Sartre was right, "Hell is other people."

Why did the chicken cross the road?
Song: Go Outside and Drive
Artist: Blues Traveler
Comment: He was parked on the other side of the road.

Why do you listen to music?
Song: Jumpin' Jack Flash
Composer: The Rolling Stones
Comment: 'Cause it's alright now. In fact, it's a gas.

What do you do when you’re alone and nobody’s watching?
Song: Coma
Artist: Coroner
Comment: If nobody's watching, am I really here?

Why are other people so stupid?
Song: Whores
Artist: Jane's Addiction
Comment: Sorry, I seem to have poor impulse control today. That just came out.

Last thing you ate?
Song: 99 Ways to Die
Artist: Megadeth
Comment: Remember that green fuzzy stuff in my fridge?

Why is grass green?
Song: Wonderful One
Artist: NewSong
Comment: Grass is green because God is love!

Your phone is ringing, but who’s on the other end?
Song: (I'm Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear
Composer: Blondie
Comment: It's my wife. No one else calls me. Really.

What should you stop doing?
Song: First Time
Composer: Styx
Comment: I should stop admitting to the sappy music on my MP3 player.

A word of advice to the readers of this quiz?
Song: Can't Get It Out of My Head
Artist: Electric Light Orchestra
Comment: Too much music clouds your thinking.

Wesley and the Nature of Faith

In beginning Kenneth Collins' book John Wesley: A Theological Journey, I've received new input to my recent exploration of the nature of faith. Apparently, Wesley was beginning to explore this same territory at the age of 22.

In a letter to his mother in July of 1725, Wesley wrote, "As I understand faith to be an assent to any truth upon rational grounds, I don't think it possible without perjury to swear I believe anything, unless I have rational grounds for my persuasion."

Collins notes that this represents an early stage of Wesley's thinking on the matter. At this stage, he was basically equating faith with belief that some proposition is true. As I've said in recent posts, I think this is a very common error -- an error committed by believers and opponents of religion alike.

John Wesley, however, had no ordinary mother, as is perhaps apparent already from the fact that he was writing about theology in a personal letter to her. In her response to this letter, Susanna Wesley wrote, "You are somewhat mistaken in your notion of faith....The true measure of faith is the authority of the revealer, the weight of which always holds proportion with our conviction of his ability and integrity. Divine faith is an assent to whatever God has revealed to us, because he has revealed it."

Paraphrasing to try to wrap my mind around what she's saying, I think this means that we don't believe the specifics of our religion, for instance, because we have been convinced of them by rational argument, but rather we believe them because we have previously accepted the authority of God and we take these things to be revealed to us by God. I like this, though it has some problems.

In the previous example I was working with of the Mormon missionary coming to believe the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates while on mission, I would analyze it this way. He initially accepted the story without quite believing it. He granted it on credit as it were. Then later, seeing God at work in his life, he tapped into a new sort of faith in God's authority and accounted this as making good on the previous credit. And so his faith subsumed belief in the story of the golden plates.

The problem is, how do we make the connection between faith in God's authority, what God has revealed to us, and the foundational stories of our religion? Does God actually reveal to us that these stories are true? If not, why do we act as if this were so?

Mulling this over I was reminded of some remarks Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has made on mystical visions. He says that while Christians who have mystical visions will typically have a vision of Jesus or perhaps of Mary, when a Jew has a mystical vision, it frequently takes the form of Ezekiel's chariot. This is fascinating, but it makes sense. Our preconceptions, it would seem, influence the way God reveals Godself to us.

Back to Wesley, after sharing John Wesley's initial conception of faith and Susanna Wesley's correction (which miraculously her 22-year old son seems to have accepted), author Kenneth Collins points the way forward. Collins writes, "It would take several years before Wesley would comprehend all three elements of the nature of faith aright: as assent, as trust, and as a spiritual sense."

I take this to be a traiditional Methodist view of faith, though it was one with which I wasn't familiar. Assent and trust I recognize as two parts of the traditional Reformed definition of faith, along with knowledge (notitia, assensus and fiducia). In typical Lutheran fashion, I tend to throw all the weight on the fiducia. But this "spiritual sense" was something new to me. As Collins describe it, faith is itself taken to be "an organ of spiritual knowledge" -- a way of hearing God.

I'm not quite sure what I think of this. On first glance it seems to me that this is a foreign element being introduced, as if faith is being conflated with its effects. And yet, it's a powerful concept and would perhaps begin to answer some of the questions I've raised above. I'll have to dwell on it a bit more, I think.

I'm Not Really a Lutheran

I was at a celebration banquet my congregation was holding a month or so ago and as I listened to the long-time members talk about the life stories and how they intertwined with the church I came to the realization, I'm not really a Lutheran.

Don't get me wrong. I think like a Lutheran. I love the Lutheran hymns and liturgies. I was baptized as a Lutheran. I was married in the same Lutheran church where my parents and grandparents had been married and where I had grown up and been taught how to be a Christian.

But I'm not Norwegian or Swedish or German or a descendent of any of the other traditional Lutheran ethnic groups. I joke that I come from a long line of Irish Lutherans. My English/Irish grandfather somehow made his way into a Lutheran church (he was at least Pennsylvanian, so I've got that going for me), and that's how I came into Lutheranism. But as I sat at the banquet and listened to the Norwegians talk about their Norwegian culture, I realized, I'm not really one of these people.

Again, I love Lutherans. I'm endlessly thankful that they let me hang around with them. I've even taken to making an odd joke about lutefisk now and then, though I've never eaten the stuff and don't intend to. Still, I can't help feeling like I'm a wolf that was raised by sheep.

I was born on Reformation Day, so I've got that going for me too, but -- are you ready for this? -- my middle name is Wesley. It's a family name. The side of my family that weren't Irish Lutherans were Methodists -- at least until my great-grandmother lost her bid for control of the congregation to another woman, so my grandfather tells me.

Now I'm not planning to become Methodist any time soon -- I'm quite happy as a resident alien among the Lutherans -- but I've recently come to the realization that I'm almost completely ignorant of the life and theology of John Wesley. So I picked up Kenneth Collins' John Wesley: A Theological Journey and an anthology of Wesley's writings. I started Collins' book last night. So far, I've learned that I also know next to nothing about the history of the Church of England after the 16th century.

What Penn Jillette Believes

I was thumbing through my copy of the NPR "This I Believe" anthology this morning, when I came across Penn Jillette's essay, There Is No God. Penn's one of those in-your-face kind of atheists who find belief in God to be foolish and unhelpful (at best), but he does it without the pretended expertise of a Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins.

It's a short essay, and so easy to respond to, so I thought I'd take a look. But rather than crow around about where he's wrong, I'd like to look at it from the perspective of seeing what religious faith looks like to an outsider.

Jillette says, "anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God." This seems to be a roadblock to faith -- thinking that faith has anything to do with evidence for something or ignoring lack of evidence. But on the whole, I think the basic orientation here might be right. Faith cannot begin with love of God, but neither can we look for it. It's discovered, and discovered within ourselves even. And though it clears develops in response to experience, I don't think it can be properly said to involve discovery of evidence that something is true.

Jillette says, "Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories." So by grace? But this is a common complaint of opponents of religion. Because God forgives, they say, believers care less about their shortcomings. I don't think this is a theoretical deduction. I think it's derived from observation, and the Christian community should be stung by this. But maybe this is the worst of it, when we proclaim forgiveness of sins, we proclaim forgiveness of other people's sins and say it isn't going to happen until they come to God. We've taken ourselves out of the forgiveness loop, and while he doesn't say this, I think this is the key to Jillette's talk about forgiveness -- he knows that he will be forgiven (or not) in the same way that he forgives others (or not). Didn't Jesus say that?

Jillette says, "Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures." I believe in God, and I can do that. But again this isn't a specious criticism. I linked to an essay a while ago called What Christians Don't Do. The essence was that Christians don't dialogue. They aren't open to other truths. This is less true in some circles since the late 60's, but it remains true that at nearly every strata of the liberal-conservative spectrum, the liberal side is seen as being too accepting of outside ideas -- at least until you get to the point where they're to closed to traditional Christian ideas, but even there the dynamic looks the same.

Jillette says, "I don't travel in circles where people say, 'I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.'" He means this in terms of listening to, and participating in, rational argument. It's a reduction of faith to believing that certain facts are true, and this reduction is happening on the side of the person of faith!

Jillette says, "Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future." The first jab here is obviously a commentary on how truly awful most religious attempts to answer the problem of evil really are, but beyond that, do we really come across as not thinking we can do something about suffering? I was a bit taken aback by the idea. But then I remembered something my wife shared with me. She's been involved in a discussion group recently, and when the question of recycling came up, a Christian said that ultimately only God can fix the planet and if God doesn't want to we shouldn't waste our time trying. Ouch!

In his Ethics Bonhoeffer says, "If the hungry man does not attain to faith, then the guilt falls on those who refused him bread." If the skeptic does not attain to faith, perhaps the guilt falls on those who made faith so unappealing. I think maybe it's time to stop refuting the opponents of religion and start listening to them. While their arguments may seem off-base to us, we should think long and hard about why they are making these argument.

I'm a Book Moocher

A week or two ago I came across an entry over at Eating Words confessing that he is a book moocher. After thoughtful reflection, I must now confess that I too am a book moocher. In fact, I highly recommend it.

Check out bookmooch.com. The way it works is this, you sign up for a free account. You list the books you have that you're willing to give away. For every book you list, you get a tenth of a point. For every book you give away, you get one point. For each point you have, you can mooch a book. The only cost is the cost of mailing other people your books.

To me, this is very cool. I love to get books. I love to have books. I have six bookcases full of books and with books stacked on top of the bookcases, piled up on my dresser and night stand, in drawers, etc. So I need to get rid of some of my books so I can get new ones. Book Mooch is perfect for this. It gives me an outlet for getting rid of my books that I can feel good about, and I get more books in the process.

I signed up this morning and listed ten books, so I could get one back. Before I was done listing my books, some guy in Washington mooched three of them. A woman in Iowa mooched another one an hour or so later. (There's a feature where the site sends you an e-mail when someone offers a book on your wishlist.)

So, on my first day as a book moocher, I mooched Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom, The Early Church by Henry Chadwick, God & Human Suffering by Douglas John Hall, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil by Heiko Oberman and The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, while giving away four books that were just taking up space on my shelves. Not a bad day's mooching.

Faith, Part 2

Lee's post today on Religious Myths has me visiting the topic of faith again. He's reading Keith Ward's book Is Religion Dangerous? and considering, among other things, how literally (or not) ancient people understood their religions. This naturally relates to the discussion from my previous post about Mormons and how their faith relates to the story of Joseph Smith.

In the PBS show on the Mormons, there was an interview with archaeologist Michael Coe, whose field of knowledge includes shamanism. According to Coe shamans generally begin their work implicitly understanding that they are "faking it" (his words) and then gradually come to believe that they are speaking to God. So Coe thinks this is what happened with Smith -- "that he didn't believe this at all, that he was out to impress, but he got caught up in the mythology that he created."

On the whole I think this is a reasonably plausible explanation. While Coe describes himself as "irreligious" he does seem to have some sense for the deeper significance of this connection that is made between the initial "faking it" and the eventual conviction, even if he thinks its a false conviction. And I think this is part of the path of faith.

In my previous post I referred to a Mormon who said he wasn't sure he believed the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates until he went out on mission. And while on mission, he became convinced it was true. He came to faith. I don't think the timing of this is insignificant. There's nothing about a missionary journey that's going to convince you of the historical truth of the story, but there is definitely something about a missionary journey that can convince you that God is still at work in the world, and if you're a Mormon to begin with, this is likely to bolster your faith in the foundational story of Mormonism.

People simply do not come to faith, any kind of faith, from a distance. It's a hands on thing. I carry around a quote from St. Athanasius and pull it out frequently. Athanasius said that if we want to understand the writings of the holy apostles we must seek to live as they lived. On her blog today Kelly Fryer talked about where the apostles encountered God. She says, "it wasn't in small group Bible study! They met God out on the road, in the city streets, by the lakeshore, in the home of strangers, 'out there' as they were loving and serving their neighbors!"

So this is where we meet God. This is where faith develops. As a Christian, I'm not likely to stumble across any new definitive evidence for the ressurection. But it as I live the Christian life in the way it's been handed down, as I put my would-be faith into action, my would-be faith becomes deep faith as I discover that what they've told me about the blessing of serving others is true and I discover that I do meet Christ when I feed the hungry and welcome strangers.

Bonhoeffer said, "Only those who believe can obey, and only those who obey can believe." But obviously there must be a way in somewhere. I would like to suggest that the way in is that you "sort of believe" and then through active living of the faith you come to really believe.

Faith

A few weeks ago, PBS ran a two-part, four-hour program on "The Mormons." I caught the first part, but my DVR erased part two before I got a chance to watch it, so I was pleased to find that I could watch the whole program on the web.

The program consisted of a narrated history of Mormonism along with interviews with various people most of whom were either current or former Mormons. One of the things that captured my attention was the nature of faith among the Latter Day Saints.

Several people talked about faith in terms of really believing the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates. One man said that he wasn't sure he believed the story until he went on his missionary journey and then, while speaking in a Lutheran church in Germany apparently, he was moved to really believe the story.

Now I would expect a lot of people of faith to want to stand up and say, "That's not what faith is!" Faith isn't about believing that some factual proposition is true. It's about trusting in God and believing that God intends good for us. Right?

But one of the things I got out of this program on Mormonism is that the relationship between faith as trust in God and believing that the stories of our religion are true just isn't that simple. And maybe this is easier to see from the outside.

For instance, part one of the program told the story of the Mormon migration to Utah in the winter following the killing of Joseph Smith. These people suffered unimaginable hardship crossing the American west in the middle of winter just trying to find a place where they wouldn't be hated and persecuted as they had been in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. And so under the leadership of Brigham Young they loaded up their wagons and headed to Utah -- Utah! I don't think there can be any doubt that this part of the Mormon experience involved a lot of faith in the "radical trust in God" sense of the word. But at the same time, they absolutely would not have done it if they didn't believe the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates.

Faith is a strange thing. Many people work very hard to keep faith unbound by dogma, and yet it is fairly impossible to have any depth of faith in "God-in-general". If God doesn't act, we can't have faith in God. And if God acts, faith must believe that God has acted.

But here's where things get really sticky. I am pretty certain that the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates isn't true. At the same time, I get the sense that the faith of Mormons, anchored as it is in this story that I believe to be false, is nevertheless genuine faith of the same quality as my faith. How can this be?

Great Reading

I just found out that Kelly Fryer is reclaiming another word -- this time 'faith' and this time in the form of a blog. Check it out: Reclaiming the F Word

I did it!

Well, it took me about 16 months to get through a one-year course, but I've finally finished working my way through Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek! I figure if I was taking this as a graded class I'd have probably gotten about a C, but I feel like I'm on my way to knowing something. I've even used the Greek text for Bible study and saw some things I didn't know.

Adventures in Environmentalism

A few weeks ago my wife and I were talking about trading my car in for a Prius. As I looked into it, I found that you can get a solar roof panel that will let it go about 20 miles a day on pure sunlight. Since I only drive about three miles each way to the light rail station, I began daydreaming of having a vehicle that would get me there and back without using any fossil fuels at all.

Then I had this vision of Grandpa Pickles saying to me, "We had a thing like that in my day. We called it a bike."

So last week I bought a bike for about half what one month's payment would have been on a Prius. Funny how simple things can be. Now I just need to get in shape enough to ride it. I took it out the first day and managed to get to the top of the highest hill on my way to the MAX station, but knowing that if I kept going I'd have to go back up that hill I turned around.

I'm thinking of moving to Oklahoma. I hear they don't have hills there.

Salvation from Sin

Furthering the conversation on progress or growth in the Christian life, I offer this from George MacDonald:

The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained: that would be to cast out of window the medicine of cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistently with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. The idea-the miserable fancy rather-has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered. Unable to believe in the forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining him not at liberty to forgive, or incapable of forgiving forthright; not really believing him God our Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a multitude of teaching men have taught their fellows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and save us from hell. They have represented a result as the object of his mission-the said result nowise to be desired by true man save as consequent on the gain of his object. The mission of Jesus was from the same source and with the same object as the punishment of our sins. He came to work along with our punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins; but a man to whom his sins, that is the evil things in him, are a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that ever he had any other hell to think of than that of his sinful condition. For to him his sins are hell; he would go to the other hell to be free of them; free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him. For hell is God's and not the devil's. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father.

The full sermon may be found here.

Progress

Last week I posted a selection from Gerhard Forde about sanctification, and some good discussion followed. I'm still unsettled on the topic. There was a time when I took everything I read from Dr. Forde as truth. I still admire his work, but I'm not so sure I can fully get on board with him anymore.

The Forde passage I quoted spoke of the dangers of "talk of progress." Brian commented that "progress is exactly the WRONG question." I agree, I think, but as Brian also observed it's hard to get the human mind away from viewing life this way.

Anything I work at, I get better at. If I play a game frequently, I get better at it. Through years of experience, my skill as a software engineer has steadily increased. With discipline, I've been able to improve my eating habits. If I'm not becoming a better Christian, why not?

Now at this point Lutherans are biting their tongues to not shout something about what it means to be a "better" Christian. I once heard it said that the utensils in the Temple weren't holy because they were better utensils that any other utensils but were holy simply because they were in the Temple. And so we turn again, as always, to the question of justification.

But wait a minute. The gift is a call, right? When Christ calls us, he calls us to mission. To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Christ, and surely that is something that we can get better at, isn't it?

Jesus told a parable, "What do you think? A man had two sons; he went to the first and said, 'Son, go and work in the vineyard today.' He answered, 'I will not'; but later he changed his mind and went. The father went to the second and said the same; and he answered,'I go, sir'; but he did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?" (Mt. 21:28-31)

Now perhaps this has nothing to do with salvation. Maybe it doesn't even have anything to do with sanctification. But what does it matter? Shouldn't we be getting better at this?

Yes, Jesus Loves Me

As part of my daily routine, I pray using the PDA version of Sacred Space during lunch. Because the lunch room at work is noisy, I listen to music as background noise to help keep my focus. Generally, I don't notice the music much. Today, I happened to be listening to John Fahey's Return of the Repressed.

The scripture reading for today on Sacred Space was John 3:16-17, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." Generally, it's hard to hear such a familiar verse with fresh ears. Today, what spoke to me were the words "God so loved".

It's far too easy to slip into thinking of Jesus in terms of doctrine or proclamation. It's much harder, for me at least, to actually connect with Jesus in terms of the love of God. I don't mean to see Jesus' life as an expression of God's love, but rather to actually feel loved by God when thinking of Jesus. That is, it's hard for me to connect to it personally.

So today I was ruminating on these things, and I prayed for God to give me the grace to make this kind of personal connection. About that time, I noticed the song playing in my earplugs. It was "The Sea of Love." Now, the Fahey album is instrumental, but this song has just the right mix of familiarity and simplicity so that the lyrics flow in my mind when I hear the music.

Call me sappy, if you must. Say I'm reading to much into a coincidence, if you must. But I was touched. And so I just sat silently and listening, imagining Jesus was sitting there with me playing this song for me (and perhaps laughing at me just a bit).

And then when the song was over I said a concluding prayer as the next song started, like the music accompanying the credits after a movie. The next song? "Yes, Jesus Loves Me"!

Forde on Sanctification

In the comments on an earlier post, the question of sanctification was raised. I recalled some remarks by Gerhard Forde questioning the possibility, even, of progress in the Christian life. I found the remarks I was thinking of in the book Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Santification in which Forde offered the Lutheran position.

His central thesis is that sanctification is nothing more and nothing less than "the art of getting used to unconditional justification." He concludes the essay as follows:

In many ways, this essay has been an appeal for more truthfulness in our talk about the Christian life and sanctification. I think that should be the mark of sanctification as well. As Paul put it, we are not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought (Rom. 12:3).

The talk of progress and growth we usually indulge in leads us all too often to do just that. But if we are saved and sanctified only by the unconditional grace of God, we ought to be able to become more truthful and lucid about the way things really are with us. Amd I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, it doesn't seem to get any easier. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a litter slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. ... Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I'm getting tired! It's just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn't think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification!

But can it be, perhaps, that it is precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain sense of humor, a certain down-to-earthness. When we come to realize that if are going to be saved, it shall have to be absolutely by grace alone, then we shall be sanctified. God will have his way with us at last.

Comments anyone?

As Heard on "Here and Now"

"Any time you have gone to a place where Snoop Dog does not want to be associated with you because you are so deeply immoral, that is a good moment for self-reflection."
-Melissa Harris Lacewell, reflecting on the Don Imus controversy

Life and the Cross

In discussing the transformative nature of prayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar discusses "the great danger of ironing out the immense drama which lies between the 'world's end' and 'heaven's beginning' and rendering it...flat and 'harmless'."

It seems to me that this is one of the decisively unique aspects of von Balthasar's theology. I have not found in any other theologian such a profound appreciation for the significance of Holy Saturday -- both in the life of Christ and, by extension, in the life of the Christian.

It seems to me that most Christians would be happy to skip directly from Palm Sunday to Easter, with the Cross as little more than a support that props up the bridge between these two triumphs. Good Friday (even the name says this) is something experienced by Christ, not by his followers. He died in our place, so we live the triumphant life. He died, so we don't have to.

But notice: we're going to die.

Our typical de facto theology doesn't match up well with experience -- certainly not in the long run and usually not in the short run either.

And this is what von Balthasar calls us to notice. The Christian life involves death. The servant is not greater than the master. We can't get to Easter any other way than through the Cross. And so we should expect to experience darkness, even the darkness and God forsakeness of the Cross. It's a sobering thought.

Paul says, "if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him." Look at the verb tenses. We have died. We will live.

It seems to me that the whole Christian life is lived between Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday. Easter exists for us only in faith.

Blogging

If you've stopped by more than once, you've probably noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. One possibility is that I've had other things on my mind. To investigate this possibility, I've started a new blog, this one about baseball. If you like baseball, check it out -- A Swing And A Miss.

So far I've just whined about MLB Mosaic and unveiled a really bad fantasy baseball strategy.

God and Monism

Having finished with Anthony Bloom's Living Prayer, I've now moved on to Hans Urs von Balthasar's Prayer. I've had this book sitting on my shelf for about three years, and only now have mustered the resolve to read it. Having read a few books by von Balthasar in the past, my experience has been that some are written with pastoral intent and are fairly accessible while others are so intensly theological that I can only dimly comprehend them. This one is a mix of both, intensly theological but pastoral.

The section I came to today particularly touched on one of my theological interests, namely the ideas of immanence and transcendence. Divine immanence is very popular these days. Everyone wants to affirm the inherent divinity within all things. Transcendence has some play too, but only in the weaker sense of mystery. Traditional affirmations about God's otherness tend to be frowned upon in many circles as awkward artifacts of the "Old Man in the Sky" sort of theism.

All this is clearly true in popular culture, particularly among the "spiritual but not religious" crowd, but I've seen it also in somewhat more academic settings (see, for example, Paul Laughlin's Getting Oriented). The prevailing wisdom seems to be that mysticism reveals that the common root of all religion lies in the experience of the Divine Oneness of all things. When it is noted that Christian, Jewish and Muslim mystics nevertheless have (sometimes) affirmed God's otherness, this is dismissed as a product of dogma imposed on these thinkers from religious institutions and not part of their genuine experience.

But what if the traditional monotheistic teaching of God's otherness isn't just dogma? What if it is an essential part of the experience of monotheistic mystics? It seems to me that this is an immensely valuable gift that Western religions bring to the table of interreligious dialogue, and it is rejected out of hand, ironically, because it clashes with implicit dogmas of Eastern religions with regard to monism.

Christians are quite willing and able to incorporate ideas of divine immanence in creation in the strongest possible terms, and we can point to testimony about this deep and constant throughout our own traditions. Nevertheless, we also insist on divine transcendence, also in the strongest possible terms. It requires, I think, a dialectical understanding.

At this point, I must quote von Balthasar. He expresses the mystical insight of God's transcendence so well.

Every awareness of existence turns into a looking up to [God], a word addressed to him, a thought of him; every situation is clarified through being related to him. It is man's anguish and his glory, his weakness and his dignity, that he must and may relate himself to God in this way; he can only be himself through God, and he can never be God. He can only affirm himself, and only then his whole environment and his fellow creatures, by uttering the stupendous No and Yes which are built into the very foundations of his being; No, I am not God; Yes, I need God as my beginning and my end. No relative being is Being, but none is apart from Being and each exists in relation and as a pointer to Being.

This is the insight that monotheism offers. Following this, von Balthasar talks about the problem that comtemplation can only lead to the insight above. We can never reach God through comptemplation. And here he brings in the Christian scandal.

There was only one way out of this impasse, namely, that infinite, eternal Being should utter its own self in the form of a relative being.

Set as it is in the context of deep mystical insight, this statement highlights what I think is the most remarkable thing about Christianity. When popular culture looks at the Incarnation, it can only see it as a product of antiquated models of God-as-superbeing who can step into another form. But that's not the Christian teaching on the Incarnation. People try to domesticate the idea and speak of Jesus as an exceptional man who was in touch with the divinity within him (and all of us), but that's not the Christian teaching either.

The Christian teaching on the Incarnation, mind-bending as it may be, is precisely that the ground of all being, Atman, the Tao, use whatever ultra-monistic term you like for the fundamental, irreducible One-ness, Is-ness, that lies behind/beneath/within all reality became a human being and dwelt among us who were not this.

Learning Prayer

God has been teaching me this week. In the first instance, I’ve been learning rather directly from Anthony Bloom’s book, Living Prayer. This is a marvelous book. I tend to have a love-hate relationship with books about prayer. I know there’s something more I need to learn, and so I keep reading new books, but so often I’m unsatisfied.

Every book on prayer, it seems, has a section on unanswered prayer. This is where they usually turn me against them. The typical response (God answers all prayers: yes, no or wait) leaves me so cold as to suspect that the author doesn’t really know any more about prayer than I do, but is repeating taught answers. And this answer is just categorically off target for me.

This is where Metropolitan Anthony’s book won me over. He deals briefly with the misconception that “answers to prayer” are about getting what we prayed for, and then delves into what he’s really interested in. Namely, for him, and for me, the idea of unanswered prayer is more about prayer feeling like monologue – praying and not sensing that God is there. In this, I got the sense that Bloom is doing the same thing when he prays that I’m doing, but he knows far more about it than I do.

Metropolitan Anthony offers several suggestions at this point. First, it may be that we are so busy speaking to God that we don’t give him space to be present. He suggests more intentional silence – a time of standing quietly in God’s presence and only speaking when you can no longer remain silent. Second, it may be that we are placing a false idea of God between us and God. He uses the example of a schoolboy who knows his headmaster by what he does and only years later realizes that he was a man. If we approach God wrongly, but convinced that we know God, we may be praying to an idol who cannot answer. Third, it may be that God has something to teach us by remaining absent. I get the sense that I’m not in that place.

But in addition to this direct instruction two things happened that were connected.

I ride the light rail to work, and everyday on my way to the platform I pass a row of bushes which are growing along side a fence that separates them from the train tracks. Often, I hear a rustling in these bushes. I’ve guessed that there was an animal, probably a squirrel in there. I’ve looked to see it, but I’ve never managed to catch sight of it. Yesterday, as I heard the sound, rather than looking down and into the bush, I took a step toward it, and I saw a bird on the other side of the fence. This is an object lesson for me.

Today, my wife and I are at the Oregon Coast, celebrating our anniversary. I was sitting inside reading for a while, and then I decided I’d like to go out on the balcony and look at the ocean. When I went out, I could see nothing. A thick fog obscured my view. I could hear the roar of the waves. I eventually managed to spot some people walking in the sand, but I couldn’t see the water at all. I stayed and kept watching. Eventually the fog drew back enough that I could see the waves breaking on the shore, but no more. This also is an object lesson.

What Christians Don't Do

It is worth remembering, as we sit here, well-fed and in the bosom of our families, that in the ancient world, the two hardest things to do are to propagate yourself and to get enough to eat. Something of the order of 80% of families did not manage to maintain a secure male line over four generations and most of the world's population lived by subsistence farming. Consequently it is something of a surprise that the two great religions to have survived from classical times are Judaism and Christianity, one of which says you shouldn't eat the most readily available supply of protein, pork, and the other of which makes a virtue of not having sex.

-Simon Goldhill, from The 2005 Kaufmann Memorial Lecture

I came across the above lecture on the topic "What Christians Don't Do" by chance today while searching for the story from the Talmud that Professor Goldhill relates toward the end. It's a very interested read. Check it out.

We're Not Worthy

During the opening confession yesterday, I took pause at the words "We are not worthy to be called your children." A friend had joined us for worship, and I knew from past discussions that she takes issue with this sort of theology. Doesn't God love us as we are? And if God loves us, who is it who thinks we're not worthy?

But I've also been reading Anthony Bloom's Living Prayer in which he suggests that we must always approach prayer as a sort of Last Judgment and, as such, should always come before God with this sort of attitude of unworthiness.

And so for much of the worship service, my mind was occupied by this question. Two stories from the desert fathers came to mind.

The first is a story of two monks who went into town to sell the baskets they had weaved and to buy bread. Once in town they separated. One monk sold his baskets, bought some bread and waited for his friend. When they met again, the second monk said to the first, "You return to the monastery without me, for I have fallen into temptation with a woman and am no longer worthy to live in the community." But the first monk replied, "Not so brother, for I also have fallen into temptation. Let us go back together and confess our sin and receive whatever discipline is necessary." So the two monks returned to the monastery and together confessed and remained in the community as penitents.

From this story I considered the corporate nature of confession. Some of us have surely committed graver sins than others. Some of us are more aware of our sins than others. But in confessing together, we stand together. Together, we are not worthy to be called children of God. And so we bear one another's burdens.

The second story that came to mind is a story of Bessarion. A man was being sent out of the church because of some moral offense. But Bessarion arose and left with him saying, "I also am a sinful man."

This story is like the first in that it also contains an element of standing together in sin and bearing one another's burdens. It also contains a bit of the theological point that if we are to be judged on sin, none of us can stand, though I don't think this is really the point of the story.

The phrase "we are not worthy to be called your children" is clearly taken from the story of the prodigal son. If the father's reaction to this claim tells us anything, it's that he couldn't care less whether or not the son merits acceptance. We can only speculate what would have happened if the son had come strutting home saying, "Hey dad, let's party." I suspect the father would have grieved knowing that he would soon lose his son again.

And so I think this sense of unworthiness is for us and not for God. It is the condition in which we are capable of accepting reconciliation with God. Many of us these days, and I suspect it's nothing new, have trouble seeing ourselves in need of such a state. We're cool with God, right? But it's a shallow cool.

Bessarion's action was a prophetic act. It showed the church that was sending away the sinful man what true spirituality must look like.

Confession of sin -- real sin, systemic sin, far-reaching sin -- is a prized part of our spiritual heritage, but in many places I fear it is in danger of becoming a gaudy show piece more than a deep part of our spirituality. Those with different aesthetic sensibilities might need some help understanding the beauty of it.

Frittered Away

"Our lives are frittered away by details. Simplify, simplify!"
-Henry David Thoreau

I decided this year that for Lent I wanted to focus on prayer. For me, ironically, that begins with reading. I draw a lot of direction from what I'm reading, and I've got a few books on prayer sitting on the shelf that I've been meaning to read for a while now, as well as a couple that I'd like to re-read. And hopefully somewhere in there I'll manage to actual pray more too.

But we're over two weeks into Lent, and I'm just now getting started. I had previous commitments to teach classes on Luke and Acts, and I've been leading a discussion on The Evangelizing Church, not to mention my congregation is beginning a capital campaign and I volunteered for one of the early roles, so my reading program hasn't managed to get underway, and predictably my increased practice of prayer has also failed to materialize.

Helpfully, before Lent I managed to work in a reading of Alexander Schmemann's Great Lent which has given me some perspective. Schmemann talks about Lent as a journey. It's not just a season of penance, it's a season of moving toward something -- specifically moving toward Pascha, the Ressurrection. And so, it should be a season of stripping away, not holding off.

Typically, certainly for myself, and I suspect for most people, Lent is a season where you start off with great intentions, go through a couple of weeks demonstrating your ascetic powers and then gradually discover how weak you really are and can't wait for Easter so you can give up the charade. There's definitely a sort of spiritual value to that. It's real.

But Father Schmemann's model works somewhat more directly. You begin by looking at yourself and looking for your weaknesses and then trying to intentionally strip away the pretension. And rather than seeing the fast as some sort of spiritual accomplishment, it's the pressure that holds your feet to the fire, so to speak.

And so the business of my life these first two weeks serves as a sort of object lesson. What is it that's keeping me from God? It's not life, per se, because surely life is the field where God meets us. But very likely it's all that I'm trying to stuff into life.

Jesus Tomb

OK, I admit it. I watched the documentary on the "Lost Tomb of Jesus" on Sunday. I wanted to be informed in case it caught on in a "Da Vinci Code" sort of way.

It doesn't look like anybody's buying it, so there doesn't seem much point in refuting it, but for my own entertainment as much as anything else, here are some things I've learned so far:

1. Biblical scholars, regardless of theological orientation, are NOT archaeologists


2. Film makers are neither Biblical scholars nor archaeologists


3. Neither film makers nor Biblical scholars nor archaeologists tend to be exceptionally good at math

Now I'm not really a film maker, Biblical scholar or archaeologist, but I do have a degree in mathematics (albeit only a B.S.).

First, let me say that my impression is that the coincidence of names is pretty much the only evidence they have. The archaeologists were very dismissive of this aspect, saying "These are very common names." This seems to me to be on par with the "I live in New York and there are people everywhere" argument for New York being more populous than California. So I wanted to see the numbers.

As I was watching the film, when they finally got around to rolling out their numbers, I spotted the card coming off the bottom of the deck. After showing a simplified form of how the odds were calculated (see p. 13 here), the film maker said, "So there is only a one in six hundred chance that this is not the tomb of Jesus." But wait! That isn't what had been calculated at all!

What the statistician had actually calculated were the odds that one of the approximately 1000 tombs excavated to date would contain this combination of names. (Look here if you want to read more, or if you're a math geek read here to hear what the statistician himself is now saying.)

And this is where a sense of math comes in for the second time. The 1 in 600 odds are being touted as convincing by the film makers. The conclusion is disputed on many grounds, mostly claims that the assumptions behind the calculations were wrong. That's probably so, but the thing that gets me is that given that we are talking about the odds that one of the tombs discovered to date would have this combination of names, 1 in 600 just isn't that amazing.

Consider: 1 in 600 is about the same as the odds of winning $7 (yes, seven dollars) on a single Powerball ticket.

Would you make a documentary about that?

For the morbidly curious such as myself, check out Joe Zias' critique for a professional archaeologists' take on the whole thing.

The Imperial Meaning Story

After considerable delay, here at last is my consideration of David Korten's "Imperial Meaning Story" as heard in his talk on Alternative Radio last month based on The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Communities....

For this story, I'd like to quote Korten directly.

This next story is a little harder for some people, but it is the foundation of the empire stories. The imperial meaning story tells us of a God who commands us to go forth and establish dominion over the earth. The God who favors the righteous with wealth and power, and who commissions his favored to rule over the poor, who justly suffer divine punishment 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.

I wish I had a way to represent his intonations because a lot of the comic effect is lost in transcription.

It's important, and a bit disheartening, to hear Korten's claim that this meaning story is the foundation of the other two empire stories. It's relatively easy for Christians to point fingers at the imperial prosperity and imperial security stories, though we too often participate even in those. But at some point we have to recognize how deeply we are implicated in the whole matter.

To be sure, the imperial meaning story is a distortion of the Christian message (and isn't targeted exclusively at Christianity), but it's not a distortion we can entirely claim ignorance of. In fact, not even our sacred scriptures are clean of this distortion. The imperial meaning story begins precisely where the Biblical story begins, with people being given "dominion" over the earth. And the story develops as the Biblical story develops, with righteous people being rewarded and wicked people being punished. The question is, where do we go from there.

Korten offers Stonehenge as an icon of religion as "earth community" and contrasts it with the Pyramids as an icon of religion as tool of the empire. In reality I suspect that in most religions, and certainly in Christianity, these two things have usually existed side-by side. Here's a picture of that co-existence:


So what do we do about this? I think it's possible to read the public ministry of Jesus as a confrontation of precisely this issue. Jesus, following the prophets, taught us that institutions are not nearly as important as interconnectedness, that we don't live to advance our own interests but rather to lift up those in need around us.

The Christian story is a response to the Imperial Meaning story, but we have to struggle to preserve it as such.

Imperial Prosperity Update 2

I heard a story on NPR this morning about Cuban doctors defecting from their assignments in Venezeula, ultimately hoping to find assylum in the U.S. It's an interesting case.

Venezuela reached a diplomatic agreement with Cuba wherein Venezeula provides oil to Cuba and in exchange Cuba assigns doctors to work in Venezuela. The doctors are providing free health care to the poor in Venezuela. The U.S., seeking to close this gap in its economic stranglehold on Cuba, has adopted a policy specifically aimed at getting Cuban medical professionals to defect.

There's a little ambiguity here. One can argue that if the Cuban doctors want freedom, it's good that America can provide it, whatever our ulterior motives may be. On the other hand, it is absolutely clear who the victims are in this case: the poor in Venezuela, who suffer as a result of America's political goals.

Imperial Prosperity Update

An article on BBC News reports Mexican protests over rising tortilla prices. At least some people fear that growing U.S. demand for ethanol is behind the price increase, which could lead to serious malnutrition among Mexico's poor.

The Imperial Security Story

Part 3 in my discussion of David Korten's Alternative Radio speech based on The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Communities....

My first reaction was that I didn't have much to say about the "imperial security story." It seemed like such a banal critique of the current American situation with names removed in a weak attempt to claim it as a universal feature of empire. But after giving it just a very little bit more reflection, I can't believe I thought that.

True, in our current political climate the fear of enemies is more openly used to force people to love the imperial security story than at any time I can remember, but this is truly an archetypal story. In fact, I think it's possible that this idea, the idea that security comes through power and might, is the most frequently argued against concept in the entire Bible.

The Exodus story establishes the Biblical prototype as God delivers the Israelite slaves from the mighty Egyptian empire. After the armies of Pharoah were drowned at the Red Sea, the Israelites sang, "I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation." (Ex. 15:1-2)

But it's a lesson that must constatly be relearned. When Samuel is conceived his mother Hannah sings to the Lord, "The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength." (1 Sam 2:4) But within Samuel's lifetime the people are asking for a king like other nations.

As the Assyrian empire rises, Sennecherib's representative tells the people of Jerusalem:

Hear the word of the great king, the king of Assyria! Thus says the king: "Do not let Hezekiah deceive you, for he will not be able to deliver you out of my hand. Do not let Hezekiah make you rely on the Lord by saying, The Lord will surely deliver us, and this city will not be given into the hand of the king of Assyria. Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria: Make your peace with me and come out to me; then every one of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree, and drink water from your own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, a land of olive oil and honey, that you may live and not die. Do not listen to Hezekiah when he misleads you by saying, The Lord will deliver us. Has any of the gods of the nations ever delivered its land out of the hand of the king of Assyria? Where are the gods of Hamath and Arpad? Where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivvah? Have they delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who among all the gods of the countries have delivered their countries out of my hand, that the Lord should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?"
-2 Kings 18:28-35

This is the other side of the imperial security story. If you're weak, submit to our empire and we'll give you security. Yet throughout all of this, the prophets kept telling the kings of Judah not to give up and not to seek military allies but to trust in God. Their advice must surely have sounded insane. Just wait? Really? But the point is this: military strength does not bring security.

If there was any doubt where God stands on this issue, it should be cleared up in the story of Jesus. Jesus was born into the world of the Pax Romana. By its military might, the Roman Empire had brought peace and security to all who would submit to them. A letter from this time speaks of Caesar Augustus as "Savior":

[T]he Providence which has guided our whole existence and which has shown such care and liberality, has brought our life to the peak of perfection in giving to us Augustus Caesar, whom it filled with virtue for the welfare of mankind, and who, being sent to us and to our descendants as a Savior, has put an end to war and has set all things in order....

But in the backwoods of Galilee, a young woman sings of God, "He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." (Luke 1:51-52) And how does this happen? By the weakness and humilation of the Cross.

And the Cross is the key to all of this. As you read the Biblical invectives against relying on power and strength, it's easy to move it into a theology of glory and transfer your reliance to "the power and strength of our God" but still thought of as power and strength in the traditional sense. And from there it is a short and inevitable step for a powerful nation to march with God on their side -- "Gott mit uns" as the German belt buckle read in both world wars. But the Cross will have none of this.

It is utterly amazing to me how quickly we progressed from the cross as a symbol of God's strength in weakness to the imperial story of "In this sign, conquer." It is shocking how a generation of Christians who had persisted in their faith through severe persecution allowed it to be said. And it is disheartening that after centuries of "reformation" their are still people who tout a "Christian nation" that would spread "democracy" by military force and make the bald-faced claim that our security depends on military strength.

An Even Better Communion Story

Speaking of stories, I shared the story of my daughter's first communion with some people from my congregation last night. One of the women told me the story of her daughter's first communion -- at the same congregation but a number of years ago.

Her daughter, like mine, saw that how you held your hands was the key to receiving the host but every week the pastor would simply give her a blessing, and every week she would make a grumpy face. One week, after blessing her and moving on, he noticed her grumpy face, said to himself, "I just can't do that," and stepped back and gave her the bread.

At this point, she held the host over her head and shouted, "I got it!"

We should all be so happy every week!