undone

A Theology of Modern Art

2013-05-17T22:01:00.003-07:00

You sir, or madam, are a space, too.

The Telos of American Practicality; or why theology is (practically) meaningless to church.

2013-04-30T11:24:00.001-07:00

tl;dr
...

The other day I found my head nodding in agreement as a friend talked about the need for churches to offer practical real world solutions. We all nodded.

Later that day found myself wondering “What the hell does that mean?”
“What is practical?”
“Whose practical are we talking about?” and an idea began to form that the insistence on the practical answer in churches can be a rhetorical powerplay.

On the one hand, I am sympathetic to cries for churches to be practical, especially in light of all the committees and discussions that attend rather obvious things. Much of the church’s lofty religious talk and theology is genuinely negated by its indifference and inability to address real problems in the world. Worse still, sometimes all the "spiritual" talk seems like filibustering to keep from being accountable to real problems. Church discussions very quickly turn into something like congressional discussions – they drag on forever and create no meaningful action. Our own little church has had a fondness for creating teams to deal with little things at times. (“We’re forming a team to discuss refilling the copier periodically, etc.)

But just as much as being idealistic and impractical can be ways to dodge real meaningful action, being practical is also a dodge. If you always do the obvious thing, you are only doing what society allows, not what the Kingdom of God demands, right? Otherwise the world would heal itself.

Church can seem apathetic about discussing hard problems in depth with people these days. (unless of course its about evolution or the end times.) We want quick solutions to get working on. We like action and results, even if they aren’t actually the results we’re looking for. So I have grown to distrust the practical answer. Not in immediate, urgent situations, mind you - “Get to the hospital,” “don’t let the kids play with knives”, and others are still good advice, but I distrust the immediate impulse to get out of the clouds and get something done in our discussions about church life.

When we gather to talk about things, people say, “let’s get practical, ” but we don’t yet know what we agree and disagree on, nor do we understand issues in depth enough to see what’s essential or nonessential, so the immediate impulse to practicality is blind. It assumes everyone generally thinks alike and sees the problem the same way. So what's the endgame here? What does our practicality drive us towards?

What is practical is doing what society allows us. It’s the prevailing ideas and actions our culturals form in us that are the practical ones because they are obvious to us.. What is “practical” is perhaps the only course of action that the Power and Principalities allow. The harder thing to do is to think; to be held accountable to bigger ideas and make decisions and take action from a different place than the world would.

Reflective action isn’t fast enough, it’s not productive enough. And the older I get, the more I am convinced that the ambiguity of not knowing what to do is intolerable for Christians. It is too threatening to face the feelings being unsure elicits. Quick, practical action provides a sense of control and surety, but it becomes its own justification – because I’m being practical, it must be right, of that I can be sure. In my own experience of churches, the most practical churches are the most businesslike, hierarchical churches, because they are skilled at doing what works.

But Jesus wasn’t really practical, not with all the dying and resurrecting stuff – why not just do a better job recruiting the right kind of people to be his disciples? He needed a better leadership structure. Why should he have let the woman with the alabaster flask waste all that ointment on him? The Gospel is effective, but not practical enough to be lived very often. We need practical action and thoughtful consideration in equal parts, but our American culture values practical action more. I'm just pining for some more balance and wondering if to be the church in America means we must create a different space in the world to be thoughtful.

The Shackles of History and Its Amnesia

2013-04-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

-Still churning on Foucault, and thinking about how captive we are to our own histories, both personal and corporate.

I've had more interaction with other pastors recently and it's been interesting because we always seem to talk about "moving forward," building healthy communities, generating positive achievements. No one reckons with the past, or acknowledges much that they have one, even as a church. Sometimes it's like talking to a bunch of really sincere medical equipment salesmen sometimes.

At the same time, it's been hard for a few friends to grapple with emotionally difficult parts of their pasts. But they are grappling, more so than some of the aforementioned clergy. I've come away from though, with a deep sense of how well our world keeps us from understanding of ourselves as products of history, even though we think of everything else as a product! (I want to speculate here that part of the power of whiteness, or at least its privilege, comes from not needing to have a history.) As much as the church is impugned for not being forward-thinking, especially in regards to race and gender, I think the problem is that we are not backwards thinking enough.

The veil is behind us, not in front of us.

Anyways, James Baldwin expresses this concern, this consciousness, much better than I in his essay, "Unnameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes." Have a look:

    One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read, for their own sakes, this record, and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives. The fact that Americans, white Americans, have not yet been able to do this- to face their history, to change their lives-hideously menaces this country. Indeed, it menaces the entire world.
    For history, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On- the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be other- wise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.
    And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror, one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view. In great pain and terror, because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating; one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history.
    But, obviously, I am speaking as an historical creation which has had bitterly to contest its history, to wrestle with it and finally accept it, in order to bring myself out of it. My point of view is certainly formed by my history and it is probable that only a creature despised by history finds history a questionable matter. On the other hand, people who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing them- selves or the world.

Baldwin's comment about, "[a] personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power," is profound and the way Jesus liberates people - especially White Americans, somehow. Our individualism begrudgingly admits to an examination of family histories, but there is a still greater examination of corporate history that we all embody, whether we like it or not. We are in many way products, and don't escape our "product-ness" until we can reckon with the social machine that created us and make room to hear the voices critical of the machinery.

"Entering into battle with that historical creation, oneself" is the challenge, especially for white men. To be set free from that and spend my energies on helping others disentangle themselves as well requires the power of the Kingdom of God.

My Worst Book

2013-03-14T09:48:00.003-07:00

Let me begin with praise for self-help books.

I love 'em.

Seriously. Yes, they are full of terrible assumptions. They often glorify the self, reducing everything to psychological adjustment. In many ways, they are the triumph of late modern capitalist democracies; technologies of the self that perpetuate middle class values. Sure. Absolutely.

But often times they are also the best advice people will receive in churches today; not for lack of other opportunities, but because of the way modern lives are closed off from real relationships over time. So for many people wrestling with their dysfunction, they provide guidance towards maturity that most people don't find in church communities, largely because they can never go there with people. There is something about the safe interiority of reading, however, that opens people up to truths they would not otherwise hear. Or maybe print just seems more official, learned. Either way, there are a whole lot of people in my church who still need to read Boundaries because they aren't taking the hint from their friends, so even if I have to warn them to check every botched scriptural reference, I still want them to be be equipped with the concepts and help negotiate the boundaries in our relationships informed by people who have considered them.

And sometimes self-help books are not worth the carbon offset they require.

Case in point: Mindset

I don't want to tee off on this book. I am sure that the author, C. Dweck, a Stanford professor, has done a great deal of powerful research over the years with much to report. But the book is really the most tepid pool of poor editorial decisions that you can imagine. It feels cobbled together by the market and not the research. This is too bad, because it's basic point is great: people can change. Our capacities for growth are not fixed. In her research (which the book provides no access to), people with a "fixed mindsets" are often more limited than people with a "growth mindset". The key then is to praise effort and practice more than achievement to help people grow. Sounds great, right?

It should be. Laying aside the industrial world's obsession with "personal achievement and "fulfilling our potential," the book seeks to trace some cognitive aspects of what hope looks like in individuals. This is a fantastic thing! At the same time as Mindset, I was serendipitously reading an article on Middle East conflict resolution which also asserted that reconciliation occurs when people believe the other party can change. Together, both pieces drew me to consider the message of hope in the Gospels, and specifically how it gets worked out in real people and real situations; what does hope look like? Over the last year or so, God has been impressing upon me that I am awfully cynical for someone preaching that Faith, hope and love abide. If God can and does change things, perhaps I should be more optimistic about people in general. Not naively, of course, but with hope that springs from the Risen One.

Understand, of course, the hope in Mindset has nothing to do with Jesus. At all. I just hoped to learn some things about being optimistic. So I approached the book humbly, aware of how bogged down, faithless and stuck my own cynicism makes me.

But the book was really bad. After divulging the main point in the first chapter, the rest of the book is full of the most banal, forced illustrations you can imagine with few practicals to teach people how to hope. Particularly grievous were the sports analogies. In comparing McEnroe to Michael Jordan, the author paints Jordan as this virtuous athlete who believed in the power of hard work to change, a basketball Jesus. Poor Mac, though, was just a petulant, insecure athlete. The book doesn't bring up how Jordan flew out his highschool coach to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony just to humiliate him. Or the women, or the gambling.... As a sports fan (I admit it) the book instantly looses credibility by forcing the example soo hard to make a point:

"Hey I like rap. Are you into the Fresh Prince, too?"

My negative reaction is probably proportional to the hype surrounding it, but this sports example points out how painfully formulaic the book is; "Athlete X is great because he demonstrates my principle _______."

/spoiler alert/
So here is my basic problem with the book:
It is ironically, shallow enough to feel cynical, feel like it was cobbled together by editors who washed out the real research and instead tried to imagine how they could reach the common person they describe by various market-share formulas. There really is no research in the book, no real depth, and once you read the first chapter, you have the whole book, and yet there is soooo much buzz surrounding it. Apparently no one was ever told "keep trying, you can grow," before. If you want a perfect, short synopsis of the main points, check out this education website summary instead and give the money you save to a worthy charity.

(As an aside, I kept wondering if there's a warning here somewhere for the interminable Bible study booklets people are forced to use in church. Doubtless you know the type:

a paragraph of vague background material/summary
3 questions about specific verses in the passage
a concluding, "what are you going to do now" question.

When you see a small group of people trying to study a new book of the Bible, wait and watch their faces when somebody suggests they could read one of those study guide pamphlets to help them. The expressions I've seen pretty much confirm that their formulaic nature doesn't really satisfy.)
/aside

So the book fails badly at being a book and that's too bad since the main point is solid. Maybe I should be glad for the hype surrounding it. It could mean people are genuinely being helped. I dunno. Since I've picked it up, I've discovered that there is an attendant Franklin-Covey-ish product line and seminar opportunities in tow, all of which seem even more cynical somehow; a great way to take a dollar while telling people something they probably have heard before. I wish there were more emphasis on the research findings, and less terribly forced stories to make the point. At least Cloud and Townsend's generic stories illustrate the points they are making.

Which brings me back to self-help books in general. What separates the good from the bad? Writing really does make a difference. I feel like I could write a "how to write a self-help book" manual because the styles and arrangements are so similar. Mindset almost mocks this with its paucity of substance and preponderance of chatty examples that demonstrate very little. At the very least, poor writing can obscure any good intentions. Take this blog, for instance...

I'm back.

2013-03-08T11:08:00.001-08:00

Hello,
I'm back. My sabbatical was lovely, thanks.
One of my conclusions is that writing and blogging is a healthy discipline for me since it allows me to think and argue about things the daily scatter of a pastor's life doesn't always have room for. Important things. The danger is that I so very much want to have something to say, but I shall try and temper this. In the sage words of Whitesnake, "Here I go again...."

Sabbatical

2012-06-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

I am fortunate to receive a sabbatical this summer. Our church practices a wise discipline of 3 months off every three years. I don't really want it, but I can tell I need it. One of the things I intend to do is blog more. I'm intimidated by the blogs I read - I don't have great theological treatises in me on a regular basis, just random jumbles of thoughts. Blogging feels pretty narcissistic and I'm not convinced anyone needs to read what I'm thinking, but I probably need the discipline to develop some thoughts and make them more accessible to our church. So here goes...

As for the sabbatical, my trepidations are not the same ones people seem to assume. I am not worried that everything will collapse without me; on the contrary, I worry things will go much better without me. It is a profound fear of missing out on things that I seem to have always had. It makes the Gospel really scary sometimes, as I seem to pick up the "do this or you're not in" internally more than the "God loves you." So there you have it. I promise not to navel gaze too much, but I still hope to be provocative.

Postmodernism and Church - would you?

2012-04-20T15:00:00.002-07:00

Would you teach a class on postmodernism at your church?
Why?
What would you hope to come of it?

I've had a hankering to do so, but I don't know if I want to other than for my own benefit. Is this something that would benefit the church? Is there some value for it? I am torn because we are not really and evangelical church and yet we are not that Biblically literate, either. So for many people, their worldview is rather traditional though our church is not. If I did it I would probably follow Smith's "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism" as a kind of outline - concise and closer to where people are at. My goal would probably be to help people see the contingent nature of every view; a kind of epistemological crowbar, and how Jesus is our anchor.

Have you or your church done something like this before? Would it just be better to do an in depth study of something like Ephesians? What do you think?

Trayvon Martin and individual justice

2012-04-12T14:00:00.004-07:00

The Trayvon Martin murder is a powerful illustration of just the kinds of things we’ve been talking about in church lately and it serves as a great litmus test to determine how much individualism (our European heritage) shapes our worldview. Those who see things through a corporate lens see Martin’s killing and Zimmerman’s non-arrest as symptoms of a greater problem of racial injustice in America. Many, however, see such a systemic perspective as race baiting hysteria. For them, the Martin killing is an isolated event, tragic but not representative of larger dynamics.

This second group has had to take on the awkward position of defending "the system." In a number of discussions I’ve read, the people who most insist that it was an isolated event resort to saying things like, “the police acted according to the law,” or “let the process run its course and we’ll find out if Zimmerman is guilty.” (-and point to the fact Zimmerman is now arrested as proof the system works, despite the fact it didn’t happen until national public outrage reared its head).

Isn’t it funny that a worldview of individual responsibility must defend the justice systems righteousness? Doesn’t this betray how much of a power and principality the individualism of the dominant culture in the US is? What a demonstration of the corporate power of individualism! We see things as individual events and cases but are unaware that we have learned to think this way systematically. To get to this point we have already been shaped by the power of a corporate system of thought, a discipleship, into individualism.

And that’s part of the problem with our justice system, I think. It is conceived of as a way to protect individual rights, but has no greater vision – it is entirely atomistic. The good of the country, of real people and real people groups, can only be conceived of an aggregate of individual rights. We have lost a sense of corporate good. The presidential campaign paints the same picture - all anybody talks about is the economy and how to get a bigger, protected share, as opposed to acknowledging and lifting up those already cut out. Elections aren't won by "we have a duty to one another," they are won by "I will keep them from taking your money!"

Isn't this individualism itself an abstraction? It must conceive of disembodied individuals detached from social location and broader forces. Now I wouldn't want individual responsibility to be ignored ever, but when does corporate responsibility become an equal partner? When is there an obligation to listen to outsider viewpoints? And why aren’t Christians more concerned about corporate responsibility and the public good? I mean, Christians are very proud of their civic concern for abortion and creationism, why not the little things like murder and morality…..? We end up defending a system in light of a bleeding dead child.

-Yes, you should read that in light of Good Friday passed and remember that the powers and principalities are the things Jesus cast down.

fighting racism one pill at a time.

2012-03-16T13:31:00.004-07:00

Perhaps you noticed New Scientist or Yahoo recently touting a "new pill fights racism." If not, here's the skinny, ripped from The Daily Beast:

Writing in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, British investigators found that a veteran heart and blood pressure pill, propranolol, which acts to lower our fight-or-flight response to anything by dialing down adrenaline production, reduced “implicit racial bias” significantly. They ran their study in 36 white 22-year-old volunteers and distinguished implicit associations from explicit racial prejudice. The implicit kind—seeing something that makes you uncomfortable and reacting with a quickened pulse—was the type “improved” while good, old-fashioned explicit racial prejudice was unchanged. In other words, the drug didn’t make you more tolerant, just less physiologically perturbed about the whole thing.

So the last line pretty much nails it, but I can't help but think that the headlines the study generated all seem pitched in an inherently white way. (Western?) I say this because of the way racism is identified as an individual problem. The study and subsequent headlines suggest racism is rooted in a blood pressure spike, a limbic issue, instead of a greater systematic power of racial oppression both subtle and overt. The question is framed in a manner consistent with white individualism. I would much prefer to work with a person whose blood pressure spikes, ...and then repents, than someone who claims "I am not a racist" while taking propranolol. It's not a pill that cures racism, it just makes you politically correct!

(Interesting thought experiment: if the government started putting the stuff in our drinking water, might it create a great polite society that never reacts to one another, but still can't see injustice in its midst? -except for all the wealthy homeowners who filter the drug out with their under counter reverse osmosis filters, creating a wealthy prejudiced ruling elite in our country who keep the masses placated by the drug, further enabling their privilege?!

..oh...)

Where does "racism" or prejudice happen?. If a pill were to fix it, does it mean biology was the problem? And if so, does that absolve one of responsibility? Clearly not or we wouldn't desire the pill in the first place. Beyond the sensationalism of the headlines, it is really an atomistic viewpoint.

Oh well. The irony of this post is that I'm all loaded up with antibiotics, steriods and painkillers right now. Science - a principality that God has redeemed for my sinuses.

Research and the Internet

2012-02-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

"The problem with quotes from the internet is that you can never be certain that they are genuine. ~George Washington"

Prejudice, Science and God's Freedom

2012-01-26T12:09:00.000-08:00

Oh this is rich: A recent correlative study claims that "low IQ & conservative beliefs linked to prejudice." As reported by Live Science:

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.
The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice, Hodson wrote in an email to LiveScience.
"Prejudice is extremely complex and multifaceted, making it critical that any factors contributing to bias are uncovered and understood," he said.

It's tempting to say this is low hanging fruit, but then again, it's tempting to imagine the study conducted by angular people in white lab coats gathering data to outlaw the savages who don't believe in science, too. Still, it is a nice cheap shot to levy at your more conservative friends.

While the findings make good eye candy, they distract, I think, from the real issues of inequity in American society. It's the classic case of examining the local bigot who use lots of epithets and harasses outsiders while ignoring the CEO in the boardroom who never questions why everyone around the table is a white male, why white men control a lion's share of wealth. Which is more damaging to society? Clearly both are evil, but because we cannot name the prejudice so easily of the CEO, and because we cannot blame him for a lack of personal responsibility for the issue, our American worldview lacks the tools to examine and address a greater systemic evil. There is no study about the privileged' sins of omission.

So of course I laughed and enjoyed the article, but I wonder if it is not on another level an interesting skirmish between the powers and principalities: the power of science, demonstrating its legitimacy by attacking the power of prejudice, which is something everyone already knows is basically bad. It leads you right up to the point of saying, "Look! Science can prove what morality is, " but doesn't get there. It will be interesting to see how a study like this might become a part of public policy. It basically says fundamentalism of any kind is related to stupidity, and we will have to figure out how to respond to that data.

But beyond this border skirmish there is a greater power in Christ. Christ's freedom to give himself on behalf of all peoples demonstrates something potentially different in how Christians can treat people we disagree with, people who are different, and even people we are enemies with. His freedom can be our freedom in the midst of the powers clashing. We don't have to choose either side; we must love them because Christ is our reason. Christ is the highest power.

Anyways, Jonah has spurred a lot of thought about the freedom of God for me and so it was along these lines I got to thinking about the article. What do you think?

A free Theology of Hope and other Moltmann

2011-12-09T12:05:00.000-08:00

Much to my surprise, I stumbled upon an online version of Moltmann's "A Theology of Hope," his most influential work. It is just html and looks to be the full text. (at least all the chapters, anyways).

To round it out, here is a link to his Capps lecture at the U of Virginia in 2005 on freedom and security. It's a .pdf from the U.

Lastly, for the main event, Moltmann v. Hauerwas , Andy Rowell recorded some lectures/panels in 2008 at Duke during the Recordings from Society for Pentecostal Studies and the Wesleyan Theological Society joint meeting. (cf., "Why ecumenical titles are terrible....") Andy Rowell recorded these and made them available, so pass along your thanks! I haven't listened to them yet, and they include other panelists (like Stassen - shout out to my homey from the block...) but I hope they are engaging.

Just look at that laugh! He's either genuinely joyful or plotting to take over the world.

Penn State Power

2011-11-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

What happened at Penn State is a terrible picture of our fallen humanity. It is also a graphic example of what a powers and principalities looks like in practice. Charles Pierce, Esquire contributor writing at Grantland, has a fascinating piece on the institutional nature of what happened:

It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.
If Mike McQueary had seen a child being raped in a boardroom or a storeroom, he wouldn't have been any more likely to have stopped it, or to have called the cops, than he was as a graduate assistant football coach at Penn State. With unemployment edging toward double digits, and only about 10 percent of the workforce unionized, every American who works for a major company knows the penalty for exercising his personal freedom, or his personal morality, at the expense of "the company." Independent thought is discouraged. Independent action is usually crushed. Nobody wants to damage the brand. Your supervisor might find out, and his primary loyalty is to the company. Which is why he got promoted to be your supervisor in the first place.

...It is not a failure of our institutions so much as it is a window into what they have become — soulless, profit-driven monsters, Darwinian predators with precious little humanity left in them. Penn State is only the most recent example. Too much of this country is too big to fail.

Pierce cuts through the hand wringing about collegiate athletics and accuses us all of living in the same world, a world of monstrous organizations and systems that have a life of their own, promising success and security in return for loyalty. This demand for loyalty though must always cross God's demands on us to live. That is one way to understand idolatry, I think, because to ensure it's own life, the powers and principalities must save their own lives, not lose them, and they do so at the expense of their own people, always at the expense of the most vulnerable. Even the judge who set Sandusky’s bail remarkably low is a donor to his non-profit organization. –everywhere one would go in State College PA, this power is at work, systemically, to both preserve the brand and protect its own.

The church in America needs to get better at identifying and fighting against the powers if are going to follow Jesus into his kingdom. How? A confidence to blow the whistle knowing we lose jobs and face shame, because our future is safe with Him? A willingness to yield our own privilege to protect the vulnerable? What role does prayer hold in such a terrible world?

I appreciate Pierce calling out “branding”. Take note church. The most insidious powers are the religious ones, because they look to our untrained eyes like God’s will.

*picture and quote taken from Grantland.

repost: Bibledex, bible book movies

2011-10-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

Ben Meyers at Faith&theology posted the following a day or so ago. It seems like a great resource, so you might want to check them out. Just please don't watch them to fact check me during the sermon. Wait until after......

Ben wrote,

Here's a great resource. Video journalist Brady Haran has collaborated with the theology department at Nottingham University to produce a short video on every book of the Bible. The videos feature various personalities from the Nottingham department – including Anthony Thiselton, John Milbank, Conor Cunningham, Alison Milbank, Philip Goodchild, and Karen Kilby. As well as covering every book of the Bible, there's a series of videos on individual verses and geographical locations.

The same guy has done two other video projects like this: one on sixty physics symbols, and one on the whole periodic table. It's great stuff."

on Purgatory

2011-09-30T14:21:00.000-07:00

"'Lord, rebuke me not in Your indignation, nor correct me in Your anger' [Psalm 38:1]...In this life may You cleanse me and make me such that I have no need of the corrective fire, which is for those who are saved, but as if by fire...for it is said: 'He shall be saved, but as if by fire' [1 Cor 3:15]. And because it is said that he shall be saved, little is thought of that fire. Yet plainly, though we be saved by fire, that fire will be more severe than anything a man can suffer in this life." (Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, 37:3)

Purgatory is a great idea. You might not feel the need for indulgences, but at some level I think purgatory appeals to us as a place to finally burn away all the dross, grind out all the flaws, work out all the kinks. It is the hammer of forgiveness; the tool by which grace can be allowed. Like a mother scolding her children as she to takes their muddy shoes off, purgatory explains how sin soaked people can stand in the presence of a holy God: we can’t, and must wash up first. One does not simply walk into Mordor, after all.

Something of the idea seems to have been around from the beginning of the church. From the prayers for the dead scrawled over early catacombs to Origen’s contemplation of a purging fire, there has been talk of an in-between place to drive the sin out of us before we see God. Augustine looks to have been very fond of it as well. The reformers, of course, would have nothing to do with it since, in addition to all the tension with church authority, it seemed to diminish the atoning work of Christ. Calvin wrote that the doctrine of purgatory is “..a blasphemy against Christ.” (Institutes, III, 5) Shouldn’t the cross be enough?

But, to this Baptist, the doctrine makes a kind of sense. It answers the questions flying around about my obvious faults; "when will the sin get burned out of him?" How do you work out the evil and fallen nature? A holy acid bath seems totally necessary to strip the corrosion from our frames. What I take issue with most in the doctrine of purgatory is its timing. I believe purgatory actually happens before death, and the name of purgatory in Baptist circles is “community.”

Community – that vague network of daily relationships- is the place where all our evil is exposed and worked out. In the midst of our connection to other people, our multifaceted issues emerge to be scraped away and the result, hopefully, is that we Christians are made fresh, true, with eyes that can see God because we have become holy as He is holy. In this way community prepares us to see God; wipes the mud from our feet. How else will the sin in our lives be pressed out and driven away?

If there is a flaw in this view of purgatory, it is that we can choose to ignore it. While it’s not possible to avoid the suffering of improvement completely, we do try to hide from it. We ignore it and deny that is really happening or necessary. We blame and judge instead of confess and forgive. We lead when we should listen. And maybe this is the worst part; instead of working through conflicts we leave. We bounce from group to group looking for a collection of people in which we can fit in easily, never really loving anyone different than we are, never learning to love the least.

Few of us ever make it into the purgatory of community. We miss our chance to persist and be refined, choosing instead to fool ourselves we’re making progress with books and seminars. We don’t buy indulgences, we buy Christian media hoping to escape our stay in the fire. Our real brokenness , the kind Christ can heal and salve, is not often brought to the surface and improved. (Who could bear it?) In truth, the agony of a classic doctrine of purgatory is more appealing because we do not have to choose it. It requires nothing of us other than dying…which we were going to do anyways. Deciding to honestly be present to the people around us is the hardest thing of all.

James Cone and Karl Barth. derp.

2011-09-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

How can I integrate Barth and social justice? Is it worth trying? I really don’t know. But when Cone writes that “The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God's own condition,” I want to say that this implies to me that before God assumes blackness, he is free to choose it. And in this thought I hear Barth. Is that fair? Can we say that without freedom then, the freedom of God to be God, justice is impossible? (A Black Theology of Liberation, p. 63)

I should probably let it go, but I feel nourished by both.

Wishtoyo, a poem

2011-08-26T15:02:00.000-07:00

Wishtoyo

I do not like pictures of the beach
with gelatin waters rolling

back to the horizon,
or a stout heart lighthouse
presiding over the churn.

Where is the split timber?
The wrecked ones on the rocks?
There is no kelp wilting on those shores,
no crabs sprinting sidelong from gulls.
It’s just unfettered open;
a banner of amnesia.

I can dream sometimes of islands on a piss plate
where I am king and the sun
shines on all my best ideas,
but I remember the light hissing out each day
under murdered clouds.

Underneath that black tarp
secret fishes shuttle back and forth
stealing away meaning from words and thoughts;
every feeling that tries to form.

There is nothing under the sea.

I will show you the sea.
The sea behind the sea.
(There, I said it!)
We might live there, even,
misplaced and wandering as
wavecrash explosions salt us

with fire.

There among the dead things that wash up
the surviving laugh in gray damp.
They smile back at the roar and crush
and feel heat and grit and skin under sweatshirts.

They play and leave for hot coffee
to push salt from their noses.
They call out names to one another,
pulling away from the surf, back from the sea,

back from the twisting line where nothing starts
and everything ends

and someone else takes pictures for a dollar.

licensed under creative commons, some rights reserved.

On Technical Writing

2011-08-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
-Charles Bukowski

In other news, pardon the dust : I am trying to figure out how to move the blog over to my own server; well, have been for the summer. Need to create separate pages for things like the media resources. Thanks for the patience.

A Christian Nation

2011-08-06T00:44:00.000-07:00

It seems to me we should fear becoming a Christian nation. Never mind that to be so would mean we were a nation fundamentally more concerned with the rest of world than our internal affairs; to be a Christian nation would mean we would ultimately be faced with the task of regulating Jesus. The idea that somehow American evangelicals have got Jesus and government figured out is absurd, and seems to be just the kind of mistake that protestant Europe made warring with Catholicism, that Catholicism made warring with the Eastern church, and that Constantine drew from in his own wars. It is the same idea abutting the Sanhedrin as they convicted Jesus and the same idea even Peter burned with as he struck Malchus. Believing it best represents God’s will, every Christian government is ultimately doomed to sacrifice Jesus once again.

Friday's lament: poem for a miscarriage

2011-07-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

On Thursday

They told us you were gone;

left weeks prior.

An awkward chrome arm

with halide lights

reached out

and snipped a hole in the sky.

Despite this hole overhead,

I believe your day is bright.

It’s good weather: you know it all.

We poke at hope with a stick.

Here the sun is obscured.

We are hot and it is dark.

Mom sweats blood. So much blood.

It pools at her feet, black and still.

Had time allowed,

we could have changed our plans.

Now I’m suspicious of plans,

wary of the sun,

wondering if the hole tracks us,

with heavy, measured steps.

-selah

Race and The Holy Trinity?

2011-06-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

Life has me on two tracks right now; preparing for our Fall efforts to address race & culture and more immediately preparing for our series about the Holy Spirit. Yesterday, after reading T.F. Torrance, it occurred to me that our inability to understand and discuss race looks similar to our difficulty in understanding the Holy Trinity. In both cases the existence of united difference is what boggles the mind. Now there's a whole world of ontological difference between one god/three persons and humanity as united diversity, but it's interesting to think that appreciating the Trinity might be a theological window for thinking about race*. God as love is simpler and the commands to love our neighbor as ourselves more direct, but I wonder how to go about unpacking "God is love" in a trinitarian fashion that would yield fruit as we consider race. I like it more than a simple appeal to the mountain all nations come to to worship God in Revelation because it seems more intertwined, more enmeshed, more shall we say.... perichoretic?

If you have any insights, pass 'em along!

*race as ethnicity/culture/nations, not American biological "race"

Power is exercised on flesh

2011-05-25T15:32:00.000-07:00

In anticipation of Easter (wow…it has been a while) I preached a Palm Sunday Sermon about life under the powers and principalities. I hoped to demonstrate how the powers were on display during Holy Week as Rome and religious authorities exercised their dominion over Christ’s human body, but my thesis was that “The powers”, abstract as they might seem, are always felt in the flesh. Christ’s body was the intersection, not just of God and man, but of the powers, too, for in his body he bore the wounds, feeling the real tear of Rome’s talons.

So I’m probably late to the party, but it seems obvious now that the powers are always felt, in some way, in our flesh. Just as God is incarnated, and faith is embodied, so too do the powers and principalities act on our flesh. A great deal of their power rests on their hiddenness today, but when people decide not to abide by the rules, these powers rear their ugly, violent selves. So I’ve been wondering how I experience the powers at work on my own body, how our church experiences the powers and principalities trying to exercise dominion in our particular flesh.

Where this struck pay dirt for me was how tired we all are. The fatigue we feel at the end of the week – the drudgery kind that makes you want to turn on the TV and go to bed instead of going to a Bible study or church on Sunday, this is the power of capitalism at work in our bodies. So we live our lives according to the rules of wallstreet and church is an extracurricular activity. Wall Street and the job market and the banks and the rent determine what is extracurricular, not our faith. Work is good, but the kind of work available, if at all, demands more than we can give and still live in genuine human relationships to others sometimes. Stringfellow teaches me that this power of industry is really the power of death at work. Sometimes when the alarm goes off, I agree.

But others have it much worse, and the human body is afflicted by the powers in many ways; some we choose, some thrust on us. The death and violence manifests particularly in the treatment of women and minorities in the US. These are the bodies the powers at work in our world deal with violently; a witness not listened to enough by those in power. Of course not. The more I think about how total the forces that make the world go 'round are, the more I feel the need for someone to save me.

Somehow, I feel that this month has been good to contemplate our discussion of the Holy Spirit coming up. I'm beginning to try digest how the Holy Spirit is the only truly real alternative to the powers that run our world – living by faith is the only genuine alternative to the powers triumphing in our bodies. Furthermore, I hope to sketch out a theology that can take seriously and materially the Holy Spirit’s power and work in us today beyond a static idea of “salvation.” In some sense, Christians claim exorcism where the powers are excercised, but what does that mean in the grit of life? As usual, I feel under prepared with too little time, but I’m hoping that the Spirit moves regardless. :)

Truth, a quote

2011-04-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

"Truth gathers no adjectives"

-Max DePree, Leading Without Power

The Politics of Redemption: Winning!

2011-04-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Adam Kotsko and An und für sich for the generous giveaway of The Politics of Redemption. I'm looking forward to reading about the "social logic of redemption" he puts forth, divested of the usual metaphysical trappings and allusive language. Please give it a look. To whet your appetite, here's a link to some review and discourse about it already.

Barth the Evangelical & Justice.

2011-04-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

“That they may see your good works and glorify your father in heaven,” that they may be a commentary on the proclamation of God’s help, is , of course, freely promised, but cannot be its set intention. Like prayer, praise and confession, especially in cases like Francis of Assisi and Bodelshwingh, it has always been spontaneous, unpremeditated and in the final and best sense unpractical talk about God. Then and in this way the light has shone out.

This was surely overlooked in H. Bar’s work, Weniger Predigt!, 1930, in which it is recommended that to-day we should not make preaching so much as service in moral and social reform our mode of proclamation.
If the social work of the Church as such were to try to be proclamation, it could only become propaganda, and not very worthy propaganda at that. Genuine Christian love must always start back at the thought of pretending to be a proclamation of the love of Christ with its only too human action. (CD I.3.I)

At first glance in the citation above, Barth sounds very much like tevangelical denouncements of social justice today, as if he is devaluing its importance for God’s work in the world. I’m not entirely sure what to think about Barth’s position, and I have a long way to go. On the one hand, it seems to divorce human efforts to relieve suffering from God’s initiative in the world, as if all justice is simply human efforts, futile, and biding time until the end. At least here, justice is not a vehicle for divine revelation.

On the other hand, it redeems social justice from being a calculated advertisement; just the kind of stuff we see today in Christian media and church campaigns. It also insulates the proclamation of God from being evaluated by the efficacy of our attempts to be just. It seems to me like this could have profound political implications too, forbidding social organization from identifying with the Word of God, -no form of governing can lay claim to divine fiat.

The discussion really hinges on Barth’s understanding of Word of God not as words about God, but rather the human words God inhabits with his Word. Clearly, given the Barmen Declaration, Barth was a proponent of social engagement. It is probably more correct to see the passage above as a rejection of liberal theology and a equating of God’s Word with only social justice. Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s overstated and possible that social justice as human activity can be seized and used by God as proclamation in his freedom without equating all attempts at justice with proclamation.

So what do you think? Am I on the right track, understanding Barth accurately or have a missed a broader context? Barth is that he is so gamey in his writing, I might find in a couple of chapters that he meant the exact opposite. At least it’s a joy to finally quote Barth from my own copy of Church Dogmatics!