Last night I brought up a definition of where I think I am with my religions these days. I call it "functional agnosticism." As I posted via Twitter:

i live like god does not exist, but i hope/want the gospel to be true.

This was a little confusing, so let me unpack it here a bit more, starting with a question:

If you peeled back all of the layers of culture, language, history, and ideology that have given shape to the meaning of the word "God" what is it that you are really left with?

Some might answer that this is why we need to go back to Scripture as a foundation of the faith. The problem with saying this is that it assumes that somehow Scripture gives us an eternal, metaphysical "God" that is unchanging and unencumbered by culture. Nice sentiment, but patently untrue. The Yahweh of Genesis who is one among a near-eastern pantheon of gods looks very different from the God of first or second Isaiah or Josiah among others. The God of Jesus and the God of Paul also take on different shapes and meaning. Scripture shows us that God changes. But is it God that changes, or just different people's idea of God?

I stick with the latter since that is all we can really know. We know, and there is little doubt, that people develop an understanding of God and it is that understanding of God that people begin to worship. This is to say that people end up worshiping divinized reflections of their own selves. The notion of an unchanging, eternal, perfect God that dictates that reflection only legitimizes the human tendency to self-worship. Even the image of Jesus gets radically distorted to bend to the desires of religious communities. This is evident in the various Gospel narratives that present Jesus in different images. Behind all of that human intervention, we are somehow supposed to find a consistent image of Jesus.

If our notion of "God" or any sacred reality is so enmeshed with our own narcissistic reflections of our own selves that we then use to Lord over others, what is left if we peel all of that away? The answer is…nothing.  All we have for God are analogies and images drawn from our own experience. All we can know about God is what we can know about our own experience and the experience of others. God is otherwise utterly unknowable. If you believe that God is utterly unknowable, this is the heart of what it means to be agnostic. There might be a God out there, but if there is, it is a God that is impossible to know since such a being is completely outside the boundaries of possible human experience. This is, in part, Kant's legacy with his description of the noumenal in contrast to the phenomenal. All we can really know is the latter.

I took an inventory of how I live. I function like an agnostic. I am not a big fan of prayer and don't do it since it does not do anything at all for me. I don't "look for God" anywhere in the world. I don't really "sense" God anywhere and I am not sure if I ever have. Worship does absolutely nothing for me other than a stop along the way for church which is really a social outlet and nothing more. Religion and theology are for me interesting, even deeply interesting. I read about Jesus and his affect in the world and I think there is something important that did happen there aside from all of the miracles which I've never had a strong affinity for. Ideas like the Trinity and Incarnation I find aesthetically beautiful and worth discussing. I do theology because I enjoy it on the same level that I enjoy a great piece of music or learning something new. But it is not even close to the love that I experience with my sons, my wife, or even my dog!

Yet I continue to practice the form of a Christian. I go to church, read the bible regularly, read theology, study religion, etc. all with the desire that it is all somehow correspondent to truth, even if there is no longer any aspect of my daily experience that can confirm for me with any degree of compelling satisfaction that "God is real." I want it to be true to give greater coherence and intelligibility to our often very chaotic experience of the world. I want it to be true to make sense of suffering and to give life to altruism and catalyze human expressions of love. Yet deep down I don't really see God here, I see people doing the best they can with what they have.

Love one another. That's how our humanity holds together and will experience mutual joy in our communities. Call is Pascal's Wager in reverse. I love because it's the best way to live. If God exists, that's favorable. If God does not exist, it's still the best way to live. God is just no longer absolutely necessary to live in order to love others.

Related posts:

1. the influence of the westminster confession on religious freedom
2. theology as world making… and world deconstructing.
3. the political meaning of "sola scriptura"

Image courtesy of http://snibbe.com/scott/bf/

Diana Butler Bass has been on Twitter for only a couple of days, and it's already great to follow. Tonight she posted this:

Greg Nyssa on God: "How then would (w)e arrive at the sought-for boundary when (w)e can find no boundary?" Why do some Xians make them?

Good question.

I think the problem in the question is the word "some." It seems to imply that there are also at least "some" or perhaps "more" Christians who do not make boundaries. I don't think that kind of reading is all that accurate.

The reality is that in any social system the people in the community create boundaries. It is part of human nature to categorize and develop constraints on behavior. Even behavioral economists argue that unlimited choice and unlimited options for behaviors do not lead to increased happiness, but decreased happiness. As it turns out the more we can choose and the more unconstrained out behaviors are, the less happy we become. That's right. There is a negative correlation between unconstrained freedom and happiness. This is why Schwartz, for example, calls this The Paradox of Choice.

The same can be said for our social systems and communities. We create boundaries, often on unconscious levels, because we have an instinct for happiness. we create labels to make judgements between objects and people that we experience. We make generalizations, we profile, and on and on. That we behave this way is almost as incontrovertible as the reality of gravity or evolution.

However, I often hear well intentioned liberals, emergents, postmoderns, etc. who are in a conundrum. They have seen the harm that intentional labels can create and wish to eschew them altogether. It is true that in society we create lables like liberal, postmodern, fundamentalist, progressive, etc. not for the purpose of ordering reality in a way that makes us happier, but in a way that allows us to control our reality by de-legitimating someone else. It's basically bullying. You force a "label" on someone or develop social boundaries in order to keep people out.

However, this is the way that systems of purity in religious communities work. It is the function of the temple, the altar, the curtain, the holy water, etc. in order to create a distinction between holy and profane. Even the most liberal communities will do it. All religious communities desire a consistent framework that members can assume in order to feel at home and nourished. The social effect is greater social connectedness to those within the community reinforced by the distinctions one can make with those outside of that community. If you look at any variable that predicts happiness, guess what it is? Social connectedness.

So the issue that Nyssa raised oh so long ago is that these boundaries, that we all create if we are "normal" functioning human beings, are not what is "normal" for God. The Trinity itself is a boundary breaching being as three persons in one substance. The Incarnation of Jesus as fully God and fully human again breaches unavoidable boundaries in humanity and its inability to join God in a union. So we cannot, as social beings, eliminate boundaries in our day to day behavior. However, spiritual discipline can help us to see just how tentative these boundaries really are.

May the boundary laden Western church re-gain some understanding of spiritual discipline in order not to create boundaries, but to obliterate them, even for a moment, with the guidance of the Spirit of God, the one source that can actually do this work on our behalf.

Related posts:

1. how's your "ism"?
2. we were born to be loved
3. are online communities are hurting "real" ones?

I recently found a poem a wrote for a little student publication called The Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary for Summer 2000. It was in my days of intense study of the philosophy of technology and its fusion with concepts of desire in postmodernism (with a clear hat tip to Kierkegaard). Enjoy!

Musings of a Hyperseducer

No related posts.

gravity
constant pull
not weight
a pressure
intense
pulling down
to some center
a vaccuum
light
delusion
image of the past
naive optimism
resisting
furiously
pulled deeper
with less of myself
in release
at the bottom
there is grace
where we are born

No related posts.

Last night I posted something on Twitter that got a lot of heat.

little ppl, morbidly obese, flamboyant effeminate, fighting: american tv is a carnivale of the grotesque.

With 140 character posts, the full context of what one posts can never be assumed. So, when I post something like this I am not immune to the reality that others might find such posts offensive. I may be stupid sometimes, arrogant at others, still confused again, but not naive to the reality that statements once posted are never interpreted isomorphically among all those who read them.

The immediate response among those who feel they represent such groupings as I mentioned is that they are not grotesque and therefore should not be considered as such. I agree. However, such a view is not reality but ideology.

A social norm is what the majority of the people or the majority shareholders of a people hold in order to regulate a society. No matter what lovely humanist affirming language we can associate with being queer, or little, or male but effeminate (female but masculine) the reality is that these are still socially deviant when put in greater social context.

What I find is that when I make that call, I am often seen as one who is actually "buying in" to the understanding of deviance for these groups. I have NEVER advanced such an opinion. Do a search on this blog and you will find the contrary opinion.

What I mean hearkens back to an article I published on this very topic. Here is a bit from the abstract:

(T)heories of the grotesque show that it is often a combination of social and aesthetic criticism that disrupts the ordered structure of experience in terms of boundaries and categories that compose that structure often in terms of explicit traditions, but also in terms of hidden assumptions and values that compose this structure.

What I mean is that the grotesque is determined by a majority opinion which is therefore normative. Blackness, queerness, transgenderedness, little, obese, effeminate, masculine, etc, are all socio-cultural catergories that require normativity to be, well… "normal."

Carnivals were a major source of fascination due to their use of the grotesque as a means of entertainment among the "normal." My comment was that the media of television is now doing the same thing. Shows about the morbidly obese, addicted, pathological, queer, materialistic, etc. are pervasive as forms of entertainment. Why? Because it is all "grotesque." It is a fascination among and in contrast to the socially constructed idea of "normal."

I stand my my statement that homosexuality is a problem not because of rights, but because of its grotesqueness to what is normative. It is a disordered relationship to sexuality compared to what is "normal." That is the root of what grotesque means.

For Bakhtin, the concept is the carnival in which those in authority are mocked and parodied.  A similar play is wrought by Monty Python who take liberties with their notions of authority and God, portraying priests and kings as buffoons, the laws of the land as absurdities, and the incapacity of high-order philosophical thought to deal with real-world problems, as in a soccer match between Greek and German philosophers who can’t seem to get out of the individual mode of reflection until Archimedes has a moment of “eureka” in order to set up a play at the end.  The issue is what is left after these boundaries become blurred and seemingly relative.

That non-normative groups in society are considered grotesque is a severe social problem. But until we embrace how severe the social reactivity to the grotesque is, the living out of the gospel is lip-service and a pipe dream to make the normative feel good about itself.

Until we embrace the grotesque to subvert and transform the "normal", we have failed to understand the gospel that Jesus revealed.

Related posts:

1. sex between men is grotesque – a repost
2. boundaries and labels: good luck getting rid of them
3. unsafe: the american default?

In 1996 I began a process that I thought would resolve into my vocation for life: minister of word and sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA). I finished the two year preparation process by the book. My presbytery passed me and released me to pursue a call.

But I backed down.

I was in my mid-20's, newly married, and was swimming in a sea of unresolved, deep spiritual and theological questions that the process never helped address, or even raise. I knew that all of my signs pointed to a quick burn-out if I continued. So I backed off to pursue basically whatever job opened for me in the education field. I had written a couple of theses on postmodernism and Christian education a large part of which included media theory and philosophy of technology. That's how I became an instructional designer; that's how I ended up where I currently am.

I was not sure any of this was a "calling," but it sure felt right – for a time.

It was during that time that the church became a source of disillusionment for me. I was asking questions that my congregation at the time had little interest in answering. If they did have answers, they were the cookie cutter kinds of addresses that I had become unsatisfied with both intellectually and spiritually. It was go big Calvinism or go home. And I did. I went home away from the church because that was no longer my home. God stopped speaking to me there. God spoke to me in walks in the woods with my wife and the dogs. God spoke to me in books and music. God spoke to me in other people, podcasts, and soon in social networking and good conversations at the bar.

I was told in 1996 that I would know if I was called to the ministry if that was the only option left that felt right. It was likened to some kind of tugging. I am still sure that this tugging is what I felt. But no one told me what it would feel like if you were not living into your calling.

What would it feel like if I ran away from God to pursue something else?

No one told me God would become my predator. No one told me that to understand calling I would have to become something new. No one told me that to become something new, I would have to let that predator catch me, kill me, and resurrect me.

Not living into a calling is a progressive disenchantment with the world and one's place within it. It is not a feeling, but a pervasive condition of unease and anxiety. It is not despair, but close to it for, as Kierkegaard would say, it is truly becoming a self that is not a self at all. Not living into a calling is Augustine's restlessness, St. John of the Cross' dark night, and that which stands on the precipice of Simone Weil's affliction. For some this kind of self-alienation is not needed. But for my stubborn personality that is able to rationalize everything into oblivion, a spiritual death is precisely what I was called to undergo. Before I can be raised from the dead by the one source to resolve alienation and enmity between creation and its very source in God.

May my spiritual death* be complete o Lord, that you may raise me from the slumber of my death anew, in order that I may receive the grace of your design.

*Please don't confuse this with a suicide note. Read some spiritual theology instead!

Related posts:

1. spiritual porn
2. my god is a predator
3. on ordination and social control

Every year, at least once, there seems to be infighting in the emergent church movement with some saying it's dead or dying, it is not what it used to be, it is no longer a revolution, etc. I responded to some of these claims here. Jonathan Brink does an even better job of describing these ebbs and flows in a more lengthy analysis here. There he argues that these things take time and in a culture of impatience, we miss the transformation taking place.

So the question on the table is still, “Is the emerging church dying or maturing?” I would suggest that it not dying but undergoing a deepening of what it means to emerge. There is considerable evidence to suggest the conversation is not dying. If anything it is maturity and even expanding.

Bruce Reyes Chow is asking something less deconstructive, as the title of this post also suggests. I agree with Jonathan. If this is a movement where something is emerging, such cultural change often takes more than one generation to be fully realized. Generations have to be willing to hand over their structures to their children and trust them with it in order to make it their own.

Robert Kegan in is classic book The Evolving Self and followed the theory in In Over Our Heads. In both books, Kegan presents an extension of Piaget's theory of cognitive development and expands it to include social-psychological development. Kegan argues that psychological development plateaus at "evolutionary truces" where change balances even if for a short period of time. Modernity was largely the development of what he calls "the institutional self" in which self-sufficiency and autonomy were held to be the primary values of society and individual development. However, as Peter Berger has argued, an outcome of modernity has not so much been secularization, but pluralization. As systems of social organization, beliefs, ideologies, cultures, and religions multiply in the same social spaces, a new set of choices and negotiations between boundaries begins to evolve and thus institute change.

The change that Kegan argued back in 1982 was the movement from this modern "institutional self" to an "interindividual self." The movement of development is in a spiral from autonomy to inclusion. What we see now is a movement from the autonomy of modernity to a greater need for inclusion and intimacy between individuals. In other words, our systems and selves have been revealed as incomplete and in need of greater collaboration and social connectedness to feel whole. In the modern era traditionalism was the hallmark of health. Now we are truly in a post-traditional era in which traditional boundaries are more fluid and invite us to experiment with the re-mix of current traditions and the development of new traditions that meet new inter-individual demands. I have also called this "meta-denominationalism." Social networking is a medium for these changes that were already occurring and has reflexively catalyzed these changes to occur.

It is out of this deep social-psychological phenomenon that we find the apt language of emergence. This is a transitional moment and "Gen X" is the first truly transitional generational cohort to work through these changes. Succeeding generations have begun to reveal that the moment of interindividual social connectedness is soon to eclipse the idea of Kegan's "institutional self." Emergence still has a long way to go before those within this moment realize what it all means. I urge people to sit in the transitional moment and enjoy it. Some generational cohorts do not get the opportunity to live in transitional moments where so much creative energy can freely flow.

With that, here is my address of Bruce's question which he limited to 140 words without defining it by what I am not.

I am emergence…

because:

• I have embraced my own adaptation to the world and to God's revelation through the world.
• I have embraced God's revelation though traditions from the East and West and understand that no tradition has the final theology to understand that revelation.
• I seek intimacy across different understandings of God and the Bible and have chosen to leave my own understanding of God open-ended to receive what others have been given.
• Theology and doctrine are social objects, are fallible, and in need of constant revision, reconfiguration, and creative reconstruction lest they become arbitrary idols to prop up the powerful and oppress the weak.
• Tradition must be used to socially include rather than exclude to reveal the Kingdom of God.
  
• I am aware of my own becoming and embrace it with vigor.

Are you emergence? If so, why?

Related posts:

1. on meta-denominationalism: emergence through convergence
2. pcusa + emergence: is the talk too cheap?
3. emergent christians missed the memo that their movement is dead.

Each age of civilization has been described by the primary technological and cultural media of that age. The stone age used stones for tools and weapons as was the case with the bronze and iron ages. As we are aware, by now, this has been called the information age (see Castells' magnificent three volume history). Language whether it is in a computer program, consumer advertisement, text message, conversation between friends, etc. is the primary means of conveying information in our age. Even as wars are fought at a distance, without efficient information gathering and transfer from one source to another, the entire technological structure of war-making would fall apart.

Language itself is also a weapon. As issues of cyber-bullying, sexting, political name-calling increase, the damage that language can inflict on people is increasingly palpable. It is a primary tool used by politicians and bigots to undermine and devalue those not like them in order to wrest the power another group may be sapping from their own control and use. As I wrote about bathroom graffiti, language is used to make another group less valued and deviant to the idea of "normal" the dominant group holding the most shares of power needs in order to maintain the upper hand.

However, none of this means that the less powerful or even the powerless should remain incapable of dodging the blows of the language wars. What should happen, and often does, is that the group with less power can begin to redefine the language and defuse the very weapons of language that were once used by those to wage war against them. This is evident with words like "nigger" or "queer" which have become words within these communities that form a sort of ironic reference to the absurdity of those who once used them as weapons.

Indeed one important means of defusing these weapons is in humor. Comedians use and reuse words that are offensive in order to defuse them from being weapons of hate even as comedy evokes laughter from the same words that once elicited responses of fear and anguish. For example, Richard Pryor's use of "nigger" in his comedy was revolutionary. George Carlin also wrote numerous comedic pieces on offensive language with words like "fuck" to defuse the very use of these words as weapons. Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and Margaret Cho have all used defamatory language in their comedy with this same function.

What I often try to do is reclaim words that become weapons in order to defuse them as weapons. Words like "liberal", "socialist", "biblical", etc. are often words used within Christian communities and political ideologies as weapons of resistance to change. Rather than be offended by language, we should find creative ways to re-mix language in ways that use humor and irony to defuse the sources of power that offend us. If language is a tool, it is only a weapon if we choose to use it that way, or if we choose to allow it to harm us.

Sometimes the hateful do this for us. Fred Phelps' small band of quasi-cultists is so over the top with its "God Hates Fags" language that it is almost self-mocking. We can laugh at its absurdity. While it no doubt does hurt people, especially at times when humor is not advised such as a fallen soldier's funeral, perhaps reminding ourselves of the insanity is a way to heal our pain at such disrespect.

Let us laugh at our enemies' use of language that is used to demean, devalue, and de-legitimate our personhood. Let us use comedy to mock the wicked. When the absurdity of evil is exposed, perhaps laughter is the first fruits of love.

Related posts:

1. not-so open source theology
2. sociology and religion, what a pair
3. the power of the professional minister

Traditionally, sociology has been trapped in two camps with regard to religion: those who seek to undermine religion as an important social force and those who more or less defend it. the former view was a driving force in the secularization of the American university as Christian Smith has shown. Religion was consistently argued as an epiphenomenal social force, something that was only caused by psychological or social needs. In other words, people only turn to religion when they need a psycho-social bandaid to resolve other deeper problems.

What is now evident is that religion is gaining legitimacy as a social force in its own right. This is an important direction for the study of religion especially in the global clash of societies where religion is clearly an important driver of economic, political, and other social behaviors.

As a new study has found, there has been a significant increase over the last 25 or so years not only in the quantity of work done by sociologists on religion, but also in how religion is treated in those studies. No longer is it assumed to be only a reflection of some other socioeconomic trend, but increasingly it is treated as the factor that may be central to understanding a given group of people.

via News: Sociologists Get Religion – Inside Higher Ed.

For those studying theology, it should be clear that sociology and biblical studies need to be more integrated as a way to gain a richer and deeper understanding of those social forces that have shaped doctrinal histories. Rather than assume that the dividing lines between heresy and orthodoxy have been established for eternity, this is one case where our changing understanding of religion as a primary mover in societies ought to fuel the engines of theological progress and creativity lest it get stuck in the irons of doctrinal anemia.

Related posts:

1. teens are functionally illiterate when it comes to religion
2. us religion: post-secular, more secular, post-christian?
3. affluence and loss of religion

Everyone has a story.

It isn't science that offers the most compelling reasons for belief or unbelief, but our experiences with others and with the worlds we inhabit. In November of 2009 I told my own pilgrimage to Thomas Mathie over at the Something Beautiful Podcast. I told him before hand that I would leave nothing hidden. The more open we are with one another, the more organic and healthy our communities can be. This is true of our partnerships with those we love, our children, our extended families, our places of work, and our churches.

It has been my experience that mainline Protestant churches have a tendency to avoid getting raw and open with one another. Testimonies are rare if they are told at all. This has been my life as a Catholic and as Presbyterian. I would challenge any pastor to step off the pulpit one summer and invite people from the congregation to open up and share their testimony every Sunday morning. We have no idea how God is at work in our communities if we are not aware of how God has shaped each one of us in our lives and how we then reflect and relate to those experiences.

This is something we are building up to at my church and talking about our hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, and sources of conflict and bad blood has been uplifting. Without knowing ourselves and our history, we could not possible hear God calling us into our mission and life together. We are learning to hear God in each other's lives for the first time. Testimony. It alone preaches.

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbours, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil. Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labour and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you (Ephesians 4:22-32).

We had a long chat and it's posted in three parts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

My intent was to be very honest. I apologize in advance if I inadvertently offended anyone. That was never my intent and those who have shaped me in my life to this day I love deeply. They have shaped me for who I am as much as any other influence that has come into my life.

Peace.

Related posts:

1. radical church idea or, what i would like to do with my life some day
2. we were born to be loved
3. go where god is, not where you believe god ought to be.