Severe Rebuke

When I worked in sales I learned the expression "tear him a new asshole." It's not the most gentile saying. The Christian translation is, I believe, "severe rebuke." I'd hate to call it schadenfreude, but I find it encouraging to read the occasional severe rebuke in a Christian publication. Two recent examples are on my mind -- Will Willimon's review of Bart Ehrman's God's Problem in the Christian Century and in Books and Culture Stanley Payne's critique of a book on Basque history by a Cameron Watson. These let me know that some editor still cares about the truth and some writer is not wringing his hands worried about offending a colleague who might blurb his next book.

Generous Orthodoxy: The Case of Joseph Lowery

The slogan "Generous Orthodoxy" is appealing. I've read the Brian McLaren book by that name but I'm not thinking only of his articulation; really, I'm thinking of Paul's direction to speak the truth in love. It's hard to be against that, but, as I think Jesus' example shows, the power is in the particulars -- nice sayings have to intersect with the specifics of Christian doctrine and practice. I recently came across an actual example worthy of consideration -- the Rev. Joseph Lowery.

Lowery spoke at Duke Sunday, Jan. 18, in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., before giving the benediction at Barack Obama's inauguration. I didn't attend, but I have since listened to his address. First, it's funny. He pokes fun at preachers and academics alike. I'd quote a joke, but it truly is all in the delivery. Second, he's old (Wikipedia puts him at 87). He can tease and exhort in ways that would be unkind or unwise for a younger man. He playfully (and ambiguously!) declared the university president's speech to have been "pretty good". He shook his finger at the single women in the audience, telling them to say "uh awn" until their men say "I do".

As for "the issue", he blasted Rick Warren for campaigning for Proposition 8. He teased, in condemnation, anyone who would take up the cause of preventing same-gender marriage. But then he turned and said in his contemplation of marraige, he could envision only a man and woman. In holding together these two positions, he made some interesting distinctions (as I read them). First, he separated law from communal practice. Law, he said, is meant to protect the rights of a minority group, not enshrine the customs of the majority. Second, he separated attitude and practice. He is suspicious of any attitude that says, "I am telling you are wrong for your own good." He seems to lean heavily on the injunction to first take the log out of your own eye. Finally, he implies a distinction between your community and my community. His "live and let live" attitude applies among communities but not within his own. If a son, church member or young pastor asked him about marriage, he seems to have a different answer than for the outsider. For those in his care, he says he can only see the union of man and woman.

I respect this teaching, even before taking into account Lowery's work in the Civil Rights Movement. I don't think he needed to knock Rick Warren, whose teaching I also respect. The distinction between American law and Christian practice I think is an important one (aren't we resident aliens!). I suspect black Christians can more clearly see the difference between America's legal system and God's standard for justice and holiness. I also appreciate the sensitivity to tone when in relationship with gay and lesbian people. In my last post, I said a weakness of (stereotypical) Protestant conservatism is that it largely reacts against liberal Prostantism, instead of casting a positive vision of the church. I take Lowery's point about "homophobia" to be similar.

In sum, I like Lowery. In his 50-minute sermon/speech, I heard a Christian voice, generous and orthodox.

Seeing Marriage within the Church

I'v been sitting on this one for the weeks since it came out over Christmas -- "Our Mutual Joy". It’s a Newsweek cover story making the “religious” case for marriage being possible between people of the same gender. It's hard to let pass such a hot-button issue. It's also hard, I've found, to bang out a pithy blog post about it....

Here's the difficulty: I disagree with the argument writer Lisa Miller makes; but, when I started writing a rebuttal I found myself disagreeing with myself, at least in tone. The exercise has sharpened my view that an understanding of marriage cannot be isolated from a wider vision of the world and the church. The vision I'm increasingly enamored with is the "catholic" Christian one (hmmm ... to capitalize the "c"?), which understands marriage as being between a man and a woman, but that's not the foundation of the catholic vision.

The weakness I see with Miller's case is that it rests on a thin vision of the church. She repeats the mainline liberal mantra of "inclusion." Inclusion is all well and good -- as I understand it, Islam, the Communist Party and the College Republicans are all happy to include you, too. The question is, inclusion into what? The liberal Protestant answer is "inclusion in an accepting community". And that seems about where the visions ends because to say anything more specific runs the risk of not being inclusive or accepting. There's no problem with that vision as such, it just doesn't seem specifically Christian in its detail, nor does it set my heart on fire.

The problem with making such a point is that it appears to argue against inclusion and acceptance, which is certainly not a Christian attitude and is understandably a turn off for some. Also, it argues against, which is to say it is presented as a reaction to the liberal vision. As bland as "inclusion and acceptance" are, the (stereotypical) conservative mantra of "don't change things" is even less appealing. It is cast primarily in the negative and has the incredulous assumption that the world hasn't or won't change. Of course it will, and so a full vision of the church must be forward facing, in addition to embracing tradition.

Here's where I use that rhetorical tool of sympathetically presenting a third option after having pointed out the shortcomings of two others. You already know its the catholic vision. It's anthem is the unity and singularity of the church across time and space. There are many, many implications of this, and of course I'm not equipped to articulate them. For my own thinking on the subject of marriage, two are most important: surrender of sexuality and authority of the church. The first addresses homosexuality in a way that is kind and comprehensive mostly because it does not particularly address homosexuality. It addresses all Christians in saying that your bodies are set apart for God -- temples for the Holy Spirit -- and so your sexuality is not meant ultimately meant to be managed for pleasure and/or convenience no matter if you fit easily into the 1950s American nuclear family ideal or not. As Christians, we have three "lifestyle" options until Jesus returns: the priesthood, marriage or a religious order. Each has its discipline for turning sexuality from manipulation and harm towards holiness. (Note that "mutual joy" is not the only dimension to the discipline of Christian marriage.) None affords a special privilege to middle class heterosexual couples.

The second aspect of the catholic vision, authority, speaks to what's actually the bulk of the Newsweek article, interpretation of scripture. Miller picks her way through the Bible and church history with the help of some liberal theologians and not surprisingly comes to the conclusion she set out to reach. And frankly I take her point that she's just doing what conservatives having been doing -- finding the parts of the Bible that suit their case. Now, for what it's worth, I think there's more intellectual integrity in the conservative position that the communities that produced the Bible, Jewish and nascent Christian, understood marriage as only being possible between opposite genders. But, that said, part of Miller's argument is that the world changes and Christian and Jewish understandings of their scriptures unfold over time. Indeed. However, a problem arises when Christians see that unfolding occurring in such different ways. Enter the authority of the church. By the scriptures own account, the church, small as it was, was the community that the Bible (the New Testament anyway). It is the church -- and there can be only one -- that decides the faithful range of interpretation of scripture. She discerns the ongoing implications of the resurrection.

Such a personification of the church, in a catholic mode, may well raise more questions than it answers, but I increasingly see it as the only viable alternative. Admittedly, I've caricatured only two alternatives; I've not tackled visions of the church such as new evangelical, pentecostal, deliverance (prosperity) and emergent. (My short answer is that each of those emphasize a characteristic of the church, but are not comprehensive visions of the church's full character.) There very much remains the "one true church question". What is it and how do you recognize it? Well, raising that question has sufficiently made my point for this post, which, remember, is about marriage. The point is you have to see marriage within the church.

The Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith meet at the church

... just finished E.P. Sanders' The Historical Figure of Jesus, a very helpful primer on the academic tools used to understand Jesus. Most helpful was Sanders candor in noting what can be said with certainty by scholarship about Jesus, and what involves some degree of conjecture. My take away is that what can be said assuredly about Jesus by the academy in no way disputes what the church says about him.

Here is Sanders' list of points about Jesus "almost beyond dispute":

Jesus was born c. 4 BCE, near the time of the death of Herod the Great;
he spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village;
he was baptize by John the Baptist;
he called disciples;
he taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee (apparently not the cities);
he preached 'the kingdom of God';
about the year 30 he went to Jerusalem for Passover
he created a disturbance in the Temple area;
he had a final meal with the disciples;
he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest;
he was executed on the orders of the Roman perfect, Pontius Pilate.

We may add here a short list of equally secure facts about the aftermath of Jesus' life:

his disciples at first fled;
they saw him (in what sense is not certain) after his death;
as a consequence, they believed that he would return to found the kingdom;
they formed a community to await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as God's Messiah.

(Reading the list again I'm reminded of ... the Apostle's Creed.)

Since this list is given in the second chapter, most of the book is spent, understandably, dealing with conjecture. I find it all fascinating, about pericopes, author agendas, proto-gospels and such, but I don't have the tools for commenting upon it.

The one comparison that does come to mind is with N.T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus (and also his The Meaning of Jesus with Marcus Borg). From what I remember, there are many similarities, especially regarding the importance of the Jewish context of Jesus' life. Wright seems to emphasis more the power of Jesus' kingdom of God claim. Sanders emphasizes more the political relationship between Ciaphus and Pilate, while down playing Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees. No big deal. The real contrast I see is in the Christian identities of Wright and Sanders. Wright, now a bishop, doesn't set aside his identity as a follower of Jesus as he cranks out books about him. He is not satisfied to let the "historical Jesus" be some real-world twin of the "Jesus of faith". Sanders does not tackle this intersection, which is fine. I just want to be clear that that is where the real action is. I believe we call it "the church".

Christian Identity from Rwanda to Durham

Here's a poignant article in Sojourners on the factors contributing to the Rwandan genocide -- The Pattern of this World.

In it, Emmanuel Katongole and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove say Rwandans took on the identities of Tutsi and Hutu over and above their Christian identity. It then draws an analogy with Christians in America (here in Durham, N.C., in particular), saying that we are beset by the same problem of taking on (racial) identities given by the world rather than from Jesus.

I'm not exactly sure why I found this moving. I think it was the combination of the lucid explanation of Rwandan history and the specific Christian call to “not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Why books should always have happy (redemptive) endings

I am an honorary member of my aunt Ann's book club. Every year she sends me the best couple of novels she read. I got Atonement from her (Ian McEwan) and read it. While reading it, I remembered bits and pieces of Crime and Punishment, which I read six years ago. Why? Here's my guess.

The landscape of Atonement is as much interior as exterior, that is, as much in the characters' minds as outside in the visible world. The main character Briony, a budding writer, in particular is described by her thoughts about the malleability of reality. The book's drama centers on Briony's false witness -- intended? -- that sends an innocent young man to prison. The sympathetically portrayed psyche of a guilty person is what brought to mind Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Briony's "crime" is not nearly as severe or overt as Raskolnikov's, but the believable layering of rationalizations is similar.

I liked Atonement; I snuck away from family during Christmas to read a chapter or two now and then. I attribute that to the masterful description of the characters' thoughts. I recognized some of Briony's thoughts as my own, and I'm sure I know people like her mother, father and older brother (her sister Emily I can't quite place). This is not what reading was like for me as a boy. I didn't like to read up through my sophomore year of high school. I thought novels assigned in school were loaded with boring "description", by which I meant scene setting, as opposed to cool "action", by which I probably meant depictions of events that would stir my hormones. What changed my mind about reading is that I found books were a way to engage in philosophical debate with heavyweight minds. I was, and am, contemplative by nature. So when my friend Brian lent me The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, I realized I was getting some high-powered thinking delivered directly to my mind. I was hooked. To tie this back to Atonement, I was reminded while reading it that I still don't like lots of scene-setting verbiage. I like action and thinking. That's what the book had.

I disagreed with Atonement the way I disagreed with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Both stories carried me right along but the existential shape of the world being presented in each did not sit with me. In the case of Dan Brown I thought he was being decitful in his use of fiction to propose a conspiracy theory about the church. With McEwan, I just honestly disagree. Back to Crime and Punishment to explain. Dostoevsky sees Raskolnikov redeemed at the end. McEwan leaves Briony's situation ambiguous (on a couple of levels). There's no doubt about the ending's cleverness, and I know the mantra about literature relishing ambiguity, but I don't think you're telling the whole truth in fiction if you leave out God's providence. I'm not saying every ending has to be happy, but if you're going to depict a world shouldn't you give a nod to the character of its creator?

A Blog is Born

The optimism of a new year brings this blog to birth.

I aspire to grow as a writer and every book I've read on writing says writers need to do two things: 1) Read. 2) Write. Stephen King says he reads 80 novels a year (On Writing). Anne Lamott says she rarely takes a day off from writing, not even Christmas (Bird By Bird). Keeping a blog is not necessarily a reading discipline but it can help because of this: You don't know what you think until you write it. That's from Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones). It's my other cornerstone of writing advice. I do read; keeping a blog begs that I write.

Also, there's my dad. One time during college, back when I kept a journal in various notebooks, he and I were traveling and shared a hotel room. He noticed my routines of yoga, meditation and journaling. He already knew about the yoga and meditation, and teased me about the journaling -- gently, as is my dad's nature. He said I was writing my memoirs for posterity. Ah yes ... we can't forget aiming for grandeur. Making the move from diary to internet just makes it more explicit.

Reader advisory: This blog is going to be "churchy". The church and Christian life is what I think about, and per the Goldberg rule it will be what I write about. I also hope to get some poems up here, and of course vignettes involving friends and family.