The Evil of Cultural Relativism

“Cultural relativism!”

“You are saying that blowing up babies and raping children is okay because they have a different culture!”

Well of course not, but I’m used to these leaps of illogic from Christians who have been saturated with a toxic mixture of slippery slope theology and breast thumping patriotism found in so much contemporary American Christianity. It goes right back to our revivalist roots in an era of manifest destiny.

The accusation came yet again from a well-meaning Christian upset that I’d tried to explain that people in the Palestinian Territories operated out of different motivations and therefore exhibited different behaviors than those in the United States.

And it isn’t just islamophobic conservatives. I’ve been taken to task for promoting  patriarchy when I pointed out that not all cultures  evaluate gender, sexuality, and sexual relationships according to contemporary American standards. They don’t all share the fascinating mixture of prudish Victorian sexual mores, infantilization of adolescents, knee jerk judgmentalism, and aggressive assertion of gender rights and multiple sexualities characteristic of we contemporary progressive Christians anxious to demonstrate that they too have moral standards.

The problem is that ever since “post-modernity” was identified as a thing we seem to be stuck with the dichotomy of imperialistically asserting of universal moral standards and accepting multiple and equally valid moral narratives.

But as I try to point out, we don’t need to be cultural relativists to appreciate and work with cultural difference. Instead we need to recognize that morality is constantly negotiated between individuals and within societies. We humans necessarily occupy an intermediate position between what we perceive as transcendent claims and the specific demands made on us in complex social relationships. And thus we humans must work out a shared morality with each other rather than sitting in judgment on one another.

The results of these negotiations are usually complex, and sometimes unsatisfactory to all parties. That is common in negotiated settlements, but they are better than the dichotomous options above.
Let’s take an example of the sort that has recently come up in discussions with my students and others.

We were talking about sexual relations between a man in his 30’s and a 14 year old woman. When I raised the case my student thought I was talking about a clear case of pedophilia to be condemned. In fact I was talking about my parents-in-law from China. The “child”-bride and her husband seemed content, and their three daughters (my wife and her sisters) and three sons all have advanced degrees and good professions. Yet my student remained adamant: “It was wrong then and it is wrong now.”

The “now” of course condemned not only those Chinese of the early 20th century, but many indigenous people around the world today including some of my former students in Malaysia.
So let’s dig deeper and imagine that instead of instant imperialistic judgement we use our imaginations and ask what kind of moral negotiations led from China in the 1940’s to the United States in 2017.

We’ll start with the fact that in China in the 1940’s, just freed from Japanese occupation and facing a vicious communist revolution, the daughter of peasant farmers living on the coast had no prospect of an education and a very good prospect of starving to death, dying in war, or working forever as a slave to some local man’s mother in law. Becoming an arranged bride of a man who had established himself as a farmer in a small frontier town in Sarawak on Borneo was in fact full of positive possibilities. At least there would be no mother-in-law.

And in any case the transcendent claim recognized by the then dominant Chinese culture was the value placed on bearing children who would perpetuate the clan identity from generation to generation. It is a value reflected in the fact that all the children of a generation share a common generation name as well as a clan name - so they can identify each other as children of that promise.

Neither of my parents-in-law could reasonably expect to “leave their mark on the world,” be memorialized in the clan temple, or even be remembered very long. But they could leave children, and grandchildren whose blood and names would bear testimony that they had fulfilled their duty base on their transcendent values. Not to mention enjoy some happiness, intimacy, and security during their relatively short lives.

Now this transcendent value was somewhat different from the values of the Methodist missionaries who were newly arrived in Sarawak. Their transcendent value was the freedom won by Christ, enacted first and foremost with schools for both boys and girls. They did expect to leave a mark on the world, the liberating sign of the cross written out in diplomas and degrees and professions.

These missionaries didn’t say “wrong” to the marriage of a 14 year old to an older man. Indeed they would arrange some of those marriages when it was necessary for mutual survival in difficult times and places. Having themselves come from generations of missionaries in China they understood both the values and the situation. At the same time they would not willingly allow a girl or boy to go without at least 6 years of schooling (more than most of my great grandparents in the US).

And in the case of my wife and her sisters they could go further. By offering employment to their father after their mother’s death, and a place in a hostel of an orphanage, the missionaries could insure that both sons and daughters could remain in school from kindergarten through graduation from high school.

They did not contest the transcendent value of insuring the immortality of the clan. They simply matched it by enacting the equally accepted Chinese value of education. By 1979, when I first visited my wife’s home town, almost every person would expect to graduate from high school before marrying. By the year 2000 many would attend a local college created by a post-missionary, entirely indigenous Methodist church.

It was an amazing transformation, one arising out of a century of negotiations in which a new morality, neither American Christian nor traditional Chinese, or perhaps both, would govern society. And it came about because American Christians chose to eschew the kind of imperious condemnation of traditional culture that brings all conversation to an end, just as Chinese pioneers chose to bring all their cultural values to the table rather than just a desire for children who could insure the survival of family and clan.

Does that sound too easy? Let’s look at another example.

One day in Kuala Lumpur I turned a corner and saw a man slap a woman on the roadside. As I slowed he slapped her again. I got out of my car and told him to stop.

When I did this I was fully aware that his culture and his religion allowed him to “discipline” a wife who “misbehaved” or brought shame on him. I also knew that it was shameful to be caught hitting a woman. And I knew that the local police were unlikely to act if I called them, which in those pre-cellphone days I couldn’t do anyway. So I was left alone to negotiate between my transcendent values (“you don’t hit people, and especially not women”) and his (“a man may strike his wife to discipline her. But doesn’t want to get caught doing it.”)

It was a fairly short negotiation. He told me to go away it was none of my business. I told him I’d knock his head off if he hit her again. And while he considered this I asked her if she wanted to go anywhere. She said her sister’s house. So while he was still considering his options I opened the car door for her. He protested again it was none of my business and we got in and we drove off. When I asked if she’d be okay at her sister's place she said yes, so I dropped her off, made sure she got inside safely, and left.

Now you may argue that I didn’t really “negotiate” about moral values. But honestly I would have been happy to have a longer discussion with him about his cultural and religious beliefs. I knew his language precisely because I’d studied those beliefs in depth. A longer discussion just didn’t seem exigent. And I knew that in that cultural setting a stronger and more credible case for considering a wider variety of transcendent claims would be made by her male relatives when they got the full story and confronted him.

My hasty, and power imbalanced negotiation (I had physical size, a car, and social standing on my side) wasn’t going to have a long term effect on ending domestic abuse in Malaysia. It might not even end it in that household. But the negotiation was neither imperialism nor cultural relativism. It was a necessary intervention to keep more harm from being done while longer, more difficult, and ultimately more successful negotiations could take place between parties more suited to bring them to an enforceable conclusion.

Transformation of societies is always possible. But we can contribute only when we abandon the assumption that we possess the only transcendent values, and that our limited and usually narrow-minded application of those values must be true for all people in all times. When we recognize that there are always other values at play we’ll find that many will align with ours. So we need to recognize that morality is negotiated, from generation to generation and between people with different views of transcendence.

After all, we are not gods to command obedience, but God’s stewards seeking always to know God’s will, knowledge of which we do not have sole possession.

Only the Truth Will Make you Free.

On Highway 45 as you drive into Dallas there is a large billboard with a homey nativity scene. It says “Just Skip Church, Its all Fake News.” It was put up by the American Atheist Association, whose leader says “We all know what you hear in church isn’t true.”

Now I’d love to take him on in a debate, but I fear he has a point. Christians seem to be falling out of the habit of seeking the truth.

It starts small; a sermon illustration either manufactured for the occasion or borrowed from another source. At one time pastors could buy books of such stories, or get them in newsletters. Now they come straight off the Facebook feed or an email chain. The characters have made-up names and there is no date or specific place mentioned. After all why bother: Its the punchline, the point of the story, that matters.

Except its not. Our congregations are already too credulous - believing all kinds of crazy non-truths, half-truths, distorted statistics, and outright lies. In an age when virtually everyone in authority lies on a regular basis the only way to be faithful to the “truth that set us free” is minute scrupulosity regarding facts and absolute clarity of language. If the veracity of a statement can’t be checked it should have no place in a sermon, or its problematic nature should be made clear. If the preacher cannot distinguish clearly between, for example, weather and climate then they  shouldn’t pray for a change in one or lament a change in the other.

Of course the place this is most important is scripture, and that takes systematic teaching through preaching that the “truth” character of language depends on the alignment of its purpose and its content. And that in turn means challenging naive literalism and its doppelgänger, Enlightenment skepticism.

We need to guide our congregations into richer epistemological self-understanding if any form of truth within scripture is to set them free to engage their world in all its complexity.
And that brings us to the most powerful force against truth in contemporary churches: interpretations of people and events through the lenses of an ideology.

Merriam Webster defines ideology as:

1. a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture 
2. a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.
3. The integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

It is 3 in this definition that can be debilitating in the quest for the truth. Ideologies in this sense inevitably simplify and thus mis-represent the nature of reality.

It isn’t the only failed ideology. Capitalism is defined by Merriam Webster as  "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.” As a description this is ideology in sense 1 and not an ideology in the sense of 3 above.

However,if you add to this definition the assertion that such a capitalist economic system will result in the greatest good for the most people you have entered into the realm of ideology. You are suggesting a system of policies that result in a system of behaviors in order to achieve a particular goal and realize a particular set of values based on unproven assumptions about the results of human behavior.

Socialism is likewise a description of a particular economic system extended to become an ideology by asserting that it is the best way to achieve the most good for the most people, and thus motivating a sociopolitical program, albeit one different from capitalism. And as an ideology it is likewise based on unproven assumptions about human behavior and their results.

The problem with both capitalism and socialism as ideologies, and both are promoted from Christian pulpits, is twofold. First, neither can be easily aligned with the sociopolitical program represented by the Biblical concept of the Reign of God. This is the value each believes it realizes,“greatest good for the most people,” isn’t a value associated with God’s Reign in scripture. What Jesus teaches is much more radical - the full realization of all authentic good for all those chosen by God to receive it. Neither capitalism nor socialism can deliver on this promise. To associate God’s Reign with either is a grave injustice.

The second problem is that neither capitalism nor socialism, as an ideology, is verifiable in the real world. This is why promoting either from the pulpit leads away from reality-based programs to do what Jesus did in enacting the Reign of God. Specific policies enacted by governments at various levels may be rationally related to achieving the realization of specific aspects of life in God’s Reign. They may do what Jesus did in his ministry. And they can be tested by their results. But these overarching ideologies remain unproven and unprovable if only because social realities never allow their complete implementation.

What Christians need to learn is not faith in ideological framings of society, but how to analyze the specific impacts of their own actions as citizens in relation to the work of Christ. This, I note, is hard work for them and for their pastors. When you consider the complex effects that all human actions have on all complicated societies you quickly find contradictory evidence and large gray areas. Yet that is the nature of reality.

Which gets us to a last form of surrender to untested and untestable presuppositions: judgment. When Jesus told his disciples “judge not lest you be judged” he was saying, it seems to me, don’t put others in your ideological program lest you discover they have put you in theirs.

Or to put his words in more relevant modern terms. Don’t judge the poor according to your capitalist ideology lest they judge you according to their socialist ideology Don’t assume they are poor because they are lazy lest they assume you are rich because you are venal. And of course visa-versa.

Or also relevant: don’t judge those who reject same-sex marriage according to your dichotomous ideology of Christlike and homophobe lest you be judged by the dichotomous ideology of obedient to Christ and sell-outs to contemporary culture.

This place, a place without simplistic ideologies and facile judgments, is where scripture tells us we must live: sometime after the resurrection and before the Lord’s return. This is why again and again the Bible urges Christians to endure the trials they face, keep focused on the task they have in Christ, remember their goal, and have faith in one whose presence is felt but cannot be seen.

We may not be able to convince the skeptical atheist that truth is spoken in church. But at least in seeking the truth without falling prey to the intellectual laziness of ideology we will be seeking the freedom Christ promises it alone will bring.

The End of Civilization as We Know It? Not so much.

In which we discuss the new tax policy.
Early morning after the big Boxing Day open house. Place looks pretty good for having had nearly 50 guests. In part because the relatives staying with us helped the cleanup.
We had a couple of "real" scientists as guests, by which I mean particle physicists (dark matter and the Higgs boson respectively). And visiting with them got me to thinking about economics.
You see, economics is "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." This dictionary definition doesn't make explicit something that should be better understood by theologians. It is a social science. The first tells you that its field of study is humans in society. The second tells you that it studies actual behavior, not how people should behave.
This distinction first became clear to me in the 80’s when I was studying Islam. Islamic Universities were being built to promulgate a new “Islamic” approach to higher education based largely on the theories of Fazlur Rahman and Muslim reformers from a century earlier.
The "Islamic Social Sciences" were to make Revelation (The Qur’an in this case) an equal partner with human observation of natural behavior in seeking to describe reality scientifically. It is a goal that many Christians also wish to pursue in higher education. And there is some basis for it. The concept of “natural” and “special” revelation pre-dates Islam in Christian circles and intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan (now at Notre Dame) are still working on how to explain it to Muslims, just as at SMU we’re still working on explaining it to Christians.
Still, the problem with “Islamic Economics” is that in the end they never studied human economic behavior, They ended up being descriptions of how: 1. the Islamic ethics that govern personal human economic behavior 2. can/should enforced as public policy in an Islamic society by a Muslim government. It was the equivalent of what Christians call "public theology." That’s why the so-called Islamic economists only cited the Qur’an and Hadith. They were theologians calling themselves scientists trying to direct politicians.
So Islamic economics tended to be neither social nor science. They were personal ethics turned into political mandates. And they were therefore ignored or only given lip service in making actual economic policy. And that remained true even when Islamic economists moved toward describing social ethics instead of personal ethics. Because neither personal nor social ideals cannot govern public policy if they are detached from actual personal behavior in society.
This is frustrating if you are a theologian. Which is why along-side every economic ideology formulated by theologians there is also a plan of public indoctrination into proper ethical behavior. Islamic economics invariably ends up with state sponsored programs to teach Muslims to behave like Muslim should behave.
And this happens, I note, in both progressive and evangelical Christian circles as well. The identification of personal and social ideals leads invariable to programs to indoctrinate children into behaving according to those ideals. OR alternatively to removing the supposed forms of indoctrination that lead them away from their presumed to be naturally virtuous social behavior. Just look at the vast growth of private religious schools from across the political and theological spectrum. Education has become the handmaiden of religious indoctrination.
What about the new tax plan, freshly passed by the US Congress and signed into law by the US president? Well it has something to offer real economists and theologians. Taxes, since the advent of modern economic theories, are never merely a way to raise revenue for the government. Taxes are a way of manipulating human economic behavior in the crudest possible fashion. They offer a set of rewards and punishments intended to direct citizens (individually and corporately) into what is regarded by the political party in power as virtuous economic behavior.
And for this reason well formed tax policy depends heavily on economists to describe, according to the state of their knowledge, how people will respond to the policy. And it requires theologians (and ideologues) to describe what kinds of behavior are virtuous.
The problem? First economists (including the amateurs we elect as politicians) disagree about the science. We are simply nowhere near Isaac Asimov’s world of the Foundation Trilogy in which social scientists could predict and tweak human behavior on a grand scale. (I leave it to you whether we have seen the rise of a “Mule” to throw a wrench in their work.)
There may be a consensus among economists, but even they will hedge their bets because they know that the variables are simply too complex and constantly changing to predict with high confidence the future results of current policy.
If you doubt this look at how badly the pet economists of the US medical industry mis-judged (and thus bet wrongly) on the long term effects of the Affordable Care Act. You can say “well the Republicans undermined it.” True, but the behavior of politicians is just one more variable that economists must take into account and which progressive politicians and a lot of economists across the board failed to take into account.
What about theologians? Well we really have a problem. We have conflicting ideals of economic behavior and don’t agree on ideal economic goals. Worse, we have our own conflicting theories of what motivates human behavior and these conflict with economic theories of what motivates human behavior.
And finally none of us take into account that culture deeply determines both motivation and desired results of economic behavior. And we live as we always have in a culturally diverse society,
Which is why I’m reluctant to believe the strident claims from politicians or economists or theologians that the new tax policy is the end of civilization as we know it, or that it will usher in God’s Reign of ever expanding prosperity.
It will probably lead to change, although our system seems to quickly seek a new equilibrium. And if voters rationally assess their understanding of the public good and vote for those who intend to enact that public good in policy then good changes will be perpetuated and bad changes will be ameliorated. Which for the last 250 years has generally and measurably been for the good.
And if voters and their representatives refuse to engage in making changes for the good because they believe it serves their political purposes? Well that has been the Republican strategy with regard to health care for the last 7 years and we'll soon see if they are punished for it by voters when the full implications become obvious. If Democrats adopt the same strategy, as they seem to be doing, then we'll see how that unfolds in future elections. If voters buy into the strident, self-serving lies that now make the basic communication patterns of both parties?
Then I may be wrong about the end of civilization. 

Jeremiah Again?

In their appeals to the 8th century prophets Christian activists become complicit our national delusion.

Ever since I was a youth, social activist Christians have made the 8th century prophets their go-to option when it comes to condemning American injustice, or indeed any injustice. But I wonder if this perpetuates an American Christian self-image that can itself become a source of injustice.

Let’s consider the context of the 8th century. Back then Israel was a nation formed by a covenant between the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and God at Sinai. As a nation it was struggling to understand why its God, about whom it made exorbitant claims of universality, was allowing it to pass through a series of internal divisions and external assaults on its integrity and freedom.

The answer of the 8th century prophets was, in essence, that it had failed to keep its side of the covenant with God. It had failed the essential demand of God to do justice and maintain righteousness.

At first glance this seems directly relevant to our own national situation when we fail to do justice and maintain righteousness. But there is a the problem. Our nation, the United States, has no covenant with God. It wasn’t formed on the promise that God would be faithful if the people would be righteous.

The basis of the United States is an agreement between humans to form a political unity on the basis of shared goals, shared laws, and shared methods of political organization. And all of those goals, laws, and political methods were made by humans for humans. God wasn't invited to the Continental Congress as even a delegate, much less an organizer. While some of the humans engaged in those negotiations no doubt fervently hoped for God’s favor, they did not, in their final document (our constitution) invoke God’s will.

There was a reason for this. They had come from the experience in which evoking God‘s will and God‘s justice had been almost uniformly a source of oppression and injustice. It had been a manipulative power-play designed to either maintain the status quo or justify bloody insurrections. The founding fathers had seen hundreds of years of warfare in Europe and England. All of it justified by appeals to God and God‘s righteousness.

If they had looked ahead to the future they could have seen an American Civil War equally justified, on both sides, by appeals to God‘s righteousness. Perhaps they could even see a self-satisfied United Methodist Church placing the Battle Hymn of the Republic in it’s hymnal so that it could gloat of victory and slaughter in Christ’s name.

It is the kind of thing that represents a combination of nationalism and self righteousness that Jeremiah would probably abhore but which flows naturally from an anachronistic reading of the 8th century prophets as watchmen for national justice and righteousness.

Facing the truth that prophetic calls for justice and righteousness in God’s name can easily, and indeed almost certainly lead to violence Christians face a quandary. Where do we place God’s call for righteousness in our national political life? Given the acute danger of a government that justifies its actions by appeal to the Almighty how do we put the call of the Almighty on the political agenda?
First that we recognize that the national prophets of our own day are not preachers thundering in public with quotes from Jeremiah and Micah. They are citizens voting their conscience in the voting booth, which should be their pray closet and the place of their most meaningful contribution to God’s reign.

Second we recognize that we Christians should read the prophets, like the entirety of scripture, to inform and deepen our understanding of God’s will in the company of our fellow Christians. Not as a polemical tool against our political enemies. In the setting of the Christian congregation they can and do bend us toward justice and righteousness which we then realize in our public actions. It is in the setting of the church that they have real meaning and positive impact.

Outside the community of faith scripture, with its remnant sense of authorizing moral action, scripture is inherently dangerous. Set loose from the church guided by God’s spirit the prophetic words will inevitably be manipulated to justify any political cause, just or unjust, that appropriates them to its purposes. They become a form of magic incantation; powerful and subject to abuse because it is incomprehensible. They not only accomplish nothing, they may well do positive harm.

We need for the eighth century prophets to rest in peace. Or our Jesus will always come not with peace but a sword.

The Christian Failure of Nerve

"History ended at Chalcedon.” These were the words of a Coptic Orthodox priest whose PowerPoint presentation on his church had come to an abrupt but timely end. Because I thought I’d need to cut him off so that our tour group could move on to lunch. He was serious.

As far as he was concerned the driving forces of church history were resolved when heresy was finally and fully defined and vanquished by the creeds. As importantly the order of the church set forth by God was fully established. After that all that remained was a faithful reiteration of what had come before.

From a comparative standpoint his was exactly the same position held by the Salafi movements in Islam that seek a recovery of and return to the time of the “rightly guided” caliphs. And you hear echoes of this in contemporary Protestant movements. A sure sign is when they see the ordination of women not as a result of progress but as an act of recovery of the practice of the early church. Hindus (think of the modern Vedanta movement reiterating the Brahmanic synthesis formed in the face of Buddhism) have similar impulses. So do Buddhists.

These movements are not strictly scripturalists. They all recognize that their understandings of scripture either don’t provide enough information to resolve every potential conflict, or actually contain unresolved conflicts. Think, for example, of how both “presbyterian” and “episcopal” (and other) structures of congregational and church leadership are found in the New Testament. Or of the dualist and non-dualists aspects of Vedas.

As a result these movements posit a golden age when these conflicts were resolved and the full-orbed truth was known. They believe in a period of a few generations beyond the founding in which God’s continued presence guided the Church, or the Umma, or the Brahmans to both fully clarify all possible disputes and their resolution, and to set in place a mechanism for enforcing and passing on those decisions.

None of these movements imagine that there will never be conflicts. They just believe that all such conflicts can be located within ancient discourses and thus resolved by reiteration of ancient solutions. There will be nothing new under the sun, or at least their sun.

Now I can’t speak for Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists although I’ve spend considerable time studying them. But I do think as a Christian that I need to point out that this approach to being Christian seems to represent a failure of nerve. Indeed, it is possibly a failure to grasp the meaning of incarnation.

When I read the New Testament I marvel at just how little Jesus gave the apostles to go on when it came to continuing his mission of announcing God’s Reign, and witnessing to him as the Christ. Apart from appointing Peter to some kind of special leadership role he gave the disciples no clue as to how to organize his growing number of followers, and all the evidence of the New Testament is that organization was pretty ad hoc for a generation or more. And then the church adopted thoroughly non-universal cultural forms from Rome.

And what about messaging? Well the apostles had his words and deeds. These clearly located his message within the world of concerns of the Jewish people (at least as understood by the apostles) as one would expect. And as they moved into the Graeco-Roman world the apostles translated this message into culturally relevant terms. Yet the gospel deposited with the apostles and transposed into another local cultural key didn’t even realize its universal claims locally.

The Jewish tradition of the rabbis, that closest to the teaching of Jesus, didn’t recognize itself and its concerns in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles any more than it could make sense of their idiosyncratic interpretation of the law and the prophets. And the Greek cultural tradition? Well it is useful to observe that it could as easily serve Islam seven centuries after Christ, and indeed nascent modern secularity, as it did the gospel of Christ. And it could as easily be critiqued by the penetrating philosophical traditions of Asia.

Put in other words (and contra Pope Benedict’s assertions) God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ didn’t affirm the privileged position of the intersection of Judaism with the Graeco-Roman world of Jesus time and the generations that followed for comprehending God’s relationship with humanity. And contra those pious books on church history we read in seminary, the Roman Empire with its excellent roads and relatively uniform administration was not somehow the perfect moment in social history to facilitate the expansion of the Gospel message.

But if God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ in a particular time and place does not affirm the universal possibilities of the West, what does it affirm? I think it affirms the hard limits of all human conceptualizations of what it means for God’s Reign and Rule to be present in the world.

When we say that Jesus was a Jew we affirm a central hermeneutical fact necessary to interpret his words. But we also recognize that as a Jewish man he couldn’t be “everyman” and inhabit all cultural worlds and all of God’s stories among humankind. (That is the particular heresy claimed of Ramakrishna by the Vedanta Hindus, and an examination of his claims is useful for clarifying what Christians do not claim of Christ.)

It would belong to the Church of Jesus Christ, animated and led by his Spirit to inhabit those worlds, learning as it went, to learn what the gospel is to be in those worlds.

So whether we cling to the universal claims of Rome or those more modern claims of Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris, and Boston (i.e. those of “progressive” Christians) I think we have lost our nerve. We’ve tied our ship to a dock in an imagined cultural Gondwana long after the continents have begun to drift apart. We’re trying to navigate by staying along the coastline when only by sailing beyond sight of land and watching the stars will take us to the places God has commanded us to go. 

We are, to use a more Biblical image, reiterating the sin of Babel. And that, perhaps, is why God appears to have said, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” Because only then will we become obedient to God's command.

We Must Sail to Apparent Wind

You can only sail to apparent wind, not the real wind.

This is one of the hardest things to teach about sailing. As the boat moves, the wind that affects the sail changes. And, although the effect is less, so do the currents flowing past the rudder.

Let's say the real wind is directly from north to south at 10 knots speed. A sailboat can't sail directly into the wind, but most boats can easily sail at a 45 degree angle to the wind. So we set our sail and as the wind flows over it we begin to move northeast, maybe at 5 knots "over ground" meaning over an imaginary fixed surface.

So just as you feel a breeze if you run or ride a bike on a still day, the moving boat feels a breeze coming from the northeast at 5 knots in addition to the wind from the north at 10 knots. Combined they act like a single breeze of nearly 14 knots from the north-northeast. And it is this wind for which the sailor must trim the sail and set the rudder. The real wind no longer matters except as one component of apparent wind.

Did I mention currents, as opposed to "over ground?" Its easy to sail fast (relative to the water beneath your bow) while being carried even faster in the opposite direction by the current.

One can easily understand that the apparent wind constantly changes in both speed and direction as the boat changes direction. And everything, literally everything, about sailing the boat, changes as well. Think about the example above. As the boat picks up speed it feels more wind, and will thus gain even more speed. And the apparent wind will shift direction as the speed increases, requiring a change in the rudder. At some point the sailor may even need to adjust the sail to actually slow down a bit or risking having the boat get blown over.

The most important point here, however, is that you simply cannot teach the theory of apparent wind and expect a new sailor to know how to sail. Not even sophisticated sailing simulation games can teach the sailor to sail. 

Real knowledge of sailing doesn't exist inside the head of the sailor. It exists in the deep connection between the sailor's body, the boat, the wind, and the water. This is why Patrick O'Brian's Captain Aubry is instantly recognizable as a real sailor while C.S. Forrester's constantly calculating and ever introspective Horatio Hornblower is a fascinating character but a landlubber's fantasy.

What is true of real and apparent wind is just as true of anything moving, including human organizations like a church moving through the social world. At some point the "real" social world being described by social analysts and demographics becomes less important, even irrelevant, compared to the world as it appears to a congregation in ministry to the people who come its door or to whom it reaches out.

And that is why you can't really know Christian ministry by going to school. All the theory in the world doesn't constitute actual knowledge. That comes only by leading the church, by becoming intimately linked to its people and the actual environment they experience in ministry. And what is true of the whole is true of the constituent parts, such as preaching, teaching, prayer, worship, and administration. You don't know what it means to lead a voluntary society until you've heard people say no to your suggestions or yes to your invitations.

Those people, like that homeless woman seeking a handout or the neighborhood children playing on the church lawn, or the city council ordinance changing the zoning of a neighboring lot are the "apparent wind" to which the church must sail. And you cannot know them until they are in your face.

Scripture in Buckets? No, there is only one Word.

There has been plenty of discussion in United Methodist circles about the authority of the Bible, with Adam Hamilton’s “Three buckets” explanation of how the Bible applies to the issue of marriage and ordination of LGBTQ persons grabbing center stage. (http://www.adamhamilton.org/blog/homosexuality-the-bible-and-the-united-methodist-church/#.Widl4LbMyEI)

While Hamilton is a gifted communicator and leader I think he’s got the wrong analogy for explaining how scripture functions as an authority for the church.

Adams’ problem, shared with his opponents, is they inderstand the Bible within a modern epistemological framework that sees truth emerging as humans analyze data and place it into theoretical frameworks that are constantly being revised from other data. 

In short the Bible is understood, at least in terms of its authority for theology, as a source of information. And like all such sources it must be evaluated to determine its applicability to the problem being solved, it’s reliability, and the proper interpretive tools that allow its data to be understood. 

Critical hermeneutics, which is to say objective scientific standards for evaluating literary sources of information, are thus applied to answer these questions before moving toward actually extracting the data made available in the Bible through exegesis.

And it is on that basis that Hamilton identifies his three buckets of data. 

The critics of Hamilton work in the same framework, but they begin with the assumption that the Bible does not need to be evaluated with regard to reliability. It is inerrant in the matters of which it speaks. Still, as this idea of inerrancy implies, the Bible must still be evaluated with regard to applicability and appropriate interpretive methods before the actual work of interpretation begins. 

The problem is that both Hamilton and his critics have misunderstood what kind of thing the Bible is. They have adopted a fundamentally flawed Enlightenment epistemology that regards everything outside the mind of human beings as an independent source of data requiring the application of scientific tools so that it yields reliable information that can help build rational intellectual models of reality that reside, or course, in the mind. 

There are two problems: first the Bible is not a data source, it is a living  partner in experiencing the truth. Nor can we consider it a “conversation partner” because even the enlightenment understanding of conversation is epistemologically flawed. It understands conversation as sharing the content of the mind; the data and the theoretical frameworks that organize it. It is the linear exchange of information rather than the mutual experiencing of reality.

When the Bible is treated as a source of information about God, creation, humanity and etc it is reduced to being the words of God rather than the Word of God - assuming that God is willing to become a purveyor of information for digestion by human minds. 

The second problem is that this approach to the Bible tears the Bible away from the experience of the Church. Indeed it turns the Bible into and independent critic of the Church, or of some particular church with which an individual or group of individuals has a dispute. And this is a bizarre turn of events, given that the Bible emerges in history with the Church in a partnership with God’s Spirit as a single engaged witness to Jesus as the Christ. 

To grasp this relationship of the Bible, the Church, and God’s Spirit we need a different epistemology. We need an understanding that truth isn’t experienced as a model of reality existing in the mind and articulated for other minds through language. Truth, or at least theological truth, is experienced as humans engage with God’s Spirit, with one another, and with the deposit of faith found in scripture to witness to Christ through direct interaction with other humans in their social and natural contexts. Truth is something we are constantly doing, not a set of ideas in our minds. 

Put another way, the Bible read through the lens of the Enlightenment is a caricature of truth that may well miss its true character entirely. Liberation theologians were getting at something similar when they spoke of “orthopraxis” rather than “orthodoxy.” But even liberation theology falls prey to an enlightenment epistemology when it seeks to characterize God’s preferential option for the poor not through a reading of the Bible in the context of active witness but through critical analysis of the text following this or that ideological framing of socio-political realities.

Put yet another way, when we hear/read the Bible in the context of worship in the community of faith as it faithfully witnesses to Jesus Christ then we are far more likely to experience the truth than when we are reading (or writing!) a commentary on its meaning. When we read the Bible along with those to whom Jesus offers himself as Savior and Lord we are far more likely to experience the truth that we are carefully parsing a critical exegesis of a particular pericope under the tutelage of a highly qualified scholar. 

This leaves us, I realize, the problem of how to judge which statements, which representations of the reality of God, should guide the Church in its mission. And the answer I think is those which have proven themselves over centuries to characterize rather that caricature the experience of the Church as it witnesses with the Bible and God’s Spirit to the world: The creeds. 

Anything more than the creeds may, in some particular cultural context, provide necessary guidance in the judgment of some subset of Christian witnesses. But it is bound to be contentious and thus to mark the boundary of a sectarian division. Such engagements and enactments as are characterized by additions to the creeds can never have the quality of truth possessed by the witness to Christ by the Church with the scripture and the Holy Spirit as characterized by the creeds alone. 

More specifically for United Methodists, neither the additions to the creeds proposed by the Wesleyan Covenant Association (ordination of women, upholding marriage only between a man and a woman) or pro-LGBGT progressives (affirmation of same-sex marriage and ordination of those engaged in same-sex sexual behaviors in the context of such marriages) represent a true experience of witness of the quality of such a witness characterized only by the creeds. Whatever the experience of truth of their proponents, that truth experience does not possess the universality and power of the witness of Church, Scripture, and Spirit as it has always and everywhere engaged the world with Jesus Christ.  

Put another way, these additions to the creeds provide a basis for creating a sect, just as they are reflective of an essentially sectarian experience. But they do not provide a basis for building the Church. 

Too Much Bumper Sticker Theology

I feel like we have a little too much bumper sticker theology going round when it comes to the concept of “inclusion.” It might be useful to establish some facts.

First. Jesus does not preach a gospel of inclusion. He also preaches exclusion. Matthew 25:31-46 is precisely about exclusion from God’s Reign. Or Matthew 8:12, 22:13, 25:30. And I’ve only scratched the surface. Rev. 21:8. Jesus preaches for decision, and decisions are meaningless if they don’t have consequences. It may be possible for a rich man to enter the Reign of God, because for God all things are possible (Mark 8:17-26), but in the short run the man cannot be a follower of Jesus.

And of course in the end it turns out the terms of inclusion for following Jesus that all but a few self-exclude from being his disciples. Indeed this is a common theme in the New Testament, how many self-exclude when the going gets tough. Quite frankly, if Jesus wanted to include everyone he wouldn’t have set such tough conditions on being his follower. But it isn’t just self-exclusion. Jesus himself cleanses the temple (John 2:15).

And I note, his disciples keep up the same practice of setting high standards and excluding. Think of Ananias and Sapphire. Or of Paul railing against the Judaizers. Or of Matthew and Paul talking about the principles by which persons will be excluded from the church.

This isn’t just a matter of revelation, its a matter of common sense. The Reign of God is a place of peace, security, justice, and righteousness. Its a place where you don’t get eaten alive by your beastly neighbors. (Matthew 7:15, Matthew 9:36, John 10:12) The word “sanctuary” comes to mind. And the only way to accomplish this is by exclusion, excluding those who rebel against God’s Reign by their refusal to follow God’s laws. (Mark 12:1-12)

 And yes, law is a relevant term here. Love your neighbor as yourself is a commandment. Jesus himself places it in exactly that context. (Mark 12:28-31) Love isn’t a sentiment, it isn’t an emotion that comes and goes in a rush of hormones, it is a command that we obey by the control of our behavior with our will. Now I’ve made my point from scripture, and what appears to me common sense. Let me suggest that common experience is the same, because inclusion always works two ways.

If as a general principle it means including me, it will also as a general principle mean including my enemies. And I frankly don’t want them included. Not if they continue to persecute me. I want the church to be a sanctuary, and I expect that is true of everyone. And this leads me to a lot of grounds for exclusion. I believe that neo-Nazis, white supremacists, persistent pedophiles, people who abuse their wives and children, those carrying guns and knives, child molesters, people full of violent invective against my loved ones, and a whole host of others should be excluded from the church so it won’t be a place where the weak are devoured by the nasty. The table is open to all, with the important caveat that they confess and repent. Otherwise they’ll just steal their neighbor’s food and elbow children off their chairs.

 And this gets us to the problem of equating “love” with “inclusion.” Somehow United Methodists have sung the chorus “Jesus take me as I am” so often that they’ve forgotten the whole “potter and clay” metaphor that comes with it. The loving potter molds the clay, she doesn’t leave it in an lump, or misshapen, or too thin and fragile to serve its purpose. As an iron monger she beats swords into plowshares, she doesn’t leave them as swords. The problem isn’t who to include, its what needs to be transformed. I can’t just say “include me untransformed or you don’t love me.” What I can say is that I don’t believe the transformation you demand is justified by scripture and theological definitions of righteousness.

 There is a final piece to this. All communities exclude, as has the church since the time the apostles, those whose words and deeds destroy the very foundations of the community. All communities must define those founding principles and defend them against those who would destroy them from within. Jesus talks about this in Matthew 7:15. He is talking about Israel, but clearly Matthew records the story because he sees Jesus speaking to the church. Paul is ever vigilant about false teaching, notable but not exclusively false exclusionary teaching (Galatians 2).

One of the confusions among US Christians is the idea that the founding principles of American democracy (freedom of speech and conscience) are founding principles of the Christian church. The Christian church is not founded on freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. It is founded precisely on the constraint of conscience by the teaching of God’s Word and the constraint of speech within the bounds of Christian teaching. I think we need to get rid of the condemnation of those who “exclude” as opposed to those who “include.”

Inclusion is not a Christian principle. And just as inclusion is not a Christian principle, so exclusion is not a violation of Christian principles nor the law of love. Indeed exclusion is the only way to protect those whom we love from wolves without and within. The commandment to love can compel us to include. It can also compel us to exclude.

 What we have in the UM is a disagreement about the nature of God’s Reign, a fundamental theological disagreement about what constitutes the ideal human community living under God’s command. It isn’t about inclusion versus exclusion, it is about who to include and on what basis, which transformations are essential to the Christian life and which are not, and where to exclude both to preserve the foundational principles of the church and peace and security of its members. Tossing around emotional bombs isn’t going to resolve these problems, or even in the end lessen our obvious anxiety and pain.

Seeking Unity in a Multiplicity of Cultures

First, I hope we can agree that the mission of the UMC is non-different from that given by Christ to the apostles: to proclaim the good news that that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  The second half of the sentence suggests, the necessity of creation care not withstanding, that the focus is on human individuals. They are the ones God loves, as is aptly demonstrated in the intensely personal nature of Jesus own ministry and that of his successors.

Still, a declaration of God’s love is not the entirety of the gospel. The purpose of that declaration is to elicit faith in Jesus Christ and thus gain eternal life. And this aspect of the gospel is elucidated in Luke 24:46 "and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” 

In Acts 1 when Jesus speaks of baptism, and in Acts 2 when Peter preaches the first post-resurrection sermon give specific content to the message. Thus in "Acts 2:38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

Nor can we leave the mission of the church with preaching, baptism, and the Holy Spirit. In the end of Matthew Jesus specifies that baptism is accompanied by “teaching them everything that I have commanded you.” And with that phrase (and many others) we are reminded that Jesus taught that God’s Reign was present in his life-giving ministry. Indeed in the rest of the book of Acts and throughout the Epistles preaching about and enacting in human lives the nature and promise of God’s Reign becomes central to apostolic ministry.

Having noted this, we can also note that when disagreements arise among the apostles it isn’t over points of doctrine, but over how  the church enacts signs of God’s Reign in its life. Circumcision, tongues, leadership roles, food offered to idols, the role of women, and marriage are all discussed in the context of how the Church witnesses to the presence of God’s Reign in its life.

And here I think we find a source of the contemporary fissure in the UMC. We disagree on what it means to enact the presence of God’s Reign in Christ. Cut through all the cultural bias, misrepresentations on both sides, needless associations with various political parties and agendas, and theological red herrings: in the end our disagreement is about the how to enact the presence of God’s Reign among us.

Specifically our disagreement is about what kind of marriage should be one of the signs of God’s coming Reign that we enact on earth. I add "on earth" because Jesus teaches that marriage is not part of God’s Reign “in Heaven” or after the eschaton. (Matthew 22:30) If marriage is a sign, it is a sign that is being transformed as God’s Reign approaches. This is what we see in Matthew 5 and 19, and in a more positive light in John 2. It isn’t surprising that Paul struggles with advice on marriage, which is both something passing away yet remains part of God’s good creation. (Corinthians 7 in relation to I Timothy 4)

So it seems to me that our conflict about same-sex marriage is whether it can be a sign of God’s Reign and thus something the church should enact in its communal life as a sign of God’s Reign. And that in turn depends on how we understand the culture into which we preach the gospel.

There are arguments against same-sex marriage being a sign of God’s Reign. Those arguments assert that according to the Bible the only intimate sexual relationships that serve as a sign of God’s Reign must be in the context of a lifelong bond between a male and a female. This is one part of a larger assertion that God has revealed in scripture a permanent natural order, assent to which is fundamental to obedience to God until God creates a new heaven and a new earth. The moral law as given to Noah, and then Israel, and reiterated by Jesus and the apostles remains in effect, and obedience to that law is a fundamental sign of the presence of God’s Reign in the church.

Yet this isn’t the whole story of how Jesus and the apostles enacted the presence of God’s Reign. In the preaching and teaching of both Jesus and the apostles the enacting of God’s Reign isn’t merely re-enacting the ideal put forth in the Old Covenant. It isn’t merely the recovery of what was lost in the long history of fallen humanity. The enacting God’s Reign is also aspirational. It looks forward to what God intends for creation in the eschatological realization of God’s Reign.

Re-creation isn’t just restoration. The emerging priesthood within the Church doesn’t look like the old priesthood. Neither do the new sacrifices on the altar. The hymnology of Heaven will be different, as will the natural ordering of the beasts of prey and those upon whom they feed.  And while the old order is an ordering of ethnic nations, tribes, genders, and classes the new order makes none of these distinctions but is instead based on spiritual gifts. Even marriage is transformed in light of God’s coming Reign. "It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” (Matthew 19)

Because the aim of the church in mission is not only to signal restoration, but also re-creation it seems to me that same-sex marriage can be seen as part of the aspirational witness toward a Reign of God in which there is no marriage at all. In its very difference from different sex marriage it points to the deeper nature of marriage: an institution in which humans learn to love one another as God loves until such time as we learn, not from our disciplined relations with one another, but directly from God. Like all marriage it should be able to stand as a sign of God’s love to a world that hardly knows God’s love at all.

It is a witness as well (like any marriage in the church) to God’s gracious accommodation to our humanity. (I Corinthians 7) In this case same-sex marriage is an  accommodation to a group of people who through some yet not fully understood set of genetic and social circumstances find genuine intimacy only with a person of the same sex. It is an accommodation to a deeply felt sense of personal need and identity that cannot be compromised or abandoned. And it is an accommodation made possible because the primary features of marriage can still be present in same-sex marriage. It reminds us of what we affirm in all our United Methodist exceptions to the exception that marriage will produce biological offspring of the husband and wife: deep personal intimacy (bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh), monogamy and cooperation in child rearing are the foundations for God’s ordering of human society; not sexual relations.

This is why in many cases in which United Methodists and other Christians actually have same-sex married people in our congregations, and indeed leading those congregations, there is no great anxiety that they represent some sign of social or even congregational breakdown. Because within the cultural context of contemporary America they don’t. Nor do they represent a failure of the church to enact signs of God’s love in Jesus Christ.

I understand that for many American Christians the issue of how to enact the ideals of God’s Reign in congregational life is tied to deep fears that the authority of God’s Word is being replaced by merely human authority. They do not agree with the argument I’ve put forward that an aspirational enactment of God’s Reign is an act of submission to the authority of God’s Word and the example of Jesus and the apostles. They cannot recognize the authority of scripture apart from their own interpretive methodologies and the particular way that scripture is embedded their particular culture. They cannot recognize re-creation except as re-iteration of the old order of creation.

For these American Christians recognition of same-sex marriage is a sign of something being lost: a distinctive and authentic Christian identity which needs to be recovered and restored within the Christian culture that reliably affirmed that identity in all its social dimensions. And because for some same-sex marriage has come to represent that loss of identity it really isn’t negotiable. Loss of identity is a kind of death, and no one willingly dies. Not on either side.

Still, it seems to me that we can conceive of an ecclesiology based around the wideness of the mission of the church rather than the preservation of identity; anyone’s identity. It would be an ecclesiology that recognizes the possibilities of real difference when it comes to appropriately enacting signs of God’s Reign, given that all such signs must both be rooted in their cultural context and point forward to something unimaginably different from our present reality. And it would recognize that all identifiers that mean so much to us, while precious, ultimately lose their luster in the light of Christ.

"For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:

Marks of a Dying Church.

As I read among the blogs and facebook postings from United Methodists I can see two  different ecclesiologies being expressed. They are based on different, although not contradictory, understandings of the human condition; different theological anthropologies. 

1. One theological anthropology understands humans primarily as broken, marginalized, and excluded from God’s reign. Thus the task of the church and the basis of all its ministries is to invite, welcome, include, and heal in the name of Christ. The church is a gathering of those who have been brought back into God’s Reign. In this anthropology the language of sin and sinner is understood primarily as another language of exclusion, a way of marginalizing people are pushing them away from God’s Reign.
2. A rather different theological anthropology understands humans primarily as rebels who reject God’s rule and reign. The task of the church is to place before these rebellious people Jesus Christ, who demands faith and submission to his rule. In this theological anthropology the language of sin and sinner is a necessary part of engaging people with the reality of who they really are so they can make the choice for follow Jesus Christ.

Each of these theological anthropologies can easily be supported from scripture. And the ecclesiologies that follow from them can also be supported from scripture. The problem, it seems to me, is that both, and they do need each other, are out of touch with both the range of scriptural understandings of the human person, and our contemporary culture. 

First, in the preaching of the New Testament humans are understood primarily in light of God’s Reign present in Jesus Christ. This means that the good news of what we can be always precedes any particular diagnosis of our human problems. The most prescient ecclesiology isn’t built on theological anthropology, but just theology. The Church is the Body of Christ. Yes, it bears the marks of his suffering at human hands and for human sin, but the dominant theme is his resurrection and glorification. The Church is primarily a gathering of saints, of newborns being raised toward their fantastic potential as children of God. 

Put in another way, the Church shouldn’t focus your attention on where you came from. It should be the place to discover where you are going. This is why healing, rather than diagnosis of a disease, is the first calling card of the evangelist. Jesus rejects his disciples' obsession with forensics, an obsession shared by modern United Methodist disciples. Instead he focuses on how God’s works are being revealed. (John 9:1-12)

When Peter preaches the first evangelistic sermon at Pentecost he begins with how God’s Spirit poured out will turn Israel’s children into prophets and visionaries. And that theological anthropology is rooted in Peter’s sermon in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. Jesus' suffering and death Peter acknowledges, but also dismisses with the single word “but” in Acts  2:24. 

And what about contemporary culture? When participants in contemporary culture like myself look at who we are and where we are we see an age of miracles and wonders, of unbelievable advancements in virtually even form of human well-being, from political structures to economic attainment to health and longevity. And we want to continue to make things get better and better.

Unfortunately many of our churches don't see ours as an age in which human advancement is a reality, or is even possible. Listening to the blogs and Facebook groups of the UMC what I hear is a constant whine of negative assessments of humans and human society. Humans as presented in the UM forums are unjust, bigoted, ignorant and hateful, or are victims of exclusion and marginalization broken by disease, poverty, and rejection, or are rebels determined to break God’s order in a society sliding further and further God’s intentions.

We read the Pew Reports and cluck with disapproval of ourselves as losers in the race to save society from its materialism and vacuousness. And like naked apes we fling our own excrement on ourselves and those around us in frustration over our failings to have created the kingdom of God or whatever we imagine it to be.  

We see society, local and global, is nothing but a bearer of inhuman, unjust, structures of oppression. Its driving instruments (economic and political) are handmaidens of the devil in maintaining those structures. Sectarian retreat or self-righteous martyrdom are the only options we can offer because sin and brokenness are all that we can see in ourselves and our fellow humans.

All this is the result of a culmination of cultural moments in our American society. It isn’t a necessary reading of the witness of the Bible or of reality around us. It is a Christian cultural reading because it is guided by the heavy blinders of our revivalist roots - recalling sinners to repentance - filtered through the expectation of a realized eschatology followed by our experience of losing nearly all of our status within society in the last century. 

From the beginning of the 20th century onward the impetus for creating a society that resembles the promises of God’s Reign shifted with increasing speed from the limited abilities of the Christian churches to the ever increasing capacity of science and technology to solve human problems, and of democratic governments to distribute those solutions nationally and worldwide. 

The response of the church, once it realized what was happening, has largely been resistance. Not just the fundamentalist resistance of evolutionary science, but the more widespread resistance to rational political science (as opposed to political ideologies), economics (as opposed to economic ideologies), and business and management science (as opposed to our criticism of anything touching on capitalism.)

And as the solutions to human problems moved further from our sanctuaries, being a sanctuary was all that was left to many of our churches and pastors, along with a theological anthropology of failure reflective of our contemporary American cultural sense of ourselves far more than the teaching of scripture.

And so we decline: because we offer the same old promises with less and less conviction, or even worse actually embrace ourselves as gatherings of the lost, lonely, and hopeless shaking our fists at the world, or beating our breasts in shame and finding such comfort as we can from the Big Chill of a dying American dream. It is small wonder so many of us embrace the Old Testament prophets. Like them we've given up on this present age, have embraced our exile, and now hope only to maintain a righteous remnant until the Lord returns or the righteous control congress and the Whitehouse. Its likely to be a long wait whatever your eschatology. 

It is worth, I think, at least considering the implicit ecclesiology of hope that we find in churches (including UM churches) that are growing. For it seems to me these churches offer the immediate promise of experience God’s life-changing Spirit, preach and teach the potential of humans to achieve great things for God, and offer forward looking paths of discipleship toward all the goodness of God’s Reign. 

And that I think, is what we find in the Bible. There, as we look at the first Church, the first enacting of what it means to be the Body of Christ, we find a gathering of disciples that burst into the world believing they could outrun God's judgment in reaching to the ends of the earth. They were not, in this sense, Wesleyans. They were not fleeing the wrath to come.  In stead they were the vanguard of redemption. And that is a movement worthy of being call Church. That is a movement for a living Church. 

Our God is Too Small to Believe.

I have the privilege most mornings of walking as the sun rises, and in this a chance to see the vastness of the universe folded slowly into the into the intimate relationship of earth and sun. 

Which always brings to mind the title of JB Phillips’ book, “Your God Is Too Small.”

It is worth thinking about two spacecraft in this regard: Voyager and Cassini. Voyager was sent on a grand tour of the outer planets. After decades it completed its mission and slipped into interstellar space, beyond the last reaches of that sun which so dominates our days. It’s future is utterly unknown.

Cassini’s fate was sealed just a few weeks ago after an equally fantastic voyage of discovery. Its creators intentionally guided it into an encounter with Saturn that would assuredly reduce it to a diffuse collection of molecules and atoms. 

Aboard Voyager was a message, inscribed on a gold disk, telling whoever might find it a little bit about the humans who created it and their planet and solar system. Aboard Cassini, it was feared, might be living remnants of earth’s biosphere that could contaminate and even destroy such non-terrestrial life as the spacecraft might encounter.

The ends of these craft were carefully plotted by their human creators in the greatest acts of faith in these last hundred years of human civilization. Because these two different ends were predicated on the belief that there is something beyond earth and its life forms. That there is something beyond humanity and our intelligence. The ends were based on the belief that we humans are stewards of more than the earth, and that we are fellow travelers with pilgrims we will never meet.

Do we believe in a God for whom earth, and indeed humanity, is just one of a countless other objects of love and concern? Certainly we need to think this way if we’ve going to understand and explain our actual place in the cosmos in a post-Copernican culture. Otherwise our God is really just a species-god, a subordinate deity responsible for a minor planet of a distant sun on the fringes of a smallish galaxy. 

And if our distinctly Christian faith is to be relevant, and not reduced to Deism, then this modern way of understanding our place in the universe requires us to reconsider the central doctrines of Christianity: the incarnation and the atonement. For as it stands both doctrines are deeply human-centric, placing humanity at the center of God’s universal purpose and plan. In their classical form the greater created order and its redemption rotate around the redemption of humanity, which makes sense only in a non-modern, pre-copernican worldview.

But can a contemporary theology, aware that humanity and its problems are those of a recently evolved species on a marginal planet, seriously assert that the central concern of the God of the entire universe is revealing God’s self to humans and reconciling God’s self with them? “The stage is too big for the drama.” as Richard Feynman once said. In the light of the vastness of the cosmos our human-centric doctrines are in danger of appearing to be human-created idols designed, like all those tribal gods in the Bible, to keep us and our problems at the center of God's concern. 

A bigger doctrine of incarnation and atonement is possible. But it will require an understanding that incarnation is more than an historic event, and is part of the essential character of the Triune God. And it will require an understanding of atonement not as merely a historical act, but part of the essential character of a Triune God ever concerned to reconcile God’s creatures to God’s self regardless of whether and how they understand the nature of their separation and regardless of whether they are human or even part of our solar system or galaxy. 

Although our journey to this reconsideration of incarnation and atonement begins with the faith of scientists designing spacecraft for the stars, its ending really isn’t rocket science. A theology for our contemporary world will need to shift away from an excessive concern with what God has done for us as humans. And certainly it will need to move away from endless disputes over the exact nature of how the cross reconciled humans to God. Instead I’ll suggest that we focus on how God’s incarnation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ illuminates for us the character of a God whose concerns far exceed the human problem however construed. 

Love is the English word we typically use to describe that character. When we can release that love from our own self-centered embrace then our God will become more credible within the contemporary experience of the cosmos, and our witness to that love in Christ will reflect a character more like that of Jesus himself.