wholly intersections
  • My Blog
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Intro to Theology

Crumbling Cultural Christendom? Resentment at AAR Part Two

11/23/2015

0 Comments

 
In my last post, I wrote about how American society and the American Academy of Religion both reflect and don't reflect the demise of cultural-Christendom, which is seen in the resentment of Christians about their loss of power and status and in the resentment of non-religious people when religious people retain power and status. It honestly wasn't clear to me who might resent the new AAR VP David Gushee more: conservative Christians, because Gushee is now LGBT affirming, or nonreligious scholars, because their scholarly guild will be led by a "professional Christian" (Gushee is a Christian theologian and ethicist). But frankly, with the elections over, whatever resentment existed was not very palpable. However, I mentioned that I clearly saw resentment in one group of scholars.
Just for kicks, I stopped in at a session of the “God Seminar” of the Westar Institute. The “God Seminar” is like the famous Jesus Seminar (also a Westar project) that voted on which sayings of Jesus from the Gospels were authentic. Following this model, the God Seminar scholars (16 white males and 2 white females, overwhelmingly American philosophical theologians) tinkered around with and then voted on a few propositions about God. At one point, one of them expressed resentful bewilderment regarding why their theological hero, Paul Tillich, didn’t have the same kind of long-term influence as the more evangelical theologian Karl Barth. One member of the panel suggested that it was at least partly due to a well-endowed center for Barthian studies (I assume he meant Princeton), a speculation that met some approval. It reminded me of baseball’s resentful/envious Yankees-haters and made me think that in America, maybe religious people, non-religious people, theologians, scholars of religion and baseball fans are one big mutual-resentment society. In America, we compromise, and nobody gets everything they want.

So what does this all mean? I’m not sure I know, but resentment is ugly, whether you see it on the news or in the mirror and mutual encouragement, appreciation and understanding are beautiful. Confronting my cynicism about the state of society, at the Temple University Department of Religion breakfast, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, non-religious, straight-people and LGBT-folks all ate a great meal, encouraged each other in their endeavors and caught up on each others’ kids and families. 
 
“The times they are a changin’” – Bob Dylan
 
“There is nothing new under the sun.”  - Ecclesiastes
0 Comments

"Not a tame lion" C.S. Lewis' critical awareness

10/17/2011

0 Comments

 
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" "roar" a bit (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" as 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 (like his hero George MacDonald) 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.
0 Comments

The Color of God

4/14/2011

1 Comment

 
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.
Picture
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 feel great.
Picture
1 Comment

Young Folks' God (or De-colonizing Theology): Teaching and Theological Process Part Two

3/17/2011

0 Comments

 
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.
0 Comments

Yosl Rakover to God: "Atheism? You're not getting off that easy."

12/28/2010

0 Comments

 
"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.
0 Comments

Re-wiring Our Brains and Our Theology

12/10/2010

3 Comments

 
Lots to talk about here. 
First, he says "the methods change, but the message stays the same."  He also quotes Marshall McLuhan, who said: "the medium IS the message [or "massage" in an enduringly poignant typo]."  People who think about evangelism and Christian missions have always known this on some level and described this reality as "contextualization," or, adapting the message so that it communicates appropriately to a given audience and context.

So what does this mean for our high-tech, wired, online culture?
In a 1996 issue of Wired, Gary Wolf wrote that McLuhan, a devout Catholic, believed that:
"As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was "a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very great electric engineer."

Hipps says that, most fundamentally, human beings are the medium of God's message.  Therefore, we have to ask how technology changes us, as communicators and receivers of communication, when we collude with technology (it should be obvious that I don't think technology is "of the devil")?

One thing that strikes me is this statement by Daniel Pink:
"In a world of Google, if you have a fact, I can in five seconds come up with a counter-fact.  Facts are now ubiquitous and free and therefore they don't have much value.  What has value is the ability to put facts in a context and deliver them with emotional impact, and that's what a story does."

A brief (and reductionistic) summary of the history of theology:
1.  Through humans, God tells a whole bunch of stories.

2.  Other humans collect those stories in a book and say "this here is the straight dope on God!"

3.  However, humans find these stories and this book rather confusing, so they re-sort (cut and paste) all the statements in the book ("facts" or "propositions") into a more "logical" set of categories (God, revelation, creation, humanity, evil, salvation, community, the future) so that those statements can provide singular authoritative "answers" to human "existential questions."  They call this "systematic theology" and work on it for 2000 years.

4. Humans (maybe starting with Hans Frei and Karl Barth, made popular by C.S. Lewis) start recognizing the limitations of this method of "knowing"  and communicating about God, the world and ourselves. 

5. In a world of Google (and "postmodernism" and the "global village" and genocide and corporate empire and string-theory), a lot "facts" and logical systems start making less sense.  Maybe people have less patience for logical arguments or following a line of thought (ie. things like this).  Maybe facts arranged in systems are boring.

6. People seek after stories and images to start to make sense of God, the world and themselves again. 
See #1 above.   Hmmm.

For more on theology and story see my friend Daniel Kirk's blog "Storied Theology."

So, do you have any sense of how you (or those you know) are different because of the technological innovations of the past say, 20 years?  Any sense of how your faith or belief system has changed?

3 Comments

Who's In? Will Lewis and Graham have an inclusivist club in hell?

11/23/2010

3 Comments

 
It doesn't take more than the first 2 minutes to get the idea.  This guy thinks Billy Graham is going to hell.  He thinks Graham is going to hell because Graham thinks some certain people might NOT go to hell.  Now, as far as I know, the preacher in the video above is a "nobody."  I mean, I'm sure God loves him and "all [people] created equal and endowed by their creator..." and all that, but you know what I mean.  Graham, on the other hand, is the most prominent evangelist of the 20th century (in case you didn't know).
So, there it is from the man himself.  In 1978, in a McCall's magazine interview, Graham (or the organization, for Graham) said, "I used to think that pagans in far-off countries were lost--were going to hell--if they did not have the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them.  I no longer believe that... I believe there are other ways of recognizing the existence of God... and plenty of other opportunities, therefore, of saying yes to God."

C.S. Lewis has been criticized for similar views (this link has some other interesting links).  At the end of The Last Battle, Lewis wrote the following famous exchange between a follower of the Anti-Aslan, Satan-figure Tash, and Aslan himself, narrated by the man:

"Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. Then by reasons of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou shouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek."

So, the most popular Christian apologist of the 20th century was also an "inclusivist."  Of course, neither of these men were professionally trained "theologians" nor does their adherence to a belief turn that belief into the proper or even an acceptable Christian position.  In The Great Divorce, Lewis even suggests that some Christian theologians might have a theology club in hell. I'm not very interested in discussing the eternal fate of either of these men, or anyone else necessarily, but Gandhi usually comes up in these conversations.  So, in our class discussion on Friday, I took a vote.  On Nov. 22, 2010, 38 out of 70 Christian college students (with their heads bowed and eyes closed) raised their hands in answer to the question, "Do you expect to see Gandhi in heaven?"

I see that hand...
For another interesting video on the subject, head over to my friend Scott's site.
3 Comments

    Matt Hunter, Ph.D

    Multidisciplinary religious scholar and practitioner

    Archives

    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010

    Categories

    All
    American Religion
    Barna
    Biblical Worldview
    Christianity
    C.S. Lewis
    Data
    Dissertation
    Education
    Evangelism
    Interfaith
    Nationalism
    Patriotism
    Race
    Religion
    Religion And Pop Culture
    Religion And Pop-culture
    Religious History
    Science
    Sociology
    Teaching
    Theology
    Unchristian
    Violence
    Visual Culture
    Young Adults

    RSS Feed

    View my profile on LinkedIn
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.