Aedificium

I’m supposed to be working on the dissertation, but I’ve gotten bogged down in some nasty German linguistics. Last night I was doing some reading designed to kind of “wind me down” and came across what I see as a prophetic comment from Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Letters and Papers from Prison. So much for winding down. I’d love to hear some thoughts on the implications of this for the church today. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

“And we cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur [even if there were no God]. And this is just what we do recognise - before God! God himself compels us to recognise it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us. Matt. 8.17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering”.

PS - Thanks Jack.

Well, I did it. I went. Feeling spiritually downcast these days, I went to one of the local Southern Baptist mini-megachurches in the area for an evening service tonight. I just needed to do it. I sucked it up, decided that I didn’t have to have a “high-church” experience tonight, or traditional baptist hymnology on an organ, but wanted to be with people who genuinely love their image of God and Christ. Most of all, I just wanted to sing contemporary praise music. I can’t explain why, and even if I could, it would be in forced academicese.

I ended up sitting next to the Associate Pastor, who I actually know a little bit. When I arrived, about 5 minutes after the start of the service, and joined in with the singing. We shortly broke into small prayer groups.

All I really want to note is how contemplative this was. I don’t believe that I have experienced such a moving spirit of prayer since I was at Glastonbury Abbey.

Being a practicing Christian, or of any other faith tradition, and a professional academic scholar of religion really is to be caught between the proverbial rock and hard place, especially when one’s family doesn’t really see what the fuss is about, as much as they might try. It can get pretty lonely between the stone and the wall.

It was a good night. A good, good night.

Stdogbert alerted me to this little piece from Reuters earlier in the afternoon and suggested that it might be blogworthy. Yep, sure is; any time an American President gets involved with trying to bring peace to the Middle East via a resolution to the Israel-Palestine contest, there’s going to be something to talk, write, read, or blog about.

This sudden interest by Bush in the Middle East peace process is remarkable. Obviously, every President has had an interest in it and they all have been involved to varying degrees, but given the circumstances going on in Iraq (and perhaps Iran in the disturbingly-near future), for Bush to start pandering peace, especially by appealing to Jesus’ beatitude to being peacemakers, when he has so much blood on his hands in the region is hypocritical and disingenuous, or just plain clueless. (My guess is it’s the last.) What fascinates me, however, is how an evangelical President like Bush is going against the old grain with this little peace-making visit. Whatever else the Bush Presidency may be remembered as, I certainly will not-so-fondly remember it as the Presidency who tried to help God out in bringing in the so-called “End Times.” I don’t think any other President has done more that, at least on the surface of things, seems to speed up the timetable to Armageddon in the Bob Hagee-an, Jack van Impe-an, Hal Lindsey-an sense.

Not too long ago, during a call for congregational prayer requests, a fellow in our church asked the pastor and church to pray for peace in the Middle East. The pastor took the opportunity to give a little mini-sermon/lecture that reflects the dispensationalist, Jack van Impean form of End Times politics. His response was something to the effect of “Well, I’m not sure that we can really do that, [name], because the Bible tells us that there will not be peace in the Middle East until the Lord Jesus returns. No matter how many Presidents, ambassadors, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and humanitarians argue for peace and work for peace, it’s just not going to happen until then, and so I think that anything we do that tries to make peace there is just getting in God’s way. But I’ll pray for Jesus’ return and that he comes soon so that we can have peace in Israel soon.” Many evangelicals, particularly those reared and raised and under the continued influence of more traditional, 1950s-60s evangelicalism, and practically all self-proclaimed fundamentalists would agree with the pastor’s assessment here. Not too many “new” or “younger evangelicals” would, however.

Probably not surprisingly, I don’t agree with this at all, because this is not what the Bible says. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Bush’s visit looks like he’s breaking rank with the older mainstream evangelical tradition he has sought to uphold as his standard for his Presidency. Just for once, for whatever motives, he is appealing to the Christian beatitude of peacableness as represented by Jesus rather than the imperialized and horrific vision of the Revelation. I have to give him credit for this.

If Bush’s effort here is doomed to fail, as I think it is, it’s not because it’s foretold in the Scriptures that it will, but that it’s just too hard of a sell. It’s because Middle East leaders can’t trust him, or the US in general, and that is simply because the track record of US involvement in this part of the world isn’t exactly worthy of trust. For that, we can’t blame the Bible, but only those who think they are doing what it says God wants them to do.

Family of four looking for church home that meets a majority of the following: 1) Church should willingly and unashamedly call itself a “Christian” church, meaning (2) it follows a local theology that its leaders and board members affirm as thoroughly Trinitarian and which (3) finds its central identity in the biblical concept of a called community that (4) engages the world, rather than insulates itself against it, is (5) committed to biblical and prophetic justice, and which (6) contests “the powers” of state, bureaucracy and empire with prophetic voice and action and which (7) maintains active and aggressive vigilance against its own potential complicity with those powers. Church should be ( Gospel- and missional-centered, (9) unafraid to name sin for what it is and (10) promote and teach the contents of Scripture as the Church’s “norming norm” even while recognizing the (11) necessity of critical reason, ecclesiastical tradition, personal impact, and interpretive flexibility among other churches throughout history and throughout the world in different circumstances from its own. Prospective church’s worship services should be (12) highly liturgical, with preference given to (13) weekly celebration of the Eucharist/Communion/Lord’s Supper and (14) worship in a building that actually looks like it has a sacred history and participates in the holy. Preference given to prospective applicants who demonstrate willingness to (15) ordain both men and women to ministry but which does not do so out of bureaucratic convenience or as political statements; applicants who refrain from ordinations entirely also considered. Churches claiming to have all the answers, or which lead members and attenders to think that they have all such answers, need not apply. To apply, email Aedificium Librarian at link provided on this page, or leave a comment below.

This time of the year evokes a lot of emotions and feelings within us. For some of us there is a sense of nostalgia for being close to family. For others, we might feel the almost magical warmth of Christmas events and the coming of the New Year. For others, we start feeling the excitement of the beginning of college hoops, football bowl games, the merciful end of the Orange’s football season, and so on. We feel the closing of once cycle and the new beginnings of another with the annual celebration of Harvesting and of sharing the abundance that God has given us with others, as in Thanksgiving meals and the giving of gifts during Christmas. With this time of year, one season of our lives comes to a close, and another begins.

We celebrate Thanksgiving this week, and with the Thanksgiving season we also enter a few others as well. We enter, for example, the Christmas season; I would imagine that, if you’re like me and my family, you’ll be starting to decorate your house, pull out the greenery, and finally succumb to turning your radio dial to Sunny 102.5 for non-stop, 24/7 Christmas and holiday music.

Related to this is, of course, the “holiday shopping” season, which in reality starts now around Columbus Day rather than Black Friday. And it is fitting that, with this being a seasonal crossing between the old and the new, the Holiday Shopping season participates in this cycle in that there is no other time of year when we are in the full-fledged mode of “Out with the old, and in with the new!” With the Holiday Shopping season, we are absolutely bombarded with advertising assuring us that we really do need NEW and IMPROVED! “this-that-and-the-other-thing.” We’re sucked into the idea that we have to have to get rid of something that might be perfectly good and replace it with a new item. The whole season can awaken the cynic in us that not only starts questioning whether our new and improved lives and gadgets are really any better than we had it a year ago. The omnipresence of advertising and of commercial icons (Nike “swoosh,” Coke, Pepsi, etc) dulls our ability to recognize that which is truly new from the simply repackaged, and when the truly new does finally arrive, we often fail to recognize it, and be thankful and grateful for it. We would feel much better, I think, if the truly new would really advertise itself as such in such a way to shock us into recognizing it, so that we CAN respond appropriately with blessing and thanksgiving.

We’re in luck. Today’s lections from Isaiah and Luke, in particular, give us God’s advertising, and they are so counter-cultural and contrary to our most deeply-seeded common sense that we find it hard to take them seriously. The evangelist reports Jesus’ apocalyptic words in Luke 21 to us on the pretext of prophesying the destruction of the Jewish Temple; he uses vivid imagery the does not, in fact, describe anything in a satisfying, “feel-good” way. Unless we have an apocalyptic fetish, neither should we think of any of these images as anything to look forward to; certainly the earliest Christians did not.

What I want to suggest here is that, far from advertising anything “new,” no matter how bleak and destructive, Jesus here is advertising in no uncertain terms the eternal state of affairs in the world. Really, how can “wars and insurrections,” “nations rising against nations,” empires taking arms against empires, earthquakes, famines, plagues, and other “dreadful signs” from heaven be advertising anything new? Are arrests and persecutions and betrayals of Christians for religious or political reasons anything new?

Advertisements specialize in imagery and depend on our familiarity with their logos, slogans, and products in order to have any effect. In this they function like icons and have tremendous staying power. In Luke today, Jesus employs the truth of these icons to advertise for all those who have eyes to see and ears to hear the way the world is today. He refuses to sugarcoat the first century, much like the ancient prophets refused to sugarcoat the state of the world in which Israel and God’s called ones found themselves in. As prophecy from the mouth of Jesus and in the context of his pronouncements on the Kingdom of God, Luke’s description of the world carries the force of the “always already” and “to come” at the same time.

So much for one kind of God’s advertising; small wonder that these things would either be glorified out of all proportion to the rest of Christ’s and the Prophets’ discourses on the Kingdom of God, or these messages are systematically and institutionally suppressed or ignored out of not wanting to appear offensive or pessimistic about the state of the world (this, of course, is the classic liberal, “progressive” heritage). But I should like to remind us all that this is not at all the only advertisement we find; instead, I want to remind us that this season of the old coming to a close and the new day dawning, both in commercial Christmas and Thanksgiving, the season of Advent is even now on our doorstep waiting to disrupt the state of the everyday.

What advertisements do we have to represent and “sell” God’s newness during the season about to break upon upon us? How will God shock us and upset us? We have seen that Jesus’ advertising strategy sells us nothing new, but more of the old; it awakens, evokes, our desire for the New.

The passage of Isaiah is one of the most outrageous advertisements of God’s Newness, a newness that, like Jesus’ Kingdom of God, is always already and to come if we but know where to look, put faith where it belongs, and do what we are commanded to do. And here we see the other element of advertising; the idea that what is being presented is so outrageous, so out of touch with our reality, so absurd to our financial sensibilities that we cannot help ourselves but desire what the advertisement is trying to tell us we want more than anything else. And the most effective ads even cause us to contemplate doing anything, even sacrificing whatever we have or who we believe we are, in order to have what it wants us to have.

What is God’s ad here? Let this sink in, and let it inform our Holiday sensibility here, especially with Thanksgiving, and Advent, and Christmas. There will be a new earth, a new Jerusalem. Not a repackaging in better boxes of what is already there; but utter newness of the earth and the heart of the people of God’s calling. There will no longer be the sound of weeping or tears of sadness. There won’t be any homeless, nor will there be those oppressed or terrorized by life today to cry out for still more deliverance. There will be rejoicing and thanksgiving, because in God’s new world there will not be any infant mortality or elderly men and women outliving their lives or widows or young men who die in war, for there will no longer be wars fought. There will be rejoicing and thanksgiving because there will no longer be the outrage of eminent domain or foreclosures on homes, and those who build will live; those who plant will reap, and those who harvest will eat and have abundance. The big will no longer consume the small, and all will live under their own vine and fig tree.

Is the Advertisement of God’s newness in Isaiah, the Advent of abundance, blessing, thanksgiving, and gratitude, too much to hope for? Isn’t it worth selling ourselves out to God’s newness, to be seduced by this advertisement, to make this an Always Already and speed up the To Come?

Advent and Thanksgiving are both upon us. May we share our abundance in the spirit of newness, and may our Thanksgiving be an advertisement to that which we, as people of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, have always already, and may our expectation of his coming stir in us and in those who know us, a new season of Hope. And Life. And faithful abundance.

Well, I’m kinda more and more becoming aware that the study of religion can be a no-win or even a lose-lose situation. (And yes, I have - presumably - completed my written comprehensive exams, so I’m looking forward to blogtharsis again.) My primary objective in my work is to encourage anyone who listens to me or reads what I write to rethink certain conceptions, conventions, and whatever, and obviously, doing this in “religion” is to tread in some dangerous waters. If I were a so-called secularist, which I most emphatically am not, as anyone who knows me and who reads this blog is fully aware, I wouldn’t care that this is a minefield. I’d simply say my piece, denounce those who damn me as a heretic or a liberal or whatever else anyone might want to call me, and move on to the next thing.But that’s not why I study religion. I’m not trying to simply secularize old “religious” holidays or explain away anything of my own, or anyone else’s tradition. I do not make my starting point the social, human nature of religious faith and practice, although it is absolutely this. I assume this. But I start more from the other side, that religion as such is the experience and search for the sacred in life as much as, if not more than, it is anything else.

But this is precisely where we (those of us “in the guild”) get in trouble. When I talk or teach or write about the Christmas holiday, for example, and draw out the history of social transformation of this ancient holy day and criticize contemporary participation in the Christmas festival as not being particularly “Christian” and certainly not very “biblical,” I get accused of secularizing a genuine Christian holiday in a way that offends Christians by robbing it of everything that is Christian about it on the one hand and promoting the social and commercial carnivalism on the other. I’m not doing either. I’m assuming from the start that the Christian holiday was a day that marked off, for the faithful, remembrance and recollection by those who shared the Christian identity of one of its foundational stories, and that while the story itself is usually well known through cultural preservation of it, its meaning has been lost. It’s been lost for a long time. In pointing out the social and carnival nature of the Christmas season, I’m not championing it; I’m pointing out the phenomenon, from a historical and mnemonic perspective, that has overshadowed the sacred nature of Christmas, and criticizing it from the same perspective and arguing that the Nativity story, understood in its own context of the first century, challenges the very thing that Christmas has become.

Today, obviously, is Halloween, or, as it was once known, All Hallow’s Eve. I get it here too. On what used to be a day/night observed to “scare off” the demonic and protect the Saints and places of God by spooking the evil away (literally, scaring the hell out of the spirit world), we now have it that the night is, in good social carnival fashion, the very opposite, when we raise hell just for the hell of it. Instead of remembering the sacred aspect of Halloween, many Christians prefer to avoid it all together as a glorification of evil, a notion to which I’m kinda sympathetic, but when I start working with this as religious phenomena, I’m accused of trivializing evil rather than recognize the vestiges of anything sacred in it. So I’m trivializing evil here, but the same routine vis-a-vis Christmas leads to trivializing the sacred, and usually by the same crowd of critics.

I think the most irksome thing is the accusations of academics and professors who try to sensitively treat aspects of religion as being arrogant know-it-alls who seem to setting themselves up to play God. Perhaps, but goshdarnit, we are professors, and we do profess to know something that isn’t usually “in the public domain,” so to speak. But when folks in our guild of academic religionists, theologians, and, heck, even pastors, come to conclusions that challenge what other people hold dear and which are ends in themselves, I have to say it sure as heck is not the professors who act like the arrogant SOB know-it-alls picking fights, or not only us.

What it comes down to is that there are a lot of people who psychologically can’t handle it very well when someone tells them they’re wrong, or rather the particular perspective or understanding of something religious that has been a part of their life for years, and my approach, especially in the sensitive souls of my students, is to avoid doing so as much as possible. Like I said, the sacred is the starting point; it’s human relation, interaction, and so on with the sacred that makes the study and teaching of religion worthwhile, and we all have different experiences with the sacred. For folks in this category, because my “mission” is to stir things up, like any self-respecting academic, please know that I’d rather not bug you, because I’m sure I’d be nothing but trouble for anyone who already thinks they’ve got it all together. But for those who, like me, are disappointed with the desacralization of our religious heritage, I would hope that we academics, professors, and “know-it-alls” can be allies here, not adversaries.

Dear friends and other readers:

I do miss blogging, and thought that I should post a little update on why I’m not really doing much with it these days. Since June, I’ve prioritized my life around my doctoral exams, which will mercifully be over at the end of this month (inshallah). I’ve got a ton of material to blog about though, so “the good stuff” will be back soon. I’ve discovered I feel more connected to my work when I blog about usual topics, so I’m really looking forward to being part of the world again. (And yes, I’m fully aware of the irony in that statement.)

Showtime in two weeks. Wish me luck.

Apparently Pat Robertson is a mite jealous over Chuck’s receipt of the JSU! Award; not to be outdone, we get this brilliant piece from the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of The 700 Club on Monday night’s show:

There you have it. “Islam is not a religion. It is a worldwide political movement meant (sic) on domination of the world. And it is meant to subjugate all people under Islamic law.”

Yikes. Not only do we need to present Pat with his own JSU! Award, but we may have to institute the F-Bomb Award for Religious Ignorance (see here, here, and here, all on Aedificium) as well.

There are something like 2.3 million or so Muslims in the US alone. That means that we Christians are more likely to bump into Muslims in the grocery store than we are to bump into Episcopalians. Pat’s, and Chuck’s, comments ought to be as unwelcome to those of us who are Christians as they are to our Muslim friends and neighbors. Neither of these guys speaks for the majority of Christians, but they’re the ones getting the airtime.

It’s not like we can get Pat off the air, I guess, but those of us in the rank-and-file of American Christians can still be active in denouncing this kind of extremism through our relationships with our Muslim friends, neighbors, colleagues, co-workers, and so forth, in pretty much the same way that American Muslims denounce terrorism and extremism. We can blog, we can call in to radio shows, we can write op-ed pieces, and engage in other creative ways of rejecting this kind of influence.

Upshot: Islam is a religion. And it’s a sibling of Christianity and Judaism. Spread the word.

Hey folks, I’m temporarily on hiatus; end of spring semester about killed me (yes, I exaggerate), and I’ve been recovering with a more three-dimensional life of hiking, bike riding, and preparing to move to the summer place. About the only thing I’ve read or written is emails and instant messages for the last couple of weeks. But I’ve got a lot of stuff in the percolator, so look for something next week. I may be asking you folks to preview a draft of an article as well. Stay tuned…

Benedict

For those readers who have been looking forward to the second part of my original “Failing Religion” post back in … what, March, was it?… I apologize for the delay. But I’m ready now.

It is a little tough to find a good entree to the topic here, so perhaps a story is the way to go. Beloved Wife spent her morning listening to the teens in our church announce their intent to seek confirmation as members in our church, for which each prospective confirmand would read their own personal statement of faith and the church Board would vote to confirm the statement and the “stater” as a member of the community.

Sounded good, if a little routine and rather “going through the motions”-ish. While this was happening in the hall, I was leading a small gathering of folks in our continued study of the Epistle of Jude. Eventually we caught up with each other after church, and Beloved Wife, member of our voting Board of Elders, was clearly distraught, having been absolutely shocked and appalled by what she was hearing from our teen-aged Seekers and which was being approved as Christian statements of faith and worthy of membership into our Christian community of faith. I’m actually being told that “appalled” is not even the right word, even though it’s true; she feels more “betrayed.” Suffice it to say that if she did not know where she was, she would not have been able to discern the difference between our Christian church, our community of faith in Jesus of Nazareth, and any typical Unitarian-Universalist congregation, based on what was acceptable as “Christian” statements of faith.

And so where our religious education has failed Americans in general in their responsibilities as members of both local and global socio-political-cultural communities, it is failing our young people today even in our own communities of faith. I can only speak, of course, from my own experience, but I can safely say that my Muslim and Jewish friends in this country admit of the same problem in their own faith communities. In a word, the problem is that our churches today have simply not learned an appropriate, Christian response to the very fact that we live in a pluralistic world and have largely been unable to steer a course between a theological wishy-washiness that doesn’t even resemble anything remotely Christian or hyper-biblicistic stance that is unable to see the good in that which is not “us.” In other words, the failure of Christian faith communities in both the mainline and evangelical worlds is resulting in the inability of these communities to define who they are in a way that is “Christian” in any meaningful way.

What is interesting is that the mainline and evangelical Protestant wings of American Christianity seem aware of this, at least to an extent. In very broad, admittedly unfair, general terms, mainline Christians have historically excelled at recognizing the social and political importance of the Gospel of Jesus and the good news of the Hebrew Prophets, but overtime these aspects have overshadowed the importance of actually teaching the Text itself, which is now only incidental in the mission to work towards a just world. To be sure, I believe that this is absolutely a crucial component of the Gospel of Christ, and any Gospel that fails to preach and live out this most evident and tangible call of the Prophets and of Christ is half a gospel at best. But it is increasingly evident that this aspect of creating a just world is assumed, not taught, and accordingly the young people in today’s social-justice-aware mainline churches have no idea what the Bible’s actual teachings are on justice, poverty, stewardship, ethical community politics and economics, and so forth. The result is that the majority of these young people who stay in a faith community see little or no difference between Christianity and other religions and faith traditions who may be undertaking the same thing, and feel themselves to be free to hold any beliefs they want so long as their community supports them as Christian members.

The mainstream evangelical world, on the other hand, has historically been strong in its Christian and biblical education and in perpetuating its community identity through identification with its interpretation and knowledge of the Bible. Evangelicalism’s emphasis on the biblical basis of salvation theology through the Messiahship of Jesus is perhaps unparalleled except for Fundamentalist churches. The emphasis on Jesus’ Messiahship is, after all, the defining difference between Christians and those of other faith traditions and communities, and evangelicalism’s emphasis has preserved that identity perhaps more than any other “flavor” of American Christianity. On the other hand, my long experience with evangelical communities is that where they are strong in basic bible knowledge and in promoting Jesus as the Messiah, the tendency has been for the last 3 or 4 decades to emphasize this aspect at the nearly complete expense of the socio-political dynamic that is so strong in the mainline churches, along with an over emphasis on the God-given authority of the State and the nearly complete absence of emphasis on the prophetic critique of power in the prophets and in Jesus’ life. (Which leads, by the way, to a complete misapprehension of the book of Revelation, but that’s a topic for another day.) The implications of these shortcomings are enormous, and they are disturbing, and fortunately more and more people (mostly between the ages of 20 and 40, from what I can tell, although obviously there are exceptions) are being convicted by evangelicalism’s complicity in the apocalyptic state of affairs that we currently find the world in.

I know that these are generalizations, and that there is a huge group of silent witnesses, as it were, between these two typical representations. But the bottom line is that mainline Protestantism and mainstream evangelicalism are both at a crossroads. The former are in jeopardy of losing their rich heritage and identity as socially-conscious Christians, and the latter are in danger of losing the once-honorable badge of “evangelical” as more and more younger evangelicals are shifting their attention to the traditional emphases of liberal protestant churches. The mainliners are terrified that if they “go biblical” in their social program they will be identified as “fundamentalists” and believe they will have no choice but to join with “the powers,” as they believe evangelicals have done. On the other side, evangelicals cannot see how to become more socially prophetic and critical of “the powers” without either becoming “godless liberal relativists” and cultural pluralists or feel like they are abandoning “the clear teachings of the Bible” on a proper Christian relationship to the State.

Once again, I think it comes down to religious, and in this case specifically Christian, education. Neither “side” demonstrates an ability to provide a more authentically prophetic Biblical and Christian interpretation of either Bible or World. Churches such as the one I belong to need to reassert their Christian identity through deeper wrestling with the Word, and churches such as those who emphasize the Word made Flesh need to reaffirm their presence in the World that “judges not, lest ye be judged.” We are beginning to see some glimpses of both beginning to do just this, which is tremendous. Still, we have a long way to go, and a lot of work to be done. I feel that the first task to accomplish is to simply talk to each other, and not in the way Democratic and Republican politicians do, and certainly not in the way liberal and conservative Christians have done. Let’s actually sit and read the text together and learn how an authentically Christian prophetic ministry can speak to power, affirm justice, and serve as stewards in this world in a way that is recognizably Christian, even while we recognize our indebtedness to those who do not share our specific faith.