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U is for Universalism (modified)

I used to joke with people that you had to be careful attending churches that had a ‘U’ in them. United, Universal, Unitarian, Unity, etc. They seemed to believe in almost everything or in not much of anything. 

It was much funnier before I was a UMC pastor… but to be honest, there is something to it.

Theological words are much the same. ‘U’ words tend to be big and sweeping in their scope. Much like the ‘I’ words seem to embody a certain period and concern, the ‘U’ words are large and consequential.

We will tackle Universalism first and then look at Ultimate Concern.

Our Pocket Dictionary defines it this way – but pay attention to how it does so:

“Universalism. Known historically as apokatastasis, the belief that all persons will be saved. Hence universalism involves the affirmation of universal *salvation and the denial of eternal punishment. Universalists believe that ultimately all humans are somehow in union with Christ and that in the fullness of time they will gain release from the penalty of sin and be restored to God. Twentieth-century universalism often rejects the deity of Jesus and explores the “universal” bases of all religions.”

  •  Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1325-1327).

Did you see it? By presenting the concept as a historical concept with some biblical precedent, it is put forward with some credibility. Then modern versions are handled in one sentence and in a way that rejects the deity of Jesus.

This is not a mistake, nor is it an accident.

Universalism is an old idea. The version that emerged in the 20th century is a different animal. In a globalized context where religions, traditions, and world-views bump up against each other everyday,  the conversation changes immensely.

There are really 2 distinct universalisms:

  • Classic Christian universalism relates to the belief that salvation is for everyone. A couple of years ago Rob Bell’s Love Wins was accused of being universalist. Karl Rahner’s notion of ‘anonymous christians’ is another expression of this impulse.

If you think that the christian God loves everyone and that ultimately (another U word) God’s work is for everyone and that basically everyone will end up with God, that would be a type of universalism.

  • Contemporary universalism is more about world religions. It is a type of pluralism. Contemporary universalism is concerned with the validity of any – or all – approaches to religion. Many look to figures like John Hick or use the ‘many paths up the same mountain’ analogy.

Contemporary universalism is as different from classic universalism as lighting is from a lighting bug.

Classic universalism is concerned with the work of Christ for every-one [thus the concern for Jesus’ divinity]. Contemporary universalism is not about Christ’s effectiveness so much as the inherent validity of traditions and religions.

Both of these notions are beautiful attempts at something grand but are warped deeply by the legacy of colonialism.

The globalized world of the 21st century means that religious conversations and convictions are perhaps the most important conversation happening in our lifetime. Unless Jesus’ return is soon, we are going to have to learn to live on this planet together.

Which leads us to another important U word.

Ultimate Concern: The idea arising from Paul Tillich that everyone has something that is of highest importance to him or her. Tillich suggested that persons’ ultimate concern, or “what concerns ultimately,” is their God. In this sense, everyone is inherently religious.

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1318-1320).

Tillich presented several innovative concepts* that reframe the whole theological enterprise. This notion of Ultimate Concern is the perfect addition to the Classic/Contemporary address of Universalism and Pluralism.

I prefer ‘comparative’ approaches that allow each tradition to speak in their own language and to utilize their own categories – and then find similarities and difference.

I also really like Heim’s approach that religions are not all paths up the same mountain but are different paths up different mountains – that are all a part of the same mountain range.

Thoughts? Concerns? Questions?

Below is a short bibliography of resources I find helpful.

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T is for Theopoetics (modified)

What is your favorite poem?

Poetry is so different than math. Math is wonderful and necessary in many arenas … but there are certain things that just can’t be captured in a formula where X+Y=Z.

God seems to be one of those topics where poetry is more appropriate than math. The divine-transcendent-eternal-cosmic beyond is not something that fits easily into a series of mathematical formulations.

Theo-poetics is a way of thinking about and talking about the divine-eternal that allows for the playful, uncertain, mysterious, and intriguing to capture our imagination of might be and what can be.

Don’t be intimidated

Sandra Schneiders (in the essay “Biblical Spirituality” from The Bible and Spirituality) says:

To begin with, we need to recognize that the discourse about “theopoetics” in general and particularly in relation to the interpretation of Scripture is a quite recent development arising at the intersection of theology and literary studies much like “biblical spirituality,” which arises at the intersection of biblical studies and spirituality. The interactive meeting ground of literary biblical studies, theology, and spirituality is precisely theopoetics or a theory of the spiritually transformative power of biblical texts as texts, actualized through a certain kind of reading or interpretation . . . It would probably be accurate to say that theopoetics is the literary or textual face of the wider concern with theological aesthetics as an approach to spirituality.

The origins of the contemporary idea of “theopoetics” are traceable to Stanley Hopper and a 1971 speech.[1] Hopper’s student David Miller offers that “theopoetics is not merely the “poetizing of an extant religious faith or theological knowledge,” but is “a reflection on poiesis, a formal thinking about the nature of the making of meaning, which subverts the -ology, the nature of the logic, of theology.” In other words, theopoetics is an attempt to subvert lifeless theology and metaphysics with beauty and a poetic sensibility.

It is a mode or flavorof theology.

J. Denny Weaver is someone who has thought about these things and here is his heady explanation:[2]

A non-poet’s definition of theopoetics might be that it is a hybrid of poetry and theology. But to call it that misses the mark. It is an entire way of thinking. From the side of poetry, it shows that ideas are more than abstractions. They have form – verbal, visual, sensual – and are thus experienced as least as much as they are thought . . . What one learns from the theology side of theopoetics has at least as much importance. One observes that theology is more than an abstraction. It is a way of thinking, visualizing, and sensing images of God. And at that juncture, theologians should become aware that traditional theology . . . is a way to think about the divine but is only one of multiple ways to consider God. Thus for theologians, theopoetics will underscore their (sometimes reluctant) admission that theology is one form of truth but ought not be confused with TRUTH itself.[3]

It has a heavy emphasis on the importance of aesthetic, sensual, and experiential knowing. It discourages the growth of “gate-keeping” mentalities in which people must learn to speak and think a certain way to have their voices heard. It is a post-modern inflected style of theological discourse without the (sometimes) slippery slope of skepticism leaving people with no ability to say anything.

As a Christian thinker, what is most compelling about theopoetics is its insistence upon the incarnational not just in content, but in method. Theopoetics wants the practice of theology to be a spiritual practice and accepts the limitedness of humanity,  affirming that there is a possible power in our words without having to pretend otherwise. It is the language of theology spoken in the accent of someone whose first tongue is not academic but sensual, whose dialect betrays an origin of flesh, and whose tone suggests that at any moment we might all be caught up in some grand dance.

Why should we encourage the development of poetic sensibilities in theological discourse? Because we were all — even theologians and pastors — made to dance, not merely think of dancing. Because when we close our eyes there is a gripping duende to the music of this world which makes us want to cry and make love. Why theopoetics? Because I believe we owe it to ourselves and to the hope of our God to live and write and pray as if the world was a gift and each Other a reminder of that which gives.

I am immensely indebted to Callid Keefe-Perry for helping me with this article.

[1] entitled “The Literary Imagination and the Doing of Theology.”

[2] In the foreword to Jeff Gundy’s Songs from an Empty Cage

[3] A useful distinction to make is one from David Miller in his essay “Theopoetry or Theopoetics?” Whereas “theopoetry” is just “an artful, imaginative, creative, beautiful, and rhetorically compelling manner of speaking and thinking concerning a theological knowledge that is and always has been in our possession and a part of our faith,” theopoetics concerns itself with “strategies of human signification in the absence of fixed and ultimate meanings accessible to knowledge or faith.” That is, theopoetics is decidedly not about saying the same old same old but with spiffy new verbiage. Rather, it begins with an acceptance of “the absence of … ultimate meanings” (very resonant with some of the work of Derrida and Foucault in regards to our inability to have certain, fixed, language) and yet insists that ours is the task to attempt to put words to that which we know we cannot get right. To eff the ineffable, as it were.

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S is for Salvation (modified)

Are you saved?

If so, from what are your saved?

And to what have you been saved?

Salvation is one of those words we sing about and talk about a lot in the church but rarely define.

During my teen years,[1]  salvation seemed like some kind of religious multi-level marketing program. You get saved by saying some special words (usually at the end of a church service or retreat), later you learn to make the presentation in order to get as many others as you can to take advantage of the salvation opportunity.

Sometimes, benefits are added like rewards that have something to do with crowns and mansions in the afterlife. Adding people to ‘team Jesus’ meant that you were accruing treasure in the right place.

Salvation was defined primarily as a one-time, transactional moment, meant to take you from death (physical and spiritual) to an eternal life that secures a torture-free, beautiful afterlife. [2]

“Salvation should be about more than eternity and a multi-level marketing scheme.”

One formal definition sounds this way:

“God’s activity on behalf of creation and especially humans in bringing all things to God’s intended goal….salvation entails God’s deliverance of humans from the power and effects of sin and the Fall through the work of Jesus Christ so that the creation in general and humans in particular can enjoy the fullness of life intended for what God has made”.

-The Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Location 1994).

Christians largely associate salvation with Jesus. Understandings about salvation often start with soteria in the original Greek New Testament. Some break it into a multipart process, others see it a ‘crisis’ event. Many see it as a synergy that humans needs to consent to and partner with, a few see it as an outgrowth of God’s sovereignty and may even hold that it is done unilaterally.[3] 

One fascinating study is to look at the different translation is Luke-Acts. According to Luke-Acts, Salvation is variously:

  •     blessedness
  •     rescue
  •     forgiveness
  •     escape (from the end of the world)
  •     the Holy Spirit (receiving it)
  •     repentance
  •     entering God’s reign, feasting in God’s reign
  •     spiritual healing, physical healing, exorcism, resuscitation
  •     revelation
  •     walking, sight, survival
  •     freedom
  •     peace
  •     glory
  •     being a child of Abraham
  •     being clean

A few noteworthy things about salvation in Luke-Acts:

  • It’s individual and communal
  • It’s present, future and arguably past
  • It has to do with God or Jesus, most of the time

According to Gonzalez, the concept of salvation was not unique to Christianity:

“In the Greco-Roman in which Christianity was born, there were many religions offering “salvation.” Most of these understood salvation mainly or exclusively as life after death, and often combined these notions of salvation with the ideal of escaping from the material world.”

  • Essential Theological Terms (Kindle Location 3851).

Religion that promises freedom and joy in the by-and-by and not in the here-and-now keeps today’s liberation at bay since it is only really possible in another world. As Christianity became the religion of empire, the understanding of salvation flattened into a far-off promise.

Salvation became so heavenly minded that it was not of much earthly good.

Gonzalez goes on to suggest that Christians lost touch with the multi-layered understanding of salvation of the scriptures, instead settling into the more common heaven-focused understanding. However, he points to the development of Liberation Theologies (see L is for Liberation) as helping us recover the wider understanding of salvation “as including not only salvation from death and eternal damnation, but also freedom from all sorts of oppression and injustice” (Essential Theological Terms, Kindle Location 3859).

Salvation is personal and communal, physical and spiritual and oriented in both the present and the future. It is grounded in actual events – a message delivered, the holy spirit falling on people or a place, or a body healing. It doesn’t seem to be reciting a prayer, making an intellectual decision, or even a specific rite or ceremony.

In fact, the dictionary authors seem to sum up our Luke-Acts findings quite nicely. Salvation is God’s deliverance of human beings from the power and effects of sin (sickness, pain, illness, death) and God’s activity on creation’s behalf (including humans) so that we might enjoy fullness of life now and in the future and reach’s God’s intended goal of Shalom.

It is a messy definition and conversation.  

If we were to take a ‘surplus of meaning’ perspective, we are not trying to distill salvation down to its simplest form or minimal requirements. We want to breath life into the concept and expand our understanding to see all that it entails and holds of us.

[1] This chapter is written in partnership with Mickey ScottBey Jones.

[2] It has benefits now like the ability to know more about God, but mostly it is about eternity.

[3] It is not accurate to say that god does it ‘to’ us – since it is something that clearly we would desire so it benefits us and thus we would obviously consent to it and thus it is not done coercively or against our will.

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Conspiracy and Christians

Does belief in the resurrection make one more susceptible to conspiracy theories? I was recently asked this questions and have been giving it a lot of thought.

I want to say no – but not for the reason that you might think.

First of all it needs to be said that Jesus’ trial is conspiratorial.

But that is not where Christians get the conspiratorial thinking. That comes from passages like Ephesians 6:12 where Paul talks about unseen realms and powers beyond our view that maneuver behind the scenes:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”[1]

It is this belief in unseen realms and in spiritually dark forces that make Christians susceptible to conspiracy theories.

It come comes holding to a pre-modern cosmology of the 3-tiered universe with heaven being a realm above and hell below. That cosmology comes with an embedded metaphysic – an explanation of the universe beyond what you can see, and touch, and explain or even understand.

The most helpful thing that I try to get protestants to understand is that we actually do this to catholic believers. Protestants historically have accused Catholics of being superstitious. Catholics are not superstitious, the have a different metaphysic.

You see this in the Reformation controversy over transubstantiation vs a ‘real presence’ understanding from people like Luther. This is why priests who sexually abuse can’t be simply defrocked – it is because of their understanding of priesthood where the person (like the bread and wine in communion) is actually ontologically changed (altered) into something else while retaining the form or appearance that it had previously. It is substantially changed (substance).

Well protestant Christians have a similar divide from modern enlightenment rational when it comes to unseen realms and angelic/demonic powers. Christians are not merely physicalists who think that everything that is real can be quantified and measured in some sort of a laboratory setting. There is more going on in the world that you can possible understand, measure, and explain.

This belief makes them susceptible to modern conspiracy theories. It is one of the features (or bugs) of our operating system. It is embedded in the DNA of the way that we were taught to think and believe.

Side note: I don’t have time to go into it here but this also includes an inherent ‘persecution complex’ even when we are the majority religion and the dominant expression.

It is helpful to think about this in the normal distribution of a bell curve. There are a small group of Christians on the far left who say “let’s just not do any conspiracy theories – just too much bad historically has come from it so let’s avoid it all together.” Then there is a large majority of believers in the middle who are not entirely closed to conspiracy because … let’s be honest: you never know. There have been nefarious schemes and not everyone’s motives are always obvious and clear. Then there are those on the tail-end of the bell curve who are prone to seeing shadows around every corner.

This is what concerns me: not those who are gullible to cynical and devious schemes and outright lies but those leaders who know that and peddle such fabrications. I am concerned about those who are led astray by the Rush Limbaughs and Jerry Falwells of the world.

Which brings us back to the original question about the resurrection of Christ.  The suspicion of conspiracy isn’t that far from the narrative of scripture. Look, something rolled away that stone and somebody took that body. It is not out of line with the entire show trial (kangaroo court) that condemned Jesus. That was a conspiracy between the religious leaders and politicians. Now, I’m not talking about modern grand conspiracies about the Illuminati and the masons or Jews in Hollywood or any of the cartoonish caricatures that make for mocking tropes. I am talking about the ever-present specter that haunts Christian thought in the real world that something is off and we don’t have all of the information – that there are forces at work behind the scenes (either political, economic, or supernatural) that pulled the strings from the other side of the curtain.

Like it or not, that makes us a little bit susceptible to these devious schemes of darkness and to those who cynically play on those fears for their own purposes. Admittedly, even saying that starts to sound like a conspiracy theory.  

If you will allow me just one-side note of application: this is actually something that conservative and liberal Christians have in common! The only difference is that liberals look to earthly powers like governments and corporations where evangelical and charismatic Christians might look to the heavenlies and a supernatural realms.

I would love your thoughts, comments, concerns, and questions.

[1] You can also see it is passages like Ephesians 3:10, “ so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” and Ephesians 2:2, “in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.”

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Layers of Evil

Evil is a real presence in our world that can be very abstract to define, fluid and ever-changing in its manifestations, but devastating (and deadly) in the its concrete consequences.

In the past I had become fond of paraphrasing Augustine that evil does not exist – it is not something but the absence of something. It seemed self-evident. Darkness is not a thing, it is the absence of thing. Where there is not light, there will inevitably be darkness. Over the past 12 years I have become aware of the inadequacy of that line of reasoning. It is not only theologically unclear but it is seemingly (maybe intentionally) elusive.

It is not enough to say something is the ‘natural’ consequence of the absence of something. Why is that capacity toward evil within nature in the first place? Is that a defect built into the human machine? Is that a bug in the system that the designer missed or is a feature of the system built in by its creator? Perhaps it was introduced by outside influence like a subversive hacker or a jealous competitor?

We used to be able to blame the demonic forces and their satanic overlords – angelic beings from an unseen and spiritual realm. In the Age of Enlightenment, however, the world became largely disenchanted and not only can we no longer outsource the blame for the evil that is in the world but we have come face to face in the 20th century with humanity’s capacity for evil and destruction. The horrors of WWII brought to light profound capacity for devastation in the forms of concentration camps, gulags, gas chambers, and atomic bombs.1

I openly admit that this constructive proposal is a form of radical theology that moves on from the inherited tradition of past understandings because they are not only but inaccurate but actually insufficient for helping us to deal with what we are up against.

We must, in our contemporary society, address (at least) 3 areas of our understanding of sin:

  • Personal
  • Social – Cooperate
  • Systemic – Structural

Then I would want to add (or include) a fourth:

• Spiritual – Cosmic

Evil is very real and incredibly consequential. I think this is what the Apostle Paul was attempting to address when he said in 2 Corinthians 10:

3 Indeed, we live as human beings, but we do not wage war according to human standards; 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not merely human, but they have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments 5 and every proud obstacle raised up against the knowledge of God, and we take every thought captive to obey Christ.

He was trying talk about the differing and multi-layered manifestation of the same causal issue. In another letter he configures by saying, “12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12) He is pointing to layered (in the academic world we would call it laminated) nature of the various manifestations in these distinct but mutually informing and empowering realms of influence: personal, corporate/systemic, and spiritual or cosmic. I think that it is vitally important to hold onto all three of those in our present day. We must contend with these various layers simultaneously and in combination :

  • Personal morality and responsibility
  • Cooperate participation in larger structures
  • Systemic mechanism of power and control
  • Larger abstract forces of our inter-related systems

The reason that we must deal with this laminated reality is that we are all (as individuals) participants in activities and groups that are complicit in ‘the way things are’. The injustices and disparities that plague our society and our globe are then outsourced (or up-sourced) to systemic mechanisms of government, business, economy, etc. Those entities are then ‘fueled’ by the permissions, desires, attitudes, anger, and failings of this greater web of meaning and connection- especially as it breaks down into isolation, resentment, despair, alienation, and even hatred.2

An illuminating framework for understanding evil in our world today has come to me from my academic work in Critical Race Theory (CRT). Racism is such a blatant and egregious offense to the dignity and humanity of another group or individual. Therefore it provides me an obvious and tangible example of evil to focus on in order to understand the elusive and sometimes abstract concept of evil in more tangible and concrete ways.

The most helpful analogy (or word picture) that I have found comes from Troy Duster in his essay ‘The Morphing Properties of Whiteness’ in the book The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duster uses the analogy of vapor, water, and ice to talk about the abstract, the fluid, and the concrete (consequential) nature of race in our culture. I love this ‘elemental’ imagery and find that it is supremely helpful in both framing these issues for myself and in facilitating discussions of these issues with others.

Ideas about race (and for this essay, ‘evil’) can be very abstract and even elusive. It can be tough to define and even more difficult to point at exactly. It can also be very fluid – it changes over time, it looks different ways in different locations, and in manifests in liquid experiences that pour into our life but may seem difficult to hold onto. Then there are moments when the vapor or the liquid solidify into rock-hard manifestations that have real world consequences that impact our concrete lived realities.

This framework is helpful for addressing the evil of race but also evil more generally. Evil is real. It is multilayered. It can be abstract and difficult to define. It is fluid is its expressions and manifestations. It solidifies in real-world consequences and conflict. Evil (and racism) is a byproduct of the overlapping interactions between our personal decisions, cooperate life and participation together in groups and cultures, the systems and structures that form the mechanisms of our global economy and society, and the ‘spirit of the age’ that fuels the underside of our national, transnational, and global systems of governance, business, security, and economy.

We can still talk about the devil, or Satan, or ‘the enemy’ as long as we understand that this is a personification of evil forces – or what I call a theo-poetic of evil. It is a basket term that helps us group and carry all of the manifestations of the hurtful and harmful effects of this larger system. The only problem is when we overly-concretize these symbols into an actual character – an evil overlord of sorts.

Someone might object by saying, “Jesus seemed to believe in the demonic realm.” But I would submit that I am not convince that Jesus believed in demons. He was able to set people free from their suffering and bring them into liberation/salvation and restore them to community but entering into their world (the way that they thought) and expose their real malady. Like an adult talking to a 4 year old he played their language game in order to maneuver the game pieces in a way that brought victory.

Look at the way Jesus taught in parables. Take Luke 16 for instance. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man Jesus is not giving us a map of the afterlife he is using that as a stage to talk about god’s involvement in the drama of human life now. Jesus is telling us what God values in this life. Jesus is not giving us a tour of how things really are on the other side or endorsing some ontological reality. He is taking on his listener’s assumptions in order to undermine their assumptions and call them to repentance.

1 Many works have influenced my thinking on this issues. From Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison about ‘the world come of age’ to the Death of God theologies of the past 60 years. The most influential however has been an edited work by Sheila Greeve Davaney entitled “Theology at the End of Modernity”.

2 It must be said that this web of influence and meaning can also be used for good – but that is not the subject of this essay.

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Fear of Critical Race

Fear of CRT

Listening to your critics or to those with whom you disagree can (at times) be very helpful and eye-opening if you give it long enough and don’t get defensive.

I have been taking in the current concern about CRT for the last couple of months to try and understand the real fear behind the public outrage by conservative Christians. You have to wade through some very distracting and disturbing inflammatory rhetoric at first but once you get past that you find several interesting areas of confusion.

  1. The Bible
  2. Worldview
  3. Identity Politics
  4. Hammer & Nail Thinking
  5. Marx
  6. Utopian Expectation

So after listening, reading, and interacting for the last couple of months here are the biggest objections to integrating CRT with Christianity.   On a side note, I have figured out that anything is a good excuse if you don’t want to do something.

Please see my page of 10 previous post about CRT or Whiteness

One issue is that most (86%) of the outrage is actually about overzealous Identity Politics and not CRT. Opponents of our current focus on racial matters or those who are defensive about whiteness tend to conflate Identity Politics and CRT because they have not taken the time to understand the difference.

The Bible is Used as a Barrier.

Based on things that are contrary to scripture. We can’t believe this because 1 Cor 6:15 says X. I have a dozen examples of this kind of thinking but John 8:34 was recently brought up, that Jesus says we are all slaves to sin so CRT can’t be right because it starts with the premise that some are oppressed and some are oppressors. This is an actual objection from just this week. It’s so easy to reconcile this! Yes we are slaves to sin that is why we participate in systems of oppression and we are oppressed. Those two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, one might argue that one is the root of the problem and the other is a fruit or expression of that same systemic issue.

A Competing Worldview.

Christian critics of CRT think that there is a Christian ‘worldview’ and thus any competing ideology or truth-claim or overarching explanation of reality (meta-narrative) must not just be refused but resisted and even attacked. The problem of course is that once you take on this combative and adversarial mentality you tend to project it and create ‘worldviews’ out of approaches or systems of thought that are hardly cohesive or holistic worldviews. CRT is not a worldview, it is an analytic tool to address the disparity and injustice built into the system that these Christian critics are desperate to defend.

CRT makes race everything.

See everything as race. Sees race everywhere. This is a classic Hammer & Nail problem. See racism where it isn’t. They actually create the problem.

But this is where intersectionality comes in.

Binary Thinking.

The biggest sticking points seems to be the binary that can be found in DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi that you are racist or anti-racist and that if you think you are not racist then you are really racist. Most people that have their hackles up against CRT are actually mad about overzealous Identity Politics or the binary approach of DiAngelo and Kendi. I actually think that if we could bracket these three things out we could have a very different conversation. I want to start asking people, “who are you working off of here?” because the vast majority of things that the outrage is focused at isn’t even CRT specifically but just a binary approach to Identity Politics.

I want to ask: who ELSE are you reading? Tell me who you are working off of.

Marxism.

You can read a lot of CRT and never encounter Marx. In fact I never have. In the history of Critical Theory you might but CRT has a different starting point. Its concern is legal, financial, issues of education, and other concrete consequences of the historical past that manifest in in our contemporary society.

I want to ask: Tell me who you are reading … what Critical Race Theorist? Please show me.

Utopian –

Tim Keller utilized this language but it is an odd thing for a Christian to say.

Let me know your thoughts, concerns, questions, or ongoing issues to address in future posts.

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L is for Liberation (modified)

Imagine stumbling into a kind of Christianity that was almost entirely different from anything that you had known about before. That is what happened to me in my early 30s. I had grown up a Christian in a minister’s home and had received my own call to ministry. After Bible College, I had been pastoring for more than a decade when I decided to returned to seminary. While writing my Master’s Thesis at an evangelical seminary on ‘Contextual Theology’ I stumbled into something called Liberation Theology (notice the modifiers). I had been raised and ordained in a Missionary denomination, but I was unaware of what had been developing in some foreign countries amongst the local believers.

Liberation Theology: This term most often refers to a theological movement developed in the late 1960s in Latin America (where it continues to hold prominence). In attempting to unite theology and sociopolitical concerns, liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez emphasize the scriptural theme of liberation, understood as the overcoming of poverty and oppression. Liberation theologies have also found expression among representatives of seemingly marginalized groups in North American society, including women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 797-800).

It was in the midst of engagement with different authors for my thesis that I stumbled upon a form of contextual theology (an alternative perspective) that stood apart from the enlightenment/colonial models. It was called ‘Liberation’ and it was unlike any of the other models being examined.

I had been sold a brand of Christianity where salvation was mostly about personal sins (like lust or being tempted to drink or do drugs) and God was concerned with getting us out of this filthy world and to heaven after we die. Politics was a dirty word – part of the kingdom of this world – and not the kingdom of heaven. We drew a big line between the spiritual and the temporal.

Liberation thinkers were almost the complete opposite, it seemed. Gonzalez explains some differences:

Some liberation theologies center their attention on international economic oppression, while others are particularly concerned with classism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and other foci. Besides acknowledging and claiming their contextuality, … liberation theologies insist on the need to promote and practice justice and love, not only at the personal level, but also in societal practices and structures.

Justo L. González. Essential Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 2442-2446).

Another significant difference between classic forms of Christianity and liberation camps is that Western Christianity is often saturated in and framed by philosophy (primarily Greek and Roman schools of thought) where liberation circles are influenced by and framed in political terms and modern concerns about colonialism and capitalism. There is a teaching about ‘God’s preferential concern for the poor’. God chooses sides and is always with the marginalized and oppressed.

There is much to be said on this issue not just because the incarnation sets the tone for liberation models of ministry but because the entire Christian gospel is based on the reality that the logos was made flesh and dwelt (camped or tabernacled) among us.

As early as the 6th century B.C.E. Greek philosophers were addressing the logos as “the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning.”

The Gospel of John borrows/appropriates/adopts this term to address the pre-existence of Christ and how that manifested in the person of Jesus. It is important to understand that the gospel writer integrated/adapted Greek philosophy. This move is significant for several reasons:

  • Proclamations about Jesus were not made in a vacuum.
  • Some early church writers drew from Hebrew narratives and themes.
  • Others spliced in philosophical ideas and concepts from non-Jewish sources.
  • Both in scripture and in church history we see a constant and elaborate mixing/integrating of external philosophies and concepts.

I bring this up because a major objection to Liberation theology is its use/appropriation of secular political theories (like Marxism) and critics will use this to discredit Liberation thought. Admittedly, liberation theology does have its drawbacks and limitations (as do all approaches) – but simply having political partnership is not one of them. In fact, there has never been a theological or ‘biblical’ expression that did not have philosophical underpinnings or explicit frameworks.

Christianity does not happen in a vacuum. All theology is contextual theology. The only problem is when certain theologies don’t recognize their contextual nature with time and place and purport to being both universal and timeless.

Liberation theology is not for everyone and it does not happen everywhere. While true that it is thoroughly political and radically ideological at points, it is also highly contextual and local – as all theology should be.

I have proposed that there are 3 primary ways that churches in North American relate to the ‘powers’ – i.e. the system, the status quo, etc. These can be broken down as:

  • Messianic
  • Prophetic
  • Therapeutic

Messianic churches focus on helping one survive until God delivers you from the system. This can be rapture, evacuation, eschatological, etc.  Messianic churches often have animosity toward culture’s slippery slope ‘slouch toward Gomorrah’ and view change as resistance. Anything else is just ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’.

Prophetic churches critique the as is structures to confront the system. They speak truth to power. Prophetic churches look toward the marginalized and those being run over by the machine.

Therapeutic churches help people exist within the system. ‘Chaplains to the Empire’ as we say. Therapeutic churches work within the ‘ways things are’ to help make you a better version of yourself.

Liberation is an entirely different approach that incorporates elements of all three but in a grass-roots way that listens to, takes its lead from, and is primarily concerned with the common people.  It organizes itself in ‘base-communities’ and takes its direction from what is happing in those local contexts. It is much more of a bottom-up model instead of a top-down hierarchical model.

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K is for Kenosis (modified)

Kenosis is one of those Greek words in the New Testament that I wish went untranslated in English. Words like agape, koinonia, kairos, and ecclesia are just great words that maintain an air of gravitas and foreignness by leaving them untranslated.

Kenosis would carry a similar power of mystery if we did not offer an English translation.

Here is how it gets translated in Philippians 2:

 5 Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

6 who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Translating the Bible is important– in fact the translatability of the Christian scriptures is a major distinction from other religious traditions like Islam. We don’t have to learn the original language in order to read and interpret the Bible.

Lamin Sanneh in Whose Religion Is Christianity: the Gospel Beyond the West, says:

Being that the original scripture of the Christian movement, the New Testament Gospels are translated versions of the message of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their scriptures well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it…  Since Jesus did not write or dictate the Gospels, his followers had little choice but to adopt a translated form of his message. (Sanneh p. 97)

So while I love this translatability aspect of the Christian testament, I also mourn for the loss of deep and mysterious words from the original language.

 

Kenosis appears four times in the New Testament. Three times in is translated ‘made void’ or ‘to no effect’. The most famous appearance is in Philippians 2:7 when it talks about Christ Jesus and is translated ‘emptied himself’.

The self-emptying of God had become a big topic in the 18th and 19th century – then expanded in the theological work after the Second World War. A popular voice of such work is found in thinkers like Motlmann and the ‘Crucified God’.

The Pocket Dictionary defines it as:

,,,*Christology,which spoke of the incarnation as the self-emptying of the preexistent, eternal Son to become the human Jesus. This self-emptying involved the setting aside of certain divine attributes, or at least the independent exercise of his divine powers. (Kindle Locations 773-777).

While the concept is beautiful … it also gets really tricky really fast.

What exactly did he empty himself of?

Most people go for the low hanging fruit of ‘3 omnis’ (as I call them) of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. Obviously Jesus could not have been those 3 things and been human. This is why ‘C is for Christology’ was an important prequal to this topic.

Once you start down the road of kenosis you quickly run into your first barrier: if Jesus was lacking something that God has … how exactly was he still God? BUT if he had something that no other human had … then he wasn’t really all that like us and thus his being tempted or performing miracles is not really something that we can exactly imitate…

Many times this leads to a ‘Clark Kent’ version of Jesus where he wore a flesh suit and appeared to be human but underneath was a superman who could have done anything he wanted … it’s just that he chose not to! This dangerous notion is rooted in the heresy of Gnosticism.

We want to be careful in talking about Jesus as a different kind of being. Jesus was fully human – what we want to affirm is that Jesus embodied humanity to a different degree. 

This is part of why there is no end to the work of christology. Depending on your ontology (view of reality), metaphysics (beyond the physical), your view of the Trinity, and your anthropology (view of humanity) … the danger of getting tied in knots is constricting.

What starts out as a beautiful word – kenosis – hides a dangerous concept that can quickly become theological quicksand.

This is the opposite of a different ‘K’ word: kingdom.

We have looked at kingdom language before but I wonder have big of difference it would make in our mental frameworks if we let untranslated: Basileia tou Theou.

From the age of Caesars to the reign of Kings it may have made sense to translate it as king-dom. It no longer does.

Not only does ‘kingdom’ not capture the nuance and possibility of expectation in Basileia tou Theou. It can actually be misleading because people think they know what a Kingdom is and are just waiting for God to take off this Clark Kent costume and take up the rightful claim to the throne!!

There are so many better translations of Basileia tou Theou. I have heard :

  • Kin-dom of God (family)
  • Reign of God (still too royal for me)
  • Common-wealth of God (my favorite)
  • Community of God (no hierarchy assumed)

I wish that we just left it untranslated as Basileia tou Theou.

You can see in these two ‘K’ words that translation is a tricky business and provides a constant supply of new material for the theological endeavor.

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Concerns About Critical Theory

Concern About Critical Theory

Not everyone is thrilled about the presence and work of Critical Theory and specifically Critical Race Theory. And I get it. I have said many times that CRT is not for everyone.

Having said that, it is important to distinguish between two very different groups who are concerned about CRT. The first is people who actually understand Critical Race Theory and have a fundamental or philosophical objection to it. The second group is people who don’t really know what it is, or have not taken the time to look into it, but take exception to its posture or tone on a surface level.

I think that both groups have a legitimate gripe – but they are very different from each other and so I want to look at their actually concerns. I have talked before about The Beauty of Critical Theory, the Upside of Critical Theory, and how it is our salvation from bad religion. Today I want to look at the concerns about Critical Theory.

The first group actually knows what CRT is and is up to and objects to the foundational premise that bases its address in oppression. Critics bemoan that initial division between oppressed and oppressor and say, “Why would begin there? What a terrible place to start. You will divide people up in hurtful ways and you make primary someone’s group identity as a victim when that only feeds their feeling of victimization and marginalization.” It seems to this educated group that you will never build anything healthy or helpful for prioritizing and highlighting someone or a groups disadvantage and alienation. That is not a constructive way to proceed to these critics and they argue that it will never deliver you to a place of empowerment or productivity if you are perpetually deconstructing the very systems or institutions that you feel excluded from or want to participate in. ‘Playing the victim card’ is a bad hand and will never help you win the game.

That is a legitimate concern. Participating in the ‘Oppression Olympics’ is a recipe for continued victim mentality and ongoing marginalization. The mentality behind CRT is feeding yourself on the negative according to these studied critics. If you want a better life, to improve your community, and to have a seat at the table there are better ways to do that than focusing on the deficit and highlighting the deficiencies of the system.

Which brings us to the second group of critics: those who just don’t like the tone and posture. This popular, and growing, concern is with the general mentality or  big-picture approach of CRT. This group doesn’t really understand Critical Theory but just doesn’t like its attitude. “Are things perfect? No. But are they getting better? Yes. So let’s focus on that and continue to progress together instead of causing more division and animosity.”

These less-knowledgeable opponents have a core objection to Critical Theory’s obsession with rummaging through the past to find injustice and even atrocities. They see history as “a long arc that bends toward justice”. They love the hallmark version of MLK and fundamentally object to viewing history as a problem and a limitation. We can’t, they argue, “go back and fix the past now – so let’s just move on and make things better now.”

This is a legitimate concern because Critical Theory really does begin with the conviction that something is deeply wrong and a problem to be addressed. It is not fun or cheery or optimistic. It is critical and pessimistic in its tone and posture. One of its founding members, Walter Benjamin, viewed history as an accumulating series of atrocities that piled up at the feet of the Angel of History who was facing backward trying desperately to resist the accumulating pile of these catastrophic events which Critical Theory then sorts through in order to account for, catalogue, and attend to their consequences. This is not a fun way to look at the past and it is not a cheery way to talk about how we got here or where we have arrived at.

Now, having said that, there is an important distinction to be made at this point: those who don’t like Critical Theory also have a pre-existing condition of being generally against Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), liberals in general, poor-me-ism, playing the victim, snowflake culture and ‘every kid gets a participation trophy’ in general. I became very aware of this cynicism in 2015 and 2016 as I got to travel the country and speak with different audiences. There was an across-the-board general sense of disdain for those on ‘the other’ side of the aisle.

So I just wanted to acknowledge that there is an actual disagreement about Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory. It is not just a matter of educating the masses or listening to the other-sides’ perspective. These are fundamental differences about foundational assumptions. Not all of Critical Theory’s critics can articulate what CRT actually wants and may not even be open to hear what its practioners are saying.

They reject the premise outright and object out-of-hand to the presumptions and assumptions that Critical Theory is based on. They refuse to concede the initial point of viewing some groups as oppressed and blaming the oppressors. They take exception to both its goals and its initial starting point and I get that. I always begin by saying that Critical Theory is not for everyone. I don’t think that everyone should do it or that it should be the predominate view.

Here is an computer analogy that might help. Critical Theory is not an operating system that can run the whole machine. It is a diagnostic tool – like a program that looks for viruses and debugs the system. It is not the game it is a referee.  it is an internal affairs task-force that is looking for corruption. It is not the business or the bank, it is an auditor. If you are expecting it be the whole thing then you have misunderstood what it is up to. But by the same token, its critics and despisers are like a King who objects to the presence of the Jester in the court. That is the entire point of the Jester – to mock, to point out inconsistencies, to level the playing field, and to expose the ridiculous elephant in the room and to help people see that the King has no clothes on! Is it objectionable? Sure. Is it uncomfortable? Absolutely. Is it needed? Yes.

So when critics object and try to defend the status quo and tell Critical Theorist to back off, get in line, knock it off, and settle down – they are doing exactly what you would expect from people who benefit from the system as it is currently configured and who profit from the as-is nature of the structures and institutions as they currently exist. All they are saying is that, “I don’t like when you name the dysfunction, expose the hidden assumptions, point out the inconsistency of my behaviors, doubt my motives, and call into question my underlying values or priorities. It makes me uncomfortable and even angry.”

That, however, is exactly the point of Critical Theory – to make visible the invisible … or as Critical Theory refers to: ideology. The goal of Critical Theory is 3-fold: to examine, to expose, and to advocate for change. The point of Critical Theory, after all, is not just to explain the world but change it toward a more equitable, just, and beneficial system for those who have been historically marginalized and disadvantaged. It makes total sense why those in the King’s court would object to that. Resisting the agenda of Critical Theory is a no-brainer as they say.

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