Tag Archives: Christianity

Miscellany

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Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’re able to enjoy at least part of the day with family and/or friends, and maybe even catch a little football along the way.

Continuing my now ongoing series of things I really want to do but most likely never will, here is another video for viewing pleasure:

1. This post seems fitting for the day. Everything you wanted to know about the history of margarine vs. butter in this country.

2. Felix Salmon talks about how to kill a city’s mojo with parking lots, while Andrew Sullivan discusses how highways can do the same.

3. Bruce Reyes-Chow delves into the radical Jesus bubble in contemporary Christianity.

The Story of our Lives

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csmonitor.com

I’ve been debating whether to write anything about the Penn State debacle or not. There’s a lot about it that makes me really angry. Child abuse, let alone serial rape and molestation, is absolutely heinous and anyone who had an inkling about what Sandusky was doing and didn’t do anything should be fired. If possible, charges should be filed. I don’t care who they are or how important they are. Maybe you think I’m overreacting, but all I can think about is the kids. They never had a chance and it’s our job—all of our jobs—to protect them.

I don’t want to write a few hundred words about my anger or how screwed up the situation is. There are already plenty of those out. What has drawn my attention is the way Joe Paterno is talked about. In almost every case the discussion falls into either a discussion of how Paterno is a fraud who was never the man his image portrayed, or how he is being persecuted and is somewhat near a saint.

As humans we want to reduce everything to the simplest terms possible. We want black and white, we want answers, we want certainty. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t offer us much of anything that fits into these boxes. Instead of a bunch of Hitlers we get a former coordinator who mentored hundreds of college kids and ran a charity that helped many more at risk youth, who also was a serial child rapist. We get a legendary coach known for doing everything the right way, meticulously fallowing up to make sure his athletes were doing well in school and expecting the best out of everyone in his program, who also let a close friend get away with sexually abusing children. We get a Pope who covered up sex abuse by his priests when he was a bishop.

These men are not just their best or worst actions. They are both, and everything in between. We don’t like this though. We want to be able to classify people as good or bad, with us or against us. If we can’t do this, then we have to spend time dealing with the complexity. Our humanity is in the complexity though. It’s easier being able to write Paterno off as a bad guy or to keep up his reputation, because then we don’t have to deal with whether or not we would do what he did. Would we report a best friend to the cops? Would we still be his friend and help him to face what he did and get whatever help he could, even as the world rejected him?

Pay attention to the movies you watch, the books you read. How many times is the main character a flawed human being who finds redemption in the end? How much of the story is based around the character grappling with his or her flaw? How important to the story is their overcoming that flaw? If you know the Bible you shouldn’t be surprised by the storyline. It’s the story of Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, and many others. Even more, it’s our story. We’re complex, conflicted and trying to overcome our flaws. As Christians we believe this is where Jesus comes in—showing us the way we were created to be, and the way to get there. We don’t get there in this lifetime, but by the grace of God we get there in the end.

This doesn’t change what has happened at Penn State, and it doesn’t make any of it better or OK. I think it does help it make some more sense. This isn’t a feel good story, and I’m not sure where redemption can come from. Sometimes in this world that’s all we get to go on.

Apparently I’m Stupid, Part 2

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Vision of Ezekiel, Peter Paul Rubens

So about a week ago I posted the first part of my thoughts gleaned from this debate. Below is part number two.

The second problem we have as Western Christians isn’t just our fault, but we are at least as culpable as anyone. The problem is that there is a lack of literacy in this country. I’m not talking just about being able to read words on a page and understand your USA Today or Newsweek. I’m talking about a fundamental ignorance of literary styles and genres. About an inability to discern metaphors and allegories, or to see a deeper meaning in a text. Jerry Coyne’s post is a perfect example of this. I would presume that Coyne would be able to read Animal Farm and explain that it was both a fictional story about animals on a farm, and an allegory about communism. I would assume that he would also agree that Orwell’s choice of using talking animals instead of people in a fictional story does not make his arguments about communism less true. Yet somehow Coyne is incapable of seeing anything in the Bible, and assumedly any other sacred text, this way. He even unwittingly admits as much, saying towards the end,

“So the problem we have with ‘sophisticated’ theologians and smart religious people like Douthat is not that we think that fundamentalism is the best interpretation of religion, but this: there is no rational basis for seeing part of the Bible as literally true and part of it as metaphor (author’s italics).”

In Coyne’s mind all the Bible has to be 100 percent literally true for it to have any meaning, even when it is poetry or clearly allegory (have you read the book of Daniel? ), and the fact that Coyne’s argument is completely absurd is his proof that the Bible is completely worthless. Then he says anyone who disagrees is stupid and pathetic for disagreeing. Would Coyne argue that we should write the New York Times off because of the comics, crossword and jumble? Clearly those don’t make sense taken literally.

The church is not solely responsible for causing this problem. We are at fault for failing to teach our members how to read the Bible in multiple ways. We have become too focused on trying to have the most authentic text possible, and the most literal understanding, and as a result we have lost the story of the BIble. Yes, knowing the original text as best we can is important. It’s also far from all we need to know. We need to recapture the stories we learned in Sunday School or in our picture Bible we had as a little kid. (We also need to reread the stories and see the endings that got left out, and the sections that got skipped, because they weren’t quite appropriate for first or second graders.)

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, Simeon Solomon

When we go back and read the stories we get a fuller picture of the God we believe in, and we can’t help but see the different messages the writers were trying to convey. Exodus can be a little tedious and repetitive, but there are also some beautiful hymns and a moving story of devotion and perseverance. The Psalms are great poetry, and the prophets can match many sci-fi novels for shear craziness of imagery. I guess that’s the real problem we have as a church—we just don’t care to read the BIble, and we suffer greatly for it. Where else can you find a collection of writings so diverse, and yet so intertwined?

This is another area where Coyne and I disagree. He thinks the Bible is,

“a jerry-rigged, sloppily-edited, largely fabricated, and palpably incomplete collection of oral traditions and myths, once intended to be the best explanation for the origins of our species, but now to be regarded merely as a quaint and occasionally enjoyable origin fable related by ignorant and relatively isolated primitive ancestors. It’s a palimpsest that is largely fictional, a story reworked many times, but based on our ancestors’ best understanding of how we came about. It’s simply a myth, no truer than the many myths, religious or otherwise, that preceded it.”

I’m guessing you can see where some of my disagreements might be… He sees these characteristics of the Bible as failings. I see the Bible as not sloppily edited and jerry-rigged, but as a collection of narratives that tell the stories of the Israelite people, and then the early Christians, left in imperfect form because that is all we have as humans. Life isn’t perfect, and neither are our stories. Honestly, if the Bible fit together perfectly I wouldn’t be able to buy it.

Coyne has problems with the works of the Bible being edited and reedited, but what writing put out for general consumption isn’t? Also, has he read past the first couple chapters of Genesis? If you do, you see that the vast majority of the Bible is not about our origin, or even the origin of sin, but about the reality of our imperfect relationship with God and how it plays out in the world.

Following Coyne’s logic in his post we should disregard the entire corpus of his life’s work once we find any contradictions in it. Clearly this is ridiculous, and it’s the same with the Bible.

Random Thoughts from the Weekend

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So a pretty busy weekend overall, and a good busy at that. A few things to pass on:

1. Immerse Journal has quickly become my favorite Christian magazine, and a go to resource for youth ministry. They’re offering a great holiday special, letting you download the new issue as a PDF for free, then once you’ve decided to subscribe you get a free gift subscription as well. Read the issue and I don’t think you’ll be able to pass up the deal.

2. Along similar lines, Tony Jones (of the oft-linked Theoblogy) is offering his latest book for $2.99 in the Kindle store. (Don’t have a Kindle? No worries, there’s a free Kindle app for pretty much any device.) If you have an interest in the future of the church, and especially if you want to be a part of deciding that future, this is a book worth reading.

3. Kate and I were at the Broncos-Raiders game yesterday and lucky enough to see my favorite team pull out a late win. I have to say though, if you feel like you’re too hopeful about the future of our country and you need to be a little depressed, go to a Raiders game. I know there are intelligent, respectable Raiders fans out there, they apparently just don’t go to games. There were a couple guys in the next section over heckling Tim Tebow the entire, calling him a sadly impressive (most would say offensive) range of insults, with the most memorable being, “where’s your messiah now Tebow?” after an incomplete pass. These guys were extreme, but they weren’t the exception either. They were the rule waiting to be proven. I’m not sure what else to say, I’m just consistently amazed each year when we go to the game.

Photo courtesy Jeffrey Beall via Wikimedia Commons

4. I’m also still not sure about Tebow as an NFL quarterback. He is 2-1 as a starter, and he clearly has the the team behind him, but it’s not pretty. There are times you watch him and he looks completely overwhelmed before the snap. Then he’s antsy in the pocket, looking to run at any chance and overthrowing open receivers. You see that and think there’s no way he has a future as a quarterback. Then the next series he comes out and is completely calm behind center, stands tall in the pocket and makes some beautiful throws. Maybe he does have a future… Could he be a Doug Flutie style QB? I really don’t know. As long as the team is winning the answer is yes, I guess.

You Want Me to go Where?

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Courtesy Wikipedia

I started seminary in Chicago in August 2005 with lots of ideas of what I thought seminary would be. I was excited and ready to save the world. I graduated in May 2010 in San Anselmo, knowing that seminary was far from what I had hoped or expected. I was even more sure the world needed saving, and even more convinced of my call to help. My journey is unique in many details, but overall, I’ve come to realize that most seminarians go through a similar journey that leaves them jaded and frustrated with church institutions. I am thankful of my time in seminary, and I do feel better prepared to be a church leader. I still believe seminary is fundamental to the training and preparation of future clergy. I also know its myriad problems that cripple its ability to consistently produce healthy and capable leaders.

I really have no idea how much time I have spent in conversation with friends, or just in thought, about how to fix seminary. I don’t even how much good my ideas are. I do know that as I read this post there were a bunch of thoughts swirling in my head, and still are, that I am now trying to separate and write down. You’ll be seeing the stuff worth general consumption coming online soon in some form.

What I want to do now is encourage you to read the entire post I linked above and consider how your church supports its leaders, and how it supports aspiring leaders. How much do you know about what it takes to become a leader in your church? What would you consider to be the most important characteristics of a pastor? How can the church prepare its leaders, both ordained and non-ordained?

This subject obviously hits close to home for me. It should for you too, regardless of whether you lead a church or not. The future of the church depends on many things (formation of children in faith, authentic worship, building relationships with God, serving the world in God’s name, among many others), and all of them go back in part to the guidance of pastors and ministers. Without leaders who have knowledge of the Bible, theology and church traditions, have developed spiritual and prayer lives, understand leadership, and have a passion for God’s children, churches don’t have the needed vision, tools, or guidance to be what God is calling them to be. Obviously pastors are not all that matters. The best pastors won’t get anywhere without a congregation willing to work and serve God. Lay leadership, no matter how much money a church has, is fundamental to having a vibrant church (which brings up the related subject of how we train leaders who don’t want to be ordained).

We’re all in this together, and we need to invest our time and resources in the places they are most needed. The training of pastors is one of these places, so again, please read this post and let me know your thoughts.

Sacrifice

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Photo courtesy imdb.com

I finally watched Of Gods and Men tonight and I’m sorry it took me this long to get around to it. If you haven’t heard of the movie, it’s about a group of monks in Algeria who are confronted by Islamist terrorists and have to choose whether to stay or leave and be killed. Now it’s not action-packed like anything from the Bourne trilogy, and it’s not a comedy either. It’s a little slow moving, and unless you know French you have to pay enough attention to read the subtitles. That being said, it’s immensely powerful and beautifully filmed. The film has an almost documentary quality to it, which makes you feel like you’re a part of the story. You feel the pain and anguish the bothers are experiencing as they decide whether to go home or continue their work in the village. You feel Luc’s fatigue after he has seen almost 150 patients in his clinic. You feel like you’re sitting in on the brothers’ deliberations and you want to voice your opinion as they go around the table. Again, it’s not light entertainment, but it is oddly hopeful.

I used to wonder what good monastic life was—what it had to offer this world. I remember thinking in college that it was incredibly selfish for people to hide away in a monastery while the rest of the world went to hell. I never could buy the idea that their prayers were enough to make up for their hiding out on top of a mountain. I’ve come to realize since then that monks and nuns have a lot more to offer than prayer, and they do much more than hide out inside their walls making beer and honey. This movie highlights the work these monks did within their community—from their medical clinic to their interfaith outreach. Their community was markedly better off because of their presence. I’ve worked with a couple Franciscan brothers and alongside some Sisters of Mercy. I’ve seen the devotion to service that they exhibited, putting their neighbors before themselves. It’s clear to me now that the world is much better off because we have people who have taken vows of celibacy and poverty. It doesn’t even take a sacrifice like the monks in the Atlas monastery made.

Photo courtesy imdb.com.

Gods is most powerful because it doesn’t overdramatize the monks decision to stay. It develops their decision out of the devotion the monks feel for the villagers they serve. It develops out of the painful sacrifice that the monks made to leave their families and forgo having families of their own to follow God. This is most powerfully shown in a scene with Christian, the elected leader of the group, and Celestine (if I remember correctly), who is explaining his decision to stay. He tells Christian the story of the last time he saw his family, for his mother’s 80th birthday, and how he was happy to be with everyone but he felt disconnected. He knew he could never leave monastic life because it was where his calling was. His new family was in Algeria. By the time we get to a scene with Christian and Christophe, one of the last to decide to stay, we understand what Christian means when he says that the brothers have already given up their lives when they chose to follow God and take their vows. In essence, the hard choice to give their lives up to God had already been made, and now it was just following where God led them. This is the power of Gods, and it is the power of todays monks and nuns. It is their daily acts of service that amount to the greatest sacrifice they make, and why we need more of them in this world.

Miscellany

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1. John Stackhouse addresses the the topic of expertise and authority in this answer to a reader question. He makes a great point about understanding what type of question we’re asking, so we can then know what kind of knowledge is needed to answer it. How different would our discourse be if we took these points to heart?

2. Brian McLaren continues the talk about thinking through our questions in this response to a reader question.

3. Tracy Howe Wispelwey thinks through the implications of the music we use in worship (h/t BM).

Keeping us in our Places

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So I really hadn’t planned on spending anymore time discussing gender roles and Christianity after I linked to this Rachel Held Evans post. Then I read through this conversation over at Two Friars and a Fool, and realized that I still had a lot rattling around in my head that needed to come out.

I couldn’t help but think that those of us who have grown up in the church, or have spent a long time there, decided the issue of female ordination decades ago, and haven’t really spent much time thinking about it since. Issues of gender roles have come up more lately. We have also spent a lot of time discussing who can and can’t be ordained. We’ve just spent most of the time discussing these in regards to issues of sexuality, not gender. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about how while the subject of female ordination has basically been settled in churches, we still don’t agree, and neither side feels the need to talk about it anymore.

(For the video above, start at the 30 minute mark for the sermon.)

The first time this became apparent to me was about three years ago when I was talking to a friend who had begun interning in a Baptist church. He had grown up attending church sporadically, and always conservative evangelical churches when he did. In contrast, I grew up attending a United Methodist church where a female pastor was always on staff. In fact, every church I had attended until that point had at least one female pastor on staff. So we were talking and got on the topic of church leadership. I asked him what he would do if he showed up for worship one Sunday and there was a woman standing in the pulpit. He paused for a moment, and then said he had never thought about it, that it would be weird, but he probably wouldn’t mind.

After this conversation, and conversations with several other people, I realized that I had never heard a defense of woman being ordained growing up. It was just taken for granted by that point. This was the same experience many of my friends and fellow seminarians seemed to have had as well, regardless of whether their church ordained women or not. The issue had been settled, and their was no need to discuss it any further.

I bring this anecdote up because as denominations become less influential, and more churches focus on reaching out to the “non-churched” the issue will need to be dealt with explicitly. There are an increasing number of people attending churches, like my friend, who don’t think about this topic because they aren’t made to. For those of us who cannot picture church without the contributions of woman pastors this is even more important for us to remember. A person who attends a church led by a woman will probably have thought about the subject. A person who attends a large church that doesn’t allow women to lead may not think about it. Most people will only think about it when a church leader brings it up, or when they see a woman preaching.

A church that only allows men to be in leadership won’t have to deal with this issue very often. Especially if they have a woman directing the nursery or elementary programs, or as the lead singer in the worship band, or if they have a woman give the children’s sermon. Women can be visible, but still not leading in anything approaching the same capacity as men. The result can seem similar to the people in the congregation, but the difference is that women’s voices, and the ways God is working through them, are silenced.

For those of us who have no desire to return to a time when women weren’t ordained we need to remember this dynamic. We need to make sure the issue is still discussed, which means we need to be able to intelligently articulate our position. This doesn’t mean prooftexting from the BIble, but being able to explain how Paul used woman as his ministry partners, as did Jesus. It means being able to explain how our position is biblical, just as we acknowledge that the arguments against women in ministry are biblical too. It means highlighting the contributions of women to show that God is calling woman to preach and teach to everyone. It means getting people to ask the questions and put faces to the answers. Is Barbara Brown Taylor any less of a preacher because she is a woman? Were the Methodists and Presbyterians wrong in affirming God’s call in the woman I have learned from and worked with? Is Kate’s and my wedding any less blessed by God because a woman pronounced us?

In the end, this is what the issue is about. We must remember it, and continue to talk about it. If this is a debate that plays out silently, it is a debate we are at a great disadvantage in. If we don’t speak up, then we will be losing an untold wealth of wisdom in the future, as well as ignoring God’s work in our communities.

My Friends Call Me… Ctd.

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I agree with Tony’s point that we need a label. As he says, “Words shape us; words do things; words have power.” His point that the power of the label evangelical is that it’s a theological term is spot on. It sounds religious, unlike progressive or emergent. I think this works similarly for Protestant as well, even though it’s not a theological term. Progressive and liberal are political terms first. Their theological significance is as modifiers of theological terms. This is key, and why evangelical is an effective label, even as it has gained strong political connotations in American culture. Evangelical is a theological term first, and a political term second. It’s also a positive term, describing what it is, not what it isn’t. This is part of why “progressive evangelical” doesn’t work. It is defining itself as a specific type of evangelical, and therefore not like the “other” evangelicals.

So what about the options for a new label? I really like “trinitarian Christian.” The trinity is foundational to my theology, so I like having that as a label. If I had my way I would use “perichoretic Christian,” but this falls into Tony’s too-obscure category. Trinitarian is attractive to me because it draws on the full breadth of who God is, and not just on a specific event, theme, or task. It’s also a well-known term with a clear meaning, so people know your basic belief without needing to know the meaning of the term in-depth.

I like the “incarnational Christian” option, and agree with Tony’s points, but I’m just not sure I’m completely sold on it. It strikes me as a little too specific, focusing on one theological theme, and maybe a little too obscure. The incarnation is fundamental to my theology, with it being an outpouring of God’s love for creation, but it’s not the only important theological term. I know some people will be worried about it not being explicitly about the resurrection, but I think the resurrection gets plenty of focus in Christian circles, and isn’t in danger of being ignored. “Evangelical” has no explicit reference to the resurrection, yet I think it’s safe to say that evangelicals haven’t forgotten about Easter.  So “Incarnational” doesn’t mean “not resurrectional.”

My concern isn’t about the meaning of “incarnational.” It is that any label necessarily says, “I am ____, and you’re not.” This is just as true for my choice of “trinitarian Christian” as it is for any other. Labels are fundamentally divisive and I think that Christianity has plenty of divisions. That being said, Tony is still right that we need a label because people will give us one if we don’t claim one for ourselves. Maybe the answer is to find a broad enough term to allow a big tent, while being inviting and inclusive in our actions and demeanor. Maybe people we don’t agree with or like will claim the label too, but I think Jesus has some things to say about bringing people together who don’t always agree. What do you think?

My Friends Call Me…

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Welcome to unevenground! I’m glad you’ve stopped by. Info about the site and my bio are in the menus above, and keep an eye on the banner for additional sections to be added as we go. So let’s get started.

Over at his blog Tony Jones has been working with his readers to pick a new title to replace the “progressive” in “progressive Christian.” To catch up on the discussion read this, this, and these. Ready?

I hate giving myself a title, I’m too self-conscious. There is part of me that wants to get a Ph.D and then become a bishop so I could be called “The Right Reverend Dr.”—but there is no way I could ever actually use that title.

Titles draw attention to ourselves. Titles define, and therefore limit us. They effectively say, “I am like this, and I’m not like that.” Titles are never fully descriptive of who we are, and the ones that stick usually aren’t the ones we choose for ourselves. Christians didn’t start calling themselves Christians, that was a label given by others. It stuck and has been the most inclusive and enduring label we have. We keep adding new ones though, and these labels keep getting new meanings added to them by us and others. The more labels we have flying about, the more important it becomes to claim labels for ourselves.

Having more than one label gets cumbersome though, so we end up having to limit ourselves to one main one. Which one do we generally choose? We choose the one that is best known by others. So terms like “Evangelical,” “Progressive,” “Mainline Protestant” and now “Emergent” become the defining labels. Some of us identify with all of them, and there is overlap in the terms, but how progressive can you be and still be an evangelical? How emergent can a mainline Protestant be? Is a progressive evangelical as progressive as a progressive? What happens when someone else says you’re not actually what you say you are? Who gets to decide who can claim a label? Can you reject meanings tied to a specific label, while still claiming the meanings you do like?

Can you see why I hate labels? If I could, I would never use one. Unfortunately that’s not an option, so that brings us back to Tony’s posts…