Theological Education and Emerging Anthropologies

The central message of the gospel is that God incarnate in Jesus Christ makes possible the restoration of our humanity.

How that message is received, understood, and articulated within each culture will depend upon that culture’s understanding of what it means to be human. While the understanding of what it means to be human may be placed in religious context, understanding a culture’s anthropology as more important that understandings its theology for communicating the gospel message. 

As importantly, it is in the anthropology of a culture that we will find God revealing God’s self within the culture. In the order of creation narrated in scripture God reveals to the first humans the natural order that includes themselves, their relation to that order, and their relationship to one another before God reveals God's own nature. Natural revelation, both in relation to the non-human and social orders precedes the special revelation by which God reveals specifically what it means to be human in relation to God.

This is ratified by the Incarnation, through which we learn that we cannot know God as God until we are restored to our true human selves by God incarnate as a human. Jesus' teaching and works, which focus entirely on restoring humanity, are one with his self-hood: making it possible to grasp that God is love. The disciples that would worship Jesus as the Christ would first know him as a human, and will naturally articulate the meaning of his divinity in terms of their how culture's understanding of humanity.

Because of its long history within the family of cultures called “The West,” and its formative role in shaping those cultures, the Christian theological interest in anthropology has primarily been in articulating the anthropology presumed to be found in scripture and continued in Western culture. Understanding how cultures outside the West construct the human person has primarily been a problem for missiology. And typically missiologists have been concerned with how the gospel addresses and reforms the presumed-to-be-inadequate anthropologies of those cultures.

The distinction between a supposedly normative Christian theological anthropology arising from what is sometimes called a “Christian” worldview and those anthropologies found in the diversity of non-Western cultures engaged by the gospel has always been problematic.

The central truth of Incarnation cannot help but be articulated within a particular culture’s anthropology, including those of 1st century Palestinian Judaism and later Greece and Rome. There is no identifiable Christian anthropology apart from that of the cultural environment into which Jesus was born and the first cultural environment into which it spread. Unless we take the fact of his birth as validating that worldview as normative and universal, which itself has little support in scripture, theological anthropology is inevitably a form of contextual theology.

Unfortunately the bitter fight with modernity waged by Christian evangelicals has led them to normalize this contextual theology and thus defend what they call a "Christian worldview." The superficial resemblance of this worldview with those of other non-modern cultures has then bolstered their claims that the so-called "Christian worldview" is actually universal, with modernity representing a dolorous deviation that must be corrected.  It is an approach as misguided as that of theologians in the liberal tradition that assume the ultimate universalization of the modern.

We now find that the anthropological consensus in Western culture is dissolving under the impacts of: 1. Growing cultural diversity in Europe and North America, 2. Rapid advances in the scientific understanding of the human person and, 3. Technological advances that introduce new possibilities for engagement among humans and between humans and machines. Moreover the process of globalization of Christianity, recognized as having taken place from the beginning, and which is now accelerating, challenges all claims from the West to possess or ever have possessed a normative anthropology. Global Christianity has multiple anthropologies, and from within each the gospel of God incarnate is necessarily understood in different ways.

This means that for theological education the missiological challenge to identify and relate the gospel to a diversity of cultures has become a central feature of the ministry of the church, and thus the pastoral leaders of the church. Standard curricula that place missiology or mission studies as a peripheral concern while continuing to privilege Western forms of theological anthropology are becoming increasingly ineffective in preparing men and women for ministry. Instead students need to be taught to analyze both their own culture and other emerging cultures (not least that of the emergent 2nd Machine age) in order to understand the fundamental meaning of Incarnation and how it is leads to the restoration of the fullness of human life.

Indeed, to go further, we must realize that a concern with philosophical theology, metaphysics, and systematic theology are  a product of a particular western and now modern cultural context, and indeed more specifically the culture of the intellectual elites who early on took control of the Christian church and imposed their particular interests on its theological endeavors. Which isn't to say they are irrelevant. They coincide with the cultural values of the rising educated middle class within which Methodism made its home in the 20th century and were thus a legitimate form of inculturation.

But even that culture is changing, and theological education must reckon with those changes or grow irrelevant.

In short, today and in the foreseeable future missiology as the basic inquiry into cultural context and how it influences the gospel need to take precedence over other forms of inquiry in seeking to articulate the meaning of the gospel in any and every particular place and time. They are the foundation of a theological education, for they alone provide a basis for comprehending how God's self-revelation in nature and society prepares for  God's special revelation in the contemporary world of ministry.

Theological Education and Social Responsibility

United Methodist theological schools have traditionally worked within a cultural system that assumed the value, and indeed necessity, of institutional engagement with the larger society both as a form of institutional responsibility and as a critical part of the pedagogy of preparing people for ministry in a socially engaged church. While this commitment remains unchanging, the modes of engagement must change in response to the changing cultural environments in which schools find themselves as well as the changing cultures within the churches their students will serve. 

As I suggested in the previous post, this first requires using the concept of culture as a key framework for analyzing the social situation in which a school finds itself. This doesn't displace other frameworks for social analysis, but it can help identify how to most effectively proclaim the gospel in its social context. After all, it is primarily culture that determines how societies understand themselves and adapt to their environment. Particularly in the complex cultural setting of contemporary US and global society understanding underlying cultural values and modes of influence will be critical to the faithful exercise of social responsibility. 

One aspect of this is grasping the complexity of US culture, particularly as it affects political values and affiliations. The work of Woodard in America's Nations is only one example of important contemporary efforts to map the complexity of the social terrain in which Christians bear witness. 

Another example is the rapid change and diminution in the role of traditional media in shaping the conscience of society, as well as the fragmentation of social consciousness abetted by the rise of new social media. Traditional means of shaping pubic opinion toward political decisions that accomplish social goals have greatly diminished in effectiveness, leaving institutions committed to these means without their traditional influence. In the case of the theological school this not only impacts the witness of the school, it impacts the effectiveness of the leaders they are training. 

We have seen this is the 2016 elections. In the period prior to the elections in my home state, Texas, there were an unprecedented number of political rallies opposing the election of Donald Trump and the implementation of his policies. The traditional media were flooded with messaging from churches and advocacy groups opposed to the policies of now president Trump. Yet in the end there was little evidence of impact on the final voting. Instead, as has been thoroughly analyzed, it was social media and non-traditional news that seemed to have been most effective in engaging president Trump's base and demotivating his opponents. Neither marches nor rallies, nor mainstream media blitzes seem to have been effective. 

By contrast the campaign of Beto O'Rourke for senate only two years later in 2018 used social media in combination with traditional block-walking to great effect in a near-defeat of Ted Cruz, who had been considered untouchable. This was at least in part because Cruz' campaign did not understand the emerging cultures of Texas and thus he continued to rely heavily on both the traditional media and messaging of his previous successful campaign.  

This is relevant to socially engaged theological education because schools have a responsibility to influence the emerging society of the 21st century toward Christian values, and because students need to learn how they and their ministries can be effective as change agents in society. This latter is in part an issue of ecclesiology, and thus a realm of contestation among theologians. But it is equally a matter of understanding effective communication in the wider cultural environment: a primarily missiological question that requires an understanding of how various forms of media function in different cultural settings. 

As an example: One important example of changing roles of media is a shift from messaging to conversation as a means of influencing individuals and groups. Traditional media place static messages in the public realm, repeating them almost endlessly to maintain and widen their influence. Social media allow and encourage conversation and engagement with a message. The most effective messages are not those broadcast most widely, but those which spread virally as individuals repeat them and draw their own social network into conversation. 

We have begun to understand that social media are ineffective when used as a megaphone to announce events or promulgate political ideas. They are most effective when those who seek to influence society can both initiate and shape an ongoing conversation that spreads organically through interlocking social networks. 

This is, of course, only the most basic description of how an emerging cultures influence institutional commitments to social engagement. The reality is both more complex and demands its own theological analysis. In the 19th century the debate over the "use of means" in evangelism was effectively short-circuited as Christians rapidly accepted the emerging cultural values. After all, they arose within a presumed Christian culture. Now, even as institutions and leaders must learn how to use social media effectively, the question of whether social media by its very nature promulgates values antithetical to the gospel must be considered. Again, this is a fundamentally missiological question with its own tradition of inquiry.

While the current cultural landscape can seem daunting the basic questions that need to be ask are familiar to Christians engaged in witness in new and complex cultural settings. Where in emerging or newly encountered cultures do we see the work of God in manifestations of God's Reign? Where do we find hostility to that reign that must be transformed by love? Such questions must not only be addressed to contemporary society, but to the means by which society engages in its own transformation. Only as we answer these questions can theological schools become effective agents of change. 

Theological Education in a Changing Culture

In an earlier blog I spoke of how the paradigm for higher education was shifting from "school" to "LMS," from place to system. One way to explore this change is to use various forms of systems theory that capture the complexity and dynamism characteristic of the larger cultural environment. 

One such approach is to understand the theological school as a cultural system in the midst of other cultural systems that make up its larger environment. This allows us to bring both methods of cultural analysis and cultural intelligence to bear on understanding and relating to these systems. And in considering the school itself as a culture system we also gain new means of understanding the dynamism of its relationships with these systems and use new analytical tools to address its inevitably internal frictions.

This is particularly important in the 21st century if we are to avoid adopting static solutions to dynamic challenges. I'll offer one example as a beginning for further reflection.

Theological schools, and indeed virtually all institutions of higher education are rushing to implement systems of online education. These appear a necessary response to rapid changes in number and culture of potential students and the value student culture places on accessibility and personalization, as well as the need for new pedagogical theories to address the ways these students best learn.

The problem with simply identifying "online" as a solution to the challenge of declining numbers of students and increasing competition with more "contemporary" schools is that merely going online risks creating a new set of static structures that cannot keep up with the changing culture of the potential student and student population. Within the school the implementation of such systems creates stress among existing faculty and creates conflicts over best practices in pedagogy.

As every theological school experiences, online courses may not best utilize faculty strengths or address the demands of credentialing authorities necessary to a student's ministry. In other words it may not be a ready adaptation to a changing cultural environment.

Thus a better way to view "online" is as a constantly evolving set of tools and pedagogical methods that expands the range of responses a theological school can offer to a changing cultural environment. Deploying these tools, among the many already available out of the long traditions of theological education, should involve looking at the actual cultural values of the student culture in a way that both acknowledges and honors those values, but also transforms them as the student is prepared for ministry.

Simultaneously a theological school must be constantly aware of emerging tools and the possibilities that they bring.

As an example of emerging tools, the advent of virtual reality and augmented reality as a medium of engagement.  Current implementations of online education have only the crudest forms of interaction among students, usually through written discussion forums. But it is already possible to create virtual classrooms in which students freely interact in a 3 dimensional space. As an intermediate step to this streaming 360 video can make integration of classroom lectures and online participation more engaging. Imagine the possibilities for making the classroom more accessible not merely as intellectual theater, but as a realm of real human interaction. 

In any case the kind of fully interactive and emotionally engaged relationships that need to be cultivated for the sake of effective ministry, while poorly addressed by "online" today may be addressed by emerging technologies in the very future. And to the extent that these emerging technologies become part of church culture then understanding them isn't merely a matter of theological school adaptation to student culture. It it a theological task rooted in understanding the missional meaning of "ex-carnation;" the driving of the spiritual from the physical associated with a growing wedge between the individual and society. Only a theological understanding of these can ground the adaptation of these technologies in the context of robust and culturally aware ecclesiologies.

In the meantime it would be best to adopt a pedagogical posture that allows constant adaptation to the changing environment in which theological education finds itself today rather than static adaptation of new technologies that themselves are in a state of flux.

Sometimes You Wake Up a Realist

Let’s review a few recent and older news items. 1. Apple caves to the Chinese government on selling an app that allows people in Hong Kong to communicate about where to meet and protest away from police. 2. The NBA caves to the Chinese government on support of the Hong Kong protestors. 3. Ford and General Motors caved to Hitler and it German operations built the very tanks that were used to kill American soldiers. A couple of references follow.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/11/maybe-woke-nbas-hypocrisy-china-has-awakened-us-consumers-about-their-own/, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/nazicars30.htm.)

I make this third point so we realize that US Corporations didn’t suddenly lose their moral spine. They never had it. And there is a reason for this. A corporation isn’t a moral person. Instead it is a collection of interests, all focused on making money. If you try to mediate between these interests by introducing moral standards the result is chaos. So the basic value of the corporation becomes the one value all shareholders agree on; the value of making a profit. That’s why the shareholders invested. Anything else confuses the purpose of a corporation with the purpose of a church, an NGO, a non-profit charity, or a government. Another reference and comments.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/19/lobbying-group-powerful-ceos-is-rethinking-how-it-defines-corporations-purpose/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/20/dont-trust-ceos-who-say-they-dont-care-about-shareholder-value-anymore/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/20/ceos-say-shareholders-wont-be-no-anymore-turns-out-they-already-werent/)

Of course this doesn’t mean that corporations are lawless. They obey the law because, and only because, there are serious repercussions to the bottom line if they fail to do so. Nor does it mean they abandon the social good. So long as it suits their public image and thus enhances the bottom line they will set up all kinds of initiatives to be environmentally conscious, supportive of equality and diversity and so on. The CEO’s discussed above haven’t done anything other than recognize that by appearing to put shareholder value behind morality they protect themselves and their corporations from bad press, attract support, and thus increase shareholder value. They won’t do it because its the right thing to do. They’ll do it because a failure to do so costs them, or doing it increases shareholder value.  

Does this mean that corporate leaders have no conscience? Of course not. Individually they may be highly moral, support great causes, and blush with shame at what their corporations do. But remember they weren’t hired to make independent moral judgments and impose them on the corporation. They were hired to increase shareholder value. In this respect they are like politicians who must put aside their personal morality to serve the moral standards of those who elected them. 

And if we want corporate morality it is precisely to politics that we must turn. 

Because corporations are run semi-democratically - each share gets a vote - then if a majority of shareholders wish for the corporation to adopt a moral stance they can push for it. But I wouldn’t hold my breath in this system. Most shares in most corporations are owned by institutions legally responsible to maximize profits. They won’t be voting for corporate morality. 

So we must turn to the politicians who make the law. While corporations are incapable of morality, they are capable of obeying the law. Thus it is politicians who must insure that the laws they pass keep corporations moral. Do the people of the United States believe pollution is immoral? Then pass laws to make it illegal. Do the people believe that freedom of speech is a moral good our nation is obliged to protect? Then pass laws that make it illegal to do business with those who attack it. 

Do our politicians turn out to be moral failures who cannot pass the laws that make ours a moral nation? Then we can vote them out and vote in new ones. Voting is always ethical. 

Complaining about a lack of corporate morality is like complaining about a lack of tiger vegetarianism. Better to pass laws to protect those most vulnerable to attack and accept for either one to exist some blood will be shed. It's been that way since God shed blood to cloth the first humans, and to over-cloth their children with eternal life. 

Being Human in the Coming Tribulation

American Christianity has offered Christians a seamless package of family, work, national culture, and church as a response to God’s calling to be human. Unfortunately the positive value of this American version Christendom is lost when American Christianity becomes Americana Christianity. Small wonder we have so regularly dehumanized those who cannot participate in the whole package.

But is the Americana Christian vision of what it means to be human that found in scripture? 

The foundation of the Biblical narrative occurs in the Garden when God, knowing that a person should not be alone, creates of the one, two and commands them to be fruitful and multiple. 

Relieved of the kind of false specificity that leads to perversions like asserting a literal seven day creation we see in this story almost all we need to know about what it means to be human. It begins a narrative arc that will carry us to the so-called summary of the law. “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.” 

What Jesus does by calling on the law, the primal law of Israel, is to place the teaching of the human vocation at the center of community life. The purpose of the church, like the purpose of Israel, is to call, lead, and form people into their true humanity. Worship, preaching, teaching, fellowship are all means to this end. 

Put in other words the freedom won by Christ for us on the Cross is the freedom to be human for God and one another, and thus to be human at all. 

The Church can’t be located with a GPS any more than the Garden of Eden. We look instead for where two or more (for you cannot be fully human in isolation) are gathered in Jesus' name, and thus gather in the freedom to be human for one another won and acknowledged as the work of Jesus the Christ.

Recovering this mission will become critical in the future. 

In the 19th and early 20th century Americans fell under the marketing spell of promoters of the "Christian family,” a concept created to promote US business interests. It has led to our absurd liturgical celebrations of holidays created by marketing and greeting card manufacturers rather than God’s history with humankind. 

In Americana Christianity a particular kind of family life was brought into the church as essential to the human vocation, diminishing the distinctive witness of the church. Now for most Americans, especially the post-boomers, the family looks less like Norman Rockwell and more like Modern Family with all its transience and variation. As a basis for pursuing the human vocation the old model of the American family has a distinctly sandy feel, while there is increasing solidity in fictive families built around bars, coffee shops, social causes and leisure time activities.  

In the 20th century Christians in the United States were coaxed into associating their citizenship with their Christian identity. A combination of business interests fearful of communism and their Christian allies fearful of modernist atheism created out of whole cloth the idea of a “Judeo-Christian” nation. American flags were planted in churches and national identity and its associated idolatry became part and parcel of the human vocation, even when there was (rarely) the recognition of other national identities. In Americana Christianity we celebrate nationalistic holidays as solemnly and robustly as Christmas and Easter, falsely injecting our nation into the story of salvation.

Among the post-boomer generation the association of nationalism with the human vocation is breaking down. The cynical manipulation of patriotism to support everything from pointless wars to gun ownership, while increasingly disassociating it from human rights, is clearly making it harder for some to join in the celebration. Coupled with increasing experiences of national and ethnic diversity post-boomers, and indeed all who have a growing experience of the larger world find it hard to see what Americana has to do with being fully human. 

And work? Until recently most Americans had a sense of vocation, of calling into an identity, that came through their work. Whether they worked in agriculture, factories, or professions work structured their time, gave them their most consistent relationships outside the family, provided a sense of place in the larger society, and even socialized them into a set of ethical standards. Being called, having a vocation, meant being called to work. This was a development both amenable to and resulting from early Protestant theology that saw in economic productivity a sign of God’s favor among the elect and thus and important outworking of what it means to be human. 

Those same Christians saw, and continue to see being unemployed, being idle, as a failure to be human. 

The emergence of an economy in which people hold many different jobs over a lifetime is rapidly undermining the idea that professional identity can be a fundamental part of having a human identity. For more and more Americans work no longer provides a sense of vocation, but merely a way to earn an income. 

More challenging, in the future economic productivity will be a less and less available option to Americans. Current low unemployment is an anomaly created by a combination of rising demand for personal services and families in which every potential worker must be employed at minimum wage to survive. In the future artificial intelligence and further mechanization will begin to eliminate jobs more quickly than they can be replaced. Indeed new businesses will be built around machines rather than employees. A church that assumes that being unemployed or idle is a failure to fulfill the human vocation will find itself dehumanizing the majority of its members. 

Finally with the emergence of post-denominationalism the church in practice is revealed for what too many churches have always been; social organizations built around neighborhood, social class, culture, entertainment, and services provided.  When a congregation fails in any of these areas, by becoming more diverse or less attentive its attendees (member is too strong a word) simply move on or more likely move out.  

And why not? If a church isn't in some way restoring people to their essential human vocation it has become irrelevant and imminently replaceable. 

These four changes I’ve mentioned; rapidly evolving family structures and their breakdown, the end of nationalism as a positive force in creating human heartedness, the growing disconnect between economic productivity and being human, and the church devolved into service provider and entertainer are leading to a coming tribulation that will exact a toll on every person whose humanity has been lost to sin and no longer hears from the church the voice of the gospel. 

As family, national identity, profession, and even church membership as sources of humanity dissolve under the pressures of contemporary culture only a church wholeheartedly dedicated to the human vocation of loving God and neighbor will be able to rescue the perishing and care for dying.  

We can do it of course, and it is being done wherever we let go our reliance on Americana  Christianity and return to reliance on Christ.

Creative Resource Sharing in the 4th Industrial Revolution

What is being called the 4th Industrial Revolution, or sometimes the 2^nd Machine Age is already disrupting human societies, and that disruption will both spread and increase. More specifically it is beginning to disrupt traditional educational goals, and will demand that educators develop new goals, and new forms of collaboration. In the coming world shaped by the 4^thIndustrial Revolution education to foster human relations will be as important as education to teach human vocations. And that shift for an emphasis on vocation to relation is the challenge educators will face in the coming decades. 

Let me elaborate. Traditional education has had one or more of five goals. 

The earliest of these was vocational; teaching students how to do a job. The first universities were vocational. They had three schools: medicine, law, and theology. The first prepared doctors, the second lawyers, and the third church administrators. In the medieval period kings and princes didn’t go to school - they learned to rule by watching their parents and the only real skills they needed were the skills of a warrior. A thousand years ago most European royalty weren’t even literate. They had lawyers and bishops to read things for them. But they were good at war. 

Then around 500 years ago this began to change. Books like Machiavelli’s The Prince appeared. Leaders needed to be more than warriors, they needed an education that specifically prepared them to lead emerging modern societies. And this is where, for the first time, we have in universities the ars liberalis, the liberal arts. Leaders of human societies needed to understand humans, and that meant reading history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics. But note, what these emerging leaders read were old classics; the literature of the Greeks and Romans. 

But times were changing, and soon it became clear that new challenges required new knowledge. New sciences, like political science and economics began to emerge. And the old “natural philosophy” became rooted in experiment and mathematics and thus became the natural sciences. So a third goal in addition to professional training and leadership emerged for the college or university: generating new knowledge, whether about the natural world or the human social world. Universities became centers for research. 

The forth goal for education came about during the 19th and 20th century breakdown of the apprenticeship system. Especially in the United States schools took over teaching auto mechanics, commercial drivers, electricians, plumbers, engineers, and so on. Schools were called upon to train experts with specialized modern skills. At a lower level this included more mechanical skills. At a higher level it included things like engineering and architecture.  

Then there is one other historical change that has greatly affected education in the modern world, and that is the rise of democracy. In late medieval society the only people who needed a liberal arts education were the nobility and maybe very rich business people. They were the leaders of society. Yet in a democracy leadership belongs to the people. So it is the people, all the people, who need understand humans and human society so that they can act as responsible citizens who exercise their leadership by voting. 

And here we find a fifth purpose for modern education - creating citizens who can intelligently exercise their responsibility in a democracy. Now everyone must be trained for human leadership, not just an elite. Some people may be doctors and lawyers, others may be engineers or architects, others may be teachers, others may run businesses, others may be plumbers or carpenters. BUT everyone needs to understand what it means to be human so that everyone can exercise their responsibility as a citizen/leader in a democratic society. 

And this is where we are right now. Schools, from kindergartens through universities prepare some people for professions like law and medicine. They prepare some people for skills-based vocations. They prepare some people to expand the range of human knowledge through research. They prepare some people to be leaders, whether in the realm of politics or business. And they should prepare all people to be citizens who understand their fellow humans. 

The 4th Industrial Revolution is going to challenge this model of education for two reasons: First artificial intelligence will gradually replace people in both professions and skills-based jobs. Secondly being successful in human relationships will become the most important way to thrive in the 4^thIndustrial Revolution. As machines do more and more for us we will value more and more what only humans can do with other humans. 

• Example: Do you need an accountant? Hire a computer program like Quickbooks. Need a layer? Hire a computer program like LegalZoom. Do you need to repair a broken sink? Go to YouTube and you’ll get step by step instructions to do it yourself. You don’t need a plumber. Need an auto mechanic? When the radiator of my car began to leak I didn’t go to the mechanic, I just went to YouTube for instructions on how to replace and I ordered the part on Amazon for delivery to my door. 
• And all those YouTube videos? If all you teach are skills then these videos may replace you.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, or maybe for a decade, but it will happen. 

In a conference last fall I heard about a major clothing manufacturer has set up a system in which complex computer algorithms design the clothes, test the designs with virtual focus groups, generate advertising campaigns, order all of the materials and have them shipped to an automated factory in China. In the factory robots make the clothes, box them, and ship them to the stores. Soon they will be shipped in self-driving trucks. ONLY at the stores do humans become part of the process. And if the clothing is ordered on the internet no human touches the clothes until the customer puts them on. 

So let me detail for you which human professions are eliminated in this system: designers and artists, marketing professionals, accountants, seamstresses, graphic designers, and quite probably sales people as well. 

Of course this system isn’t up and working. But it will be sooner rather than later. And the people it will put out of work won’t just be in the US. They will be in Asia and Latin America and Africa. So if we are just educating people just to do mechanical jobs, we may be educating people to be jobless in the future. 

But education has never been just giving humans skills has it? All of us in education know that job training is only part of it. We aren’t creating workers to be replaced by robots. We are creating citizen-leaders who will take on the critical responsibility of leading society. We are creating humans who know how to collaborate with their fellow humans, care for their fellow humans, and indeed love their fellow humans. This human vocation, these human to human skills, can never be replaced by a machine, no matter how intelligent. And this human to human vocation will be the key to our future. 

What humans were created to do, and most desire to do, is to relate to their fellow humans. And that tells us where the future of education lies. It lies in the liberal arts and their study of what it means to be human. It lies in the task of preparing of preparing men and women to be citizens who care for one another and society. The future will be on learning how to foster relationships rather than merely carry out a vocation.

And this, above all, requires three new forms of collaboration. 

The first is rebuilding the collaboration between spirituality and secular society. It will be a collaboration in which the enormous value of secularity in building modern societies is re-introduced to the spirituality, the sense of God and the transcendent, necessary for the citizens of these societies to realize the fullness of their human purpose. 

The second is learning to collaborate with the new smart machines. According to work done at Stamford those who succeed will be those who learn how to human creativity, ideation, and intuition compliment emerging intelligent machines. Think of your smart phone. It is already full of artificial intelligence, but it can’t actually do anything useful without you. Think of i-Movie. It is a very intelligent application. Feed in some video and it will come up with a movie. A bad movie. Because only you can identify what is interesting, what makes a compelling story, what represents and happy ending. Humans have to provide the creativity, the new ideas, and the intuitive feel for what has emotional impact.

The third form of collaboration and that most important to us, will be between educational institutions across different nations and cultures. We can’t learn to be human, or teach what it means to be human, from within a single cultural or national context. We have teach each other across cultural and national boundaries. We have to learn from each other across cultural and national boundaries. And that means collaboration in teaching and learning. 

And this is why our team from Southern Methodist University is here in Manila today. We are creating a educational tool called “The Virtual Visiting Professor.” It will make learning resources available to both teachers and students worldwide. More importantly our virtual visiting professors will come from across globe. Teachers and students will be able to learn from scholars and practitioners from a variety of different cultural and social contexts. 

In fact, our first group of virtual visiting professors is made up of theological school teachers from here in the Philippines, whom we have been recording for the last four days. You will hear from some of them later. 

In the next 12 months we’ll add virtual visiting professors from Africa, and Latin America. In the next several years we hope to have hundreds of virtual visiting professors sharing their passion and expertise across the globe, including with those of us in Western colleges and universities. Because those of us in Western universities cannot understand what it means to be human unless we learn from Asians and Africans and Latin Americans. We cannot teach our students how to better understand their own humanity unless we engage our students with multiple cultures and viewpoints. 

Of course this is a huge challenge. Unlike other material on the internet we won’t just offer lectures, but other resources that teachers need in the classroom such as readings, discussion questions, and learning objectives. And instead of focusing on international experts we’ll be looking for local teachers who remain close their students and situation. 

As importantly we won’t just be creating one-off resources, but bringing scholars and practitioners into a collaborative network in which individuals and institutions continue to contribute to the resources available. We will partner with institutions here in the Philippines and across the globe so that our first resource scholars here in the Philippines, our first Virtual Visiting Professors, will continue to develop material to share across the globe, and as we add virtual visiting professors from other continents will find new colleagues for collaboration. 

And finally we won’t limit our resources to those who have access to the internet. We are presently developing and patenting an inexpensive hardware device that can make all of our program content available anyplace where the sun shines to power the batteries. 

The 4th Machine Age is coming to all of us. And it will challenge all of our understandings of what it means to be human and to live meaningful human lives. To keep our humanity in the coming age of robots and artificial intelligence we will need to offer each other, across the globe, the knowledge we are passionate about, the questions and concerns that animate us the most, and the practical experiences that we can share to help one another. 

Only when we ask together what it means to be human will we find answers that meet the challenge of the future. But we can rest assured that if we ask that question the critical question of what it means to be humans in relationship together we will find that the future is glorious for us all. 

Reason the Path to Freedom

In my previous post I tried, however artlessly, to make two points. First there is no freedom in a church that manipulates its members. Secondly if the church is in the business of  manipulation it will, if it hasn’t been already overwhelmed by the superior ability of artificial intelligences. 

In making the first point my linking of emotions with manipulation was rightly challenged  by the fact (which I accept) that appeals to emotion are a necessary part of any kind of motivation. Put another, motivation isn’t necessarily manipulation. Further, an emotional experience may be an entry into a genuinely spiritual experience.

Or it might not. The problem is that emotions are notoriously non-discriminative and easily misled. Take, for example, the way that natural feelings of love for and pride in one’s family, clan, tribe, and nation can be turned to hatred for strangers and foreigners. There is a reason that right in the heart of the formation of the nation Israel was God’s command to love the foreigner and sojourner. The birth of a nation inevitably sows the seeds of xenophobia. 

More importantly, as the church has always taught, love, caritas, is not a feeling. It is an act of the will guided by reason. This is why this particular love is the only kind of love that is both free and is liberating. 

It may be a good thing to be freed to fully express ones feelings of devotion to God, particularly in the cultural detritus of an overly intellectualizing enlightenment. But being freed from emotional constraints isn’t the same as being freed from sin, and a confusion between the two is deleterious to the faith. Nor is the feelingof being set free the same as actually being set free to love as Christ loves. 

Or as scripture teaches, true love, the love of Christ, is shown by the fruit we bear, not our feelings.

Without intellectual discipline, without the discipline of testing the feeling of a spirit’s presence against the Spirit of God alive in scripture, it is easy for every kind of spirit to masquerade as the Spirit of Christ. And without the discipline of the will toward doing good, feelings of compassion quickly dissipate before any fruit is born.

For this reason a church that wishes to lead its members to freedom in Christ must attend to the development of the intellect and the will. It is an endeavor threatened by the emerging culture of the 2nd machine age. 

Threatened first because the rise of artificial intelligence makes it easier to abandon natural human intelligence. Thinking about God is necessarily abstract, and developmental psychologists tell us that that even when we humans are mature enough for abstraction we fall back to concrete thinking. We’d rather do math on our fingers than remember the laws of math, just as we’d rather assign migrants the concrete status of “illegal” or “victim” than contemplate who they really are for God. 

In the parable of the Good Samaritan Jesus takes the easy “count your fingers” concept of neighbor and makes it hard. He pulls the rug from under a falsely concrete concept of neighbor and expands into an abstraction with no geographical or legal reference. A concrete act of love alone gives substance to a concept of neighbor that has no boundaries. 

Our problem is that Christians used to asking Siri or Alexa or Google for answers are losing their capacity for such difficult questions. Nor are they helped by already existing AI controlled Bible studies that short circuit the intellectual process of reading scripture for one’s self. The “chain reference Bible” was perhaps the earliest subversion of the human capacity to engage scripture for ideological purposes. It isn’t the last. The proliferation of such studies as apps and online can readily be misused to undermine the capacity of Christians to think freely about God’s Word and thus test the spirits in their midst.

The second threat to loving God with the mind follows naturally: congregations and church leaders dependent on these AI powered apps can easily be manipulated by their effectively anonymous authors. Indeed mass manipulation becomes possible as preachers and churches subscribe to studies, sermon outlines, and all sorts of related material in a complete package for managing the intellectual (more properly anti-intellectual) life of the congregation. 

And this is taken even further when worship is effectively taken over by AI as churches subscribe to so-called worship resources that dictate everything from songs to prayers to sermon outlines and illustrations. Buy a package and you have an instant church, and a pastor and congregation freed from engaging in critical thinking and intellectual discernment. As a seminary professor I sometimes wonder why we bother to educate students when all that we train them to do may be farmed out to a for-profit publishing house whose true values and intentions are hidden from view. 

In the coming 2nd machine age real leadership will be exercised in the kind of spiritual discernment which scripture advises to the then nascent Christian community. And at the core of that discernment will be reason and observation. Leaders for the coming age must realize and teach that when the Spirit sets us free it is to love God with our minds, for only then are we free indeed. Nothing will do more to confirm the freedom won for us by Christ than a church that teaches its members how to think. 

Restoring Love as the Source of Human Value

There is a heresy at the heart of American Christianity: the belief that the production of disciples of Christ is what gives Christians and Christian churches their value. 

In the last post I pointed out four challenges to the way in which we value our humanity posed by the 2nd Machine Age we are beginning to live in. 

First, machines will increasingly take over the intellectual tasks that were markers of human distinctiveness. What we believed marked us as unique will first be shared, and then we will be surpassed. 

Second, machines will become moral agents, making decisions of the type heretofore limited to humans. This will attack the assumption that human uniqueness lies in our being conscious moral agents. Or more properly, the nature of our moral agency will change. As creators of moral agents who determine the parameters of their decision making ours will be a kind of super-morality - taking on a role more like that traditionally assigned to God. 

Third, with the rise of artificial intelligence machines will become increasingly capable and will no longer need human servants. This means that humans will be increasingly cut out of the cycles of economic productivity by which we’ve commonly measured our value.

Finally, the rise of AI will inexorably concentrate wealth in the hands of the minuscule elite that owns them and has the majority claim on what they produce. And this will render an increasing number of people “worthless” by common social standards. 

To the extent that we have valued ourselves on the basis of possessing intellect, possessing moral agency, and our productivity (in any sense) we will have a decreasing value. To the extent that we haven’t fully considered our responsibility as creators of moral agents our theological anthropology will remain incapable of relating our actual selves to God. Together these will demand a renewal of Christian anthropology that that focuses on what actually is capable of giving a distinctive value to our humanity: the love of God.

With regard to the first of these challenges we are in some respects already on our way. Pastors thinking deeply about the inclusion of persons who do not have or will never have a fully formed intellect have already taken on part of a key challenge of the 2nd Machine Age. The same is true of those engaging with some seriousness in the emerging field of disability studies. Now we'll need to go further. We will find that relative to the capabilities of artificial intelligence and the intellectual demands placed on us by our environment we are all less than fully formed. 

With regard to the second, in an odd way the current struggle within the United Methodist Church has forced the self-identified traditionalists to at least assert a theology of human value based on God’s love for all rather than on the production of moral behavior. Likewise progressives are, or should be engaged in a recovery of a theology of human value based in God's love in relation to persons whose excluding behavior they find loathsome. But I note that this is, on either side, a work of recovery rather than invention. We are not the first generation of Christians to struggle with God’s love, and thus the demand on our love, for those incapable or unwilling to producing moral behavior of which we believe God approves.

Similarly, serious theological consideration of the responsibilities of parenting and leadership more generally engage the problem of nurturing and guiding moral agents. But it will be necessary to expand the scope of such reflection to include those who create moral agents and those who, as they design virtual worlds, create the moral universes in which increasing numbers of persons dwell at least part of the time. And we will need to ask: what does it mean to sit in judgment on creatures for which we are responsible - already a fraught problem when it comes to pets. 

It is the third challenge, associating value with productivity, that will and must reconfigure contemporary Christian culture. 

That human value derives from God's love isn’t a new idea. Indeed it is the oldest Christian theological idea. Jesus reveals that God values us, and thus gives us value, as participants in the God’s own inner life. In Christ we are drawn into the love that defines God’s nature as Lover, Beloved, and Love itself. There is nothing we can do that can either increase or decrease our value since that value derives entirely from what the Triune God has done through all eternity; include Creation in the Divine Life. 

But while we humans cannot increase or decrease our value, we are invited by Christ to experience and enjoy  that value by consciously participating in the Divine love, by participating in the love between the Love and the Beloved. 

It is the nature of the participation in Divine love offered by the Church that will need to change in the emerging 2nd Machine Age. 

The problem of participation will first affect the so-called prosperity gospel preachers, since it is inevitable that given increasing joblessness and concentration of wealth their congregation members will not experience prosperity. If you are preaching that material prosperity is the means by which your congregation participates in God's love then you are doomed.

Equally challenged is the implicit message to the already prosperous that God has blessed them so that they can (through the church) give their money and time to others. This is frequently the bedrock message of American Christian churches. We validate our prosperity by the assumption of social responsibility, and these become the twin guarantors of our value. As that prosperity disappears and people are less able to assume social responsibility preachers of the gospel will (hopefully) be forced to offer a deeper message about God's love and human value. 

Yet the deepest challenge will be developing a theological anthropology that disentangles value (of both individuals and the church itself)  from the production of disciples, the growth of the church, and the production of righteousness.  

Look at the United Methodist Church mission statement: "The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." The very mission of the church is tied to production. And inevitably the valuation of both members and congregations is tied to production as well. UM leaders across the board have made it clear that congregations that aren't producing are failures, as are their pastors. Worse, there is no reason that cleverly programed smart machines can't market the gospel as effectively as they already market goods on the internet. 

It is relatively easy to assert that we shouldn't judge our own value or the value of others on the basis of economic productivity, although putting this assertion into practice is difficult. But when it comes to the production of disciples we appear to have a clear command of Christ to make something, and thus a clear valuing by God of human productivity. And yet this is heresy, a heresy at the heart of American Christian identity that has led it to the greater heresy of placing productivity as the key marker of human value.

When Jesus calls his apostles to join in his work of both manifesting the immediacy of God’s Reign while proclaiming the same he isn't calling for the apostolic production of disciples. He isn't calling for the formation of an evangelistic machine whose input is sinners and output is believers. But to see this clearly we need to consider three things. 1. All those verses in which Jesus calls his disciples to join his work must be considered, not merely one or two verses that churches have grasped as inspirational slogans to spur their leaders and members on to greater productivity. 2. The actual implementation of Jesus' command by those who knew him best. e. A close consideration of the relationship between the creativity engendered by love and the productivity engendered by command. 

In the next two posts I’ll consider these. With regard to the first I’ll maintain that taken together, and along with their outworking by Jesus' disciples, Jesus’ call for his followers to join in Jesus’ mission is a call to join in loving their fellow humans, not producing members for the church. With regard to the second I’ll maintain that this loving is essentially a creative act rather than a productive act. It is our ability to create in love, in union with  reality-encompassing Divine, that must give human life its distinct value in the coming 2nd Machine Age

Is Worthless the New Priceless?

Revaluing and Devaluing Humanity

The post is the first in a series that will examine how rapid changes in our culture will interrogate classical Christian forms of self-understanding, and create new understandings of what it means to be human. 

One part of the greatest shift in human culture since the enlightenment is the emergence of the 2nd Machine Age. Alongside the rapid degradation of the eco-systems on which human life depends, new concepts of what it means to live in time, and the reformation of scientific epistemology it will permanently change our perception of what it means to be human. 

The 2nd Machine Age is already creating disruptions in the economy from which new forms of human empowerment emerging, even as it challenges traditional sources of human security and meaning. But most importantly the 2nd Machine Age will challenge current understandings of what it means to be human and offer new possibilities for self-understanding.

The 2nd machine age will complete a process that began with the emergence of modernity and the rise of efficient modern social structures in Europe. The genesis of such efficiency, and the value placed on it, has its own history, but it represents a continuation of structures created by the Roman Empire and perpetuated and refined by the Roman Catholic Church even as the Empire crumbled. 

The near endless wars inaugurated by the Reformation would lead more directly to the increasingly efficient social organizations necessary to gather and distribute resources to support victorious armies. The maintenance of the colonial enterprises that soon followed led to the further refinement of such structures, even as gradually enhanced communication on a global scale both demanded and allowed further efficiencies. By the 19th century the industrial revolution provided both a model and an impetus for a modern society: the machine. 

A kind of synergy developed. The machine isn't merely a thing. It is an idea: a means by which processes can be organized for maximum production with minimum cost. Its core value is efficiency. And efficiency isn’t merely a core value for machines. It becomes the core value for the society that the machines serve. Human society could and would be reordered to serve the needs of machines, which would more efficiently serve society. (And the capacity to make war, it must be noted, drove both.)

There were profound implications for human self-understanding and self-valuing. Heretofore humans (at least in the Christian West) understood their unique value primarily in terms of moral agency and unique intellectual capacity. Made in the image of God, humans had a unique capacity for righteousness and understanding of both themselves and divine. In the first machine age the capacity for production, for creating wealth, would be added to these two and eclipse them. 

The church was fully complicit in these changes. Indeed the church, particularly the Protestant Church re-defined itself away from the worship and praise of God to the production of disciples. In order to “make disciples for the transformation of the world” churches would become evangelistic machines whose product, disciples, would become the workers in either making more disciples or moving down the assembly line become part of a social transformation machine. Even worship was called into the process of production. Rather than being an end in itself worship became a critical gateway into discipleship. Both pastors and congregations would be judged by their output, their production of disciples.

Humans might be made in the image of God, but the church quickly affirmed that they were also made into the image of the machine. They were producers. 

And this is what will change in the 2nd machine age.

First, with the rise of artificial intelligence machines will become increasingly capable and will no longer need human servants. They will take over more and more of the tasks now carried out by humans. This goes far beyond robots taking over manual labor. Already artificial intelligences replace receptionists, customer service professionals, bookkeepers, accountants, lawyers, medical professionals, and computer programmers. More deeply AI will, as it already does, play an increasingly role in guiding all forms of human interaction in the realm of the internet and social media.

Examples. A mere year ago (2018) it took a trained human radiologist to formulate a report on a routine echocardiogram on my heart. A day or more would pass before a second appointment could be made for my cardiologist to examine the report and formulate treatments. This year (2019) the machine used to create the echocardiogram constantly compared it to the previous year’s echocardiogram and within minutes generated a diagnostic report. I could see my cardiologist within the hour. And someone lost a job. And to the extent that my cardiologist examines such reports, performs a rational analysis according to fixed rubric, and prescribes a treatment one wonders how long it is before she is replaced. 

Or consider the use by churches of web sites as portals through the internet, and videos for preaching, teaching, and evangelism. It is likely that AI designed templates based on large scale data analysis of those colors and themes more attractive to consumers were used to create most current church websites. It is equally likely that videos were produced with heavy design input from similar AI analysis and templates. How long before your web designer just loses a job? 

Moreover it is well within the reach of current artificial intelligence to write a sermon crafted to tug on the heartstrings and empty the wallet. Even more within the range of AI (already demonstrated at a conference I attended in Nov. 2018) is creating a full range of worship music in a variety of styles and performing that music on synthesizers. Given the highly mannered leadership styles of both traditional and contemporary worship it will be relatively simple for AI to both create and lead, in robotic form, a worship service. 

Second, machines will become more autonomous, with self-driving cars being the most obvious case. They will increasingly become moral agents, making decisions of the type heretofore limited to humans. We have already seen the extent to which computer controlled flight systems are tended  to rather than controlled by pilots. Such machine based decision-making will interrogate the uniqueness of humans as moral agents, and indeed will place humans in the position of creating moral agents. 

Third, machines will increasingly take over the intellectual tasks that were markers of human distinctiveness. The now popularized shift in the mid-20th century from computers as people to computers as machines was simply the leading edge of this. Artificial intelligences are now beginning to direct the activity of computers, determining productive research directions rather than merely serving human masters. And it is predictable if not inevitable that they will inaugurate research, at first under the guidance of goals set by humans, but possibly guided by their own emerging values. 

Finally, the rise of AI will inexorably concentrate wealth in the hands of the minuscule elite that owns them and has the majority claim on what they produce. The growing gap between the ultra rich and everyone else will only grow in the coming decades. Churches will experience something similar. Those which most effectively use the tools of the 2nd machine age in marketing and worship production will capture a growing share of the religion market, while others will fall into a devalued obscurity. Indeed we have seen this in the UMC for the last two decades as both pastors and congregations that failed to “produce” disciples have been subject to either constant intervention to make them more "productive" or failing that, treated as toxic or incompetent pariahs. 

These changes will send a clear message to humans who have come to value themselves and understand their humanity in terms of moral agency, intellectualization, and particularly production, whether of material wealth or Christian disciples. The distinctiveness of humans as moral agents and intellects will diminish or disappear, and humans as producers will have a steadily decreasing value.

In short, critical parts of human self-understanding, the self-understanding ratified by Protestant theological anthropology, will disappear or be completely devalued in the 2nd machine age. A prayer in the UM liturgy asks that humans be “spared from grinding toil that destroys the fullness of life.” In the coming age humans may actually beg for grinding toil just so they have an opportunity to affirm to themselves their value. 

There is another possibility for human self-understanding, but it will require a radical reworking of contemporary Christian understandings of what it means to be human. We will need to recognize that the unique human vocation, for which humans are uniquely fitted, is the capacity for the worship of God, building human community, and participation in the ongoing creation of the world.  These will be the subject of the next several posts. 

(Those interested in these developments might wish to read: The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson or 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Harari.)

Don't Want to Live in That World

A couple of years ago at a conference I was sitting at lunch with a group of scholar; missiologists I respect. They were generally more conservative than I am, and so when the topic of same-sex marriage came up I decided to be more an observer than participant. 

Speaking of his church members one said, “they don’t want to live in a world where men marry men.”  And they all nodded.

Understand that these are people who speak other languages fluently. They have lived years in other cultural settings. They read the Bible and are dedicated to following Jesus. They teach students of many races and many have married into other cultures and ethnicities. They are themselves Latino and African American and  Asian as well as White American, men and women. They cannot be easily dismissed as bigots. 

But they can be located in a kind of global evangelical meta-culture which, to cite Geertz, creates a structuring of human experience that, being perceived of as uniquely real, offers a deep sense of meaning. And that structuring of human experience is around a divine ordering of human society believed to be read directly from and enjoying the authority of the Word of God in the Bible. 

The world the denizens of this culture do not want to live in is any world that interrogates or denies its founding myth; that God’s order is immediately available for human implementation through reading the Bible. 

And same sex marriage, not just in society at large (which isn’t expected to follow God’s order,) but especially in the Church, directly denies that God’s desired order can be read directly out of scripture. Same sex marriage in the church rests on the assertion that God’s desired order is equally revealed in scientific descriptions of the natural and human world. These become central to a natural theology  which any theological description of God’s ordering must take into account. Nor can one simply dismiss the observable natural order as spoiled by Sin. Genesis 9 quoted in Acts 14 gives the lie to any such theological perversions. It is and remains God’s world. 

But as soon as rational and scientific descriptions of the world become a partner with scripture in discerning God’s order the founding myth of the global evangelical meta-culture comes into question. God’s order appears more complex than scripture allows, and humans have a far more active and complex role in discerning it. A sense of meaning and even purpose in this world shaped by scientifically informed natural theology will be very different from that found by reading the Bible alone. 

I thought of all this as I watched a Brandi Carlisle concert. A brilliant, moving songwriter. A woman married to a woman. A mother of two daughters. I thought of it as I listened to the Turtle Creek Corale and their evokative imaging of Silver Bells at their Christmas concert. Where two men may marry and raise children and greet friends on the street. And that is the world I want to live in. 

Not just because it fully includes the people with whom I live and for whom I care along with their aspirations to love this world and in this world as God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son. But because only this world is wide and deep enough to manifest the fullness of God’s self revelation; which cannot be limited to Jesus Christ or the words of God’s Word. 

And because only this world adequately challenges humans to rise to their full role as stewards of God’s created order. 

There is a parable of Jesus in which a man leaves three stewards in charge of his estate. Two take charge as he has directed, use their initiative, and bring an increase. One, fearing his master as a hard man,  buries what he has been given in the ground where it yields nothing. 

Too many Christians are like this third steward, frightened of the responsibility for reaching their own judgements based on all the evidence of God’s self-disclosure. They are frightened of the risk that leads to an increase for God’s Reign. And so fearing God’s wrath they try to simply reiterate what was always accepted as a godly order in the past, holding fast to the assurance that if they have not fully manifested God’s righteousness, at least they have avoided God’s wrath.

I don’t want to live in that world, and frankly I don’t think the apostles, not least Paul, wanted to either. Their teaching and preaching, fired by Christ’s spirit, exploded beyond the bounds of a first century Jewish conception of God’s order. It discerned dimensions of diversity in the human world hitherto unimagined. And it saw an underlying unity whose basis had been hitherto unknown. Their apocalyptic imagination saw a future so fantastic that it has inspired humans ever sense to dream of new Jerusalems.  What would those shaken into awareness of the vastness of God’s plan and the depth of their responsibility to understand it and carry it forward think of their descendants busy defending the status quo lest their master be angry? 

I do not want to live in their world. Christ calls us to something wider, deeper, and more far reaching. Christ calls us to be stewards whose task is not to imitate the past, but to discern from our ever expanding knowledge of God’s creation those forms of human relationship within creation that most resemble God’s Reign. And we do it knowing that even if we fail our daring to try is more faithful than acting out of a fear of failure. Any future we create as we act out our freedom and responsibility in Christ will be more beautiful than the past, and will give more glory to God. 

On the Border Between Science and Theology

Is where everything happens.

Marcelo Gleiser has written eloquently about what he calls the Island of Knowledge. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmos-quantum-and-consciousness-is-science-doomed-to-leave-some-questions-unanswered/  for an account of where he is coming from. Gleiser’s image of an island of knowledge that is always expanding raises the question of just what is the ocean into which it expands. What is that other part of reality into which knowledge expands, but which can never be fully known? 

Actually theologians and philosophers have a name for that other part of reality. It is called transcendence, that which is beyond the kind of human knowledge that science generates. The island that is known through science is then called immanence. 

Transcendence is the particular domain of reality that theology claims to explore with its particular ways of knowing. Those ways of knowing vary according to the culture in which theology takes its specific forms, as do the characterizations of transcendence. 

But regardless of these cultural (usually identified as religious) variations all theologies have this in common: Just as transcendence is the name of the space into which the scientific island of knowledge grows, immanence is the name of the space into which the theological island of knowledge grows. Indeed it has nowhere else to go. 

Whether a religion bases it’s understanding of transcendence on philosophical speculation or revelation, that understanding assumes and lives on the boundary between human knowing that belongs to the domain of immanence and the transcendent that it claims to know. And every expansion of its knowledge of the transcendent stretches the immanent capacity to know and pushes into the immanent domain of acting on that knowledge. 

So science and theology share a common boundary at which all increases in knowledge are possible, and that is the boundary between transcendence and immanence. And on the boundary are found all those currently contested issues about what it means to be human, since it is humans and humans alone who straddle that boundary with their personhood. 

This leaves us with two possibilities for understanding how science and theology interact. One is that there is an ever growing shared body of knowledge - what on a Venn diagram would represent the overlap between the expansion of science into transcendence and the expansion of theology into immanence. Thus, for example, as scientists push the boundaries of knowing into realms that directly affect our understanding of what it means to be human in relation with both other creatures and one another there is a clear overlap with theological reflection on the same relationships, but understood out of meditation on what is known through revelation or philosophical reflection. 

And each may, and should inform the other. The scientists' own boundary indicates the importance of transcendence to human self-understanding. Specifically to be human is to relate to transcendence out of the quest of knowledge. The theologian’s own boundary indicates the importance of immanence to human self-understanding because to be a knowing human is to be rooted in the immanent domain, more specifically to be a creature that grasps the immanent domain with its senses and seeks to extend the language of immanence into describing the transcendent. 

Yet there is a more intriguing possibility for shared knowledge. Rather than imaging relatively smooth overlapping boundaries between the knowledge of immanence and the knowledge of transcendence we might see them sharing a fractal boundary whose expansion can go on forever sharing only a boundary and never a domain. Transcendence and immanence always touch, but the one never crosses over into the other.

Rather than finding a shared domain, theologians and scientists will find new dimensions of their common boundary. 

And this is why scientists and theologians have much to discuss with each other. They are not only exploring a common boundary. At a macro level they have overlapping concerns related to what it means to be human on the boundary with transcendence in relation to society and the larger natural world. There is plenty about which to dialogue. But it will always be a dialogue at the border of their respective ways of knowing, lest either be deprived of having a voice at all. 

Pro-Israel and Anti-Semitic

That was what a Jewish colleague said to me in describing many of the Christians he works with regularly.

It seems a strange designation, but it should challenge Christians to think more deeply about their relationship with both Jews and Judaism, and how their attitude toward Israel may be the other same of the same bad coin.

Let’s start with the easy part. Christian discourse about Judaism is almost always anti-Semitic. The reason for this is that it almost always characterizes Jews and Judaism in Christian terms, inevitably creating some form of religious other in order to better define what it means to be Christian. There are three main forms:

1. The worst form of appears in the “Christ-killers” discourse that began, if not with John’s gospel then the earliest interpretations of it. It continued through the early church, inspired and justified pogroms and expulsions all through European Christian history, and most recently animates and inspires white supremeist attacks on Jews. 
2. More subtle, and still pervasive in Protestant Christian preaching, is comparing Judaism as religion of law versus Christianity as the religion of grace. The more subtle form of this is comparing any kind of Christian legalism to the teaching of the Pharisees, or of any kind of sacerdotalism to the religion of the Sadducees and priests. Jews and Judaism othered in the form of the cartoon caricatures of Jewish religious leaders found in the New Testament. 
3. Finally, and most difficult for those who have recognized the explicit and implicit anti-Semitism in the forms above, is characterizing Jews and Judaism as “just like us” except that Judaism doesn’t acknowledge Jesus as the Christ. Of course this is a big step forward from either 1 or 2, but it still defines Judaism in Christian terms. So, for example, when Christians recognize that Judaism really is a religion that recognizes God’s grace and love we are still defining it in terms of our centers of validity. 

One can argue that defining others in one’s own terms is inevitable. We all process human relationships in terms of our own point of view and values. Who a person, group, or religion is to us is inevitably who they are for us. But the problem with all three of the above characterizations of Jews and Judaism is that they define Jews and Judaism in terms of what came before us. By comprehending Jews and Judaism in Biblical categories found in Christian theology we are defining them in terms of what is supposed to precede Christianity and which Christianity therefore inevitably supersedes.

Even when we find in Judaism the foundations of our own religion; whether in theology, ritual, ethics, or prophecy we inevitably become a crushing weight built upon it and thus never allow it to be for us something new, something truly different from ourselves. 

And this is both historically false and demeaning. What I have learned these last 10 years in dialogue with Jews in both Dallas and Israel is that contemporary Judaism, whatever common foundations it may share with Christianity historically, is in many ways a post-Christian religion with its own integrity. The Judaism of the oral Torah, remembered and elaborated in the ongoing process of the Talmud, speaks to us with an independent voice that we cannot comprehend within the limited framework afforded us by Christian theology. We cannot speak about it, except to report what we have heard from it. 

And this requires of Christians that our theological understanding grow in the process of Jewish-Christian dialogue. We can't approach dialogue to find something we forgot about our scriptures but the Jews somehow remember.  We must approach dialogue with the expectation of learning what we never knew and never could know from a people with their own distinct knowledge of and relationship with God. 

But this requires that we recognize that our relationship with God manifest in creeds, rituals, and ethics be regarded as a sufficiency but not a plenitude. We know all we need, but never all that there is to know about God. 

And that gets us to the problem of Christians who are “pro-Israel,” or more generally understand Israel in geo-political terms. Almost inevitably the Christian concept of the modern nation-state of Israel consists of one or more three American Christian fantasies. 

1. The first is a fantasy in which modern Israel re-iterates our own American struggle to found a burgeoning, modern, democracy in a new land. As persecuted Christians fled Europe for the New Jerusalem, so persecuted Jews fled Europe to re-take the old Zion that was always rightfully theirs. Was the land already occupied? Well so was the New World. But just as Christian civilization would displace or convert the Native Americans so modern European Jews would turn the fallow soil of Israel into a gardens and vineyards, quite naturally displacing the Arabs who happened to already live there.
2. The second fantasy is the imagined Christian end of history in which apocalyptic end-times prophecies of the restoration of Israel usher in the return of Christ. Never mind that this scenario spells war, death, and destruction of countless Jews as the world’s armies gather on the plain of Meggido and the great tribulation takes place. From the safety of their post-rapture view of history Christians will be able to cheer the salvation of the righteous remnant before the creation of the New Jerusalem. 
3. The third, doppleganger of the first two, imagines that Israel is nothing but an extension of the American "empire" and indeed of some metaphysical "Empire" down through the ages. 

In either or all of these fantasies Israel as a Jewish nation is once again the “other” against which Christians define their place, now not theologically, but historically. So even when they are nuanced they are both simultaneously pro-Israel and anti-Semitic. John Hagee believes that Jews are “just like us” and do not need to convert to Christianity to be saved, but his understanding of Israel formulated in terms of the return of Christ is still anti-Semitic in the sense of which I speak.

And again, what Christians, particularly American Christians must do is to let Jews generally and Israelis specifically tell us who they are and how they understand history and their place in it. Instead of putting Israel into the context of a Christian reading of history we need to ask how Jews understand Israel in a Jewish reading of history. We might learn something. Because just as our Christian understanding of God is sufficient for salvation but incomplete, so our Christian understanding of history is sufficient to secure our hope but incomplete when it comes to political and social relations. To be complete it must take into account the understanding of history, and I emphasize the post-Christian understanding, found in Judaism. 

In normal interpersonal and inter-community relations the problem of “othering” is always present and must be worked out as each side listens and increasingly takes the other’s self-understanding into account of what can become a shared experience and understanding of reality. But the case of Christians and Jews isn’t normal. Christians and Christianity are directly responsible for centuries of oppression and ultimately the attempted genocide of the Jews. Since 1948 even Christians who have strongly supported Israel do so from a historical understanding of the nation that robs it of the agency of self-definition. 

So today it is urgent that Christians simply stop speaking about Judaism, Jews, and Israel, and even less at Jews and Israel, and instead simply listen. We don’t have to agree with what we hear, but we do need to take Jews, and indeed all those who are other but should never be othered, seriously.