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

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.

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 feel great.