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America is like God – both can ask for your life

Charles Taylor, in his book Modern Social Imaginaries,  utilizes the term ‘social imaginary’ to refer to god-like capacity described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities.  The term encompasses a threefold meaning:

  • First is the way that ordinary people “imagine” their surroundings in images, stories, and legends.
  • Second is the general acceptance and participation in the imaginary by a population and not simply the theories dominated by a small elite.
  • Third is empowerment provided from the imaginary for widely shared practices – and a sense of legitimization.[1]

One impact of this capacity to conceptualize national identity and belonging is in answer to the question “what would make someone be willing to die for their country?”

Anderson proposes a model of historic drift where sovereignty, which had previously been located in either religion or king (or both), has shifted decisively to the Nation in recent centuries. This is a dramatic innovation and recognizing nationality as a valid location for sovereignty has significantly altered matters related to loyalty, sacrifice and belonging.

Anderson proposes a definition of the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” The distinction as imagined comes because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them”.

Communities are limited because there must be some distinguishing demarcation outside of which are other communities (nations), which provide both competition and opportunities for cooperation. This distinction provides a vital function as classifications for the project of establishing communities.

Communities are imagined as sovereign “because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm.” [2]
The dissolving social order of caste and class provided more level (if desperately unequal in reality) conception of both membership and participation for the mass of the population. This perceived leveling and opening gave rise to a new capacity for sacrifice on behalf of the imagined entity – an entity that was not solely and externally located in eternity or beyond, but in an ideal which one was associated (belonged) and participated and was thus responsible. To die for a religion (God) or a King was to reinforce that social order which established the hierarchical strata. Locating sovereignty within the conception of Nation – however dispersed and elusive – was a profound change.

In 1922 Carl Schmitt wrote his famous work Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty and claims  that

“all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[3]

In 2011 Paul Kahn wrote an engagement of Schmitt’s work with four new chapters on the same subject where he says that the capacity for the state to ask for this kind of sacrifices, the power to pardon – which is a remnant of Kingly authority, and the symbolic notion of a flag that needed to be defended are all remnants of a religious notion. The very word sovereign is borrowed from religious vocabulary.  Kahn explains:

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary … (arguing) that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.[4]

You can begin to see why the constitution is often thought of and talked about as an inspired document (sacred text) and why those who were responsible for it’s creation (founding fathers) are celebrated at patriarchs.[5]  If Schmitt is right – even partially – then all of these similarities are neither trivial nor inconsequential.

The power of the state to ask for death in order to preserve itself and the capacity of people to willingly offer their lives in defense of that conception is profound. The notion of the sovereign holding the power of exception goes all the way from the individual being pardoned (as referenced earlier) to modern realities impacting all of humanity. The President has the ability to launch nuclear weapons if the President was to view that the national interest was in jeopardy.

Kahn uses this to illustrate his point. What are we saying about the nation that we are willing to jeopardize human heath, the planet, and subsequent generations for its defense? What could possibly be above human health and planetary environmental conditions? The answer is ‘only something that is of ultimate concern’. 
The modern conception of the state is thus a result of religious conceptions and has replaced (in some sense) religion as the location of sovereignty one is willing to ultimately sacrifice and die for. Nation is a construct of transcendent meaning found in an imagined community.[6]

Now this is where it gets really interesting! 

Arjun Appadurai, in Modernity at Large interacts with Anderson and observes that:

Modern nationalisms involve communities of citizens in the territorially defined nation-state who share collective experience, not of face-to-face contact or common subordination to a royal person, but of reading texts together.[8]

Much of the rhetorical energies of the ruling powers are used in order to urge “their subjects to give up … primordial loyalties – to family, tribe, caste, and region” for the “fragile abstractions” called nations which are often “multiethnic … tenuous collective projects”.[9]

Only within the power of national imaginaries can one see the possibility of such a monument as a tomb left intentionally empty or holding the remains of an unidentified combatant. Anderson points out the absurdity of “a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals.”[10]  There is no reserve of belonging that would justify such a display. It would hold little value outside the context of national identity.

And that is how the sausage called nationalism is made!

[1] Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.

[2] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 8.

[3] Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, location 37.

[4] Ibid., 360.

[5] CBC Ideas podcast  ‘The Myth of Secularism’ part 5

[6] It is not difficult within this framing to view contemporary movements such as the Tea Party as merely an extreme example of a group calling for a romanticized notion of an imagined past or legacy.

[7] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 8.

[8] Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 161.

[9] Ibid., 162.

[10] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 10.

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Moving Toward Multiplicity

Listening to Howard Zinn (author of the classic A People’s History of the United States) at a town hall meeting style presentation recorded in 2007 (you can get it on Itunes from WGBH Politics) I was struck by the need to recognize the sheer complexity of issues and multiplicity of perspectives. complexity

To state it as simply as possible: Not everything is the same. When we attempt to represent EVERYthing as if it were represented by ONE thing, we often neglect the complexity and multiplicity involved in the matter.

I will use two examples that Howard Zinn illustrated well at the community forum, then address the issues that it seemed relevant to connect to.

Zinn takes on the idea of “Family values”. Some conservative political interest say that they represent ‘family values’. But he asks “Which family?” I think it is a valid question. There are families with single moms and multiple kids, divorced dads raising a family, there are foster families, adoptive families, multi-generational families living in the same house. There are lesbian couples with no kids and gay couples with kids. My wife are were D.I.N.K.s (double income – no kids) hen she lost her job while were trying to adopt (which fell through recently) and every permeation you can imagine.

Which family is represented by Focus on the Family’s values? It is erroneous to act as if there is one kind of family and that you represent their values.

That is, unless you are saying that you value only one type of family.

That would be fair enough but you would have to stop using the phrase ‘family values’. Some families value making money or achieving success. Some value conformity. Some value religious adherence above all else. Some value military service while others value independent thinking or even civil disobedience.

Zinn says the same thing about the ‘National interest’. I am a big fan of Paul Kahn’s Political Theology and both he and Zinn talk about President’s ability to declare war or even launch the nuclear codes should the President deem it ‘in the national interest’.

But which of the many National interests? The Nation is not interested in only one thing. There are hundreds or thousands of interests. Unfortunately the reductive mono-speak is code. These buzz-words become code-words for an assume-unstated single issue that clouds the true complexity behind the language.

Zinn touched another example which has been showing up in a lot of my reading lately. The phrase ‘We the people’ is a magnificent ideal. I admire the phase and the idea behind it so much. But I think that it is worth noting that when it was written – we the people were not in the room. At the time of it’s writing, not every ‘we’ was represented.

There were no native americans in the room, no women, no blacks, no commoners. Just land-owning white males. But they had an idea – and it is that idea that we love!

I actually think that this is the exact type of trajectory mentality that we see in a progressive reading of the New Testament. When Paul says in Galatians 3:28 that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” He is doing this exact thing. He wrote in prophetic expectation using the 3 categories employed in his day were being broken with resurrection power. Barriers between nationality (or race), legal status and gender were being dissolved. My assertion is that it was not for the purpose of homogenization but for multiplicity! The former containers can not contain what it being poured out and welling up in Christ’s new life.

This is why I don’t sweat the fact that Paul appears to by anti-gay (though I argue that he was not anti-gay in the same way that those who quote him today are). You have to read Paul on a trajectory. Within the fruit of the Spirit of God is seed of liberation and transformation. So like ‘We the people’ – it looks forward to a greater reality than was present at it’s writing. Contained within the words is an ideal not yet realized. That is part of why I don’t want to conserve the reality of the time of it’s writing, but spring board off of it to be propelled to a greater one.

We can get caught up in reductive views that ignore the inherent complexity that we are dealing with. For instance, “Is the world essentially good or bad?” or “Are humans inherently evil or innately good?” That kind of simplicity is blind to the multiplicity of factors that we are dealing with in any conversation and allowing the conversation to be framed that way almost ensured that no progress will be made.

Good people still do bad things or even do good things with poor motivation. People who do bad things often love their own families.

We do ourselves a great disservice when we allow our media to talk about ‘the evangelical vote’ or even ‘the black perspective’ as if those parameters only mean one thing or as if everyone within designations voted the same way or believe all the same things, hold all the same values and act in unison. It is fictitious, deceptive and paralyzing.

You can’t even say ‘gun owners’ and mean one thing! Our language (and the dualism behind it) is crippling our culture.

There has been a great “De-centering” that has happened to humanity in the past 500 years. If you just look at the effect starting with Copernicus and continue to Darwin, the earth is not the center of the universe and neither are humans.

It would do us well to move from a reductive mentality (center/ order) to a dynamic interplay of emergent elements. When we recognize the complexity and multiplicity involved in the reality behind our ‘code words’, we will begin to access the real issues that face us.

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The Church’s Task

In the next 24 hours I will be putting up 4 blogs – taken together, you will be able to tell what I have been thinking about the past month.  I would love your feedback on any of them.

Last month David Fitch tweeted this:

“The biggest task of today’s church is to undermine in its members the blase unexamined acceptance of secular assumptions for everyday life.”

I thought about it all day and just couldn’t be sure he was right on this one.

Now just to let you know where I am coming from:

Put that all together, I have doubts about Fitch’s assertion. Here is why:

I am increasingly suspicious that secularism is both a consequence and a side effect of Christendom. It is the West’s Frankenstein if you will. We made it. Then it took on a life of its own – a life we don’t like very much and which damages our efforts and injures our cause.  I think we have to start there.

I agree with Fitch that there is a ‘unexamined acceptance” and would go even further and say that it results in an assumption that what we see is the way it is. That our current mechanisms of organization are final forms and that the ‘as-is’ structures come with a large measure of ‘giveness’.  Tripp often applies this capitalism, nation-states and democracy. I would tack on both denominations for the church and militarism for US America.

I am just not so sure that our main task is to undermine. Maybe that is where my hangup comes. I am leery of this approach because it seems like we are defaulting the ground rules in the initial move and framing the task in a conceding first move.

I might be naive here but I am just not sure that the church needs to
A) give that much ground initially
B) frame her task in the negative.
I know it’s just so much one can do with a tweet but … there is something there that gives me caution.

So what is my constructive proposal?  I’m working on it.

I would want to frame it more like Stuart Murray does in the book Post-Christendom  and acknowledge that initial concession was early on with Constantinian Christianity. Then Christendom. Then Modernity.  With those three concessions we admit that the as-is nature of existing frameworks for both church and culture are thoroughly compromised and corrupted.

BECAUSE of that. We abandon the recuperation, rehabilitation, reclamation , and renovation projects (and mentality) all together! (all 4 faces of it).

It’s over man.  Let it go.

THEN we start new and in the positive. The 21st century provides fresh possibilities and opportunities IF ONLY we will let go the idea of getting back to something or getting something back. I know we never start from scratch – we never get back to square one. But …

I don’t want to be the undermining parasite ON the big organism. That is too small a task.  I want to partner with God in the healing of world (Tikkun Olum in Hebrew).  I want to participate in the development cosmic good – until then at least the common good. 

 

PostScript: now that I started down this “re” line I can’t stop coming up with words I want to flesh out further!
Restore: no
Re-imagine: yes
Represent: yes
Re-member: sure
Resurrect: ummmm not really
Reflect: probably

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The Pros and Cons of Advent

Last Monday John Stewart did a very funny bit on the Daily Show about how Christmas has gotten so big that it is starting to take over other Holidays – what we used to call Thanksgiving is now ‘Black Thursday’ … Watch out: you’re next Halloween!

And in one sense, it is true. Christmas has become, as many have articulated, a frenzied orgy of consumerism. My dean, Philip Clayton, in a piece entitled “ Reflections for a Time of Madness” points out:

In an irony of history, the time of spiritual preparation and silent waiting has become the busiest, most frenetic season of the year.

 Now admittedly I am new to Advent. This will only be my third time through it. I have embraced it with gusto though! Last year I even bought a box of these amazing Liturgical Calendars and led a series of lessons on it in the Adult Ed. classes at our church.

In fact, when Stuart explains that the 12 days of Christmas is actually the period from Christmas day to Epiphany (January 6) when the Magi (Wise Men) are celebrated as visiting the baby king. The sad part is that just 5 years ago, that would have been news to me! I probably thought that not only was it the 12 days that led up to Christmas – but that I was showing great restraint to limit the season to just 12 days.

I love reading, listening to and even chatting with Phyllis Tickle and Dianna Butler Bass [one of my conversations with her] about all of the rich tradition and deep meaning that are to be found in walking these ancient paths.

And while I am very excited about the spiritual season of waiting and reflection, I have a new wrinkle in my fledging appreciation for the liturgical season. We have started a new emergent gathering (the Loft LA) that employs an ‘ancient-future’ sort of engagement.

This coming Sunday we are introducing the group to the Advent Conspiracy and I am very pumped to enter into the that conversation.

 I am, however, a little less enthusiastic about introducing the topic of Advent itself. In fact, we have debated, prayed and really wrestled with how to approach this. Our liturgical service (10 am) does Advent that the 9s. We go all out. We even hold off singing the famous songs until Christmas day – even though we have this amazing (and overwhelming) pipe organ that would be a huge draw for those who like to sing the classics in preparation for the big day.

 But is it worth it to bring up the topic to a crowd of newbies? My conviction is wavering.

Look, I love Christmas. I love the month of December and the lights and the presents and everything that goes along it with. I love singing Christmas carols in December! Do I really want to get into this counter-cultural restraint motif with new folks? Is it really worth initiating folks to this old way?

 Part of me says no! The ship has sailed – that battle is lost. Christmas starts before December in our culture and we should capitalize on that as the Church! Stop being such sanctimonious nay-sayers and pious do-rights and join the party! Plan, strategize, and engage the people around you at the time the are most christianly-inclined!

They are singing things like: 

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,

‘Til He appear’d and the soul felt its worth.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!

O night divine, O night when Christ was born;

 

Truly He taught us to love one another;

His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother;

And in His name all oppression shall cease.

What the HELL is your problem?
Get with the program!
Shake off the dust Church Lady and roll with the times!
Carpe Mañana! 

Then another part of me says ‘Advent makes so much more sense – is so much more meaningful – and aren’t we preaching an anti-mammon counter-cultural message anyway? Maybe we should cave in to culture. Maybe we should concede to the bloated, grotesque, shallow, hollow consumer and credit card carcass that christmas has become.’  Maybe Advent is still worth doing … even with new people.

Maybe, especially, with new people. Maybe giving them an alternative to the frenzied and hectic mess that December has become is exactly how we could minister to and with them.

Or maybe Advent is just one more of these sentimental oddities that the church likes to hold onto and even prides itself on hanging onto until it’s dying breath. It’s not like we own Christmas. Wait … we do kind of have an invested interest … one might even say a market share … and by God – we are going to love it to death.

As you can tell, I am quite unsettled on the issue.  Thoughts?

 [please let us know if you grew up with Advent in your response] 

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5 Biggest Pastoral Changes in the Past 5 Decades

I’m preparing to facilitate a conversation with some colleagues in the new year about ministry and honoring tradition. I want to begin – and thus frame – the conversation with the changing culture that we are products of, interact with and attempt to minister to.

It is a different way to approach the topic of tradition, admittedly, but my thought is that we start where we are and then trace threads into the past to uncover their significance. I almost always find it unhelpful to start in the past – say at the Protest Reformation – and then slowly work our way up. It is simply too limiting (in scope) and cumbersome (in process) for the contemporary expectations of ministry.

I have been reading a little Gordon Kaufman. He has me thinking about the ‘nuclear age’ and how deeply that shift, from the end of WWII, has impacted us sociologically, psychologically, and spiritually. I take this as my launching off point.

 So here are my Big 5 – in no particular order. I wanted to throw them out here and see what others who are older, or wiser, or more insightful might add to the list or modify.

 Pervasive Pop Psychology  – My dad tells a story about interviewing retired pastors 30 years ago. He asked them when things seemed to change. All of them, without exception, pointed to the window from 1968-1970. They talked about Woodstock, Vietnam, and Nixon among other things.

Many of them also talked about people’s awareness and pop psychology. I will always remember the story of a son who came home from college to visit his folks on the farm. He tried to talk to his dad about his feelings, motivations, childhood memories, his subconscious, etc.  His dad responded, ‘Son, what the hell are going on about?’ He just had no frame of reference for it. Similar stories were repeated, in differing configurations, over and over by  the ministers.

Pop psychology has permeated every facet of society. From Oprah on daytime TV to Self-Help books – it impacts what people expect from a pastor and what they want from things like premarital counseling.
In my first 10 years of ministry, I often said that I would have more prepared for the actual way I spent my week if I had gotten a degree in psychology  rather than in Bible.

Biblical Scholarship – speaking of the Bible, I am shocked as to how much different those conversations go than they did 20 years ago when I was trained in Apologetics/Evangelism.  Between the Jesus Seminar, the Da Vinci Code and Bart Ehrman popularizing the stuff many pastors knew from seminary but were not allowed to say in the pulpit, it is a very different playing field.

It is an odd split: people often know little of the Bible – because they know so much stuff about the Bible. We can’t assume even a Sunday School understanding or a surface devotional reading. But at the same time, the culture wide awareness of critical Biblical scholarship is shocking. That was not true 50 years ago.

The Internet – The Internet changes everything. From the way people spend time to the way that they shop for a church. Facebook has changed how people connect to each other. Google has changed the way people access information. It is impossible to overstate how big of an impact the Internet has had on Western society. If you are still doing church the way you did 50 years ago – and think that it will have the same effect – you are fooling yourself. You may have the same seed, but the soil itself has changed. It will not grow the same crop or produce the same fruit.

Two little examples: When kids who grew up in your church come home from college and sit in on Sunday school (for example). They will assume that they get to share their opinion. They don’t sit quietly and honor the elders by talking last. They will raise their hands and talk first. Is it that they are over empowered? No. It is that they assume that they get to help shape the discussion and their opinion is valid. They don’t sit quietly and try to get up to speed or catch up on what they have missed.

  • This is the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.  A church website is 1.0 – the staff puts out the information that it wants people to see. You read it like a newspaper. It is not interactive. Facebook is 2.0 – it creates the environment but does not generate the content. Young people live in 2.0

Doug Paggitt talks of ‘the pastor as Google’. I love this. People don’t go to Google for Google. It is not a destination. It helps people get to their destination. If it does this well, people trust Google and go it often. Pastor used to be like encyclopedias. They were a resource, a destination for information. Now, the pastor’s office is not a destination, the art of pastoring is help people find theirs. If we do that well, they trust us and come back the next time they need direction.

Pastor as encyclopedia is a repository of information. Pastor as Google is a resource that knows how to find the information.

24 Hour News & Christian Media –  Cable news and Christian radio probably have a bigger impact on the people who fill the pews that any pastor can be expected to have in a 30 minute sermon once a week.  There is no other way to say it, the narrative that is being put out on media outlets like Fox News (Clash of Civilizations) or Christian Radio (the 6 Line Narrative) is so pervasive and so monolithic that it can feel as if your parishioners are being pastored far more by their TV and car radio that you will ever be able to.

This is also part of why our country and culture have become so:

  1. polarized
  2. adversarial

I am horrified by this trend more than all the others combined. I think that it hurts the heart of God and I know that it hurts our Christian witness.

Fractured Globalism  and PostModernity – People have great troubles conceptualizing and articulating how fractured, dislocated, overwhelmed and powerless they feel in the global marketplace. Things are not simple now. Things have never been more complex and overwhelming. Look at the food on your table? Do you know where it comes from? Think about your Thanksgiving dinner last week and imagine how many miles and from how many countries those ingredients were trucked to end up on your table. You might be shocked.

Think about your car. Was it all made and assembled at the same plant? Or even in the same country. The automotive industry was fairly straight forward 50 years ago. Now it is an example of inter-national, multi-corporation conglomerates. We have been de-centered, and people feel it. The way we conceptualize ourselves, our connection to family, the way we picture the world working, the universe and thus God. The best book I have read on the subject is “Identity, Culture, and the Postmodern World” by Madan Sarup.

The PostModern Turn – speaking of PostModern, this may be the biggest of the 5 changes. It is funny to me that some christians still want to debate if the category is real just because it can not be succinctly or universally defined (how very modern!)  Look, call it what you want: late-modernity, hyper-modernity, high-modernity, or some other thing – what can not be denied is that something big and deep has shifted. Blame it on the philosophers (Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, etc) if you want. Make up a new name for it if you must. But please stop pretending that what we are looking at is nothing radical or unexpected. Even the ostrich thinks that it is time to pull your head out of the sand!

One interesting reaction, and this applies to denominations, is the counter-modern responses that want to go back to an imagined past and reclaim a romantic pre-shift relationship between the Christian religion and

  • society
  • the economy
  • science
  • other religions

You can see this in counter-modern responses like Radical Orthodoxy (retreating to the hills of Thomism), Post-Liberal thought, Hyper-Calvinism and the Tea-Party in politics. Even if you pastor with an established denomination (and many don’t) you have to contend with these fractious groups that will impact your congregation.

Those are my 5 Big changes for Pastors over the past 50 years. I would love your thoughts!  What would you take out and what would you add?

1

A Sentence about Seminary

Once in a while you run into a sentence that hits you like a ton of bricks.  You can read thousands of sentences in order to get to it.

Only rarely do you see it coming. Once in a while you are in a chapter that is so rich and nourishing that the sentence is just the Pièce de résistance.

Over the past 21 years, I have 5 sentences that have hit me like this. I can tell you exactly where I was when I first read them and why they hit me so hard. I say 21 years ago because that is essentially when I started reading. I was captain of the football and basketball teams in High School and didn’t so much … how do they say? … read.

It was after High School when I was no longer at my parents house – and I couldn’t make sense of my faith – that I picked up a copy of Josh McDowell’s apologetic classic: Evidence that Demands a Verdict.  On that first page was sentence that stabbed my in the heart. That was the first of the 5 sentences.

Yesterday in the spirited exchange of comments on my blog post “You have to believe in Hell, Predestination, Election and the Book of Revelation”  Nate Gilmore (you can hear his Georgia via Iowa drawl on last week’s TNT) was responding to a little bit of a fun rabbit trail we had going about seminaries and said:

 At least in online encounters, I’ve seen far more appeals to authority, citing “Biblical scholarship” as if it were a monolith, from liberals than from right-wingers.  In my own experience, the conservatives are much more interested in seeing the argument worked out than in “experts say that…” claims.

This is one of my favorite topics of discussion!  I love this topic! Not because I agree with the binary between Conservative and Liberal (I don’t – I can’t after reading The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen, which contains 1 of my 5 sentences) but because I have a story about it  – a story that holds the last of my 5 sentences.

The Story:

I was writing my Master’s Thesis on Contextual Theology and I was utilizing a lot of material from a specific author – a real authority on the subject.  In the midst of completing the Thesis I was accepted into the PhD program at a large Evangelical shool where he teaches and I was even appointed to study with him!  It was an amazing honor.

After the Thesis was over, I was reading as much of his work as I could and I ran into a sentence from which I never recovered. He was talking about the need for innovation in the way we do Seminary – something that I am very passionate about – and he made a quick point about the difference between Liberal and more Evangelical seminaries in Africa.

He said that in Africa, Evangelical seminaries are much bigger, grow faster and produce more pastors because they are very method focused. They teach future pastors what to do.
Liberal seminaries, however, while being much smaller, are where almost all the innovation happens. His observation was that the difference came down to permission. His caution was that innovation can not become syncretism. 

Its not that his point was especially earth-shattering or unique. There was just something in the way he said it … or perhaps it was the gravity he carried as my future PhD Advisor … but I put down the book, went for a walk, and decided that I needed to go a different direction. I turned down my appointment to the school and enrolled in a totally different program at a Liberal institution (Claremont School of Theology). 

It was odd that someone I respected said something I agreed with, and the end result is that I knew I had to go a different direction than them.

This is the reason that I went into Practical Theology. It bridges the gap between these Liberal and Conservative approaches. It also attempts to bridge that gap between the Church and the Academy. It also addresses the false gap between theological theory and practice.

I’m so happy with my decision. Every time seminary education comes up, that sentence rushes to the front of my mind. My father (who was recently on the podcast) now runs the D.Min at his Evangelical seminary – so the topic of seminary education comes up a lot.

I don’t normally subscribe to the Conservative/Liberal binary, but in this case I concede the framing of the discussion because the institutions themselves identify this way and teach this way in a sort of self-reinforcing manner. 

You may not like the split, but if those on the inside are telling you that there is a significant difference … you may just have to go with it for a while and see where the road takes you.

 I just wanted to share my little story and see if anyone had any thoughts on the subject. 

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Christians have to believe something about Hell, Election and Predestination

On last month’s TNT I said something that I have heard a lot of feedback on (some positive and some negative ). I thought it would be good to continue the conversation here on the blog.

 My assertion was that: If you are a Christian, you have to believe something about hell. It is just not an option to say “I don’t believe in hell”.  The word ‘hell’ is in the English version of the Bible and you can’t just say, as a Christian, that you don’t believe it. You can hold that it was a burning garbage dump in a valley outside Jerusalem that Jesus makes a poetic illusion to … but you have to believe something about hell. 

I would go on to broaden that assertion. I would say that you must believe in predestination, election, and the Book of Revelation.

All 4 of these are topics that l have personally heard people say “I don’t believe in __”

  • You have to believe something about hell.
  • You have to believe something about predestination.
  • You have to believe something about election.
  • You have to believe something about the Book of Revelation.

It is is just not an option to say “I don’t believe in hell”.  Jesus did.  If you are a Christian, you have to hold some belief about it.

Paul spoke of predestination. Election is a theme in scripture. You can’t just say ‘I don’t believe in Revelation’.  You can object to how some people interpret and preach the Book of Revelation … but you can’t ‘not believe’ it.

 Why It Matters: 

I come from an Evangelical-Charismatic background and am now employed at a Mainline church and attend a Mainline school.  I am passionate that thoughtful progressive Christians can not make the same mistake that Liberals made in the past century. By ‘de-mythologizing’ the Bible they undercut the very foundation that the tradition is built on.

It is like sawing the very branch that your a sitting on … on the tree side of the branch! What do you think is going to happen? You are left no place to perch.

I love Biblical Scholarship. I delight in post-modern and progressive theology. I take seriously the post-colonial critique and the perspective of feminists and queer theory. But it does us no good if we know what we don’t believe about something but do not have the ability to present in a constructive way what we do believe about those very subjects.

There is so little value in participating in a community based on a tradition where one does not believe in the very words of that faith’s sacred text.

Why even do it?  I think that is why so many ‘nones’ have just opted out. I actually greatly respect those who participate in the emergent conversation and who are valiantly attempting to update their denomination from within. It is far easier to just walk away from the entire project all together … and many have.

So How Do I Do It? 

Predestination:  Forget about the historical hyper-Calvinist understanding that you ‘don’t believe in”. Romans 8:29 says “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.”

Who did God foreknow? Everyone.  What are they predestined to? To be conformed to the image of the Son.  Does everyone arrive at their destination? No.

Predestination might be, what some Process thinkers would be called, an ‘initial aim’. It is God’s desire for all. God doesn’t always get what God wants ( see 1Timothy 2:4).

 Election: Karl Barth said it clearly. God elected Jesus. All humanity is involved in that election. All who are ‘in Christ’ are elect.

 The Book of Revelation: You may not like the ‘Left Behind’ / Hal Lidsey / Jack Van Impe interpretation of the Book of Revelation … but you can’t, as a Christian, say that you don’t believe in it.  It’s in the Bible. You have to believe something about it.

The Book of Revelation was a political critique of the Roman Empire of the first two centuries written in the genre of the ‘apocalyptic’. It is not predictive of the 21st century. But we don’t want to throw it away!  What we need, more than ever, is to imitate it and write an apocalyptic critique of our as-it structures, systems and institutions of injustice and our empire. We need a prophetic imagination.

You can’t say, as a Christian, that you don’t believe in this stuff. You have to believe something about this stuff. My suggestion is that we just believe more informed better stuff about these topics. The simple fact is that we are community of people centered about a sacred text and it is simply not acceptable to say ‘I don’t believe in something’. We are free to not believe in some people’s interpretation – but we have to believe something about it. 

Thoughts? Questions? Comments? 

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I asked Rob Bell about planting another church – he talked about Eucharist

In the a recent episode of Homebrewed Christianity, I asked Rob Bell what he would do if he were starting from scratch again.  I was particularly intrigued for three main reasons:
1) I actually am starting a new gathering so I wanted to pick his brain.
2) Bell is so creative and innovative – who better to ask?
3) His answer was somewhat surprising.

“I would have Eucharist a lot. And I would make it really clear to everybody that the Eucharist is our only hope. Because otherwise, there’s a thousand forces – the entropy is overwhelming…preferences and particularities…there are a thousand ways for a church to go in all these different directions – you end up just barely being able to hold it all together. But if you have the bread and the wine, and on a really regular basis, you put the bread and wine on the table and you say “Okay everybody – here you go: Body broken, blood poured out…”

I am not the most sacramental minister in the world so I pressed him on it a little bit. I said that both my co-pastor and folks like Nadia Bolz-Weber are really sold that Eucharist is the thing! I have even heard some RO types say that it is the only thing that can fix the world.

I heard  that and thought … look, I like communion as much as most (I would guess)  – but really Rob? The eucharist?  So I said (basically) “Yeah, I guess I’m just not that into it.  I’m more relational about it.”  By that I meant that when we sit at any table, the Spirit of Christ is with us and in that sense we are communing. When it is at church and we have special elements, it is Communion (capital C). I just don’t get into the ‘real presence’ thing at any level.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Roger Haight (and his book Jesus: Symbol of God).  I get the difference between a sign, symbol, and sacrament. I was just a little surprised that if Rob Bell were going to start from scratch … Eucharist is the first thing on the table?  (pun intended)

Rob doubled down. He said “Well it is relational!” He went on to clarify that you put the bread and the cup on the table and then ask:

“Alright – everyone have their rent payed this month? Anyone have any medical bills?”

I was stopped in my tracks. I was inspired. I even said to Rob that he almost converted me.

It’s moments like that where you realize when we say Eucharist or Communion … we may not all be saying the same thing.   It is sad at one level.  It is also inspiring at another level.

All I know is that I sure am glad that I asked that follow up question. Bell gave an incredible answer and really has me thinking about community, service and communion differently.

I recognize the gap between my and Rob’s take on this … but he has me thinking.

 

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I Voted For the First Time Last Week

Seven days ago I voted for the very first time.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to puncture the seal – cross that threshold – and break my long string of abstaining.

 Here is the background on why I have never voted: 

  • In High-school my family moved from the Chicagoland area to Saskatchewan, Canada. After High-school I stayed in Canada to play football when my family moved to NY and I became a dual citizen.

When you come of age outside your culture of origin, you see some stuff within that culture a little differently. Voting (and politics in general) was one of them. I didn’t see its impact locally like I would have if I was a farmer or a school teacher, I saw it through the media circus. Loyalty and responsibility take on a different meaning when you have dual belonging.

  • When I got filled with Holy Spirit and called to ministry I was initiated in a very dualistic form of evangelical charismatic christianity. It was spiritual in contrast to physical. Church in contrast to world. Supernatural in contrast to natural.

I was a zealous young man and so I took it further than most. Many would quote the verse “we are in the world but not of the world”. I would take it further and quote 2 Timothy 2:4 “”No good soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer.”  I followed the Lutheran idea of ‘two kingdoms’ (kingdom of God and kingdom of this world) all the way down.

  • When I became Ordained I not only opted out of Social Security (which ministers are allowed to do in their first two years of filing taxes) but I registered with the Government as an objector.

I am a registered objector. I indicated that what remaining taxes I did pay, I did not want them going to pay for wars … and this was before W was in office (!). I would tell people “I am not political. I am focused on the spiritual realm not the physical. The government takes care of people in this way, I take care of people in a different way. Plus, I don’t want my loyalties in the natural realm to limit my ministry to people in the supernatural.”  It actually worked quite well for me for a time. I was very vocal about my opting out of the system and in my congregation was a eclectic mix of New England Democrats and pre- Fox News Republicans.

Here is why I was thinking about voting for the first time: 

  •  I no longer subscribe to the dualism of natural – supernatural, physical – spiritual, or church – world. I have shed my understanding of Luther’s two kingdoms.  I read Jesus’ admonition about “In the world but not of the world” differently now … and all it took was an introduction to Biblical scholarship and some Roman political history. 
  • Randy Woodley was my mentor in seminary and he would ask me to explain my politics to him and then challenge me that it was incoherent and inconsistent. I play my conversations with him over and over in my head. Once you study colonial history (or even 20th century history) you realize that to be silent in the face of systemic oppression and repressive legislation is to become complicit with the injustice and suffering that the God you claim to serve is so opposed to.
  • I read Martin Luther Kings “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”  and realized that I was one of those white ministers he was talking about being disappointed in and let down by.

“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; …Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

  •  The attacks on September 11, 2001 and the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld (and Halliburton) parley into two wars under the false guise of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ haunts me when I think of how a different administration might have proceeded differently.
  • As one getting their PhD in Religious Education I have become all too aware of the impact of economic and bureaucratic decisions on children’s education. I don’t see how you can know what I know now and not do something so little that can make such a big change for so many.
  • I live in California where we don’t just vote for candidates (which I was still leery about) but we also vote on propositions. Some of these propositions directly impact school budgets and it would be gross neglect to stay silent on them when our public schools are in such desperate shape.
  • The Paul Ryan budget was and is immoral and unimaginable. I was still siting on the fence about voting – even with the whole Tea Party and Occupy movement thing – until Romney’s selection for his Vice Presidential running mate. I have watched the union stuggles in Wisconsin and Chicago, I have listened to the disgusting rhetoric of this latest financial crisis and continueing bailouts of Wall Street and too-big-fail banks… but when Romney picked Ryan … and I had just recorded that interview with Randy Woodley … I was horrified.

 Why I was still hesitating: 

I read Chris Hedges ‘Death of the Liberal Class’ and can not shake the nauseating reality of just how broken our democratic system is. Both candidates are owned by big business and the election (thanks to the Citizens United decision) is a sham.

It seems to me that to participate in a process this corrupt is to somehow be complicit with the immorality and to sanction or validate these compromised actors.

I have gone this long and there is just something in my identity, something about the way that I imagine myself and tell my story that can not conceive of crossing that line – of breaking the seal and entering into this realm. It was the strangest thing to think about.

 In the end: 

Smiley and West is my second favorite podcast in the world (next to the one I am on). No, President Obama did not do so many things that he said he would do the first time (like close Guantanamo) but … he also did some stuff (like health care reform) that was much needed (although I question the for-profit nature of our insurance companies).

I’m still leery about endorsing professional politicians, but in the end I just didn’t know how I can have learned what I have learned about education in the country and not do something that would so greatly impact the young people – and disproportionately young people of color.

After all, I would hate to have the problem of Christopher Reeve that I spoke so harshly against.

 I am interested in any thoughts on my journey and process.  Comments? Questions?  

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