Assumptions.

I had a really great conversation with someone in my family last night, and it prompted me to clarify something.  This may get a bit deep, but I'll try to be as clear as I can.  It's also long, so proceed at your own risk.

All Christians, Evangelical, Mainline or Catholic proceed from a certain set of assumptions.  Most Catholics, for example, don't make a "personal relationship with Jesus" a central part of their faith and practice.  They experience God primarily through liturgy and sacrament and interpret Scripture within the context of not just the local parish community, but within the wider Catholic traditions of the last 1,500 years or so.  Evangelicals, who centralize a personal, experiential relationship with Jesus and a clear, memorable "conversion experience" are horrified by what they regard as paganism by the Catholics, while Catholics are flabbergasted by arrogant, populist Evangelicalism.  Both proceed from their own assumptions, which are based on their interpretation of - you guessed it - the Bible.

Let's take this a step further.  All orthodox Christians assume the doctrinal truth of the Trinity.  The Bible, however, does not directly teach trinitarian doctrine anywhere.  It is an invention of the third and fourth centuries AD, arrived at as an interpretation of several passages, and it was by no means uncontested.  The wording of the Nicene Creed reflects the controversy.  It does not say "we believe in a trinitarian God," it says "we believe in one God," and then goes on to clarify the three persons.

So do we believe in one God or three gods?  A Muslim would insist that we believe in three Gods, and if we equate the words "God" and "Allah" (and I would), then to an Muslim now we're engaging in idolatry.  Explain it any way you want, and the result is the same. 

The thing is, the Trinity rests on a bunch of assumptions of which most Christians are not aware.  It is a product of a Greco-Roman way of ordering theology.  Greek philosophy had no trouble distinguishing between distinct things, entities or identities while maintaining a cohesive unity.  They saw it all around them, after all.  A tree was both unity and multiplicity, a single thing  made up of constituent parts that informed and defined it.  The Greeks saw each person as a whole greater than the sum of his or her parts.  Their pantheon of gods reflected this, as each individual deity was really no more than a reflection of an aspect of Divinity.  When Christianity came along, the Greco-Roman world had no trouble at all with the concept of a trinitarian God because it had an epistemological framework ready-made.

But it goes even further than that.  Greco-Roman society was rigidly structured, an orderly hierarchy into which each person fit in a specific place.  The layers were somewhat permeable; one could move up the ladder, as it were, but only with the help of someone at the next level, which made the complex web of kinship and patronage critically important.  Honor was found not in rising above one's station, but by fulfilling one's purpose in the social order to the best of one's ability.  Paradoxically, a person who wanted to rise through the ranks would not do so through self promotion, but by strict attendance to the obligations appropriate to his or her rank.  The idea of a well-ordered, eternally static Trinity made up of persons with distinct roles fit perfectly into Roman society (or was it a product of Roman society?).

The Trinity was not a universal concept though, not even for Christians.  It was largely a doctrine of the Western Church, which quickly imposed the social order on the church, rigidly ordering it with pastors, priests, bishops, archbishops and so on, and on the Trinity, which it ordered neatly in terms of the Roman household: Father, Son and Spirit (wife).  Although the official formulation recognized that all members were co-equal, the Church historically has framed the Trinity in subordinationist terms (Father, then Son, then Spirit).

The Eastern Church, however, made very different assumptions.  It arose in a culture that did not order itself as rigidly and though it accepted the general hierarchy of the Western Church, it consistently pursued a more community-based daily practice.  One might say that the Western Church emphasized the oneness of God, while the Eastern Church emphasized the threeness.  This has had all sorts of implications for the way these two strands of the Church have organized themselves.  We Evangelicals are a product of the Western Church and have inherited much of its theology and organization.  Much what we believe about God, which we think comes directly from the Bible, is really based on a framework of Greek philosophical understanding.  The salvation experience, a personal relationship with Jesus, conversion, the Trinity - all rely on the assumptions that Westerners bring to the table, and are not shared by much of the rest of the world.

Arab culture, for example, has arisen under very different circumstances.  The geography and climate made cooperative effort critically important.  Since resources were scarce, Arabs organized their society in tribes that were more flexible and mobile so they could easily relocate when circumstances demanded it.  While there has always been a hierarchy, the tribal structure and the importance of cooperation made it much less nuanced.  There was the Sheikh and his family, and then everybody else.  There was little exploitation though, and so no need to form a more stratified social order.  The difficult conditions under which life was lived demanded cohesiveness; oneness and unity were matters of life and death

Islam reflects this understanding.  There is Allah and there is Muhammed, the Prophet of Allah.  While Muhammed is revered above other men, he is not Allah.  Islam emphasizes the oneness and singular importance of Allah, around which every other element is arranged.  Arab Muslims have one God, complete in himself and in whom all mankind finds completeness and unity, and there is no societal framework for conceptualizing something like a Trinity.  It's not that they're not intelligent enough to understand it, or that they don't want to understand it, but that it simply doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to them because they come to the table with a completely different set of assumptions.  The fine distinctions Western Christians make between the persons of the Trinity sound like contradictory nonsense.  Arab Muslims proceed from an extremely conservative interpretation of the Koran, which is read only in the original Arabic and only by men trained to do so; consequently, our formulation of doctrine by implication (rather than strict literal interpretation of Scripture) also doesn't work for them.

This is a very long post to say this: don't be too sure that the things you believe proceed directly from a clear, unadulterated understanding of Scriptural truth directly from God.  God speaks to people in ways that they comprehend; if he wanted to reveal himself to an Arab, would he not do so in a language and culture that he could grasp?  After all, the fact that you're Christian is largely because you were born in America (the heir of the Roman Empire) and that the Roman Empire adopted Christianity early on, and that happened because God revealed himself to Jews in first-century Palestine.  If you are a Christian, it is mostly by virtue of your birth into the Western world.  Were you born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, you would be Muslim.  Were you born in India, or in much of Asia, you would be Buddhist.  In neither case would much of what Christians believe make any sense to you no matter how carefully put. 

Do you really want God to reach the world?  The WHOLE world?  Then you might have to release some of your hangups about how he does it.  There are distortions in every belief system; God asks everyone to change something, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or otherwise.  Let God do things his way; don't impose your assumptions on it.

Obvious

I once delivered a sermon in which I contended for a God who was obvious, asserting that those who seek him will always find him.  I said that the "narrow gate" of Matthew 7 was really a warning intended for clean-living Christians, who have a greater capacity for self-righteousness than the hooker down the street.  I said that the "narrow gate" is really like a huge archway; just turn around and it's right there.  You can't miss it.  Once you walk through it, there's just open space.  You can't get lost.  You can't make a wrong turn.  You needn't worry about all of that because it's not the point.  I was simply telling people not to make it any harder than it actually is, not for themselves or for anyone else.  Don't impose artificial conditions.  Don't put up flaming hoops for people to jump through. 

You would not believe the kind of angry resistance I got.  Many Christians are deeply offended by the idea that it could be this simple, but there's nothing new about it.  Jesus says similar things to the Jewish religious elite time and again.  It's not heresy.  Patrick of Ireland (otherwise known as St. Patrick) composed this famous little prayer:

"God above me.
 God below me.
 God in front of me.
 God to my left, and to my right.
 God in every eye that sees me.
 God in every ear that hears me.
 God within me.
 Amen."

In Matthew 5:6, when Jesus says "[b]lessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled," he doesn't mean "good moral behavior."  The Greek word dikaiosune refers to one's covenant standing with God, which is purely a function of his gracious activity.  God's covenants, through which he expresses his love for us, are entirely one-sided.  The katharos kardia ("pure heart") Jesus mentions in verse 8 should be understood in that light. 

Later, in Matthew 7:7, Jesus says "[a]sk and it will be given to you; seek and you will find.  Knock and the door will be opened."  It's important to understand the way Greek grammar works here.  When we use the future tense in English, we typically are referring to some unspecified point in the future.  While that can be true in Greek, the future tense is also used in what is called the future imperatival sense.  It indicates a causal relationship, two things inextricably bound together.  If you do this, then that will happen.  The Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 are written in the future imperatival.  Why?  Because they come with an implied, "or else." 

What Jesus is saying, in other words, is that those who seek him will always find him.  He's not hiding.  He's not making himself intentionally difficult to understand.  He doesn't obscure himself in any particular culture or limit himself to any one sacred text or another.  While he refuses to be neatly packaged, marketed and consumed, he also refuses to be nailed down and defined in any one creed, tradition or experience.

He is not a narrow gate, or the eye of a needle.  Open your eyes and you will see him.  Turn around and you will find him.  You will find him in the words of many sacred texts because Jesus is not the container, but the contents.  He is not the menu, but the meal.

So relax.  There are many ways to seek God, and if you seek him you will find him.  When you do, he will make sense because he wants to make sense to you.  He wants you to understand him.  If God does not seem obvious, it's not because you're not trying hard enough, but probably because you're trying too hard.

Myth

People tend to equate "myth" with "untrue story," but myths are actually stories that tell deep, abiding truths about who we are as human beings.  The Bible, for example, is full of "myth," and that doesn't mean it's not true.  The great contradiction is that Christians tend to dismiss the stories told by other people as "myth" (applying the "untrue story" definition), but insist that our own are somehow different, somehow more true.

There is a Greek myth about a man named Narcissos (Americans have typically made Narcissos a woman because of the assumptions we make about gender), who sees his own reflection in a pool of water, falls in love with it and, unable to leave, wastes away and dies. 

Evangelical Christianity, in many ways, is Narcissos.  We have fallen in love with our own reflection.  We reject anything we do not understand or cannot shoehorn into (or extract out of) the Bible, which we follow instead of God much of the time.  Instead of looking for deep, God-given truth anywhere we can find it, we've decided that the only place God has ever truly revealed himself is in our sacred text.  Anything else is nothing more than false truth.  Sure, it may seem like truth, or peace, or goodness, but it's really just a "counterfeit" sent by the devil to fool us.

The Bible, by the way, is the reflection I'm talking about.  Evangelicalism largely doesn't bother to really examine what the original meaning was; instead, we formulate doctrines or rules based on our own cultural prejudices, and then find justification for them in a mis-reading of the Bible.  Women in ministry and the big moral issue with the gay community are two obvious examples.  It's not God that hates women and gay people, it's Christians.

Truth arises in many places, including many sacred texts.  That doesn't mean one has to accept every tenet of every faith as God-given, as people introduce distortions into everything God does.  It's unavoidable.  But we must not dismiss truth because it didn't come from the Bible.  We must not insist that the whole world adopt our version of "truth," which is much less about the Gospel than it imperialism, and the wholesale adoption of conservative capitalism wrapped in a (very) thin layer of Christianity.  We must allow God to speak to different cultures in different ways and yes, sometimes wearing a different face.

We might just have to accept that, were God to desire to form a relationship with a non-Western culture, he might just look like one of them and speak in ways that would make sense to them.  We might have to see that the "narrow gate"** is far wider than Christians may want it to be. 

I mean, really, does anybody honestly think that Gandhi didn't know God?


**The "narrow gate" analogy in Mathew 7 isn't about non-believers.  Jesus is talking to the Jewish religious elite, warning them that their identity badges, all the things they think make them part of the in-crowd, won't get them very far.  In other words, the "narrow gate" applies to Christians, not non-Christians.  It's not non-Christians who find themselves on the "wide road" that "leads to destruction," but Christians.

Soul-eyes

What we call the "soul" is that part of us that is made to comprehend the grand mystery that is God. When I say "comprehend," that is exactly what I mean. We cannot "know" God in the sense that we can know a math problem or even the way we "know" another person. The issue is, whatever we think we "know," God is infinitely more than that. So in this relationship there is, rather than an infinite regression as we find in philosophy, an infinite ascension; we come to some conclusion, realize that God is more than that, and then reach beyond it to the next conclusion.

The problems start when we misuse our soul-senses, which are designed to see and not to be seen. If we turn these senses away from the One who created them, pointing them inward to the task of self-scrutiny, then we create a kind of feedback loop in which we dredge up the very worst in ourselves, hold it to the light of discovery, and then consume it instead of offering it to God. We return again and again to view the things that distort the image of God, trying desperately to do what only He has the grace to do. Most of us are constitutionally incapable of not doing this. Perversely, it is another part of our basic fallenness.

And so we return to the purpose of the soul: to gaze upon the omnipotence and the immanance of God and to offer itself in a continual act of self-immolation. The self is destroyed, the ego is dethroned, and the soul is re-united with our bodies and our emotions. It is an act of re-creation. The false self, which judges itself harshly by what it does or achieves is minimized and the true self, which perceives itself solely as it relates to God, comes to the fore. The Fall is reversed and God achieves the goal of the cross: the redemption of whole people.

Christ is risen.

Offense

Matthew 13:53-58 relates the story of Jesus coming back to his home town, presumably after a lengthy time away. He started off by teaching in the synagogue, which was probably par for the course for itinerant prophets. Jesus is different though, and the townspeople recognize this, as had others (see Matthew 7:29).

Their reaction is different than Jesus' audience outside his home town. The passage implies that they grumble to themselves, "where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? Isn't this (just) the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother's name Mary, and aren't his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren't all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?" (13:54-56)

The next verse is critical: "And they took offense at him." (13:57)

They think Jesus is getting above his station, that he's putting on airs, pretending to be something that he's not. Tradespeople were at the lowest end of the power and influence scale in first-century Jewish society; by right, Jesus should have taken up his father's trade. His choice not to do that probably brought shame to his family. They won't listen to what he's saying because they can't get past who they think he is.

Consequently, Jesus "did not perform many miracles there because of their lack of faith." (13:58) It's not that Jesus' power was diminished, as though it were linked to the amount of faith available. He simply understood that any miracle would have been misinterpreted and distorted. If they would not believe based on the strength of his teaching, what good would a miracle do? Even if they followed him, they would have done so for the wrong reasons.

I do the same thing with Jesus all the time. I get stuck on my own perverse understanding of who the Savior is, and I stop listening. I won't leave my agenda and take Jesus for his (which is what "repent, and believe the good news" means), and as a result there isn't much he can do for me. My heart is hard, my eyes are closed and I am hard of hearing, as Jesus would put it (quoting the prophet Isaiah). Anything he did for me would simply be misinterpreted. I would follow him for all the wrong reasons.

We follow the broken, bleeding One, the Son of Man who abdicated the throne and became humble, just like us. If we make Jesus into another power source, something we engage so that we can be victorious over sin, then we miss the point, I think. We close our eyes to the powerlessness and humility that God intends for us to see and to model. Jesus simply reinforces our already-raging egos, which feed fantasies of accomplishment, achievement and perfection.

We are supposed to see the carpenter's son whose brothers and sisters live next door to us, the son of Mary, a man like us in every way. We should take full account of Jesus' humanity and not reject it in favor of divine power. We must turn to face the naked, suffering Jewish man executed on a cross by the Roman government.

We must accept him as he presents himself to us and not remake him in our own image.

"Blessed is the one who does not take offense at me." (Matthew 11:6)

Am I my Brother's Keeper?

Among the Christians that I know, much the debate around the concept of universal healthcare, or an expansion of the social welfare state in general, revolves around one question: why should I pay for someone else's healthcare? Let's look at this a couple of ways.

The title of this post is Cain's response to God when God asks Cain where his brother is (as if God didn't know). Cain knows perfectly well that he killed his brother, but says to God, in effect, "how should I know? Am I my brother's keeper?" Everything God does next shows us that the answer to that question is a resounding YES. God later enshrines this concept in the Law, which explicitly provides for the people on the lowest rung of the power and influence ladder. We are responsible for each other. We are responsible to God for the kind of society we create. Jesus takes issue with those who have a lot, telling them that if they're relying on it to "save" them, then they should also try getting a camel through the eye of a needle. This is Jesus at his sarcastic best. If you hate the idea of "your" resources being used to fund other people's medical expenses, then Jesus might be talking to you.

From a social-political perspective, there is nothing new about these debates. We were having them in the 1930s when FDR was sculpting what would become the Social Security Act of 1935. Oddly enough, most Americans were fine with the idea of social welfare, but that's because the middle-class was on a par with the working- and lower-classes. The Great Depression was also the Great Equalizer. That said, there was plenty of push-back, mostly from corporate America, the American Medical Association, and conservative churches, all of whom considered the ideal of American individualism, the rugged pioneer surviving on his wits with his family in tow, to be sacrosanct. There were all kinds of financial interests mixed in there too, of course. In the end, FDR managed to get the Act through Congress minus universal healthcare, which the AMA was successful in killing.

So what happened between now and then? The 1950s happened. After the War, the U.S. entered a period of stability and prosperity (which was an inch deep at best...read Elaine Howard May's "Homeward Bound" if you want to know more). It was also a time of stifling conformity. Prosperity became the norm; anything else became a form of deviance. Old values began to emerge: if you were poor, it was because you were lazy. Or black or Hispanic. Because everybody knew that they were shiftless. Racial tensions that remained dormant during during the War awoke with a fury. The almost exclusively-white suburbs looked to the edge of the cities, to the ghettos teeming with brown-skinned people who had moved there earlier in the century, and they began to get angry.

Nevermind that there have ALWAYS been more poor white people than poor black people. Nevermind that there have ALWAYS been more un- or underinsured white people than black people. Still the image persists: the recipient of state health care, ADC or other welfare programs is a black women living in the projects with her four illegitimate kids by three fathers, none of whom are around anymore. Why should we pay for that, huh? They should get jobs and take care of themselves, just like we do, right?

Who are you thinking about when you think of someone without healthcare? Let me help. Hannah and I don't have any health insurance. We haven't for probably six years. It happened when Blue Cross/Blue Shield began to increase our rates 27% a year. We finally had to drop it when the monthly premium reached $1300 a month. It was more than our mortgage, and over twice as much as BOTH of our car payments combined. Our kids are covered by the State of Georgia, thank God. But if anything happens to Hannah or me, we're screwed.

There. Does that put a face on it? Are you your brother's keeper? Are you my keeper? Hannah's keeper? Would you sacrifice some of the luxuries in your health plan so that Hannah and I could see a doctor when we're sick? Because we do get sick you know. We need yearly preventative care just like you do, but we don't get it because we have to choose between feeding our family and getting medical care. I *have* a job. Two of them, actually.

It's easy to stand on principle when you're not the one suffering. It's easy to create caricatures and subtly racist straw men. The real face of the health insurance crisis looks just like Hannah and me, though.

Are you your brother's keeper? I hope so, for their sake and for yours.

I have a big mouth. And sausage fingers.

Hi. I'm Frank. I'm addicted to arguing about stuff on Facebook. I've been clean for about two weeks, and I have to admit that I don't miss it much.

I also must acknowledge that I have a tendency to go way too far in defense of a point. Aggressiveness and rudeness are never justified, even if it's a *really* good point. I also confess that I have a near-pathological aversion to trick questions or "I'm going to straighten you out" kind of language. As soon as I detect either one (and both are commonly aimed at pastors), I go after that poster with all the powers of intellect and persuasion at my command. It's not very nice, and I shouldn't do it. All that to say, there are some very good reasons for me to steer clear of forums like Facebook and confine those kinds of discussions to one-on-one encounters.

There's something bothering me though.

There's an implicit expectation on the part of many of the Christian people I know that we should never engage in any controversy of any kind, that no issue is worth standing one's ground over at the risk of being divisive. In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. said "so often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound." I agree with him. In his day the issue was racism. Most denominations refused to take a stand for fear of alienating their more conservative members (who were frequently the biggest givers as well). They talked a big game about "unity," but it was really little more than rank cowardice. For the sake of unity, the church was complicit in a heinous, systematic sin.

That's the way I have come to view huge portions of the American evangelical church today. They're all about the love of God, so long as we limit it to people who are like us. We're all about the poor so long as it's about minimal sacrifice and good feelings and not about addressing political and economic institutions that oppress them (because that might cost us middle-class white folks a lot more).

This position is chuck-full of double standards. Fighting for health care for everyone? DIVISIVE! Fighting for a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage? That's fine. Arguing against the next war? INSENSITIVE AND UNLOVING! Agitating to make abortion illegal or picketing a clinic? Not only is it not wrong, it's our DUTY! Moreover, it seems that the disunity comes only from the liberal side, but the conservative side is protected by a blanket of piety and patriotism. It's funny how some Christians are all about the Gospel being a "sword" until they're on the pointy end. Then it's all petulance and whining about the meanness of it all.

I conducted an informal experiment last week. I listened to the most conservative Christian radio stations I could find for seven days in a row. I found that they were, between infrequent songs, little more than a medium by which conservative political values are propagated. They talked politics not once or twice, but EVERY SINGLE DAY, multiple times per day. It wasn't about abortion either. It wasn't about gay marriage (this week). It was about "Obamacare," which is in the Supreme Court for oral arguments this week. Every DJ was clear about his or her message, too. No ambiguity there. They wouldn't even use the title "President," instead derisively, disrespectfully referring to the president by his last name only as though he were a football coach. Christians have to pray for "Obamacare" to be repealed in the name of American Freedom! The worst part was when they'd pray that God would grant wisdom to the Justices so that his will would be done here on earth.

God's will? forty to fifty million people un- or under-insured to the extent that they can't see a doctor when they're sick is God's will? When is that ever God's will?

Beyond the hypocrisy and callousness of it lies the church's revolting capacity to be the "archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are" ("Letter from a Birmingham Jail" again). I'm not the first one to notice it. People like Washington Gladden, Robert Ely, Caroline Crane, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Bishop Francis McConnell, Charles Stelzle, Shailer Matthews, Walter Rauschenbusch and Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote extensively on it.

I will admit that Facebook is probably the wrong forum for these kinds of discussions, but I utterly reject the notion that the church should take no public stance on issues of injustice. Political injustices require a political remedy; economic injustices require an economic remedy, and the church can and should have a voice in all of it. Where one side pushes a gospel of bigotry, cruelty and exclusion, the other side must push back to bring balance to the message.

Enough damage has been done by a Church full of silent, compliant pastors. I'm not one of them. I hope you're not either. Harry Emerson Fosdick said

"A man who says that he believes in the ineffable value of human personalities and who professes to desire their transformation and yet who has no desire to give them better homes, better cities, better family relationships, better health, better economic resources, better recreations, better books and better schools, is either an ignoramus who does not see what these things mean in the growth of souls, or else an unconscious hypocrite who does not really care so much about the souls of men as he says he does." (Christianity and Progress, 48)