In my recent posts about progressive Christianity and our longing for a tribe, a close knit faith community, I discussed why it can be hard for progressives to build, maintain and grow a church.

One solution here, that a lot of progressives take, is to worship with a community that is more conservative than you are.

There's an art form to pulling this off. So let me offer some recommendations.

First, by "more conservative than you are" I don't mean a conservative church. That may not be tenable. What you are looking for is something that might be described as "moderate." If you can't find a local progressive church, find the most moderate church you can. 

Second, your bond to the church can't be based on agreement. Obviously. But that's hard for many of us since our default--among both progressives and conservatives--is to think that "being a Christian" means being right, possessing all the correct ideas. More and more it seems that Christianity is becoming an issue-based religion, an ideology, having the right views on a suite of issues, progressive or conservative.

If you can't let this go then you'll spend all your time at church thinking, "That's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong..." Maybe it is all wrong, but as Jesus said, people will know we are Christians by our love. You have to build your relationship with the church on something more than intellectual assent. Don't just sit in the pews spinning theological plates in your head. My recommendation would be to throw yourself into a ministry you are passionate about. Make that service and the people in that ministry your tether to the faith community.

Third, try not to be a theological snowflake. You're worshiping in a more conservative context, so some people are going to hold and proclaim traditional, conservative beliefs. Don't fall to pieces if someone mentions hell or penal substitutionary atonement or a problematic theodicy.

Of course, every situation is different. Some churches are toxic. And you have to be wise about how you share your progressive beliefs. It's all very complex and delicate. Still, my main point is that if you choose to worship with a more conservative church you need to have some thick skin, theologically speaking. You can't be fragile or brittle every time you hear something you disagree with. Again, it's related to the point above, you have to build the relationship on more than theological agreement.

A few months back I mentioned in one of these Friday journal entries that I don't read a lot of fiction. More precisely, I haven't read a lot of fiction outside of Flannery O'Connor over the last few years.

I did, however, manage to read The Brothers Karamazov last summer. It took me forever, but I finally read the whole book.

And goodness, how it has stayed with me. I carry so much of that book with me. I think about it all the time. Book IV, the teachings of the Elder Zosima. Alyosha's whole way of moving through the world, especially how he mends and heals all the way through Part 4. The moral choice presented by the book, Ivan's "everything is permitted" versus Zosima's "make yourself answerable for all men's sins."

Encouraged by how much the novel has affected me, I'm going to read another novel this summer. I'm going to stick with the Russians. I have Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina on my shelf and plan to tackle one of them this summer.

I'm a big fan of The Bible Project. They make very good videos for Bible study, brief overviews of all the books of the Bible, along with thematic videos. If you teach Bible classes at all, be sure to check them out.

Today I'm writing to share how pleased I've been with The Bible Project's Read Scripture App. I've always wanted to read the Bible through in a year, but I always end up getting stuck in the middle of Leviticus. But with the Read Scripture App, which I started the first Sunday of Advent, I'm just humming along. What is nifty about the App is how the reading plan follows the story of the Bible and how they use The Bible Project videos to set up, guide and orient you through the books. All that helps give you a narrative GPS when you feel lost in the middle of a book like Leviticus or reading an obscure prophetic book.

You can see the whole reading plan here (PDF). And the App is free.

All that to say, if you've ever wanted to read the Bible from cover to cover, in a year or at your own pace, you should check out the Read Scripture App.

The argument I make in The Slavery of Death is that there are two paths set before us, neurosis or grace.

One path is the path of self-esteem, striving to build, perform for, achieve, and secure sense of significance and self-worth by participating in a "hero project."

The phrase "hero project" comes from the work of Ernest Becker who described how cultures give us a pathway to achieve a "heroic" identity. Cultures help us know if we are winning or losing in the eyes of those around us. How we divide up the successes versus the failures in the world around us--within families, in our workplaces, in the larger American culture--is evidence of the "hero project" at work.

You can be either winning or losing in the hero project. But either way, you'll be trapped by neurosis. The winners will be vain, self-absorbed, workaholics, competitive, selfish, egoistic, judgmental, smug, driven, contemptuous, perfectionistic, and haunted by the possibility of loss and failure. If you're losing in the hero project you are insecure, shamed, envious, depressed, and self-loathing.

Again, either way, winning or losing, you're doomed to a neurotic existence.

The other path, as I describe in The Slavery of Death, is to renounce the hero system and receive your identity as a gift. Baptism is the sacrament of this identity, we are crucified to the hero project--considering it all to be "trash" in the words of Paul--to be reborn into our identity as "Beloved," just as Jesus experienced at his baptism.

This "eccentric identity," to borrow the phrase from David Kelsey, is located outside of the matrix of self-achievement and self-esteem, outside of vanity and shame, beyond winning and losing. Buffered and immune from the evaluations of the hero system, our identities are "hidden in Christ." Neurosis is replaced by peace and grace.

As best as I can tell, those are the two paths set before us. The two ways you can live your life.

Neurosis or grace.

A few months ago I was leading our adult Bible class at church in a study of the book of Jonah. Did you know that Jonah is mentioned in the Bible in one other place outside of the book that bears his name?

That mention occurs in 2 Kings 14:

2 Kings 14.25
[Jeroboam II, King of Israel] was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel from Lebo Hamath to the Dead Sea, in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher. 

According to 2 Kings, Jonah son of Amittai was the prophet to helped Israel restore the northernmost border of Israel. This border would have been the boundary between Israel and an invasion from Assyria.

Given this history we can understand a bit about why Jonah ran from God's call, and perhaps even why God selected him in the first place.

Here was a prophet who had built a wall being sent to extend grace to the very people that wall was intended to keep out.

I suggested to the class that Jonah's call would have been like a Trump-supporter who was fired up about the border wall between the US and Mexico getting called to a ministry with illegal immigrants.

That cognitive dissonance may have between too profound for Jonah to tolerate. So he ran.

Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.

I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.

--Flannery O’Connor, from her prayer journal

From time to time I'm asked by people savvy into issues of branding and brand-building, "Why is your blog still at blogspot.com?"

Back in the early day of blogs, jumping onto Google's blog hosting platform--Blogger--was a simple and easy thing to do. Wordpress was just getting started and was Blogger's main rival in those early days. A lot of people who started with Blogger switched to Wordpress because the templates were cleaner and more professional. But I stayed on Blogger.

Eventually, as the readership of this blog grew, people began to inquire about when I'd be taking the next step in blogging professionalization, moving to a new, branded web address like "experimentaltheology.com" or "richardbeck.com." Over the years I have also been invited by Patheos and Christian Century to be hosted on their sites.

But as you can see, I've declined those opportunities and have just kept blogging away here at the original site on blogspot.com.

Why? Three reasons.

First, it's free. Moving to my own branded address would involve paying for that hosting service. And I refuse to pay money for something I can have for free. Image be damned.

Second, about that image. I don't know if you've noticed, as I mentioned last week, but I intentionally handicap myself on social media when it comes to building a brand. I don't use Facebook or Twitter to promote the blog across social media platforms. People also email me all the time about how they can get email notifications about my posts. And I have no idea, and have put zero work into figuring it out.

All that to say, I make it hard to find me and follow me.

And that's intentional, a practice in humility. I want to spend zero time pondering how to get "bigger." Such thoughts are just not spiritually healthy. Keeping with Blogger is a similar practice. A move to a web address like "experimentaltheology.com" would be a spiritual shift for me, a shift away from being a person who loves to blog to becoming a brand. I keep on Blogger to mortify the branding temptation.

Third, Blogger helps keep me away from advertisements. One of the reasons I didn't shift to Wordpress was that if you use their free service you have to have ads. Blogger is both free and allows me to remain advertisement free.

I've resisted monetizing my blog because I blog for fun. This is also connected to keeping with a free service. If I had to pay for blog hosting then I'd have to think about monetizing the blog to pay for those expenses. And I really don't want to go down that rabbit hole. If I stay here on Blogger I can blog for free and I don't have to hit you with advertisements or requests for financial support.

So, there's your answer. That's why I'm still here at blogspot.com.

In my Psychology and Christianity class here at ACU, we've been having some conversations about death anxiety and love. Those conversations reminded me about a post I wrote a few years ago (to follow and lightly edited), about about how my argument in The Slavery of Death intersects with The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

If you've not read The Road or seen the 2009 movie based upon the book, what follows is a quick summary highlighting the aspects of the plot that are relevant to the argument in The Slavery of Death. Spoiler alerts ahead.

The Road follows "the man" and "the boy"--a father and son--who are traveling down a road in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. We're not sure what has happened, but everything is covered with ash and food no longer grows. Most of the book follows the man and the boy searching for canned goods as they pass through empty towns pushing a shopping cart carrying all their belongings. A couple of times in the book, because they cannot find food, they come to the edge of starvation.

Beyond starvation, the other danger the man and the boy face are roving bands of cannibals. Because of the food shortages it appears that humanity has taken one of two moral paths. The man and the boy call themselves "the good guys" because they have chosen not to resort to cannibalism in the face of starvation. However, some others--whom the man and the boy call "the bad guys"--have resorted to finding and keeping people for food sources. They even, it seems, use pregnant women as food sources to eat their babies.

Consequently, much of the suspense in The Road is the man and the boy trying to stay clear of or having encounters with the bad guys, the people who have turned to violence in enslaving others to use them as food. The man carries a revolver with a single bullet. He is saving it to kill the boy should he ever be taken by the bad guys. And he also shows the boy how to shoot himself so that, should the man ever die, the boy can kill himself if he is ever about to be captured. In The Road it is better to shoot your child rather than have them eaten. Or to have your child preemptively commit suicide.

Depressed yet? Clearly, The Road isn't a happy book.

With this much of the plot in hand, let's turn to to discuss why I consider The Road to be a sort of laboratory for the thesis of The Slavery of Death.

In The Slavery of Death I make the following argument. We are biological creatures prone to anxiety in the face of death. As animals we have to be concerned about our survival. This makes us selfish and self-interested. As I argue it in the book, this biological need and vulnerability exerts upon us a constant moral tug causing us to put our needs above the needs of others. It's this inclination that sits at the heart of our "sin problem." It's this tendency--rooted in basic survival anxiety--that causes us to be incurvatus in se (curved/turned inward upon the self).

In short, we are not intrinsically wicked. We are anxious. And that anxiety--the biological imperative to survive--is what causes us to become sinful in how we come to reduce human life to an animalistic, Darwinian game of survival.

Now, the argument of The Slavery of Death is that this basic survival anxiety can be overcome by love. Love can, in the words of 1 John, "cast out fear." Love can replace our selfish survival concerns with concern for others. We can, in love, "lay down our lives for others." Love transforms fearful animals into human beings. Instead of fear causing us to be incurvatus in se we can become excurvatus ex se, curved outward in love toward others.

But there is a problem with this formulation and I wonder if you noticed it when you read The Slavery of Death. Specifically, love is being built upon a very shaky moral foundation: the survival needs of a biological animal.

These were the issues we were discussing in my class.

Specifically, all this conversation about love is all well and good when we have enough food, clothing and shelter. After we have met our basic needs we can share our surpluses with others. But what happens in the limit case? What happens in the face of a Malthusian catastrophe when there is not enough food to go around? Will not all this high talk about love collapse in the face of massive biological need?

Stated starkly, is not love a sort of moral luxury? Something we can spare until life become truly desperate?

I hope you can see in these question how The Road is an examination of the psychological issues as work in The Slavery of Death. For while The Slavery of Death is largely about our neurotic anxiety in the face of death (our worries about self-esteem and significance), The Road sweeps past neurosis to focus with laser-like intensity upon the relationship between love and basic anxiety, a fear not about being "significant" but about literal survival. It seems relatively easy to show how love can overcome neurotic anxiety, how I can forgo self-esteem enhancement to wash feet and serve in unnoticed locations, not letting my right hand know what my left hand is doing. But is it possible for love to overcome basic, survival anxiety in the face of something like mass starvation?

That is the moral question at the heart of The Road. Is love possible in the world envisioned by The Road?

Because if love cannot be found in The Road then biological need and vulnerability would be revealed to be the moral singularity of human existence. Love and humanity would be the moral luxuries of "civilization," useless surplus goods like a diamond ring. At root, we'd be revealed to be animals. Nothing more.

And so, with that as backdrop, let's return to The Road looking for love in a world of starvation and cannibalism. Looking for love in the limit case.

In this search I think we can find love in The Road in four places.

First, and most obviously, we find love in how the man loves the boy. If The Road is anything it is a prolonged meditation on the love the man has for the boy. This love also undergirds the spiritual themes of the book. In a widely quoted passage from early in the book:

He knew that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

So the love the man has for the boy is the primary story of love in the book. And throughout the book this love is described as the inbreaking of the divine. The boy is the "word of God" speaking to the man. And late in the book the boy is described as the tabernacle, the container of God's presence:

He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He'd stop and lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle. 

If I were being bold I'd argue that The Road is a prolonged meditation on the notion that "God is love." There is discussion of God in The Road. Prayers are offered to a grey, ashen sky. But God is absent and silent. God is, rather, found in the love the man and the boy have for each other. God is found in that love. God is that love.

A second place you find love expressed in The Road is the distinction made frequently in the book between the bad guys and the good guys, those who have turned to cannibalism and those who have not. And to be clear, the cannibalism isn't the eating of those who have died of natural causes but the enslaving or killing of others in order to use them as food.

This is a very bleak scenario, and The Road posits this vision as the inevitable moral outcome in a world of mass scarcity. In The Road the Darwinian survival of the fittest reaches this, its logical conclusion.

Morality here boils down to its final, ultimate question. The moral question behind all moral questions. The question you reach in the end if you push hard and far enough on a biological creature: In the limit case, would you kill and consume others?

Like in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy The Road posits two paths, one path is the path of virtue and holiness, the path of "the good guys." The other path is the path of depravity and wickedness, the path of the "the bad guys." Like Moses did with Israel, The Road presents a stark choice: Choose which way you shall go. Will you shed blood to live or will you refuse to kill even though you may starve? According to The Road this is the question that sits behind all ethics. This is ethics in the most extreme situation imaginable, the limit case.

And as we see in The Road there are "good guys." True, while many have been reduced to bestiality under the Darwinian pressures, there are those in The Road--the "good guys"--who refuse to kill others. The "good guys" retain their humanity. The good guys are not animals, they are human beings who see others as human beings. I count that as a form of love.

Let us now return to the love the man has for the boy.

At this point, a cynical, Darwinian reader might be saying, "I understand how the father loves the son. But this is familial, even mammalian, love. The love of a parent for his or her genetic offspring. Emotionally, yes, this is love. But is it true altruism? For is it not the case that all biological creatures selfishly benefit by ensuring the survival of their genetic offspring?"

This question brings us to a third location of love in The Road: the love of the boy for others.

True, in The Road the love of the man is almost fanatical in its focus on the boy. For the man, only the boy matters. All others will be sacrificed, must be sacrificed, in order to protect and ensure the survival of the boy. This mainly manifests in the book as the man's refusal to share food with anyone else other than the boy.

But throughout the book the boy--the "word of God"--begs and begs the father to share. And the boy is often successful in this. The father is constantly pulled out of his moral tunnel vision that only the boys matters. Where the father is blind the boy sees the needs of others. And so the boy and the man, in the face of scarcity and starvation, do share with others. This is altruism.

Finally, we come to our fourth example of love in The Road, the example that comes at the very end of the book. Remember, spoiler alerts.

Again, The Road is a prolonged meditation on the heroic sacrifices the man makes for the boy. If The Road is anything it is a portrayal of the endurance and fierceness of a father's love.

But is this the limit of morality, the best that love can do? In the limit case, is this--parental love--the zenith or morality? Or is there something that transcends this love?

The Darwinian critique noted above returns: Is the love of a biological parent for their child truly the highest form of love we can aspire to?

Is familial love the limit of love?

The Road answers no. There is more love in the world than a parent's love.

At the end of The Road the man dies. The boy is left alone and must now fend for himself in a world of bad guys.

The boy is soon approached by a man. Is this man a good guy or a bad guy? We find out that he's a good guy. He is also father, he has a wife and two boys. They are a family, something the boy has been longing for. And concerned about the fate of the boy now that the man has died this family welcomes the boy.

And the woman who adopts the boys speaks of God. The final scene in the book with the boy:

The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best  thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.

Again, the divine love on display in The Road is very much the immanent love between persons. The boy can't talk to God, but he can talk to his father, the one who loved him so passionately. And the woman who speaks of God compares the Spirit of God to the breath of humans--"the breath of God was his breath"--passed "from man to man through all of time." Again, I could argue that the theological theme of The Road is the notion that "God is love."

For our purposes, I'd like to draw our attention to how the adoptive love of the family for the boy transcends the biological matrix. The love of the man for the boy in the book is heroic and divine. But it's not the final or even highest act of love in the book. The final and highest act of love in The Road is when the family welcomes the boy--who is not one of their own--into their family. The family, in love, is willing to carry this extra survival burden. This is a love--a love associated with God--that transcends the Darwinian, biological struggle.

To conclude, let me say that this analysis of love in The Road does not exhaust the spiritual themes in the book. And many of these other spiritual themes are not as rosy and the themes I've pointed out here.

But I do think it clear that love is found in The Road and that love functions in the face of death very much as I describe in The Slavery of Death. I was gratified to find that the vision I articulated in The Slavery of Death was found on The Road. In The Road, when life is pushed to its absolute limit and placed under the severest Darwinian pressure, love can be seen triumphing over death. Love can be seen making us human in the face of death. In the love of the man for the boy. In the refusal of the "good guys" to kill others in order to survive. In the love of the boy getting his father to share with others. And in the final adoption of the boy into a family speaking of God.

The Road depicts the Fall at its absolute, apocalyptic worst. William Stringfellow says that the goal of the Christian life is to walk humanly in the Fall. And in The Road, despite all odds, we see this happen. We see in The Road love conquering death. Love making us human. In the end, we don't have to become animals. We have a choice in the face of death.

We can be human.

We can love.

I was sharing in one of my classes about the relationship between neurosis and capitalism.

"Neurosis," I said, "is the fuel for the engine of capitalism."

Other theologians have described how capitalism is an economy of desire. To keep the engine of consumerism humming along, capitalism creates, fuels, and feeds off of desire. But I like focusing on neurosis rather than desire. Because the desires capitalism exploits are rooted in feelings of inadequacy. Consumerism is driven by how we purchase our way toward status and significance. We buy our way toward self-esteem.

Neurosis is what we're pointing to when we talk about "keeping up with the Joneses." The Joneses have a bigger house or a nicer car or a new pool. Those things make us feel inadequate and insecure, like we're falling behind. And all these feelings are examples of neurosis.

Describing all this to my class, I said that Dr. Suess' story about the Sneetches is the best commentary I've ever seen about neurosis fueling capitalism. Notice how, in the story, neurosis--feelings of inferiority and superiority--create and fuels consumer demand, and how Sylvester McMonkey McBean makes a fortune off the neurosis.

That's the moral of the story of the Sneetches (full video here).

Neurosis is the fuel for the engine of capitalism.

Here's something else about Leviticus.

While modern readers tend to get hung up on the archaic strangeness of Leviticus, the overall logic of the book makes sense. Whatever we might think of its particulars, the Levitical code embedded life within a sacred matrix. The code tangibly imbued life with sacred weight and texture.

Again, whatever we might think of the specifics of the Levitical code, we do need sacred weight and texture. We need seasons and rituals to hallow time, events, people, promises, values, places, life transitions, tragedy, and loss. Even atheists hallow funerals and marriages and light candles at sites of national tragedy. 

And yet, in the day to day grind it's hard to hallow in our secular, disenchanted age. We don't have a sacred matrix. And this is one of the reasons why I think faith is so hard for many of us. Instead of living within a sacred matrix that gives our lives holy weight and texture, we experience belief as a choice to be made moment by moment, day after day. Faith is in our heads, an intellectual thing, rather than as the sacred texture filling our lives.

This is one of the reasons that, as a Protestant, I'm so attracted to Catholic aesthetics. The sacramental aesthetics of Catholicism--the candles, statues, beads, icons, incense--helps create a sacred matrix. I think Protestants who struggle with faith can learn something from this.

If you struggle with faith, think levitically. Get out of your head and live within a sacred matrix.

As I describe in Reviving Old Scratch, Freedom Fellowship, the mission church I attend, has a charismatic worship style. Hands are raised and waved.

We also have praise flags, made of colorful fabrics with "Jesus" written on them. When the Spirit moves them, worshipers at Freedom will go pick up a flag and wave it during our praise service.

Charismatic worship, all the hand and flag waving, isn't my comfort zone. But I embrace how my friends worship.

And in reading through the book of Leviticus recently I found a bit of biblical warrant for all the waving. As a part of the sacrificial system there were what are called "wave offerings," where grain or a part of an animal sacrifice was literally waved before YHWH.

Admittedly, there is some distance between the Levitical wave offerings and our Jesus praise flags, but the whole notion of waving to God as a sacrifice of praise is rooted in the Bible.

And while I'm not keen to wave a praise flag myself, I'm happy to help my church family with any biblical justification they might need to lift those praise flags high.

If you've tried to look me up on social media you'll know I'm not on Twitter or Facebook.

There are times I get angsty about that. How will I build an audience for this blog? How will I push out news about a book I publish?

Most of time, however, it's such a huge relief not living on social media. True, I'm blessed that I have a day job that pays the rent. I don't need to build a publishing and speaking platform to support a living as a writer. If I was a full-time writer, then yes, I'd need to full court press social media. That would be a part of my job.

But having a job, I don't need to push like that. Sure, by not pushing I'm reducing my "voice." But I think I've done enough spiritual work on myself to not get overly worried about the size of my impact upon the world.

People ask me all the time, "How's you book doing?' And I always say, "I have no idea." Truly, I don't keep up with it. I just want to be proud of my books, I don't need to sell them.

And the trade-off in staying off of social media is so, so worth it.

In light of my recent posts about post-evangelical Christian loss and nostalgia, our longing for a tribe, let me point you to Christine Emba's recent column in the Washington Post, "Liberalism is Loneliness."

Emba's column is a reflection on Patrick Deneen's recent book Why Liberalism Failed.

The heart of the matter, as I wrote about two weeks ago, is how Western liberalism dissolves traditional and historical sources of connection and community. Liberalism dissolves group affiliations and treats us as rights-bearing individuals who stand alone before the state. In my posts I said that liberalism has an aerosolizing effect upon groups, it atomizes and then disperses us.

Here is Emba summarizing this impact and its consequences:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

That’s the heart of it, really. Liberalism is loneliness. 

And like I mentioned in my series on tribes and progressive Christianity, we suffer when we're not a part of a tribe. As Emba observes:

Over the past 15 years, the U.S. suicide rate has increased by 24 percent; the rise in so-called deaths of despair is constantly in the news. The most liberal nation in the world reports less happiness and more pain than its illiberal counterparts. We may have traveled to the “end of history,” but the majority of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track. And we’re desperately, desperately lonely. 

So what's the solution? Emba concludes by suggesting that we're going to have to become a whole lot more intentional about forming close knit communities. She brings up the Benedict Option, a vision that appeals to conservative Christians but leaves progressive Christians cold. But as I've argued, progressives need their own version of the Benedict Option to deal with the isolation and loneliness that liberalism is producing.

But this is going to be a hard labor, especially for progressive Christians whose embrace of liberalism makes it hard for them to form the close-knit churches they crave. Again, progressive Christians need to embrace their own Benedict Option. As Emba concludes:

Yet the deepest solution to the problem of liberalism is as personal in scale as its deepest quandary. To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

First, thank you to everyone for all the positive feedback about Stranger God. It's so encouraging to visit churches who have been reading the book and hearing your stories of how the book is challenging you and drawing you into practices of hospitality and kindness. The Little Way of Thérèse of Lisieux will do that to you!

For those of you working with churches and groups interested in hospitality, Fortress Press just made it easier to order Stranger God for your people.

First, just a reminder that Stranger God how has a free, downloadable Discussion Guide that teachers and discussion leaders can use to lead conversations about the book.

You can download the Discussion Guide here (PDF).

Second, Fortress Press is now offering up to a 50% discount for bulk orders. Bulk order prices and ordering details can be found here.

Now you can order a bunch of books for your staff, ministry leaders, Bible classes, small groups, discussion groups, and book clubs at an affordable price!

If you missed it, Jana and I were recently on Ian Cron's Typology podcast. You can listen to the episode here, or search for Typology on your podcast app.

Ian's podcast and his book The Road Back to You is focused on the Enneagram. In the podcast Ian and I talk about my initial skepticism about the Enneagram and ways it's helped Jana and I in our marriage. Jana is a 2 and I'm a 5w4.

If you don't know your type or want to start exploring the Enneagram you can take an assessment here at Ian's website.

A couple of things about the content of the podcast.

First, Ian and I spend some time talking about things that cut across the types--virtue, mental health, and IQ specifically--as well as raise questions about the stability of the types across situations and contexts. I think these are really important observations about the Enneagram (and any personality model) as they point to ways where the Enneagram is incomplete, and even unhelpful in some situations.

But the other thing about the podcast that's noteworthy is that Jana is also a quest, and we talk a bit about our marriage. This is a part of my life that regular readers have not heard much about, in my writings or on other podcasts I have done.

And you can hear on the podcast the most beautiful sound of my life:

Jana's laughter.

I wanted to make one other comment before moving on from this series about tribes and progressive Christianity.

In Part 3 we asked the question, "If progressive Christians would like a tribe, why don't they just create one?" In answer we listed reasons why it's hard for progressives to create, maintain, and grow their churches.

But one of the answers I failed to mention is that many progressive Christians aren't just post-evangelical, they are post-evangelism.

The progressive impulse toward tolerance and inclusion, along with a post-modern stance on truth, leaves progressive Christians in an awkward position in regards to evangelism, sharing the gospel with non-believers. Evangelism smacks of judgementalism, I'm right and you are wrong. Worse, evangelism can tend toward colonialism, the history of white missionaries being sent to save dark pagan savages.

A related issue here is that progressive Christians are burdened by so many doubts that they lack the necessary conviction to feel passionate about sharing the gospel with others. If you're not sure you believe any of this stuff, how can you be expected to convince others to believe in it?

In short, progressive Christians tend to be poor evangelists. And for many progressive Christians, that's a feature, not a bug. The tolerance and the doubt--avoiding the "sin of certainty" as Peter Enns puts it--is the whole point of the progressive Christian journey.

And yet, that makes it difficult for progressive Christians to create or maintain a church of any size, a local tribe where they can belong and share life in thick and rich community.

Basically, if your church is post-evangelism your tribe will dwindle and vanish. Another reason progressive Christians so often find themselves alone.

I don't know if it's growing older, or if God, after decades of work, is finally breaking my heart. Or maybe I'm just slowly going crazy.

I find myself growing increasingly sentimental. I'm quick to tears in the face of beauty, suffering, and the passing of time. The ache springs out of this great affection, sympathy, and joy.

It's not a mountaintop experience, triggered by beautiful locations or charismatic speakers. The fount of these tears is the ordinary. This is a mysticism of the gutters and alleyways.

It's like that mystical moment Thomas Merton had standing on a busy city sidewalk, looking at all the passing people and feeling great love for them. The blind now seeing clearly. I'm no Merton, but my tearful moments are like that.

A flash of love and joy when beholding the world.

With the Masters golf tournament starting today, I was reminded of a post from 2011 (below and slightly edited) when I compared obeying the Sermon on the Mount to playing the game of golf. As you watch the Masters this weekend, ponder the following:
 
I was out at the prison leading our weekly Bible study. I'd just finished reading the entire Sermon on the Mount--the Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapters five through seven. After finishing, one the inmates raises his hand.

"Is this attainable?" he asks.

The question gave me pause because just the day before we had been talking about the Sermon on the Mount in our Sunday School class. The argument the teacher made in our class was that the Sermon was unattainable. He made the argument Martin Luther popularized, that the Sermon is intended to humble us, to show us how salvation by works is impossible.

So, is the Sermon on the Mount attainable?

I guess it all depends upon what we mean by "attainable." When I look at various parts of the sermon, even the hardest parts like turning the other cheek and loving our enemies, I am pretty certain people have attained these standards. Christian history is full of biographies of saints who have loved enemies and turned the other cheek.

The point being, in any given moment of any given day I think the Sermon on the Mount is attainable.

Given that assessment, the question might move on to issues of sustainability and maintenance. Is it possible to sustain, decade after decade, a faultless adherence to the Sermon on the Mount?

I think the Sermon on the Mount contains the answer to that question in the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our sins."

So we are walking a fine line here. On the one hand, you don't want to say that the Sermon is unattainable, because clearly it is attainable. We really should try to attain to the ideals set out in the Sermon. And, with the help of God, we actually can attain these things.

But on the other hand, the Sermon is so imposing we know we are surely going to fail. A lot.

So how are we to thread the needle?

Well, this might be the worst metaphor you'll ever hear, but I'd like to compare the Sermon on the Mount to golf.

I don't golf a lot. But when I'm visiting my family I golf with my Dad. He's very good. I'm...less good.

If you don't know anything about golf all you need to know for our purposes is this: Golf is hard. It's a frustrating and infuriating game. Hence Mark Twain's quip: "Golf is a good walk spoiled." If you've ever played golf you know exactly what Twain was talking about.

There were times, particularly in my early years with the game, where I felt that golf was a form of Calvinistic self-loathing or Catholic self-mortification. I felt that you could either whip yourself for your sins or go golfing. The two seemed equivalent, spiritually speaking. And there have been times on the golf course when I would have preferred whipping myself rather than looking for another lost ball because I keep slicing my drives into the woods.

The point here is that golf is attainable on any given shot but, due to its difficulty, not sustainable. Even the pros make double bogeys. In 2011, Rory McIlroy was leading the Masters before going into the final round. He shot an 80. Watching Rory on the 10th hole of his final round I thought, "Hey, that's where I end up on golf courses! In someone's backyard." Five years later, in 2016, Jordan Spieth blew up. And don't get me started on Greg Norman in 1996.

The point is, golf is so hard even the pros melt down.

In this, I think golf is kind of like the Sermon on the Mount. Attainable on any given shot, any given hole, any given round. But too hard to be sustainable. There will be bogeys and double bogeys. (Or, if you're me, a whole lot worse.)

And given this degree of difficulty and likelihood of failure you often see golfers come unglued on the course. I've seen golfers curse, throw clubs, break clubs, throw clubs into ponds. Or just give up and drive off the course. Some, out of frustration, give up the game.

Similar things, I think, can happen with the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is so hard we can become demoralized and self-loathing. And this can lead to quitting and giving up.

I've wrestled with these sorts of reactions in my golf game and in my Christian walk. In my early years with golf I got angry a lot. But as I've matured I've learned to keep my cool, even when I get an eight on a par three (this happened last week). I've learned to focus on the process rather than the outcome. And because of this I've improved a lot over the years.

In short, despite golf's difficulty and my repeated failures, I've found joy in the game of golf. I'm happy on a golf course. Even when my score is bad.

I'm looking for something similar in my relationship with the Sermon on the Mount. If I approach the Sermon with a grim Puritan rigor I don't think I'm going to be very pleasant to be around. I'll wind up wrapping a Beatitude, like a seven iron, around a pine tree. But if I can find joy in the climb then I think I can make progress over time. The key to becoming a skilled Christian is to practice the faith with joy. Even in failure. The alternative is guilt, shame, and anger. Which leads to giving up on the game. Our journey of faith then becomes a good walk spoiled.

So pick up your clubs and take up the Beatitudes. Be prepared to succeed. You can actually, on any given hole and in any given interaction, attain the state of perfection. You can make a par and you can act like Jesus. The Sermon or a drive in the fairway really is attainable. Mere mortals can pull it off.

Still, you're going to fail a lot. So be prepared for that as well. Because how you react to the failure will in large part determine if you keep coming back, and if you'll get better and more skilled as time goes on.

So, blessed are the merciful, and this putt breaks a little to the left.

Either way. Have fun out there.

In my post yesterday about raising Millennials as liberals, I bet a few readers were thinking, "What about the Benedict Option?"

That is, isn't one of the big points made by Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option that we need to raise our children in a tribe if we want them to be faithful Christians?

So let me say a few things about tribes and the Benedict Option.

Let me start with this. I agree with with Rod Dreher on two key points.

First, Christianity demands more than liberal tolerance.

Second, tribes are necessary for spiritual formation.

I've described all this before in my call for a progressive version of the Benedict Option. Cruciform, self-donating love is way, way more than liberal tolerance. Cruciform, self-donating love is hard, sacrificially hard. Consequently, we need a tribe to form us into the ways of Jesus.

In short, progressive Christians need a Benedict Option.

My problem with Rod Dreher's articulation of the Benedict Option--that the counter-cultural way of Jesus requires a community of spiritual formation--is how little he talks about Jesus. Rod talks a ton about prayer, liturgy, church going, orthodoxy, tradition, monasticism, and sexual ethics. But he rarely writes about Jesus. He rarely talks about love.

The greatest failure of Rod's book The Benedict Option is how he left out the progressive versions of the BenOp, intentional communities like the Catholic Workers and the New Monastics such as Jonathan Wilson Hartgove's Rutba House. To say nothing of Jean Vanier's L'Arche communities. Rod says he left these groups out of the book because he finds their way of life too radical for ordinary Christians to emulate.

But I call bullshit on that.

For example, in his book and on his blog Rod waxes on and on about the monks of Norcia. But why doesn't Rod find the monks of Norcia too radical for ordinary Christians to emulate? I doubt many of us are lining up to take vows of celibacy and poverty. Rod sure isn't.

But what the monks of Norcia can do for us, as they do for both Rod and I, is inspire a monastic way of life that we can, to greater or lesser degrees, emulate in our own lives. I pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

But if that's true of the monks of Norcia, why can't that also be true of the Catholic Workers and the New Monastics? This is my point.

I agree with Rod that Christians with day jobs, families, and mortgages aren't going to live the way the Catholic Workers live. But nor will they be able to live like the monks of Norcia! Yet both groups can inspire ways of life that we can, to some degree, emulate. And yet, the monks get included in the Benedict Option and the Catholic Workers do not. Why?

I think Rod left them out because the progressive politics of these communities don't fit with his preferred narrative of what the BenOp is supposed to be and look like. In short, Rod's vision of the BenOp is too partisan. And that's a shame. There is a progressive Christian version of the BenOp and Rod is refusing to call attention to how these Christians are living into the way of Jesus in sacrificial and beautiful ways.

All that to say, progressive Christians have a BenOp and they need a BenOp.

Even liberals need a tribe for spiritual formation.

The other reason I've been thinking about tribes has to do with raising our children in the church.

Last week I wrote about our small group discussing our being raised in smaller, more conservative Christian churches. Theologically, we moved away from those faith communities, but relationally we look back with great fondness on our childhoods. Again, for a lot of post-evangelicals, it was the best of times and it was the worst of times.

And really, for all of our small group it was just the best of times. We've changed our minds, theologically, but we have uniformly warm memories of our childhoods in the Churches of Christ. To be sure, a lot of people have been burned badly in our faith tradition, but those aren't our stories.

Anyway, we were talking about how our kids now view the church. We've become liberal in our views and so we've raised our kids as liberals. We've preached messages of tolerance and inclusion. And we've been successful. Our kids don't look on the world with judgment and suspicion. They welcome difference.

But we've noticed that this comes with a price. Our kids don't have the same loyalty to the church as we do. We were raised conservatively, so going and being loyal to a local church is hardwired into us. We can't imagine not going to church. It's who we are. But our kids weren't raised by conservatives, they were raised by us, post-evangelical liberals. Consequently, our kids don't have that same loyalty toward the church.

So we were talking about this paradox in our small group, how our kids weren't raised by our parents, they were raised by us, and how that's made our kids unlike us. Especially when it comes to how we feel about church.

Basically, our kids aren't post-evangelicals. They are liberals.

And to be clear, since we're liberals, we think this has been a wonderful accomplishment. We're proud of the generosity and kindness of our children as they move through a pluralistic world. So we're not lamenting that they are liberals. Our kids care passionately about racism, sexism, and oppression.

But we are starting to lament how our kids are being sent out into the world without a tribe, without the deep sense of belonging we experienced as children. Our kids are beautiful people, but we worry they are sacrificing life-giving, face-to-face community in the tribe for likes on Instragram and Snapchat. Millenials are tolerant, but they are also anxious and adrift. And there's more to Christianity than tolerance. More on that in the next post.

All that to say, we've seen the trade-offs between liberalism and the tribe that I've been discussing in these posts playing out in the lives our children as well.

The question I left us with last week in Part 4 was if we can create a tribe without all the bad stuff.

I think so, I hope so. I do think, however, that every tribe brings into our lives a suite of temptations that have to be monitored and managed. We need a tribe, but tribes have a dark side that needs to be resisted.

I wrote about this last fall. I made the argument across a few posts that since we can't 100% eliminate the temptations of a tribe we should at least join a tribe that has resources for self-criticism. From one of my posts last fall:

I don't know if humans can ever escape creating tribal affiliations and identities. Wanting to be a part of a tribe seems hard-wired into the human psyche.

A tribe gives us a home, a place of community and belonging. And yet, tribes are also the source of much evil. Prejudice, scapegoating, war.

The best we can hope for, I think, is being a part of a tribe that has resources for self-criticism.

I then went on describe how the Old Testament enshrines this self-criticism. Ponder the witness of the prophets. Israel canonizes self-criticism in the prophets. Self-criticism becomes the Word of God for Israel.

The voice that Israel elevates as God's voice is a voice that criticizes the tribe.

Of course, this doesn't prevent Israel from falling into tribalism. Tribes will be tribes. But in the prophets Israel built in capacities for self-criticism that help keep the tribalism in check.

All that to say, I don't know if we can wholly avoid the temptations of the tribe, but we can join and create a tribe that has the resources to push back on its worst impulses.

May your sight burn with the flames of grace
as you stand over the bones--
ivory white and stacked high in the sand--
to behold the roaring wind
bringing the dead, clattering, back to life again.

May your despairing heart be singed with joy
as you walk with a stranger
along the road.

May your life be watered by the dew
when Love surprises you in the morning.

May you stand defiant before the logical world
as the prophet of the impossible,
to thunder in sackcloth at their disbelief:
"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"