the parish

The Justice Project: A Response

2009-11-12T08:37:45-06:00

I should have learned my lesson by now. Seriously. Don't post in haste. Re-read. Think about what I'm writing. I didn't on The Justice Project and Kevin Lum, a former SNU classmate and now worker of miracles at Sojo, caught me with my pants down, just like Noah and Ham (sorry, needed a random Bible reference). Here's what Kevin wrote:

I read your review of the Justice Project and was disappointed you completely failed to mention Elisa Padilla or...Ashley Bunting Seeber. Oklahoma is rubbing off on you; you simply overlook the women. Elisa’s voice is important not only because she’s a woman, but because she’s a Latina living in a poor neighborhood in Argentina. I know Brian is the big name on the cover, but it’s worth acknowledging the women who contributed to this book. I care for a couple of reasons, but especially because I know Elisa and have great respect for her. Elisa is the daughter of Rene Padilla and doing great work in her own right. She heads up the Kairos Foundation, prints a magazines, and publishes theology books in Spanish—all with a very small budget.
While I’ll agree with your critique, I think you also failed to mention the full diversity of the writers. There are Latinos, blacks, woman, and Native Americans. This is important, because we often only hear white men talk about justice. Even if the message is similar, it’s important to hear voices from other backgrounds.

And he's right. I like to think of myself as a feminist, and I believe in many ways I am, but I totally blew it on this one. I mentioned the men because I primarily wanted to talk about Tony Jones's chapter; I still think it's the best in the book by hundreds of cubits. However, it would have been a simple matter to talk about at least one chapter by a woman, and Kevin is right to call me on it. It does indicate that in spite of my best efforts I seem to take the voices of men more seriously than I do that of women, at least as far as theology is concerned. (I assure you I do a better job in the classroom.) Unintentional sexism is still sexism. As for the diversity, I pointed out that I included a quote from McLaren's blog where he mentions the diversity. Kevin, because he's honest, readily admitted that he skips excerpted quotes, a habit we both picked up reading theology, I bet.

Irony-Resistant Fundy Fun

2009-11-11T09:41:42-06:00

This is a real conversation with a real fundamentalist student who drove me crazy last semester. Saw her today. She's a very good artist. She was drawing an angel, and the work was amazing. I'll cal her K.

Me: That's very good work, K. I didn't know you were an artist.

K: Have been most of my life I guess. I'm doing this for a friend.

M: Like to hang in their room?

K: No. It's going to be a tattoo. (Grimaces) You used to be a preacher, so you know Christians aren't supposed to get tattoos, right?

Me: They're not?

K: No. It defiles their bodies. It doesn't matter if it's a cross or an angel. It's wrong. It's in the Bible!

Me: Um...

K: Yeah, we don't want to have this conversation.

Me: Nope. But you are very talented.

K: Thanks. I was drunk when I started this one.

The Justice Project

2009-11-08T16:41:51-06:00

This is the latest entry for the Ooze Viral Bloggers:

Brian McLaren is the main editor for this collection of "essays" for Baker Books, and as compilations go, this one is hit and miss. I admit up front to having a great deal of respect for Brian. He's one of the kindest, most sincere people I've met who happen to be professional ministers. He also has noble goals with this book. Here's an excerpt from his blog:

... so that more and more readers in the US and abroad could hear from Native American voices who are so often forgotten, Latino advocates and activists who pursue "mission integral," African Americans with their rich tradition of a justice-integrated gospel, people working among the poorest of the poor in urban slums and rural villages, people working to save ecosystems and the beautiful creatures who live in them. I wanted to be sure people got to know some of the amazing people in my circle of friends - thoughtful scholars and grass-roots practitioners, older and younger, homemakers and agitators, conservative and liberal and otherwise. So ... as you can imagine, this project has been a real joy for me.

He's the rare idealist in ministry who is not completely out of balance or completely burned out. All that to say that because Brian is involved and because justice is probably one of my primary orientations, especially when teaching, I wanted to like this collection. First, the good news. There are new voices here, voices people need to hear. Longtime blog friend Anthony Smith gets a chapter, and his is a voice that the white church needs to hear. There are also chapters from the usual suspects (i.e., Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt). The book's organization is clear, the chapters short (usually five pages or less), and the reading level light. Again, I think justice is important, and I'm glad Baker asked Brian to put this together. The church should care about justice. It ought to be axiomatic that Christian at least means "person who gives a shit about justice." The fact that a book is necessary probably indicates that Brian and his writers aren't convinced that the church cares. The Sojo crowd does. Some of Emergent does. Those two audiences are perfect for this book. Not sure it will get much of a reading outside those two circles.

Now for the quibbles. In his chapter Tony Jones stresses the importance of hearing others' stories. I don't necessarily disagree with that. My concern is that most people have no idea how to tell their stories in a way that is useful. They are not typically deeply reflective. Other than an exercise in ego-masturbation, most storytelling serves no redemptive purpose. Until the story has been been filtered through the lens of genuine reflection, it is typically a narcissistic exercise in having my voice heard. I suppose one could argue that allowing the voice to be heard is important, and again, I don't disagree. But the voices of disenfranchised people don't always sound like Anthony's. There is too much anger, too much frustration, too much unmediated rhetorical vomit for the story to be worthwhile. We don't so much need to hear their stories as enter into friendships so as to make sense of the stories. For every storyteller who has thought deeply about her narrative, there are hundreds who still need the collective benefit of a community who occasionally says, "There might be another way to see this." This is, I admit, a small quibble, but it's not unimportant. Anyone who has endured the unfiltered rhetoric of the narcissist will admit that humans are wonderful at self-deception and need to be led through the deconstruction of their narratives so as to find what is true about them.

Second, rather than pick on particular writers for their inability to add much of substance, I would like to say that much of the book is too thin to be very valuable. Several of the pieces, including at least one by someone who ought to be better at it, read like sermons or thinly disguised devotional pieces. Jones avoids that criticism by saying much that is meaningful, and he stands out from the rest of the writers as a man of genuine thought and reflection, as well as a damn good writer. As with any collection like this, there will be weak spots. The editors shouldn't be castigated too severely though, as the book largely does what it hopes to do: draw attention to justice around the world, as well as offer a few strategies for church participation.

This last bit really isn't a critique, just a point of curiosity. How is the book going to be used to reach those parts of the church that most need to hear it? My friends who are still Christians already care about justice. They don't need a primer. Emergent and Sojo don't need another book. I'm curious what the hope is to get this book into the hands of people who need to hear it. It's not like Jim Wallis hasn't spent his life preaching this message, and while Sojo continues to grow (I think), the movement is marginalized among the evangelical monsters who prefer to think of Sojo as a "liberal" group rather than a group dedicated to justice. It might be time for a book that brings in theistic and non-theistic voices, as I'm pretty sure justice need not be clothed in the language of soteriology.

The Future of Faith: Fundamentalism and Spirit

2009-10-27T11:40:53-05:00

I can't seem to get very far into this book without finding points of disagreement or points that need to be clarified. Believe me, I understand the near-hubris involved with disagreeing with Professor Cox when it comes to religion, but it may be that someone in the conversation can show me where I'm mistaken.

Cox asserts that fundamentalism is losing around the world, especially in the global South, an area that unfortunately suffered the twin afflictions of fundamentalist missionaries and colonialism. He contends that Christianity around the world is casting off the ecclesial straight-jackets of doctrinaire creedalism and inerrancy for a new Age of the Spirit—a term he readily admits is not without its problems. It is on these twin points that I wish to disagree.

Fundamentalism as defined by Cox is certainly losing. Looking back at its origin in the early 20th century, we would be hard-pressed to point to exemplars of that mentality today. There are some groups, but they are as rare as Anabaptists, and they certainly make no rumbling on a global geiger counter, while maintaining the ability to make local pastors miserable as hell when they bring their campaigns of purification into local congregations. However, fundamentalism of the consumerist-evangelical stripe is winning. Christians in the global South are leading the drive against the acceptance of LGBT persons. One need not even look to traditionally fundamentalist denominations like the Church of Christ or the Southern Baptist Convention to find these examples. Episcopal Bishops in Africa and Pentecostals in South America (a group that is certainly "Spirit-led") will suffice. The status of women and gays has changed little in these allegedly, according to Cox, newly pneumatologically-inspired sects. Pentecostals and their treatment of women being an exception. Their perspective on the Bible and homosexuality hasn't changed at all.

On the American side of this issue are the denizens of the ever-increasing population of American megachurches, as well as their littler brothers, the medium-sized SBC churches and congregations in the Hybels/Warren mold. While no one would actually call these churches tradtionally fundamentalist, they manifest odd selective fundamentalism on issues like abortion, homosexuality, women in ministry, and their hermeneutics of the Tanakh. Where they tend not to be fundamentalist is when the passages of Scripture concern their own Western, consumerist, conservative, pro-violence lifestyles. Matthew 5-7, for example. This new fundamentalism reads passages that apply to disenfranchised people with all the verbal-literalist zeal of the original fundamentalists, while ignoring huge tracts of Scripture that challenge their own lives. The consumerist in them won't allow them to make the world of the Bible inconvenient; it is there for their own catharsis, their own redemption, and the expurgation of their little sins. Catastrophic sins fall under the escape hatch clauses, and Jesus is viewed as a standard that no one is expected to emulate. How convenient to have a standard that functions to disenfranchise some and justify others, even in their own sins. Perhaps it is time to read Pascal's dialogues with the Jesuits again.

As for this Age of the Spirit, very few phrases could be more obscure. What exactly does Spirit mean in this case? What are the criteria for hearing the Spirit and discerning this Holy ghost? Cox seems to be trending toward a more open view of membership in the Church—and that's not a bad thing—but the question remains: if the ethic of a people is the mark of the Spirit as well as evidence of the presence of the kingdom of God, why bother with all this creedal, ecclesial, and structural nonsense? The ethic does not require a Savior to make it plain, nor do those who practice it require redemption. The living is the redemption, the salvation in the world. The living, the kindness, the generosity, the love, and the sacrifice make it plain, as well as demonstrate the salvation of the world through means of the ethic of the kingdom. Perhaps Cox is onto something...but I think Yoder was onto it years ago. Perhaps this is not where Cox is headed, but following the language of Spirit leads necessarily to a broader definition of soteriology. For those who will argue that the Spirit speaks the will of God, I would simply ask, how are we to know the Spirit's voice and how do we discern between the different interpretations of "God's will?"

The Future of Faith: Equivocation?

2009-10-24T14:14:44-05:00

Two things before I get started with the critiques. First, thanks to Tripp Fuller for sending this book to me gratis so that I can join the blog tour. Not sure how many folks would send a book about the future of faith to a skeptic, but Tripp took the chance. Second, I have long admired and respected Harvey Cox's work; he's one of the sanest, more balanced voices in the field and his coming retirement is a tragedy for the students of Harvard, as well as the rest of us. I hope he plans on writing extensively in his retirement.

If I ever decide to do my Ph.D., it will most likely be in linguistics. I am language/communication nazi. Just ask my students. Clear, precise language is critical when people holding different assumptions begin a conversation. Equivocation on the definition of a word, or, worse yet, leaving the definition vague for the sake of making an argument easier, makes me crazy by degrees. I should state up front that I'm not very far into the book, so I'm not sure where Cox is headed just yet, but he runs off the rails early in the book. The issue is the difference between faith and belief. More particularly, it's how faith and belief are not to be used synonymously and how that leads to problems with the practice of a particular faith, a point on which Cox and I agree.

Back in the my pastoring days, I insisted that beliefs were settled convictions about things we can know. Faith only applies to things we can't know. The best example for me in those days was the egregiously stupid insistence that we had to have faith that the Bible was inerrant. My response was always that the Bible never demands faith in itself; it points to faith in Jesus, and since we can easily demonstrate that the Bible is not inerrant, then it's foolish to have faith that it is. So the object of faith is always unknowable, otherwise faith is a word the best use of which becomes a redundancy. Why have faith in something I know to be true, and conversely, why have faith in something I know to be false? Belief works better in both cases, or disbelief. All that to say this is where Cox and I seem to be in agreement.

Where Cox runs afoul of my anal retentiveness is here:

"Faith is about deep-seated confidence...Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion...But faith, which is more closely related to awe, love, and wonder, arose long before Plato, among out most primitive Homo sapiens forebears...Creeds are clusters of beliefs. But the history of Christianity is not a history of creeds. It is the story of a people of faith who sometimes cobbled together creeds out of beliefs." pgs 3-4

Please note that Cox defines both words by comparison and analogy, not specifically. This is an argument that requires specific definitions. It may be that he will define them later, but in the meantime, I'll be required to read pages of argument wherein the words are used with only the barest of definition, allowing for equivocation. That's gripe number one. Number two goes like this. The history of the church is absolutely a history of creeds. The earliest ones are in the Bible, including the ubiquitous confession "Jesus is Lord," and several took the form of hymns. Think the Apostle Paul in Philippians. Those creeds reflected settled beliefs in the object of faith. Cox rightly points out that the creeds have been changed over the years, but the earliest ones are still the most consistently believed. Additionally, it is pointless to have a fixed confidence (faith) in an object if you have no reason to believe that your confidence won't be misdirected. The early church had faith in Jesus because they believed him to be the Messiah, not because they were responding with some sort of feeling of awe or wonder. They most certainly were, but that awe, wonder, and faith were predicated on an abiding belief in the incarnation of God in the form of Jesus. Faith without a reasonable object is too close to delusion to allow me to discover the difference. It looks and feels like insanity, sometimes benign, but not always.

I'll attempt to plow through more of the book this weekend because I'd love to give it a fair shake. These are just initial concerns and it is entirely possible that Cox will eventually settle my mind.

The Future of Faith, Intro

2009-10-24T13:34:52-05:00

Philip Clayton and Harvey Cox both have new books out and they are taking them out on tour. One of the blog tour stops will be here, but as you can see below they will be making their rounds over the next month until they wrap things up in Montreal at the American Academy of Religion's annual meeting. There they will be joined by an illustrious panel including Eric Gregory, Bruce Sanguin, Serene Jones, Frank Tupper, and Andrew Sung Park to share a 'Big Idea' for the future of the Church. These 'Big Ideas' will be video tapped and shared, so be on the look out for live footage from the last night of the tour. Philip's new book is Transforming Christian Theology for Church & Society and Harvey's is The Future of Faith. Both are worth checking out at one of the many tour stops. If you can't wait you can listen to them interview each other. Enjoy the blogging! Joseph Weethee , Jonathan Bartlett, The Church Geek, Jacob’s Cafe, Reverend Mommy, Steve Knight, Todd Littleton, Christina Accornero, John David Ryan, LeAnn Gunter Johns, Chase Andre, Matt Moorman, Gideon Addington, Ryan Dueck, Rachel Marszalek, Amy Moffitt, Josh Wallace, Jonathan Dodson, Stephen Barkley, Monty Galloway, Colin McEnroe, Tad DeLay, David Mullens, Kimberly Roth, Tripp Hudgins, Tripp Fuller, Greg Horton, Andrew Tatum, Drew Tatusko, Sam Andress, Susan Barnes, Jared Enyart, Jake Bouma, Eliacin Rosario-Cruz, Blake Huggins, Lance Green, Scott Lenger, Dan Rose, Thomas Turner, Les Chatwin, Joseph Carson, Brian Brandsmeier, J. D. Allen, Greg Bolt, Tim Snyder, Matthew L. Kelley, Carl McLendon, Carter McNeese, David R. Gillespie, Arthur Stewart, Tim Thompson, Joe Bumbulis, Bob Cornwall This Tour is Sponsored by Transforming Theology DOT org!

Prayer Alert: Franklin Graham

2009-10-19T14:32:11-05:00

Please be in prayer for Franklin Graham. McClatchy reported that the son of the famous evangelist had to take a cut in pay. I'm hoping his family will still be able to eat. Before you rush to his defense on this, please note that he took the step after watchdog groups called attention to the situation.

The Diversity Culture, Again

2009-10-08T11:38:11-05:00

I reviewed this book before it came out, breaking my rule of not criticizing things until I actually read them. However, the ad from Books & Culture was so bad that I simply couldn't resist. Now, however, I've read it, and I'm happy to say I was mostly right, and to be honest, partly wrong. Raley writes for evangelicals, but he does so at a level slightly more learned than the typical "this is how you talk to scary pagans" book I see at the local Christian kitsch store. The previous criticisms I had of the book's premise do apply. Learning to talk to pagans in order to get them saved is disingenuous. If you have an agenda going in, you're not a friend; you're a proselytizer. If you try to get your friend saved, then you're probably still a friend, but if you persist in offering me something I don't want, I will write you off as a sales rep for a company with merchandise I don't want. Raley likes to believe that he stands on solid ground with his arguments, even referring to people like me as inhabitants of a "bankrupt" form of life. Wow. Good thing the pagans aren't reading this themselves; they might be offended to know their chosen lives are bankrupt and in need of a savior. Although, most Christians are hard pressed to define salvation in non-eschatological terms (this does not apply to Anabaptists and their kin, nor to the friendly group at Sojo), so the offer of salvation is predicated on a gift I don't want and a reward they can't demonstrate.

Here are the problems with Raley's approach in no particular order, except for the first two because they reveal how flawed his methodology really is.

There is no such thing as the "diversity culture." It's a phrase Raley coined, and it's the same old Hybels-talk in newer, more postmodern clothes. You can't break Americans (Indians, Malians, etc.) into convenient subgroups so that you can target your advertising (err...I mean evangelistic) campaign. Raley uses the denizens of a coffee shop, Cafe Siddhartha (that's Buddha for you non-hipsters out there), to define the diversity culture. Umm, Pastor Raley, the entire culture is diverse, including your church in northern California. As for the postmodern stuff, please stop. You're ten years late for the diversity/relativism train. We're not all relativists; we just don't find anything all that compelling about your soteriological model.
Raley uses the "most emailed" section of the New York Times online edition to discover what the diversity culture finds important, including (deep sigh) transgendered toddlers. The methodology here is so absurd that any sociology or anthropology prof would tell Raley to resubmit his thesis with a better calculus as to how to evaluate culture. Do only pagans and the diversity culture read the NYT? Do Christians not read it? Does everyone that reads it email a link to an interesting story? What kind of sample group are you getting? What does your control group look like? This is straightforward marketing with a scattershot methodology that demonstrates people who read the NYT occasionally forward interesting pieces.
So, so, so tired of Jesus' conversation with the woman at the well used as a model for how to reach me. Pastor Raley, Jesus and the Samaritan woman shared some crucial assumptions, including a conviction that theism was the correct path. The woman at the well may help you talk to Muslims (and that's doubtful since all the monotheists have a successionist view of their beloved texts), but it won't help you with deists, atheists, skeptics, and monists.
This from my previous review: "...if Christians have grown up in a culture (church) that has so fundamentally misinformed them about what the world is like, that would be the fault of the church, and the cure is systemic, just like the problem. My suspicion, based on teaching college students every year, is that young people have absorbed their culture far better and are far more comfortable with being 'postmoderns' than crisis culture book writers realize. If you're trying to train people over 50 to communicate to the "postmodern culture," you're tilting windmills. They either live and breathe in that culture, or their best chance is just casual, polite acquaintances with denizens of that scary culture. Culture is (at least) language and semiotics, and only people who grow up in a particular culture or immerse themselves in it communicate correctly within it."
There is no such thing as a postmodernist. No such thing. No agreed upon set of criteria exists. No practices. No assumptions that can be generalized. Stop targeting us and just try to be a friend. People are different: different assumptions, desires, fears, hopes, beliefs. If postmodernity teaches us anything at all, it's that each person stands uniquely within their own frame of reference and that frame of reference can't be quantified into some sort of evangelistic algorithm. Stop. Please.

Nope, not one bit scary...

2009-10-07T16:14:59-05:00

Thanks to Tripp for passing this along. If you're curious about details, as if you need an explanation, here's freak show central.

The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers

2009-09-30T09:45:32-05:00

Cathleen Falsani, an amazing religion columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, has put together an overview of the Coen Brothers' films, including a chapter on A Serious Man, the new film that releases in October. The book drops tomorrow, but Falsani's publicist mailed me a review copy, which I finished last week.

Fans of the Coen Brothers will enjoy the assessment, especially those Christians broad-minded enough to handle the profane world of the Coens. The book looks at all 14 films using a broad overview, a plot assessment (summary), and a theological question: what does god look like in this film? Falsani concludes with a brief, bulleted list of the Coens' gospel.

I've read Falsani for years and have great respect for her ability to make complex subjects lucid and her evenhandedness in her columns. She is an excellent writer with a fair-mindedness not always found in the faithful. Her lucid writing comes through in the book, and she's kind enough to warn about spoilers in the chapter on A Serious Man. I read it anyway.

If I have a criticism of the book, it is that we tend to interpret the images of god and spirituality in films according to our own categories and assumptions. Falsani, who appears to be an evangelical, often makes the mistake of thinking about god from just that perspective. In doing so, for example, she makes Fargo, one of the best of the corpus, into a morality tale wherein Frances McDormand's character embodies all the good virtues. I completely agree to that point. But it seems that god is wholly absent from the film, inasmuch as everyone else sins boldly and badly, leading to the catastrophic results. Redemption is nowhere in the film, unless you count McDormand and her husband, who embody the virtues of simplicity, charity, fidelity, kindness, and thrift. But the redeemed don't need a redeemer; the unredeemed, who do need one, are left to their own devices—a common motif in Coen Brothers' films. (Hard to watch No Country for Old Men and find a glimmer of god helping the floundering fools.) If there is a theology to Fargo, it is that practicing the virtues, including being content with what we have, is the way to salavation in this world. Yes, it's a biblical message, but it's an axiom that transcends sectarianism, appearing in almost every faith as well as among atheists and skeptics.

That being said, the book is an enjoyable, easy read, especially for fans of the Coens. For newcomers, there may be too much information. Probably better to see the films before reading the spoilers.