the parish

Death, be (not) proud

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

The hot, grieving hairdresser wife has been to four funerals in the past month. I'll be going to two this week: one for my mom's husband and one for my younger brother's mother-in-law, both victims of lung cancer, both died Saturday night. I know, my mother's husband is technically my step-dad, but she didn't marry him 'til I was 23, so it's not like an official step-relationship. He was a good man though, and he was great to my mom. Ranch foreman, bull rider, cowboy, gentleman, churchless Christian: a good man in many, many ways. The lady who died, Margo, gave me my first job out of prison. Actually, she and her ex-husband gave me a job when I was on bond and rehired me when I was released. They helped reintegrate me to the real world. She even wrote me in prison. A kind, caring, 3-pack a day woman.

These are the deaths that trouble me, the ones that make me want to believe in resurrection. I want to believe good people get something beautiful in the next life, as opposed to rotting lungs, wheezing, and emaciation in this life. I've been reflecting on this since the hottie and I went to the funeral of another good man: a 43-year old husband, father, brother, son, and damn good human being who died of his first and last heart attack, leaving three kids behind. I understand the emotions and the rationale that lead to the postulation of an after-life. Who wants to lose a father at 16 and never see him again? Who wants to lose a husband at 43 and have no hope of reunion? How can you not fear something that takes the good and the bad, the young and the old, the healthy and the ill? It's an inexplicable affliction that is only mitigated by the hope of another life, later.

But I don't know if I believe that. I'm not sure there is anything afterward. I'm not sure it will matter once we're dead, but this week, I know it matters to the living, so I opened this with John Donne. It's one of the few verses in literature that inspires me to believe. And if you've never seen Emma Thompson read it and hope for it in her HBO movie "Wit", then you need to rent it immediately and cry like a baby. Peace.

YouVersion and the Demise of the Bible

The hydra-headed megachurch in OKC is on the verge of launching an online Bible project, ominously and ironically named YouVersion. The question on their front page: "Is the Bible relevant today?" The answer, and I don't mean this rhetorically, if you're lifechurch.tv is an unqualified "yes!" Craig has made a career out of making the Bible "relevant" for the lctv groupies. Which is to say he's made a career of glossing over the difficulties and nuances, all the while providing easily-digestible, pithy synopses of Bible excerpts for the consumers at lctv to take home and "apply to their lives today."

YouVersion is an attempt to extend the relevance of Scripture in the environment of Web 2.0. (Before anyone takes issue with the appellation, please know that I'm not an evangelist for web 2.0, but I recognize that evangelicals are trying to develop apps that take advantage of the 2.0 hype.) Much like eBible, YouVersion will allow the user to append notes, links, and other study helps. The move into 2.0 in this case takes the form of allowing the user to link to film clips, videos, and music files. Let's say you and your Bible study group, also known as a "small group" in the parlance of Church 2.0, are studying the Epistle of James (not that you would without great qualifications). Someone in the group wants to extend the group into web 2.0 by creating a group on YouVersion using James as the jumping off point. The group can be created, the notes shared, and any files linked or attached can be accessed by the group. So, instead of some dry old Calvin commentary on James, you can pick a favorite movie clip or perhaps have your son or daughter do an impromptu rap based on James 1. (That could be an audio or video file.) Just imagine that instead of reading a stuffy old Interpreter's Commentary, you can watch a sermon of Craig or a video clip of The Passion of the Christ to illustrate the benefits of suffering.

I don't foresee YouVersion being a huge hit for a couple reasons. People don't read their Bibles much anyway, so it's unlikely they will read the Bible plus appendices. And, why the hell would anyone care about film clips attached to certain passages? Especially at a fundangelical church? For example, to illustrate the point of "bear one another's burdens," the best recent example comes from the ending sequence of Black Snake Moan, but people who go to Lifechurch.tv aren't going to post a clip from a movie featuring a naked, smoking hot Christina Ricci chained to a radiator. The use of the grotesque (in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor) is lost in the prurience of the image. The metaphor is subsumed in the appeal to the flesh. The fundangelical movie fan will only see the appeal, not the metaphor. You can eliminate some of the best "biblical" movies in recent memory based on that criterion: Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, Man on Fire, The Proposition, and any movie that attempts to undermine the myth of redemptive violence. Anyone who still counts profanities or boobs to gauge a film's appropriateness is not the kind of person I want recommending movies for me.

Here's my elitism sneaking in: I don't think the average lctv member is capable of exegeting movies and culture at a sophisticated enough level that their movie recommendations would actually illuminate a passage of Scripture. I'm seeing endless clips of Braveheart and Gladiator, with the occasional nod to The Passion of the Christ, because Americhristians don't really know well how to deconstruct redemptive violence. And as far as their notes on a particular passage go, if preachers can't keep my interest, why would someone with absolutely no theological training and no understanding of the culture or context interest me? Sorry. Maybe I'm an elitist shit, but I think Keen's critique of the "cult of the amateur" applies especially in this case.

I will leave alone, for now, the other critiques about individualism, literalism, and silliness this sort of project engenders.

Forbes and Associated Press on Evangelicals and the Arts (like real art)

Not a bad piece of work here. I love how diplomatic he is about Kincade, but it's nice to see the "painter of lite" barely gets a mention. I count that as a hopeful sign for my artist friends who are Christian.

A Moment of Self-Indulgence

Tomorrow I turn 43. I'm celebrating this year by having a "favorite things" day. Starbucks in the early a.m. with friends. Ingrid's, a wonderful German restaurant, for a Bavarian breakfast. An hour browsing at the bookstore. Belgian beer at Tapwerks in the afternoon. Light dinner and fantastic wine at Bin 73. All in the company of the hot, hairdresser wife. She bought me a bottle of Clos du Val ('02) Cabernet and a bottle of Stag's Leap Artemis ('04) for my birthday wines. I'll probably have the Silver Oak Napa tomorrow night at Bin 73, but who knows...I may find something wondefully different. The only favorite things missing from my day will be friends and family, but I can't see them all in one day. I have a grace-filled life, and I'm grateful for it.

Redeemed to God, Part II

Just to clarify, I don't know what the idea of being redeemed to God means if by that phrase someone means that I'm supposed to have a relationship with God. And by relationship I mean the kind where you talk to each other, know each other, hang out together, etc. Within a Christian framework it seems that Jesus came to reveal who God is, so it's not as if prior to Jesus people had a great idea what God was like. That is very evident within the narrative of the gospels because the people of God don't recognize the incarnation of God. This despite 39 previous books that allegedly revealed God's will, character, wants, and whims.

This is the point where Christians will say, "Jesus came so we can know God (among other things), and we receive the Spirit of God as both a guarantee of our salvation and a means to commune with Jesus." The problem as I see it is that there is no way for anyone to differentiate "the Spirit" from intuition, whim, impression, thought, hallucination, or projected desire. Talking to God at this point becomes a game of deciding which impressions are the Holy Ghost and which ones are random thoughts that flit through my head. This was especially treacherous in my charismatic days when everyone thought they had a "word from God." If there are no criteria by which to judge the Ghost's activity, then any inclination or desire can be read as "the Ghost." Borat made this painfully obvious in the scene where Cohen gets "saved and filled with the Spirit" at a charismatic church. No one knew they were being played, so everyone agrees to play along: Borat is therefore momentarily a charismatic Christian.

To use a less absurd example, the average person cannot distinguish the voice of the Ghost from any "good" thought that might come to mind. When people tell me they talk to God and God talks back, I ask what God had to say. It's always something vague or trite, and something that cannot be disproven: "I love you," "I've been with you all the time," "I hurt as much as you," "Trust me," or some equally innocuous tidbit. Just once I'd like someone to hear from God in such a way that the veracity of the claim can be measured. If it can't, you might as well be making things up in your mind. This tendency becomes dangerous and destructive when the voice of God is offered on behalf of someone else: the kind person who told a 12-year old girl last week that God took her daddy because He needed him for something. (God needs a 43-year old man more than his 12-year old daughter?) One of my favorites in the charismatic days was "God is going to restore your marriage." A promise that had the happy effect of making someone actually work at his marriage thereby fulfilling the "prophecy."

Christians seems fond of saying that God doesn't micromanage. Great. I think the Bible makes that abundantly clear, unless you read it through a Reformed lens, but what does that mean for a Christian? If God doesn't micromanage, what is she going to tell me? Greg, I don't care how you get this done, but I need you to go to Zambia, hold a revival, and get thousands saved. How 'bout, Greg, go to the hospital and pray for Joe Jones; I'm going to heal him of leukemia. Nope. God doesn't talk enough, nor does she speak with a distinct voice so that the person who wants to know God is talking can distinguish that voice.

Communication is the heart of relationship. Christians seem to know this when they trot out the old canards about marriage and family, but they develop selective amnesia concerning this point when the conversation is about prayer. You can't have relationship with someone whose face you can't see, whose words you can't read (I dare you to mention the Bible.), or whose voice you can't hear. Call it what you want, but it ain't a relationship. If being redeemed to God means that I'm supposed to have some sort of relationship with Her, then I'm out. If redeemed to God means Jesus came so we would know at some level that God really loved us, I can live with that. If that love has to be mediated by some other means than loving the other as if that other were the beloved of God, then I'm lost. I can't love an abstraction or a concept. I can love a person. I hope that God is okay with that.

Redeemed to God

In the wake of my "Glorious Ruin?" post, someone asked if I thought humans need or needed to be redeemed to God. What is redemption, I guess is the question. The normal response is to start tossing out Bible verses to prove that Jesus was actually buying us back or paying our debt on the cross. That method ignores the midrash function of Scripture and does not take seriously the possibility that people were writing documents to explain God's behavior from within a set of culturally shaped assumptions. For example, when the whole world is awash in blood and blood sacrifices, how could Jesus not be functioning in that role somehow? His death on the cross seems to fit the socio-religious pattern of blood sacrifice, and Girard's argument that he is being scapegoated points to another sociological interpretation of the event that I believe has some merit (although I don't completely buy Girard's argument).  In case we're doubtful the writer to the Hebrews clears it up for us by assuring us that there is no remission of sin without the shedding of blood. This despite the Torah's insistence that God requires obedience and not sacrifice. Therein lies one of those contradictions that is not really a contradiction. It's a discussion. One writer says "blood," the other says "obedience," still another says "Torah," and yet another says "love mercy, do justice, walk humbly." Fundangelicals, who insist on a univocal text, say, "The Bible means all of them." It does inasmuch as the writer believed he was articulating something truthful about God and God's activity. Unfortunately, it's very possible that any of those writers got it badly wrong.

There are more than two choices here though; it doesn't have to be "the whole thing is true or none of it is true." Or the corollary: if you can't trust part of it, how can you trust any of it? Well, because it's not a matter of trust; it's a matter of reading it as a discussion of how and who God is, bearing in mind that the people who wrote it were as plagued with cultural lenses and prejudices and assumptions as we are. I guess the question I've been driving at all these years is "what did Jesus come to do?" I no longer believe he came to offer himself to appease God's wrath. That just seems petty to me, and odd. God sets up a system in which we have to fail and then creates a penalty for the failure and then pays the penalty herself? Why not just skip to step four, redemption, or avoid step one? Is it possible that God woul prefer we act right? Is it possible that the kingdom of God is a world in which we treat each other with love, respect, grace, dignity, equity, and honesty? If redemption means anything, I think it means that we are saved from ourselves by living like the kingdom of God is here now. What good does it do for Jesus to die if we don't follow the pattern? I don't care that Paul says we're still dead in our sins if that is some defense of substitutionary atonement. But if he means that we live in our sin as long as we choose to participate in a world that doesn't look like the kingdom, then I think he's right.

I do think there are things that anger God. I hope that injustice and violence and rape and child abuse anger God. I hope that poverty angers God. But if God needs to fix it by killing someone, then the system sucked from the beginning and I find it difficult to believe that we have any moral culpability for the shitty way the world has run from the beginning. However, if what God was hoping for all along was for us to treat each other as we'd like to be treated, then what Jesus does makes perfect sense. He shows us the means to redemption, and that means is participating in the socially-embodied ethic of the kingdom with the full awareness that there may be a brutal price to pay for the participation. Imputed righteousness and substitutionary atonement just give us an out for our lack of participation. We can always point to the Biblical text and say, "Look how sinful Paul and Peter were. How can we hope to be better? Ah, Jesus' blood; that's the answer." If Jesus' blood makes us secure in our salvation and complacent about our behavior, then he really did die in vain. But that is precisely what imputed righteousness does. It removes the burden of living in the kingdom and defers holiness to another world soon to come. The righteousness of God is revealed in Jesus because what God really wants, I think, is people who live like they believe that living in the kingdom is redemption. Being moral creatures who choose the good is redemption. Jesus didn't just preach the kingdom; he lived as if it were already here. It's the model of living I care about, not the method or meaning of his death. That meaning is inscrutable, and the Church hasn't agreed on it for 2000 years, but his life...that's something that we can emulate.

If heaven is supposed to look like anything, and I'm still not sure I believe in heaven as conceived by Christians, it would look much like the kingdom of God as a socially-embodied ethic of grace, justice, equity, and honesty. When Christians ignore the possibility of living in the kingdom now, as if salvation means something other than that, and live as if the second coming will make a radical difference in the way they treat each other, it just puzzles me. What do you think heaven is supposed to be if not a way of living that exemplifies the kingdom life Jesus demonstrated? Seriously. I think I'm no longer a Christian because Christians seem so oblivious to what is apparent from the text they nearly worship: salvation is for now, but salvation isn't a payment of blood; it's living like Jesus.

Two of my favorites together, at last...

Douglas LeBlanc of GetReligion (and Christianity Today) interviews Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer (and Harper's and Rolling Stone and Killing the Buddha).

A Glorious Ruin?

One of the questions posed to me in Nashville was how I would respond to C.S. Lewis's contention that humanity is "a glorious ruin." Lewis bases his position on the classic theist idea that humans fell from a state of innocence to our current state of depravity. Chesterton went so far as to say that human depravity is an absolutely demonstrable truth; one only needs to look around. And no one can measure the harm that Augustine has done with his ruminations on original sin and human depravity. Luther, in his Bondage of the Will, may top all comers in this area though. Christian theology has been hopelessly entangled in this ridiculous doctrine from almost the beginning of the Church. Is humanity a glorious ruin?

I said no. I said we are what we are, and we've always been just that. If the Genesis 3 story means anything I think it means we all move from a place of ignorance to enlightenment and that we all achieve the status of gods in our moral development inasmuch as we exchange what we know to be right for a preference that is destructive, selfish, or just vain. Enlightenment in this sense not necessarily being a good thing. It could simply mean an awareness of the consequences of the choices before us and a perverse preference for the wrong choice.

I don't think there was a time when humanity existed in bliss and innocence. At some point in our development, we all choose to fall. The fall narrative is a psychological description of the process of becoming morally aware creatures. We're ruined by our choices and our participation in systems of violence, destruction, lust, gluttony, oppression, etc. The cure for this state of moral awareness and ambivalence need not be another murdered man on a cross; it seems that soteriology is best understood in the framework of friendship because friendship draws us out of our selfishness and helps us prefer another. Any discussion of "friendship with God" seems like nonsense talk to me since God is not there in any guise wherein she would be recognizable. Salvation is and has been available in the form of friends, family, and even strangers, but I've never known salvation in the Christian sense to be distinguishable from non-salvation. How do I know that I'm saved? The Bible says so. What should I feel? You can't trust your feelings; trust God's word. What then does salvation look like? Jesus on the cross. This is, of course, God of the gaps talk. It proves nothing, solves nothing, demonstrates nothing, and can't be discerned in any normal activity in human life. It is salvation from nothing to nothing. Salvation, even in the Bible, was always realized by the presence and activity of a person, even when that person was Jesus.

Conversation: the Buzz

Brian McLaren says in New Kind of Christian that we ought to stop counting conversions and count conversations instead. Emergent is a conversation and a "generative friendship." Conversation, like community, has become one of those words that has been sapped of usefulness by virtue of its use in Christian circles (cf., salvation, growth, outreach, evangelism, small group, etc.). The problem for fundangelicals is that conversations must have a soteriological telos, be it actual conversion or "one plants the seed, one waters, and God gives the increase." I'm not sure what a conversation is supposed to be, but I think we came really close to a damn good instantiation of it in Nashville.

We sat around several tables with a very diverse group and were able to be completely frank about what we believe without being outwardly judged. (I can't speak to anyone's internal responses.) I was able to say things like, "If the Gospel is that God needed still more blood to be happy, if he wasn't satisfied with the amount of blood already shed on the planet, then I don't give a shit about the Gospel." No one flinched. I honestly wasn't trying to shock or offend, but I'm so used to offending or shocking people with the way I frame things that I was amazed that the room basically shrugged. We listened to the stories of three men who had accepted their homosexuality at a fairly young age and walked away from the church when it became too painful to remain, in part because of the attempted exorcisms, laying on of hands, swearing off the lifestyle, pleading with God for deliverance, and the message that they could not be gay and whole. We listened to single women talk about their attempt to do ministry in the church as ordained ministers. We listened to men who had been staff pastor at a megachurch until the disillusionment was too great to continue. We mainly listened. We asked questions. We debated a bit. We offered counter positions and different perspectives on common experiences.

What was the goal of this? To become friends. Just friends. Not to convert, nor to save, nor to chastise, nor to judge. Friendship is the telos of conversation. Friendship is the means to redemption. Friendship only works when everyone is allowed to believe what they believe without the fear of being "othered." I don't know that we accomplished anything deeply profound in Nashville, but I know we made friends. Peace.

Meaning and Interpretation

In response to my Outside Looking In post, fiodax asked several questions about interpretation, particularly Scripture and interpretation. I hope this is something of an answer.

Evangelicals since Barth are divided into three camps: let's call 'em literalists, emotivists, and experientialists. I've spent far too many words on literalists on this blog. The short description is a fundamentalist who believes the words in the Bible are literally the words of God communicated to human authors who got it completely right. Emotivists are where most people live. They believe the Bible is the "word of God" but tend to pick and choose the bits they like. If pushed, they will say they don't believe all of it is to be taken literally, but they will be oddly intractable when it comes to particular passages, especially related to atonement, future things, holiness, and homosexuality. Experientialists, including gay people, would say that the Bible is somehow the word of God or that it contains the word of God. Their experience has led them to read Scripture differently, imposing upon the text a hermeneutical lens based on experience.

Frei largely followed Barth when he said the goal of reading the Scripture in community was to draw us into the world of the Bible and allow the narrative to shape our understanding of reality. A critical misunderstanding of which texts ought to shape our understanding has led reactionary fundamentalists to assert that irrespective of our experience the Bible has the final word. If my experience conflicts with Scripture, my experience is suspect, not Scripture. That is a far different idea of allowing the Bible to shape reality than Frei intended.

I think the primary difficulty of allowing the Bible to shape reality is that reality is something that has to be interpreted to begin with. For the sake of all my materialist friends out there, yes, I believe there is a reality that is not constructed by language, but knowing that reality given the limitations of language is...I want to say impossible, but let's settle for damn near impossible. When a kid first starts learning religious language, she will ask, "What does 'saved' mean?" At that point Christians want to believe they refer to a text to provide a definition. In fact, they refer to a text that is first an experience, and then an interpretation, and then an attempt to communicate, and is finally an attempt to understand the communication (which has been interpreted for us, by the way). Even if you believe God provided the experience and the interpretation and the communication, you can't avoid the difficulty of interpreting events and trying to assign meaning based upon the lack of prior experience. (To argue that God is capable is no argument at all. Classic theists believe God is capable of doing many things he doesn't do, like stop hunger.) When Moses finds a burning bush, he doesn't access a database of prior burning bush experiences that interpret the event for him. When someone encounters God in some transcendent experience, they are without a database of experiences and vocabulary. We have to use the tools we've been given. That means we sift through the available texts looking for something that looks like what we've experienced. The vocabulary is preselected, and each word contains meanings and nuances that militate against an accurate portrayal of the actual events. We are creatures of metaphor. Language is dependent upon it.

The Bible doesn't provide a communication that stands outside the rules of interpretation and meaning. In fact, the Bible is a product of people trying to interpret the meaning of events. What else is the New Testament if not an attempt to sort out the meaning of the resurrection? So, along comes a Jesus guy who says odd things about God and life. Everyone tries to impose their own understanding on the event, and yet, here we are arguing about it two millenia later. We take words from Scripture and we use them based on meanings we've been taught. There is no bank of information available to give meaning to words. Experience gives meaning to words, just as experience is part of any interpretation, and then we use words to explain experiences, but the words shape the meaning of the experience in ways we can't control.

So, a community comes together and they say, "We are going to say x means x, and the words we will use to describe x are y and z. Our collective understanding of this experience is that we should talk about it using x, y, and z." An outsider would rightly say, "But I didn't experience x." The community responds, "We know, but you have to experience that to understand y and z, and if you don't experience it, then you need to trust us, on faith, that we are telling you the truth about x, y, and z." So now the outside tries to experience something akin to the community-forming experience. If it's similar, he will readily use x, y, and z to talk about it. If it's not, he will look for other words, and if he uses those other words with the community, meaning will break down and eventually fellowship. So, if the outsider has a stubborn nature, he will say, well x is actually my experience of x. The other is false." Or we could try saying that much can't be known.

I Didn't Get Saved in Nashville

Back from Nashville. One of the best times I've ever had in a city in the U.S. Only Chicago ranks higher as of now. We were fortunate to have the services of new friend David Eby, who lives in Brentwood, acting as host and guide. That kept us out of all the touristy spots: Sun Records, Wild Horse, Opryland, etc. Instead, we went to a couple areas in Nashville that are in the early stages of urban renewal (and gentrification, to be frank). Still, gentrification aside, we had a great time. I already linked to the Scarritt-Bennett retreat facility. But the other highlights in order of preference were Sambuca, Fido, Frothy Monkey, Mellow Mushroom, a local Mediterranean restaurant on 21st Ave. South, Cabana, and Bound'ry. You'll notice that those are all restaurants or coffee shops. We had such a great time being with new friends and trying new things, and as is often the case, the best times are had around a table.

Sambuca has half-price bottles of wine (only the stuff under $80, so no Far Niente or Opus One or Silver Oak) on Sunday nights. Kira Small was the talent, and the lady can sing and play. How can you not find good music in Nashville? We had one of the greatest servers ever: thanks, Brittany. The hot, gregarious hairdresser wife has photos from almost everyone else on the patio that night. She'll be posting them soon over on pepper spray. (By the way, I'll let her tell the story of the Parthenon replica and Blade's retirement years spent in the sun.) And yes, that flush I'm wearing is from the second bottle of wine.

The God-talk went very well. It's always interesting to sit down with a diverse group of people. In this case, a gay couple who have been together for 23 years, one half of a gay couple and former Pentecostal Holiness pastor who has been with his partner for 20 years, a single, female Presbyterian missions director/adjunct professor, a single, female Presbyterian minister, two former staff pastors at a Nashville megachurch, and the Hortons. What a group. I have more to say about the talk and what I learned about communications and belief over the weekend, but I'll save that for another time. I just wanted to put in a plug for Nashville.

And, yes, I absolutely went by the Southern Baptist Convention's "headquarters." I did not demand entry though.

On the Outside Looking in

It appears that the hot, photo-crazy hairdresser wife and I are not going to do well in this conversation. There is one other skeptic at the table, a wonderful, smart, funny gay man who left ministry in the Pentecostal Holiness Church more than twenty years ago. He's had the same partner for 20 years now. He's probably far less histrionic than I about church stuff, but I find myself talking to people who believe what the church needs is reformation rather than demolition. Seems that all the reformations have only managed to shift the power base to others who end up doing much the same as their predecessors, only with different justifications or hermeneutical reasons. The question I keep running into, and that I will ask today, is how do you use Scripture to shape your life without allowing experience to be the primary lens through which we interpret. The question is particularly poignant for gay people, whose experience has forced on them a different read of Scripture. Fundangelicals who have no vested interest in reading it differently still allow the thing to shape reality, rather than allow reality to speak back into the community's conversation and reveal the parts of Scripture to be as absurd as they appear to be.