This famous bit of dialogue (adapted with reasonable faithfulness to the screen) from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis seems to be a preacherly favorite, and for good reason.  When I think about the ways American churches have domesticated Jesus (who can frankly seem a bit rough-around-the-edges in the Gospels) it IS kind of scandalous.  However, I wonder if preachers love this passage so much because they feel domesticated themselves and this gives them permission to push the boundaries; to "call sin sin" or assert their authority in some way.  Again, I tend to think that part of the problem of mediocrity in American Christianity is that if a church attempts to exercise any social authority in the lives of its members, they go elsewhere (if consumerism in church selection isn't a sign of domestication, I don't know what is).

However, the abuse of authority is also a serious problem in Christianity.  So I find it absolutely fascinating that Lewis uses his phrase "not a tame lion" to be the rationale behind the subjugation of Narnia in The Last Battle.  If you haven't read it - DO.  As with the rest of the series, it does contain the ethnocentrism that detracts from its contemporary potential, but the portrayal of deception and the abuse of beloved doctrines is brilliant.  As the free Narnians are manipulated into willing slavery, they ask "how could Aslan demand all this?"  The response is always, "Well, he's not a tame lion, after all."  In one poignant scene, King Tirian of Narnia frees a group of dwarves and tries to enlist them to help free other Narnians, but they balk at his request, being a bit confused after their deception about who Aslan really is anymore.  Tirian's undoing is his recitation of the now cursed aphorism, "He's not a tame lion, after all!"  The dwarves walk away.

It seems that everyone has forgotten the crucial clause added by the Beavers:  "But he's good!  He's the King I tell you!"  It never comes up. The element of criticism that could have been applied is lost.  Notice that the application of this criticism requires a fundamental assumption:  that there IS a correlation between what the Narnians think "good" means, and what "good" must mean to Aslan.  Unlike many theologians and pastors, who quickly jump to the conclusion that God's ways (and their own?) are too transcendently "other" to be questioned, Lewis invites critical thinking about cherished theological maxims and their deployment by those who claim to speak for God.

In the book of Job, Job rants and raves and demands his day in court with God, counter to his companions who offer the conventional wisdom.  In the end, God responds in a strangely nuanced fashion.  On one hand, God rebukes anyone's (or is it just Job's friends?) capacity to challenge God's ways, but the text also affirms that Job did not sin in anything he said and God states that Job has "spoken of me what is right."  I admire Lewis for his foresight about this beloved phrase and his willingness to include its abuse and manipulation in the last of the series.

So, expect this song/video from Gungor (Michael) to be the next lightening rod for rants against redefining Christianity around love.  I'll not argue one way or the other.  I like the song!  Catchy.  Happy. Seems true enough to me.  My only beef is with the video depicting God's "love" turning vegetables into candy and easing a man's road rage by giving him a pogo-stick with which to hop over offending traffic. That's some SICK privileged theodicy.  But, I'm more interested in helping people explore the ongoing question of the color of God.

In 1974 (the year of my birth), William R. Jones (a Black Unitarian Universalist minister) published "Is God a White Racist?" in C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Experience in Religion. It has since become a book (which I haven't read), but his answer in 1974 was that if we stick with our traditional (even traditional Black theology) answers to the problem of evil and suffering, we have to answer, "Yes!" Suffering in the world seems disproportionately inflicted upon dark skinned people.  Our traditional theologies also suggest that the majority of these same people will go to hell, while a more sizable proportion of White people will go to heaven. The growth of the church in the global south might help remedy the latter complaint in the long run as far as traditional theologies go.  Having rejected the deist God and the God of many traditional theologies, Jones goes on to suggest a humanocentric theology that basically leads to secular humanism (God is love and manifest exclusively in humans being humane).  It is massively unclear to me how this is a better option.  I suppose people who accept this view stop blaming God for the problems of the world??  If we have a humanocentric deity, doesn't "God" ultimately just become a symbol for the people with power?  In my view then, it seems like Jones' "God" would STILL be a white racist, given his assessment of the world.

In 1925 Countee Cullen published Color.  Cullen's poetry includes a great many poignant and pained theological poems, I limit myself here to some famous lines from "Heritage" from the aforementioned collection.

Quaint, outlandish heathen gods
     Black men fashion out of rods,
     Clay, and brittle bits of stone,
     In a likeness like their own,
     My conversion came high-priced;
     I belong to Jesus Christ,
     Preacher of Humility;
     Heathen gods are naught to me.     

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
     So I make an idle boast;
     Jesus of the twice-turned cheek,
     Lamb of God, although I speak
     With my mouth thus, in my heart
     Do I play a double part.
     Ever at Thy glowing altar
     Must my heart grow sick and falter,
     Wishing He I served were black,
     Thinking then it would not lack
     Precedent of pain to guide it,
     Let who would or might deride it;
     Surely then this flesh would know
     Yours had borne a kindred woe.
     Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
     Daring even to give You
     Dark despairing features where,
     Crowned with dark rebellious hair,
     Patience wavers just so much as
     Mortal grief compels, while touches
     Quick and hot, of anger, rise
     To smitten cheek and weary eyes.
     Lord, forgive me if my need
     Sometimes shapes a human creed.

It does seem to me that the needs of (nearly?) every person to sense that God can empathize with us drives us to imagine God in our own image. Cullen later imagined Jesus as a lynched Black man in his 1922, "Christ Recrucified."
On the other hand, echoing the dominant strains of American masculinity, the pastor of the "other" Mars Hill Church (Seattle) once famously intoned:   "In Revelation (the last book of the New Testament), Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up."  Problems with hippie-diaper-halo-Christ aside, wasn't this the basic problem of the zealots?  Never mind.

I'm sure no one will ever get this quite right.  I know I don't.  It's much easier to do some of this via negativa.  I can tell you what's WRONG about our God-images easier than I can give you one that is right.  This might be the point of that old commandment, though the incarnation (my favorite doctrine) fouled that up a bit, and now everybody is into icons (myself included).  Let's see if doing things via negativa might lead us to a positive statement.  God IS not a white man, not a boxer, not a Jewish Che Guevera, not a Christian Che Guevera (William Wallace), not a sum of the good in humanity... not "a ninja fighting off evil samurai" (thanks Talladega Nights)... Oh, I know!
God is an unprejudiced white-hipster!!  Like me!  I

This is an experiment.  Let me know if you like it and it works.  Here are links to the major NYTimes religion headlines for March.  The "linker" neither endorses nor opposes (as far as you know) the opinions of the writers.

Intelligent Life Elsewhere - Is this "religion" (?) 'cause its definitely "faith."

Mexican Catholics in NYC Pack the Pews
Photo essay

Serious Catholic Troubles
Abuse Scandal 1 Priest Suspensions
Abuse Scandal 2 Finances and Native Victims

The Muslim Brotherhood in the New Egypt

In-House Fighting on the Meaning of "Pro-Israel"

Book of Mormon on Broadway (?) "Which brings us, inevitably, to the issue of sacrilege."
Follow up Article

Bach Collegium Japan performs Bach's Mass in B Minor - should this be considered an interfaith event?
"Et incarnatus est" - the reviewer doesn't say what this means.

Eat, Pray, Smear - Hindus in Queens celebrate Phagwah/Holi
Photo essay of same

Fair to Muslims?  The Congressional Hearings on Radical Islam

Give Peaceful Resistance a Chance

Yesterday, I briefly reviewed Jones and Woodbridge's Health, Wealth & Happiness.  Today, I will give an overview of Part 2: Corrections, and offering a few concluding thoughts; critical and affirmative.

Chapter 4: "The Biblical Teaching on Suffering" may be the most crucial chapter in the whole book because this reality is in many ways the fulcrum of the scale that tips us into either prosperity gospel, American Dream thinking or biblical consistency.  Chapter 5: "The Biblical Teachings on Wealth and Poverty" is generally very thorough.  Given the brevity, it cannot be very deep. I think their account is preferable to prosperity gospel teaching, but is unlikely to challenge the degree to which ALL American Christian thinking is accomodated to no-holds-barred capitalism.
Chapter 6: "The Biblical Teaching on Giving" is like unto the former.  It offers a concise encouragment of generous giving and an appropriate critique of the concept of "tithing."  They encourage giving to the church and other Christian organizations and direct readers to organizations that track the financial integrity of different ministries.
The Conclusion offers some helpful questions for self-diagnosis, suggestions for dialoguing with friends who are attracted to the prosperity gospel and concise replies to common defenses of the prosperity gospel.  The include a short additional reading list, among which the most important is probably the late Gordon Fee's pamphlet The Disease of Health and Wealth Gospels, because Fee was a Pentecostal New Testament scholar in the Assemblies of God tradition.

This is a very important book for its accessibility and reliability.  These authors are not writing polemic.  It is straightforward argumentation without loathing or arrogance as far as I can tell.  They counter the most dangerous aspect of the prosperity gospel which is to victimize the suffering by blaming their circumstances on a lack of faith.  For this alone, I would commend them.

In general I think it is unfair to criticize people for not writing about what I want to read about.  However, I do think that a narrow definition of prosperity gospel may mask the degree to which many more American Christians conform to it.  Van Rheenan's article "Contextualization and Syncretism" includes the following account:

Two years ago Jim planted an evangelical Bible church. The guiding question forming
his strategy was “How can we meet the needs of the people of this community and make
this church grow?” Jim developed a core team, launched with an attendance of 300 after
six months of planning, and now has an average attendance of 900 people each Sunday.
By all appearances he is very successful. However, Jim is inwardly perturbed. He
acknowledges that his church attracts people because it caters to what people want. The
church is more a vendor of goods and services than a community of the kingdom of God.

If the medium is the message, many of our churches "preach" a gospel that tells us that being a Christian and financial prosperity are joined at the hip, even if they never say that.  New Testament scholar Ben Witherington comments on his own contact with prosperity gospel in Moscow and the "American Gospel of Conspicuous Consumption." He recommends Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, which is excellent but goes too far for some people.  I wonder, as does the narrator of the Lausanne video on my last post, if I find it easy to criticize the prosperity gospel preachers and their adherents because I assume that the worlds goods will always be within my grasp one way or another. 

Another point is that while several prosperity preachers have been demonstrably exposed (or outed themselves) as scam artists exploiting people, in many cases it seems to me that prosperity congregations are not just seeking their own, but are deriving some sense of pride, prosperity, and well-being from identifying with their pastors' prosperity (which they shares by investing in organizations that serve the community even as they live in opulence).  The adherents personal ambitions are secondary in their own minds as well as their pastors. However, this is a sociological rather than a theological or biblical analysis. I still recommend Jones and Woodbridge's helpful little book, which you can buy from my friends at Hearts and Minds Books.

Some months ago, my wife and I were spontaneously offered free tickets to go hear Joel Osteen in Norfolk, VA.  Being a scholar of American religion, and having already lined up babysitting, we decided to go for it.  Joel was on in about 30 minutes.  We were nowhere near the venue, but all we had to do was follow the crowd.  In David W. Jones and Russell S. Woodbridge's Health, Wealth & Happiness: Has the Prosperity Gospel Overshadowed the Gospel of Christ? (Kregel, 2011) state that Olsteen's message reaches roughly 200,000,000 households, 40,000 actual congregants in Houston, TX and "can be seen in 100 countries worldwide (72)."

Full disclosure:
1. I harbor a prejudice against wealthy and ostentatious churches.
2. Being somewhat prone to cynicism on the few and brief occasions that I have listened to Joel Osteen, I have found him to be a helpful corrective, but I am distracted by his similarity in appearance to Martin Short.
3. I crassly define "prosperity gospel" as the message that "if you have enough faith, you can obligate God to fulfill his 'promises' to you and give you financial and physical prosperity, 'cause he wants to do it anyway." I regard this as a false gospel, though many of its adherents are admirable Christian people.

The prosperity gospel is now a full blown global phenomena affecting millions of people ("46% of self-identifying Christians" including 96% of Nigerian Christians according to Jones and Woodbridge) and it often travels hand-in-hand with global Pentecostalism (with the latter I have no general dispute whatsoever).

Jones and Woodbridge pull together a great array of resources to discuss and critique the prosperity gospel (without becoming uncivil).  They name names and attempt to treat it thoroughly in its historical context, contemporary iterations and relation to biblical teachings.  One fairly obvious complaint I had with their introduction was their claim that prosperity gospel promises much and demands little.  I think this video by the Lausanne Conference demonstrates that this is not the case.

In Chapter 1, they situate the prosperity gospel in the New Thought movement from the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), to Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993).  They then identify 5 Pillars of New Thought:
1) Distorted view of God.
2) Elevation of mind over matter
3) An exalted view of humanity
4) A focus on health and wealth
                                            5) An unorthodox view of salvation

In Chapter 2, they identify the pillars of New Thought in the teachings of prosperity gospel preachers, including Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen.  Somewhere between chapters 1 & 2, they miss the influence of Russell Conwell (1843-1925, founder of Temple Baptist Church and Temple University in Philadelphia), and I suspect that they do so because Conwell was a mainstream Baptist preacher and not a charismatic. He does not fit the mold exceptionally well (though he shares a Philadelphia connection with Swedenborgians) but he preached his Acres of Diamonds sermon over 6,000 times, from which the following is taken:

"I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich....  Let me say here clearly .. . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them... I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathised with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins ... is to do wrong.... let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. ..."

This chapter also has a helpful critique of Joel Osteen.  My limited experience with his teaching led me to conclude that he had developed a well proof-texted theology of positive thinking. I have heard him speak in a manner that had him sprinting madly (rhetorically speaking) toward the line where relatively benign pop-theopsychology meets full blown prosperity gospel. He always seemed to stop just short (in my mind) with his toes on teh line and his arms flailing to prevent seemingly inevitable transgression.  But he always stopped, even if those that he shared the platform with did not.  This chapter amply demonstrates both his lowest-common-denominator Christian theology and his adherence to a full-blown prosperity gospel.

Chapter 3 critiques the prosperity gospel and deals especially well with the tendency of some preachers to extend Christ's atonement into a universal doctrine of physical healing for those who have faith to believe it.  Joyce Meyers takes a lot of heat in this chapter.  They deal specifically with a variety of theological and interpretive fallacies that are common among prosperity preachers.

Tomorrow, I will post an overview of Part Two: Correction

The conversation above, for all of its flaws (it is an unedited part of a longer documentary by Tony Jones based on his 2009 book The New Christians) is a good demonstration of how I think "Reformed" or "traditional" Christians and more "postmodern," "progressive" or "Emergent" Christians (PPECs below) are missing each other. I planned to write these posts weeks ago, before the Bell's Hell controversy broke (here), but never got to it.  Now it seems urgent.

As I teach theology at an ecumenical Christian college with a thorough but hospitable faith statement, I make it clear that we aren't a church and aren't in the indoctrination business.  I most frequently drive my students back to the Bible with their theological questions while explaining how various groups in church history raised "big issues" and made sense of them.  In the last post in this series I noted that many of the young (often nondenominational) Christians I teach want to opt for a "lowest common denominator theology." However, at around the same age, many young Christians discover the joys of tradition, as well as critical thinking and the like. Some have sunk their teeth into church and theological traditions ranging from Eastern Orthodoxy to Reformed while PPECs(now for about 14 years) have essentially been asking for (demanding? taking?) the same freedom that new churches of the global "south" have taken in their post-colonial contexts (see especially the writings of Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako). 

The PPECs are essentially saying, "We have history with various traditions of Christianity that were imposed upon us, but we now claim the right to take the best from what we received and to develop theology for today that fits our context."  Like most of the young Christians I meet, PPECs seemed to have minimal (initial) connection to the enculturated dispositions and intellectual frameworks of any traditional denomination, though some have church/family loyalties and their beliefs packed for them. Nearly the same could be said for the church culture of Anabaptists; radical reformers who hit "reset" on the church in the 16th century much harder than Luther or Calvin and took it in a different direction  Perhaps it is no surprise then that many PPECs have read Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder and Western-culture missiologists like Lesslie Newbigin and his descendants.

In 1659, Rome’s Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had the sense to ask 3 French missionaries to China:  "What would be more absurd than to import France, Spain or Italy, or any other country of Europe into China?  Don’t import these, but the faith." Granted, they assumed the "venerable antiquity" of Chinese tradition (and the controversy went on) but they had the right question and imperative. The overwhelming density and pervasiveness of current Western cultural influences (popcompared to anything that might be called "venerable" amounts to the accrual of culture for young Westerners today that is arguably as removed from the major theological traditions of "old World" Christianity as Chinese culture may have been in 1659. 

Jewish legend states that 70 isolated Jewish elders each made exactly the same Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures for Ptolemy. Sometimes Christians who have embraced a traditional systematic theology act as if all other Christians should arrive separately at the same systematic theology from their readings of the Bible.  Or, barring this, that they should skip the theological process and just buy the systematic theology they are offered. Neither of these options is likely. If this has NOT been the case missiologically on other continents, should it be the case in Europe or North America as the church seeks to re-evangelize its old territory? Some may embrace a traditional theology expressed in new or old ways.  Others need the freedom to engage in theological process for themselves, in community, from the scriptures; finding different points of connection, priorities and emphases than their Christian ancestors.

"Every single thing I prepared to teach them had to be revised or discarded once I presented it to them.  Just what was the essential message of Christianity?"  Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (1978)---

“So… do you think I’m going to hell?” (there was a Seinfeld episode about this, )
“It doesn’t matter what I think.  I’m not the judge.  God is.”
“Well… do you think you are going to hell?”
“Of course not!  I’ve accepted Jesus as my…”
“Well… I haven’t.  So, you must think I’m going to hell!”
“Listen.  It’s not about hell.  It’s about finding eternal fulfillment in a personal relationship with Jesus.”
“If you have this personal relationship, then you can at least tell me if Jesus is the kind of guy that would send someone to hell for feeling fulfilled without him!  How personal is this relationship!?”
---
Someday, I will write a book called Simple, Easy, Religionless Christianity Made Understandable.  I’ll write whatever I want, but that will be the title because there seems to be a market for these books.  I own at least two.* Many Christian college students in my classes lump all of life into three piles (Sometimes its just Piles 1 & 3).

Pile 1: Everything I need to believe or do to get into heaven when I die.
Pile 2: Everything obligatory or forbidden that will incur guilt and shame if denied.
Pile 3: Everything else, including the explanations for the things in Piles 1 & 2.

Given their theological convictions and the fact that most of them haven't read the Bible much, there is a fair amount of sense here; regardless of my protests.  Thankfully (I guess), something in Pile 2 complicates things.  Evangelistic obligation.  In class, I will put students in trios.  Student 1 must “share the gospel” with Student 2.  Student 2 pretends naivete, listens and asks questions for further clarification.  Student 3 listens and throws “flags” or “bleeps out” Christian jargon that would require explanation for someone with minimal background in Christianity.  They take turns and most of them experience massive frustration.  They realize all of the hard work that Christians have done to pack dense theological content into relatively few words.  They realize that Pile 1 & 2 items with no explanations have no “street value."  We enter a cycle of opposing movements.

Movement 1: Consolidate and Assimilate - They want to know "the essentials."  What constitutes "mere" Christianity, the things all true Christians should agree about?  We talk about this as a class and come up with a list.  Then people add things that not everyone in class agrees on.  We argue down to a basic list.
Movement 2: Proliferate and Differentiate - I begin to ask them to explain these things.  We quickly develop explanations that don't make much sense and about which very few people can agree.  The street utility of some things in Pile 1 becomes fragile. The neccesity of working on Pile 3 becomes apparent, but when things get too complicated... we're back to Movement 1.

For a slightly clearer version of this, go HERE.  Thanks to Len Swidler of the Dialogue Institute (who first introduced me to interfaith dialogue when I was his TA at Temple 8 years ago) for sending this out.

In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin describes his encounter with his friend's regal pastor, who asks him the question above.  Baldwin writes, "Now this, unbelievably, was precisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue... Perhaps part of the terror they had caused me to feel came from the fact that I unquestionably wanted to be somebody's little boy. I was so frightened and at the mercy of so many conundrums, that inevitably, that summer, someone would've taken me over... (Baldwin, 28)"

Sociologist Christian Smith (UNC - National Study of Youth and Reigion, Soul Searching, Souls in Transition, etc.) and Youth Minister Mark Oestreicher (Youth Specialties, Youth Ministry 3.0, etc.) agree that developing affinity (or "network closure" in Smith's more technical sociological term) is a major task of both adolescence and youth ministries.

While teaching religion and theology classes at Messiah College and Temple University, I have been deeply aware that many students are struggling with religious issues because varying answers to certain questions about life, behavior, theology, ethics etc. have the potential to alienate them from a community of people (church, family, peer group).  I recall one student in particular at Temple whose scientific friends and church community both told her she couldn't accept evolution and remain a Christian.  She had to choose whether to belong to the scientific or Christian community according the representatives of these groups that she knew.  But there are other cultural issues at work as well.  One of the most divisive demands I'm seeing within and between faith communities today places political affinity ahead of ANY other commitment, but perhaps that is not the most insidious affinity demand.  Identity politics in our world are completely understandable, even if the divisions created are regrettable.  It takes solidarity to get anything done.  Teenagers (and all of us I suppose) are being asked to identify as consumers.

We are all being asked to identify with a number of "pimps and racketeers" who will hold sway.  Religious commitments are expected to fit in neatly with other commitments.  It seems to me that often we do not reshape our faith to accommodate other loyalties.  We reshape our faith so that it becomes subservient to those loyalties, and all of this under the guise of a highly destructive individualism.  I'm concerned for youth.  Not because of the terrors and tragedies of the world in which they are being asked to mature, but because the global and local affinities they are being invited to embrace are so anxious, ambitious, deceptive, exploitative and ultimately shallow compared to the richness of the kingdom of God.

"I believe in the God of Israel, even when He has done everything to make me cease to believe in Him."  So writes Zvi Kolitz in Yosl Rakover Talks to God, the the fictional first hand account of a Jew about to die in the Warsaw Ghetto.  This is one of the most powerful theological texts I have ever read. If theodicy (God and the problem of evil) is one of your things, click the link and read the short full text.  Among the many overlapping issues that Kolitz contends/wrestles with here is the question of what a mature personal relationship with God might look like. 

Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote Loving the Torah More Than God, a short commentary on Kolitz' text wrote:  "The simplest and most common reaction [to the Holocaust] would be to decide for atheism.  This would also be the reasonable reaction of all whose idea of God until that point was of some kindergarten deity who distributed prizes, applied penalties, or forgave faults and in His goodness treated men as eternal children... only he who has recognized the veiled face of God can demand that it be unveiled (Kolitz 81& 86)."  Levinas ends up advocating an allegedly superior religious humanism, where God's absence is God's presence and God "is recognized as being present and inside oneself (Kolitz 83)."

Deep stuff.  I can live with paradox, and mysticism, but Leon Wieseltier, (thankfully) less awed by Levinas than myself, writes, "...this is not paradox, it is contradiction... only an intellectual's incredibility."  Leon notes that in Yosl Rakover's monologue, God and humanity are not to be muddled, but Levinas' God is "so near that he may be said to be ourselves, and merely the hallowed name of of our highest standard (Kolitz 97)."

All this theophilosophicalizationism is invigorating for "us" intellectual types, but maybe it still keeps the "one who is there" (to use a lovely little abstraction) abstract.  While it may seem less mature and sophisticated and respectable, I suspect the following cinematic relationship is more mature than much of our piety and intellectualizing.  It carries the intimacy (if not the erudition) of Yosl Rakover, but expects more.