Sunday, August 25, 2019

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.

Friday, August 16, 2019

Creative Resource Sharing in the 4th Industrial Revolution


What is being called the 4th Industrial Revolution, or sometimes the 2nd 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 4thIndustrial 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 4thIndustrial 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. 

Monday, August 12, 2019

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.