Experimental Theology

Why The Bible Made Impossible is Impossible

2012-01-27T05:29:00.002-06:00

There has been a great deal of conversation about Christian Smith's new book The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. All the positive reviews are well deserved. I agree, it's a wonderful book.

In fact, I'm in the midst of a short series I'm doing about the book for the bible class I teach at the Highland Church of Christ. The Church of Christ is a biblicist tradition. However, a lot of our people have grown disillusioned with the bible. The bible has become a stumbling block to faith. Which is why I wanted to do a series at my church about The Bible Made Impossible. Smith's book is therapeutic for people struggling with "the Good Book."

There are a lot of good overviews of the book out there. Let me point you to Rachel Held Evan's as a place to start. But let me give a quick overview so I can get to a comment I have about the book and the point of this post.

What is biblicism? Concisely, it is a theory (often unstated) about the nature, purpose, and function of the bible. Its ruling idea is that the meaning of the bible is clear and transparent to open-minded readers. The implication of this idea is that when people sit down to read the bible a broad consensus can be reached about the will of God for any number of issues or topics, from gender roles to the plan of salvation to social ethics to the end times to church organization.

The first part of Smith's book is engaged in blowing up this idea. Empirically speaking, the bible does not produce consensus. Empirically speaking, what we find, to use Smith's phrase, is "pervasive interpretive pluralism." Even among biblicists themselves consensus cannot be reached. For example, Smith points us to books like the Four Views series from InterVarsity Press. Surf over to that link and look at the titles of the series. Four (and sometimes five!) views on just about every topic in Christianity. What does that say when conservative evangelicals, who hold that the bible is both clear and authoritative, can't agree?

Thus, Smith concludes that biblicism is a wrongheaded way of approaching the bible. Biblicism doesn't deliver on what it promises: consensus and clarity about "the will of God."

In the second part of the book Smith turns to describe what he considers to be a better and more faithful evangelical reading of Scripture. This first move he makes is to argue for a Christocentric hermeneutic. The nature, purpose and function of the bible is to point us to Jesus, the Word of God. The "unity" and "consistency" of God's Word isn't to be found among the (at times contradictory) stories and teachings found on the pages of the bible. The bible isn't pointing to itself. Nor is it particularly interesting in issues of "reliability." The prime interest of the bible is the One to whom it is pointing. The bible is a witness not a rulebook, it is a chorus of voices giving testimony to the Word of God. No one has summarized this better than Jesus himself:

John 5:39-40
You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Now you might be wondering, how does this solve the problem of pervasive interpretive pluralism? Aren't there many views of Jesus on offer? Isn't "Jesus" just a container we fill with reflections of ourselves?

Smith talks about this response but he doesn't have a final answer. Not that he could or should. That's a tall order to fill. Smith mainly argues that the benefit of shifting to this Christological conversation--Who is Jesus? Where is Jesus? How is Jesus among us?--is that it makes what is implicit now explicit. That is, rather than pretending we aren't interpreting Scripture, pretending that "God's will" is clearly and transparently written in the bible, we are forced to take up our hermeneutical burden, squarely facing, again and again and again, the question once raised by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today.

That might not be much of an improvement. But it does, however, as Smith points out, lift a considerable burden from the bible. No longer do we have to obsess about the bible's inconsistencies and opacity. We can, rather, get on with the business of finding and expressing the Incarnate Word among us.

In all this I'm in 100% agreement. But the demands of this sort of approach are not negligible. Smith follows his chapter on Christological hermeneutics with a chapter entitled "Accepting Complexity and Ambiguity." In this chapter Smith says,

There is no reason whatsoever not to openly acknowledge the sometimes confusing, ambiguous, and seemingly incomplete nature of scripture. We do not need to be able to explain everything all the time. It is fine sometimes simply to say, "I have no idea" and "We really don't know."

Thus, Smith argues that we should "drop the compulsion to harmonize" the bible and that we should live "on a need-to-know basis." We should embrace the mystery and the uncertainty.

Again, in all this, I find myself in complete agreement. But here's my problem:

Only a few people are going to be able to do this.

That is my quibble with The Bible Made Impossible. Specifically, the recommendations of The Bible Made Impossible are, well, impossible, psychologically speaking. Not across the board, mind you. There are a few people who are psychologically able to tolerate ambiguity and the associated existential anxiety. Because these are pretty big stakes we're talking about here. We're not talking about ambiguity in, say, a form you have to fill out at work. We're talking about sin, salvation, heaven, judgment, grace, hell and all that jazz. And with stakes that huge any ambiguity is going to create an enormous burden of anxiety.

In short, I find The Bible Made Impossible to be psychologically naive. That sounds harsh, so let me clarify. I'm not speaking to Smith's scholarship, which is awesome (plus, he's a great writer). I'm speaking to the anthropological and psychological assumptions that need to be in place to pull his vision off. And to clarify some more, I can guarantee you that Smith is aware of these challenges. He's a sociologist after all. The problem I'm pointing out is that these challenges, where I think the rubber meets the road, aren't discussed in any great detail in the book. That's my point. You read the book and say, "Great idea, but golly, the majority of people aren't going to be able to pull this off. Not without something else being said or done."

Here's the deal. People turn to the bible for consolation and guidance. They want to know if they are doing the right thing, if God is pleased with them. And it's at that location--right there--where the real work has to be done. Because the stakes, as I said, are high. If heaven and hell is in play, if there is any anxiety whatsoever about God's approval, then telling people to "embrace ambiguity" isn't going to help. It's just throwing gasoline on the fire.

George MacDonald on Salvation: "In Jesus Christ I See the Very God I Want"

2012-01-26T05:38:00.002-06:00

There were a lot of things George MacDonald helped me with when I first encountered him in college. One of the things I was starting to struggle with, mightily so, was with certain visions of God that regulated particular theories of salvation.

For example, I was struggling with images of a wrathful and bloodthirsty God. That the God I was called upon to worship could only be appeased by the spilling of blood. What sort of God was that? The whole vision seemed pagan to me. And that's what I concluded, that most of contemporary Christianity is just Paganism 2.0.

MacDonald helped me forward. He gave me the confidence to replace those pagan notions of god with the God of Jesus Christ. Last week I told you I was reading back through MacDonald's novel Donal Grant. It was passages like this one from Donal Grant that proved so helpful to me:

"...in Jesus Christ I see the very God I want. I want a father like him..." [said Donal to lady Arctura,] "...No other than the God exactly like Christ can be the true God. It is a doctrine of devils that Jesus died to save us from our father. There is no safety, no good, no gladness, no purity, but with the Father, his father, and our father, his God and our God."

"But God hates sin and pushes it!" [exclaimed lady Arctura.]

"It would be terrible if he did not. All hatred of sin is love to the sinner. Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He would not have moved a step for that. The horrible thing is being bad, and all punishment is help to deliver us from that, nor will punishment cease til we have ceased to be bad. God will have us good, and Jesus works out the will of his father. Where is the refuge of the child who fears his father? Is it in the farthest corner of the room? Is it down in the dungeon of the castle, my lady?"

"No, no!" cried lady Arctura, "--in his father's arms!"

"There!" said Donal, and was silent.

The Slavery of Death: Part 20, The Devil's Work

2012-01-25T04:25:00.010-06:00

Critical post in this series. Having taken a tour through psychology we are, finally, going to close the circle and converge back upon Christus Victor theology.

Let me first summarize the takeaway from the last post, our review of Ernest Becker's book The Denial of Death.

A key point in The Denial of Death is that self-esteem is involved in managing death anxiety. Living with the specter of death humans seek to live lives that might have some permanence and durability in the face of death. Our cultural worldviews aid in this quest by providing us with cultural goods and values that seem to transcend death. In pursuing these goods and values we follow a path toward meaning and significance. Self-esteem, how we compare to the cultural values, helps us monitor our progress. We participate in what Becker calls "cultural heroics."

While there are psychological and cultural benefits to be had in all this, in the end this is a precarious and fragile business. Our day to day lives often don't feel very heroic. Consequently, we feel that meaning and significance is fragile and shallow. We can come to doubt that our culture telling us the truth. We wonder if working for "the man" is really admirable and worthwhile. The gold watch at the end of a career can seem perfunctory and pointless. We wonder if there is something more to life. But to even ask that question brings on the threat of an existential crisis. To ask those sorts of questions, questions about the validity of the hero system, can bring you to the brink of despair. It's easier to just keep your head down, existentially speaking. It's easier to remain oblivious, to keep punching the time clock and watching American Idol or football games.

And here is where we can see why the bible describes our lives as a "slavery to the fear of death." We're not really paying attention to what is going on. Our cultural hero system and the self-esteem it produces keeps us distracted and oblivious. Sort of like being plugged into the Matrix. This makes life within the hero system feel, in reflective moments, artificial, empty, contrived, and arbitrary. To use a term from the theologian James Alison, we feel we are pursuing ersatz meaning.

And this dynamic leads us to an even darker outcome. If Becker's The Denial of Death helps us understand the biblical claim that our lives are enslaved to the fear of death how might this fear be the work of the Devil? Again, as it says in Hebrews 2.14-15 the Devil is the one controlling this fear. Christ comes to set us free from this fear, to "destroy the devil's works" (1 John 3.8). And while we have come to see how a slavery to the fear of death might make us existentially oblivious and cause us to pursue ersatz meaning and self-esteem, it's not yet clear how this is "the devil's work." What is the connection between the fear of death and the satanic?

This theme is explored by Becker in Escape from Evil, the sequel to The Denial of Death.

According to Becker, the great tragedy of human existence is this. As noted above, our lives are experienced as "significant" because we create cultural hero systems. And yet, our hero system isn't the only one on offer. Every culture has its own values and goods, is its own hero system, that help define what a "meaningful" life looks like. This poses a problem. Our hero systems only "work" if we experience them as immune to death, as something eternal and timeless. In this, our hero systems are religious in nature. In fact, for most of us our hero system is our religion.

So when hero systems and the gods supporting them come into contact we experience an existential threat. The existence of other ways of life, other values, and other gods threatens to relativize our own values and god. That is, our "way of life" is found to be just one option among other options in the marketplace of worldviews. This shakes our confidence that our particular worldview is both true and eternal. If there are many gods how can I be sure my god is the one true god? Pressed further, how can I be sure that all of these gods aren't just figments of our imaginations to help us cope with our death anxiety? Suddenly we feel the existential floor open up beneath us.

In short, alternative hero systems--other values, gods, and ways of life--threaten to undo everything that has made our life feel significant, meaningful, and secure. The ideological Other, in posing an implicit critique of my hero system, threatens me to the core, attacks the very source of my self-esteem. And here's the deal. The ideological Other doesn't really have to do anything to us directly. Their mere existence is enough to threaten us. They represent, on the edges of our awareness, a dissenting voice. A group who doesn't bow to our god and, thus, calls all we hold dear into question.

So what do we do in the face of that threat? It's pretty simple. We demonize the Other. Rather than endure the existential discomfort it's easier to double-down on our worldview and to see the Others as malevolent agents. We aggress against the Other. In mild forms, we see the Other as confused or mistaken, a target for evangelism. More strongly, the Other is an enemy we have to forcibly eliminate.

Here is Becker describing this dynamic:

The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system. Which is another way of saying that societies are standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence....

[Given that] cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial, [w]e can then ask empirically, it seems to me, what are the costs of such denials of death, because we know how these denials are structured into styles of life. These costs can be tallied roughly in two ways: in terms of the tyranny practiced within the society, and in terms of the victimage practiced against aliens or “enemies” outside it...

And with this conclusion we have reached the climax of our psychological analysis. Here is how the "slavery to the fear of death" produces the "works of the devil." Fearing death we seek solace, comfort, and immorality from our cultural worldviews. But these worldviews can only assuage our fear if they appear to us as eternal and timeless, as something immune to death. But when worldviews collide, as they do in pluralistic societies, our hero systems are relativized and called into question. This undermines the existential armor we need to achieve a workaday equanimity in the face of death. And rather than endure this anxiety we opt for violence, lashing out at ideological Others.

According to Ernest Becker this, then, is the great tragedy of human existence: That which makes life worth living--our cultural hero system and the self-esteem it provides--is the very source of evil.

Thus we converge, from a psychological vantage-point, on a core teaching of Christus Victor theology: The fear of death keeps us bound to both sin and the devil. And we've come to see how this fear is a slavery. It is a fear that has captured everything around me and everything within me. Death soaks into everything. It soaks the cultural hero system that gives my life meaning. Thus enslaving me to the Principalities and Powers. It soaks my self-esteem, an armor of ersatz meaning and pseudo-significance. And all of it--described by the bible as a slavery to the fear of death--pushes me to become a creature of violence and sin.

And so we cry out with Paul:

"Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?"

The Authenticity of Faith Now Available

2012-01-24T04:44:00.009-06:00

I'd like to announce that my second book The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience is now available. It can be purchased here from Amazon or, if Amazon runs out (UPDATE: they have), here at the ACU Press website.

The book description:

A psychologist tests Freud's claims that faith is a form of wishful thinking and belief in God a consoling illusion.

Is faith simply a form of wishful thinking? Is belief in God merely a consoling illusion? So argued Sigmund Freud in The Future of an Illusion. And the force of Freud's argument continues to be felt as it features prominently among critics of religion such as the New Atheists.

But was Freud right? Until now, few have directly examined the plausibility of Freud's argument. But here, in a groundbreaking analysis inspired by the religious types described by William James in his seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience, Richard Beck explores the motivational dynamics among ''summer Christians'' and ''winter Christians.'' Further, across a variety of laboratory studies, Beck examines how Christians variously engage with art (exploring what Beck has dubbed ''The Thomas Kinkade Effect''), doctrine (from the Incarnation to beliefs regarding the activity of the devil), and religious difference in a pluralistic world. In each instance, Beck analyzes the underlying motivations of the religious types, sifting through the varieties and illusions of religious experience.

The Authenticity of Faith presents a radical ''New Apologetics,'' an attempt to move beyond contentious philosophical and theological disputes to examine the scientific merits of Freud's critique of faith. Here is an unlikely journey--the scientific search for an authentic faith; the outcome is sure to inspire reflection, conversation, and debate among believers and skeptics alike.

Some of the book endorsements:

''Many scholars have studied the relationship of psychology and Christianity in recent decades, but only a few offer the fresh creativity that Dr. Richard Beck brings to the task. The Authenticity of Faith will make us think, and then it will make us think again, and ultimately it will foster a living faith characterized by depth, relevance, and wisdom.''
--Mark R. McMinn, PhD, Professor of Psychology, George Fox University; author of Sin and Grace in Christian Counseling

''Richard Beck artfully blends psychological theory, empirical research, and theology to tackle a challenging question: Are religious beliefs motivated by mere wishful thinking? This well-crafted, thoughtful, and engaging text is guaranteed to provide readers with plenty of food for thought.''
--Julie J. Exline, Associate Professor of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University

“Using social scientific research, Beck identifies the flaws in Freud’s dismissal of religion as a neurotic defense against mortal dread. He draws on the writings of William James to show the complexity of religious belief, which emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual believer. Written in a way that is accessible to readers who aren’t trained in social scientific research, but rigorous in meeting the standards of the social sciences, The Authenticity of Faith is a masterful example of the ‘new apologetics.’”
--Steven Rouse, Professor of Psychology, Pepperdine University

As I've mentioned before, I thank the readers of this blog in the Acknowledgements. There is reads:

I would also like to thank the readers of my blog Experimental Theology where early drafts of this material first appeared. I’m blessed to have one of the most intelligent and thoughtful readerships on the Internet. A warm thank-you to my readers for your many helpful comments, feedback, and encouragement. You were the first to let me know that this material deserved a wide audience.

In the early days of this blog I did a series called "Freud's Ghost: The Quest for an Authentic Faith." Some of you will remember it. When I wrote that series I had yet to do the empirical work to support the argument I was making then. Years later those studies have now been done, the laboratory work to support my hunch that Williams James was right (in contrast to Freud's "one size fits all" account of faith) in speaking about religious varieties.

In all this, The Authenticity of Faith represents my long personal and professional engagement with Freud's critique of religious belief. It all started in college when I turned to face the question squarely: Did I believe in God or heaven because it made me happy?

After years of self-reflection and research, through seasons where my faith has ebbed and flowed, The Authenticity of Faith is my answer.

Warhorse

2012-01-23T05:33:00.002-06:00

I took my oldest son to see Warhorse last week. Really enjoyed it. And here's why.

Warhorse might be one of the best anti-war movies I've ever seen. It's really subversive.

No doubt there have been a host of films that have more graphically portrayed the brutality and nihilism of war. But Warhorse does something really different in exposing the Principalities and Powers.

If you've not seen the film a bit of overview with no spoilers. Warhorse is a World War I film. We follow a horse named Joey and his first owner, a teenager when we first meet him, Albert. Albert and Joey form a spiritual bond and we recognize in Joey an indomitable spirit. When war breaks out Joey's family, because they are poor, sell Joey to the war effort. Joey becomes a warhorse. From there we follow Joey and the owners who care for him during the war. These owners are British, German and French. Though our affections are always with Albert, Joey's original owner, Joey finds good and compassionate people on both sides of the war.

That is, I think, the particular anti-war genius of the movie. Most war movies have to pick a side. For example, compare Warhorse with Saving Private Ryan, another of Spielberg's war movies. No doubt Saving Private Ryan portrays the horrors of war more graphically than Warhorse (though Warhorse is pretty grim). But one criticism of Saving Private Ryan is that it chooses a side. The Germans are anonymous ciphers. Humanity and heroism is on the American side.

By contrast, since the star of Warhorse is the horse the film isn't choosing sides as strongly. Thus, we follow the horse back and forth across the battle lines and this blurs the distinction between "the good guys" and "the bad guys." This is sharply illustrated in a scene late in the movie when a German and a British soldier meet in the middle of "no man's land" between the British and German trenches to attend to Joey.

It's this blurring of the distinction between Us and Them that I find really powerful in Warhorse. The "good guys" are those who show humanity and compassion on both sides of the lines.

But there is more. One of the visual metaphors in the movie is a regimental pennant that Albert attaches to Joey when Joey goes off to war. As Joey exchanges hands during the war we see this pennant exchange hands. And here's the significance of that.

Early in the movie we note that Albert's father is an alcoholic. Later we learn why. He was traumatized by his service in the Second Boer War. He drinks to forget the horrors of war. The regimental pennant Albert attaches to Joey was his father's from the Boer war.

And as we follow the pennant of Albert's war-damaged father through the film, going from solider to solider (and to non-combatants), we start to see the trauma of war spread. British solider, German solider and even French civilian. None are spared. War damages them all.

In all this we begin to see that Joey isn't the only warhorse in the film. Joey is a symbol of something much darker. The first warhorse in the film is actually Albert's father. And Albert soon follows.

Everyone, German and British alike, is found to be a "warhorse." And we leave the film thinking that the real enemy isn't the man in the other trench.

We're all just warhorses, we come to realize. The real enemy is war itself.

Among Those For Whom No One Else Cares

2012-01-20T05:26:00.002-06:00

"To be concerned with the outcast is an echo, of course, of the Gospel itself. Characteristically, the Christian is to be found in his work and witness in the world among those for whom no one else cares--the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the misfits, the homeless, the orphans and beggars. The presence of the Christian among the outcasts is the way in which the Christian represents, concretely, the ubiquity and universality of the intercession of Christ for all men."
--William Stringfellow, My People is the Enemy

Meditations on the Little Way: Part 4, The Elevator to Jesus: The Practice of the Little Way

2012-01-19T05:06:00.004-06:00

In Part 3 of this series we discussed Manuscript B of Story of a Soul, the mystical charter of the Little Way, where Thérèse came to recognize her vocation as love. In the Body of Christ she would be the heart.

Having discussed the spirituality of the Little Way, in this post I want to turn to practical matters. How do I, practically speaking, follow the Little Way?

Most of the material relevant to the practice of the Little Way can be found in Manuscript C, the final two chapters of Story of a Soul.

Earlier in this series we noted how Thérèse compared the Little Way to the "science of love." At the start of Manuscript C she uses another striking metaphor: The Little Way as an elevator to Jesus:

We are living now in an age of inventions, and we no longer have to take the trouble of climbing stairs, for, in the homes of the rich, an elevator has replaced these very successfully. I wanted to find an elevator which would raise me to Jesus, for I am too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection.

Again, Thérèse was dreaming big dreams, spiritually speaking. Before the elevator metaphor she writes:

You know, Mother, that I have always wanted to be a saint. Alas! I have always noticed that when I compared myself to the saints, there is between them and me the same difference that exists between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and the obscure grain of sand trampled underfoot by passers-by.

I'm guessing we all can identify. The lives of the saints appear to be Mount Everest's of holiness. How to get up that high? Thérèse continues...

Instead of being discouraged, I said to myself: God cannot inspire unrealizable desires. I can, then, in spite of my littleness, aspire to holiness.

Refusing to give up her aspirations to holiness, and despite the daunting climb before her, Thérèse set herself the task of finding an elevator to Jesus. And thus was born the Little Way.

Thérèse discovered the Little Way by contemplating the words of Jesus in the gospels. These passages in particular:

Matthew 22.39
"The second commandment is like the first: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

John 13.34-35
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

As Thérèse pondered these words she realized that she didn't love the people around her--her fellow Sisters--as Jesus loved them: "I realized how imperfect was my love for my Sisters." Convicted by this, Thérèse began striving to allow the heart of Jesus to emerge within her, to allow Jesus to love her fellow Sisters through her life, words and actions:

Ah! Lord, I know you don't command the impossible. You know better than I do my weaknesses and imperfection; You know very well that never would I be able to love my Sisters as You love them, unless You, O my Jesus, loved them in me...Your Will is to love in me all those You commanded me to love!

Yes, I feel it, when I am charitable, it is Jesus alone who is acting in me, and the more united I am to Him, the more also do I love my Sisters.

So, how does all this look in practice?

There is a pretty large literature that unpacks, systematizes, and interprets the Little Way. I've read very, very little of this literature. So for my part I will simply gather stories from Story of a Soul that show Thérèse practicing the Little Way in her day to day life. These stories show Thérèse demonstrating little acts of charity and self-mortification.

Let me first, however, say a word about self-mortification and its relation to charity and the Little Way. Thérèse was a Catholic monastic. Consequently, self-mortification was part and parcel of her spiritual walk. But self-mortification often doesn't sit well with many Protestants. More, we don't understand it's relationship to love.

This is unfortunate because self-mortification--dying to self--was an important teaching of Jesus. At root, self-mortification is wrestling with and overcoming selfishness, self-love, and self-absorption so we can become available to and make room for others. When it comes to self-mortification we shouldn't be thinking of hair shirts. Rather, we should call to mind something like this:

Luke 14.7-8a,10
When Jesus noticed how the guests picked the places of honor at the table, he told them this parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor...But when you are invited, take the lowest place...

This is, in fact, one of the acts of self-mortification Thérèse mentions in Story of a Soul: "I don't hasten to the first place but to the last."

These are the acts of self-mortification that Thérèse is speaking about in the Little Way. Acts of humility, restraint, self-control, forbearance, perseverance, patience and long-suffering. It is about "bearing with" people. Self-mortification is less about fasting for forty days than it is about holding your tongue, waiting patiently, mastering your irritation, avoiding the the spotlight, refusing to respond to insults, allowing others to cut in line, being first to apologize, and not seeking to win every argument. In all this we begin to see how self-mortification is related to love. For example, is forgiveness an act of self-mortification or charity? It's both. It's an extension of grace that flows out of an act of self-overcoming. With your ego out of the way it's easier to be open to the other. Thus Thérèse argues,

Love is nourished only by sacrifices, and the more a soul refuses natural satisfactions, the stronger and more disinterested becomes her tenderness.

With that in mind, let's turn to illustrations of the Little Way. There are many, almost maxim-like, nuggets sprinkled throughout Story of the Soul related to the Little Way...

Charity consists in bearing with the faults of others, in not being surprised by their weaknesses, in being edified by the smallest acts of virtue we see them practice.

It is no longer a question of loving one's neighbor as oneself but of loving him as He, Jesus, has loved him.

When I wish to increase this love in me, and when especially the devil tries to place before the eyes of my soul the faults of such and such a Sister who is less attractive to me, I hasten to search out her virtues, her good intentions...

I want to be charitable in my thoughts toward others at all times, for Jesus has said: "Judge not, and you shall not be judged."

...but the most extended and practical description of the Little Way is found in the final chapter:

I have noticed (and this is very natural) that the most saintly Sisters are the most loved. We seek their company; we render them services without their asking; finally, these souls so capable of bearing the lack of respect and consideration of others see themselves surrounded with everyone's affection...

On the other hand, imperfect souls are not sought out. No doubt we remain within the limits of religious politeness in their regard, but we generally avoid them, fearing lest we say something which isn't too amiable. When I speak of imperfect souls, I don't want to speak of spiritual imperfections since most holy souls will be perfect in heaven; but I want to speak of a lack of judgment, good manners, touchiness in certain characters; all these things which don't make life agreeable. I know very well that these moral infirmities are chronic, that there is no hope of a cure, but I also know that my Mother would not cease to take care of me, to try to console me, if I remained sick all my life. This is the conclusion I draw from this: I must seek out in recreation, on free days, the company of Sisters who are the least agreeable to me in order to carry out with regard to these wounded souls the office of the Good Samaritan. A word, an amiable smile, often suffice to make a sad soul bloom...I want to be friendly with everybody (and especially with the least amiable Sisters) to give joy to Jesus.

This is the practice of the Little Way, or a central part of the practice. It is to seek out "the imperfect souls" in our lives (I'm sure people are coming to mind) who we generally, along with others, seek to avoid. As Thérèse describes, these people are touchy, irritable, and generally lacking in social graces, among other faults. More, these faults are chronic, personality-based issues that aren't ever going to change (get "cured" to use Thérèse's word).

The Little Way is to see these souls as "wounded" on the side of the road and to respond to them like the Good Samaritan. Or, to use Thérèse's other image, we can see these souls as chronically ill and respond to them like a Mother caring for her child ("I know that my Mother would not cease to take care of me, to try to console me, if I remained sick all my life"). Practically, this means we seek out the company of these individuals. And finding them we offer kindness and friendliness.

This is the crux of the Little Way: Seeking out the unlikable people in our world and offering them kindness. Thérèse describes this as being faithful to Jesus's command to love both our friends and our enemies:

The Lord, in the Gospel, explains in what His new commandment consists. He says in St. Matthew: "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies...pray for those who persecute you." No doubt, we don't have any enemies in Carmel, but there are feelings. One feels attracted to this Sister, whereas with regard to another, one would make a long detour in order to avoid meeting her. And so, without knowing it, she becomes the subject of persecution. Well, Jesus is telling me that it is this Sister who must be loved...

That's a great phrase. "We don't have any enemies in Carmel, but there are feelings." I'm sure you can relate. "I don't have any enemies per se at the office but there are, well, feelings." Those feelings are the focus of the Little Way. And we see the central theme again: Overcoming natural attractions and aversions to seek out the one who isn't an object of affection. I'm particularly struck by how Thérèse compares social avoidance--taking "detours" in order to avoid annoying people--as a from of social persecution.

Goodness, I can identify with that. The avoiding people. The "detouring" around them. The Little Way challenges this natural impulse of mine. And it help me see that seeking these people out and spending some time in friendly conversation is a way I might respond to the Parable of the Good Samaritan in my day to day life. I don't have to wait to find a bloody body in a ditch to act like Jesus's model of love. I can do something "little" but just as heroic this very day: I can stop taking those detours and thereby crack the bubbles of social persecution in my workplace (or anywhere else).

In Story of a Soul Thérèse gives an example of doing this very thing:

There is in the Community a Sister who has the faculty of displeasing me in everything, in her ways, her words, her character, everything seems very disagreeable to me...Not wishing to give in to the natural antipathy I was experiencing, I told myself that charity must not consist in feelings but in works; then I set myself to doing for this Sister what I would do for the person I loved the most. Each time I met her I prayed to God for her...[But] I wasn't content simply with praying very much for this Sister who gave me so many struggles, but I took care to render her all the services possible, and when I was tempted to answer her back in a disagreeable manner, I was content with giving her my most friendly smile, and with changing the subject of our conversation...

One day at recreation she asked in almost these words: "Would you tell me Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus, what attracts you so much toward me; every time you look at me, I see you smile?"

A couple of observations about this example of Thérèse's own practice of the Little Way. First, we again see the seeking out of a person who Thérèse found "very disagreeable," and pretty disagreeable across the board--personality, manner, speech. Second, Thérèse moves beyond prayer to focus on actions, doing good things for this person. Third, we see patience and restraint in interacting with this Sister, Thérèse watching her words, keeping a smile on her face, and sometimes changing the topic of conversation. Finally and most importantly, the Sister noticed! This isn't love in the abstract. Thérèse's behavior made an impact.

I'm sure many of you are starting to shake your heads. "There is no way," you're likely saying, "that I'm going to seek out and be friendly with [insert name of co-worker, family member, etc.]."

Hey, I'm right there with you. I think we're continuing to see how these "little" things aren't so little. And why Thérèse ended up becoming saint for choosing to live this way.

Let me conclude with another example of the Little Way. I love this example because it's such a goofy thing but so very common in day to day life. I'm sure you'll be able to relate to Thérèse's experience:

I am going to recount certain little struggles which will certainly make you smile. For a long time at evening meditation, I was placed in front of a Sister who had a strange habit...This is what I noticed: as soon as this Sister arrived, she began making a strange little noise which resembled the noise one would make when rubbing two shells, one against the other. I was the only one to notice it because I had extremely sensitive hearing (too much so at times). Mother, it would be impossible for me to tell you how much this little noise wearied me. I had a great desire to turn my head and stare at the culprit who was very certainly unaware of her "click."

How awesome is this!? And can't you relate? Boy, I can. I often find myself in moods where people irritate me, for no good reason. I don't like the sound of their chewing. The way they are clearing their throat. The way they are standing too close to me. Ever have one of those moods, where little things people are doing are just driving you crazy?

So there she is, Thérèse at prayers getting annoyed at a Sister for making a distracting clicking noise. The story continues...

I remained calm, therefore, and tried to unite myself to God and to forget the little noise. Everything was useless. I felt the perspiration inundate me...

Again, what I love about this is how small this story seems and yet so huge. How much of our interactions with others is driven by these experiences of irritation? My day is full of this sort of stuff. And the Little Way is calling us to take these moments of impatience and annoyance and turn them into moments of holiness. Thérèse concludes:

I searched for a way of [listening to the noise] without annoyance and with peace and joy, at least in the interior of my soul. I tried to love the little noise which was so displeasing; instead of trying not to hear it (impossible), I paid close attention so as to hear it well, as though it were a delightful concert, and my prayer (which was not the Prayer of Quiet) was spent offering this concert to Jesus.

How to summarize the spiritual heroism of the Little Way? Think of it this way: You can run off to a monastery or hit the mission field or, wait for it, start mastering your irritation. In comparison this last seems, well, pretty little. But upon reflection, each of these seems pretty damn heroic. That's the genius of the Little Way. Finding the experiences of day to day living to be locations of epic spiritual struggle, the narrative arch of the great saints and martyrs.

And yet, this is so hard to see. Because let's admit it. Who thinks mastering your irritation, say, standing in line at Walmart is your St. Francis or Joan of Arc moment? Who thinks putting up with the annoying sound of a co-worker eating potato chips in the break-room is the path to sainthood?

Nobody.

But Thérèse did.

And she called it the elevator to Jesus.

The Fence of Matthew Shepard

2012-01-17T05:11:00.004-06:00

"It's gay awareness week."

That's what the killers said to Matthew Shepard before brutally beating and torturing him.

Eighteen hours after the prolonged beating a cyclist found Matthew, alive but unconscious, hanging on a fence (pictured right).

The cyclist initially mistook Matthew for a scarecrow.

Matthew was taken to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. We was in a coma. The autopsy later revealed that Matthew had been struck in the head 18 times with a pistol causing severe brain-stem damage. Matthew never regained consciousness. He died at 12:53 a.m. on October 12, 1998. He was twenty-two years old.

The Westboro Baptist Church attended Matthew's funeral.

They held up signs.

"No Tears for Queers"

"Fag Matt in Hell"

Many of us recall the news coverage of Matthew Shepard's death. The outcry was enormous, eventually leading to advocacy groups requesting that attacks made on the basis of sexual orientation be added to the federal definition of a hate crime. After numerous setbacks and a great deal of political posturing the legislation was finally passed in 2009 by the US Senate and House. President Obama signed the bill into law on October 28, 2009, eleven years after Matthew's death.

...

People wonder from time to time why I write about the relationship between the gay community and the Christian church. It's not a comfortable topic where I live and work. But the answer is pretty simple.

I'm haunted by the scarecrow hanging on the fence.

In James Cone's recent book The Cross and the Lynching Tree he makes the argument that the cross and the lynching tree need to form a dialectic. If the two are separated the cross becomes innocuous and meaningless. As Cone writes:

Unfortunately, during the course of 2,000 years of Christian history, this symbol of salvation has been detached from any reference to the ongoing suffering and oppression of human beings...The cross has been transformed into harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their neck.

Cone argues that during the Civil Rights struggle the Christian symbol of salvation should have been, though it was not, connected with the lynching tree--an actual and ongoing location of human oppression and cruelty. For when the two become separated--when the cross hung around our neck or in our church fails to bring to mind current and ongoing locations of cruelty in our world--then the Christian faith has lost its way.

The cross, to be a truly Christian symbol, must bring to mind the lynching trees of the world.

Christ hangs from the cross as Blacks hung from trees. As Matthew Shepard hung from a fence.

Cursed scarecrows all.

As it says in the Good Book: "Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse." (Deut. 21.23)

Until we see Jesus standing with the cursed we will never understand the central symbol of our faith nor what it means to be a Christian.

Saul falls on his face on the road to Damascus. He looks into the blinding light and asks, "Who are you Lord?" And the reply comes: "I am the one you are persecuting."

Jesus hangs on the crosses of the world, from the trees and from the fences. It is as Elie Wiesel describes in his memoir Night. After watching a young boy hanged by the Nazis in the concentration camp:

Behind me, I heard a man asking:

"Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He? He is--He is hanging here on this gallows..."

Though some might object to me drawing an equivalence between the history of African-Americans in the United States and that of the gay community, I don't want to put sorrows in the balance. Some may want to point out that gay persons are not being lynched and hung from the trees as Blacks were in the Jim Crow south. And because of this we might conclude that the fence of Matthew Shepard is an isolated incident, a crime committed by two hateful and deranged individuals. That the death of Matthew Shepard has nothing to do with me, has nothing to do with you, has nothing to do with the church.

And yet. And yet. I am haunted by the fence of Matthew Shepard.

As I reflect on my Christian walk I often ponder this question: If I had lived in Nazi Germany would I have stood up for the Jews?

Most Christians didn't. And as I psychologist I'm familiar with studies like the Sanford Prison study and the Milgram Obedience study. I'm aware that normal, god-fearing people can do horrible things when pressure is put upon them.

So what makes me so special? Statistically speaking, odds are I would have made a good Nazi.

I also think a lot about the Civil Rights Movement in the US. I ask myself: If I had lived in the South would I have marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.? As Cone asks, would the cross in my church have made me think of the lynching trees in my nation? Would I have seen the connection?

Again, most Christians didn't.

And I keep wondering. Am I any different? What makes me think I'd be a courageous agent of light in those circumstances? Odds are I'd be just like everyone else.

And then I think about the fence of Matthew Shepard.

Let me tell you what keeps me up at night. My deepest fear in life is that I'm going to end up on the wrong side of God's history. Like so many Christians before me. My fear is that a moment will come when I am asked to stand up for those hanging on the trees, literally and symbolically, and I'll respond with "That has nothing to do with me. That has nothing to do with the church."

Where are the cursed scarecrows of this world? And does the sight of the cross bring them to mind?

I've read a lot of books and written a lot of words about Christian theology. But really, it's all pretty simple.

Jesus hangs from crosses, from trees and fences.

And to see that, like Saul on the Road to Damascus, is the day of your conversion.

The day you become a Christian.

A Bedtime Prayer on MLK Day

2012-01-16T21:34:00.004-06:00

Sitting on my boys' bed tonight before prayers.

"You know guys, you might be the only kids at your school who actually sat at Martin Luther King Jr.'s kitchen table."

"Yeah."

"That's a pretty cool thing to remember on MLK Day, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

"Do you remember what we saw outside the house when we visited?"

"Wasn't it the place where they bombed his house?"

"Yes. It was the place where they bombed his house. That's one of the reasons why we celebrate saints like Martin Luther King, Jr. It takes courage to do the right thing. Like David and Goliath. Like Stephen before the Sanhedrin. Like Daniel in the Lion's Den. It takes courage and bravery to do the right thing."

We say our prayers, I turn out the lights and leave the room. At the door I stop and turn back. I whisper a final prayer.

"Be brave my boys. Be brave."

Mountaintop

2012-01-16T05:08:00.001-06:00

"I asked God to give me the strength to remain nonviolent and to forgive the people for what they might do."

I was sitting with Drs. David and Jennifer Dillman along with twenty-two ACU students listening to James Zwerg. We were in Montgomery, Alabama almost fifty years to the day when James, along with the other Nashville Freedom Riders, got off the bus at the Greyhound station just down the street. The Nashville Freedom Riders were in Montgomery because the original group of Freedom Riders had been attacked in Anniston and Birmingham. Knowing they would face similar attacks, the Nashville riders had come to Montgomery to finish what the original riders had started.

James was one of the first off the bus to face the mob, many of whom were carrying pipes, chains, and clubs. Being the first white Freedom Rider to come into sight James knew he’d face the brunt of the mob’s fury. But right before the blows fell upon him James stopped, gathered himself, and asked God to forgive those about to beat him.

How did we wind up in Montgomery on the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides?

For years David, Jennifer and I had separately dreamed of a bus trip taking ACU students through significant sites in the American Civil Rights movement. The summer before I had been able to scout various locations with my family on the way home from a family vacation. Having shared our visions, back at ACU David and I huddled over maps determined, along with Jennifer, to make this trip a reality.

We settled on a route. Abilene. Little Rock. Memphis. Birmingham. Montgomery. Selma. Jackson. Abilene. The circuit would take us through some of the most dramatic moments in American history. Brown vs. Board of Education. The Little Rock Nine. Police dogs and fire hoses in Kelly Ingram Park. The Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr. and Montgomery Bus Boycott. Bloody Sunday. The Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Rights March. The balcony of the Lorraine Motel. Freedom Summer.

And, of course, the Freedom Rides.

We didn’t plan it this way, but David, Jennifer and I quickly realized that we were planning our trip the very year marking the 50th Anniversary of the original 1961 Freedom Rides. We also realized that we’d be on the road the same week in May as the original Rides. All sorts of commemorations were being planned for the days we’d be in Alabama. PBS was airing an original documentary about the Freedom Rides during the week of the trip and every day we awoke to newspaper articles discussing the significance of the Freedom Rides. As our bus rolled down the road it was like we were stepping back in time.

Of course, the great blessing of this timing was getting to meet with two of the original Freedom Riders. The day after meeting with James Zwerg our students also met with Dr. Bernard Lafayette, participant in the Nashville sit-in movement, co-founder of SNCC, Freedom Rider and close associate of Dr. King. Dr. Lafayette, a world leader in the philosophy and training of non-violence, looked at our students and said: “Find an issue in life that you are willing to die for. We’re all going to die. The question is, are we going to live?”

Everywhere we went the atmosphere was thick with stories of heartache and heroism. As we walked the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma we were able to experience the courage of the Bloody Sunday marchers. Cresting the bridge you see below where the line of troopers, many on horseback and wearing gas masks, waited for the marchers. The courage of that march really can’t be communicated until you trace that journey with your own two feet as I had the summer before with my wife and two sons.

Every day of the Freedom Ride was like that. You kept finding yourself on holy ground. And sometimes quite unexpectedly.

We were pulling out of Memphis having just visited the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Theron came to the front of the bus and asked if we might stop by the church were Dr. King preached his last sermon.

When the bus pulled up to the church a security guard came alongside us. We explained who we were. Suddenly, the security guard turned into the best tour guide we had on the trip. He pulled out his keys, let us in and showed us around. And then the moment came when he let each of us go up and stand in the last pulpit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The students were visibly moved standing in that spot. Just hours earlier they had looked out over the balcony of Room 306 where Dr. King had been gunned down. We had left that place with a sense of sadness and loss. But here in this church our spirits lifted. The man we had lost hours before came back to us in the incandescent vision of his final message. Standing behind that pulpit you could almost hear his voice cascading again over the pews:

“I've been to the mountaintop…And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. “

This essay originally appeared in the Summer 2011 edition of ACU Today. The picture above, of MLK's final pulpit, the place he delivered the Mountaintop sermon, was taken by me during the ACU Freedom Ride.

On Subversion and Shame: I Like the Color Pink

2012-01-15T10:07:00.001-06:00

I like the color pink.

This has, interestingly, caused not a few people to feel perplexed by me.

The reason for this is that pink is a feminine color. So if you're a man who likes pink this is considered to be strange and deviant.

A part of my fondness for pink has to do with growing up in the 80s where there was a phase of preppy-based chic with khaki pants and pastel colored shirts--yellow, blue, green and pink. More, the pastel colors of Don Johnson in Miami Vice made pink both masculine and cool. In fact, for a senior prom I once went in a white tux from the Miami Vice collection complete with pink tie and cummerbund. Quite a look.

The point is, I grew up liking pink.

But here's the problem. Apparently, pink is really only allowed for men if it's a pink shirt (or a tie). And even that's a statement, particularly here in West Texas. But pink outside of that boundary is considered weird.

For example, given that my hair is long I like to wear bandanas to keep my bangs out of my eyes. I use bandanas sometimes as men aren't allowed to wear headbands. That's what Jana told me when I floated the idea of wearing one. Instead, I use a fake headband called "reading glasses." I use the glasses to pull my hair back as seen in my Streaming video and in the videos with Rachel Held Evans. Side benefit: this is a "headband" that makes me look intellectual.

Anyway, I wear bandanas to keep my hair out of my face (as seen here). And my favorite go-to color for the bandana is pink.

This always makes people do a double-take. Good God, a man with a pink bandana! For example, last fall I was at a High School football game and I was wearing the pink bandana. On Monday one of Jana's colleagues asked, "Did I see Richard wearing a pink bandana at the game on Friday?" Jana responded, "Yeah. Richard likes pink. Why do you ask?" "No reason," she said, "I've just never seen anything like that before."

Few have. At least where I live.

This came to a funny head a few weeks ago. I was given as a gift an Otter Box (a protective case) for my iPhone. I had to order it from our college bookstore. The Box I had before was all black and I found that boring. So the young lady who was helping me was walking me through all the accent colors: navy blue, yellow and, you guessed it, pink.

"I like the pink one," I said.

"The pink one?"

"Yes. I like pink on black. Don't you?"

"Uh, yes. But this is for you, right?"

"Yes. Is that odd?"

"Well, you don't see a lot of guys get pink iPhones."

"It's not totally pink. It's mainly black."

"That's true. But it's still pink."

Yes, I know. But I like pink. Social convention be damned.

Anyway, my iPhone is now a constant source of conversation.

Now why am I telling you all this? Well, the other day I was thinking about the power of social stigma and shaming. Most people wouldn't ever cross a social boundary like this (e.g., getting a black and pink iPhone), even at the expense of their own preferences. The shame, the "sticking out" it just too heavy a burden to bear.

But I wonder. If Christians are supposed to be a "peculiar people" we might need to learn to inoculate ourselves against social shaming. We might need to practice, on a regular basis, small acts of social non-conformity. We need to get used to not caring what people think. We need to become immune to shame.

This reminds me of the shame-attacking exercises of the psychologist Albert Ellis. When working with clients who were totally paralyzed by social shame Ellis would have them do something in public that was both very noticeable and very ridiculous. The most famous example is pulling a banana around on a string in a public place like a mall. Here's a video example of this.

Now most people, those who are terrorized by the opinions of others, would say to Ellis, "I could never do that! It would be too embarrassing." But why live life being bullied by embarrassment? Who cares if people look at you? Who cares if they laugh?

Exactly. The world isn't going to end if people think you're a bit off your rocker. Just look at me.

So learn to embrace your own version of the pink iPhone. Engage in small acts of subversion. Vaccinate yourself against shame. Buck the system.

It might be one of the most important spiritual exercises you practice.

Forget Your False Teachers

2012-01-13T05:25:00.001-06:00

I got a Kindle for Christmas this year. I like it, but I still prefer regular books. Probably always will.

The reason I got the Kindle is because you can get all of George MacDonald's works for free or practically free. My plan for the Kindle was to get back into the novels of MacDonald. It's been years since I'd read one. But which one to read first?

I picked Donal Grant as he was the character that stuck with me the most all these years. Perhaps because he was a scholar/tutor. So, a quote for your weekend, from the novel Donal Grant:

Those who seek God with their faces not even turned towards him, who, instead of beholding the Father in the Son, take the stupidest opinions concerning him and his ways from other men--what should they do but go wandering on dark mountains, spending their strength in avoiding precipices and getting out of bogs, mourning and sighing over their sins instead of leaving them behind and fleeing to the Father, whom to know is eternal life. Did they but set themselves to find out what Christ knew and meant and commanded, and then to do it, they would soon forget their false teachers. But alas! they go on bowing before long-faced, big-worded authority--the more fatally when it is embodied in a good man who, himself a victim to faith in men, sees the Son of God only through the theories of others, and not with the sight of his own spiritual eyes.

This quote captures one the greatest lessons I've taken from MacDonald. Following Jesus--obedience to the Master as MacDonald would put it--is the truest path to good theology, orthodoxy, truth, doctrine, and understanding. Behold the Father in the Son and leave the stupid opinions behind. Set yourself to find out what Christ knew, meant and commanded, and then do it, and forget your false teachers.

Insights that changed my life in college.

Meditations on the Little Way: Part 3, "My Vocation is Love"

2012-01-12T04:40:00.006-06:00

As mentioned in my last post, Manuscript B of Story of a Soul is considered to be the mystical heart of Thérèse's Little Way. It was written to her sister who asked her to describe her "little doctrine."

The first part of the manuscript is addressed to Marie; the second, longer half is addressed directly to Jesus.

In her opening to Marie Thérèse talks about learning from Jesus "the science of LOVE." (Note: Again, all italics and capitalizations are Thérèse's.) Thérèse describes to her sister the primacy of love and how it relates to her Little Way:

The science of Love, ah, yes, this word resounds sweetly in the ear of my soul, and I desire only this science...I understand so well that it is only love that makes us acceptable to God, that this love is the only good I ambition...

Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.

After the introductory remarks to her sister Thérèse turns to address Jesus for the rest of the manuscript.

She begins by recounting a vision of Anne, the deceased Founder of the Carmelites in France. In the vision Thérèse asks Anne if God is pleased with her. Does God approve of her Little Way?

Mother, tell me further if God is not asking something more of me than my poor little actions and desires. Is He content with me? ...

She said to me: "God asks no other thing from you. He is content, very content!"

However, this assurance for the Little Way was not enough. Thérèse still struggled with the seeming insignificance of both herself and her spiritual efforts. She wanted her vocation in the church to be heroic:

I feel within me other vocations. I feel the vocation of the WARRIOR, THE PRIEST, THE APOSTLE, THE DOCTOR, THE MARTYR. Finally, I feel the need and the desire of carrying out the most heroic deeds for You.

She wants, "in spite of my littleness," to "enlighten souls as did the Prophets and the Doctors." To, like the apostles, "travel the whole earth to preach Your name," to "preach the Gospel on all the five continents simultaneously and even to the remote isles." She says, "I will be a missionary, not for a few years only, but from the beginning of creation until the consummation of the ages." She wants to be a martyr, to give everything to Jesus: "I would shed my blood for You even to the very last drop." She dreams of being like her fellow countrywoman Joan of Arc.

And yet, there she was, a twenty-three year-old cloistered nun, and by her own account someone of limited talents and abilities. And though that might have been and likely was excessive humility, I think many of us can resonate with Thérèse's struggle. How many of us have wanted to head off to the dangerous mission field? To sell it all and walk off like St. Francis of Assisi? To speak to huge crowds like Billy Graham? To do something radical?

We have heroic dreams for our spiritual lives.

And yet, most of us live quiet lives among friends, family and co-workers. And the smallness of our spiritual lives can make us wonder, like Thérèse wondered, is "God not asking something more of me than my poor little action and desires. Is He content with me?"

Here we find the great appeal of Thérèse's Little Way. It is a heroic path toward sainthood--the "democratization of holiness" as Thomas Merton called it--that everyone can travel. No matter how humble your talents or situation. There is a radicalness that can infuse the workaday.

So Thérèse struggled with her vocation. She wanted to be Joan of Arc, but it wasn't happening. So she began to despair again:

O my Jesus! what is your answer to all my follies? Is there a soul more little, more powerless than mine?

Her answer came in a mystical breakthrough while reading 1 Corinthians 12-13:

I read there, in the first of these chapters, that all cannot be apostles, prophets, doctors, etc., that the Church is composed of different members, and that the eye cannot be the hand at one and the same time. The answer was clear, but it did not fulfill my desires and gave me no peace.

Why? Because she still didn't know what her vocation was. Was she an eye, a hand, an ear, a foot? What part of the body was she?

She read on into Chapter 13...

Without becoming discouraged, I continued my reading, and this sentence consoled me: "Yet strive after THE BETTER GIFTS, and I point out to you a yet more excellent way." And the Apostle explains how all the most PERFECT gifts are nothing without LOVE. That Charity is the EXCELLENT WAY that leads most surely to God.

At last, she had found her vocation. The key to the Little Way. What part of the body would she be?

She would be the heart.

I finally had rest...Charity gave me the key to my vocation. I understood that if the Church had a body composed of different members, the most necessary and most noble of all could not be lacking to it, and so I understood that the Church had a Heart and that this Heart is BURNING WITH LOVE. I understood that it was Love alone that made the Church's members act, that if Love ever became extinct, apostles would not preach the gospel and martyrs would not shed their blood. I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES....IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL!

Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love...my vocation, at last I have found it....MY VOCATION IS LOVE!

Yes, I found my place in the Church...I shall be Love. Thus I shall be everything...

This is the mystical core of the Little Way. To follow the Little Way is to commit to being the heart of the church. The Little Way is to become love incarnate in your day to day existence with others. No grand overseas adventures. No speaking to massive crowds. No riding off like Joan of Arc. Simply becoming love. Right here. Right now.

Thérèse is called "The Little Flower." One reason for this is a metaphor she goes on to use to describe what being love--the heart of the church--is like. She compares the Little Way to strewing flowers around the throne of God. Each small act of love we do is a flower strew in the Courts of Heaven.

But how will she [Thérèse is speaking in the third person] prove her love since love is proved by works? Well, the little child will strew flowers, she will perfume the royal throne with their sweet scents...

I have no other means of proving my love for you other than that of strewing flowers, that is, not allowing one little sacrifice to escape, not one look, one word, profiting by all the smallest things and doing them through love..

Strewing flowers might seem a bit girlish and feminine. I doubt someone, say, like Mark Driscoll sees himself strewing flowers around the throne of God (though I've spent a good minute here smiling as I imagined that). But sentimentality aside, there is steel here. Requiring a hard, Navy SEAL-like discipline. The discipline of the Little Way is to make every act of sacrifice during the day, every look, and every word flow from love. Yes, these are little things, each act a small "flower," but I bet you are beginning to appreciate the heroic audacity of the spirituality of the Little Way. The Little Way isn't, when put into practice, very little at all. It's pretty damn hard to do and you'd be heroic for even trying it. That's why Thérèse is a saint without the riding off to grand adventures like Joan of Arc. Some adventures are standing right in front of you.

Yes, each little flower--each loving word, act, or look you give today--is a little thing. But cumulatively? It's the love of God incarnate. In you. For the world.

Our vocation is love.

Adam's First Wife

2012-01-11T05:30:00.007-06:00

Let's start with a crazy question: What do Adam's first wife and nocturnal emissions have in common?

A few days ago I couldn't have answered that question. But some of my research drew me into an interesting bit of scholarship regarding gender relations, sexuality, textual criticism, Jewish lore, and demonology.

First, let's start with the obvious: Adam's first wife?

To understand the Jewish legend that Eve was Adam's second wife we need to explore the texts of Genesis 1-2 and the contrasts between the two creation stories found therein.

As biblical scholars are well aware, the first chapters of Genesis appear to be written by two different authors. The two authors are called the Elohist and the Yahwist. The Elohist is called this because he (we assume it was he) uses the word Elohim to refer to God. Elohim is typically translated "God" in English bibles. So when we read "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" the Elohist is writing.

The Yahwist, by contrast, uses the name YHWH to refer to the Deity. In many English translations YHWH is translated LORD, all caps. The Elohist story of creation ends in Genesis 2.2. The Yahwist story of creation starts at Genesis 2.3. You can see both the beginning and the ending of the two accounts as well as the switch from "God" to "LORD" in referring to the Creator:

Genesis 2.1-4
Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.
--End of Elohist Creation Story--

--Start of Yahwist Creation Story--
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens...

It is believed that the two stories were edited together by a third author (a "redactor") working with both manuscripts.

In some ways the two stories complement and supplement each other. But there are differences that have preoccupied scholars. One location of contrast is in the creation of Adam and Eve:

Elohist Version of Adam & Eve (Genesis 1.26-27):
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Yahwist Version of Adam & Eve (Genesis 2.7-8, 15-23):
Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed...

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and then closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”

Most readers of the bible read the first account from the Elohist--"in the image of God he created them / male and female he created them"--as an abbreviated summary of the longer, and admittedly much weirder, account of the Yahwist, where God parades all the animals before Adam suggesting he pick a mate from them ("You know God, I'm kind of fond of that zebra over there. Those stripes are sexy..."). But really, these are two different stories.

Incidentally, egalitarians like the Elohist version best where man and woman are created at the same time as equals. By contrast, hierarchical complementarians like the Yahwist version better with the ordered creation of man before woman and woman made from man's rib.

But for this post we are interested in a Jewish legend regarding the differences between the Elohist and Yahwist versions of Adam and Eve. While many Christians read these texts as being the same story (one compressed the other more detailed) there is a Jewish tradition where these are read as two stories about two different events--the story of Adam's first wife and the story of Adam's second wife.

The two stories run like this. The first, Elohist account is the story of the creation of Adam and his first wife. For some reason (which we will get to), this wife goes missing and Adam finds himself alone. Finding this unacceptable, God makes a second wife for Adam. This is the Yahwist story, the story of making Eve from Adam's rib so she will stick with Adam (unlike the first wife).

So who was Adam's first wife? And where did she go?

This brings us to the story of Lilith.

According to Jewish legend, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. Her name comes from one of the Akkadian words (which is uncertain) lilatu ("night") or lilu ("demon" or "phantom"). As the story goes, Lilith felt herself to be Adam's equal (as the Elohist seems to suggest). Eventually, however, Lilith refused to submit to Adam, wanting to be the dominant one. Adam, with the help of God, resists this usurpation. In response Lilith either leaves or is cast out of Eden leaving Adam alone and in need of a second, more submissive wife. Enter Eve.

Is Lilith in the bible? Curiously, she is, if only obliquely. In the middle of a discussion about the destruction of Edom we read in Isaiah 34.14:

NRSV
Wildcats shall meet with hyenas,
goat-demons shall call to each other;
there too Lilith shall repose,
and find a place to rest.

NJB
Wild cats will meet hyenas there,
satyr will call to satyr,
there Lilith too will lurk
and find somewhere to rest.

NASV
The desert creatures will meet with the wolves,
The hairy goat also will cry to its kind;
Yes, the night monster [Lilith in footnote] will settle there
And will find herself a resting place.

The Message
Wildcats and hyenas will hunt together,
demons and devils dance through the night.
The night-demon Lilith, evil and rapacious,
will establish permanent quarters.

RSV
And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas,
the satyr shall cry to his fellow;
yea, there shall the night hag alight,
and find for herself a resting place.

ASV
And the wild beasts of the desert shall meet with the wolves,
and the wild goat shall cry to his fellow;
yea, the night-monster shall settle there,
and shall find her a place of rest.

NIV
Desert creatures will meet with hyenas,
and wild goats will bleat to each other;
there the night creatures will also lie down
and find for themselves places of rest.

Here in Isaiah 34 we find a list of night creatures that will haunt the ruins of Edom. Some of these animals can be found at the zoo: wildcats, hyenas, wild goats. But there are some spooky creatures here as well: devils, demons, satyrs, night hags, monsters. And Lilith in particular.

As the legend continues, after leaving Eden Lilith becomes the first succubus, which fits the etymology of her name, a creature who haunts the night killing human infants and seducing men, particularly in their dreams.

Thus the nocturnal emissions.

The Slavery of Death: Part 19, The Denial of Death

2012-01-10T05:01:00.003-06:00

In Part 17 we discussed William Stringfellow's analysis of Death and the Powers. According to Stringfellow, the "idol of all idols is death." Death is the force that sits behind the Powers. And recall the diversity of the Powers. A list from Stringfellow includes:

[The Powers] include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family...

That's a lot of stuff. How is it all connected to death? According to Stringfellow each of these things is a created thing. This echos Romans 1:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles...They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

The point for Stringfellow is that as created things--products of human activity and thought--the Powers are subject to death. Thus, the morality of the Powers--the "angel" or spirituality of the Powers--is survival, fending off death. Death here is revealed to be the god being served. Consequently, as humans serve the Powers they serve Death. Thus, to be possessed by the Powers is to be enslaved to death. Stringfellow once more on this connection:

Death is the only moral significance that a principality proffers human beings. That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a principality—for a great corporation, profit, for example; or for a nation, hegemony; or for an ideology, conformity—that is sooner or later suspended by the greater moral power of death. Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being.

I think Stringfellow is right in all this, but I think his analysis needs to be deepened. It is true that the Powers, as human products, are corruptible. Thus, to spend a life serving a Power is to serve an idol, a corruptible thing. But this points to a Sisyphean futility rather than to a "slavery to the fear of death," let alone to "the demonic." Stringfellow's analysis points us to Ecclesiastes where all is found to be "vanity of vanities." But how does his analysis connect to Hebrews 2 and the "slavery to the fear of death"?

To connect Stringfellow's analysis of the Powers to "the slavery of the fear of death" I'd like to, finally, bring in the work of Ernest Becker. With this connection we'll have in hand a psychological understanding of what it means to be, in the words of Hebrews 2, all our lives enslaved to the fear of death. More, we'll understand how this enslavement produces the "works of the devil," bringing us full circle back to Christus Victor theology.

Our discussion of Becker will be in two parts. In this post I'll summarize the important points from Becker's monumental The Denial of Death. The Denial of Death with help us understand what it might mean to be "enslaved to the fear of death all our lives." In the following post I'll turn to Escape from Evil, the sequel to The Denial of Death. Escape from Evil will help us understand why this slavery to the fear of death produces the "works of the devil."

Ernest Becker begins his analysis in The Denial of Death by focusing on our need for self-esteem, our craving for our life to be significant and meaningful--to both ourselves and to others. Becker describes this as a striving for heroism, suggesting that “our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.”

This heroism--a feeling of significance--is achieved by following cultural pathways that mark a life, within any given culture, as both admirable and well-lived:

…this is what a society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism… It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

For example, I'm an American college professor. This marks out a "hero system" that can give my life significance and meaning. That is, there are various things I can do within his hero system to be "successful" and feel good about myself. For example, I can publish articles and get good student evaluations. Such things mark me as being "good" at what I do and I get, as a result, a self-esteem buzz, a sense that my life "matters." Think of the hero systems you live within. What are the things you'll do today to feel successful and win praise from others?

So far so good. We all strive to be “heroic,” to achieve self-esteem in lesser or greater ways by comparing ourselves to some hero/value system rooted in our cultures. But what is motivating this need for heroism?

Becker argues that quest for self-esteem is fundamentally an attempt to cope with the terror of death: “heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” This implies that culture itself, the routes toward heroism, is massively engaged in death denial, the repression of death awareness. As Becker notes, “cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial.”

That's a pretty big claim. To take one example, Becker is saying that the "American way of life" is a defense-mechanism. A hero/value system that helps us cope with and transcend death anxiety

Where does Becker come up with this?

According to Becker, the higher cognitive and symbolic capacities of humans make our workaday lives existentially unbearable. The specter of death looms over all, making a mockery of our life projects. Our primal instincts for self-preservation are brought up short in the face of our cognitive capacities that inform us death is unavoidable. This clash—the instinct for self-preservation with an ever-present death awareness—creates an extreme burden of anxiety that other animals are spared:

The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else. It is only if you let the full weight of this paradox sink down on your mind and feelings that you can realize what an impossible situation it is for an animal to be in.

This experiential burden threatens madness or despair. How do we make life “count” in the face of death? It is at this point where cultural hero systems step in to provide paths toward death transcendence, a means toward a symbolic (or literal) immortality. Life achieves significance and meaning when we participate in these “greater goods” that can outlive or transcend our finite existence. We can create a life that matters through reaching for symbolic, if not literal, immortality. My life is deemed meaningful because my children outlive me or I wrote a book or I helped the company have its best quarter of the year. Children, book and company are all forms of "immortality," a way to living into the future in an effort to "defeat" death.

The upshot of this analysis—that we strive for a heroic existence and that cultural hero systems are helping us cope with the terror of death—is that our identity is being driven by death anxiety.

Here we are at the hub of the argument I want to make. What does it mean to say that we are "enslaved all our lives to the fear of death"? With Becker we are getting a vision of what this looks like. Recall, in earlier posts I said that our fear of death is largely unconscious and neurotic in nature (though, of course, the fear of death can become overt and acute in life-threatening situations). With Becker the mechanics of all this are revealed. Self-esteem, the bedrock of our identity, is revealed to be a form of denial, an existential defense mechanism, an illusion to help us avoid the full force of our existential predicament.

This is why Becker calls human character—our personal route toward self-esteem—a vital lie. Our identity is a lie because it is a fundamental dishonesty, in the moment, about our true existential situation. More, this lie obscures the fact that our self-esteem is borrowed, that it rests upon a cultural hero system. The lie hides the fact that my self-esteem is fundamentally a form of idolatry, a service rendered to the cultural hero system--the principality and power.

But this dishonesty is vital as this daily obfuscation is necessary for the human animal to continue on in the face of death. Again, the existential burden death places upon us is impossible. So culture helps us bear this burden, largely through repression and sublimation, by providing us routes of identity-formation via cultural heroics. Here is Becker on these dynamics:

We called one’s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation…We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance. The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity.
...
…the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness. It is not hard to reason out: If character is a neurotic defense against despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of, what they struggle against, and are driven toward and away from.
...
It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: [character-building hero systems] makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity possible.

Let's go back and reconnect with Stringfellow and the Powers. As seen above, particularly in the first of these three quotes, Becker agrees with Stringfellow: we serve the Powers, we engage in idolatry. But why? What motivates this service? According to Becker, it's the fear of death. We want our lives to "matter." We want our lives to "last." But how? How do we "matter" and "last" in the face of death? Answer: We serve the idols (hero systems) of the culture. The company, the political party, the ideology, the religious denomination, the nation. These idols are "bigger" than we are which tricks us into thinking they are able to last and transcend death. Consequently, if we serve these idols our life becomes "meaningful" and "successful" and "immortal."

So we serve a Power. We pour our lives into the idols--these engines of self-esteem and "immortality"--and feel, on a day to day basis, that we are living meaningful lives. But are we really? Let's remember the message of Ecclesiastes!

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

We can spend our whole lives trying to be "successful." But as Stringfellow has pointed out, death outlasts it all. This is why Becker calls our sense of self-esteem a "lie." I think the Teacher of Ecclesiastes would agree.

This brings us to an earth-shattering conclusion. We are enslaved to the fear of death because our self-esteem is, at root, a defense-mechanism involved in death repression. Ponder that. Think about everything you are currently pursuing in your life that is outside of God. Your dreams, goals, and New Year's resolutions. Think about everything you use to pat yourself on the back, all those things that make you feel good about yourself, or special, or better than others. Maybe you're good at your job. Or your kids are talented. Maybe you have a great marriage. Perhaps you are good looking or are in really good shape. Maybe you're really smart. Maybe your blog gets a lot of page views. Maybe a lot of people "liked" your quip on Facebook.

Think about all those things, all those things that make us feel that our lives are "important" or "unique."

Then read Ecclesiastes.

Suddenly you'll see Becker's point about self-esteem being a lie.

Personal example of this. The copies of my new book arrived. So I brought one home to show Jana and the boys. We were all very happy. Later I said to Brenden, my oldest:

"Brenden, you know what Ecclesiastes says about writing books?"

"What?" he replied.

"Well, of the making of books there is no end."

I wasn't trying to be a downer. This isn't about a morbid self-esteem or an effort at self-mortification. It was about resisting the lie, about realizing that my self-esteem is being seduced on a daily basis by the Father of Lies who uses my fear of death to enslave me with the lure of "significance." I was simply reminding myself that the cultural hero system I live within--the college professor hero system--is an idol. Writing a book doesn't make me matter. Doesn't make me better. Won't make me immortal.

True, writing a book might make be "better" within the hero system as I compare myself to others and reap self-esteem benefits. But this is the devil's trap. It is an example of how my fear of death--the craving to matter and have something outlive me--is keeping me enslaved to sin.

How so? Well, if I get any self-esteem from the book I get trapped in a host of sinful practices. Pride. Jealously. Even depression if no one buys the book. This is why we are describing self-esteem as a defense mechanism. My feelings about the book and its reception make me defensive. Why? Because I need the book. The book makes me feel heroic. And I need that heroism to make me feel that my life counts in the face of death.

To conclude, let's revisit our orienting text:

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Reading this text let's think of the dynamics described by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death. We are enslaved to death because we pursue self-esteem in order to "count" in the face of death. This means that our personhood is saturated with death. Everything about ourselves that makes us feel good, successful, smug, important, cool, worthy, snobbish, distinctive, admirable, or headline-catching is, simply, a lie. A death-denying lie. But a lie we will spend our lives anxiously chasing.

This is Not the End

2012-01-09T05:35:00.000-06:00

Given that my artistic tastes are so bad I never like to "recommend" things. But I feel confident in this.

I've found Gungor's latest album Ghosts Upon the Earth to be, musically and theologically, absolutely stunning.

The song "This is Not the End" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard:

This is not the end
This is not the end of this
We will open our eyes wide, wider

This is not our last
This is not our last breath
We will open our mouths wide, wider

And you know you’ll be alright
Oh and you know you’ll be alright

This is not the end
This is not the end of us
We will shine like the stars bright, brighter

I find myself crying every time I hear it. It's my hope.

Meditations on the Little Way: Part 2, Story of a Soul

2012-01-06T04:59:00.002-06:00

As I recounted in Part 1, the influence of Thérèse of Lisieux was due to the publication of her spiritual memoir Story of a Soul. Published in 1898, the year after Thérèse died from tuberculosis at the age of 24, Story of a Soul became a sensation. It led to worldwide devotion, with many Catholics praying to Thérèse. Miracles due to her intercession followed, leading to her sainthood in 1925. But it was the theological content of Story of a Soul, with its discussion of the spirituality of the Little Way (among other things), that led to Thérèse becoming a doctor of the church in 1997.

What was in this memoir--Story of a Soul--that caused such a ruckus?

In this post I want to give a brief history and overview of Story of a Soul. But I'd like to offer a warning before you rush off to buy a copy.

While it is true that many have been profoundly affected by Story of a Soul it's also true that a lot of people don't like the book and can't see what all the fuss is about. My point is that it's possible that you could buy the book and fail to finish it. I myself struggled with it a great deal.

This was, in fact, the reaction Dorothy Day had toward the book. Here is how Day described her first encounter with Story of a Soul:

At that time I did not comprehend that we are all "called to be saints," as St. Paul puts it. Most people nowadays, if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the "whole man," the integrated man. We all wish to be that, but in these days of stress and strain we are not developing our spiritual capacities as we should and most of us will admit that. We want to grow in love but we do not know how. Love is a science, a knowledge, and we lack it.

My confessor at the time was Father Zachary, an Augustinian Father of the Assumption, stationed at the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe on West Fourteenth Street. He was preparing me for Confirmation, giving me weekly evening instruction.

One day Father Zachary said to me, "Here is a book that will do you good."...The book he now handed me was The Little Flower: The Story of a Soul...

I dutifully read The Story of a Soul and am ashamed to confess that I found it colorless, monotonous, too small in fact for my notice. What kind of saint was this who felt that she had to practice heroic charity in eating what was put in front of her, in taking medicine, enduring cold and heat, restraint, enduring the society of mediocre souls, in following the strict regime of the convent of Carmelite nuns which she joined at the age of fifteen? ... I was reading in my Daily Missal of saints stretched on the rack, burnt by flames, starving themselves in the desert, and so on.

Joan of Arc leading an army fitted more into my concept of a saint...I wondered what this new saint had to offer...it took me a long time to realize the unique position of Therese of Lisieux in the Church today.

It's not just the unheroic littleness of the Little Way that can rankle. As Day hints at, some can find the writing of Story of a Soul to be colorless and monotonous. More, there are parts of Story of a Soul that are a overly sentimental and sweet. As Jesuit author James Martin describes in his book My Life with the Saints:

Though there are parts of her story that I find difficult to accept (her childhood religiosity can sound pretentious, precious, and even a little neurotic, and her efforts at self-denial sometimes are close to masochistic), and though it is embarrassing to admit that one of my favorite saints is one of the most girlish and cloying, it is finally the woman herself who appeals to me. Like every other saint, Thérèse Martin was a product of her times, raised in the overheated environment of a super-religious family and formed in the pious nineteenth-century French convent life. So it is hardly surprising that some of her words and actions occasionally baffle us. But shining through the nineteenth-century piety, like a pale green shoot bursting through dark soil, is a stunningly original personality, a person who, despite the difficulties of life, holds out to us her Little Way and says to us one thing: Love.

Like Martin, Day eventually came to see heroic "bigness" of the Little Way, comparing it to the nuclear power hidden within the atom:

Is the atom a small thing? And yet what havoc it has wrought. Is her little way a small contribution to the life of the Spirit? It has all the power of the Spirit of Christianity behind it. It has an explosive force that can transform our lives and the life of the world, once put into effect.

The point being, even great admirers of Thérèse have struggled with their initial encounter with Story of a Soul, both its style and its message. For my part, being a rationalistic and practical sort of person, I struggled with all the mystical flights that fill Story of a Soul. When love-drunk contemplatives wax on about their mystical and rapturous unions with God I tend to roll my eyes. I can handle a few lines of the stuff. But Story of a Soul has pages and pages of it.

So reader be warned. Story of a Soul might not be your cup of tea. That said, the spirituality of the Little Way is too important to miss. Thus this series! Aren't you glad you're here? This is my attempt to extract and summarize the Little Way from the Story of a Soul so that it can get a wider hearing.

A brief overview of the history, structure and content of Story of a Soul.

The Story of a Soul is a compilation of three different manuscripts--A, B, and C--written to three different people, for three different purposes, on three different years. An overview:

Manuscript A (1895): Written to her sister Pauline

Recall, Thérèse was at Carmel with her two older sisters, Pauline (who was the Prioress) and Marie. One day the sisters were talking and reminiscing about their family and childhood. Wanting to capture this and capitalizing on Thérèse's writing ability Pauline, as Prioress, "ordered" Thérèse to write about the family and her earliest memories. Thérèse dutifully did so, writing an autobiographical memoir spanning her earliest recollections to the time of her entrance into Carmel at the age of fifteen. The manuscript was written for her sisters as a family keepsake.

Manuscript A mainly recounts, beyond family history, the spiritual development of Thérèse during her early years, the immature setbacks and the advances. There isn't much about the Little Way in Manuscript A, but there are glimpses of it here and there:

It is love alone that attracts me.

Jesus has no need of books or teachers to instruct souls; He teaches without the noise of words.

I applied myself to practicing little virtues, not having the capability of practicing the great.

Because I was little and weak He lowered Himself to me, and he instructed me secretly in the things of His love.

God made me feel that true glory is that which will last eternally, and to reach it, it isn't necessary to perform striking works but to hide oneself and practice virtue in such a way that the left hand knows not what the right hand is doing.

I expect that Manuscript A will be hardest part of Story of a Soul to get through. It was for me. Plus, its the bulk of the book.

Manuscript B (1896): Written to her sister Marie

Recall, in April of 1896 Thérèse woke up in the middle of the night with blood in her mouth. Fearing that her younger sister would die before she could share her approach to the spiritual life Marie asked Thérèse to write down "her little doctrine."

Manuscript B is short, about 24 pages. It is the mystical heart of the Little Way. It's not very practical, but it's the spiritual core. Many consider it to be one of the crown jewels of the mystical tradition.

The lasting appeal of this vision has to do with Thérèse's struggle to find her vocation before God. What was she to do for God given her limited talents and capabilities? The answer she discovered was love. Her vocation was to be love (BTW, the all caps are Thérèse's. When she gets excited SHE GOES ALL CAPS!!! I can't imagine what Thérèse's tweets would have looked like...):

I understood that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES...IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL!

Yes, I have found my place in the Church and it is You, O my God, who have given me this place; in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love. Thus I shall be everything...

This is, I believe, the lasting appeal of Thérèse--placing love at the center. As she describes it, there are many people with many great gifts in the church. Thérèse didn't have those gifts. So she set herself the task of being the heart of the church. That's the key, living your life as the heart of the church. "I shall be love," she says. That is the core of the Little Way, expressing love to everyone in the ebb and flow of life's interactions with others. Mother Teresa summed up the Little Way like this:

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

Story of a Soul introduced that idea to the world.

Manuscript C (1897): Written to Mother Marie de Gonzagne

As Thérèse neared death Pauline began to regret that she had only ordered Thérèse to write about early family memories (Manuscript A). She wished that she had ordered Thérèse to share more of her religious life, particularly as it developed over her nine years at Carmel. Recall, Manuscript A ends with a 15-year-old Thérèse entering the monastery.

Trouble was, Pauline was no longer Prioress and couldn't order Thérèse to write more. (Why not simply ask your sister to write some more? Because of the monastic call to humility. Thérèse would only write about herself when ordered to.) To get around this, Pauline convinced Mother Marie, the sister who succeeded her as Prioress, to order Thérèse to write about her religious life at Carmel. Thérèse duly wrote two long chapters--Manuscript C--but died before it was finished.

If Manuscript B is the mystical core of the Little Way in Manuscript C we get a vision of the praxis of the Little Way as Thérèse describes her life among the sisters at Carmel:

Charity consists in bearing with the faults of others, in not being surprised by their weakness.

[When] the devil tries to place before the eyes of my soul the faults of such and such a Sister who is less attractive to me, I hasten to search out her virtues, her good intentions.

I want to be charitable in my thoughts toward others at all times.

I wasn't content simply with praying very much for [this "very disagreeable"] Sister who gave me so many struggles, but I took care to render her all the services possible, and when I was tempted to answer her back in a disagreeable manner, I was content with giving her my most friendly smile, and with a changing of the subject of the conversation.

I told myself that charity must not consist in feelings but in works.

In the posts to come I'll share more quotes and reflections from both Manuscript B and Manuscript C (with bits of A thrown in)--the mystical and practical manifestos of the Little Way.

Until then, may we all strive to become the heart of the church.

"I shall be love. Thus I shall be everything."

The Slavery of Death: Part 18, N.T. Wright on Christus Victor

2012-01-05T05:01:00.005-06:00

A lot of people are listing N.T. Wright's recent book Simply Jesus on their "Best Books" lists for 2011. I agree, it's a great book and a lot of the book nicely supplements the work we've been doing in this series, particularly the work with Christus Victor theology. Recall, in the last few posts we've been thinking about the role of "the satanic" in human relations through the work of Walter Wink and William Stringfellow (and earlier in this series the Church Fathers and Eastern Orthodox theology).

What is the book Simply Jesus about? Simply stated (he he!), the book is trying to get into the head of Jesus. What did Jesus think he was doing during his life and ministry? How did he see himself? How did he envision his task? That's the question the book starts off with. The very opening lines:

Jesus of Nazareth poses a question and a challenge two thousand years after his lifetime. The question is fairly simple: who exactly was he? This includes the questions, What did he think he was up to?...

You'll have to read the book to find out all the in's and out's of the answers to that question. What I'd like to do is underline the Christus Victor themes from the book that supplement and reinforce what we've been talking about in this series. Specifically, Wright argues, rightly in my opinion, that Jesus primarily saw himself as doing battle with the devil.

1 John 3.8b
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

This conflict was framed by the Second Exodus expectations that Jesus invoked as he described his life and ministry. As Wright describes it, the Exodus story had seven themes:

Wicked tyrant
Chosen leader
Victory of God
Rescue by sacrifice
New vocation and way of life
Presence of God
Promised/inherited land

By invoking this story, in announcing the inauguration of a Second Exodus, Jesus uses the seven themes (the Exodus narrative/paradigm) to describe his own life, teachings, and eventual death and resurrection.

So the question becomes who is the "Wicked tyrant"? Who is playing the part of Pharaoh in Jesus's dramatic retelling of the Exodus?

For a lot of the Jews Rome and Caesar would have been the obvious contender. But as we know, Jesus didn't say much of anything about Roman occupation and oppression.

So who is Pharaoh?

Well, this is where the Christus Victor themes come in. Here is Wright, after many chapters working through New Exodus material, finally turning to the battle with the Wicked tyrant:

[W]herever we look, it appears that Jesus was aware of a great battle in which he was already involved and that would, before too long, reach some kind of climax.

This was not, it seems, the battle that his contemporaries, including his own followers, expected him to fight. It wasn't even the same sort of battle--though Jesus used the language of battle to describe it. Indeed, as the Sermon on the Mount seems to indicate, fighting itself, in the normal physical sense, was precisely what he was not going to do. There was a different kind of battle in the offing, a battle that had already begun. In this battle, it was by no means as clear as those around Jesus would have liked who was on which side, or indeed whether "sides" was the right way to look at things. The battle in question was a different sort of thing, because it had a different sort of enemy.

Who was that enemy? Wright continues...

The battle Jesus was fighting was against the satan.

After citing passages to support this claim (Mark 1.13, 27, 34; 3.11-12, 22-27; 5.1-20; Luke 10.18; 13.16; 22.31; John 13.2,27), passages I pulled together (along with others) in Part 3 of this series The Gospel as the Christians First Understood It, Wright goes on to discuss how many modern Christians have wanted to deemphasize this understanding of Jesus's mission:

Many modern writers, understandably, have tried to marginalize this theme, but we can't expect to push aside such a central part of the tradition and make serious progress. It is, of course, difficult for most people in the modern Western world to know what to make of it all; that's one of the points on which the strong wind of modern skepticism has done its work well, and the shrill retort from "traditionalists," insisting on seeing everything in terms of "supernatural" issues, hardly helps either. As C.S. Lewis points out in the introduction to his famous Screwtape Letters, the modern world divides into those who are obsessed with demonic powers and those who mock them as outdated rubbish. Neither approach, Lewis insists, does justice to reality. I'm with Lewis on this. Despite the caricatures, the obsession, and the sheer muddle that people often get themselves into on this subject, there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do.

Wright then goes on, as I have done in this series, to bring the work of Walter Wink into the conversation in the effort to help us moderns think about "the demonic":

You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this [a dark force taking over people, movements and countries], but many still choose to resist the conclusion--despite the increasing use in public life of the language of "force" (economic "forces," political "forces," peer "pressure," and so on). In recent scholarship, Walter Wink in particular has offered a sharp and compelling analysis of "the powers" and the way they function in today's world as much as in yesterday's.

Readers following this series will recall that we recently reviewed Wink's analysis in Part 16 To Destroy the Devil's Work. Wright then goes on to discuss how this understanding of the demonic can help us better describe, from a Christian perspective, what is going on in our lives:

Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of "good" and "bad" in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast "people like us" as basically good and "people like them" as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an "axis of evil" and then go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and "the other lot" into demons; we "demonize" our opponents. This is a convenient tool for avoiding to have to think, but it is disastrous for both our thinking and our behavior.

But when you take seriously the existence and malevolence of non-human forces that are capable of using "us" as well as "them" in the service of evil, the focus shifts. As the hazy and shadowy realities come into view, what we thought was clear and straightforward becomes blurred. Life becomes more complex, but arguably more realistic. The traditional lines of friend and foe are not so easy to draw. You can no longer assume that "that lot" are simply agents of the devil and "this lot"--us and our friends--are automatically on God's side. If there is an enemy at work, it is a subtle, cunning enemy, much too clever to allow itself to be identified simply with one person, one group, or one nation. Only twice in the gospel story does Jesus address "the satan" directly by that title: once when rebuking him in the temptation narrative (Matt. 4:10), and again when he is rebuking his closest associate (Mark 8:33) for resisting God's strange plan. The line between good and evil is clear at the level of God, on the one hand, and the satan on the other. It is much, much less clear as it passes through human beings, individually and collectively.

Wright then brings us back to how Jesus understood his mission and vocation. What did Jesus think he was doing?

Somehow it appears that Jesus's battle with the satan [begun with his temptation in the desert], which was the battle for God's kingdom to be established on earth as it is in heaven, reached its climax in his death. This is a strange, dark, and powerful theme to which we shall return. For the moment the point is clear: Jesus is indeed fighting what he takes to be the battle against the real enemies of the people of God, but it is not the battle his followers or the wider group of onlookers was expecting him to fight. Jesus has redefined the royal task around his own vision of where the real problem lies. And he has thereby redefined his own vocation, which he takes to be the true vocation of Israel's king: to fight and win the key battle, the battle that will set his people free and establish God's sovereign and saving rule, through his own suffering and death.

Meditations on the Little Way: Part 1, Thérèse of Lisieux and the Democratization of Holiness

2012-01-04T05:02:00.001-06:00

How many of you are familiar with St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the spirituality of her "Little Way"? I've only recently discovered her and want to write a few posts to share and capture what I've been learning.

I stumbled onto Thérèse as I've continued thinking about issues I raise in Unclean regarding Christian hospitality. Specifically, I have been thinking a great deal about what it might mean to welcome others in day to day interactions. I've been kicking around descriptions about what it is I'm trying to describe. Sometimes I like the labels "micro-hospitality" or "little hospitality." This practicing of "little hospitality" requires great attention to the present moment (e.g., Am I listening well? Smiling? What is my body language saying? Am I agitated inside?). So sometimes I think of it as "mindfulness hospitality" or "the mindfulness of welcome." Then at other times I'm convinced that the word kindness captures everything I want to say.

Obviously, I'm not the first to have pondered such things. And my investigations into this subject eventually led me to the Little Way of Thérèse. Not being Catholic I'd never heard of Thérèse, but I've been really excited to discover her and would like to share with you what I've found.

Let's begin with some biography and the influence of the Little Way.

Thérèse Martin was born on January 2, 1873 in Alençon, France. Her parents were two very devout Catholics, Louis and Zelie Martin. The family had a very high view of monastic life as both parents tried in their early lives to join a monastic community. Eventually two of Thérèse's older sisters--Pauline and Marie--entered the cloistered Carmelite monastery in Lisieux, Normandy. (The family had moved to Lisieux after the death of Zelie when Thérèse was four years old.)

Thérèse herself was spiritually precocious and wanted to follow her sisters into the Carmelite community. But she chaffed at having to wait until she was sixteen years of age. She eventually petitioned Pope Leo XIII for a special dispensation to enter the monastery early. This was granted and on April 9, 1888, at the age of fifteen, Thérèse joined her sisters at Carmel.

From all external perspectives Thérèse's years at Carmel were quiet and uneventful. She dutifully participated in the life of the community, but without outward distinction. She loved to write, often composing plays to be put on by the sisters.

In the early morning of Good Friday in 1896 Thérèse awoke finding her mouth filled with blood. After a painful and prolonged struggle with tuberculosis for well over a year Thérèse died, after two days of great pain, on September 30, 1897. She was 24.

In 1925, a mere twenty-eight years after her death, Pope Pius XI presided over Thérèse's sainthood. Since then Thérèse has become one of the most popular saints. Pius X called Thérèse "the greatest saint of modern times."

In 1997 Pope John Paul II named Thérèse a doctor of the church putting her in rarefied air, a saint among the saints, in the company of people like Augustine and Aquinas. Only three women are doctors of the church--Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena and Thérèse of Lisieux.

In the ceremony for Thérèse John Paul II described the doctor of the church in this way:

When the magisterium proclaims someone a doctor of the Church it intends to point out to all the faithful, particularly to those who perform in the Church the fundamental service of preaching or who undertake the delicate task of theological teaching and research, that the doctrine professed and proclaimed by a certain person can be a reference point, not only because it confirms to the revealed truth but also because it sheds new light on the mysteries of the faith, a deeper understanding of Christ's mystery.

John Paul II went on to describe Thérèse as "one of the great masters of the spiritual life in our time."

I hope, at this point, your curiosity is piqued. Specifically, I'd like to draw your attention, if you missed it, to the contrast between the quietness of Thérèse's life and the accolades that so quickly followed her death--worldwide devotion, sainthood, and becoming a doctor of the church. No miracles were associated with Thérèse during her life. She never left Carmel. She started no new monastic orders. She did nothing, externally, that drew attention. She was just one nun among other nuns in a cloistered community. And even among her fellow sisters Thérèse's life was unremarkable and lacking in distinction. In fact, when Thérèse died one of her fellow sisters worried that no one would have anything to say at Thérèse's funeral. Never was a saint more unnoticed. More, let's remember that Thérèse died when she was 24. What could such a young person have to say to make her a doctor of the church?

The impact of Thérèse rests upon the influence of her spiritual memoir published after her death--Histoire d'une Ame in French, Story of a Soul in English.

Story of a Soul was published the year after Thérèse's death in 1898. And much to the surprise of her fellow Carmelite sisters, it went on gain widespread notoriety and influence. During her life few around Thérèse sensed that a spiritual hurricane was raging inside of her. That the quiet and humble exterior was hiding "one of the great masters of the spiritual life in our time." Who knew that spiritual greatness could be so quiet, kind and bland?

This is, I think, one of the great attractions of the spirituality and story of Thérèse. The life of Thérèse suggests that sainthood and spiritual genius might be standing right in front of us. Thérèse teaches us that we've become confused about what sainthood looks like. We are picturing something grand and heroic and headline grabbing. But Thérèse teaches us that sainthood can be quiet and nondescript. One of the greatest of saints--even a doctor of the Church on par with Augustine and Aquinas!--can be the person checking you out at WalMart, or the old lady sitting by you at church, or the mom with two toddlers, or the college student, or the janitor taking out the trash in your office. Thomas Merton, who was greatly influenced by Thérèse as were people like Dorothy Day who wrote a biography of Thérèse, noted that one of the things Thérèse accomplished was the "democratization" of holiness. Anyone could be a saint. As John Paul II said of Thérèse, "God has offered the world a precise message [that of Thérèse's] 'Little Way', which everyone can take because everyone is called to holiness."

Ponder that. What does sainthood look like? Imagine yourself living with this quiet, undistinctive twenty-year old girl at Carmel, little suspecting that she would become one of the most popular saints in the world today and a doctor of the church. Imagine struggling with what you'd say at her funeral as there didn't seem much to say.

What does sainthood look like?

In the next post I'll give an overview of the history and content of Story of a Soul. From there we'll get into a description of the Little Way.

The Medal of St. Benedict

2012-01-03T05:20:00.002-06:00

Ya'll know I've been thinking a lot about Christus Victor theology. As Gustaf Aulen describes it:

[Christus Victor's] central theme is the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ--Christus Victor--fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which mankind is in bondage and suffering...The work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil.

Because I've been thinking about this a lot--Christ's defeat of the devil--I've been attuned to anything I come across or read that has Christus Victor themes. A recent find in this regard: the Medal of St. Benedict.

We were home last week visiting my family for Christmas. During our time there I was wanting to purchase The Rule of St. Benedict, one of the founding and guiding documents of monasticism. I dropped by the local Barnes & Noble to see if they had a copy. They didn't. But outside of town there is a Benedictine monastery that I knew had a bookstore. So I called out there, figuring that if anyone had a copy of The Rule of St. Benedict it would be, well, the Benedictines. (Incidentally, this monastery--The Benedictine Sisters of Erie--is the home of author Joan Chittister.)

So Jana and I drove to the monastery and shopped in the bookstore where I picked up a copy of The Rule and a few other books. While we were checking out the sister handed us a few St. Benedict Medals. She said, "Here, you can have some of these. They are Medals of St. Benedict." I took them and thanked her. Then she said, "They give protection from evil."

That caught my attention. Who doesn't want to be protected from evil? But more to the point, "protection from evil" rings with Christus Victor themes. So when I got back home I did a little reading about why the Medal of St. Benedict is associated with this sort of protection.

The medal, as you can see here, has two sides. On the front of the medal is an image of Benedict himself. In his left hand he is holding a copy of The Rule and in his right hand he is holding a cross aloft. Around the edge of the medal are the words Ejus in obitu nostro presentia muniamur. Translated this means, "May we be protected by his presence in the hour of death."

Due to the peace of his own death Benedict is considered to be a patron saint of the dying and the medal is often used in ministering to the sick and dying.

The Christus Victor themes are found on the backside of the medal. The back of the medal is dominated by a cross. On the vertical bar of the cross are the letters C, S, S, M, and L. On the horizontal bar of the cross are the letters N, D, S. M, D. Taken together these letters stand for the the Latin words Crux Sacra Sit Mihi Lux--Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux. Translated this means, "May the Sacred Cross be my light--Let not the dragon be my guide."

And there is more. Around the border of the medal are the letters V, R, S, N, S, M, V--S, M, Q, L, I, V, B. These letters stand for the Latin words Vade Retro Satana! Nunquam Suade Mihi Vana! Sunt Mala Quae Libas. Ipse Venena Bibas! Translated this means, "Begone Satan! Never tempt me with your vanities! Evil is the cup you offer. Drink the poison yourself!"

These are the inscriptions on the medal that relate to its association with protection against Satan, evil, and temptation.

(I haven't discussed all the symbolism on the medal but I can't resist one other comment about the medal. On the front side, to Benedict's lower right, is a broken cup of poison. On his lower left is a raven carrying away a poisoned loaf of bread. Apparently, some enemies of Benedict had tried to poison him on a few occasions and he was miraculously rescued each time. Consequently, Benedict is also the saint you'd pray to if you've been poisoned. So file that tidbit away.)

Because of the explicit command to Satan--"Begone Satan!"--the Medal of St. Benedict has often been used for exorcisms. In fact, the medal is often incorporated into the crucifix for this purpose creating a St. Benedict's Cross (though the more workaday use of the cross is like that of the medal--a general talisman/prayer against evil). The combination of the medal with the crucifix makes the St. Benedict's Cross a powerful weapon in the hands of an exorcist.

Obviously, I was thrilled to discover all this theology from the Catholic tradition. The next day, after reading about all this, I went to a store and purchased a St. Benedict's Cross. It's the must have gift for anyone thinking a lot about Christus Victor theology.

The cross has also proven useful in my marriage. After explaining the cross to her I keep using it to exorcise Jana. She'll be sitting quietly on the couch knitting or reading and I'll come around the corner holding the cross aloft saying, "Begone foul spirit!"

She is not amused.

And really, given my understanding of the Principalities and Powers exorcising my wife doesn't make sense. (Though it is great fun.) I mainly purchased the cross so I can have it with me when I go shopping, to work, to church and watch politics play out in this country and around the world.

"Begone Satan!" indeed.

It's Still Christmas

2012-01-02T04:14:00.006-06:00

I didn't grow up in a liturgical tradition. But through my experiences with The Book of Common Prayer I am slowly learning the ropes.

But as a neophyte I still make a lot of mistakes. For example, I tend to mix up Advent songs with Christmas songs. I sing the Christmas songs during Advent. Which drives liturgical purists crazy.

But by far the hardest thing for me to get used to, liturgically speaking, is the fact that it's still Christmas. Christmastide lasts from the Feast of the Nativity (December 25) to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). These are the proverbial "Twelve Days of Christmas."

Growing up we just had "Christmas Day." Thus, Christmas was over on December 26th. And I'm finding this to be a hard habit to break. I keep thinking Christmas is over. So I have to remind myself, almost daily, "It's still Christmas. It's still Christmas."

What makes this hard, as I remain in my non-liturgical tradition, is that everyone around me has moved on. Friends keep apologizing for still having their Christmas trees up. And I keep saying, "No worries. It's still Christmas! The tree should stay up until Epiphany." I think I'm being helpful in pointing this out. But mainly I just get strange looks.

That said, I think the biggest culprit in this truncating of Christmas is New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Smack in the middle of Christmastide is this other "holiday." Though it isn't, in fact, a holy day at all.

Still, as the "next" celebration New Year's Eve causes us to truncate Christmas. The Christmas tree might stay up on December 26th, but it many Christian homes the tree doesn't make it past January 1st.

This is sad and problematic for two reasons.

The first reason is this. We all lament the commercialization of Christmas. But what few Christians realize is how we unwittingly enable this trend by restricting Christmas to a single day. If you restrict the celebration of Christmas to a single day you strengthen the association between Christmas and opening gifts. The point of Christmas becomes the shopping for and opening of presents. In fact, for many I'd say that Christmas is officially over once the presents have been opened. Christmas isn't really even a whole day. It's a few hours lasting from the time the kids get up until the presents are all opened. In many Christian households Christmas lasts about an hour, roughly from 6:00 am to 7:00 am. Christmas is over before lunch on December 25th. No wonder the opening of presents has come to dominate the celebration of the Incarnation.

The celebration of Christmastide, the full Twelve Days of Christmas, can help push against all this. Christmas isn't an hour. It isn't a morning. It isn't a day. It's a twelve day season.

So let's resist the cultural push to be productive and "get Christmas put up" as soon as possible. Leave the tree and the Nativity set out. Let's slow down and prayerfully linger. Yes, well into the New Year. Let the kids learn that Christmas cannot be reduced to the one hour when they opened their presents. Christmas isn't over. We're still in the middle of it.

A second problem with Christmas ending early due to New Year's Day is that we are allowing secular time to trump liturgical time. Which defeats the whole point of the liturgical calender. Our lives are governed by the clocks of the world--the punchclock, the appointment book, the federal "holidays." The whole point of the liturgical calender is to create a "sanctuary in time," similar to the Jewish observance of the Sabbath. Here is Abraham Heschel describing how Jews view the Sabbath. Read it and think of the liturgical calender, Christmastide in particular:

The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own...

Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of the year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals...

The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things in space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

Again, I think Heschel's observations apply to the Christian liturgical calender. We learn to free ourselves from the slavery of the "To Do list" and the punchclock of modern economies to move within a "holy time," a cathedral in time set apart for worship and renewal.

But we can't celebrate these cathedrals of time if we rush through celebrations like Christmas. Especially so if we are allowing secular time--the change of a calender year--to trump liturgical time. To allow New Year's Eve to truncate Christmas is a symptom of the very disease the liturgical calender is trying to cure.

So let's keep the celebration going.

It's still Christmas.

2011 Year in Review

2011-12-29T04:48:00.002-06:00

Dear Friends,
As the year comes to a close it's my tradition to do an end of the year wrap up for the blog. It helps new readers catch up and regular readers find posts they might have missed...and to reminisce a bit. For my part, I like to gather my favorite posts in one location.

Welcome to all of you who've joined us this last year. You can find past reviews here: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.

Experimental Theology 2011 Year in Review

1. Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality and Mortality
This year saw the publication of my first book. Thanks to all of you who have read the book and to those of you who have posted reviews on your blog or at Amazon. Though the book isn't perfect, I'm proud of it. I don't think there is anything quite like it in the theological world. I've had people like Walter Brueggemann and Stanley Hauerwas say they learned a lot from the book and many people have told me that the book was "life changing." This summer I'll be speaking on the book at Streaming and the Theology and Peace Conference.

2. Universal Reconciliation
This was the year of Rob Bell's Love Wins so I wrote some more about universal reconciliation this year. The most trafficked post I wrote about universalism this year was Universalism and the Open Wound of Life, where I again point out that universalism, for me, has more to do with theodicy (the problem of suffering) than soteriology (the problem of salvation).

This year I also wrote a series of posts working through various objections to universalism. I pulled those posts together into Universal Reconciliation: Some Questions and Answers. Finally, this year over at Two Friars and a Fool I had a exchange with Daniel Kirk from Fuller Theological on the topic of universal reconciliation as the "best ending to the Christian story."

3. Stories from the Prison Bible Study
Throughout the year I've shared stories from the Monday evening bible study I help with at a local prison. The most popular stories where On Fear and Following: Reading the Beatitudes in Prison and John 13: A Story from the Prison Study. The former essay will appear in 2012 as a chapter in a book edited by my friend Richard Goode concerning the work and influence of Will Campbell. Look for And the Criminals With Him from Wipf & Stock this spring. The latter essay, on John 13, may be one of the most powerful things I've shared on this blog. Many readers have let me know that they've used that story in worship services, sermons, or church publications.

4. The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
Statistics-wise, the most popular post I wrote this year was The Gospel According to Lady Gaga. The post begins with some humorous autobiography but slowly morphs into a prophetic cry.

5. The Bible
I write a lot about the bible on this blog, sharing insights about biblical texts and reflecting on biblical hermeneutics. Interesting posts about biblical texts from the past year included The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs, Cheap Praise and Costly Praise, "My Heart is Overwhelmed": Universalism and the Prophetic Imagination, Easter Shouldn't Be Good News, The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation, and "Jesus Stopped."

Posts about hermeneutical issues that got a lot of attention were "Biblical" as a Sociological Stress Test and On Christian Communion: Why is Killing Okay But Not Sexuality?

6. Jesus Would be a Hufflepuff
Go figure, but the second most popular post I wrote this year, in response to the last Harry Potter movie coming out, was Jesus Would be a Hufflepuff. The post is silly but it does highlight a lot of what I do here: The quirky theological connection. (See also: On the Moral Example of Jack Sparrow.)

7. Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: On Disenchantment and the Demonic
Speaking of quirky theological connections, my favorite post of the year was this analysis of the demonic in Scooby-Doo. I continue to think a lot about the Powers and the demonic. Another popular post on this topic from this year was Tales of the Demonic.

8. Autobiography
From time to time I like to write autobiographical posts. I think it helps readers get to know me better. Four of the better ones from last year were Adventures in Looking Like Jesus (Or a Crazy Person), Get On a Bike...And Go Slow, What I Learned on Palm Sunday With the Greek Orthodox and Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation.

This year readers also got to put a face with a name by watching my conversation with Rachel Held Evans on blogging.

9. Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
Last year I was startled to find myself quoted in Bradley Wright's book Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...And Other Lies You've Been Told. In the book I'm quoted as saying:

"Christianity" has essentially become a mechanism for allowing millions of people to replace being a decent human being with something else, an endorsed "spiritual" substitute.

Was I wrong in saying that? Read the post to find out.

10. Provocations
From time to time I write posts geared to provoke (the most famous example being my The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity which blew up again in the final weeks of this year). Some provocations from this year: Marriage as a Spiritual Failure, Your God is Too Big, The Satanic Church, and The Poetry of a Murderer.

11. Ghostbusting
This year my ghostbusting adventures continued. The story of my students and I "busting" the Anson Light made it into local, regional and national news outlets. (I even did a local radio show about our adventures.)

12 Poems
I continue to post poems from time to time. Here were my favorites from this past year: Seeing Like My Dog, Dharma, Amnesia, Morning Office, Incarnation, and The Territory of Our Bleeding.

13. The Slavery of Death
Finally, I like to do original work on this blog. I like to actually do theology on this blog as well as write about theology. Actually, I don't do proper theology but work at my particular theology/psychology mash up.

This year the best of this sort of work was found in my The Slavery of Death series (which is still ongoing though nearing its end). The series is, at root, a psychological meditation on Christus Victor, about what it might mean to be freed from the slavery to the fear of death (Heb. 2.14-15). When the series is over I'll gather it into a Table of Contents, but if you'd like to catch up these posts, if read in order, will allow you to trace the main moves of the argument:

Christus Victor: "To break the power of him who holds the power of death"
"He who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil." (Part 1)
Christus Victor (Part 2)
On Sarx and Soma (Part 4)
The Dynamics of Sin and Death (Part 5)
Ancestral Sin (Part 6)
"In this world we are like Jesus" (Part 7)

Death & Resurrection: "To free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death"
The Pornography of Death (Part 11)
The American Culture of Death Avoidance (Part 12)
The Children of God and the Children of the Devil (Part 13)
Eccentric Identity (Part 14)
To Live as Death Where Not (Part 15)

...

Thanks to all of you who came here to read in 2011 and to those of you who regularly share your own thoughts and insights with all of us. I've been blessed by your online friendship and conversation.

Finally, one thing to look forward to in the coming weeks is the publication of my second book The Authenticity of Faith: The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience. (A preview can be found here on page 19 of the online ACU Press catalog). In the Acknowledgements of the book I've written the following:

I would also like to thank the readers of my blog Experimental Theology where early drafts of this material first appeared. I’m blessed to have one of the most intelligent and thoughtful readerships on the Internet. A warm thank-you to my readers for your many helpful comments, feedback, and encouragement. You were the first to let me know that this material deserved a wide audience.

See you in 2012!

Grace and peace,
Richard

"We Are Jesters."

2011-12-28T04:29:00.000-06:00

Over the holidays I've been reading Fr. James Martin's book Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life. I've really enjoyed two other of Martin's books, My Life With the Saints and The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything.

Here is Father Martin on The Colbert Report talking about Between Heaven and Mirth and the humor of Jesus:

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

James Martin

www.colbertnation.com

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Political Humor & Satire Blog

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Between Heaven and Mirth is an apology for joy, humor and laughter being a central part of the spiritual life. I heartily agree. Ever since college I'd been attracted to the merry band of holy fools that followed St. Francis, the merriest and most foolish of them all. Fr. Martin's book is a light and breezy read, but it is full of great quotes and antidotes, many from the lives of the saints. Here was one of my favorites:

There is a Talmudic story of a rabbi meeting with Elijah the prophet, who would answer questions for him about the "world to come." The rabbi was in the marketplace when he came upon Elijah. He asked the prophet whether there were any in the marketplace who merited a place in the world to come. Perhaps the rabbi was hoping that Elijah would assure him that his piety and wisdom would earn him that reward.

Instead, Elijah pointed to two men and said, "Yes, those two." The rabbi approached the two men and asked them who they were and what they did. They replied, "We are jesters. We make sad people laugh. And when we see two people arguing, we make peace between them."

Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven Has Come Near

2011-12-27T04:30:00.000-06:00

What is the proper response to the gospel?

The answer to that question will, of course, depend on how you define the gospel. Last week I wrote a bit about how Scot McKnight contends that the Good News isn't the "Steps to Salvation." Rather, the gospel is the declaration that Jesus is Lord, that the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated in Jesus of Nazareth. This is why Jesus himself preached the gospel, well before his crucifixion. For example, after his baptism in the book of Mark Jesus is observed preaching the gospel:

Mark 1.14-15
After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

What is the gospel according to Jesus? It is the declaration that "the kingdom of God has come near." Similarly, when Jesus sends out his disciples in Luke 10 they proclaim the same message:

Luke 10.8-11
“When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near.’

As I reflected on this during Advent I began to wonder if we need to rethink the "proper response" to the gospel. Specifically, the soterian gospel has tended to emphasize a response of faith. Cognitive assent. But when we come to see the gospel as the declaration that the "kingdom of God has come near" the issue is less about belief than repentance. Jesus declares in Mark "Repent and believe the good news." The primacy of repentance is even more clear in the gospel of Matthew:

Matthew 4.17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The role of repentance is also highlighted at the very beginning of Mark (and echoed in Matthew and Luke) when we take in the message of John the Baptist:

Mark 1.1-5
The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way”—
“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”

And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.

The message of the Baptist is what caught my attention during Advent. Prior to Jesus's entrance John is "preparing the way for the Lord" by "preaching a baptism of repentance." To be sure, faith is a prerequisite for all this. Obviously, you'd have to believe John's message before undergoing his baptism of repentance. But this is banal. Such a faith doesn't, in itself, constitute a full and proper response to the gospel. Rather, the response we see is a repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This is how the heart is properly prepared for responding to the kingdom coming.

This makes sense if we consider the gospel to be, as Scot McKnight has argued, the declaration that Jesus is King. Kings don't demand belief or faith. You don't believe in kings. No, you obey kings. You give a king allegiance. So when the kingdom comes the proper response is behavioral, a reconfiguration of loyalties. A new apocalyptic reality has been revealed and we are called upon to readjust our lives to this new reality. This is why the ministry of John the Baptist was necessary.

Why has the role of repentance been deemphasized in many sectors of Christianity? One answer, I think, has to do with what Scot McKnight has pointed out: We've reduced the gospel to salvation. Thus, the crux of Christian life becomes cognitive assent (i.e., faith) rather than readjusting our lives in the face of the gospel--that Jesus is Lord and the rule/kingdom of God has broken upon us. As I described above, it's so much easier to believe that Jesus is King than to obey him as King. The point being, for great swaths of Christianity the message and ministry of John the Baptist has no place. We don't tell people that, to accept the gospel, they need to prepare themselves. All you need to do is believe in Jesus and say the Sinner's Prayer. Compare that with John's baptism of repentance and his message:

Luke 3.10-14
“What should we do then?” the crowd asked.

John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.

Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”

He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”

When people ask "What must I do to be saved?" Christians don't, as a rule, say things like "If you have two shirts give one to the poor." We don't see that action--giving away excess possessions--as an example of responding to the gospel. But it is. It's readjusting your life to the new rule of God.

A second and related reason for the eclipse of repentance is that repentance has become a morbid concept. Christians are ashamed of repentance because it doesn't sell well with the public. And this is understandable. If you've grown up with toxic, guilt-driven fundamentalism the word repentance conjures up notions of shame, self-loathing, and a wrathful, judgmental God. When we hear "Repent!" many of us hear "You're going to hell ya damned sinner!"

But this is where I think the ideas of preparation and allegiance come in handy. Repentance is preparing for the reign of God. It's not about getting down on yourself. It's about clearing out the rubbish and clutter of our lives. Sort of like spring cleaning. (Literally, at times, a spring cleaning. To the point of going through your stuff and giving it away.) More, repentance is about loyalty and allegiance. It's about hearing the declaration of the gospel and switching sides. It has less to do with guilt than about joining up with a new team.

Incarnation

2011-12-25T00:01:00.003-06:00

Merry Christmas! A poem for the start of Christmastide:

Incarnation

This is the emptying.
The release of heaven.
The descent
into the warmth
of a young girl's womb.
Vitally yoked
to her heartbeat and life.
Sharing the scandal
and embarrassment of flesh.
A covenant of love
sealed in ligament and bone.
Glory
to God in the Highest.
Glory
here in straw and blood.

The Iconoclast Podcast

2011-12-23T04:47:00.001-06:00

I wanted to point you all to my recent conversation with Mark Van Steenwyk and Sarah Lynne Taylor for the Iconoclast podcast hosted over at Jesus Radicals. Most of our conversation focused on the topic of Christian hospitality and the issues I raise in Unclean.

I was very honored to be invited to be a part of the podcast because when I think about Christian communities living out the vision I paint in Unclean I think of Mark's work and the Missio Dei community.

The Slavery of Death: Part 17, Death and the Powers

2011-12-22T05:29:00.003-06:00

In the last post of this series we started a discussion about how we might become "possessed" by the principalities and powers. The question going forward is how this "satanic" or "demonic" possession is associated with death. Again, from the very beginning this series has been contemplating a sort of reversal regarding the relationship between sin and death. Protestants tend to think that sin is the cause of death. The Eastern Orthodox, by contrast, tend to think of death being the cause of sin (once the Ancestral/Original Sin got the process started). Biblically, the causation seems to go both ways:

Sin causing Death:
"The wages of sin is death." (Rom. 6.23)

Death causing Sin:
"The sting of death is sin." (1 Cor. 15.56)

In this series we've been working with the Orthodox formulation--"the sting of death is sin." But again, the causality here is mutual and reinforcing. Earlier in this series I made the following diagram to illustrate this cycle:

The Ancestral Sin begins the process, separating us from the Divine Source of Life. This introduces death into human experience. Separated from Life humans are mortal animals--in the words of Paul we are sarx ("flesh"). Consequently, when death is brought to bear upon sarx we act out in sinful ways. As mortal animals we default to a Darwinian survival ethic defending against loss, deprivation and death. These actions, however, continue to keep us separated from God and, thus, the cycle repeats itself.

Biblically, the psychology of this cycle is wonderfully captured by our orienting text:

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

That is, the fear of death, as illustrated above, keeps us stuck in the cycle of sin and death.

In light of all this, the issue we began to ponder in the last post is how the satanic might be involved with the fear of death. As it says in Hebrews, the devil "holds the power of death" and, through that power, holds humanity captive.

So how are we to think about the relationship between the satanic and death? An appeal to the devil seems superfluous. Isn't death, all by itself, scary enough? Can't we just talk about death and its impact upon human psychology and leave the devil out of it?

If we did I think we'd be missing something important. And here's why. Few of us live close to death. We have enough to meet our basic needs, and much, much more. So death, real survival pressures, isn't something we regularly face. (Though many people in the world do face these direct pressures. We're all aware of the fact that 15,000-30,000 children will die of starvation today.)

So, given that our wealth has insulated us from the direct assault of death how can it be said that we live enslaved to the fear of death?

It is here where I think an analysis of the satanic principalities and powers will prove helpful. We don't notice our enslavement because, as I've argued, our fear of death is largely neurotic and unconscious. In biblical language, the slavery to death has more to do with idolatry than with a direct survival threat.

In the last post we began to get our heads around what this might look like. Specifically, following the work of Walter Wink we can think of the principalities and powers as the spirituality embodied in various human arrangements, generally power arrangements. In light of that what we now need to do is to connect that spirituality with death.

Going forward I am going to make the following argument: Death is the spirituality of the principalities and powers. Thus, to be "possessed" by the principalities and powers--to be engaged in idolatry, wittingly or unwittingly--is to be possessed by death.

How shall we connect the powers to death? Well, if Walter Wink helped us think about the spirituality of the powers, William Stringfellow will help us see how that spirituality is characterized by the idolatry of death.

Regular readers know I love Stringfellow. I've quoted him extensively over the last few years, and am about to do so again. So if you are familiar with Stringfellow's work you might want to stop here. But before you surf away let me make this point. The reason I love Stringfellow is that he has helped me make a connection between the biblical language of the principalities and powers with the psychological analysis of Ernest Becker in his books The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil. If you've read both Stringfellow and Becker you'll be nodding right now with a smile on your face. You likely can see the connections I will make in the posts to come.

But if you are new to either Becker or Stringfellow then keep reading. For the rest of this post I'll sketch how Stringfellow connects the powers to death. In the posts to follow I'll build a bridge between Stringfellow--and through him the entire biblical witness and Christus Victor theology--and the psychological work of Ernest Becker.

A distinctive feature of Stringfellow's take on the powers is how wide he casts the net. The powers don't just include human power relations (e.g., governments, organizations) but any bit of culture that has power and influence over people. One of Stringfellow's descriptions of the Powers:

According to the Bible, the principalities are legion in species, number, variety and name. They are designated by such multifarious titles as powers, virtues, thrones, authorities, dominions, demons, princes, strongholds, lords, angels, gods, elements, spirits…

And if some of these seem quaint, transposed into contemporary language they lose quaintness and the principalities become recognizable and all too familiar: they include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family—beyond any prospect of full enumeration. The principalities and powers are legion.

The important part of this description for our purposes is that life is saturated with the powers. Anything that influences us, anything that dominates our thoughts, feelings or behavior is implicated in the powers:

People are veritably besieged, on all sides, at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers each seeking to dominate, usurp, or take a person’s time, attention, abilities, effort; each grasping at life itself; each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty. In such a tumult it becomes very difficult for a human being even to identify the idols that would possess him or her…

Most of us spend our lives serving one or more of these powers. We serve an institution, a nation, a religious denomination, a theological system, a political party, an employer, an ideology. In biblical language this is called idolatry. Effectively it is being "demon possessed." Stringfellow on the dynamics of this possession:

[The Power] is in conflict with the person until the person surrenders life in one fashion or another to the principality. The principality requires not only recognition and adulation as an idol from movie fans or voters or the public, but also demands that the person of the same name give up his or her life as a persons to the service and homage of the image. And when that surrender is made, the person in fact dies, though not yet physically. For at that point one is literally possessed by one's own image.

Importantly for our purposes, Stringfellow goes on to connect the powers with death. Being dominated or "possessed" by the powers is to be involved in the idolatry of death. Stringfellow on this association:

…history discloses that the actual meaning of such human idolatry of nations, institutions, or other principalities is death. Death is the only moral significance that a principality proffers human beings. That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a principality—for a great corporation, profit, for example; or for a nation, hegemony; or for an ideology, conformity—that is sooner or later suspended by the greater moral power of death. Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers—the idol of all idols—is death.

The point for Stringfellow is that the powers, like people, are motivated to survive. Thus, we serve the powers to help them fend off death. But this service is ultimately futile. The power cannot survive apart from God. Consequently, every bit of energy we give to the powers is, in the end, given to death. Death here is revealed to be, as it works through the powers, the great moral force in the world:

Death, after all, is no abstract idea, nor merely a destination in time, nor just an occasional happening, nor only a reality for human beings, but, both biblically and empirically, death names a moral power claiming sovereignty over all people and all things in history. Apart from God, death is a living power greater--because death survives them all--than any other moral power in this world of whatever sort: human beings, nations, corporations, cultures, wealth, knowledge, fame or memory, language, the arts, race, religion.

Let's summarize all this and start building bridges with the work of Ernest Becker. A key idea in Becker's thinking is how we are all motivated by self-esteem--the desire to live a life worthy of respect and approbation. But to get this self-esteem we have to spend our lives in service to some power. Stated more strongly, self-esteem is granted by the powers. We are successful because we've served a power well. We help the company make money. We help the church grow. We help our candidate win the election. We spend our lives trying to collect the various "blue ribbons" handed out by the powers. These blue ribbons form the substance of our self-esteem and self-definition.

But at the end of the day, according to Stringfellow, all that work, all those successes and blue ribbons, are in the service of death. In a hundred years or five hundred years the company or institution we are serving isn't going to exist. So what does that say about all those blue ribbons we got? And even if our nation or religious denomination does survive for a millennium who is going to remember our blue ribbons? No one. Just read the book of Ecclesiastes. All those blue ribbons are just vanity of vanities.

What this means is that death saturates our identity. This is the Great Lie from the Father of Lies. All those blue ribbons--all those things that prop up our self-esteem--are revealed to be driven by the idolarty of death. The power wanted to survive. So we helped. And we got a blue ribbon for our efforts. People applauded us and we felt "successful." But what were we doing the entire time? Playing the survival game. Death was was calling the shots and running the show.

That conclusion might be hard to believe. The work of Ernest Becker will help us see this more clearly. For now we just want to begin to explore the association between the powers and death. In addition, we see once again how resurrection involves freedom from the fear of death. Let's let Stringfellow have the last word on how the resurrection life is a life freed from demonic idolatry and the "slavery to the fear of death":

[Christ's] power over death is effective not just at the terminal point of a person's life but throughout one's life, during this life in this world, right now. This power is effective in the times and places in the daily lives of human beings when they are so gravely and relentlessly assailed by the claims of principalities for an idolatry that, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence in the life of the world. His resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death's works, safe and free from death.

A Den of Comparison

2011-12-21T05:00:00.000-06:00

People ask me a lot why I'm not on Facebook or Twitter.

The simple answer is that I can't keep up with it. Between my email Inbox and this blog I'm at my limit. I don't have room in my life to add Facebook and Twitter interactions.

This, I'm told, really inhibits my ability to build a readership for this blog. I'm unable to buzz my blog on Facebook and Twitter. But I really don't care.

And there are moments when I think I reap a lot of other spiritual, psychological and social benefits for not being on Facebook. Last spring I did a series--"The Angel of the iPhone" (see the sidebar)--trying to think about the good and the bad of Web 2.0 connectivity. The series was prompted by the spate of stories and examples of people giving up Facebook for Lent. Why, I thought, was Facebook a target for Lent? Was Facebook a "guilty pleasure"? A form of self-indulgence? A spiritual distraction? Here at the blog I asked you, if you had given up Facebook for Lent or gone on a Facebook fast, what motivated you to do so. Here were some of your answers:

I felt guilty about all the times I disappeared from reality to converse with virtual friends.

...it consumed so much of my time...

It's possible that I have an actual psychological addiction to Facebook...The sort of thinking that leads me to perpetual page refreshing seems eerily akin to the behaviour of rats who want another serotonin shot and keep pumping that pedal...

So much of what I posted on Facebook was worded in order to see how many people would ‘like’ my comments. It’s just another way in which I am programmed to worry about what other people think and addicted to their praise.

I felt that God was asking me to give it up.

...postings would leave me angry. That made it impossible to simply log on for fun. The anger, I soon found, was not good for my soul.

I gave up facebook because I felt that it was distracting me from God's primary callings on my life, and I realized that I was not being a good steward of my time.

My reason [for giving up Facebook] was to not get "sucked in" during work or free time, lost in the news feed of others.

[Facebook] had become part of my habit to a degree I was uncomfortable with. Whenever I was bored I'd just click the icon on my bookmark bar or the app on my phone for a minute of mindless scrolling and reading about things that (for the most part) don't really matter.

It's a tool with the potential to suck out your soul...

I gave up having online debates/discussions/arguments about politics and religion.

I feel like Facebook was allowing me to be "friends" without being actually friendly, a key temptation for an introvert such as myself. Second, I found myself comparing my life to the exciting lives posted by others, and coming up lacking (in my mind)...

I would say that my reasons [for fasting from Facebook] had to do with sensitivity vs. stimulation. Our culture is addicted to stimulation (Kurt Cobaine- "here we are now, entertain me"). However, the more stimulated one gets, on movies, gadgets, music, etc. the less sensitive they become.

For me, this was about my growing insecurity that was in a lot of ways fueled by the time I spent on Facebook.

Facebook is something of a monster, chewing up increasing amounts of time as the number of friends grows larger and larger and the need to post every thought, photo and comment feels greater and greater.

I was recently reminded of the comment above--"I found myself comparing my life to the exciting lives posted by others, and coming up lacking"--reading Daniel Gulati's article Facebook Is Making Us Miserable at the Harvard Business Review blog. Daniel writes about discoveries he made in researching a recent book about how Facebook is affecting the lives of young professionals:

[T]his new world of ubiquitous connections has a dark side. In my last post, I noted that Facebook and social media are major contributors to career anxiety. After seeing some of the comments and reactions to the post, it's clear that Facebook in particular takes it a step further: It's actually making us miserable.

Facebook's explosive rate of growth and recent product releases, such as the prominent Newsticker, Top Stories on the newsfeed, and larger photos have all been focused on one goal: encouraging more sharing. As it turns out, it's precisely this hyper-sharing that is threatening our sense of happiness.

In writing Passion & Purpose, I monitored and observed how Facebook was impacting the lives of hundreds of young businesspeople. As I went about my research, it became clear that behind all the liking, commenting, sharing, and posting, there were strong hints of jealousy, anxiety, and, in one case, depression.

Where is this jealousy, anxiety and depression coming from? Number one among Gulati's list of answers is this:

[Facebook is] creating a den of comparison. Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, "Hey, I just got promoted!" or "Take a look at my new sports car," trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates an online culture of competition and comparison...

Comparing ourselves to others is a key driver of unhappiness. Tom DeLong, author of Flying Without a Net, even describes a "Comparing Trap." He writes, "No matter how successful we are and how many goals we achieve, this trap causes us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success."And as we judge the entirety of our own lives against the top 1% of our friends' lives, we're setting impossible standards for ourselves, making us more miserable than ever.

The Territory of Our Bleeding

2011-12-20T05:20:00.005-06:00

There's a lot of sadness in our faith community. I have a friend who is hurting beyond all words. A poem I wrote last night. A lament.

There is so much sadness
in the world.
And the edges of it
so icy and sharp--
the territory of our bleeding.
And there a numbness
too cold
for weeping.
But deep inside
the concavity of pain
there is a warmth--
the ache of love--
that thaws all loss
to the torrent and dew
of grief.

A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

2011-12-19T05:05:00.005-06:00

It's the last week of Advent.

Last night we had our small group over for our annual Christmas party. After eating we gathered around our Christmas tree, kids on the floor and adults squeezed in on the couches and chairs. Ed and Jenni played their guitars and Marcia played her flute as we sang Christmas carols, the kids shouting out the song numbers from old church songbooks.

As we were singing It Came Upon the Midnight Clear I was struck by the prophetic power of the third verse:

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.

It's a stunning image. The angels appear above the shepherds and declare the birth of the Christ child with this refrain of peace on earth:

Luke 2:13-14
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men."

And yet, as It Came Upon a Midnight Clear recounts, since that angelic declaration of peace there has been "two thousand years of wrong." Why? Because "man, at war with man, hears not the love-song which they bring."

We don't hear the love song.

And so the call continues to go out: "O hush the noise, ye men of strife, and hear the angels sing."

The King Jesus Gospel: No More Epicycles

2011-12-16T09:10:00.009-06:00

My guess is that we can all tell stories of defining theological moments in our lives. Moments were we realized that the answers we were getting from parents, Sunday School teachers, or learned university professors weren't able to meet the challenge of the questions we were asking. Borrowing the theory of scientific revolutions from Thomas Kuhn, our theological paradigms (Step 1) were facing too many anomalies--unexplained data points (Step 2)--leading to a theological crisis (Step 3). A paradigm shift--a theological revolution (Step 4)--was in order.

We've all wrestled with theological anomalies and the crises they create. Sometimes the anomalies can be incorporated by adjusting the theological paradigm. Just like the astronomers who added epicycles to Ptolemy's perfect circles of geo-centric planetary motion. In a similar way, we create theological epicycles to fit new and troublesome data into our current theological systems.

But sometimes the data can't be incorporated. Too many epicycles and the system gets clunky and baroque.

I distinctly remember one of these moments in college.

I was taking a class on the gospel of Luke. On the day in question we were discussing this passage from Luke 5:

Luke 5.17-21
One day Jesus was teaching, and Pharisees and teachers of the law were sitting there. They had come from every village of Galilee and from Judea and Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with Jesus to heal the sick. Some men came carrying a paralyzed man on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.

When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

The professor was talking about the great faith of the friends and commending them to us as an example. But I had zeroed in on another part of the text. I raised my hand.

"Excuse me, professor."

"Yes, Richard?"

"The text says Jesus forgave the man's sins. Here and elsewhere in the gospels it appears that Jesus was able to forgive sins."

"Yes, that's true. Jesus had the authority to forgive sins. Jesus was God Incarnate."

"Yes, I agree. But all that makes me wonder about why Jesus had to die."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if Jesus could forgive sins, if God can just forgive sins because God can do anything, then why did God need a blood sacrifice?"

At this point the professor went on to explain that the answer to my question was that Jesus's blood flowed both backward and forward in time. So when Jesus was forgiving sins in Luke 5 it was under the blood shed on Calvary flowing backward in time. Those sins weren't really forgiven until after Jesus died. The forgiveness in Luke 5 was anticipatory.

I let this answer pass, but something snapped inside of me. "Bullcrap," I said in my head.

I had smelled an epicycle.

Something was getting brushed aside. Something important. Later on, I realized it was the gospel itself.

Let me commend to you the new book by Scot McKnight, The King Jesus Gospel. Many of you read Scot's blog Jesus Creed so you are aware of the book. And many other blogs have posted reviews as well. But if you missed it I wanted to make you aware of this very good book. More, I expect to use many of Scot's ideas in the years to come on this blog. So I'd like to formally get those ideas out on the table.

Scot's book orbits around a simple question: What is the gospel?

Scot suggests that we to try to answer that question before going far into his book. And I'd ask you to do the same thing: In a sentence, what is the gospel?

It's Scot's argument that many of the answers we give to that question--in fact, the answer most given by evangelicals--has conflated the gospel with salvation. More, we've come to emphasize salvation at the expense of the gospel. That seems like a strange claim. Here is Scot introducing the contrast:

Evangelicalism is known for at least two words: gospel and (personal) salvation. Behind the word gospel is the Greek word euangelion and evangel, from which words we get evangelicalism and evangelism. Now to our second word. Behind salvation is the Greek word soteria. I want now to make a stinging accusation. In this book I will be contending firmly that we evangelicals (as a whole) are not really "evangelical" in the sense of the apostolic gospel, but instead we are soterians. Here's why I say we are more soterian than evangelical: we evangelicals (mistakenly) equate the word gospel with the word salvation. Hence, we are really "salvationists." When we evangelicals see the word gospel, our instinct is to think (personal) "salvation."... We ought to be called soterians (the saved ones) instead of evangelicals. My plea is that we go back to the New Testament to discover all over again what the Jesus gospel is and by embracing it we become true evangelicals.

One of the reasons I wanted to review Scot's book is that I'd like, as might many of you, to use the label soterian from time to time to describe how many Christian think.

Again, the crux of Scot's argument is that the Plan of Salvation isn't the gospel. No doubt they are related. And Scot discusses their relationship in the book. But they aren't the same. The "Good News" isn't the Steps of Salvation. In my tradition these Steps were as follows: 1) Hear, 2) Believe, 3) Repent, 4) Confess, and 5) Be Baptized (for the remission of your sins). Your tradition might have a different list of Steps. Still, at Scot points out, these Steps aren't the gospel. They are, rather, compressed descriptions about how we are to respond to the gospel. Yes, there is a close relationship between the news and the response to the news, but the distinction is important as The King Jesus Gospel is keen to point out. Scot on the distinction:

It is customary in America to refer to the "gospel plan of salvation," by which we mean how an individual gets saved, what God has done for us, and how we are to respond if we want to be saved...[Now it] may strike you as uncommonly odd for me to make this claim, but I'm going to say it anyway: this Plan of Salvation is not the gospel...[W]hat I hope to show is that the "gospel" of the New Testament cannot be reduced to the Plan of Salvation.

Okay, so if the Steps of Salvation aren't the gospel what is the gospel? Scot goes back to the earliest apostolic tradition and finds it in 1 Corinthians 15:

First Corinthians 15 is nothing less than a lifting up of the curtains in the earliest days of the church; it tells us what everyone believed and what everyone preached. This passage is the apostolic gospel tradition. Thus...

Before there was a New Testament...
Before the apostles were beginning to write letters...
Before the Gospels were written...
There was the gospel.
In the beginning was the gospel.
That gospel is now found in 1 Corinthians 15.

Here it is, the gospel distilled:

1 Corinthians 15.1-5
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

This is the gospel: The life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus. More specifically, the gospel is how the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus fulfilled God's promises to Israel and, through Israel and Jesus, God's promises to the nations and all of the Created Order.

Another way to say this is that the gospel is the Good News about the identity of Jesus (particularly how Jesus brings the Story of God to its culmination). The gospel, Scot says, is about a person:

There is a Person at the very core of the gospel of Paul, and until that Person is put into the center of centers in Paul's gospel, we will not comprehend his--scratch that--the apostles' gospel accurately. The gospel Story of Jesus Christ is a story about Jesus as Messiah, Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Savior, and Jesus as Son...If I had to sum up the Jesus of the gospel, I would say "King Jesus." Or I would say "Jesus is Lord" or "Jesus is Messiah and Lord."

The gospel is the proclamation of a new new reality that has dawned upon us in Jesus Christ. This is why the gospel is an apocalypse (an "unveiling"). In the life, death, burial and resurrection Jesus is revealed (apocalypse) to be both Lord and Christ. Proclaiming the gospel is to proclaim this news. Jesus is both Lord and Christ.

Of course, once you hear this news, you will want to adjust to this new reality. How to adjust to this new reality is what we call "the steps of salvation."

Stepping back, some might object that Scot is marking a difference that doesn't exist. But the implications of focusing on the gospel rather than upon personal salvation are pretty profound. I refer you to Scot's book for his discussion on this subject (creating what Scot calls a "gospel culture" rather than a "salvation culture").

But the most obvious implication that Scot points out is this: the gospel is bigger than my personal salvation. This really is a Copernican paradigm shift, moving from a me-centric story to a Jesus-centric story. The me-centric story of salvation is just about me "getting saved." Harps in the clouds and all that jazz. But a Jesus-centric story--the proclamation that Jesus is Lord--is a whole lot bigger.

And, truth be told, a whole lot scarier.

Plus, the Jesus-centric, gospel story answers my old undergraduate questions about Luke 5. That story isn't about me and my guilt. That story isn't about a theory of salvation. That story is a gospel story, a story about Jesus.

That story is the proclamation of the Good News. Jesus is Lord.

No more epicycles.

The Slavery of Death: Part 16, To Destroy the Devil's Work

2011-12-15T05:02:00.006-06:00

In the last few posts in this series we've been talking about how a "slavery to the fear of death" (Heb. 2.14-15) creates sin. I now want to turn in this series to how this slavery is associated with the satanic.

Recall, Christus Victor atonement isn't preoccupied with human guilt. Rather, the focus is on how humans are enslaved to various spiritual forces. Salvation comes to us, then, when we are liberated from these hostile powers. As Gustaf Aulen describes:

[Christus Victor's] central theme is the idea of the Atonement as a Divine conflict and victory; Christ--Christus Victor--fights against and triumphs over the evil powers of the world, the 'tyrants' under which mankind is in bondage and suffering, and in Him God reconciles the world to Himself.

In Scripture the main "tyrants" are described as three, practically interchangeable, forces: Sin, Death, and the Devil--the unholy Trinity. Christ comes to set us free from these forces. As Aulen goes on to describe:

The work of Christ is first and foremost a victory over the powers which hold mankind in bondage: sin, death, and the devil. These may be said to be in a measure personified, but in any case they are objective powers; and the victory of Christ creates a new situation, bringing their rule to an end, and setting men free from their dominion.

If you've been keeping up with this series all this is very familiar. The trouble comes, however, with how modern readers of the bible are to understand sin, death and the devil to be "objective powers." Over the last few posts I've shown how, objectively and empirically, a fear of death motivates human sinfulness. There is an objective "power" in death that causes sin. But what about the devil? Again, let's recall two of the key passages guiding our meditations:

1 John 3.8b
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

What are we to do, as modern readers, with these references to the devil? As Aulen notes, one of the reasons Christus Victor atonement fell on hard times (replaced with the now ascendant substitutionary theories of atonement) was that it became difficult for modern readers to deal with the dualism inherent in texts like the ones we've been working with. The whole "devil holding humanity captive" idea seems a bit exotic, primitive and superstitious. Death is something we can work with, but the devil? Aulen describes how liberal theologians came to reject the thinking of the early Church Fathers:

[Modern, "liberal" theologians were] inclined to be critical of the forms in which the patristic teaching had usually expressed itself. They disliked intensely the 'mythological' language of the early church about Christ's redemptive work, and the realistic, often undeniably grotesque imagery, in which the victory of Christ over the devil, or the deception of the devil, was depicted in lurid colours. Thus the whole dramatic view was branded as 'mythological.' The matter was settled. The patristic teaching was of inferior value, and could be summarily relegated to the nursery or the lumber-room of theology.

Again, a part of this rejection was the dualism inherent in Christus Victor atonement:

Dualism was not popular with the Liberal Protestant theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but the classic idea of the Atonement is dualistic and dramatic: it depicts the drama of the Atonement against a dualistic background. If Dualism is eliminated, it is impossible to go on thinking of the existence of powers hostile to God, and the basis of the classic view has been dissolved away.

So this is an issue we are going to have to struggle with if we want to go forward with a robust vision of Christus Victor. That is, it is all well and good to describe how our fear of death can motivate selfishness and sinfulness. It's quite another thing to describe the "satanic powers" holding humanity captive.

So, how are we going to deal with the dualism inherent in Christus Victor theology? And how might we connect bondage to the "satanic powers" to everything else we've been discussing regarding the "slavery to death"? How are the devil and death related? These questions move us into the final act of this series, a consideration of how the principalities and powers are implicated in our "slavery to the fear of death."

My analysis of the powers, and many of you will see this coming, is going to rely on the work of Walter Wink. Specifically, I'm going to use Wink's work on the issue of dualism, the issue that makes a lot of people squirm when in comes to Christus Victor theology.

(Note for regular readers: If you've read my posts on the demonic you are already familiar with what I'm about to say. So you might elect to stop here, noting that, at this point in the argument, I'm using Wink's treatment of the demonic.)

The heart of Wink's analysis is to note the tight association between the physical and the spiritual in the biblical descriptions of the principalities and powers, the "hostile forces" holding humanity captive. In one sense, when it comes to the powers a part of the problem for modern readers of the bible is that we are actually too dualistic. More dualistic, in one sense, than the biblical authors. When modern Christians talk about the devil or demons they are generally conjuring up ghostlike spirits, entities wholly disconnected from physical manifestations of power. In the bible, however, you don't see such a stark separation. This is, perhaps, best observed by taking an inventory of the phrase "principalities and powers" in the New Testament.

The phrase archai kai exousiai--translated "principalities and powers"--occurs ten times in the New Testament. In the gospel of Luke, the only occurrences of the phrase in the gospels, the pairing "principalities and powers" occurs twice. In both occurrences the phrase refers to human political institutions:

Luke 12:11
"When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say...

Luke 20:20
Keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies, who pretended to be honest. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.

The other eight occurrences of archai kai exousiai occur in the epistles:

1 Corinthians 15.24
Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power.

Colossians 1.16
For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

Colossians 2.10
...and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.

Colossians 2.15
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Ephesians 1.21
...far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

Ephesians 3.10
His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms...

Ephesians 6.12
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Titus 3.1
Remind the people to be subject to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready to do whatever is good...

We can make a couple of observations about these passages. First, yes, there are times when the language of the powers seems to be picking out strictly "spiritual" powers (e.g., Eph. 6.12). However, there are other times when the phrase is picking out a strictly human, generally political, powers. (e.g., Titus 3.1). But more often than not, most of the passages are blending the two powers. For example, Colossians 1.16 clearly refers to both visible and invisible powers, powers in heaven and on earth.

The other thing to note is that the language of the powers often occurs in longer lists. In the New Testament these lists include: Chief priests, rulers, people, scribes, synagogues, kingdoms, thrones, angels, authority, glory, majesty, dominion, life, and death. Such lists continue highlight the conflation of physical and spiritual power in the New Testament.

The point being that while there is a dualism at work here it's not as dualistic as we might think. The regulating idea for the ancients seems to be this: manifestations of physical (generally political) power were manifestations of spiritual power. The two--physical power and spiritual power--were two sides of the same coin.

This might seem strange until we realize how the ancients viewed their kings as divinities. And if not themselves divine, the rulers were at least ordained by God. To defy the king was to defy God.

And, even though we consider ourselves more "enlightened," nothing much had changed. We also sacralize the political realm. It's God and Country. People aspire to create a Christian nation, a nation where political rule/power mirrors spiritual rule/power. Pondering these modern-day dynamics should help us get inside what the bible means by "principalities and powers."

Now it is true that the ancients, given their cosmology, saw the spiritual powers as existing "over" or "above" the physical powers. That spatial orientation is hard for modern readers to get their heads around. In light of this, how are we to keep the tight association between the physical and spiritual powers?

Wink suggests swapping an Above/Below orientation for an Inside/Outside orientation. Specifically, rather than seeing the spiritual as "above" the physical we see the spiritual as the "inner" life--the "heart" and "soul" if you will--of a power system. For example, when we talk about a nation, an economic system, an organization, or a corporation--each examples of power relations--we can talk about the "spirituality" each embodies. We might find a particular power system to be, say, humane or inhumane. These descriptions are picking out the "spirituality" of the power. And with this reframing in hand, we can describe the satanic and demonic as the spirituality embodied in death-dealing power structures. Here is Wink describing this:

What I propose is viewing the spiritual Powers not as separate heavenly or ethereal entities but as the inner aspect of material or tangible manifestation of power...the "principalities and powers" are the inner or spiritual essence, or gestalt, of an institution or state or system; that the "demons" are the psychic or spiritual power emanated by organizations or individuals or subaspects of individuals whose energies are bent on overpowering others; that "gods" are the very real archetypal or ideological structures that determine or govern reality and its mirror, the human brain...and that "Satan" is the actual power that congeals around collective idolatry, injustice, or inhumanity, a power that increases or decreases according to the degree of collective refusal to choose higher values.

Now it might be objected, if this is the case, that the word "spirituality" isn't really necessary. If all we are talking about are physical powers why make recourse to the word "spiritual"? Mainly because it is very difficult to physically locate the powers in the scientific laboratory. For example, the phrase "Give me liberty or give me death!" holds great sway over many people. That sentiment has power over people. But where is that power physically located? In atoms? In the strong nuclear force?

The point being, the use of "spiritual" or "religious" language here isn't a regression into superstition. It is, rather, an attempt to describe how various supra-physical forces have power over human affairs. Powers that are hard to pin down in the laboratory. Powers that will outlive us. (For the scientifically inclined I tend to think of these powers as emergent properties of physical systems which exert downward causation.) Wink on this point:

Every organization is made up of humans who make its decisions and are responsible for its success or failure, but these institutions tend to have a suprahuman quality. Although created and staffed by humans, decisions are not made so much by people as for them, out of the logic of institutional life itself. And because the institution usually antedates and outlasts its employees, it develops and imposes a set of traditions, expectations, beliefs, and values on everyone in its employ. Usually unspoken, unacknowledged, and even unknown, this invisible, transcendent network of determinants constrains behavior far more rigidly than any printed set of rules could ever do. It governs dress, social class, life-expectations, even choice of marriage partner (or abstention). This institutional momentum through time and space perpetuates a self-image, a corporate personality, and an institutional spirit which the more discerning are able to grasp as a totality and weigh for its relative sickness or health.

...The institution, however, is the totality of its activities and as such is a mostly invisible object. When we confuse what the eye beholds with the totality, we commit the same reductionistic fallacy as those Colossians who mistook the basic elements (stoicheia) of things for the ultimate reality (Col. 2:8,20). The consequence of such confusion is always slavery to the unseen power behind the visible elements: the spirituality of the institution or state or stone.

Going forward I'm going to be working with this view of the "hostile powers" holding humanity captive. I'll be thinking through how "the inner aspects of material or tangible manifestations of power" keep us enslaved to the fear of death and produce "the works of the devil." With this analysis in hand we should wind up with a robust understanding of how Christ liberates from sin, death, and yes, even the devil.

Professor in Prison: Why Five Stones?

2011-12-14T04:54:00.001-06:00

As regular readers know, I've been helping lead a weekly bible class at a local prison. I've shared a few stories from the study, the most popular being this one.

One of the things that I've tried to downplay in the study is my status and title of "college professor" and "Dr. Beck." I just want to be Richard. But the guys in the study keep calling me "Professor" and "Dr. Beck."

I was recently lamenting about this with Jana. But she said something that really helped me. "You know," she said, "a lot of those guys never got a chance to go to college. You going out there, I bet, makes them feel a little like they are getting to take a college class." Jana's wise in this way. Her words made me realize that I didn't have to feel embarrassed by my title. In fact, it could be a location of grace.

Not that I play this up (and it helps that I don't really look like a professor). I just feel more comfortable if the guys want to call me "Professor" or "Doctor."

But here's the best thing about being a professor in prison: I've become a sort of answer engine. I'm their Google. At the end of every study a bunch of the guys will come up to me and ask questions. Mostly about the bible. If I can't answer right away I go off to find an answer and return with it next week. And the questions they ask are all over the place. Here's a recent one that was great fun to look into:

With the study over, one of the guys comes up to me after class and asks: "Professor, I have a question for you."

"Great. What is it?"

"Why did David, when he went out to fight Goliath, take five stones from the stream?"

"Why did David take five stones?"

"Yes. Why five stones? If David trusted God wouldn't he have taken only one stone into battle?"

I'd never thought about that. And by the way, these are the sort of questions I get a lot. The guys don't often ask about huge theological questions like the problem of evil or predestination and free will. They ask these midrash-like questions about small textual details and anomalies. Questions about why, if David was trusting in God, he took five rather than one stone into battle.

Well, I didn't have an answer. So I did a little research. You'll be surprised to know that there has been a bit of discussion on this subject. Who knew? One of the more interesting answers is based on this text:

2 Samuel 21.18-22
In the course of time, there was another battle with the Philistines, at Gob. At that time Sibbekai the Hushathite killed Saph, one of the descendants of Rapha.

In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jair the Bethlehemite killed the brother of Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s rod.

In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—twenty-four in all. He also was descended from Rapha. When he taunted Israel, Jonathan son of Shimeah, David’s brother, killed him.

These four were descendants of Rapha in Gath, and they fell at the hands of David and his men.

As we read here, there seem to have been five giants from Gath. Goliath and these four (one of whom, it seems, had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot). The four giants from Gath read about in 2 Samuel 21 are all "descendants of Rapha." And one of them was "the brother of Goliath." If we speculate a bit--And who doesn't like some good midrash speculation?--we might weave all this together to come up with an answer as to why David picked up five rather than one stone. Specifically, he might have picked up five stones because Goliath had four giant brothers. Or, at the very least, one giant brother and three giant cousins.

David went down to battle with five stones prepared to whip the whole lot of them. Five stones for five related Philistine giants.

Such are the things I research being a professor in prison.

The Satanic Church

2011-12-13T05:31:00.003-06:00

Last week I mentioned I was reading Jacques Ellul. In his book The Subversion of Christianity I wanted to point you to an interesting take Ellul has on Jesus's comment in the gospels about seeing Satan fall from heaven like lightning:

Luke 10.17-18
The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”

Jesus replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."

What might his passage mean? Ellul focuses on the literal interpretation of the Hebrew word הַשָּׂטָן (ha-satan)--accuser. So what might it mean that our accuser has "fallen from heaven"? Ellul's analysis:

"I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning," Jesus tells us. This is basic. Let us recall again that Satan is not a person. (There is no real need to use a capital; the term is a common one.) He is not Satan but the accuser, or even the accusation. We have to say that wherever in any form or for any motive an accusation is made (including true and justified accusations), there is satan. Satan is then at work, is present, and becomes a person. The process (as for the devil) is clear-cut. The accusation crystallizes in some way, and it results in the development of a personalized accusing presence. We are familiar with the process in the development of accusations, for example, collective accusations. Jesus tells us that satan is no longer in heaven. What he means is clear. There is no longer any personified accusation before God (as in Job) now that Jesus the Son of God has come to pardon us. To use the patristic image, an advocate, not an accuser, now stands at the side of God.

Most are familiar with the biblical allusions Ellul is making to Job and Jesus. You'll recall that Job's problems start with accusations made by Satan in the Heavenly Court:

Job 1.6-12
One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”

Satan answered the LORD, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.”

Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”

“Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”

The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”

Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.

So Job is afflicted because, as Ellul notes, the accuser stands before God in heaven. Consequently, throughout the book of Job Job cries out against this. Rather than an accuser standing before God in heaven Job wants a witness, intercessor, friend, advocate and redeemer, someone to compassionately plead his cause before Yahweh:

Job 16.18-21; 19.23-27
“Earth, do not cover my blood;
may my cry never be laid to rest!
Even now my witness is in heaven;
my advocate is on high.
My intercessor is my friend
as my eyes pour out tears to God;
on behalf of a man he pleads with God as one pleads for a friend."

“Oh, that my words were recorded,
that they were written on a scroll,
that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead,
or engraved in rock forever!
I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
with my own eyes—I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!"

Curiously, we never see Job's prayer answered. The redeemer/friend/witness/advocate never makes an appearance in the book. But in the New Testament we do find an answer to Job's prayer. As Ellul notes, Satan is no longer accusing us in heaven. Instead of Satan we find Jesus at the right hand of God as our advocate, friend, and redeemer. Job's prayer is finally answered.

Hebrews 4.14-16
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

So accusation has been cast out of heaven--"I saw Satan fall like lightning"--and in its place is the redeemer Job had longed for, an advocate at God's hand who can "empathize with our weaknesses."

But Ellul goes on. Given that accusation/satan has been cast down from heaven we confront the fact that accusation (the satanic) is now on earth. Accusation has become human sport. Ellul on this point:

God does not hear, does not want to hear, will not listen to the accusations that assail him from every side. But if accusations are no longer in heaven, if they no longer emanate from heaven, if God is not himself as accuser in any matter, then not only is accusation still on earth but it is also flourishing there. It is developing to the same degree as it is banished from heaven. That which no longer explodes as hatred and accusation in heaven is condensed on earth...Thus satan, accusation, proliferates in our world.

In this sense, we are satan. We are the accusers. We act like Job's satan, judging and accusing each other before God. We speak the words of the Pharisee in Jesus's parable, "I thank you Lord that I'm not like these other people."

Or the words of the crowd seeking to stone the woman caught in the act of adultery: "The Law says to stone her."

Or the words of the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son: "This son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, and you kill the fattened calf for him!"

Or the words of the religious leaders to the disciples: "Your teacher eats with tax-collectors and sinners."

Satan on earth.

And guess who is really good at this accusation, and often the very source of it? The church. Ellul goes on:

The church becomes the origin, the perfecting, and finally the model of all accusations and all systems of inquisition. It has brought the mechanisms of accusation out of the individual and private domain and into the collective and institutional domain. I do no want to overemphasize the Inquisition but it is still true that this was a prodigious perversion of revelation. A totality based on pardon became a totality based on inquisition...[S]atan came to lodge in the church's heart, the church itself became the great mistress of accusation and transformed itself into an invading cancer, crushing without end.

And because the church became preoccupied with accusation rather than pardon the rest of the world followed her example:

Alas, this development of accusation characterizes Christendom and then moves into secular movements. If our actual world is a world of insatiable accusation--political, social, intellectual, and moral--it is because of this mistaken switch on the church's part, under satan's influence. Satan made the church his special prey so that by means of it as his intermediary he might make the world truly mad.

Hating Pixels: A Modern Day Reflection on the Sermon on the Mount

2011-12-12T10:27:00.005-06:00

In my last post I quoted this famous section of the Sermon on the Mount:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you."

It struck me, as I once again pondered this teaching of Jesus, how many of us don't have actual enemies. To be sure, most of us have workplace tensions, conflicts with people who are snarky, hyper-competitive, gossipy, jealous, rude, boorish, or adversarial. But are they enemies? I'm sure it's an issue of gradation. And many of us do have true enemies, people actively and malevolently set against us.

What strikes me about this is that, even without hosts of enemies, we still do a lot of hating. As I tell my classes when I lecture on Freud: You got to hate someone. According to Freud all our pent up aggression and frustration has to go somewhere. It seeks an outlet, a catharsis, a target. And more and more often this "hatred" is directed at pixels.

What I mean by this is that when I hear someone just going off on someone, channeling a lot of anger, more often than not they are talking about someone on TV, not someone in their actual social sphere.

Most of our enemies are pixels.

Two example. First, take hate in the realm of sports or celebrities. People hate rival sports teams or team owners or players. You mention the name of a team or player and you'll hear people say, "I hate him." You mention some celebrity getting divorced or going through some trouble and you hear people say, "I hate her." Which is curious as we don't actually know any of these people. We're hating pixels.

Same goes for politics. I have liberal friends who hate Sarah Palin. That's what they tell me. On the other side I have friends who hate President Obama. Again, I have their word on that. But as with sports stars or celebrities, we don't actually know any of these people. We're hating pixels.

More often than not, our enemies aren't real. They are virtual. They are, if Freud is to be believed, dark projections and representations of our fears and paranoia. They are pixelated bogeymen and demons.

And if that's true, I wonder what it might mean to "love your pixelated enemies."

Might the souls of my liberal friends be hanging in the balance depending upon how they love (or fail to love) Sarah Palin? Might the souls of my conservative friends be hanging in the balance depending upon how they love (or fail to love) Barack Obama?

Might one of the greatest acts of Christian charity in the modern world be love toward the pixelated enemy?

The command "love your enemies" is very, very hard. And I wonder, do we think of that as we watch TV?

Display It Through Your Actions

2011-12-12T05:25:00.002-06:00

Over the weekend my post The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity bounced around the Internet again (posts do this from time to time), mostly burning through Facebook.

The comments are more than I can keep up with. I did, however, if you missed the activity on this post, want to point you to the most "liked" comment over the last few days. It's a story from Mac:

A few weeks ago I was doing a community clean up in my neighborhood. I rode to the sign-in area with a neighbor, who was also the block captain. His SUV had a giant "Jesus Saves, Obama Spends" sticker on the window. When I got in the car, I had to move the enormous bible off the seat to make room. Clearly they were "gawd fearin' Christians".

Halfway through the clean up I approached a leaf-covered yard that others seemed to be skipping. I started to rake and the block captain ran up to me, pulled me aside and started speaking in a hushed voice.

"We're not doing that yard," he said.

"Why?"

"Because when my wife went looking for volunteers, he said he didn't want to participate in 'this crap'."

"So?"

"So he isn't getting his yard raked by us."

I took a look down the street, at all the nicely raked lawns, and then at my neighbors truck, with the obnoxious window decal.

"You know what," I said, "I'll rake the yard, and if he wants to yell at someone for doing it, he can yell at me. His house is still part of the neighborhood."

My neighbor, with his huge bible, bumper sticker and absurd blow-up nativity scene shook his head and left me to rake the yard alone.

If you're going to publicly display your faith, display it through your actions.

Thanks Mac. Convicting story. Reminds me of this:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Christian Anarchism & Atheism

2011-12-09T04:51:00.003-06:00

My friend and colleague David has gotten me interested in the work of Jacques Ellul. And as I've read Ellul I've gotten more interested in Christian anarchism, particularly after reading Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity.

I'm new to this literature, so please don't count me as an expert. I mainly want to point out two things in this post.

First, in an important sense, all Christians are anarchists. The word "anarchism" comes from the Greek ἄναρχος (anarchos) which means "no rulers" or "without rulers." For the Christian such a description, obviously, refers to the ultimacy of human rulers.

An anarchist strain runs throughout the Old and Testaments. We see it in the Old Testament in God's unwillingness to give a king to Israel. When God finally relents God takes this as an explicit rejection and predicts things aren't going to go well for Israel:

1 Samuel 8.6-22
But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the LORD. And the LORD told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

So Samuel passed on the Lord’s warning to the people who were asking him for a king. “This is how a king will reign over you,” Samuel said. “The king will draft your sons and assign them to his chariots and his charioteers, making them run before his chariots. Some will be generals and captains in his army, some will be forced to plow in his fields and harvest his crops, and some will make his weapons and chariot equipment. The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him. He will take away the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his own officials. He will take a tenth of your grain and your grape harvest and distribute it among his officers and attendants. He will take your male and female slaves and demand the finest of your cattle and donkeys for his own use. He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you will be his slaves. When that day comes, you will beg for relief from this king you are demanding, but then the Lord will not help you.”

But the people refused to listen to Samuel’s warning. “Even so, we still want a king,” they said. “We want to be like the nations around us. Our king will judge us and lead us into battle.”

So Samuel repeated to the Lord what the people had said, and the Lord replied, “Do as they say, and give them a king.” Then Samuel agreed and sent the people home.

So the bible has a very dim view of kings. But the people want one. And their reason for wanting a king is interesting: "to judge us and lead us into battle." Another sign that the bible has a dim view of kings is that every Old Testament king had a prophet. And in Jesus's day Herod had John the Baptist.

But beyond the kings of Israel we also see the Israelites coming into conflict with the rulers of foreign nations. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego's refusal to bow down, under threat of death, to the golden idol erected by Nebuchadnezzar:

Daniel 3. 13-18
Furious with rage, Nebuchadnezzar summoned Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. So these men were brought before the king, and Nebuchadnezzar said to them, “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, that you do not serve my gods or worship the image of gold I have set up? Now when you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music, if you are ready to fall down and worship the image I made, very good. But if you do not worship it, you will be thrown immediately into a blazing furnace. Then what god will be able to rescue you from my hand?”

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

What is interesting here in Daniel, and this is the second and larger point I want to make in this post, is the conflation of anarchism and atheism. You'll recall that the word "atheist" was coined by the Romans to describe the early Christians. This was because Christians rejected the gods of the Romans, denied their legitimacy, ultimacy and existence.

In short, there is a conflation between the rulers/rule of a nation and the pantheon of gods supporting it and conferring legitimacy. To be an anarchist, then, one also has to be an atheist. The two go hand in hand. And we see this clearly in Daniel. To say no to the rule of King Nebuchadnezzar is to refuse to worship his idol.

This duality sits at the heart of the Old Testament in the experience of the Exodus. Moses emancipates slaves by revolting against both the rule and divinity of Pharaoh. To the Egyptians Moses was both an atheist--in his denial of their divinities, Pharaoh among them--and an anarchist. The political and the spiritual go hand in hand.

So there is this interesting conflation of obedience and worship. Both, after all, involve "bowing down." Perhaps the best word to pick out this area of overlap is allegiance. When push comes to shove, whom do you serve? This is nicely pointed out in a well-known example of New Testament anarchism:

Acts 5.27-29
The apostles were brought in and made to appear before the Sanhedrin to be questioned by the high priest. “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name,” he said. “Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and are determined to make us guilty of this man’s blood.”

Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!"

Along these lines, we might consider Jesus to be the paradigmatic case--the Original Anarchist. Note the conflation of refusing rule and refusing to worship:

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’”

Another theme of anarchism is being "stateless." This is also a theme found throughout the Old and New Testaments where the people of God are considered pilgrims, exiles, and sojourners. 1 Peter is a prolonged meditation on this theme. Right at the start of 1 Peter Christians are addressed as eklektois parepidemois diasporas. This is variously translated as:

NRSV:
"To the exiles of the Dispersion...who have been chosen."

NIV:
"To God's elect, strangers in the world, scattered..."

NJB:
"...to all those living as aliens in the Dispersion...who have been chosen."

NLT:
"...to God's chosen people who are living as foreigners."

Good News:
"To God's chosen people who live as refugees scattered throughout the provinces of..."

Later, in 2.11, the author of 1 Peter uses a different word to describe Christians, paroikos: "Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles (paroikos)..." Where parepidemois carries the idea of "sojourning" paroikos is a political word referring to the tenuous relationship (or lack thereof) between the the pilgrim and the state he/she is currently residing in. Because of this paroikos is often translated as "resident alien" or "resident non-citizen." The important part for our purposes is how 1 Peter uses the idea "statelessness" to describe the Christian relationship with the world. We are resident non-citizens of the world. In this sense, the Christian identity is anarchical.

And it's this anarchical relationship with the world that produces persecution. After Peter and the apostles give their speech about obeying God rather than men they are flogged. Jesus also speaks of this persecution in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.

Why would anyone want to persecute the poor in spirit, the meek, the peacemakers? That's a puzzle. Until we ponder the provocative and anarchical nature of the phrase "Kingdom of Heaven." It's the anarchical nature of the peacemaking that's bringing the persecution. Here is a peace that occurs outside of, in opposition to, and as an indictment of worldly rule, with how Leviathan "makes peace." This was why the early Christians were persecuted by Rome. Rome wasn't upset by Christian meekness and humility. Rome was upset by Christian atheism and anarchism. In the Roman worldview Caesar was considered to be the Son of God and his imperial accomplishments were proclaimed as gospel ("glad tidings"). Christians, however, recognized a different Son of God, a King even, and proclaimed a rival gospel. Thus the clash between rival conceptions of rule (anarchism) and divinity (atheism). Walter Wink describes the conflict:

When the Romans archons (magistrates) ordered the early Christians to worship the imperial spirit or genius, they refused, kneeling instead and offering prayers on the emperor's behalf to God. This seemingly innocuous act was far more exasperating and revolutionary than outright rebellion would have been. Rebellion simply acknowledges the absoluteness and ultimacy of the emperor's power, and attempts to seize it. Prayer denies that ultimacy altogether by acknowledging a higher power...prayer challenged the very spirituality of the empire itself and called the empire's "angel," as it where, before the judgment seat of God.

All this is to simply point out the anarchist themes in the bible and how those themes are intimately associated with issues related to idolatry and false worship. There is a pervasive spiritual aspect to Christian anarchism. It cannot be reduced to political actions or activities. Specifically, Christian anarchism is atheistic in denying that which confers spiritual legitimacy to the use of power. This is, I think, what it means to "discern the spirits" and to claim that our battle "is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers of this dark age."

And yet, if we utter this atheistic "no" we step outside the nexus of values and ideologies that legitimize how meaning is constructed in the world (mainly though the use of power). The atheistic move makes us appear "lawless," advocates of anarchy and "no rule." This is the root of Christian persecution. Why Jesus was considered to be both demon-possessed and executed as a political dissident.

Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?

2011-12-08T05:24:00.000-06:00

One of the most discussed posts I've written on this blog was The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity.

As that post buzzed around the Internet it seemed to hit two different audiences for two different reasons. For Christians, my advice to the student seemed to get the most attention. It appeared that "insiders" appreciated my move away from "working on your relationship with Jesus" to concrete obedience to Jesus (e.g., seeking reconciliation). For non-Christians, my comments about Christians being bad tippers seemed to get the most attention. For these "outsiders," many of whom worked in the restaurant industry, this observation seemed to confirm a stereotype they had about "the Sunday lunch church crowd."

Anyway, that post was a meditation on how we tend to use "religion" as a replacement for being a more decent human being. We'd rather have "quiet time with God" or want to "get into the word" than forgive our enemies or spend time working at a homeless shelter.

In making that observation in the post I made this sweeping statement:

"Christianity" has essentially become a mechanism for allowing millions of people to replace being a decent human being with something else, an endorsed "spiritual" substitute.

I stand by that statement. As would, I think, most of the Old Testament prophets. And Jesus.

But maybe I'm wrong.

I say that because I found myself quoted at the start of Chapter 7--"Do Christians Love Others?"--in Bradley Wright's book Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...And Other Lies You've Been Told.

Bradley is a sociologist from the University of Connecticut who blogs over at Black, White and Gray (and formerly at his personal blog). His book Christians Are... was, I think, somewhat in response to the book unChristian, which used survey research to describe how Christians behave, well, unChristianly. Bradley's book seeks to take a second look and wants to correct some of the exaggerations and negative stereotypes regarding Christians, particularly Evangelical Christians. Hence the title "Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...And Other Lies You've Been Told."

Toward that end, at the start of each chapter of Christians Are... Bradley begins with quotations selected to illustrate a negative stereotype about Christians. A stereotype that is, presumably, a "lie." Starting with those quotes/"lies" Bradley goes on to review data, mainly survey data from the General Social Survey (GSS), to evaluate these negative stereotypes/"lies." As you might guess from the title of the book, after surveying the data in each chapter these stereotypes come to be seen as exaggerated, overblown or outright wrong--the "lies" from the title. Chapter titles include "Are We Losing our Young People?" and "Have Christians Gone Wild?" And one of the chapters is entitled "Do Christians Love Others?"

And that's where my quote comes in. At the start of Chapter 7 in Christians Are... you read, with two quotes from others, my assessment that, and I quote myself, "'Christianity' has essentially become a mechanism for allowing millions of people to replace being a decent human being with something else, an endorsed 'spiritual' substitute."

As you might imagine, I was, in turn, startled, flattered and then worried to find my quote at the start of the chapter. Everyone likes to be quoted. But not in this manner! I've never met Bradley and hadn't known he had selected my quote as an illustrative "lie." So after my surprise I was a bit anxious and keen to read the chapter.

Maybe I'd overstated my case. Had I lied?

Before going on, let me just say that I greatly admire Bradley's work. As a complete stats geek I love what he does. We social scientists need to stick together. So I encourage you to follow Bradley at Black, White and Gray and check out his book Christians Are... along with his newer book Upside. (And, if you ever run into me, I'll autograph Chapter 7 of Christians Are... for you. Right by my quote.)

What I want to do, for the rest of this post, is to walk through the evidence Bradley cites in the chapter "Do Christians Love Others?" to see how my quotation fares. I'm going to break my analysis down by the Chapter 7 subheadings.

Do Christians Love Others?

Summary:
The first section of the chapter is entitled "Do Christians Love Others?" In this section data is reviewed from the GSS about how religious groups responded to two questions: 1) how often the respondent feels a selfless caring for others and 2) how often the respondent accepts others when others do things the respondent thinks are wrong. Overall, "Black Protestants, especially, and Evangelical Christians score highest on these measures, with about 40% or more agreeing that they selflessly care for and accept others. In contrast, only about 25% of the religiously unaffiliated report doing so."

The section goes on to look at other items on the GSS assessing "I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me" and "When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective toward them." Again, Evangelicals score high on these self-assessments: "Eighty percent of the Evangelical respondents reported being concerned for those less fortunate, and 86% reported feeling protective toward those taken advantage of. In contrast, the religiously unaffiliated group registered the lowest scores, with 68% reporting concern and 75% feeling protective."

The section also reviews three other GSS questions similar to the ones above and the results come out the same: Evangelicals rate themselves higher than others.

Analysis:
So, what can we say about this? Hard to say, right? This could be good news or bad news depending upon behavior. Particularly when the label hypocrisy is in play. It's clear that Evangelicals see themselves as loving and caring. But are they? If they are, this is all good news. But if they aren't this is very, very bad news. In fact, this would be the news I delivered in my chapter-leading quote: religion is making Christians feel better about themselves at the expense of actually being better.

So is this a case of self-description or self-deception? For my part, to pick one example, I have some serious reservations about Evangelicals rating themselves so high (the highest!) on accepting people who are doing something Evangelicals think is wrong. Seriously? Evangelicals are the most accepting people when, say, they are dealing with a woman getting an abortion or gay marriage? There's not a wee bit of self-deception in play here?

Do Christian Actions Reveal Love?

Summary: Acts of Charity
In this section we move away from self-assessment to behavior (though even these "behaviors" are still self-reported survey items on the GSS and, thus, still prone to bias). The GSS asks two charity-related items: During the last twelve months how often have you "given food or money to a homeless person?" and "done volunteer work for a charity?" (Bradley focuses on those who said they have done either of these at least twice a year.)

The results for the first question: "Forty-eight percent of Evangelical respondents had given food or money to the homeless twice or more in the previous year. This put them at the low end of the observed range, for 60% of the Black Protestants gave to the homeless as did slightly over half the Catholics and members of other religions. The Evangelical rate of giving is similar to the 44% of Mainline Protestants and religiously unaffiliated."

The news was a little better for Evangelicals on the question about volunteering for a charity (does teaching Sunday School count here?): "Mainline Protestants were the most likely to volunteer (43%), followed closely behind by Evangelicals (37%), members of other religions (35%), Catholics (33%), Black Protestants (31%), and, lastly, the religiously unaffiliated (25%)."

Analysis:
Hmmmm. So let's get this straight. Evangelicals see themselves as very loving. And yet, when it comes to, you know, helping homeless people they aren't any different from the religiously unaffiliated (a group that could include, say, Satanists). This isn't good news for a group claiming to follow a Lord who taught:

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

I mean, when you say "Jesus is Lord" what's going through your mind?

So I'm wondering. Might this disjoint between self-assessment and behavior be the thing that's grating outsiders about Evangelicals?

Summary: Small Acts of Kindness
This section of the chapter goes on to discuss GSS items that assess more workaday acts of kindness: How often in the past year have you "looked after a person's plants, mail, or pets while they were away"; "offered your seat on a bus or in a public place to a stranger who was standing"; or "carried a stranger's belongings, like groceries, a suitcase, or a shopping bag?"

For my part, as huge advocate of kindness, I'm very interested in this sort of behavior. The results: "When it comes to looking after other people's stuff, Mainline Protestants and Evangelicals were the most likely to do so (52% and 46% respectively). But with offering a seat to others or helping them carry their stuff, on the other hand, Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants scored low. Members of other religions are the most likely to do both (35% and 40% respectively)."

Analysis:
This is pretty damning. Looking after people's stuff is a nice gesture. But it doesn't assess acts of kindness to strangers, a key teaching for Christians: "Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." But on this key criterion, kindness to strangers, other religions and the irreligious do better than Evangelical Christians.

Attitudes Toward Other Groups

In this section Bradley turns to attitudes about social groups: social class, race, and sexual orientation. I'll summarize each in turn.

Summary: Attitudes toward Rich and Poor
Bradley remarks that he couldn't find a good measure of attitudes regarding justice-related issues. As he notes, positive or negative feelings about a government program aimed at helping the poor conflate "a concern for the poor with attitudes toward government involvement in social programs." Still, I would really like to see the numbers on this. If care of the poor is a top priority wouldn't you feel more, rather than less, positively about your tax dollars being spent in this way? If Christians don't mind the government building bombs why would they mind it building, say, schools or health care clinics?

Bradley eventually settled on two "feeling thermometer" (1 to 100) ratings about the rich and poor from the 2006 Social Capital Community Study. The results aren't all that interesting, likely due to the measure: "Each of the four religious groups [Protestants, Catholics, Other Religions, Unaffiliated] stated warmer feelings toward the poor than the rich...In terms of the gap between poor and rich ratings, there wasn't a lot of difference between groups."

Analysis:
The rich can't catch a break! It's nice to see the preferential option for the poor found among just about everyone.

Summary: Attitudes about Race
The actual title for this subsection is "A Disappointing Discovery About Race." Bradley only looks here at data for White respondents. His opening salvo: "The analyses that I present here constitute, in my opinion, bad news for Evangelical Christians..."

The analysis starts with data from a 1-8 point "feeling thermometer": "In general, how warm or cool do you feel feel toward Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics." Every religious group liked themselves (fellow Whites) the best. The data on those Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics: "There is some variation in feelings toward minorities, however, with members of other religions having the overall warmest feelings toward Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics." The highest ratings came from Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated. The lowest ratings? Evangelicals.

Bradley goes on to look at another question: Would these religious groups hold race against a political candidate? The results: "A full 19% of Protestant respondents would hold a Hispanic candidate's ethnicity against them, as would 11% of Catholics and about 9% of members of other religions and the religiously unaffiliated. Similar proportions hold for Black candidates, albeit at substantially reduced levels. Seven percent of Protestants would be less likely to vote for a Black candidate, compared to 6% of Catholics and 3% of the religiously unaffiliated and members of other religions." For some reason, the Protestant group here wasn't broken down to reveal the particular feelings of Evangelicals. But as Protestants they are the religious group most likely to hold race against a person running for political office.

The final question examined in this section had to do with attitudes toward inter-racial marriage within the family. The question: How do you feel about "having a close relative or family member marry a ____ person?" with the blank being filled in with Black, Asian-American, or Hispanic-American. The results: "According to the survey, opposition to marrying a non-White person varies widely by religion, and, overall, Evangelicals were the most opposed to it." Guess who were most accepting? You guessed it. The religiously unaffiliated.

Analysis:
Wow. I'm almost speechless. But let me rush to say this: Let's be clear, most Evangelicals are not racist. But Evangelicals are more likely to be racist compared to all the other religious groups, including the irreligious. And that's just embarrassing. Beyond embarrassing. When non-Christians are more Christ-like we have a huge, huge problem.

Summary: Attitudes about Gays
No surprise that Evangelicals don't approve of gay sexual relations. This is expected given their views that this activity is sinful. But what about the "love the sinner, hate the sin" dynamic? And let's remember the finding from above: Evangelicals report being the most accepting of people (compared to other religious groups), even when those people are doing things they disagree with. So, do Evangelicals separate their feelings about gay behavior from their feelings about gay persons? The results from another "feeling thermometer": Of all the religious groups Evangelicals score the lowest with the most negative feelings toward gays as people.

What about a GSS question regarding freedom of speech and Constitutional liberty: "If an openly gay man wanted to make a speech in your community, should he be allowed to?" As Bradley says, "Denying anyone the right of free speech seems particularly harsh." So how do Christian groups fare? Bradley's summary: "Evangelical Christians show relatively high levels of this form of intolerance." Higher than all other religious groups, including the irreligious.

Analysis:
Not surprisingly, Evangelicals are the most rejecting of gay persons. Willing, even, to scrap the Constitution and First Amendment rights. Which, let's admit, is a bit ironic.

Some Good News: Young People & Church Attendance

So far, the evidence has been pretty grim. But the chapter ends with some good news: Young people.

In the final section of the chapter Bradley reviews data showing that younger Evangelical Christians are more likely to engage in acts of charity. They are also more approving of inter-racial marriages and have more positive feelings about the gay community. So maybe things are improving. We'll see. People tend to get more conservative with age.

There is also some good news sprinkled throughout the chapter. For many of the observations noted above increased church attendance among Evangelicals attenuates some of the trends. These are data points that push against my statement that Christians use "religious" activities (e.g., church attendance) to replace acts of goodness. But what we don't have in the chapter are weekly attendance breakdowns for all the non-Evangelical groups. That is, in these follow-up analyses we're comparing the "best" of the Evangelicals against the group means of the other religious groups. That's not a fair comparison which is why I've focused on the overall group means. (For example, beyond looking at devout Catholics or Episcopalians, the irreligious group is particularly heterogeneous. I'd like to compare Evangelicals to, say, atheists in the Peace Corp). More, I'd like to see the numbers that fall into the church attendance groupings. It seems pretty clear from the data that nominal Evangelicals are pretty awful. I'd like to know how big that group is within the Evangelical cohort.

Overall Conclusions: Did I Tell A Lie?
So, what are we to make of all this? Are Christians hate-filled hypocrites? And what about the status of my quote in light of all the data?

Let's start with the label hypocrite. I take this label to mean a disjoint between self-appraisal and behavior. Do we see that in the data Bradley presents? I think so. Recall, Evangelicals rated themselves the most "loving" of all the other religious groups. And yet, when we look at the ratings of actual behaviors and attitudes toward others, Evangelicals are no better, and often worse, than others. The word hypocrisy could be applied here.

What about being hate-filled? Well, hate is a pretty strong word. In social psychology it's a word to describe feelings toward out-group members (though each of us can hate particular people for a variety of reasons). So how to Evangelicals look when we examine their feelings toward out-group members? What we find is, in Bradley's own estimation, the most disappointing findings in the entire book. Compared to all the religious groups, including the irreligious, Evangelicals are more prone to hate when it comes to out-group members (e.g., Blacks, gays). Evangelicals are not, by any stretch of the imagination, hate-filled. But the seeds of hate are more deeply sown in the soil of the Evangelical heart than anywhere else.

Let's now turn to my quote. Is "Christianity" a mechanism for allowing people to replace being a decent human being with an endorsed "spiritual" substitute? On one hand, as noted above, when we look at church attendance among Evangelicals we seem to find a salutary effect. People seem to be better for going to church. In this case, church attendance appears to be doing some moral good. And I'm pleased by that. It's one of the reasons I go to church. It helps me to be a better person (though I recognize that not everyone gets what I get out of it).

However, in the data analyses we don't ever get measures of commitment or devotion for the other comparison groups. To be direct about it, we only get follow-up analyses for the Evangelical group when their trend looks bad, to show, it seems to me, that not every Evangelical fits the mold. Which is a fine thing to point out. It's just that, as I noted above, we're not then comparing the best from each group.

So if we stay with the overall group means we are left with the conclusion that Evangelicals aren't any better, and often worse, than others. And yet, they seem to feel pretty good about themselves, morally speaking. What can account for that disjoint? I think my hypothesis of "religiosity" creating an illusion of morality is a plausible explanation. (For more on the psychological dynamics of this "replacement" effect see my discussion of the Macbeth Effect in Unclean.)

All in all, then, I think I'll stick by my original analysis. I didn't see anything in Chapter 7 of Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...And Other Lies You've Been Told that would make me change my mind.

In fact, thanks to the book, it looks like I might have been telling the truth.

On Prophecy and Policy: To Not Refuse the Gift of Speech

2011-12-06T05:35:00.002-06:00

In recent weeks I've written about capitalism and the Occupy Wall Street movement. I often get frustrated with the conversations posts like those generate. And the frustration isn't always about how those posts get co-opted by the snap-judgment polarities of the current political climate in America. (Though I do try to resist those polarities. In the aftermath of my post on capitalism I had people to my right worried about what they saw as a defense of socialism. To the left of me I had people worried about my defense of capitalism. So everyone had something to be angry about. Job well done?)

No, my frustration has more to do with the disjoint between prophecy and policy. I think it's clear that the current political and economic systems are hurting people. And yet, from a historical perspective the current political and economic systems have done the world great good. I, for one, don't want to wind the clock back.

The point being that it's difficult to transition from the clarion call of prophecy to concrete policy proposals. I know something is awry in the world but I struggle with finding the best way forward. Take the health care issue in America today. Should we repeal the Affordable Care Act, going back to having millions of Americans, citizens of the most affluent nation in history, without access to basic health care? Or should we perhaps go further, having a single-payer government-run system like we see in Europe? Or should we keep the current system, a system that works with private sector insurance providers (a system, incidentally, once championed by Republicans)? What, in short, is the best way forward? Surely we should try to do something to get every American access to basic health care. People suffer without it. And as good neighbors we should care about that suffering.

For example, close to my home is a Planned Parenthood. And Christians are regularly out front protesting about abortion. Props to them. But my guess is, based upon the demographics of the protesters (anti-abortion Christians in West Texas), that few of them are supportive of the Affordable Care Act. Which is a bit of a head scratcher for me. Don't we want these young women and the children we want them to bring to term to have access to affordable health care? Shouldn't we structure our social contract to deincentivize abortions? Shouldn't we love those children after they are born as well? Why does the Christian's interest in the baby last for only nine months?

In short, there are many ways our social contract is death-dealing. Ways that transcend the current platforms of both political parties.

(See, I'm stepping on everyone's toes again. My apologies if I've gotten you angry. I'm not trying to.)

But it is very hard to know, from a policy stance, what the best solution is in these various situations. (For example, there are host of rejoinders to my pro-universal-health-care + pro-life vision above.) This is one of the frustrations with the OWS movement. OWS may be very good at pointing out the problem but they've struggled with providing a solution. And for my part I share a similar feeling of frustration trying to connect the dots between prophecy and policy.

And that demoralizes me and makes me want to give up.

But I read something yesterday from Rowan Williams that made me feel a bit better about all this. From Williams's book Resurrection:

The Spirit opens our mouths for the dumb, in prophetic declamation and in patient and undramatic educative work. If we are to make a convincing job of naming the helpless and oppressed, we have much observation and analysis to do: if the Spirit gives utterance to us, it may be by freeing us from the paralysis induced by the complexity of the situation, so that we can risk a statement--knowing we invite denial, refutation or dismissal. The last thing a Christian should be eager to do is to minimize the moral unclarity and situational nuances of human relations; but the capacity to make articulate (even if, inevitably, provisional) judgement must not be stifled. We must allow ourselves to be given a language for this judgment by our trust in the faithfulness of the Spirit we invoke: we speak and act in the conviction that the Spirit can and will act creatively through our responsible decision--whether or not it is objectively "right" or adequate. The Spirit may work in debate at least as much as consensus and we shall have done something if we have only initiated such a debate.

So in the Spirit, in the hope of grace, we are enabled to give voice to our judgement and discrimination, to name and identify both victim and oppressor. Our responsibility is two-fold: not to speak glibly or hastily, pressed by doctrinaire, or merely fashionable, influences; yet not to refuse the gift of speech when we believe ourselves to have discerned the identity of the victim.

A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature

2011-12-05T07:28:00.001-06:00

Happy second week of Advent!

I'm sure you've noticed that the Advent and Christmas carols are starting to fill the air. We sang a few at our church this Sunday, among them O Holy Night.

O Holy Night--Cantique de Noël in the original French--was composed in 1847 by Adolphe Adam. The text of the song came from a poem--Minuit, chrétiens--written by Placide Cappeau who had been asked by a parish priest to write a Christmas poem. Later, in 1855, Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight created a singing English edition based on Cappeau's French text.

As we were singing O Holy Night this Sunday I was struck by the themes of emancipation from the third verse and chorus of the song:

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.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! O praise His Name forever,
His power and glory evermore proclaim.
His power and glory evermore proclaim.

When I was looking into the song on Wikipedia I discovered that these themes of emancipation are even stronger in the original French poem. A more literal rendering of the third verse and chorus:

The Redeemer has overcome every obstacle:
The Earth is free, and Heaven is open.
He sees a brother where there was only a slave,
Love unites those that iron had chained.
Who will tell Him of our gratitude,
For all of us He is born, He suffers and dies.

People stand up! Sing of your deliverance,
Christmas, Christmas, sing of the Redeemer,
Christmas, Christmas, sing of the Redeemer!

He sees a brother where there was only a slave. Love unites those that iron had chained. People stand up! Sing of your deliverance.

Those are some pretty powerful lyrics. More, these were political and prophetic lyrics.

Recall, the song and French poem were written in 1847. The English version was written in 1855, six years before the American Civil War and eight years before the Emancipation Proclamation. O Holy Night, it turns out, was a song of political resistance and protest. Imagine Americans singing in the years leading up to the Civil War the lyrics Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother; And in His name all oppression shall cease.

O Holy Night as political protest. A Christmas carol as resistance literature.

This is as it should be. Advent is a call to Christian anarchism, the proclamation of the King of kings. With the coming of the Christ Child the Principalities and Powers had been put on notice. There's a reason the Powers tried to kill the baby. Reasons a young pregnant peasant girl once sang about:

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever."

On Election and Coercion

2011-12-03T07:13:00.010-06:00

I've been following with some interest the posts of Scot McKnight regarding the books by Roger Olson and Michael Horton, Olson's Against Calvinism and Horton's For Calvinism.

I haven't read either book, so I'm mainly reacting to Scot's summaries of the books and his reactions to them. I'm no fan of Calvinism and it doesn't seem that Scot is either (at the very least he has serious reservations). So I've been sympathetic to Scot's worries, questions, and concerns about Calvinism as he's reviewed the two books.

The most recent post caught my attention as it wades into the issues of monergism versus synergism and resistible versus irresistible grace.

For those needing to get up to speed, a quick primer. Simplifying greatly, synergism is the view that humans cooperate with God in the act of salvation, that human will has a part to play. God offers grace and humans have to respond. Synergism is the view held by Arminians. Monergism, by contrast, is the view that only God acts in salvation. This is the doctrine of election, where no bit of human agency is involved in salvation. God alone acts and saves. Monergism is the view held by Calvinists. Crudely, we can make the contrast by asking "How many wills are involved in salvation?" One? Or two? Is it God's will alone? Or God's will plus our will?

Monergism and synergism sit behind the debates regarding resistible and irresistible grace. Arminians, in their endorsement of synergism, believe in resistible grace. This makes sense. If two wills are involved--God's and my own--then it's possible that I can exercise my will to reject God's offer of grace. Grace can be resisted. Calvinists, by contrast, in their endorsement of monergism, believe that grace is irresistible. And this makes sense as well. If human agency isn't involved in salvation then the person can't "resist." If God alone is working and God elects you then grace happens automatically, it's irresistible.

The point being, given their assumptions about the role (or lack thereof) of human agency/choice in salvation, the Arminian and Calvinistic views of grace are internally consistent.

The debates, therefore, aren't about the logical consistency of the two views but the sort of God they portray. And that's the main worry Scot expresses in his latest post: If monergism is true what sort of God would pick some and not others? Doesn't it make more sense, in light of the claim that God is love, that God elects all of us but it's up to us to respond?

Another way of thinking about this is that monergism is good at preserving God's sovereignty where synergism is good at preserving God's love. So take your pick. Do you want your God sovereign or loving?

(I, personally, as a universalist, don't think we have to choose. We can endorse both. Universalism is the view on offer where we can endorse the best of both Calvinism and Arminianism. God wills to save everyone (the best of Arminianism) and God gets what God wants (the best of Calvinism).)

But all this is just background for why I want to draw your attention to Scot's post. Again, I grew up in an Arminian tradition so I agree with Scot's worries about monergism, about the implications it has for our view of a loving God. But where I differ a bit from Scot is in regard to the second worry he expresses in the post, the worry about God overriding our free will and coercing us into salvation.

This concern is easily seen. If monergism is true, if humans have no choice in the matter of salvation, then isn't the doctrine of election a form of coercion? Isn't God forcing you into heaven? Here is Scot expressing his concern:

I will put my cards on the table first: I believe those Calvinists who push hard for irresistible or effectual grace sketch a God who coerces and I am convinced, regardless of their contentions, that they effectively (and effectually) deny free will. If grace is irresistible, it is not chosen; if it is irresistible, humans aren’t free to say No to God.

This is the bit I want to respond to.

As regular readers know, I've gone off a time or two about the use of free will in theological debate. I've teed off on Rob Bell, N.T. Wright, Greg Boyd and I'm about to say a few things about Scot's argument above.

But let me be clear. I'm in complete agreement with Scot's concern. In my opinion he is 100% right. So my quibbles aren't about the theology. We agree on that. My quibbles are about the psychology.

As I've written about before, I think it's problematic to put so much theological weight on such a sketchy anthropological concept like "free will." I could ask Scot the same sort of question about free will that I asked of Greg Boyd:

Why would you build any theological argument upon a non-biblical, philosophically contested, scientifically disputed, and perennially controversial anthropocentric abstraction?

The problem, as I've articulated before, is that I don't like to see conversations about God dependent upon anthropology, particularly a philosophically and scientifically contested bit of anthropology. A theological reliance upon free will seems sketchy to me, like building on quicksand. Personally, I'd like to see theology come out right because we are getting God right rather than getting humans right. And I think that's where Scot is positioning himself. He wants to make a claim about God but he's using a claim out humans--an extraordinarily contested and controversial claim--to get there. That's my worry. Why base your soteriology on a dubious and hotly contested theory about human anthropology? It makes your theology so fragile and open to critique. Particularly in this Age of Neuroscience when more and more people are going to be expressing doubts about free will. This is, one might say, the neurological equivalent of being a Young Earth Creationist.

Now, to be clear, this isn't to say Scot's general worry about coercion is wrong. It isn't. My point is, rather, that when you are building a theological structure free will isn't a brick you should be reaching for.

So let's rework Scot's worry with different psychological bricks. Let's get at his theological concern using a more coherent and scientifically plausible anthropology. Let's put free will to the side and build with some better material.

To recap, Scot is worried about God's election overriding human "free" will, that monergism effectively marginalizes human agency and that, from an experiential standpoint, this would leave the human person doing something he or she didn't "choose" to do. Hence Scot's use of the word coercion--doing something you didn't want or choose to do.

As longtime readers know, Scot isn't actually talking about "free will" here. He is talking about what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls volitional unanimity, when my choices are aligned with my desires. The experience of human freedom comes when we are doing what we want to do, when volition lines up with caring.

So Scot is right to say that a feeling of coercion is experienced when our choices become misaligned with what we care about, about what we want and desire. This inner state of conflict is often experienced by addicts or by those with compulsions. But we all experience this state to greater or lesser degrees when we give in to temptation. We feel internally overthrown. This is the experience of volitional wretchedness that Paul describes in Romans 7.

So, yes. If, as monergism claims, God makes us choose things we do not want to do we'd experience a feeling of coercion, of volitional violation. We'd experience choice as coming from outside of ourselves overriding our goals, desires, and life story.

But let's be clear. We don't need to describe this as a violation of free will (whatever that this). The feeling of coercion--election as an experience of volitional violation--is real, but it's produced by breaking volitional unanimity, introducing a disjoint between choice and caring.

So far, so good. But the Calvinist has a response. And some people in the comments of Scot's post make this point: What if God isn't just affecting volition, what if God is also changing our affections, what we care about?

This is a great point. As I've often said, the issue when in comes to human choice isn't volition but affection. Our choices go where our affections go. We don't really choose God. Rather, we fall in love with God. And most spiritual biographies (see the lives of the saints) have this sort of character. A love story, of pursuit and resistance and ultimate union. It's a journey of the heart, not of the "free will." It is as Augustine said, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in You."

So it seems that all the monergist needs to do is to suggest, at the moment of election, that God changes both will and heart, volition and affection. Such a change would preserve volitional unanimity. With a change of the heart our new God-given will would line up with it: We would be both choosing God and wanting to choose God. And that unanimity is the experience of freedom. We'd feel no coercion.

So is monergism saved if we posit that God's election is both volitional and affectional? Not quite. The problem comes when we think about the nature of selfhood. Specifically, "the self" isn't just about affection. It's about memory, story, biography, integrity, and time. For the self to be the self it has to be recognized, named and embraced. In a certain sense, the self is a story we tell about ourselves over time. And that story has to have a plot, some narrative coherence and integrity. The person I was yesterday has to have some narrative connection with the person I am today. Otherwise we'd slide into insanity.

A simple example of this is waking up in the morning. As we regain consciousness one of the first things that happens is that the self is gathered and reorganized. We find the bookmark in the story of the self and get ready to move the plot forward. We wake up thinking, "What was I going to do today? Ah, yes. I have that important meeting." We remember ourselves. Our story comes back to us as we prepare to go forward in time. (And, if you're me, you need some coffee to get this process jump-started in the morning. Before your story kicks in we are, almost literally, zombies. That's what a zombie is--a human being with no narrative, no story, so self. That's what I'm like shuffling toward the coffee machine...a narrativeless zombie)

All this to say that humans are biographical creatures, that the self is narratological.

So what would happen if we woke up one day and found our affections radically disconnected from who we were the day before? We, quite literally, wouldn't recognize ourselves. The prior self would be a stranger, an alien doppelganger.

A first blush, that might sound really biblical. A perfect description of putting to death the "old man" and putting on "the new." But as I recall from those texts we are called to do this over and over. Day and after day. It seems that "putting on the new man," "not grieving the Holy Spirit," "presenting yourselves as living sacrifices" and "working out your salvation in fear and trembling" appear to be pointing to the ongoing work of sanctification, which fits better with synergism than with monergism.

But my concerns here are still mainly psychological. Waking up one day with radically new affections would traumatically fracture the narrative flow of the self. We see this sort of fracture in a variety of psychological disorders from amnesia to Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) to dementia. True, this narrative fracture might not be experienced as coercion, but it does create a catastrophic disruption of the self. It is still a phenomenological violation of the individual, the worry Scot is expressing in his post.

The point being, I think Calvinists are being psychologically naive when they say that God radically changes us in the moment of election. What they are positing isn't psychologically plausible. We wouldn't see joy or illumination at the moment of transformation but panic and psychological disorientation. The narrative flow of the self would be so traumatically ruptured that the person would struggle, and often fail, to make sense of their memories and life story.

All this presupposes that the transformation is quick. But what if this process happened more slowly, over years and years? Truth be told, as a universalist I actually think that is what is happening. That God is slowly bringing each of us along, each at a different narrative pace. A pace mainly set by God's patience--God's concern to preserve our volitional integrity, to not coerce us, to bring us to grace in a way that keeps our selfhood as biographical creatures intact. Some of us are moving rapidly home. Some of us are taking journeys like the Prodigal Son, walking away from God at this point in the story

But if this is the case, we return to Scot's point: surely human agency is involved in this process. That there is synergism between God's will and my own. Truly God is shaping us, choosing us, and electing us. It's just that this election is occurring at every moment of our entire life story.

A story, I believe, each of us is helping God to write.

Which Marley Was That?

2011-12-02T08:22:00.005-06:00

Yesterday I was lecturing in my class about the role of empathy in altruism. Since it's the Christmas season I was making a lot of references to the various charity opportunities we are exposed to this time of year. For example, I was talking about the shame I feel every time I walk into the store past the Salvation Army bell ringer. I often give some money but it's motivated by shame. Same sort of shame I feel when a cashier says ringing up my purchase, "Would you like to donate $5 to help the homeless this Christmas season?" What are you supposed to say to that?

So a lot of helping is motivated by internal impulses to manage shame, guilt, and image. Not that I'm complaining too much. I tend to think guilt is a good thing. I appreciate my guilt. I told onto it as a talisman.

Still, it's not very altruistic to give out of guilt. Which is where empathy comes in. A lot of good empirical research, most of it done by Daniel Batson, suggests that altruism (being fully other-oriented) is possible when empathy is engaged.

So this is what I was talking about in class yesterday, about how we should cultivate empathy. To make this point I ended up talking about Scrooge in Dickens's A Christmas Carol. I was, in my dramatic way, recounting the Ghost of Marley visiting Scrooge. But after class I realized I'd made a mistake. Instead of calling him the ghost of Jacob Marley I was calling him the ghost of Bob Marley.

And that, we all know, is a very different sort of Christmas story...

Love Wins: Part 9, Ghosts

2011-12-02T05:33:00.001-06:00

I hope you've enjoyed this idiosyncratic ramble through Rob Bell's Love Wins. This is the last post in this series.

Love Wins ends with a short little chapter entitled "The End is Here." There isn't a whole lot going on in this chapter, it's mainly an invitation to step into the love of God, but the start of the chapter caught my attention.

At the start of the chapter Bell talks about a moment, the moment when he was in elementary school, when he knelt by his bed and said a prayer, his parents alongside, to invite Jesus into his heart:

I told God that I believed that I was a sinner and that Jesus came to save me and I wanted to be a Christian.

A lot of evangelical Christians, I'm guessing, have a similar moment in their own biography.

(I don't, incidentally. The Churches of Christ believe that salvation occurs at the moment of baptism. We don't recite prayers "accepting Jesus into our hearts." Mainly because not a single person in the bible was asked to so such a thing or converted in this manner. Not one person, in the entire bible, ever prayed a prayer asking Jesus into his/her heart. So in the Churches of Christ we're a bit flummoxed by the whole "sinner's prayer" routine. We don't understand why evangelicals, people who claim to be especially committed to the bible, do something so unbiblical. Why not just do what they did in the bible? But I digress. Back to Love Wins...)

Why does Bell tell us at the end of the book about his bedside conversion? Particularly when he goes on to highlight everything about that moment that might look forced, naive, simplistic or even wrong:

Now I'm well aware of how shaped I was by my environment, how young and naive I was, and how easy it is to discount emotional religious experiences. With very little effort a person can deconstruct an experience like that by pointing out all of the other things going on in that prayer, like the desire to please one's parents and the power of religion to shape a child. But however helpful that may be, it can easily miss the one thing that can't be denied: What happened that night was real. It meant something significant then and it continues to have profound significance for me. That prayer was a defining moment in my life.

The point Bell wants to make is that, despite all this, despite his youth and his theological naivete, there was something of God in this moment.

Still, why is he sharing this? He continues by suggesting that the point in all this is that we shouldn't look back on our earliest understandings of heaven, hell, and salvation with shame or embarrassment. Maybe we got God all wrong when we were younger. But that doesn't mean God wasn't with us all the while. As Bell writes:

As we experience [God's] love, there is a temptation at times to become hostile to our former understandings, feeling embarrassed that we were so "simple" or "naive," or "brainwashed" or whatever terms arise when we haven't come to terms with our own story.

I'm not exactly sure what Bell is aiming at with all this. Who his audience might me. But my guess is that he's talking to people who have come to share his vision of God's love and who now, in light of that vision, look back on their past with feelings of remorse and even anger. Perhaps there are scars from a harsh fundamentalist upbringing. Perhaps there is a feeling of being emotionally abused or theologically hoodwinked.

And if that's the case, if that is what Bell is aiming at, then I see his point about coming "to terms with our own story." It's hard to move into a future of love if there's some baggage from the past.

I've been writing at this blog for about five years. And during that time I've had lots of conversations with lots of different people about the life of faith. And one of the things I've learned from all those conversations is this: When it comes to God, more than anything else, people are wrestling with ghosts.

And by that I mean people are wrestling with their past. Their home. Their church. Their early and formative experiences with God. These ghosts are ever present. They haunt every conversation about God, faith, and the church. Nine times out of ten, if someone expresses a view about the church they are talking about a ghost. Some residual hurt that has never healed. Nine time out of ten, if someone expresses a view about God they are talking about a ghost. A parent. A church. A preacher.

Ghosts haunt it all. So much so it's hard sometimes to tell when we are talking theologically or therapeutically. The wounds of the past spill forward into any conversation about the life of faith.

Which is to say, if I'm following correctly, that I agree with Bell on the need to reconcile with our past. Come to some sort of peace. Because if we can't we'll never find grace in all the conversations we have about God, church, and faith. All we'll find, over and over, conversation after conversation, are ghosts.

Cheap Praise and Costly Praise

2011-11-30T05:21:00.000-06:00

One of the more popular devotional/praise songs when I was in college, and one still used on our campus, was "The Steadfast Love of the Lord Never Ceases." The lyrics:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion says my soul.
Therefore I will hope in Him.

The lyrics come from Lamentations 3.22-24 (the exact wording is from the ESV). It's a great song but I have some problems with how we sing it. Specifically, the song is taken out of context.

What is missing when this song is sung is Lamentations 3.1-21, all the verses leading up to this outpouring of praise. These verses are critical if we are to properly understand the sort of faith being expressed in verses 22-24.

Here are verses 1-21 (NLT). They are an extraordinarily raw and heart wrenching expression of lament and accusation:

I am the one who has seen the afflictions
that come from the rod of the Lord’s anger.
He has led me into darkness,
shutting out all light.
He has turned his hand against me
again and again, all day long.

He has made my skin and flesh grow old.
He has broken my bones.
He has besieged and surrounded me
with anguish and distress.
He has buried me in a dark place,
like those long dead.

He has walled me in, and I cannot escape.
He has bound me in heavy chains.
And though I cry and shout,
he has shut out my prayers.
He has blocked my way with a high stone wall;
he has made my road crooked.

He has hidden like a bear or a lion,
waiting to attack me.
He has dragged me off the path and torn me in pieces,
leaving me helpless and devastated.
He has drawn his bow
and made me the target for his arrows.

He shot his arrows
deep into my heart.
My own people laugh at me.
All day long they sing their mocking songs.
He has filled me with bitterness
and given me a bitter cup of sorrow to drink.

He has made me chew on gravel.
He has rolled me in the dust.
Peace has been stripped away,
and I have forgotten what prosperity is.
I cry out, “My splendor is gone!
Everything I had hoped for from the Lord is lost!”

The thought of my suffering and homelessness
is bitter beyond words.
I will never forget this awful time,
as I grieve over my loss.
Yet I still dare to hope
when I remember this:

And it is here, at this moment, where, inexplicably, the song of praise breaks out:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning.
Great is your faithfulness.
The Lord is my portion says my soul.
Therefore I will hope in Him.

Now here's what I want to ask you. Isn't it cheating a bit to jump to verse 22 without first singing verses 1-21? And yet, that's what we do in worship. We skip to verse 22. Literally and metaphorically. Skipping over the lament we jump straight into the praise. We skip over the brokenness. The sorrow. The tears. The grief. The despair. The anger. The pain. The doubt. The god-forsakenness.

We skip over it all and start worship at verse 22.

And what sort of spirituality does that create? Answer: It creates a false, cotton-candy sort of spirituality. A spirituality that wants to jump to the happy ending without the dark and painful journey of lament. It makes me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's distinction between Cheap Grace and Costly Grace. I wonder if we should start talking about Cheap Praise and Costly Praise.

Cheap Praise starts with verse 22. Costly Praise starts with verse 1.

To be clear, I'm not saying that we shouldn't sing verses 22-24. I'm just saying it's cheap to skip ahead. Skipping ahead you skip over the experience where God is a wild animal who drags you off the path and tears you to pieces, leaving you bloody and broken. Skipping ahead you skip over the experience where God stands you up against the wall and uses you for target practice, shooting his arrows deep into your heart.

If we start the song, as we often do, with verse 22 we get one sort of spirituality. A spirituality of cheap praise. But if we start the song in verse 1 we get something very different, costly praise. A praise that is hard-won, honest, and truthful.

And it all boils down to where you start the song.

Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study of the Word "Righteous"

2011-11-29T05:48:00.007-06:00

One of the interesting things about the bible is that it defies theological systematization. The bible is unruly and messy. And for some, this multivocality (which many take to be a euphemism for inconsistency and incoherence) is damning, marking the bible as an error-filled and wholly human product.

I get that. There is nothing more disorienting than growing up as a fundamentalist and encountering multivocality and discrepancies in the biblical text. This is a well worn path--disillusionment with biblical literalism--from belief to unbelief.

But while I appreciate these struggles, and struggle with them myself, there are times when I really enjoy the zany inconsistency of the bible. I enjoy the fact that it often feels like we are trying to stuff a thunderstorm into a bottle. What I love (and hate if I'm honest) about the bible is how, just when you've got something figured out, there is a chorus of voices within the text that resists what you've just created--your simplification, codification, and systematization. There's a reason, for example, why Calvinists and Arminians will never agree. They each sit on opposite ends of one of these perennial tensions.

All this struck me the other day thinking about how a lot of Church folk use the word "righteous." Specifically, they are not using the word in a biblical way. Rather, they are using the word as a theological term. A fully biblical usage leaves words messy and imprecise. But used theologically and doctrinally these words become clean, clinical, and precise. The word "righteous" in this instance is just a cog in a theological machine.

For example, when many Christians use the word "righteous" they don't have the biblical usage in mind. Because the biblical usage is all over the place. Rather, their use of the word "righteous" is governed by how the word functions in a made-man system that is imposed upon the bible. And when this man-made system is imposed on the bible a lot of the unruly stuff in the biblical text is cut out, marginalized, and left to the side.

Think of man-made doctrinal systems as a cookie cutter and the bible as the cookie dough.

What this means is that when people use a word like "righteous" they are using the cookie cutter version of the word, not the cookie dough version of the word, the biblical version of the word. That is to say, when people use doctrinal terms they are pushing a lot of biblical material to the side, ignoring a lot of the biblical material that doesn't fit into the shape of the cookie cutter system.

Let me illustrate this. One cookie cutter use of the word "righteous" is to claim that righteousness is imputed by God and has nothing to do with human moral effort. We all know passages, most of them in Romans, where Paul uses the word righteous in this way. But that cookie cutter use of the word leaves a lot of cookie dough on the cutting board. Some examples:

Matthew 25.45-46
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

Matthew 25 is a great example of how the righteous are defined as those who care for the poor and needy and, thus, are the ones who inherit eternal life.

Here are some examples of personal piety earning you the label righteous:

Mark 6.20a
Herod feared John and protected him, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man.

Luke 1.5-6
In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were righteous in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commands and decrees blamelessly.

Luke 2.25
Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was on him.

This passage in Luke is a nice parallel of Matthew 25 where welcoming the poor is "repaid at the resurrection of the righteous":

Luke 14.13-15
"But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”

Here's a curious passage in Romans, of all places, about righteousness being connected to moral effort:

Romans 2.6-13
God “will repay each person according to what they have done.” To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and who reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger. There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile; but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For God does not show favoritism.

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous.

Speaking of Romans, just when you think you've got the mantra "by faith alone" down you run into Martin Luther's letter of straw.

James 2.24
You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

Following James, you can't get any more clear on the relationship between actually doing right and being righteous than the words of the Beloved Apostle:

1 John 3.7
Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous.

If John is to be believed then there's been a whole lot of deceiving going on! When was the last time you've heard it preached from the pulpit: "Let there be no mistake, dear congregation, it is only the one who does what is right who is righteous." Personally, I think we need some sermons like this. I agree with St. John. Christians are being lead astray.

Finally, just when you hear a great sermon on how all our good works are filthy rags that we need to take off so we can be clothed in Christ...

Revelation 19.8
"Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” (Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of God’s holy people.)

D'oh!

The Slavery of Death: Part 15, To Live as if Death Were Not

2011-11-28T05:33:00.003-06:00

In the last post we talked a bit about the eccentric identity of Jesus, about how Jesus didn't own or possesses his identity, how he received it as gift from the Father. Consequently, Jesus did not fear death, did not fear dispossession or loss. There was no "grasping" in Jesus (cf. Philippians 2.6). This allowed Jesus to step away from the anxieties that drive human rivalry, to step away from the ways we strive for meaning, success, status, reputation, security, and esteem.

In making those observations we followed the work of Arthur McGill. However, another thinker who has done great work in this area is the Catholic theologian and writer James Alison. I'd like to share a few quotes from Alison in this post to reinforce and supplement our analysis about the identity of Jesus and the identity that we are called to adopt.

A key insight for Alison is the way death has distorted human desire. This informs Alison's view of the doctrine of Original Sin. Recall from the very first posts in this series that we've been thinking about what, exactly, we've inherited from the Fall. Specifically, we've been following the Eastern Orthodox tradition which suggests that what we inherit from the Fall isn't sin per se, but the mortal condition--death. Being mortal--in the Apostle Paul's word "flesh" (sarx)--Satan can use our fear of death to tempt us into sinful practices. Being mortal the fear of death is the greatest motivator in human psychology and the Devil uses this for his purposes. This is the slavery to the fear of death, a fear controlled by Satan, that is discussed in Hebrew 2.14-15. This is the work of Satan that Jesus came to earth to dismantle (1 John 3.8). This perspective regarding the relationship between sin and death (what the Orthodox call Ancestral Sin in contrast to the Protestant doctrine of Original Sin) is descried well by the theologian S. Mark Heim:

Removed from Eden we are "[u]nourished by the divine energy, our existence fades into subjection to corruption and death. In such a state, our mortality becomes a source of anxiety. Futile attempts to defend ourselves from it lead us into active sin and estrange us from trust in God. Now sinfulness is more a result of mortality than mortality from sinfulness. To say that humans are 'conceived in sin' does not mean that some guilt or evil inclination is passed on to them in the act of their conception, but that what they inherit is a mortal human nature, which became mortal as a result of sin.

Alison is very much working with this view, but he goes a bit deeper. Specifically, he suggests that the rule of death after the Fall has distorted and disordered our desires and affections. It's not just that we are anxious about death, but that our anxieties have so shaped our desires that we want and crave things that are, at root, death fetishes. We crave things in the Fall that are significant to us only because they help us hide from or flee from death. And these cravings are what brings about human contentiousness and violence. Alison summarizing this take on the doctrine of Original Sin:

Very briefly put, this doctrine posits that, in the light of Jesus' resurrection from the dead, it became possible to look back and see that all humans, ever since there has been humanity (and the codeword for this was 'since Adam'), have been involved, by the mere face of being born and socialized into human culture, in a culture run by death, vengefulness and its scapegoating and sacrificial outcomes. We are thus all born into a culture in which desire is distorted against itself and frustrated.

"All desire is severely distorted" according to Alison because these desires "partake of the imagination which dominates us, an imagination run by rivalry, resistance to change, the longing for security, and by the need to protect ourselves against death by seeking our survival at the expense of others." That's a key insight. In the Fall, in this era dominated by death, we find ourselves among rivals with each of us seeking to "protect ourselves against death by seeking our survival at the expense of others."

And yet, Alison continues, these desires are "capable of being undistorted over time, of being brought to share, starting from where it is, in the life of God." How is this accomplished?

Alison's answer parallels the analysis from the last post. The difference is that, rather than talking about identity, Alison talks about two different sorts of desires. On the one hand are the desires distorted by death, the desires we have because we've been "born and socialized into human culture, in a culture run by death." These are the desires of our "flesh," the desires that Satan uses to lure us into ersatz meaning (e.g., making money, being "successful," being famous, etc.). But in the life of Jesus we find another source of desire. Here, in the personality of Jesus, are desires that are uncontaminated by death. As described by Alison, in a world where death lures us into sin Jesus becomes a counter-lure, a location of desire that is not distorted by the culture of death. Alison on this contrast:

So we might talk about two sorts of imagination alive in humanity, one, the apparently normal one, in which we are run by death and given meaning starting from death, in which the search for meaning is always over against some other, and in which we lure each other on, and which is inevitably futile--haunted by vanity; then the other sort of imagination which has been made available by the installing in our midst of the first fruits of a counter-lure: the possibility that our imaginations and our desire can be made alive to meaning and goodness in a way which does not lead us into conflict and rivalry.

Again, the things we desire are meaningful insofar as they aid us in the fight against death. And as we've noted, this effort necessarily brings us into conflict with others. The way out, according to Alison, is to transcend death. To live as Jesus lived, to live as if death were not. This robs death of its power to confer meaning. And when death loses its power to confer meaning we find that we are no longer in rivalry with others. No longer do we "need to protect ourselves against death by seeking our survival at the expense of others." This is the same analysis we observed in the words of John Chrysostom: "[H]e who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil." Here is Alison on this point:

[W]e wait for grace to bring us to our senses, to our right minds, by refusing all sorts of lures and temptations into easy meaning, and we are only able to do this by living as if death were not. That is, by treating death, and all the ways in which it runs, frightens, compels, hurries, threatens, shames us as something which is not out to get us and has no power over us.

Now one of the things I really like about the way Alison approaches this topic is a particular frame he uses, a frame that I think is really helpful in connecting all this theology with day to day life. For example, you may have been asking over the last few posts, "What does all this look like in practice?" What might it look like to step away from desires that have been distorted by death? What might it look like to live as if death were not?

Well, according to Alison one aspect of how this might look is in the renunciation of "winning." Our death-driven desires and rivalries are often experienced as competitions that we are trying to "win." This could be winning an argument, winning an election, winning a promotion, winning recognition, winning the lottery, winning a fight (of any sort), winning a battle for control, winning in the court of public opinion, winning a struggle for power, and so on. Almost all our rivalries involve some sort of "winning" against a rival.

But those who live as if death were not don't worry about winning or losing. Because winning is only meaningful against a backdrop of death. Winning is only meaningful if death is handing out prizes to winners and losers. This is why, as noted in the last post, Jesus was so calm in front of Pilate. Jesus wasn't trying to "win." Jesus wasn't afraid to "lose" when Pilate threatened him with death. Jesus was playing a different sort of game. Consequently, death couldn't be used to push or pull Jesus, couldn't tempt him into caring about what most of us care about (i.e., winning or losing). As Alison describes:

We are so used to describing Jesus' cross and resurrection as a victory--a description taken from the military hardware store of satanic meaning--that we easily forget that what that victory looked like was a failure. So great is the power behind Jesus' teaching and self-giving that he was able to fail, thus showing once and for all that 'having to win', the grasping on to meaning, success, reputation, life and so on is of no consequence at all. Death could not hold him in, because he was held in being by one for whom death does not exist, is not even the sort of rival who might be challenged to a duel which someone might win. But if death can only get meaning by having victory, if the order of sacred violence can only have meaning if it matters to us to survive, to be, to feel good, at the expense of someone, then someone for whom it doesn't matter to lose is someone who is playing its game on totally different terms, and its potential for giving meaning collapses.

I hope you can see, in relation to the last post, how this extends our analysis of Jesus's identity in interesting ways. Free from the fear of death Jesus is able to "fail." Or, rather, he's able to "succeed" in a manner that can only be viewed, from our death-infected vantage point, as utterly alien and paradoxical. Unlike most of us, Jesus isn't using death to create meaning. Jesus doesn't have to own or possess something--doesn't have to win--to be successful or important or admirable or secure. Jesus isn't driven by death-infected desires. Which means Jesus doesn't have to fight against you or me or anyone else. Jesus doesn't worry that you might get or have something that he desires. Jesus isn't worried about you getting his promotion, moving into his neighborhood, getting the recognition, ruining his nation, cutting in line (literally or socially), your team winning, or you getting your candidate elected. These death-infected desires don't motivate Jesus. It's never you against Jesus. Jesus is not a rival of yours. No matter who gets the promotion, or neighborhood, or recognition, or nation, or position, or election Jesus doesn't experience loss. He's not trying to win against you. Winning doesn't motivate Jesus.

Because Jesus lives as if death were not what motivates Jesus is love.

As Alison sums it up:

[Jesus] models what it looks like to live from within the utterly non-rivalistic creative power for which death is simply not a reality.

The Christmas Story

2011-11-27T05:12:00.001-06:00

Wishing you a blessed first Sunday of Advent.

"Love is the Expansion of the Self"

2011-11-24T10:07:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Timothy for sending me this video, a clip for an upcoming documentary about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I expect many here will have a variety of opinions about the OWS movement. I'd like to bracket those issues (pipe dream!) and simply say that I resonated a great deal with the theology of this particular video. I think it expresses a lot of insight into the Principalities and Powers. This isn't to say capitalism and market economies are evil, just that they are as fallen and prone to the forces of dehumanization as all institutions in the Fall. Satan is ruling capitalism as surely as he is ruling the other Principalities and Powers. The key is resistance to the forces of dehumanization. To, in the words of William Stringfellow, live humanely within the fall. It's that expression of humanity, that desire to humanize modern economies, that attracts me to the video.

Besides, the phrase in the video "love is the expansion of the self" could have come right out of Unclean...

BTW, has anyone read Eisenstein's book Sacred Economies?

We Weren't as Good as the Muppets...

2011-11-23T08:23:00.002-06:00

Our church has being doing a series entitled "I am Highland" which introduces one of our members and shares a bit about their ministry and journey with the church. You can watch these at Highland's site on Vimeo.

Anyhow, here was the "I am Highland" video from this week:

Daniel the Puppet - I am Highland from Highland Church on Vimeo.

BTW, regular readers know why Daniel doesn't play Jesus at Highland. It's because that role is already taken. For your information Daniel, I'm the one who plays Jesus at Highland.

Anyway, I loved Daniel's "I am Highland" video. It was very nostalgic for me.

If you didn't grow up going to church you may be unaware about just how much Christians are into puppetry. Puppets are huge with Christians. For example, puppets make it in at #123 on the list of Stuff Christians Like.

Puppets at my church mainly showed up during Vacation Bible School. I have fond memories of this as the High School students were in charge of the puppets for VBS. So as a teen I got pretty good at puppetry. I was aided in this by the fact that as a child I lived through the Golden Age of Puppets in the US. During my formative years Jim Henson made puppets mainstream, taking his creations from Sesame Street to primetime TV with The Muppet Show (the show debuted in 1976 and ran until 1981). In fact, this Thanksgiving weekend the Muppets are making a bit of a comeback with a new movie--The Muppets.

So as a kid I imbibed--from Sesame Street to The Muppet Show--a lot of good puppetry. Thus, when I became a senior I felt well prepared to be the teen in charge of the VBS puppets. And this being my last time with the puppets as a part of the youth group, I decided to raise the bar.

It ended up being a bit of a disaster.

For starters, I went a bit crazy with the scripts. Back then you couldn't (or at least we didn't) buy canned puppet scripts for VBS. You had to write your own. You'd look at the themes each night and try to write a little situational sketch with the puppets to illustrate that evening's message. I went a bit overboard with this, writing overly long (sort of like my blog posts) scenes aiming, in my own mind, at the VBS equivalent of an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

The other problem was that, due to the complexity of the skits I wrote, I needed a lot of scene changes. That's right, I needed scene changes. No plain black background for me. Amazingly, I convinced our youth group to come to the church on weekends to paint backdrops for the puppets. I'd convinced them that all this work was going to be worth it. We were going to have the best VBS puppets our church had ever seen!

So we painted. And rehearsed. Watch out Jim Henson.

It all came to a humbling end when, on the first night, we were doing a skit to illustrate the theme "Jesus is our Savior." The scene I wrote had the puppets out on a boat on a sunny day. Things are looking good until the clouds darken and a storm blows in. (Scene change!) The waves get higher and one of the puppets is pitched out of the boat and begins to drown.

If I recall, the puppet gets pitched out of the boat because of a lighting strike. We had this big cardboard lighting bolt attached to a clothes hanger.

This is all very exciting isn't it?

Anyway, the puppets in the boat find a life preserver and throw it to the drowning puppet. After much effort and drama, they pull him back onboard. He's saved! At this point the clouds break and the sun returns. (Scene change!) Back under sunny skies the puppets discuss the rescue and make the observation that Jesus is...wait for it, wait for it...just like a life preserver!

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a damn fine puppet script.

Anyway, things don't go as planed. The scene changes involved pulling a string to get the painted fabric pulled up and over the 2x4 board above us. During the first scene change the fabric got caught and wouldn't move. So we tugged and tugged, eventually pulling the board onto our heads. Crash!

I think some of my friends actually did get whacked pretty good as our hands were occupied, being inserted into puppets as they were and thus unavailable to ward off the blow. The song leader rushed to our aid and helped pull the board and all that painstakingly painted scenery off of us.

Needles to say, the kids just loved it. Roaring with laughter through the entire mishap. The incident is now a part of church lore as the day-the-puppets-pulled-the-scenery-on-top-of-their-heads story.

And so ended my puppet career.

At the time, I felt like such an idiot. But now, looking back, I have such fond memories. I loved those puppets. So many warm memories of friends (we are all grown with kids of our own now) kneeling behind the puppet theater, arms aloft, scripts taped to the boards in front of us, making magic like Kermit the Frog.

We weren't as good as the Muppets, but we made the kids laugh. And that's what I remember most of all.

The Slavery of Death: Part 14, Eccentric Identity

2011-11-22T05:08:00.005-06:00

In this post I want to finish our exploration of Arthur McGill's book Death and Life: An American Theology. More, I want to starting tying together a lot of the threads from this series.

Across the last two posts we've been using McGill's work to approach two texts:

1 John 3.8b
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

According to McGill, Americans are dominated by a culture of death avoidance. Fearing death we create identities built on possession and ownership. As McGill says, "I can do this securing in two possible ways. First, I may try to seize bits of the world for myself. Second, I may act in such a way that I will be approved by other persons or forces so that, in reward for something I have done or because they expect themselves to benefit from me, they will deliver some bit of reality over into my control." McGill calls these two routes to identity aggression and appeasement.

We see in this, in light of Hebrews 2, the association between a fear of death and a bondage to sin and the devil. Fear of death leads us to create a "sinful identity," an identity built upon possession. More, this fear causes us to fear loss and dispossession. This fear infuses existence and brings us into conflict with others. As McGill writes,

What propels people to possess? Their fear of death, their fear that their identity will be taken from them.
...
A sinful kind of identity surely requires aggression or appeasement; it requires defenses against others and against the threat of death as final dispossession.
...
[When we define our identity] in terms of a reality which we can have and which we can securely label with our own name, we live under the dominion of death; we live under the dominion of dispossession. We live in terror of death, of having this bit of reality which we call ourselves, taken from us. Our whole existence is controlled by that terror.

In light of all this, let's now attempt to connect McGill's analysis with the work we did early in this series. Specifically, we can see a parallel between McGill's "identity of possession" and sarx, Paul's word for the sinful identity. As NT scholar James Dunn has described Paul's use of sarx:

[Sarx denotes] what we might describe as human mortality. It is the continuum of human mortality, the person characterized and conditioned by human frailty...

Sarx creates sin because, being mortal, we strive to fend off death through possession. As John Chrysostom observed: "[H]e who fears death is a slave and subjects himself to everything in order to avoid dying." Here we see how mortality fears are the source of our "selfishness," of our "fleshly desires." As Orthodox theologian John Romanides has summarized:

Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man's fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him...Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man's weakness in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up. In addition to the fact that man, [as John Chrysostom has written,] "subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying," he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. He loves flatterers and hates his detractors. He seeks his own and envies the success of others. He loves those who love him and hates those who hate him. He seeks security and happiness and wealth, glory, bodily pleasures...Fear and anxiety render man an individual.

Having connected McGill's analysis to the Eastern Orthodox perspective regarding the relationship between sin and death we can now turn to the Christus Victor themes of salvation. The Scriptures say that the Son of Man appeared to "destroy the devil's work," to defeat the one who "holds the power of death." So how might this happen in McGill's analysis? How might we be rescued from sin, fear and the devil?

The answer builds off of McGill's notions regarding an identity based upon possession and how that makes us anxious about dispossession. Christus Victor salvation, for McGill, involves us being liberated from an identity of possession. Liberated from this identity our fears of dispossession will cease allowing us to respond in love to those around us. The fear of death dissipates and love can emerge. "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear."

How might this look? McGill gets his answer by examining the identity of Jesus in the gospels. Where does Jesus get his identity? And how is Jesus's identity different from our identity of possession? Toward an answer here is McGill analyzing the identity of Jesus in the gospels:

In the New Testament portrayal of Jesus, nothing is more striking than the lack of interest in Jesus' own personality. His teachings and miracles, the response of the crowd and the hostility of the authorities, his dying and his resurrection--these are not read as windows in Jesus' own experience, feelings, insights, and growth. In other words, the center of Jesus' reality is not within Jesus himself. Everything that happens to him, everything that is done by him, including his death, is displaced to another context and is thereby reinterpreted. However, this portrayal is understood to be a true reflection of Jesus' own way of existing. He himself does not live out of himself. He lives, so to speak, from beyond himself. Jesus does not confront his followers as a center which reveals himself. He confronts them as always revealing what is beyond him. In that sense Jesus lives what I call an ecstatic identity.

In all the early testimony to Jesus, this particular characteristic is identified with the fact that Jesus knows that his reality comes from God...Jesus never has his own being; he is continually receiving it...He is only as one who keeps receiving himself from God.

The key to Jesus's identity is that he doesn't "own" it. Jesus doesn't "possess" himself. Rather, Jesus receives his identity. His identity is gift. The center of Jesus's identity exists outside of himself. In the language of David Kelsey Jesus is living an "eccentric existence." From Kelsey's book Eccentric Existence:

[T]he question "Who are we as creatures?" makes it clear that while I have my personal identity only in and through relations with other creatures of giving and receiving, my personal identity is not given to me by them in their assessment of me and does not depend on their judgments of me. My personal identity is free of them, grounded elsewhere. I am radically given to directly only by the triune God. Faith as trust responsive to God's giving is the attitude that my right to be and act, and the justification of the time and space I take up being and acting, is not contingent on my meeting the needs or acquiring the approval of any of those finite others to whom I give and from whom I receive in the society of creatures. Faith is the attitude of trust in God's radical giving of reality as alone definitive of my personal identity: a finite creature called and empowered to be, to act, and to give in my own place and time. Your personal identity is defined by God alone and not by any creature. It is eccentrically grounded and defined. (p. 339-340)

An "eccentric" identity is an identity grounded outside the boundary of the self. An eccentric identity is the opposite of McGill's identity of possession where, as he describes it, "I have a boundary which marks the domain of my reality." As McGill notes, Jesus did not define his identity in this manner. Jesus had an "ecstatic" or "eccentric" identity, an identity found outside of himself in the Father. Consequently, Jesus feared no one. Was competitive with no one. Was aggressive toward no one. Why? He didn't own himself. And, thus, could not be dispossessed of himself. McGill on the dynamics of the Christ-like, eccentric identity:

[B]ecause I no longer live by virtue of the reality which I possess, which I hold, which I master and keep at my disposal, I am free to share myself and all my possessions with others. Above all...I can be honest with others. I can be open before them. I do not have to draw a line to mark the boundaries of my reality where I place a sign which says "Keep Out." I do not have to conceal my being behind a wall in order to keep it mine and to prevent others from taking it from me. Since I never have myself, I can never be dispossessed of myself. In short, in all my relations with other people I am freed from the anxiety of having always to keep possession of my own reality in order to be.

The classic example of this in the gospels is Jesus's lack of fear in the face of Pilate.

John 19.9b-11a
“Where do you come from?” Pilate asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate said. “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”

Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above."

Jesus doesn't have to aggressively protect himself from Pilate. Jesus's non-violence, his ability to love, was founded upon his eccentric identity. Free of the fear of death Jesus is free from sin, violence, and the devil. Perfect love had cast out fear. Thus, Jesus can go to the cross and forgive those who sent him there.

It is as John Chrysostom says, "[H]e who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil."

Once again, as we saw early in this series, we see the close connection between the fear of death and sin. But our earlier biblical/theological analysis is now starting to unpack in ways that might allow us to get a handle on, psychologically speaking, what it might mean to be set free from the fear of death and why that liberation might allow us to exist in loving ways with others. Following McGill, when we fear death we cannot love others, for death causes us to adopt an identity based upon self-ownership. This sort of identity, and the striving it promotes, brings us into rivalry with others. As John Romanides describes:

Love that is free of self-interest and necessity fears nothing...All human unrest is rooted in inherited psychological and bodily infirmities, that is, in the soul's separation from grace and in the body's corruptibility, from which springs all selfishness. Any perceived threat automatically triggers fear and uneasiness. Fear does not allow a man to be perfected in love...Being under the sway of death and not having real and correct faith in God, man is anxious over everything and is ruled by selfish bodily and psychological motives and, thus, he is unable to love unselfishly and freely. He loves and has faith according to what he perceives to be to his own advantage...Thus, he is deprived of his original destiny and is off the mark spiritually. In biblical language, these failures and deviations are called sins. The fountain of man's personal sin is the power of death that is in the hands of the devil and in man's own willing submission to him.

Consequently, if we want to step out of this dynamic--to step out of our anxiety-driven rivalries as Jesus did with Pilate--we need to adopt an eccentric identity. A loving identity that is "free of self-interest and fears nothing."

Across these posts we should be gaining a sense of what all this might look like. Opposed to an identity of possession we have an identity received as gift. Rather than holding onto our identity with a death grip, we come with hands that are open. Perhaps there is no better vision of what this might look like than in Philippians 2:

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped...

Note the role of grasping--holding onto status, reputation, power. Clinging to--grasping--the stuff of self-definition, self-esteem, personhood and identity. Grasping is an identity of possession.

And how many of us are engaged in this activity? Grasping at identity? Clinging. Holding on. Knuckles white.

But if we let go, if we don't fear death, loss, and dispossession, the devil begins to lose his power over us. We are starting to see how the Son of Man is "destroying the works of the devil" by "freeing those who all their lives where held in slavery by their fear of death." As John Chrysostom describes:

For indeed 'man would give skin for skin, and all things for [the sake of] his life,' [but] if a man should decide to disregard this, whose slave is he then? He fears no one, is in terror of no one, is higher than everyone, and is freer than everyone...And when the devil finds such a soul, he can accomplish in it none of his works. Tell me, though, what can he threaten? The loss of money or honor? Or exile from one's country? For these are small things to him 'who counteth not even his life dear,' says blessed Paul.

Do you see that in casting out the tyranny of death, He has dissolved the strength of the devil?

Notice how Chrysostom describes the victory over Satan as the victory over the identity of possession. If nothing can be taken away from us the strength of the devil, which is based upon the fear of death, is dissolved. This freedom is exactly what Jesus demonstrates in Philippians 2. Jesus lets go, empties himself, entrusts himself to the Father. Nothing can be taken away from Jesus because he doesn't own it in the first place. Jesus doesn't fear dispossession because he's already dispossessed himself in the act of kenosis. Consequently, no one could threaten or scare Jesus into acting selfishly or aggressively. As Pilate discovered, the fear of death, Satan's greatest tool, was ineffectual against Jesus. Death had no power over Jesus. This allowed Jesus to fully love us, "to become obedient to death, even a death on a cross."

John 15.13
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

And let's return to Philippians 2 to note that this route, this letting go, is the remedy Paul puts forward to reduce rivalry, the violence produced by grasping, by the identity of possession. This link between possession and rivalry is also nicely illustrated in the book of James:

James 4.1-2
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God.

What causes violence--quarrels, fights, and killing? An identity seeking to possess. Desiring but not having. Coveting but not getting what we want.

The solution, again, is to receive our identity, as Jesus did, as a gift from God. We learn to let go. And by adopting this eccentric identity we begin to "have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus."

1 John 3.14-18a; 4.17b-18a
We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?

In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love.

Streaming 2012: "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

2011-11-21T05:01:00.006-06:00

I mentioned a few months ago that I'll be presenting with Walter Brueggemann during Streaming at Rochester College this June 18-20 on the theme "I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice."

I've cut a few promo videos for Streaming. In this one I talk about how Dr. Brueggemann's discussions regarding the tensions between the Levitcal and prophetic traditions in the life of Israel helped trigger some of the points made in my book Unclean:

It's an honor, to say the least, to have someone like Walter Brueggemann read your book and comment on how much he learned from it. A few weeks ago I was also surprised and humbled to get a note from Stanley Hauerwas complimenting the book. Dr. Hauerwas specifically commented on how helpful the book is in thinking through how the church treats the mentally ill and disabled, a subject of interest to him (and me--shoot, I bet we're all interested in the how the church treats all sorts of people).

Unclean is a book about the choices facing the church in how it treats people. And those choices aren't easy. So I'm looking forward to thinking through those dynamics this June at Streaming with Walter Brueggemann and others interested in missional leadership. Hope to see you there!

On Heretics & Disagreement

2011-11-19T07:34:00.005-06:00

We muzzle dogs; shall we leave men free to open their mouths and say what they please?...God makes it plain that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy. We are to crush beneath our heels all natural affections when his honour is at stake. The father should not spare his child, nor the husband his wife, nor the friend that friend who is dearer to him than life.
--John Calvin, Protestant Reformer and Father of Calvinism (1509-1564)

Calvin says that he is certain, and [other sects] say that they are; Calvin says that they are wrong and wishes to judge them, and so do they. Who shall be judge? What made Calvin the arbiter of all the sects, that he alone should kill? He has the Word of God and so have they. If the matter is certain, to who is it so? To Calvin? But then why does he write so many books about manifest truth?...In view of the uncertainty we must define the heretic simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself.
--Sebastian Castellio, French theologian (1515-1563)