Battling Theologies

McKibben identifies a very real problem for churches, one apparent in the contrast between American and European societies. As McKibben notes, European societies have managed to take care of the poor, the "widow and the orphan," in Biblical terms, without Marx or Jesus. The American church, on the other hand, has managed little more than its own stock portfolio, at best. As a moral voice in this country, whether the issue is babies having babies or illegal and immoral wars, the church speaks with the voice of the turtle. But there is a reason for that, and it is at once the rose, and the worm in the heart of the rose, for Christianity.

The Church in Europe for centuries was the conscience of the king. (Although it didn't last long, in the English tradition the King, on Good Friday, would re-create the "last supper' of the Gospel of John by washing the feet of beggars in court, and giving them gifts; a reflection of the Biblical injunction to care for the poor as a matter of justice). But kings did not rule long who abused their people harshly (the lessons of the French Revolution were not lost on Europe). Kings always had a charge to take care of their subjects (the common law of England was based on the premise that even the peasant was the king's property, and to assault the peasant was to damage the king's property. Thus the state had an interest in keeping the peace and in punishing perpetrators of assault, or other crimes). It was an easy transition, then, from the monarchical state to the "socialist" state, and as the Church withered in the Enlightenment and afterwards (even Romanticism spurned the Church), the spiritual connection to care for others was easily replaced by the social obligation to "do the right thing." Or, at least, be civilized.

In America, self-reliance became the myth, and the church became the provider of charity (usually delivered with a strong dose of a gospel of "God helps those who help themselves!"). The American church, in other words, was always more concerned with personal salvation than with material security (after all, if you are "saved," then your material needs will be taken care of; if they are not, then perhaps you are not "saved").

But now, material comforts are the way to salvation. Now we even say that comfortable, middle-class people can't be Christians. Which would be a solution, except for the example of Central America, where more and more people are turning away from "liberation theology" and embracing the "gospel of wealth," the idea that Christianity is all about amassing your treasure here on earth, where God can protect it from moth and rust (apparently).

The flip side of this is something McKibben himself alludes to (albeit unintentionally), something I've come to call "vulture theology." It's a popular excuse among pastors and church judicatories: that the "people" will come back to "us" when they find out they really "need" us." When the "kids" grow up and have "kids," and want their kids to have a moral framework to learn in (Sunday school, at least). Or when they get divorced, lose a parent, a spouse, even (sadly) a child. "Vulture" theology, in other words: if we just wait until something in them dies, they will have to come back to us.

We never put it that way, of course, because it would appall even jaded pastors. But it is what we mean. Which is part of the tension between the individual and the institution. In a nutshell, I agree with what Diogenes said about church in the comments below. And I'm Protestant enough in background to be wary of prebendaries and prelates and all the other pomp and circumstance of the RC and Anglican communion. But institutions are a necessary human evil; without the church as it historically developed (although that development was neither a necessity nor an inevitability), none of us would be, or know anything about, Christians, as there would be no Christianity to profess. But professing Christianity does not mean professing the tenets of any one church above another, or against another.

Still, we need the institution; and the institution needs us. But does society need Christianity? And if so, which version? The European model? The American? or a third way, such as, say, the Celtic?

"The struggle continues"

Let's start with this comment, which is very nearly perfect:

Is it all right if I quote the Scriptures? :-)

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

He [Jesus] said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12)

For me, the only way to begin to live the teachings I quoted is "in Christ". Some days, the only way I get out of bed in the morning is "in Christ" - Christ working in me. For me, that is salvation, which I need every single day.

If only because it incorporates the scriptures along with a trust in the reality of God that isn't dependent upon someone else's idea or assent, and that doesn't, equally, try to establish a hegemony from the idea of God.*

That sounds like a slap at everyone else, and I don't mean it that way; but I'll circle back to the point.

Texts and questions are like a Rorschach inkblot:  the answers reveal so much about the person answering.  Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity, for example, would probably in reality resemble Freemasonry (such is the way of the world).  What it would not resemble is the "liberal theologians" dream,  or Camus' world of plague, or be a religion without religion which would be...secularism?  Let me quote again what I quoted below.  Bonhoeffer starts with a question:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today" (LPP 279). For Bonhoeffer, Christianity’s identity was a problem because the world had "come of age;" that is, the world had become conscious of itself and the laws that governed its existence, and thus it did not need the trappings of religion any longer:

The "trappings of religion" is the issue here.  What are the "trappings of religion"?  Buildings?  Spires?  Stained glass windows?  Pews?  Organs? Pulpits?  I know of churches which have done away with all of those things.  Is that the "religionless Christianity" Bonhoeffer meant?  Knowing his work, I daresay he'd think many of those churches were closer to Christian-less Christianity.  And that's not what he was advancing.  Why?  As he makes clear, the issue is much more subtle and complex than that:

The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience – and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more (LPP 279).

I apologize for the poor formatting in the previous post; it probably contributed to the confusion.  Bonhoeffer makes a sweeping critique here, but one I think many of us would agree with, especially in the present day.  I'm intrigued by the idea that "the time when people could be told everything by means of words...is over."  In this day of cable TV and the internet where everything, even streaming videos, depends so much on words (how else does FoxNews communicate?  Or the Tea Party?), I think Bonhoeffer is still right.

We could discuss that.

He goes on to say the "time of inwardness and conscience" is over, and so the "time of religion in general" passes with the passing of these two eras.  Obviously he has a specific concept of religion in mind, but we should all be specific.  Before we get to that last sentence, let's reflect a moment on what he doesn't mean.

To understand what Bonhoeffer meant to affirm by religionless Christianity, his concept of ‘religion’ must first be grasped. In continuity with Feuerbach, Bonhoeffer regarded religion as human dependence upon God at the boundaries of life. He gave specific content to this by defining religion more precisely as individualism (the psychological attitude of a subject) and a metaphysical system (Gruchy 1991, 38). Both aspects of religion are faulty: individualism promotes an un-Christian retreat from the world, and religion’s attempt to provide a secure metaphysical explanation of salvation enables people to escape the challenge of the gospel (Gruchy 1991, 38). Moreover, in a world "come of age," religion’s psychologism and metaphysical claims about God simply cannot be accepted. Therefore, Bonhoeffer saw religion as a genuine hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ.

If this analysis is correct, Bonhoeffer is staying true to The Cost of Discipleship and, even more importantly, to his Ethics.  It is one of the benefits of old age (or at least to get past youth) to recognize that what was true and simple when you were young, is still true, but is not simple.  I'm especially intrigued by Bonhoeffer's idea of dependence on God at the boundaries of life.  It's an insight I had in seminary, and it's probably due to Bonhoeffer more than anyone else that I realized it. It leads to what I've labeled "vulture theology," a common expression among many pastors I know that while the church may lose the youth as soon as they are old enough to stay home on Sunday morning, that we'll get 'em back when they have kids, or need a funeral, or face a crisis (financial, personal, existential, doesn't matter).  It's a rather gruesome hope for sustaining an institution that's supposed to be upheld by the God of the living and of all life.

Notice there, too (and again, I blame the poor formatting on the last post; I don't know what went wrong there), Bonhoeffer defines religion in very negative ways.  It is individualism ("religion is a private matter!") and the metaphysical system.  Both, Bonhoeffer thought (rightly, I think) led individuals away from the claims of the Gospel to be in the world while not of the world (try it.  It's quite a struggle.  That struggle is real.)  Individualism promotes a retreat from the world to what makes me happy and comfortable; the metaphysical system makes salvation paramount and secures you from any of the challenges of the gospel.  After all, if I'm saved, if my one hope is in a metaphysic that puts my soul at the center of a cosmic system of divine justice and retribution, what need I care for my fellows, except as a random act of kindness?

And the more atheists fight with Christian concepts of a metaphysical realm more real than this one, where the true life is finally lived, the more we help them make religion a hindrance to true faith in Jesus Christ.

And what would true faith be?  What does the Lord require of you?

According to Bonhoeffer, the church has failed in its mission to the modern world because it was not able to separate the message of Christ from religious trappings. The church used God as a metaphysical deus ex machina, a God of the gaps that filled the holes of our knowledge. Bonhoeffer noticed that as secularism increasingly permeated the lives of modern people, this metaphysical God of the gaps was being pushed further away into irrelevance. The Church’s response was to stake out the inner life of the person for God, thus summoning up God to answer "ultimate" questions like death and guilt. For Bonhoeffer, this signaled a retreat into subjectivism, into the personal categories of sin, despair, and anxiety over against the objective work done by God in Jesus Christ. Moreover, it only affirmed a God found in weakness, not in strength, a God at the periphery of our existence, not the center.

Vulture theology is a subset of the "God of the gaps" theology.  If we cannot reconcile the classical metaphysical system with present-day science, we push God into the places science can't yet go, and all that does is allow secularism to push God further away.  God becomes the last resort, the place that, when we have to go there, God has to make us whole.  And when God fails to do even that, then what's the point of God?  And about this time the critique of "liberal theologians" kicks in.  God as the answer to "ultimate" questions is a direct swipe at Paul Tillich.  I'll say up front I'm no fan of Tillich.  His Systematic Theology is supposedly founded on Kierkegaard's thought, but the very first thing Kierkegaard opposed was the systematic thinking of Hegel, which is pretty much what Tillich brings to the discussion.  Had he been alive, Kierkegaard would have started a third round of his authorship just to oppose Tillich who, ironically, is the father of systematic theology as a course of study in most seminaries.  Bonhoeffer opposes this retreat into "subjectivism," an opposition I'm sure Kierkegaard would join him in (when S.K. wrote "Truth is subjective," he didn't mean it's personal).  And I certainly agree with Bonhoeffer's criticism that affirming God in weakness, the "God of the gaps," is putting God at the periphery of our existence, not at the center.

Which brings us back to the comment I started with.  When I was a pastor, I was working on the idea that worship had become, even for believing Christians (never mind the baptized heathens), a matter of a Sunday morning filling station.  That is, you came to church on Sunday morning to get your spiritual tank refilled, much as you have to refill the gas tank of your car from time to time.  Bathed in the comfort and reassurance that God loves you and wants you to be just as you are, without one plea (except "Please, sir, I want some more!", which God would surely grant), you go out into the world and struggle with it as a car struggles against friction, until your energy source is used up and you return for another refill, in a week.

God as endless commodity, in other words.

What I wanted to do was shift the perception, change the assumption:  what if, instead of coming into the presence of God for a spiritual recharge or refill, we came into the presence of the living God with fear and trembling?  Not the fear induced by horror movies or the thought of destruction or the loss of loved ones or a job, but the existential awe that creates an awfulness (in the old sense of the world, being filled with awe) at the nature of God, an awe that would put the world in perspective.  Sort of the positive version of "eat a live frog first thing everyday, and nothing worse will happen to you all day."  If, on one morning of the week, you encountered the living God, the one not present in the storm, though there is a storm, not present in the earthquake, though there is an earthquake, the one who made Sinai shake and tremble until the Hebrews told Moses to talk to God for them, because they were afraid; if you encountered the presence of that God, wouldn't your week be different?  Wouldn't what loomed so large suddenly seem small?  Wouldn't you be more inclined to think you don't need to sweat the small stuff, and that it's all small stuff?  What difference might it make if you came to worship wondering what the Lord requires of you, rather than what you require of the Lord?

Would that be a religionless Christianity?

*Any establishment of a system, especially for an idea about God, runs the risk of being established against other ideas, and implicitly declaring those ideas inferior; and on what basis, except preference?

Where's All the People?, Part Infinity

My seminary education was surprisingly reliant on sociology.  Not in the theological classes, but in the ecclesiological ones.  There was great attention paid to where the "church", writ as largely as possible, was going.  I came to call some of the conclusions "vulture theology."  Something like this:

Social science research has long suggested that Americans’ relationship with religion has a tidal quality — people who were raised religious find themselves drifting away as young adults, only to be drawn back in when they find spouses and begin to raise their own families. Some argued that young adults just hadn’t yet been pulled back into the fold of organized religion, especially since they were hitting major milestones like marriage and parenthood later on.

Vulture theology is the idea the church will always falter but never die because young people will do what they did in the '60's:  abandon church until they need it for marriages and baptisms and weddings and someplace "safe" to take the family at least once a week.  Nothing in this article surprises me; or disturbs me, for that matter.   Does it point toward a bleak, dystopian future in which no one attends church and the buildings become the "bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang" that Shakespeare alluded to?  Only he was thinking of the Catholic churches taken over by Elizabeth I's father, and abandoned on pain of death.  This future is not that past, but is it as dreary and dreadful as the images make it sound?

Nah.    What's going on in church attendance has been going on for a long time.  We've becomes used to "mega-churches" replacing churches, but that's a phenomenon that's, at best, 40 years old.  And they will fade as their pastors fade (Mars Hill is gone; the Crystal Cathedral died with Robert Schuller).  I'd go so far as to say mega-churches are the Facebook of churches:  attractive to old people who think they're on the cutting edge, but of no interest to Millenials who, frankly, probably have a lot of reasons for not going to church besides politics.  We've also gotten used to the idea that church is a central pillar of American society; but that's an idea that's pretty much the experience of the post-World War II world, which is, SURPRISE!, the experience of the Boomers.  And let's face it; we're fading away, too.

The politics is an interesting issue.  Seems that doesn't attract people to church the way we imagined it would.  I remain critical of the United Church of Christ (the church which ordained me) because of the public emphasis on social justice/political issues.  Not that I am opposed to social justice; far from it.  But while LBJ and Bobby Kennedy could talk about social justice as a national commitment, it has become an issue that is purely political, as everyone now sees the world as a zero-sum game (a report on NPR this morning about a union in Nevada is illustrative.  Sanders, Warren, and Biden spoke to the union, but Warren and Sanders had to explain how "Medicare for All" would preserve the healthcare benefits the union had negotiated and was so protective of.  They didn't care how a proposal would benefit everyone; they were most concerned with preserving their benefits from any change, where "change=loss."  That's the zero sum game we practice today, a presumption Kennedy and LBJ did not have to work against.).  When the UCC talks about social justice, the world hears a "liberal" political position being advocated.  Much as I agree with Walter Brueggemann, a little attention on matters spiritual and even communal might not be a bad idea.  Then again I'm hardly a 'builder' of churches, so what do I know?

Except that I'm not surprised by the study concluding Millenials aren't going to church because they never went to church and because the public face of church is an institution interested in power and money.   The church writ large has done that to itself, selling out to Mammon and the prestige offered by the world rather than trying to be the Body of Christ in the world.  But what withers away is false, and what remains will be true, no matter how few people adhere to it.

As I've said before, when that 4 in 10 becomes 6 in 10, we'll be back to where we were 100+ years ago.  Which still won't be the worst place to be.

"That's how the light gets in"

Lord knows I can drum things right into the ground, turning the most gossamer of butterfly thoughts into lead weights and depleted uranium-heavy meditations which are toxic in their own right.  So I'm going to try to leave this one as untouched as the original consideration, and see what I can do with it later (probably nothing, given my track record and jackdaw mentality, i.e., the pursuit of shiny things).

The "God of the gaps" used to refer (and for some still does) to God squeezed into the gaps in our empirical (not necessarily scientific) knowledge of the world, as if relating God to the world was of critical importance to believers.

To some believers that relationship is critical; then again, there are many paths to God, and that phrase doesn't just mean many approaches through world religion.  The beliefs of a Mother Teresa aren't necessarily completely harmonious with those of a Jesuit Pope, and the theology of a poor mother in the barrio isn't necessarily the theology of a seminary professor at a Catholic seminary.

And which of these is right, and which is wrong?

So some need God to explain the rainfall, and some consider God to explain human existence.  Which gets us to the newer, more modern use of the "God of the gaps."  It's akin to what I've labeled "vulture theology."  God is supposed to fill the gaps in our personal lives.  God is supposed to answer why bad things happen to good people (the good people always being us, and those we cherish).  God is supposed to fill in the empty spaces; and it seems we have so many empty spaces.

There's been an outpouring of grief for famous people lately, to the point we can see it as narcissistic.

“Several factors are at work here: the cult of celebrity, a more emotionalized society and, indeed, a more fragmented and lonely society that uses public grief, however dubiously, to bond with strangers through collective tear shedding.”

The fragmented and lonely society is the touchstone.  "Bowling Alone" is how Robert Putnam described it.   If there is a "God of the gaps" in modern American society, it is mostly likely found there:  in the spaces between our social contacts; in the isolation we live in even as we connect on social media.

The isolation itself isn't new.  Annie Dillard describes it about her mother's life in the suburbs where Dillard grew up, the suburbs familiar to Baby Boomers who saw it reflected on their televisions every night.  These are the gaps we have made for ourselves, and now we want God to fill them.  Or we want something to fill them.  Which may explain both our grief when celebrities die, and our anger that religion no longer supports us.

And as if to oddly underscore my point, the Bernie Sanders campaign releases a wordless ad that plays "America" from the "Bookends" album, a Baby Boomer paean to lost innocence and the search for community:  "'Kathy, I'm lost," I said/Though I knew she was sleeping./"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why!/Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all come to look for America."

Vulture Theology

Sherri said...

I keep seeing that study headlined 'Less-educated & poor abandon religion.' Seems like to me it should be 'Religion abandons less-educated & poor.'

I actually meant to start this discussion here:

The study also shows that Americans who make more money attend religious services more frequently, and that Americans who have been unemployed at any point in the past 10 years attend services less frequently. The study found that people who are married, who do not approve of premarital sex and those who lost their virginity later than their peers also attend services more often.

“While we recognize that not everyone wishes to worship, and that religious diversity can be valuable, we also think that the existence of a large group of less educated Americans that is increasingly disconnected from religious institutions is troubling for our society,” says Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the study and a professor of sociology and public policy at the Johns Hopkins University. “This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work.”

And then Dean French and Walter Russell Meade intervened in ways comical and grossly ignorant. Events changed, too, so where I meant to start is no longer the place I would start from. But I can't toss that aside either, because it is prologue to what I have to say now. So let's begin with prologue and see where we end up.

Probably this problem is a matter of economics, not just individual finances: in a 24/7 economy, Sunday has been squeezed out as the "day of rest" (whether it ever should have been a day the stores were closed is another matter, but it ain't that day anymore!). And if you are working a minimum wage job, especially (which I assume is the best you can do these days, with just a high school diploma), you're probably working more than one job just to pay for the gasoline to get you to work. Doesn't leave much time for Sunday morning services, which is still the preferred hour of worship for most Protestant Christians.

And why is that? There's a curious cultural vestigial practice right there. Why must church be open for worship between the hours of 9 and noon on Sundays? Frankly, Sunday morning is the only morning I can even THINK about sleeping in (past 6 a.m.) or having time to make breakfast something other than what comes out of a box ready to eat (more and more I think of the foods of my convenience foods childhood as MRE's). My sympathies lie with people who would rather be elsewhere on Sunday morning. Of course, my sympathies lie more strongly with people who understand worship as a discipline, not just a social duty. But those sympathies are more befitting of the monastery than the modern world, so I'm left wondering why Protestantism is so determined to "market" itself, and yet also so determined to cling to practices that are long outworn.

Or maybe they aren't so outworn; I prefer the calm silence of Sunday morning for worship, to the dull quiet of Saturday evening in church, when everyone else in the world is heading out for Saturday night. I can see where that kind of discipline for worship is as hard as the discipline of the monastics. But that's a memory from childhood, when the world was calm on Sunday morning. Today it is still calmer than the rest of the week, especially in the city; but it isn't exactly calm. But there is a discipline involved in worship, a "Du muss gehen!"* that has to be maintained, since worship has stopped involving families in their homes sometime shortly after Paul died. Instilling that discipline, or overcoming that inertia, has been a problem plaguing pastors since at least the incoming tide of the post-war church boom began receding.

One answer to the problem prominent among pastors when I used to hang out with them was what I came to label "vulture theology." Nobody really liked the sound of it (the idea, not my label), but they were also rather comforted by it. The idea was that children came to church as a captive audience, and parents brought them because they felt compelled to do so, so the children would learn good lessons about life (and maybe discipline. Whether any of that is true or not is another matter. Certainly they learn about power and how many people like to wield it, no matter how small the arena.). When those children reached the age of consent (which varies in Christian churches, but usually the age of confirmation) parents generally gave up forcing them to attend, and the children usually stopped. (The blessing/curse of the church. In Protestant denominations, confirmed children became voting members of the congregation. I liked it; the one place I was an adult, like my father, although I was still young in the world. But most confirmands vanish after the confirmation service, glad to be able to choose not to stay.) They would return, vulture theology theorized, when they had kids, or when the chips were down and they needed the church for comfort and support.

In other words, at a time of spiritual crisis, or spiritual (or real) death. Vulture theology. We pastors were like undertakers; all we had to do was be patient; sooner or later you'll come to us.

Funny, that isn't happening: "The study also shows that Americans who make more money attend religious services more frequently, and that Americans who have been unemployed at any point in the past 10 years attend services less frequently." I would first compare this to the theories that Islamic terrorism was bred in ghettos and poverty and powerlessness, because who else would become a suicide bomber except someone with no material prospects to look forward to? And it turned out the most likely terrorist was a child of wealthy parents. To speculate why it was them, and not the poor, whom Al Qaeda and others were more likely to recruit, one cannot ask the first question without making presumptions that exclude other possibilities. Were they, for example, driven by a lack of direction in their lives? By the emptiness of material possession? By a need for meaning that property ownership couldn't provide? Such questions presume conditions which may, or may not, exist. Such questions presume there is a spiritual dimension to human existence and frankly, I don't hear too many people talking that way anymore.

I don't hear people making those presumptions unless I read old books that already sound like they come from a pre-Enlightenment era, books like Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. No one today considers humanity in the "Old World" way Frankl does, and his language is so pre-21st century empiricism (which borders on logical positivism, another irony), it almost seems pre-Cambrian. But if there is an explanation for things like wealthy children becoming suicide bombers, and for riots across England, for the decline of the unemployed in worship in America (and the rise of the well-off, who obviously feel more comfortable in church, or have more time to take some comfort there), then perhaps the explanation is not in simple terms of a hierarchy of needs. Maybe we have needs that don't arise only at the top of that hierarchy. Maybe what keeps mankind alive isn't bestial acts alone, after all.

And maybe the vulture is not our best selection from the ancient Christian bestiary.

Before you say that the decline in worship of the poor is clearly an affirmation of Maslow's hierarchy, let me point out the church started among the poor ("Foxes have holes, and birds their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head...") and stayed there almost up until the time of Constantine. And the concern of the church is always supposed to be the poor, although the eye strays from that goal from time to time:

"My church comforts the sick and the dying. My church feeds the hungry. What does your church do? Oh, that's right, you don't have a church!"

And certainly the church can do that without too much affliction to the comfortable (affliction which would make the feeding of the hungry and the poor almost impossible, if carried too far, so let's be reasonable), but should the church itself be so comforting a place the poor should feel uncomfortable there? That's a problem as old as Protestantism itself, and one reason new churches, like the Pentecostal movement, spring up from time to time. They begin in marginal communities and can promise dramatic changes (Harvey Cox has pointed out, over and over, that the Pentecostal movement was one of the first truly interracial churches in America). Then, of course, the institution becomes established, and has to look to its own concerns, and the pastors become personalities, and they need TV cameras to "spread the message," and soon the message is them, and then....

Well, that's one way it happens. The other is that the poor and marginalized move up the economic ladder and take their church with them, and pretty soon the church is as much an institution of society as any "mainstream" denomination. And that brings blessings and curses, too.

But the results reported in this study are interesting and sad. The church, respondents say, is a place of judgment, especially about sexual matters ("The study found that people who are married, who do not approve of premarital sex and those who lost their virginity later than their peers also attend services more often."), and it is a place associated with monied interests. That should comfort Dean French, but it is cold comfort to the rest of us who take the parable of the sheep and the goats at least somewhat seriously. Given the few mentions of the Temple in the Gospels are about the iniquitous influence of money (the cleansing of the Temple; the widow's mite; even the impermanence of the seemingly permanent structure), you'd think the institution would have gone a different route, attracted a different crowd. Then again, what would it be if it had? Would it even be, at all?

We prefer either/or answers. We prefer solutions which eliminate problems or, at worst, create new problems. We like, in other words, Hegel; but we get Derrida:

“In our ‘wars of religion’, violence has two ages. The one…appears ‘contemporary’, in sync or in step with the hypersophistication of military tele-technology—of ‘digital’ and cyberspaced culture. The other is a ‘new archaic violence’, if one can put it that way. It counters the first and everything ir represents. Revenge. Resorting, in fact, to the same sources of mediatic power, it reverts (according to the return, the resource, the repristination and the law of internal and auto-immune reactivity we are trying formalize here) as closely as possible to the body proper and to the premachinal living being. In any case, to its desire and to its phantasm. Revenge is taken against the decorporalizing and expropriating machine by resorting—reverting—to bare hands, to the sexual organs or to primitive tools, often to weapons other than firearms. What is referred to as ‘killings’ and ‘atrocities’—words never used in ‘clean’ or ‘proper’ wars, where, precisely, the dead are no longer counted (guided or ‘intelligent’ missiles directed at entire cities, for instance)—is here supplanted by tortures, beheadings, and mutilations of all sorts. What is involved is always avowed vengeance, often declared as sexual revenge: rapes, mutilated genitals or severed hands, corpses exhibited, heads paraded, as not so long ago in France, impaled on the end of stakes (phallic processions of ‘natural religions’). This is the case, for examples, but it only an example, in Algeria today, in the name of Islam, invoked by both belligerent parties, each in its own way. These are also symptoms of a reactive and negative recourse, the vengeance of the body proper against an expropriatory and delocalizing tele-technoscience, identified with the globality of the market, with military-capitalistic hegemony, with the globalatinization of the European democratic model, in its double form: secular and religious. When—another figure of double origin—the foreseeable alliance of the worst effects of fanaticism, dogmatism or irrationalist obscurantism with hypercritical acumen and incisive analysis of the hegemonies and the models of the adversary (globalatinization, religion that does not speak its name, ethnocentrism putting on, as always, a show of ‘universalism”, market-driven science and technology, democratic rhetoric, ‘humanitarian’ strategy or ‘keeping the peace’ by means of peace-keeping forces, while never counting the dead of Rwanda, for instance, in the same manner as those of the United States of America or of Europe). This archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of ‘religious’ violence claims, in the name of ‘religion’, to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body: as though thereby to eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound. Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.”

Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, tr. Samuel Weber (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 52-53.

I've highlighted the bits that are of most interest to me, but to begin with Derrida identifies a double origin which struggles with its "twin" (let us say) but cannot destroy it; not without destroying itself. It can't synthesize it, either. They are too much alike, too much different, and irreconcilable without the destruction of both. There is no "third way" here. There is only the struggle.

Israel, the scholars tell us, means "struggles with God."

It is notable, of course, that this study doesn't highlight a violent response to the situation, but something more akin to a resigned shrug. Life, after all, is supposed to be hard (Puritanism, at least as remembered in modern America) and only the blessed are supposed to be rich (Calvinism, again as vaguely remembered in modern America), and if the church is so concerned with either why I should be rich (Joel Osteen) or social justice for some other group besides mine (liberal mainstream churches), then where do I go?

I honestly don't know how quickly the mainstream churches have turned on this dime, but my experience is they are more like aircraft carriers than small and agile boats. Reinhold Niebuhr tells a wonderful story from his days as a Detroit minister. He took the pulpit one morning to rail against the heartlessness of the automakers who were laying off workers in the Depression at a record rate. Niebuhr spoke passionately for the unemployed, and furiously about the companies who would discard them so callously. After the service, a church member approached him to say he, the member, was in management at an auto worker, and was suffering great torments calling in employees to hand them their last paychecks. Niebuhr realized then that no problem is a matter of the abstract "they," but is always about "us." And when you have to rail against "us," it's suddenly a much harder thing to do.

I have a friend who has been in ministry most of his adult life. When there were attempts to boycott Taco Bell because of the labor practices used to harvest the tomatoes the corporation used, attention fell on an employer in his town. A representative from the national church came to town to "educate" the pastors in town about the issue. When they tried to point out they had church members who worked for the company Taco Bell bought produce from, their words fell on deaf ears. The matter was one of ideas, not people, and the pastors were failing to hold up their end for the good of the goal.

Churches have a hard time avoiding such conclusions. Institutions have a hard time with nuance, and the church is, by and large, an institution. So if the churches are not tackling the problem of unemployment in a coherent or even useful manner, I won't be surprised. There is precious little they can do besides rail against the system, perhaps in the manner of Jesus cleansing the temple of merchants. But the church is not Jesus, and the free market is not the Temple; so there's that. There's also the obvious problem: wealthy people support the church, unemployed people don't. The first rule any pastor learns in a modern church is: don't bite the hand that feeds you; not if you want to eat.

I don't think those hands need to be bitten anyway, but any discussion of money from the pulpit makes people squirm; and any discussion that goes against the grain of modern understandings of poverty might well make those who aren't poor or about to be poor due to job loss, more than a bit uncomfortable. And I don't know how it would make the poor and unemployed any more comfortable, either. So we're back at the pastor's problem: what do to, and how to do it.

One problem is the language we feel compelled to use. I still remember speaking up in a meeting of clergy and interested laity on a church response to a scientific subject. When I pointed out the statement being crafted made precious little reference to God, I was berated by a lay person for "beating up" on science. I was doing no such thing, but no one in the room, laity and clergy alike, supported my position, so I learned when to shut up (basically, always) and when to speak up (basically, never) and thus got through the rest of the process without incident. We don't like talking about spiritual matters, at least not as Protestants, because we sound too much like religious know-nothings. Or we are religious know-nothings who understand science only as it makes us materially comfortable, and abandon it to pursue rather silly spiritual ideas that are really no more sound than triskadekaphobia and other superstitions, so as to keep our science and our religion comfortably separated. I've seen many examples of both. Until we can find or appropriate a language that expresses our confessions of faith without expressing our credulity about the physical universe, we'll have quite a struggle with this issue. That language is available; but we have yet to do the hard work of appropriating it to our use.

Another problem (although almost all our problems, thanks to Hume, come down to problems of language), is our problem of identity. After Freud and the Viennese school of psychology, we all assume human beings are primarily sexual creatures. After menarche and puberty, we are all driven by sexual desire, so much so that we must be identified, first and foremost, as heterosexual or homosexual, or even bisexual and transgendered. Again, the modern liberal church has nobly taken up this cause, reinforcing the idea that we are not first creatures of spirit, but creatures of our genitalia and what we want to do with them. What would happen, though, if we thought of ourselves first as spiritual beings, and secondarily as material beings? We might try to disappear into the ether, I suppose, trying to become as diaphanous and "pure" as possible. But I don't think so; I don't think we'd have to abandon the world to be spiritual beings in the world, though we might have to stop thinking Maslow's hierarchy (which I first encountered in seminary; three college degrees, and I had no use for that pyramid until I was training to be a minister of the gospel) is the baseline for human needs, and spirituality comes in fourth or fifth or sixth in line. What if we simply turned that around? What seismic shifts in human consideration might arise?

Yet another problem is the problem of the holy.

This archaic and ostensibly more savage radicalization of ‘religious’ violence claims, in the name of ‘religion’, to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body: as though thereby to eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound. Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication.”

Derrida is concerned with violence, but we need not follow him there to appropriate his language and understand it correctly. What about the claim, in the name of 'religion,' to rediscover the roots, the place, the body and idiom, of 'religion.' Isn't that what Dean French is doing, and to a lesser extent Walter Russell Meade? They come closer to speaking the language of violence on the subject of poverty than anyone else I'm hearing. And that is an interesting thing about the discussion of poverty: the very discussion of it usually makes us very nervous.

In Ursula LeGuin's Omelas, even a kind word to the child in the basement is enough to end the perfection of the too-true-to-be-good city. I find that whenever a kind word is spoken about the poor, almost-violent reactions often ensue. I knew a kind and good man, a church member (not of my church) who insisted that panhandlers on the streets of Houston, obviously destitute and broken people, in fact made $30,000 a year (apparently a princely sum; I think his age was showing in that calculation) by begging, which proved, PROVED!, they were not, indeed, worthy of our compassion. He meant well, but while the poor may always be with us, it seems to most people that we don't always have to care for them. Meade and French stand in a long line that I remember from my childhood, when anecdotes about color TV's in tar paper shacks proved that the poor weren't really victims of a system, but simply profligate and poor managers of their admittedly meager incomes. We seem to feel, somehow, that the poor indict us in our comfort, and any kind word delivered to them or even about them, that isn't tempered with some kind of rebuke for the group as a whole, is enough to afflict what makes us comfortable. Speaking harshly of the poor is our own way of trying to "eradicate uprootedness and reappropriate the sacredness of life safe and sound." But, of course, what we end up with is: "Double root, double uprootedness, double eradication."

We always have the poor with us because we are always committed to systems that make sure some one else is poor, that someone lives in the basement so we can enjoy the sunshine and festivals of Omelas. That is the double root we always strive to uproot and eradicate. But we uproot and eradicate ourselves, in the effort, as well. Is it any surprise that: “This development reinforces the social marginalization of less educated Americans who are also increasingly disconnected from the institutions of marriage and work.” Disconnecting people from institutions we don't really want them to be a part of is the primary work of an institution.

So, do we abandon the institution? If we do, where do we go? And after all, is the Church really Omelas? Do we really have no alternative but to accept it, or walk away?

Who is the church, anyway? The priests, the bishops, the pastors and judicatory of whatever form and function? Or is the church the people in the pews? Is the church you? Which is not to say that you are the Body of Christ, but is the Church so apart from you that it, too, is an abstraction, a thing to which you have nothing but an unfortunate connection? If pastors are waiting like vultures for parishioners to come along in the end, in the last resort, are you waiting for the church to act like the church you imagine, in the end, in the last resort? Maybe it is time, again, to ask the passionate questions (on another subject, but again, we can disregard that) of that passionate Roman Catholic, Walker Percy:

What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness?...God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing...What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest! Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!

Maybe that's what we should do. It is clear Meade and French and their ilk are wrong, and worse, dangerous. But knowing that doesn't tell us what to do, only what not to do. So what do we do? We get up. That's right, nothing more than that. Get up! Protest! What is missing? Who is robbing us? God? A thief? Find him! Find the thief! Find God!!!!

Sorry, no answers here at the end of the book. Just more questions:

If you're looking for an answer,
If you're looking for a way,
If you're looking for directions,
Or a lesson how to pray,
Then there's nothing for you here,
You'd better go.

"Song for Maybe Christians," as best I can remember it 40 years later. Something I learned in high school. Some things stick with you longer than they should.

UPDATE: There is, by the way, a response to poverty in this country from major religious organizations. The membership of this group is really quite impressive. On the other hand, they are not the Tea Party (or Tea Parties), and they don't attract the attention of the DC media crowd. There is also the distinction between poverty (a concept) and the poor (people). But it is a response. A candle in the darkness, as it were.

*(try as I might, I can't find the German double "S" on my computer. Apologies!)

Old Rocky Face, look forth!

You know, it's just easier to be against something:

Since the beginning of the Obama presidency liberals and progressives have demonstrated little political passion compared to those on the right. Once the election was over, once a black man was elected president, once the Democrats controlled Congress, liberals and progressives declared victory - and left the game.

And most of the push for Obama was to cleanse the Augean stables of what the Bush Administration left behind. When it turned out Obama wasn't Hercules, and that the task wouldn't be as simple as re-routing a river, everybody got bored and dissatisfied and then got mad and decided to get even. Which isn't to say everything Obama has done has been ideal or perfect, but if you expect politicians to always pander to your preferences and always to solve your preferred problems, then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

But getting back to being against something:

Surely, that could be seen in last summer's rage over health care, where in public forums across the country the right showed up in huge numbers -- irate, strident, and full of wrath. If you supported health-care they shouted you down, accused you of favoring socialized medicine (never mind that many of the accusers were on Medicare), said you were Marxists or communists -- or worse.

Their mantra was unrelenting, "We want our country back!" they yelled.

What they want, of course, is what Tom Tancredo wants: they want that "other" out of their White House. "Other" now being the preferred term for the evil that dare not speak its name. I prefer "other" be a term of art in the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas, because "other" in this context is simply a euphemism for plain old American racism:

"I remember a little thing, like Ms. Obama saying she didn't want any Christian artifacts in the White House during Christmas time," Tancredo said. Another problem, Tancredo said, is "hosting Ramadan events there."

Tancredo's recitation of the urban myth about Michelle Obama disdaining Christmas is just one of several instance of Tancredo ascribing an otherness to the Obamas.

Let me pause to say it again, for emphasis: Tom Tancredo is not "ascribing an otherness to the Obamas." He's a racist: plain and simple. He's upset because a black family lives in the White House. End of discussion. Everything else he says about the Obamas only makes sense in that context. And racism stirs passions and ignites groups of people to action because it gives you something to be against. It also underscores that "they" lost, and now "they" want to do something about it, much as progressives and liberals felt for 8 years of the Bush Administration. And, of course, "they" learned their tactics from "us:"

In the 60s and 70s, having finally achieved their principal objectives, civil rights as the rule of law, the end of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon out of office and disgraced, liberals were spent, emotions drained, energy gone. There were no more rivers to cross or mountains to climb. Everest, K-2, and Annapurna were conquered. Liberalism was victorious. Those who believed in its cause, which they believed to be moral and just, turned to other pursuits.

A large political vacuum was created, but it didn't last. Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority arose -- and American politics were forever changed.

What was Falwell's inspiration?

He said he watched William Sloane Coffin Jr., the Berrigan brothers, and other Christian clergy march against the war in Vietnam and decided if they could march against a war he could march for the rights of the unborn. Coffin, the Berrigans and others left the parade. Falwell and Robertson and Dobson took their place.

Civil rights, as I recall, wasn't so much achieved, as the air finally ran out of the balloon with Dr. King's death. It was pretty much left to society to catch up to the vision Dr. King (and many, many others) had espoused. The public struggle had been going on for almost 2 decades at that point; the energy needed to sustain it was finally over. Vietnam ended, too, and Nixon left office in disgrace before that: two "enemies" fallen. And where did Falwell get his inspiration? From the opposition to government and war led by the Beriggan Brothers and William Sloane Coffin and others. We have met the enemy, and he is us.

Antipathy is all too human, and it is all to easily inspired. Take Sarah Palin, for example:

"It's just a peculiar thing, but she does, as I found out in May, she presses a button and what comes back is hate," he said. "The people who respond when she complains about something are just so filled with hate. I got some of the ugliest, most vile e-mails directed at me, my grandchildren, my children, my wife – just ugly, ugly stuff."

As for his interviews, most people he approached in Palin's hometown were willing to speak, but he said there was what he calls an "undercurrent of fear."

"People – I don't know if they're afraid of shadows or whether there's something real there – she's no longer in a position of governmental influence but there are people up there who are scared to death to talk because if Sarah ever found out they talked, oh, something terrible would happen to them," he said.

Not coincidentally, you get much the same thing from the Vanity Fair profile about her. Then again, her whole premise seems to be fear and animosity. "Mama Grizzlies." "Don't retreat, reload." And so on. When she isn't fanning the flames of animosity and opposition, she's looking for enemies to be outraged by. Need I say this kind of fear of strangers is as American as neighborliness and friendly welcomes?

It's almost cyclical, this sense of opposition and victory and disengagement and new opposition. Yeats would describe it as the gyres, interlocking cones along which history moved, back and forth. Hegel, in popular culture anyway, would call it thesis and antithesis and synthesis, which eventually gives rise to a new antithesis, sparking another round of opposition. Lost in the usual understanding of Hegel's theory is that the two sides remain in existence, only their power over events swings back and forth, like some mad pendulum. The names, ultimately, change, the uniforms may even be different: but the players remain essentially the same. If the best are full of doubt and the worst are full of passionate intensity, it seems more and more to depend on which side you are on, as to which are best and which are worst. The whole thing comes to seem completely pointless and mad.

I've seen the baseless accusation flung, more than once, that religion is simply a human attempt to defy death, or to explain suffering, or to overcome some problem of individual existence (we all die, but not all of us at once). It's a reductio ad absurdum based on the same ignorance it accuses religion generally of sustaining. One of the ignored lessons of Christianity, though, one of the lessons of the Hebrew Scriptures that endures without let throughout the New Testament, from the first word of Mark to the last word of the Revelation, is that the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jesus, is a God intimately involved in history. We've distorted that intimacy, especially since the Romantic period, into individual intimacy: a God who is involved in the best possible outcome for each of our individual lives, a kind of child's imagining of what the world of adulthood is like, as foolish and unrealistic as the child who imagines what is beneath her skin is simply solid flesh, rather than the complex mass of nerve and bone and muscle, ligament, tendon, organs, and connective tissues of all description. A world that is so simple that God could order each individual's life to be perfect for that person is a world so narcissistic and narrow I wouldn't want to live in, couldn't imagine finding happiness in it. What Christianity is supposed to proclaim is a God involved in human history, and that is a complex and difficult proclamation indeed.

It is not, for starters, a proclamation that God is moving all events, whether we can know it or not, toward good, toward a purpose, toward a moment when all eyes will see and all hearts will open and finally humanity will have "evolved" to a point to be ready to accept the God who comes leveling mountains and raising valleys so no human eye can miss the sight. Again, to take that literally would mean the surface of the earth would have to be peeled off like an orange, and late out flat as if there were a planet-sized table top arranged for the occasion. It's a metaphor in Isaiah's text, not a prediction of apocalypse or, if you prefer, Ragnorok. To take literally that God is organizing every last event for good, is to imagine a God who is a monster for letting so much evil happen consequent upon good finally being produced. It is to argue for a God for whom the ends do justify the means, and that is a perverse doctrine indeed. The kerygma that God is involved in human history is a difficult and complex one, and it is not one to be dismissed as a "mystery," either. There is a reason "Israel" means "Struggles with God," and it is better that we understand that struggle is an inheritance from Christianity's Jewish ancestry, not a resolution brought about by the Pauline declaration of the nature of the Christ.

We have to move past, in other words, the idea that the only meaning in life is found in opposition, and the only purpose of struggle is to achieve a resolution. Because in that very limited sense the explanation of Hegel is right, and every synthesis (resolution) simply leads to a new antithesis. The players never leave the field, they simply change jerseys. If we are looking for a resolution, or even a meaning in opposition, we will be eternally frustrated. Part of the problem is that in the Jewish and Christian understanding, it is the nature of God to be "Other," and that otherness prompts struggle. But that struggle is relationship, the relationship of created to Creator. It is not the resolution that is meaningful, it is the struggle that is meaningful.

At this point a sound Niebuhrian doctrine would point out to me that I'm still wishing for the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging, when all I'm ever going to get is the Church of Meaning and Belonging, and I might as well accept the limitation. Between the Idea and the Reality Falls the Shadow, and all that. But then that's a perfect example of the struggle, isn't it? If I demand all or nothing, if I demand a resolution to this struggle or I won't engage it any longer, then I'm denying the central truth I'm trying to proclaim. So let me intrude this thought, instead. The analysis is of Genesis 22, the akedeh, the binding of Isaac by Abraham:

Many commentators focus on the way that Abraham's faith is tested when God asks him to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac. Abraham gets to the very moment of killing his son before being stopped by an angel. The school of religious thought that celebrates blind faith hails Abraham for his willingness to put obedience to God ahead of filial love.

But there is another, very different lesson that we can draw from the juxtaposition of Genesis 22 with the reading from the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 21. The key verse is Genesis 22:2. It gets translated as God saying to Abraham: "Take your son, your only [yechidcha] son, the one that you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as a sacrifice."

"Only son"? We know that Abraham had another son named Ishmael. He was born out of the union with his handmaiden, Hagar. It is only when Sarah gives birth to Isaac in her old age that Ishmael loses standing in the family. This happens when Sarah insists to Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael be banished from the household, all of which is recounted in Genesis 21. Abraham does not question God's command to sacrifice Isaac. Nor does he question Sarah's command to banish Hagar and Ishmael. What's to admire?

In Genesis 22:2 it is hard to accept that God thinks Abraham has only one son. In the previous chapter, God appears to a desperate Hagar, who expects to die in the wilderness with her son. God shows Hagar a well of water and she picks up her son from the ground and gives him drink. At that moment, God promises to make of Ishmael a great nation. Abraham is thus seen as the father of two great nations, the Jews, through Isaac, and the Arabs, through Ishmael.

Thus yechidcha, "your only son" in Genesis 22:2, must be God's description of Abraham's privileging Isaac over Ishmael. This reading is supported by the second part of the sentence, which specifies: "the son that you love."

Perhaps God is not testing Abraham's faith as much as he wants him to re-visit his behavior towards Ishmael. The same Abraham who pleaded to save the lives of sinners in Sodom and Gomorrah cast his first son into the wilderness at the behest of Sarah without a second thought. Now God wants Abraham to experience the near loss of the son he favored in the hope that he can stir compassion in him for the son he cast out.

The story is about, the rabbi says, the theology of scarcity, v. the theology of abundance:

It would be easy for us to make Sarah the villain here, as it is her jealousy that leads to Abraham's heartless act. But, in fact, we are all subject to the impulse that drives Sarah. We believe that love is a limited resource. If X enjoys love, favor or affection, then there is not enough for me. I thus need to either compete with X, cast aspersions on X's reputation by speaking ill of him or her, or eliminate him or her. We do this in our families, in our work places, in our congregations and in our politics.

Now, there is a touch of what I call "vulture theology" in the ending of Rabbi Schwartz commentary, although the insight is true:

We should not have to come to the verge of losing that which is most precious to us in order to see this truth.

As Joni Mitchell would say: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." If I call it "vulture theology," it's because I've seen pastors use this kind of "you'll need the church when all else fails, you'll need us when you've lost everything and we're still here" approach to justify the church's existence (when all other justifications fail, of course), so the verge of losing everything as a theological revelation is a dangerous one. Not in this circumstance, however; not if we understand it correctly.

"Against" is all about scarcity. There is only so much goodwill to go around, so much love, so much money, so much of...well, whatever. What little there is must be hoarded, held onto, protected, encircled, surrounded, hidden, denied to others, kept for us. "Against" is easier. "For" is hard, because "for" sees abundance in the fact that we all have enough. "Against" says there are limited resources and we must save them for ourselves, for you and me, and when push comes to shove, I'm not so sure about you. We've been down this road once or twice before: on this blog, in human history:

The consistent thread through the Hebrew scriptures into the proclamation of the basileia tou theou is that humans must eschew and avoid political power, because power draws its source from the fear of scarcity. As Brueggemann reads the Biblical narrative, Pharoah represents the people who live in fear and anxiety and anger. Such people have no energy left over for the neighborhood. In the story of Joseph and Pharoah, the guy with the most power and authority and wealth, dreams of scarcity. Which is not surprising; Pharoah's oikos is governed by the fear of running out. It is what keeps him in control, keeps him in power and why the people allow him to rule. This anxiety about scarcity is what drives the Hebrews into slavery and so, in brief, Genesis moves into Exodus.

Now Pharoah is so afraid of scarcity, so filled with anxiety for what might be taken from him, he begins to kill the babies of the Hebrews (and here the parallel to Herod in the New Testament, where he is clearly Pharoah to all the Gospel writers, becomes clearer. This is where Matthew draws his parallel with the Massacre of the Innocents). This is Pharoah's anxiety at work. As my notes indicate from the lecture: "The system that generates anxiety cannot relate to steadfast love." Which all by itself explains much about the reaction to Tom Fox, and even to the desire to go to war in the Middle East, a desire Wesley Clark says originally led to a plan to invade 7 countries in that region. But the story of the Exodus is that "Anxiety generated by ideology and social systems is not a part of the human condition." It is, in other words, our creation, and our creation, unlike God's, is grossly imperfect.

Enter Moses, a person with nothing who dreamed of freedom and departure from the "anxiety producing system." And then there is the miracle in the desert, the gift of God's abundance in the manna which comes to break the influence of the anxiety system (it comes as the people are complaining that they were better off in Egypt than in the desert). Our anxiety, Brueggemann notes, is a product of our lack of trust (faith) in God. God's offer of abundance, he says, calls into question the anxiety created by social systems, by human structures and strictures; and yet God never gives us more than "this day our daily bread."

I know this has the particularity of Christianity, of Judaism, but how else would you have me speak? Any more universally, and it is merely vague and glittering generalities, pretty to look at but adding up to too much of nothing. Any more particular, and I am clanging cymbal, noise adding up to nothing. Besides, I like the idea of the guy with the greatest power and wealth tossing in his bed, haunted by nightmares of scarcity. It rings so true on such a universal level, it's practically an archetype. At least, it would be, if we valued wisdom as much as we value money and power.

But the two are contraries; you can't value one while valuing the other. It's an either/or, a dichotomy with no compromise. In times of deprivation, in times of slight want (compared to Third World poverty how much, really, are Americans suffering? I can't help ask the question, even as I know how unfair it is to compare and contrast sufferings, to establish a hierarchy of loss), when we should recognize that our fundamentals are not sound at all, are not enduring or reliable or concerned with our well-being, when we should turn away, not just "against," and we still can't do it. Imagine if we heard a voice asking us to make the sacrifice of Abraham. But that's why the story of the akedeh is so terrible; we know we could never do it; not because we lack the "blind faith" of Abraham (which faith was not blind at all, but that's another discussion), but because it would leave us nothing to be against. And that, finally, is what we refuse to let go of: without opposition, we are nothing.

Opposition is the force that gives us meaning. Or, at least, we think so.

Oh, Good Grief!

It's a pity I'm having such a good conversation on what church is for in comments below, and then I come across this, except it's a fine example of the problem, because this will get much more attention than anything I've ever said or read about ecclesiology:

“The person who’s in need… they look to the government for the answer, not God, and I think in that way government has done an injustice that’s even bigger than just the creation of an entitlement welfare state,” Green said. “In this setting, I’ll share the story, I think it interrupts the opportunity for people to come to a saving knowledge of who God is.”

Green argued that since Jesus regularly used his powers to cure lepers, the modern-day church should take on a similar role.

“If you look at the Gospels and you go and study the Gospels, every person who came to Christ came to Christ with a physical need,” he said. “It was either hunger or a disease.”

I've talked before about what I call "vulture theology," the idea that, like undertakers, church is inevitable and people will have to come there.  This ups the ante on that considerably:  illness as a chance to save souls.

I've nothing against religiously supported hospitals (my daughter was born in one; so was I, for that matter).   The UCC still operates hospitals and nursing homes and orphanages and even mental care facilities which were started in the 19th century by the German E&R church, not in the spirit of evangelism, but in the spirit of care.  And not because Jesus healed people in order to save their souls but because, in the theology I espouse, because Jesus cared about people and illness both burdened them, and set them apart from society ("Master, who sinned, that this man was born blind?").

That attitude, as we've heard recently, still prowls the halls of Congress, and no doubt many regions of this country.

Is this a proper role of the church?  To care for people in order to make them proper Christians?  Raises all sorts of issues about who is a patient, doesn't it?  Besides the question "What is church for?", which is obviously being answered here with "for people to come to a saving knowledge of who God is."

I'm not arguing for or against that idea, because it can't be argued against and eliminated from consideration.  But it is an idea that is primary in American culture, and the answer to the question is more and more  "Saved from what?"  Saved from the empty pursuit of possessions?  So Christianity is all about asceticism?  Saved from the empty enjoyment of our possessions, so we can enjoy them more fully and richly?  Saved from illness; or if not from illness, from being treated in a government hospital?  I agree with this idea:  "I guess I would say that finding our way is a large part of our responsibility, since our proper way leads us back to God and our neighbors."  The question is:  how do we express that now?  Especially when what is more loudly heard is either the attitude of the church should be to use hunger and disease as opportunities to evangelize, or hunger and disease are conditions people deserve because they have sinned; or at least made "bad decisions".

Dese are de conditions dat prevail.

And then there's "Science Mike":

According to McHargue, his work is uniquely suited to a digital world. “We’re this work for the Internet age,” McHargue said. “In a world where every idea is a Google search away and there’s too much information to create a coherent narrative, how do we help people adapt to that world at the intersection of science, faith and art?”

If you want to find out what "Science Mike" McHargue is on about (and why he calls himself "Science Mike") you can read the article.  It splits into two halves, and it's the second half I'm interested in, because of the "nones":

The increase in the religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” population in the United States over the last decade has led some to conclude that the American public is becoming less religious. The Pew Research Center published data in 2015 showing that the religiously unaffiliated comprise 23 percent of the American public and much higher rates among Millennials. More recently, Pew reported that over half of the nones have a low or medium religious commitment.

But does this mean the religiously unaffiliated are not religious? Or does it just mean we need to readjust our definition of religious commitment?

The term none “becomes a catch-all for a lot of different people,” says RD contributor Kaya Oakes, author of the The Nones Are Alright, pointing out that the term was constructed by polling firms.

Surveys conducted by Pew or the Public Religion Research Institute do not provide options that would explain the diversity of religious commitment in the United States. Public knowledge about the nones remains limited when we use a polling term that overlooks people who may identify with multiple religions or still believe in religious ideas, but do not want to belong to an institution.

In her research for The Nones Are Alright, Oakes says she encountered folks who identified with a Christian identity, but did not go to church. This is the population McHargue and Gungor belong to and seek to speak to through The Liturgists.

“It is a mass disaffiliation movement. It is not a secularization movement,” McHargue said about the rising number of religiously unaffiliated. “Why? Because the church was an abusive uncle for a long time and it’s reaping what it has sown.”

Oakes stresses there needs to be an understanding that disaffiliation “has become normative.” Religious affiliation is not always a transition from one religion to another. People are “curating and assembling an identity” outside religious institutions that can be permanent, Oakes said.

Sorry for the long quote, because the point is almost buried there:  "disaffiliation 'has become normative.' "  And that's the real issue for the church, be it a Protestant denomination or the Church of Rome.  I won't even raise the question whether people can "curate and assemble an identity" outside of religious institutions, because the answer is:  "No."  But if people don't see the church as being "for" that, then the question is:  "What is church for?"

And the answer can't be:  "waiting patiently until they realize they need us."

More Songs About Building and Food

I didn't realize until just now how much that title has to do with church(es).  Anyway....

On the matter of generations, and speaking broadly (which is not to say sociologically, but I'll put mine up against theirs any day):  Boomers were the generation that actively and as a cohort (we imagined ourselves a "generation" because we were told we were.  American public demographics, the division of groups into "generations" based on birth year, a form or astrology, really, began with the Boomers.  Other generations were labelled around that cornerstone.) "rebelled" against their parents.  "We're not gonna take it!" was our mantra.  We had our own music, our own clothes, our own antipathy to a war we had to fight for reasons we couldn't understand, etc., etc., etc.  Debate the validity of those assertions all you want, it was the perception.

Subsequent generations, "Gen Xers" and "Millenials," took that sense of breaking from the parents, as their birthright.  Each saw it as their choice to define their culture, and although all three pretty much did it within the confines of American culture (how much has really changed for minorities, Native Americans, and even women, since the '60's?  Some things dramatically, most things not so dramatically.  The idea of men as "macho" and football watching knuckle draggers is even more emphasized than it was in my childhood.  "Macho" Christianity has even risen from the ashes of the early 20th century, echoing a vision of Christianity that goes back to the "Dream of the Rood."

So it goes.

Boomers left the churches of their parents as soon as they could.  Some returned when they had kids and wanted the stable life they remembered from childhood, giving rise to the "vulture theology" that, like funeral directors, churches would get you in the end (you need us for baptisms, marriages, and funerals, and you want your kids raised "right").  But the Sunday Schools of my youth, packed with the kids of parents who were in church themselves (or sometimes just dropped the kids off for a quiet Sunday morning at home) had disappeared by my daughter's childhood.  Because of "liberal theology"?  Hardly.  More due to the disappearance of the weekend and the end of Sunday as a "sacred space" set aside for church in the morning and pro football in the afternoons.  Kid's soccer and other athletic events crowd the weekend calendar now, and Sunday morning is no longer sacrosanct.  Parents work 7 days a week, and if they don't, weekends are dedicated to all the things Mom used to do during the week (at least for that halcyon post-war era we grew up thinking was the way things has "always been").  "Time, time, time, see what's become of me," is no longer the lament of an adolescent who finds he has to grow up and doesn't like it.  It's the curious result of all out "time-saving" devices not making our life as push-button easy as that of George Jetson, but more frantic and filled with work.  Church is a leisure activity:  it fell by the boards slowly but surely over the decades.

And it wasn't because the churches became more "liberal."  If they were liberal today the words of Dr. King's letter wouldn't be as relevant now as they were when they were written.  If they became less affirming of the world people wanted to hang on to, a world where whites were in charge and everyone knew their place (and I don't mean a white supremacist world; it doesn't have to be that malicious and restrictive to apply), churches did so reflecting the changes in culture of the world they were in, and suddenly being "in the world" but not "of the world" became extremely important.  Except mostly the people demanding that wanted to the church to be "of" a very different world than the world they found themselves living in.

Churches haven't lost members because they became too liberal; they have lost the battle for attention and time.  Even the entertainment factor of "conservative" churches is starting to fade.  Liturgical worship, while it will never been seen in a Baptist congregation, is becoming more widespread and being rediscovered by traditions that had abandoned it.  Churches that never had a "church year," that even would have considered the concept too "Popish," are taking up the idea of Advent and Lent as ways to make worship more meaningful and less the annual routine of sermons about salvation and how to be successful broken only by Christmas and Easter celebrations.  The very purpose of church is being re-examined, and where that purpose centers on community, it centers on the locale of the congregation.  Some congregations form communities which thrive and prosper and reap the fruits of the Spirit.  Some communities are always seed thrown on dry ground:  they never set roots and produce plants that thrive.  This has always been true in the church, too, for 2000 years; but the sense of the place and propriety of institutions which was assaulted by the Boomers, has become almost absolutely unnecessary to Millenials, whose icon is not the CEO but the entrepreneur who, by individual genius, becomes rich by selling to millions.  The church thrived in a post-war world where corporate achievement defeated Germany and rebuilt Europe and left America prosperous and powerful.  Business leaders of corporations gave way to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who had a great idea that made them rich and powerful.  In "Blade Runner 2049" the CEO of Tyrell, connected personally to even his humbler employees and seeing himself as still the salesperson for his company, is replaced by the hermit in his isolation chamber who only needs the tools of technology to enact his vision of what the world should be, whether the world wants it or not.  He is god, and he stands alone.  What need of community has he?  Even Ryan Gosling's character has to learn the lesson:  what are people for?

Religion is one way of answering that question; but American culture in general just now seems to think it knows the answers religion offers, and it rejects them.  So if there is a rise of "nones," it isn't because American churches became too theologically liberal, but because the entire concept of religion became too irrelevant.

That seems to be the common wisdom.  Whether it actually is wise, is another matter.

As for the idea that morality and God must go hand in hand, or religion is doomed: this is the inverse of an old canard dating back to the Victorian Era.  In that age of revolution religion itself seemed doomed (Nietzsche is the prophet of this movement, but not in the sense of seeing a future the rest of us can't.  He was simply pronouncing the present; or so he thought.).  This loss was not bemoaned by the ruling class in England (where the revolution began, with the Industrial Revolution and its twin, Romanticism, the revolutionary idea of the centrality of the individual) so much as feared, because without the terror of God as Judge and Hairy Thunderer, how could the many-headed be kept civilized?  They feared the separation of God from morality because they feared the loss of power morality gave them (the freedom basically to do as they pleased, but to tell the hoi polloi to do as they said, not as they did.  The irony being that today the British royal family is more petit bourgeois than anyone in England.).  Sartre was of like mind, and tried to establish an ethic that replaced the authority of God with the authority of the other.  But the assumption that morality is what kept us from anarchy and chaos, and that only an iron fist in the velvet glove would keep us from nature red in tooth and claw, was a Hobbesian holdover we had no more reason to rely on than the assertion that liberal churches slit their own throats by their liberalism.

So, today, is religion losing ground because so many Democrats declare they don't need God to be moral?  What ground did religion have, that it could allow so much injustice (see Dr. King's letter) and still declare itself moral?  What ground do these non-religious but moral people have today?

I'm listening to people on the radio discuss fires in California, and what they are saying is that there is an environment there which expects wildfire, and the more we reject that reality, the more damage we do to ourselves.  Clearing brush, thinning trees, controlled burns:  these are all the practices that allow life in fire-prone areas to go on.  We ignore these lessons to our damage, even our peril.  The analogy to the teachings of the law, the prophets, the gospels, the epistles, is that those teachings are as prescriptive as the rules about living in ares where fire is the norm (or, in Texas, flooding).  The "morality" of the Scriptures is not a series of "do's" and "don'ts" imposed by a prim schoolmarm with a sharp rap of the ruler on your knuckles.  It is the way of wisdom:  of happiness and prosperity for all (not just a few at the top) and life into the ages (not necessarily the metaphysical sweet bye-and-bye).  If morality is simply a series of "thou shalt nots" or "thou shalt face eternal punishment," then we are just extending human power structures into eternity itself, and what then for the power of powerlessness, which is one of the real messages of the Scriptures?  We are prone to live against the world we live in, and it costs us dearly to be so selfish.  Scripture teaches us to live with the world and each other, a way that benefits all.  It isn't about morality and who's doing "right," it isn't about punishment for doing wrong; it isn't even about institutions to keep us in line.  If there is change going on and it isn't a "goosey" feeling, perhaps that is the true movement of the Spirit.  The Spirit has been compared to a goose, but not one you feel or inflict.  The Spirit has been called a wild goose; going where it will when it will.  We need to be lifted from our selfishness and our self-centeredness and our conviction that if we can just create the right technology, the right app, our singular vision can save the world and leave us in comfort for the rest of one life.  We need a larger vision.  We need, perhaps, new styles of architecture, a change of heart.

We don't need to go backward, to recapture the past, in church or in society or in culture.  "Yesterday, all the past...."  Today, the wild goose calls.  Whether we will hear it, whether we will follow, is entirely our responsibility.

Winter Is Coming

That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

--Willie the Shake, during the off season

This is basically a long comment to this post; so you might want to read that before reading this.

I like Rahner's metaphor of "winter" as it relates to Christian faith.  It's an apt one.  But if you're going to establish the metaphor of the long season of death (or near death; winter always implies spring, and resurrection. Probably why Christmas comes in December, and Easter in April.), you have to stick with it.  Which is the problem with this recommendation:

It is a source of never-ending concern to Rahner that much of what people hear in the preaching and teaching of the church draws on a primitive idea of God unworthy of belief[**],rather than communicating the reality, the beauty, the wonder, and the strange generosity of the mystery of God.  The average sermon, along with the popular piety it encourages, has a basically retarded notion of God, he judged, acknowledging neither the absolute difference of God from the world nor the marvelous truth that God's own self has drawn near as the inmost dynamism and goal offered to the world.  All too often sermons work with the tired ideas of modern theism, reflecting a precritical mentality that sees God as someone whom we can calculate from our formula of how things work, thus replacing the incomprehensible God with an idol. They fashion the Holy in the image of our own concerns, our neurotic fears, our puny hearts, rather than honoring the impossible outpouring of love by which God not only sets up the world in its own integrity but, while remaining radically distinct, gives the divine self away to the world.  They neglect to inform us of the most tremendous truth, that we are called into loving immediacy with the mystery of God who self-communicates to us in unspeakable nearness.  After listening to such dismal sermons can we really say that the world "God" brightens up our lives?   Unfortunately Rahner wrote, it is more often the case that the words of the preacher fall powerlessly from the pulpit,  "like birds frozen to death and falling from a winter sky."

I don't disagree with this critique, but popular piety is an implacable stone that is not moved easily; and sermons are hardly the unstoppable force beating against it.  It isn't just the average sermon that has "a retarded [sic] notion of God," it's the average pew sitter.  Those who want a more challenged and challenging notion of God usually have their own ideas what that is, and will eventually feel slighted by the preacher enough to leave.  Those who like the popular piety will also be insulted, but they are more likely to have a rounded stone quality to them:  the rivers of tradition have washed over their beliefs so long, shaping them and even creating them, that the generic God of piety and 19th century sentimentality ("I Come To the Garden Alone") is a comfort to them.  Like rounded stones they lay flat and form the river bed.  The jagged stones of prickly particularity don't stick together, and don't even conform with other jagged stones.  Church is, at heart, a voluntary community; people don't volunteer to join a community that doesn't suit their interests, either in providing comfort, or in conforming to their preferences for particularity.

I agree with what I consider to be the more Jewish/Hebraic theology of God:  God was Other, God as Creator whose relationship to us is based in that fundamental act, as well as a relationship chosen by God and not created by us.  The "mystery of God who self-communicates to us in unspeakable nearness" "while remaining radically distinct," and "gives the divine self away to the world."  But honestly, what does that communicate to a mother grieving the death of her babe in arms?  What does that communicate to a broken soul seeking comfort and raised in the pieties of "Jesus loves me, this I know"?  God drawing near "as the inmost dynamism and goal offered to the world" may be a better theology than the misbegotten interpretations of John 3:16 that put atonement as the be all and end all of Christianity, but neither one offers much comfort in a funeral service, or to a couple considering divorce, or to abuse victims, or teenagers just trying to figure out how to be adults.  It isn't particularly meant to, but how do you replace centuries of Christianity, from sentimental pietism to the harsher cruelties of atonement and doctrines of original sin, without realizing you can't just wipe those things away, and the fact that preaching really isn't the most important work a pastor does?  Indeed, the emphasis on the sermon is the emphasis on "This is what we're here for."  It's a very Protestant emphasis, and it may actually be the problem of modern Christianity is the emphasis on the Word, rather than the praxis.

Two communities which tried to reimagine Christianity in modern times are Taize and Iona Community.  Whether they are still going strong, or have faded away, I have no idea.  Certainly neither "reformed" Christianity, nor did they mean to.  If anything, the accepted with metaphor of winter Rahner posits, and responded to it positively.  But I don't recall hearing any great preaching coming out of either community.  No one posted their sermons on-line (then again, neither group was ever associated with a U.S. presidential candidate).  I don't know of any real sense of preaching coming from either group.  Prayer and singing, yes; preaching?  Not so much.  I don't mean preaching was disdained; but the preaching of the Word, an emphasis of Protestant (especially Reformed tradition) churches, doesn't seem to have been central to either group.

In seminary we learned to "exegete" worship spaces.  There was an old German E&R (now UCC) church in the town where I first had a pulpit.  The original pulpit was in the back wall of the sanctuary, high above the pews.  It was a church with a balcony on three sides, not just at the back as a choir loft.  Built in the days before PA systems, it was also meant to put the preacher above the people, so all could hear.  But it emphasized the place of the Word in worship.  The sacrament of communion was probably practiced 4 times a year, not monthly as is the modern Protestant practice, nor weekly, as is the practice of Episcopalians/Anglicans and Lutherans (among the Protestants).  The Word was the center point of the service, the focal point of the worship space.  It is not at all unusual to find old Protestant churches where the pulpit is in the center of the chancel, or a chancel without an altar at all, merely a table to hold, occasionally, the communion elements.  The main thrust of the Reformed movement, to distinguish themselves from Catholic practice, was to center worship on the Word, rather than the eucharist.  Even the altar, meant to represent the place of sacrifice, was transformed to a table, meant to hold the food for the meal.

Maybe it's merely time to swing back to emphasis on the act of worship (liturgy, common prayers, singing), rather than on the observance of worship (listening to a sermon or, worse in my eyes, watching a performance presented as worship, and all you have to do is enjoy the band and the singers, and not be too disturbed by the "message").

I am a great fan of worship as an encounter with the living God, an encounter terrible and unworldly when it occurs.  I treated worship not as a battery recharge, filling up your spiritual tank with enough God to get you through the week before it was time to return to the filling station of the church; but as the time when you were most likely to encounter the reality of God, an encounter that would put the rest of your week (at least) in perspective.  If some pastors secretly affirmed "vulture theology," the idea that sooner or later (for weddings, funerals, crises), you had to "come back to church," then mine was akin to "eat a live toad first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day."  I didn't mean my doxology (philosophy of worship, loosely stated) to be quite so cynical, but I did mean to turn the emphasis around from what God can do for us, to what we can do having experienced God.  Had I been a better pastor overall, it might have actually led somewhere.

So if I disagree with Rahner (well, as presented by Elizabeth Johnson), in the end, it is a disagreement with the assumption that Protestantism as we have known it will always be with us, and will always be essential to Christianity.  Even the Southern Baptists, the most reformed of the Reformed tradition (with the exception, perhaps, of a few small and virulently Calvinist denominations), are trying to rediscover Advent and even Lent to give their worship year a bit more of a structure than just Christmas Even and Easter Sunday.  Southern Baptists will never become liturgical, and I encountered enough resistance to my "Catholic" style of worship to last me a lifetime, or to make me think all Protestants will ever agree on anything.  I agree with Rahner that winter is coming; but I'm also convinced no shift in preaching is enough to assuage the pain of the losses winter brings.  Then again, winter always leads to spring, and even winter is a time for joyous holidays.