[+/-]

gyreblog.com

[+/-] Postscript

The so-called conclusion having finally arrived, the reader may well be curious about my future, both blog-wise and otherwise. Regarding the latter, I will be spending the next three months at a place called L'Abri (the Canadian one) where I'll be reading books and participating in community living. Among other things, I'm hoping to gain a better understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Christ, and whether that is something I can or want to pursue. I'm also hoping that adopting a somewhat simpler lifestyle (read: limited internet access) will help me develop a little self-discipline, and maybe even work on some spiritual disciplines.

A happy side effect of having limited internet access is that, despite living in a community on a beautiful west coast island and presumably learning many interesting things, I cannot reasonably be expected to keep a travel blog. This is a great relief.

So I'm not likely to post anything for the next three months or so. After that, I'm not sure. I expect I'll get the itch again at some point.

In the mean time, for those who are feeling nostalgic, I have hastily compiled a list of 20 (natch) of my favorite posts from the archives:

The Prodigal Returns - A parable expressing the angst that birthed this blog
Laura, I Love You - My first attempt to stop pining for God
Dufflepud Theology - I like this one mainly for its title
A Prayer - A pretty big shift in my worldview
Fog - Whence "twenty feet"
Moving Beyond the Bible - Why I don't see scripture as the last Word
What I'm Trying to Say is This - A (vain?) attempt to talk about beauty
Greater Things Than These - Thoughts on the Sheep & the Goats
It's Been a While - How I pray, when I pray
An Extravagant Hope - My best shot at eschatology
His Love Endures Forever - A study of my least-favorite Bible story
Fruit in Keeping With Repentance - My favorite Hellfire preacher
A Hole of a Different Shape - Why God is not all we need
I Choose Love - Why I don't believe in Hell
Hell and Justice - Why I don't think we deserve Hell
Come Be My Light - Reflections on Mother Teresa's biography
Prophecy and Innerancy - Why inerrancy misses the point
And of course,
In Conclusion: The Bible, Belief, and Discipleship

Peace.

[+/-] In Conclusion: Discipleship

This post is the third in a trilogy. I recommend reading parts one and two first.

As I said previously, I've come to understand Christianity as a way of life - the act of dying to yourself daily, taking up your cross, and following Jesus. The question, then, is whether it is possible for a person in my position to be a Christian. Can I truly be a disciple of Christ without accepting the Bible as my ultimate authority, the infallible word of God? Can Jesus be my Rabbi if I'm not certain exactly what he said?

There is, of course, a great inherent difficulty in trying to be a disciple of someone who lived two thousand years ago. We can't go directly to him for instruction and guidance, so we necessarily become disciples of Christ, as understood through the Bible. Or rather, Christ, as understood through the Bible, as understood through friends, parents, pastors, mentors, books, and culture.

This obstacle is insurmountable, but not fatal. We cannot reach back to Jesus himself, but we can get closer than we currently are. We cannot know the truth, but we can unmask delusions. We can do the best we can. We can take up our crosses and follow, even if we're not certain just what it is we're following.

I think there is inherent value in a life of discipleship, apart from the value of following Jesus specifically. Discipline is both a means and an end. But you can't be a disciple of your own values or morals or your own personal concept of God. To be a disciple you must have something outside of yourself to which you're totally dedicated and submissive. I, having no ultimate external authority, am unqualified.

I accept this as a necessary consequence of my choice. I can't have it both ways. I can pursue goodness, seek truth, develop self-control, love others, and even try to emulate Christ without an absolute authority. (It is, of course, possible to learn from someone without being fully devoted to them.) But I cannot call myself a disciple.

A couple years ago I read The Cost of Discipleship, and was struck by the assertion that "only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes." I know that faith without works is dead; could it be that works without faith are no better? Is faith somehow necessary for obedience? What kind of faith? Faith in what? What is it about Christ's call that makes obedience without faith impossible?

Recently I've realized that Bonhoeffer is not identifying some special feature of Christian discipleship, but merely stating a plain fact about the nature of obedience. True obedience is an act of faith; it is not possible to obey anyone except insofar as you trust them. The disciple may not want to follow, but he follows. He may not see why he should go this way, but he follows. He may be certain that this is entirely the wrong path, that he is headed for disaster, that another way would be safer, smoother, faster, but he follows. If I follow Christ only when it seems wise to me to do so, I am not really following him at all.

And so obedience requires an object. I cannot say, "I obey Christ" unless I can point to something and say, "and this is what I mean by 'Christ'." It is not necessary (nor is it possible) to know that the Word you follow is genuine – the very voice of God. But you must act as if it is. To follow, you must be willing to leave not only home, family, and fields, but society, morality, and reason. You must be willing to sacrifice anything and anyone.

The thought terrifies me. Who could ever make such a choice? What if the Christ I followed told me not to resist an evil person, or to sell everything I have? What if he told me that God orders genocides, or abandons his creations to eternal torment? Who could accept such teachings?

We’ve forgotten how dangerous obedience is. We remember that Isaac was spared, and forget that he was very nearly murdered. And how many others, when under the knife of another man's faith, have been so lucky? Divine voices, it seems, seldom recant.

I've said before that I want to pursue love first and foremost, and that I am a Christian only to the extent that Christianity spurs me toward this goal. I am a Christian second, and so not a Christian at all.

And yet.

The idea of surrendering myself entire, of dying not only to my appetites but to my hopes and ambitions, my beliefs and principles, even to my conscience, has a strange and persistent appeal.

If a Voice called me, could I resist? Would I not take up my fire and my knife and follow him?

[+/-] In Conclusion: Belief

Aside from my approach to the Bible (see the previous post) the most significant point where I've departed from the doctrine of my Evangelical upbringing is that I don't believe in hell. It's not that I ever stopped believing in hell so much as that I came to realize that, despite my best efforts, belief in hell is impossible for me. I'm not saying that a place of eternal torment does not exist (what do I know about such things?). It's just that I don't know how I could live my life as a believer in hell. It would change everything, and it would probably drive me to despair. So what else can I do? I reject belief in hell.

On the other hand, there are a lot of big Christian doctrines that I just don't feel too strongly about. Is Jesus God? I don't know. I tend to think of him that way, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to me. (Although I firmly believe that Jesus was God’s Messiah - the one chosen to speak for God and do his work.) I like the idea of the trinity, because of what it suggests about the significance of community, but I have no real interest in any doctrine that tries to explain the relationship between Jesus and God. And the objective, historical reality of the virgin birth doesn't really interest me.

So in some cases I disagree with the central doctrines of conservative Christianity, but most have simply lost importance for me. The essential change is not in the content of my beliefs, but in my understanding of the nature of belief itself.

The way I read the Bible, true faith is inseparable from works. When Jesus asks us to believe, he is speaking about lifestyle, not doctrine - the sort of faith which spurred the heroes of Hebrews 11 to action. Our beliefs are manifest in the way we live our lives. To the extent that our intellectual beliefs about Christ do not govern our lives we are, in fact, unbelievers.

I'm not saying that we who don’t practice what we preach are frauds or unredeemed. I do not preach a spiritual elitism, and I am as weak and inconstant in my faith as anyone. I affirm the sufficiency of God's love and grace, independent of our belief. But I think we need to call our unbelief what it is.

Peter Rollins, one of my favorite Christian writers at the moment, was asked if he denies the resurrection, and admitted that he does:

I deny the resurrection of Christ every time I do not serve at the feet of the oppressed, each day that I turn my back on the poor; I deny the resurrection of Christ when I close my ears to the cries of the downtrodden and lend my support to an unjust and corrupt system.

However there are moments when I affirm that resurrection, few and far between as they are. I affirm it when I stand up for those who are forced to live on their knees, when I speak for those who have had their tongues torn out, when I cry for those who have no more tears left to shed.

This is what faith in Jesus means to me. I am a believer in Christ inasmuch as I am actively striving to imitate him and put his teachings into practice. I have a habit of thinking that Jesus rose bodily from the dead. But my opinion on this matter just doesn't seem all that significant to me anymore. What matters to me is that I live (or am beginning to live, or desire to live) as if dead and ruined things can be brought back to life, as if God has called me to participate in the resurrection of all creation.

So what do I believe in? What are the ideas that shape my view of the world and the way I live my life?

I believe that there is a God, and that she love us.

I believe that I was created to love and be loved, and that this is true of all other people, and even all of creation.

I believe that Jesus exemplified God's love in his life and death.

I believe that there is gratuitous and unjustifiable evil in this world.

And I believe in the ultimate redemption and reconciliation of all things.

Some of these beliefs come naturally to me. I believe them because, for whatever reason, I cannot do otherwise. Some of them are the result of long and careful consideration. And some have been adopted out of necessity, in order to save me from despair.

I am interested in why I believe what I believe, whether these beliefs can be justified, and what amendments I ought to make to them, but mostly I want to work on living them out.

[+/-] In Conclusion: The Bible

This will not be an apologetic. I don't believe in apologetics. I feel the temptation to justify, even to proselytize, but any such effort would be a distortion and a betrayal. I came to this point through years of struggle and confusion, and I can't (and when I think about it, I wouldn't want to) bring the reader to comprehension or appreciation or agreement with a few well-chosen words.

In any case, I don't believe that everyone ought to see things as I do. My worldview changed because I was no longer capable of believing as I had, and I was compelled to find something I could believe.

The essential change in my life over the last five years is that I no longer see the Bible as infallible. What I mean is that I don't believe everything the Bible says is completely true - theologically or otherwise. I don't believe, for example, the part about the Egyptian plagues. I don't believe that's how it happened, and I particularly don't believe what it says about God.

Inevitably, then, people want to know which parts of the Bible I do believe in. By what means do I determine what to believe or disbelieve? Do I just ignore the parts I don't like?

I don't have really satisfying, concrete answers for these questions. I do have some hermeneutical principles (I'm certainly interested in understanding what the Bible really means to say) but they don't tell me which parts of the Bible are True and which aren't. Honestly, I have a hard time really thinking about the Bible (or anything else) in terms of some absolute, objective standard of truth.

I would say that the Bible is God-breathed (a beautiful, mysterious term), and I would certainly say that it is useful, but I reject the doctrine of inerrancy because, for one thing, I don't think the authors of the Bible thought in terms of inerrancy. Of course they believed that God's word was true, but "true" meant different things to them than it does to us. I've said more about this in other places, so I won’t delve too deeply here.

This is the best explanation I can give: The Bible is the fulcrum of my faith - not the foundation, not the containing walls, but the point around which I orient myself, and in relation to which I take my bearings. I don't always agree with the Bible, in fact it sometimes angers, frustrates and disgusts me. But I am never done with the Bible. I can disagree with it, even rebel against it, but I cannot dismiss it. To put it succinctly, the Bible is the voice that I cannot ignore.

Having such a voice is valuable to me in many ways:

It gives me a sense of belonging, reminding me of the ancient and enduring tradition that I inhabit.

It reminds me that I am the spiritual progeny of thieves, murderers, genocidal conquerors, and all other kinds of sinners, that I am no better than they, and that God loves me nevertheless.

It reminds me that I am not the final authority on any matter, that different people have wildly different perspectives on God and morality, and that my own views are no more likely to be right.

It reminds me that there is great evil in this world, and that I must stand against it, no matter what.

It reminds me also that God is in the business of redemption, that the sick can be healed, the broken restored, the dead raised to life, and the wretched made agents of grace.

And it reminds me that God and creation alike are complex and mysterious, and that the pursuit of knowledge, like any meaningful pursuit, will never come to an end.

I do not accept whatever the Bible says without question, but I respect it, and I commit myself to it, and I wrestle with it. I don’t ignore the parts that bother me. If anything, I tend to concentrate on them. I live in this tension: recognizing that I am a small, frail creature in the midst of something deep and ancient and holy, and yet still maintaining my autonomy.

There is a question of where my disagreement with the Bible is leading. In the future I may be called to submit to Scripture on even the most difficult points. But I feel that at this point it would be a betrayal of my convictions, and even (if I may make such a grand claim) a betrayal of God’s calling to me, if I were to give up the struggle.

Again, this isn't a sales pitch. I don't think everyone ought to approach the Bible this way. Some are called to struggle; others to sacrifice. I do worry about people who are wholly unperturbed by verses like Psalm 136:10, but I think it is possible to engage the Bible honestly, having predetermined, ultimately, to submit. The essential point for me is that the Bible is a very complex and difficult book. It was not written to provide comfort and certainty. If we can agree on this one thing - that the Bible is to be wrestled with, that it blesses us, but also wounds us - then we are not so far apart.

[+/-] Happy Anniversary

Today, as one incorrigible follower has already noted, is the one-year anniversary of my last post here, which was itself merely an apology for my long absence and a promise to return with a thrilling conclusion soon.

"Soon" being long past, I am obliged to apologize again, and again promise that my return/final departure is imminent. I will even say that it's closer than it has ever been before.

Summer is winding down, a stint at camp is approaching, and I expect to have little free time or internet access in the fall. And so this, at long last, is it. Make or break. Do or die. Sydney or the bush.

My plan is to post on each of the next three weekends, which will bring me about to the limit of my modest window of opportunity. This will require a good deal of time and effort, and some compromise to my unreasonable editorial standards, but I feel confident I can distill something publishable from my interminable drafts in that time.

And if not, it's time to be done with the whole damn thing anyway.

Next week: The Bible

[+/-] The Once and Future Blogger

It looks like I'm done with blogging. It looks like I'm done, but I'm not.

What's happened is I've been horrifically busy these past three months. Working 12-hour days. Buying and maintaining a car. Planning my future.

More than that, I've been in a writing slump for some time now. I attribute this partially to my ever-rising editorial standards - my posts are generally shorter than they were when I began but take much longer to write, and many never get published. The other difficulty is that I've been coming to some conclusions.

You might think that having decided a few things would make it easier to write, but this seems not to be the case. I've always found it easier express confusion or disagreement than to put forth my own position. When presenting my own views I feel like I should be some kind of expert - if not on the subjects of my opinions, then at least on my opinions themselves. If I think something, I should be able to express it, right? Well, it's hard.

But I think the time is right to try. This blog has always been about my search for a spiritual je ne sais quoi - the god or truth or purpose without which I felt alone or lost or unfulfilled. The loneliness and lostness and unfulfillment has diminished over the past four years, to the point that I am no longer searching in the way that I was then, and so I think it is time to bring this blog to a proper close. Despite the fact that the object of my search remains (and I think will always remain) somewhat unknowable and inexpressible.

I should have said that it's almost time to conclude this blog. Time continues to be a scarcity. I'm rushing off to camp for the remainder of the summer, but I will make a determined effort to return in the fall, and then I will tell you what there is to tell.

[+/-] Prophecy and Inerrancy

I apologize for the lack of posting of late. I have plenty to write about, but school's been taking up a lot of my time. They're making me write essays, if you can believe it.

I'm taking a Religious Studies course on Jesus, and I've been doing a little research on the infant narratives in Matthew and Luke. Here's what my textbook (Howard Clark Kee: Jesus in History) has to say about Matthew's version of events:

Each of these "historical" moves was ultimately dictated... by the divine plan laid down in Scripture. The return from Egypt is said to be the fulfillment of Hosea 11:1. The grief of the mothers whose children were slain by Herod is seen as predicted in Jeremiah 31:15. The move to Nazareth is said to accord with "what was spoken by the prophets": "He shall be called a Nazarene" (Matt. 2:23). There is no text corresponding to this declaration, but it is likely a reference to Isaiah 11:1, as noted below.

Matthew has no interest in the actual historical events in biblical times out of which the prophets spoke these words, nor does he make any attempt to show a direct correlation between the historical events in biblical times and the situation in the time of Jesus. Hosea was describing the Exodus from Egypt, when God delivered his people ("my son") and led them into the land of Palestine. Jeremiah's words probably refer to the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E., some 100 years before his own time. Jeremiah's prophecies come from the last quarter of the seventh century B.C.E., shortly before Judah, the southern kingdom, likewise fell.

The word Nazarene does not occur in the Hebrew Bible, but is probably traced to Isaiah 11:1, where the shoot (nester) from the stump of Jesse is mentioned as God's agent in establishing his just rule on earth. The metaphor in Isaiah is that of a tree cut down, which signifies the end of the Davidic dynasty. The prophet foresees the appearance, from the seemingly lifeless stump, of a shoot that will both signal and effect the reestablishment of the Kingdom. Conceivably, Mathew could have found in this prophetic word a prediction pointing to the kingly role that was assigned by Christians to Jesus. Instead, Matthew used the Isaiah 11 passage to prove that it was ordained in Scripture that Jesus' residence should be in Nazareth. (The Hebrew letters would be n-ts-r; the language was written in consonants, and the reader supplied the vowels; hence, Na-TSa-Rene.)

The writer of Matthew did not ask what Isaiah intended by his words; he was interested in finding what they might mean to him and his readers. Since the Bible was held to be divinely inspired, its sacred letters were subject to multiple interpretations, limited only by the talent and ingenuity of the interpreter. The discovery of obscure meanings in Scripture was regarded as a tribute to its divine origin, not a falsification of the intention of the biblical writer. The question of the Old Testament writers' intentions was for Matthew as well as for Jewish interpreters of his age an irrelevant one, because they believed that the God who had spoken through the prophets in the past was still in control of human affairs and was shaping them in accord with his own purpose, which the skillful interpreter of scripture could discern in the present and correlate with the writings from the ancient past. What was significant was continuity of divine purpose, not precision of historical knowledge.

(Links and paragraphs added.)

I noticed years ago that Matthew's Old Testament "prophecies" often don't say what he claims they do. (The famous "virgin" birth prophecy is another good example.) At first I though Matthew is simply lying. From a modern western perspective, Matthew's creative exegesis looks like an effort to dupe ill-informed readers into the conviction that Jesus fulfilled Messianic credentials laid down centuries before.

But of course, Matthew was neither modern nor western, and he wrote according to the the literary and scholarly conventions of his own time and culture. As strange as it seems to us, his complete disregard for the intended meaning of the texts he quotes would have been quite legitimate in the eyes of his Jewish contemporaries.

Part of the problem is that Matthew's understanding of words like "prophecy" and "fulfill" are somewhat different from our own. His account of Jesus' birth and early years is designed to recall that of the nation of Israel (a dreamer named Joseph, the journey to Egypt and back again, escape from a fearful king who kills baby boys) and establish Jesus as both the Messianic King and a sort of new Moses. Matthew quotes from the scriptures in order to underline these similarities, and would have understood them more as prefigurations of Jesus than as predictions.

This is why I think the doctrine of inerrancy (at least in its popular form) misses the point: it assumes that the Bible conforms to modern logic and literary conventions that were completely unfamiliar to its authors and intended readers. If we want to assess (or assert) the truth of an ancient document, we must consider the way it was intended to be true, not the way we would like it to be true.

Of course, this isn't easy to determine. Like anything thousands of years old, we don't have a precise understanding of ancient Hebrew culture, logic, or literary genres. It's unclear exactly what sort of apparent errors or untruths (from a modern perspective) might have been acceptable to the various intended readers of the scriptures. Chronological adjustments? Misleading prophecies? Historical inaccuracies? Embellishments and extrapolations? Theological discrepancies? (I may deal with some of these points in subsequent posts.) Whatever conclusions we may reach, it's clear that a good dose of humility is required.

But whether or not the Bible is true in the ways that the authors intended it to be, or (still more difficult to discern) in the ways that God intended it to be, this much is clear: it was not written with our modern assumptions and expectations in mind.

[+/-] The Things He Reads

I figured it's time I plugged my friend Raskolnikov's blog, which is comprised almost entirely of excerpts from books he reads. This appeals to me on three levels.

First of all, the blog is a good resource. Sometimes a passage gives you a better feel for a book than a dust jacket blurb or endorsement. If you're an avid reader, I'm sure some of it will pique your interest. And if you're not the sort who's likely to pick up something by, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you may still be interested in reading a snippet of his writing that someone else found interesting.

Raskolnikov's project is also interesting to me because it's a kind of an anti-blog. It seems the blogosphere (and indeed, a fair chunk of the internet in general) is primarily a mechanism for broadcasting the thoughts, opinions and experiences of anyone with enough free time and self-importance to proclaim them.* In such a culture a mysterious, apparently Russian bookworm, a man (woman?) who resists entirely the urge to rant, ramble or pontificate on whatever strikes his fancy, who presents instead the thoughts of better thinkers, the words of better writers, is something of an anti-hero. A rascal, if you will.

And sometimes when I read this blog I feel a little of what I've felt in the presence of a Torah scroll. I sense a kind of holiness in copied words that is lost in printing presses and electronic databases. I'm not sure how well I can articulate this, but I feel like there's inherent value in copying out a text - value beyond whatever readers may get out of it. I guess I see it as a way of identifying oneself with the words, something like repeating liturgy or submitting to religious rules. Maybe I'm making too much of this - in my experience, actually copying texts is pretty mundane. But I guess most spiritual disciplines, in practice, feel mundane to me.

*My opinion of we bloggers is not so bleak as this paragraph might suggest. There are two sides to the coin. But it's refreshing to me to read a blog so free of the (often unwarrented) self-interest that seems to be inherent in the medium.

[+/-] The Word made Flesh

From Come Be My Light, part of a poem by Mother Teresa in response to Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" (Mt 16:15):

Jesus is the Word made Flesh.
Jesus is the Bread of Life.
Jesus is the Victim offered for our sins on the Cross.
Jesus is the Sacrifice offered at the Holy Mass
for the sins of the world and mine.
Jesus is the Word--to be spoken.
Jesus is the Truth--to be told.
Jesus is the Way--to be walked.
Jesus is the Light--to be lit.
Jesus is the Life--to be lived.
Jesus is the Love--to be loved.
Jesus is the Joy--to be shared.
Jesus is the Peace--to be given.
Jesus is the Bread of Life--to be eaten.
Jesus is the Hungry--to be fed
Jesus is the Thirsty--to be satiated.
Jesus is the Naked--to be clothed.
Jesus is the Homeless--to be taken in.
Jesus is the Sick--to be healed.
Jesus is the Lonely--to be loved.
Jesus is the Unwanted--to be wanted.
Jesus is the Leper--to wash his wounds.
Jesus is the Beggar--to give him a smile.
Jesus is the Drunkard--to listen to him.
Jesus is the Retarded--to protect him.
Jesus is the Little One--to embrace him.
Jesus is the Blind--to lead him.
Jesus is the Dumb--to speak for him.
Jesus is the Crippled--to walk with him.
Jesus is the Drug Addict--to befriend him.
Jesus is the Prostitute--to remove from danger and befriend.
Jesus is the Prisoner--to be visited.
Jesus is the Old--to be served.

It reminds me of that story from Matthew 25 (the implications of which struck me a few years ago).

If you're aware of the central theme of this book - Mother Teresa's spiritual darkness - you would probably assume that the title is her plea to God. In fact, the opposite is true. "Come, be My light" were the words by which Christ called Mother Teresa to Calcutta.

I think the call can be understood in two ways. The obvious meaning is that Mother Teresa was to be a conduit of Christ's light to the poor, through her compassion and service. As she says above, "Jesus is the Light--to be lit."

But the latter part of the poem reveals a second meaning: Jesus is not only the source of the light but also, in some sense, the one to whom we bring light. When we feed and clothe and love other people, in a very real sense we are feeding and clothing and loving Christ.

This is something I need to work on - seeing Jesus in the people around me, and especially those in need. There is no need for me to discern who is deserving of my love. Every day I see Christ, as Mother Teresa said, in many "distressing disguises". My highest calling is to love him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, however he may present himself to me.

I pray that my eyes may be opened, to see the Word made Flesh.

[+/-] Come Be My Light

I've been reading Come Be My Light - a sort of spiritual biography of Mother Teresa, based on her personal letters. These letters reveal that despite a dramatic call from God to ministry in Calcutta, Mother Teresa abruptly ceased to feel his presence when she arrived, and conducted the rest of her life in spiritual darkness and sorrow. (An article in Time offers more details. Via Michigan.)

I found the book less challenging and inspiring than I'd hoped - I am so unlike Mother Teresa that I scarcely believe we're of the same species, and I could no more love like her than write like Shakespeare. And while she and I have both experienced disappointment with God, hers was vastly different in content, degree and duration. The book is interesting (if a bit slow-moving) and has certainly increased my respect - nay, awe - of Mother Teresa, but at the expense of any hope I had of relating or empathizing with her.

More than ever I understand the impulse to pray to saints. Mother Teresa reached a peace about her inner darkness and saw her suffering as a means for God to bring others to salvation. On the back cover is this quote: "If I ever become a Saint--I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from Heaven--to light the light of those in darkness on earth."

It reminded me of the Buddhist idea of a Bodhisattva: a person who achieves enlightenment (Buddhahood) but who refrains from entering Nirvana indefinitely in order to free others from suffering. (It also reminds me of the first verses of Romans 9, my least favorite chapter in the Bible, in which Paul makes a statement so powerful and so beautiful that I almost forgive him the rest.) Greater love, I contend, has no one than this.

I said earlier that I can hardly believe I'm of the same species as Mother Teresa. But I am, and that's the whole point. She was no angel-messenger come down from heaven. No god among mortals, no Word-made-flesh. She was a woman. A mortal like myself, and a sinner. However different she was in her character, experiences and actions, we are somehow of the same essence, and I feel a kinship with her that I could have with no higher being. Transcendent in love and holiness, she is near to me yet in her frailty and finitude.

Pray for me, Mother. Saint of Darkness, be my light.

[+/-] Community

Well, I'm back. I don't know if I'm going to keep doing this or what. I've got things to write about, but I don't know if I have the time or the motivation. We'll see how it goes.

What I've been thinking about most recently is community, as it pertains to Christian life. Winter Camp, as usual, was amazing. I seem to be at my best when I'm at camp. I don't think this is unusual.

It seems like we tend to separate community from the rest of life. We go on retreats or whatever and we have these great experiences of intimacy and commonality and it's refreshing and inspiring. And then we go back to our real world and try to live our lives the way we wanted to or thought we were going to when we were at camp.

Why do we live like this? I know that I can't live at home the way I can at camp. Maybe that's a failure on my part. Maybe I'm supposed to be able to be able to transcend my circumstances and feelings and be loving and purposeful all the time. But I think it's easier to change my environment than to stop being affected by it.

I know its not always possible to create an ideal environment. I know things get in the way, or things fall apart, and I can't just hide from the world at camp or somewhere. But I don't think I should have to choose between being in community and being in the world.

I want to live in a community. A focused, structured, missional community. I want to have people around me who are committed to the same goal, and committed to me. I want people to serve, and to serve with. I want people to guide me and encourage me and touch me and share their lives with me.

I don't think I'm being greedy or unrealistic. I think this is the way I'm meant to live. And I think I can do it.

I don't know how all the details will work, but I'm trying to figure it out. Maybe I'll join a monastery. I hear there are Franciscans in town. Maybe I'll hook up with the New Monastics. Maybe I'll run away to L'abri for a bit. Maybe I could start my own thing. I don't know.

I'm open to ideas.

[+/-] Happy Holidays

Hi.

Sorry about my much-longer-than-expected absence. I've been (and continue to be) busy and distracted and a little bit writers blocked. There probably won't be much here until Januaryish.

I do have things to say, but I'm having trouble getting them down in writing. This happens to me sometimes.

In the mean time, here's another gem from xkcd:

[+/-] Stuff

I'm sorry for the lack of posts recently. I'm midway through my end-of-term essay writing frenzy. By this time next week I will be free.

Until then, here's some stuff:

Apparently this blog reads at an undergrad level.



I'm more than a little skeptical. Not sure what the creator was reading in college, but it clearly wasn't Kierkegaard.

I'd like to think that the average high schooler could make sense of my writing, but I guess I do use big words sometimes.


Here's a shocker: apparently this blog is worthy of a NC-17 rating. Why? Primarily my liberal use of the words "pain" and "hell". Riiiight.



Good thing the kiddies can't read it anyways.


And have you ever wondered where I fit in the wide world of Christian theology? Wonder no more!

What's your theological worldview?
You scored as a Emergent/Postmodern
You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.

Emergent/Postmodern
89%
Modern Liberal
64%
Classical Liberal
61%
Neo orthodox
54%
Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan
43%
Roman Catholic
32%
Charismatic/Pentecostal
25%
Reformed Evangelical
14%
Fundamentalist
0%

That sounds about right. I confess I don't know much about Neo Orthodoxy, Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyanism, or the differences between Modern and Classical Liberalism. (Anyone care to enlighten me?) But I do like what I've heard about the Emergent church (primarily via Brian McLaren), and the blurb at the top sounds pretty good to me.

Want to see your theology expressed as a bar graph? Of course you do! Take the quiz here.


And a few links for good measure:

Here's the most interesting thing I've seen this week (via slacktivist).

Jim at Straight, Not Narrow weighs in on the "War on Christmas".

My current favorite web comic is xkcd.

[+/-] Real Live Preacher

Note (July 08): I've updated the links in this post - most of these stories are now in the rlp archives. Just so you know. Also, at this point the Preacher is no longer shipping his books, which is a shame. I trust he'll start again at some point.

I recently read RealLivePreacher.com (the book), by Gordon Atkinson. I finally bought a copy because the Preacher is now selling them personally (there's a story behind that, if you're interested). Each book now comes with a little handwritten note and a couple random objects stuck between the pages.

Nearly all the essays in the book can also be read on his blog, but for some reason it's exciting to have them in tactile form. And as a bonus, I now have a slightly risque free beer token from some pub in Texas, a CD of Mexican music, and a packet of vanilla chai tea.

The book is worth buying, even if you're not an avid reader of the blog. It's kind of a "best of", and it makes a good introduction to the Preacher. Most of my very favorites are there, such as:

The Preacher's Story
George the Middle, Beginning and End
The two about Rabbi Jonah and Robert
The Advent and Passion of Elliot
John the Baptist (still cracks me up)
Bifocals

These are excellent stories. I don't like to throw around the words "must read", but I'm tempted to invoke them here.

And if you want to read more, here are a few good ones that didn't make the book:

The Truth About Snow
The Soft Stories series - Old Man Cedar, Chloe, Looking For Elliot and Main's Folly
The Gospel According To Anna
The Foy Davis series

The Preacher also wrote an excellent dramatic version of the Christmas Story, which is now available as an audiobook. It's beautiful and insightful, and well worth purchasing.

[+/-] I Want To Pray To Mary

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.

It's such a beautiful prayer. So poetic. Reverent, but warm. Grace, blessing, holiness, a plea for intercession, and an acknowledgment of mortality. You could not write a better prayer.

The problem is I don't believe that Mary stuff. I don't believe she has some special power or authority, and I can't help but feel that God doesn't approve of me praying to a dead woman. Particularly because I don't believe in it. I don't have a problem with those pray and believe it, but I feel like I shouldn't, because I don't.

I say the prayer and the words are hot in my mouth. They taste like swear-words tasted in grade two, like beauty tinged with blasphemy.

Will God forgive me this prayer? I don't pray much. Will God appreciate the reverence of this prayer, how it makes me aware of my need for grace and help, and the feeling of comfort and security it brings me? Or is He angry that I long to pray to a mortal, but have so little to say to Him?

I firmly believe that it doesn't matter what name we give to God. He's called a thousand names; I think He can figure out who we mean. And I don't think He minds that most of us pray to a well groomed, Caucasian Jesus. But "Mary" is not a name I have for God.

Even "Mother" doesn't bother me. Nothing wrong with a Mother God, whatever Johnny Cash says. (That line about the father hen really pisses me off.) But Mother of God is something else.

Maybe I can't do it. That makes me sad.

But I can certainly say "La Elaha Ela Allah". It doesn't have quite the same feel to it, but it's beautiful and meaningful, and I think I really believe it.

La Elaha Ela Allah.

There is no god but God. So I probably shouldn't pray to Her mother.

[+/-] On Pain and Its Redemption

I got thinking recently about the idea that all the suffering we experience is ultimately for our own good. It's true that we often seem to become stronger, wiser, more compassionate, and so on, as a result of hardship. Perhaps God is justified in allowing or causing pain because ultimately the good it produces in us outweighs the inherent evil of our suffering.

For most of us (Kantians may disagree), the ethicality of inflicting pain on someone "for their own good" is a question of ratios. How much pain are we talking about? How much good may result? How likely is the desired result, how devastating the worst case scenario, etc. I think we can agree that disciplining children, in a reasonable and restrained way, is necessary and good. Few of us would wish that we had never experienced pain, and perhaps some of us who have experienced great pain believe that it ultimately worked for our benefit or betterment. It's difficult to speculate about what a completely pain-free creation might look like, but I'm willing to concede that a certain amount of pain (perhaps much more than I would think) is necessary in order to make us what we are meant to be.

Still, it's hard to imagine all the pain we experience having a positive effect. I don't have a problem with God putting us through adversity, but sometimes it feels like He's pruning with a canon. Pain seems to weaken or destroy people as often as it heals them.

It's not the existence of pain that bothers me. It's not even the amount, strictly. (It certainly looks excessive to me, but who am I to say what's necessary?) What horrifies me about pain is that it seems to be distributed completely at random. Pain falls in great mounds and bare spots, choking many of us with more than we can bear and leaving some with less than they need. Could it be that the God who wrote the laws of physics and wove our DNA allows suffering to rain down on us, but cannot regulate the flow? Or am I to believe that tsunamis and genocides are doled out with eyedropper precision? How then can I account for those who are overwhelmed and ruined by extraordinary pain?

In my attempts to account for what seems to be a profligacy of suffering, I feel that I have a choice between two extremes: either I must believe that God is in way over his head, powerless to reign in the horrific and gratuitous suffering of so many of his creatures, or else I must believe that God's power far surpasses even my wildest dreams.

Please do not confuse the latter god with that of orthodox Christianity. I'm talking about a god who possesses power and a plan that far surpasses what any religion permits me to hope for. A god who is at work on something wholly beyond my understanding - a god who will not merely bring an end to suffering, but who secretly collects every drop of senseless pain and evil and works it all for some greater good.

I don't see a place for a middle-strength god - one who commands the wind and the waves but cannot stop hurricanes and tsunamis, who saves forever His elect, but loses the rest of creation to hellfire.

I don't think the profusion of senseless and destructive suffering is a mere misperception. I see evil in this world that no theodicy can account for, and no god I've heard of could possibly set right. I do not have the ability to be optimistic about the ultimate goodness of our suffering. My only choices are dark pessimism, or wild, desperate hope.

[+/-] What I Learned About Quakers

I attended a Quaker church last Sunday. He's what I think of when I think Quakers:
1. Underground railroad
2. Old-fashioned clothes, like the the oatmeal guy.
3. Pacifism
4. Mysticism
Pretty good list. I've always thought Quakers were awesome, even though I didn't know much about them.

Well it turns out Quaker meetings are boring as hell. Seriously, this may have been the most boring church service I have ever attended in my life. But not in a bad way. I mean, I can imagine it being good if I was a different person. Basically it was 45 minutes of silence, followed by a brief open sharing time. People just talked about what they'd been thinking about; none of it was overtly "spiritual".

So I'm not likely to attend their meetings on a regular basis, but I am pretty much in love with them. Specifically their beliefs and values. Their big thing is that each of us individually is guided by God, and that this guidance, not the Bible, is our ultimate authority. They don't believe in creeds, religious hierarchies, or church rituals. Sometimes I wonder if Christians really believe we're indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and what we might look like if we did. Maybe we'd look like the Quakers.

So they're radically individualistic, and also really into experiencing God, in a low key, mystical kind of way, but they're also big on community. That's why they come together to sit quietly for an hour: apparently they're actually seeking some kind of communal mystical experience with God. They get awesome points for putting the words "communal" and "mystical" in the same sentence.

They're so serious about this that they make decisions by consensus. They have no church leadership of any kind. Instead they have business meetings were they each listen to what they feel is God's leading and then they talk about it until the all agree.

Also, they're extremely egalitarian, and have been since the beginning. Not only did they oppose slavery, but since their conception in the 17th century Quakers have refused to acknowledge class distinctions and have treated women as social and spiritual equals. (Who would have guessed the Quaker Oats guy was a feminist?)

Other cool things: they dress plainly, they've never been anti-intellectual, they don't distinguish between the sacred and the secular, they don't believe in telling lies or attempting to deceive in any way, they'd sooner go to jail than fight in a war, and they welcome non-Christians as full members of their communities. You can be a Muslim, a Buddhist, or an Atheist and also be a Quaker.

(Apparently there's a more conservative branch of Quakers which places more emphasis on the Bible and conducts slightly more conventional meetings. The statements above are generalities, and are probably more accurate for liberal Quakers.)

I know not all of you will be as impressed by this stuff as I am, but whatever you think about their beliefs (or however boring you find their meetings) you have to respect these people for the way they live their convictions. Besides the anti-slavery stuff, Quakers won the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize, and have been involved in the founding of organizations like Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Amnesty International.

[+/-] Ebenezer Scrooooge

I attended the St Joseph's College Chapel this week. I liked it. It still had that high church feel, but was small enough to feel cozy. They read the story of the rich man and Lazarus, which I found confusing. Here's the last bit:

"Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment."

Abraham replied, "They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them."

"No, father Abraham," he said, "but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent."

He said to him, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead."

- Luke 16:27-31

I find that hard to believe. Does Jesus really think that people who don't listen to scripture won't be moved by miracles? Don't we all know people who repented only after experiencing a miracle? And didn't miracles accompanied the words of God throughout the scriptures, particularly in the cases of "Moses and the Prophets"?

Didn't God preform many miracles through Moses to give authority to his message?

Didn't Elijah, the greatest of the prophets, call down fire from heaven to prove to Israel that his God was the true God?

Didn't Jesus give his witnesses miraculous power, and wasn't the performance of miracles a cornerstone of evangelism in the early church? Wasn't the great missionary Paul converted as the direct result of a miracle (specifically, an encounter with a dead man)?

Didn't Jesus himself augment his teaching with miracles? Didn't he use these miracles to shock people, to make them think, and to establish his authority as a messenger from God?

And isn't Jesus' own resurrection from the dead the cornerstone of Christianity? Didn't this great miracle (the very thing that the parable says would change no one's mind) open the disciples' eyes to the truth of Jesus' message?

This parable's perspective on miracles sounds very modern to me. People are always trying to tell me that we don't get a lot of miracles these days because people wouldn't listen to them anyway, and the Bible by itself should be enough to convince anyone. I don't see that anywhere in the Bible ...except here. Can anyone explain this to me? Can this passage be harmonized with the flashy methods of prophecy and evangelism that pervade the Bible? (I've included a few biblical counterpoints below.) Does anyone believe that people who reject the Bible would not be moved even by an encounter with a dead man?

I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done— by the power of signs and miracles, through the power of the Spirit.

- Ro 15:18-19

But I will come to you very soon, if the Lord is willing, and then I will find out not only how these arrogant people are talking, but what power they have. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.

- 1 Cor 4:19-20

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

- 1 Cor 15:14

[+/-] Hell and Justice

I've been rethinking hell. It's been along time since I took seriously the idea that humanity deserves eternal suffering. But I decided I should try to make a cool-headed assessment of the various possibilities. I’ve approached this by considering what might constitute a just cause for damnation.

1. Anything at all, or even nothing
This is the view that God needs no reason for causing his creatures infinite suffering. Rather than God being just because He acts justly, His actions are just because they're performed by God. God alone makes the rules; there are no transcendent moral laws by which He abides. The interesting and troubling implication of this view is that there is nothing inherently wrong about any action, however horrific it may seem to us. So the only reason why rape is wrong is that God says "Don't rape people". If God didn't command us not to rape, there would be nothing wrong with rape.

So is justice a transcendent law, or merely a part of creation? I suspect that most of us can imagine something an almighty God would be capable of doing which would be wrong. (He may in fact be prevented from doing it by His inherently just nature, but that's another issue.) I think causing immeasurable suffering to a helpless and undeserving creature is an example of something that would be unjust even for God. Consequently, if we are to believe in damnation, we must believe that it is something we deserve.

But you could take the opposite position - that anything God could possibly do or command would be just. My problem with this, besides the effect it has on my stomach, is that this makes justice kind of an empty concept. How can we make sense of saying "God is just" if "just" simply means "what God is"? If all God’s qualities are understood this way, it’s difficult to understand why He’s worthy of worship or obedience or love.

2. Someone else's sin
So if I've established that God is in some way constrained to act justly, the next question is whether (or to what extent) I understand what justice is. Is it possible that my own intuitions about justice could be wildly mistaken, and that justice permits - or even requires - one person to be punished for the sins of another? I'm don't think I could imagine anything that seems more fundamentally unjust, but it appears that at least some biblical authors disagree. Could it be that every one of us is guilty and deserving of damnation because of our ancestors' sins? That even infants who do not have free will and thus have never sinned are nonetheless under the righteous wrath of God? I have a hard time believing that my moral intuitions - intuitions which I'm told are given to me by God, those same gut feelings that tells me rape and murder are wrong - are so drastically mistaken on this point. The idea that we are justly found guilty of crimes we have not committed is beyond my imagination.

If this is justice, am I meant to comprehend it? Might I some day understand rationally that children are guilty of their parents' sins, and that every one of us really deserves to burn for Adam's disobedience? Or is it something that I must take on faith? If I were to try to believe that what seems to me the most grievous of all possible injustices is, in some unfathomable way, completely just, I would have to have to have enormous confidence in the source of this doctrine, and in my correct understanding of it. I'm a long way away.

3. One's own sin
If we accept that God acts justly, and that our understanding of justice is not wholly mistaken, we can move on to the question of eternal punishment. I fully understand that I am an imperfect creature, both by nature (which is not my doing, and for which I am not deserving of punishment) and continual choice (for which I do deserve punishment). I recognize that I do not deserve to stand before a holy God because of my willful unholiness. But do I deserve infinite punishment for my finite sin? If I've decided to believe that there is such a thing as justice apart from the will or whims of God, and that it is at least somewhat comprehensible to me, can I make sense of the idea that unending torment is a fitting punishment for finite sins?

The first thing we have to get out of the way is the idea that some people deserve eternal torment and others don't. If there were any relationship between the degree of sin and the degree of punishment, no one could possibly deserve infinite punishment. As creatures with finite wills and powers, living finite lives in finite worlds, we cannot do infinite evil. So either Hitler does not deserve eternal suffering, or you and I and Mother Teresa all deserve it as well. If we believe in eternal punishment we must sever the intuitive link between the severity of a crime and the severity of its punishment.

Which is a hell of a task. Even ignoring the mind-boggling prospect of infinite suffering, can we accept that all crimes are deserving of equal punishment? Can we accept that a lie is precisely as damning as an act of genocide? I can't see how.

Once again, we cannot say that we're so evil we deserve eternal punishment. Either we deserve it because we are less than absolutely perfect, or we do not deserve it. Is eternal torment just punishment for the smallest imaginable sin? Again, I can't see how.


My conclusion at this point is I don’t believe a just God would punish anyone with eternal suffering. This is not the same as believing there is no hell. I've by no means considered all possibilities here, but it's a start. I may consider other options in a subsequent post. Anyway, let me know if you disagree on any point.