Lots of buzz about Rob Bell and the "universalism" tag regarding his upcoming book due out toward the end of March:
LOVE WINS. from Rob Bell on Vimeo.
Thanks to Mike for linking to this interview with Bono. I was grabbed by his comments right at the first:
My understanding of the Scriptures has been made simple by the person of Christ. Christ teaches that God is love. What does that mean? What it means for me: a study of the life of Christ. Love here describes itself as a child born in straw poverty, the most vulnerable situation of all, without honor. I don't let my religious world get too complicated. I just kind of go: Well, I think I know what God is. God is love, and as much as I respond [sighs] in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that's my religion.
Over at the Daily Dish I saw this TED talk by Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh, about Mesh businesses:
Listening to the talk I was struck by the idea of peer-to-peer car sharing, allowing people to use my car when I'm not using it. It reminded me of my recent post regarding church giving, sharing and hospitality where I offered a few mesh-like ideas.
I know I'm not that old, I'm just 43 (Or at least I think so. Last year I told everyone I was 43 when, in fact, I wasn't. Seriously, I was confused on that point for a whole year.) But when I text I feel old. Here's why:
I just can't help but text in fully grammatical sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation. I never type something like this:
how r u?I'd text it like this:
How are you doing?This has to be a generational thing. Although my mother, who I know to be, as a biological fact, older than me, seems to have jumped right in with her grandkids with the texting abbreviations.
I wanted to add one more thought to my posts on happiness. In my prior four posts I stayed close to variables that have some empirical literature behind them, things we know to be predictive of happiness. So I mentioned things like gratitude, mindfulness, and relationships.
But in this post I want to mention something more idiosyncratic, something that I, myself, have found helpful: The Consolations of Philosophy.
I note this as an idiosyncratic coping strategy as I don't think everyone will find this approach helpful. You do have to be a bit bookish. But my hope is to say a few things that can open this approach up a wee bit.
One of the struggles in subscribing to universal reconciliation are the constant misunderstandings. Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding involves the distinctions between soteriology and theodicy.
If you are new here, let me define those terms. Soteriology has to do with salvation. Theodicy has to do with the problem of horrific suffering (sometimes called "the problem of evil" or "the problem of pain").
When I say I believe in universalism 99% of the time people think I'm attracted to the position because I have soft heart, soteriologically speaking. I want a happy ending where "everyone gets to go to heaven." For some reason, it is believed, probably because I'm a theological flower child, I just can't stomach the Judgment and Sovereignty of God.
So the debate that typically ensues is all about soteriological issues: sin, forgiveness, judgment, justice, heaven, and hell.
To be clear, those issues are of interest to me. But what most people fail to understand is that my universalism, and most of the universalism I encounter within Christianity, isn't motivated by soteriological issues. The doctrine isn't attractive because it solves the problem of hell. The doctrine is attractive because it solves (or at least addresses) the problem of pain.
Okay, last post regarding my practical suggestions for improving traditional church giving. This is the post I was really wanting to get to.
Now, if you are a staff member or leader of a church my last two posts--about a giving receipt and more direct giving on Sundays--might have made you cross your eyes. Your natural and very legitimate response might have been this: Great idea but who is going to coordinate all this?
Excellent question.
Let's put a pin in that question and talk about many of the excellent points many of you have been making about tithing. Specifically, shouldn't Christians be giving more that 10%?
Again, excellent question.
And the answer to both questions, I think, is the same: Hiring a Minister of Sharing.
Here's the cold hard truth. If you were to poll church leaders asking them to name the most pernicious influence upon American Christianity I bet the answer would be unanimous: Materialism and consumerism.
Day in and day out, this little corner of the blog world is pretty quiet. Occasionally, however, something I write ricochets around the Internet (for example, a few weeks ago, with a head's up from Wayne, Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish linked to The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes). This activity settles down after a day or so but then, perhaps a year or two later, another tipping point is hit, usually via Twitter, and the activity for a particular essay lights up again.
If you follow the comments on the sidebar or RSS feed you'll have noticed that my post How Facebook Killed the Church woke back up over the last few days. Largely due to these blogs--Jesus Creed, First Things, and The Lookout--where you can follow lots of interesting conversations about my argument and my IQ.
I'm wondering if anyone else has ever been puzzled by this phrase in the Lord's Prayer:
And lead us not into temptation...I always have a mental hiccup whenever I or my church says this line. The request, for some reason, seems slightly odd and incongruous. Has anyone else felt the same way?
A repost from 2007:
The content of this post has largely to do with where I work: A college campus, where romance and dating are, well, of significant interest.
You may recall from Psychology 101 Freud’s stages of psychosocial development: Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latency, and Genital. Well, as today is February 14 I’d just like to point out that I find Valentine’s Day over-genitalized. And I’d like your help in reversing the trend.
To recap, these posts are about rethinking church giving, trying to make the Sunday morning offering a spiritually formative practice. In the opening post I argued that I felt that spiritually formative giving wasn't going to happen if there was a psychological disconnect between the giver and the ministries the offering supports. So I suggested tightening up the association.
Here's another way to do that.
The most spiritually formative giving that my church does occurs around Thanksgiving when, on Sack Sunday, the church members take up to the front sacks of food for our food pantry. By the ending of the service the stage is packed with food. Then, after the service, we all grab the sacks and take them to a waiting truck. I expect lots of churches have giving times just like this.
The most spiritually formative aspect of this is the shopping during the week in preparation for the service. It's particularly meaningful for my boys who love to go up and down the aisles of the grocery store picking out food items. As we do so we get to talk about giving, poverty, gratitude, and what all this means for someone who follows Jesus of Nazareth.
Sack Sunday nicely illustrates how when there is a direct connection with the giving we have a better chance of creating a spiritually formative experience. So I wonder, might this idea work for other aspects of church life?
Jana, my wife, is 1st-5th grade teacher's aide at Abilene Christian Schools. She loves her job and has the funniest stories about her experiences with the kids. She really should capture them all and write a book.
The other day the students in the 2nd grade were working through a unit on Martin Luther King Jr. As a part of that unit they engage the I Have a Dream speech by working on a paper where they fill in the blank:
I have a dream _________________.Jana was touched by the response from one little girl:
I have a dream that the people who are fighting will stop. I wish that poor people aren't sick and they aren't hungry. I wish Martin Luther King was still alive so he can make his great speeches! I wish the weak were strong.That's priceless. Then Jana moved on to the next little girl:
I have a dream that I was a zebra who was 14 months old.The lessons we learn, it seems, can be a bit unpredictable.
As regular readers know, I've been doing a lot of thinking about Christianity and art. Just this month my paper Death, Art and the Fall: A Terror Management Perspective on Christian Aesthetic Judgments appeared in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Some of that paper is abstracted in my recent post The Thomas Kinkade Effect.
So I was excited to find out about the project by Makoto Fujimura (h/t Ben Myers and Alan Jacobs) to illuminate the four gospels in commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of the King James Bible. If you are interested in the interface of Christianity and art, go to Fujimura's website and watch the video about the project. During the video Fujimura offers some of the best theology I've heard in quite a long time:
Art is always transgressive. What I always say is, we need to transgress in love. We, today, have a language that celebrates waywardness. But we do not have a language, a cultural language, to bring people back home.A PDF of the bible (the first couple of chapters of Matthew) can be found here. Check it out. It's beautiful. The bible can be purchased from the publisher here and from Amazon here.
Okay, here's my first practical idea for increasing the connection and immediacy of giving for the Sunday morning offering:
Give the church a weekly receipt.The source of this idea goes back to a suggestion I read about last year suggesting that the government give taxpayers a tax receipt. No one likes taxes. But taxes in the abstract are just awful. We just see money going out and wonder what, if anything, that money is being used for. So the argument has been made that if taxpayers received a receipt after Tax Day they could see where, exactly, their money was going and what they were paying for. Because considered on a item by item basis many, if not most, taxpayers don't mind paying for each particular item. The receipt, thus, helps the taxpayer connect their money with various public goods. Here's an example, based on real data, that circulated last year about what a tax receipt might look like (click to enlarge):
Some of you may know Mark Weathers from his comments here. I wanted to point you to his series starting in the Austin Examiner: The Predicaments of Praying from Privilege. After a quote by Thomas Merton, Mark starts the series off with a couple of difficult questions for many American Christians:
In the grand scheme of history, I have never confronted the magnitude of difficulty that befell the vast majority our human ancestors. Pestilence, famine, tribal warfare, drought, systematic persecution, discrimination, religious violence and hunger are alien concepts to me. I confront them only as newspaper headlines. If I even look around the globe today, the global nexus of journalism opens my western mind to distant moral epidemics that I cannot even contemplate. Oppression of women, the poor and racial minorities around the world is simply staggering.
I set up this rather general backdrop because therein lies my spiritual conundrum. How do I pray before God, taking into account the rather minuscule weight of my problems?
... how do we speak our experience of crisis to God, and still remember that our pressures are minor when weighed on the scales of human history?
If you are regular church goer I'm wondering if you have been experiencing something similar to what my wife and I are experiencing. Specifically, it seems harder and harder to drop money in the collection plate.
To be clear, we tithe. But we don't drop all 10% in the collection plate on Sunday morning. We devote some portion of our tithe to the weekly offering, but the rest we spread around to charities or needs where we can give more directly and/or interpersonally.
And that got me wondering. My hunch is that a lot of people give the same way. A small portion goes to the church and the rest is given directly to people with no "middle man."
If that is so, why might that be?
I have long argued here that Christians should work a whole lot more on kindness than love. Love, I've argued, is too amorphous and abstract. Christians have lost the meaning of that word in day to day interactions. Even worse, some Christians use the word love to justify being harsh and exclusive. Love becomes doing what is "best" for you and, by the way, you don't get to decide what is best for you. I do.
But it seems to me, when you look at the Christian virtue lists, that kindness comes before love. So we start small. Work on kindness first and then graduate on to love. If you are a thoroughgoingly kind person odds are you have a great shot at becoming a loving person. But if you skip the lessons of kindness it is very unlikely you'll learn how to love. It's about baby-steps. And they start with kindness. To capture this Jana and I have a saying we share with each other quite a lot:
Kindness is the tutor of love.I found support for this view recently in a very unlikely place. In Nietzsche's Human All Too Human he says this about "goodwill":
When you write about happiness you want to avoid saying stuff that is obvious but impractical. That is, we know a lot about the correlates of happiness but citing those correlates might not be helpful.
For example, we know that rich relationships are predictive of happiness. And you often hear recommendations along those lines at church: Get into relationship with others.
That's a fine thing to recommend but it can be frustrating and annoying to people who find themselves lonely or very introverted. Yes, relationships are key, but getting those relationships can be a bit of a trick.
So, three thoughts about this.
I was blessed today,
or lucky,
depending upon your cosmology.
But really,
this isn't about metaphysics.
It's about riding my bicycle home
and getting caught in the rain.
Not a hard rain, mind you,
where you cannot see
for the rivers of water in your eyes.
A soft rain,
just enough
to make the scent of earth and grass
wake up,
and fill the air.
You know that smell.
And the sound of the tires,
a vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,
(that's how I'd spell it),
as they slashed through shallow puddles
with beads of water spinning off the rubber.
And the sky overhead,
so close and watchful.
Like a brooding parent
worrying about the prudence of my actions,
and slightly disapproving.
But I did not mind
his glower
or the looks of children
peeping through foggy windows
as they passed me on their drive home from school.
I did not mind.
For I was happy
and awake.
I can offer no advice better than Montaigne's
If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there...I do nothing without gaiety.
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).