If You Don't Like Change

You’ll like irrelevance even less. 

The greatest challenge humanity will face in the next 50 years is a challenge that Christian theologians have barely begun to consider, and which Christian preaching appears to not address at all. That challenge will be the removal by artificial intelligence of many realms in which humans find unique self-worth. 

The term “artificial intelligence” really says it all in this regard. Up to today Christians have understood that their unique value within the order of creation is precisely intelligence. Traditionally the divine image in us, what sets us apart from the other creatures, is our intelligence. This neatly avoids anthropomorphizing God while setting us apart from the beasts. Indeed, when analytic philosophy is used as a means of apologetics it is through the assertion, simply put, that our minds are uniquely shaped to resonate with the existence of God and even the specifics of the Christian gospel. 

Of course we make room for variations in this characteristic. Not all minds reflect exactly the same characteristics of the divine mind. And we recognize that all humans, regardless of variations in this thing called intelligence, are recipients of God’s love. That could change. Genetic research going on today (SA Feb 2019) will develop therapies to alter structures in the brain as a cure for “diseases” and “abnormalities.” 

But just as increasing understanding and appreciation of animal intelligence is narrowing what humans can uniquely call their own in some realms, so Artificial Intelligence is reducing the realm of observation and analysis where heretofore human intelligence has been unique. We justly celebrate the human “computers” whose skills in the middle of the 20th century ushered in the age of modern science, but realistically the computer on which I type this is carrying out thousands of times more calculations in a second than an army of such “computers" could accomplish in a year. And when it comes to higher level analysis? 

Right now with relatively few inputs (my keystrokes) this laptop computer and the appropriate software can look at everything I’ve written and suggest not mere words, but complete sentences that finish my thoughts. Computer algorithms already create art (musical and visual) in almost any style that is indistinguishable by non-experts, and even experts, from that created by humans. 

But who will write those programs? Who will conceptualize them? Well the writing of many types of computer programs is already in reach of AI. Indeed software engineers depend on these virtual helpers. Conceptualizing what needs to be written is of a higher order, but is still based on analysis that can be accomplished by AI. All that AI lacks is an inner motivation to do anything at all. Once given most tasks, however complex, AI is capable of accomplishing them. And don’t think people aren’t building motivation into AI systems.

At a recent conference on AI we heard that there already exists machine intelligence that will create thousands of possible clothing designs, use virtual focus groups to test their popularity in all dimensions with various demographics, work out the processes necessary to both create the designs and market them, and finally manage the machines that create the garments and those that produce the various forms of advertisements and deploy them in various media. Robots will package them and deliver them to stores. Or when they are available online, deployed from fully automated warehouses, what’s left? Accounting in this realm is a trivial task requiring no humans - mere interactions between computers. 

The only task left for humans is to buy the product.

In short, in the long economic evolution that led from being hunters and gatherers to being producers and consumers of industrial products, to being producers and consumers of services and entertainment is leading us to become only consumers. Machines will be the producers. This is why the coming period is often referred to as the “fourth industrial revolution.” 

Naturally this poses profound economic challenges. If most of us cannot compete with machines in the market for producers how will we have enough money to purchase products to consume? The question won’t be about redistribution of wealth, but about redistribution of dwindling opportunities to produce and how we pay for supposedly "non-productive" human interactions. 

Right now, for example, we depend on volunteers for a lot of important human activities. Little league coaches, scout leaders, Sunday school teachers, community theaters, and so on. What happens when people don’t have the jobs to support leisure time volunteerism? Or must work two or three jobs reduced to minimum wage by competition with machines? The real work in our society may become that to which we currently assign no monetary value. 

And this is where Christian witness needs to rediscover its central purpose: restoring humanity to those from who it has been stolen, taken captive, held for ransom, by Sin. The challenge of the new millennia is to raise us all up as something more than mere producers and consumers. The challenge is to restore us to stewardship even as our technology relieves us of the burden of production. The challenge is to restore us to the vocation of truly being fruitful and multiplying as our technology begins provide us all our needs. 

Genesis 1 and 2 has now so often been misinterpreted by Christians that we can hardly see what is before our eyes. The first humans weren’t called to produceanything. The Garden did that. They were called to be stewards. So what could it mean to “be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth” other than to spread this stewardship over all of creation. The need to produce is a symptom of sin, not the fundamental purpose of humanity. 

Put more strongly, the child feeding her pet rabbits every day, changing their litter, and insuring that they are warm and dry is far closer to the human vocation than her parents out working to make a living. Not that their task isn’t, for the moment, necessary and even virtuous. But it isn’t a necessity that should take precedence over their real human vocation of stewardship; love of creation and one another. 

Unfortunately the church seems to have tacitly accepted that humans are defined by their capacity to produce and consume; by their value in the labor marketplace and as responders to marketing rather than to God’s calling. 

We should beware the siren call to a ministry of production for religious consumers; whether it be of new members, changed lives, worship experiences, or social services. With increasing number of Christians participating in worship through electronic media it is almost trivially easy to replace preachers, worship leaders, musicians, and so on with their virtual counterparts. Computers that already write convincing poetry and song lyrics won’t have any trouble out-preaching the average pastor, and creating an avatar indistinguishable for a real human has already been done. 

And the call to faith? To repent and follow Christ? There will be an AI in the future more effective than Billy Graham and quite possibly based on a careful analysis of his sermon content, vocal stylings, and larger institutional framework. Indeed, in the future people in search of inspiration will be able to list their top five preachers and get a sermon delivered by an artificially created amalgam of all of them, keyed particularly to their challenges, needs, and emotional trigger points. No doubt Google and Facebook are working on the app even now, as hackers insert just a little bit of perversion in the mix.

Contemporary Christianity is already halfway to being just another product on the market for transcendent meaning, and Christians to becoming consumers in that market. Even the Eucharist is now doled out in many churches in machine packed servings of grape drink and “bread.”  It is hard to see why AI’s couldn’t take us the rest of the way toward eliminating any inefficient human touch.  (And, it might be noted, leading meditation classes, conducting Hindu rituals, offering dharma instruction, chanting the sabbath prayers, and leading the Friday call to prayer.) 

Again, the growing consolidation of Christians into larger and larger, and increasingly virtual communities, would seem to make this inevitable. So we should never forget that AI’s are the only real masters of the virtual world. 

Even our social services can easily be managed, and probably more efficiently, by algorithms that measure exact need, design interventions, coordinate community resources, and with the aid of self-driving vehicles and virtual classrooms deliver it all in precisely measured quantities to communities in need. Already we are obsessed with demographics and statistics whose meaning is far better discerned by AI than mere humans. Having displaced real people with statistics why not go the whole way and let them be cared for by algorithms? 

There is another path, but only if the Christian church vigorously offers an alternative vision of humanity to that which sees us as producers and consumers of goods, services, and entertainment. Only a vigorous assertion that the primary, indeed only distinctly human vocation is the love and care of one another and creation will save humanity. Without it we will become mere animals scrabbling for the crumbs that fall off a table set and served by AI’s for tiny fragment of humans who direct their efforts for their own pleasure. 

But this will require a careful reconsideration of the mission of the church. From the beginning until today we have assumed that our social and cultural frameworks would provide the myriad human interactions that give humans immanent purpose. Economic, political, and social interactions would provide the leaven that made for fruitfulness and multiplication. All we Christians needed to provide was the spiritual seasoning, the salt that gives life a little extra flavor.  

Now, as all those immanent human purposes fall into the hands of intelligent machines we must be the first to say that the true purpose of humans is to love. Love is the real leaven that makes human societies and cultures fruitful. So we must be the community in which the sole vocation is cultivation and expression of love. Only this will make us relevant. 

Christians Cannot Know it Alone

In a recent edition of Scientific American, Dec, 2018, there is an article on “how to fix science.” An important component of that article, which follows up on the work of Adam Frank and others, is the idea that knowledge in the broadest sense must be public. Descriptions of reality that are un-communicated and therefore untested by those outside the scientific community can hardly be taken seriously as knowledge. The scientific method, which demands results that can be reproduced by more than one investigator, must be expanded to include communicating to and testing those results with those outside the guild. Scientific American itself is part of this process as its authors seek to explain current scientific knowledge to the general public. 

But it is only part, and that is what the article recognized. The real test of scientific knowledge isn’t that it can be communicated by professionals for comprehension by amateurs. The real test is that it can be communicated to those entirely outside the guild and its methodologies and tested against the human experience of nature unshaped by scientific ways of knowing. Only then is there a pragmatic political result for the good. A scientific claim to know something that cannot be known publicly, however grounded in one’s well tested methodologies, is simply esotericism.

In many fields of knowing this idea that knowledge of reality is public is profoundly unsettling to   communities that have taken for granted a cultural consensus around their core beliefs and practices. In the academic realm whole careers have been dedicated to mastery of a field of study confirmed by the guild of fellow researchers. To have an academic title and position in the modern university is essentially a claim to know things that the public doesn’t know and cannot know without reproducing the skills learned within the guild, whether it be the guild of natural science and its sub disciplines, or the guild of the arts, or humanities, or the social sciences. Or Christian theology.

Christian theologians, like all of those engaged in the academic disciplines, typically pursue knowledge of the Christian faith in a framework dictated by the traditions of their guild for use in a wider Christian community that accepts that framework as both normative and authoritative. And if that is the limit of their knowing then I fear they don't know anything. There has been a breakdown in the process of communicating theological knowledge to the public and then testing it with what the public knows. 

Indeed there is more than a breakdown. In some theological circles there appears a denial that theological knowing need be public knowing at all. In the previous blog I critiqued David Watson's apparent ignoring of natural revelation. Yet he does take up the possibility that God is speaking in a variety of ways, so long as "God's speaking is tested against what God has spoken in the past - and spoken through authoritative interpretation." And where is access to that authority for Watson?  It is only through the Church which "interprets Scripture in dialogue with the church through the ages."

In short for Watson, and for those who self-identify as "orthodox" or "traditionalist" there really isn't any need to know with the public. If it is true "about God, human beings, and the world we live in," then the final authority is the Church's tradition of interpretation of scripture. The problem here is that Watson is essentially telling people what traditional Christianity has always told people: "our special revelation and tradition gives us a better knowledge of who you are than you have yourself or yourselves."

Now this might make sense to people if Christians restrict their pre-emptory knowledge to knowledge of what it means to be human to the human relationship with God. However, traditionalists aren't willing to be so limited. Their presumption extends to knowledge inward to the biological and psychological origins of human sexuality and outward to the nature of the human family. 

The exclusive claim to speak authoritatively about the human person seems to be a view borne out across a much wider range of theologians who clearly communicate only for and within the guild and the larger church. And who teach only to create the next generation of acolytes on their way to guild altars. 

I suspect that this has happened because there has arisen a Christian tradition that entering into the realm of knowing God, humanity, and God’s relationship to the world requires a special, esoteric quality called Christian faith. In short it demands that one know the world as the Christian community knows it before one can know it at all. In this view there simply is no natural revelation worth speaking of. 

It is fairly obvious that in the United States this insistence that Christian faith precedes knowledge of reality has been an evangelistic disaster. Even those raised in Christian communities are falling away, and those attracted to them are often naively attracted by simple human fellowship, or are more dangerously seeking the mindless comfort of a sect or cult. 

Too many pastors, who with the rise of modern seminary education were on the frontlines of engaging in the dialogue between theology and public knowing, are now called by both their congregations and their bishops to be carnival barkers whose livelihood depends on bringing crowds inside a big tent with narrow views. They must grow churches of people obedient (like themselves) to the cult rules, and not to engage in an ongoing dialogue between Christian and public knowing. 

But more importantly the insistence that orthodox Christian faith precedes genuine knowing is potentially a disaster for academic theology itself; and enterprise which too easily becomes the manipulation of relationships between increasingly esoteric symbols drawn from Christian tradition into structures of knowledge impenetrable by all but the experts in the theological guilds. And when this happens the guild no longer produces any knowledge at all, because Christians cannot know it alone. It is ludicrous to claim knowledge of the God of all reality while claiming that the test of true knowledge is the particular preserve of the Christian community in conversation with itself.

This may sound like an invitation to reiterate the failure of the liberal theology that traces its roots to Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. But the liberal project didn’t diminish because it sought to make theological knowing a form of public knowing. It has diminished because public knowing has changed. The public no longer knows reality according to Enlightenment principles (and in terms of the broadest public probably never did.) But public knowing (except within diminishing cultural redoubts) isn’t pre-modern either. We cannot go back to the “good old days” when the cultural consensus had already been shaped to, and had shaped, Christian knowing. The contemporary public is diverse and complex and has not as yet been effectively engaged by Christian theology - witness its waining interest in what we Christians have to say. 

I would suggest that the most important task of contemporary Christian theology is, if not to reiterate the liberal project then to reiterate its aim: to know God in public by engaging the God-knowing public in dialogue. And I will go further and assert that doing this is simply taking on the task Christ gave the Church to bear witness to him to the ends of the earth.

The apostles of Christ thought with their audience as they bore witness to him. They didn’t demand Christian faith prior to understanding.  Like Jesus they engaged the faith they found with their witness of what they knew. 

Just as scientists need to engage not merely in the public defense of knowledge, but the public production of knowledge so Christian theologians need to cease making claims and begin learning with those outside the faith but within God’s providential self-disclosing. Only then will theology actually know something about the God who disclosed God’s self in Jesus Christ. 

The Last Western Men

CS Lewis gave an address in 1955 entitled “The Old Western Man.” He referred to himself and others as “dinosaurs." Lewis was both enough of an observer and a scholar to see that the world and worldview in which he was nurtured was passing away. 

Lewis had lived long enough to know that it wasn’t merely the old western man that was disappearing. The church of England and the particular form of evangelical Anglicanism that he represented was already in a state of almost complete collapse. His book, Mere Christianity, which had animated a generation of English Anglicans, had transported very well to the American evangelical context of the time. But it’s vision of orthodox Christianity was not sustainable in England after World War II. Evangelical orthodoxy simply could not initiate or sustain a revival of Christianity in the England of the 1950s or indeed up until today. 

Far longer lasting and far reaching are Lewis's narrative works. Like the works of J.R.R. Tolkien at the other Inklings Lewis’ narrative works do not describe a world of orthodox practices and morals. They do not even mention God or name his Son. They do not offer a theological justification for Christianity. Instead, they invite the reader, and later viewer into fictional worlds based on the fundamental principles of God’s engagement with creation and of human nature. Orthodoxy becomes what Lewis called the “deeper law” that shaped the outcomes of creaturely action in these fictional universes. And this is an orthodoxy that can speak to many times and in many cultures.

Louis could imagine a world before the Fall, and thus ask us to enter into into a moral universe not built on the assumption of sin. Lewis could imagine a world after the flood in which its purgative effects succeeded, and thus invite us to understand a moral universe without the need for further witnesses to God’s righteousness. In creating these fictional worlds of Perelandra/Venus and Mars he could see the noetic covenant and the laws of Mount Sinai not as the roots of our moral universe but as the branches from those roots in a particular world. 

The eternal love of the triune God rather than the historically conditioned needs of human societies was the creative source of his fictional worlds. 

Unfortunately contemporary acolytes of Lewis too often claim the dross of doctrine and law rather than the gold of an orthodox understanding that God’s love is ubiquitous, while human sin and the provision for it is both temporally and geographically local. Rather than addressing the contemporary context the deep law, the law of God’s providential love, they have chosen to defend the structures of Christendom in all its fading glory and fossilized bones. In doing so they, not a changing culture, have turned Lewis and his peers into dinosaurs. 

Lewis could imagine a world in which fawns and centaurs, those half-creatures of fantasy were redeemed unchanged but fulfilled by this deep law. Tolkien imagine dwarves and elves and men and halflings and wizards and orcs within God’s providential love. Some Christians can’t even imagine a world in which God’s love accepts transsexuals as they are. 

What Lewis did not recognize, or perhaps recognized by placing his bets on fantasy stories, was that the problem of the passing of Christendom is not merely the rise of secularity, or even a modern understanding of the world shaped by atheism, materialism, and evolutionary theory. It is not merely that the tide has turned and the sea of faith is receding (to the dismay of Matthew Arnold.) It is that the language through which faith recognizes and expresses itself has changed. People no more speak the faith language of Christendom than they speak the Latin of the church fathers. 

So it isn’t that sea of faith has receded. Rather faith has escaped from the inaccessible redoubts of the medieval worldview and increasingly inaccessible bulwark of modernity. 

This isn’t merely a matter of losing Christian terminology and the slow forgetting of classical theological reasoning. The grammar of faith, its internal logic, has changed. We no longer understand our relationships one another and with the transcendent in terms of beliefs locked within in a dogmatic structure created by the laws of logic. Ours is not the faith of arguments and propositions creating a coherent framework within which to locate specifically Christian belief. It no longer gazes in longing to find its place amid the cycles and epicycles of a theology systematically engineered according to its own internal logic but increasingly out of touch with narrated experience human becoming.

As importantly our grammar of moral reflection and expression is no longer shaped by rigid rules for human behavior and static definitions of sin and righteousness. Like orthodox theology, orthodox ethics finds itself in a Ptolmaic dilemma of having to create ever more complex justifications, epicycles within epicycles to prevent its unbending rules and definitions from being not merely incredible, but actually destructive. The problem isn’t isn’t just the content, or even its fundamentally flawed assumptions. The problem is that orthodox ethical reasoning is a language incomprehensible to contemporary persons.

Ours is the grammar, the logic of narrative. It is a grammar in which consistency is incoherent without authenticity. It is the grammar of characters in action rather than characteristics in static relation.

This isn’t merely true of our self-understanding. It is true of our understanding of God. The character of God revealed in Jesus Christ compels us, as it did his first followers, to worship. The characteristics of God as detailed in systematic theology neither compel us to worship nor are necessary to our faith in Christ. In this new grammar the phrase "God is love" means nothing. The phrase "God loves" means everything so long as it is seen enacted in the great drama of the unfolding world. So imitation of Christ’s actions, his story lived out moment by moment in specific situations is ethically compelling, while all attempts to reify those actions into unchanging rules universally applied are incomprehensible. 

Aristotle’s Poetics is a far better guide for the modern preacher/theologian than his Organon. 

Not that every part of our world participates in this new grammar of faith. Theological schools are notoriously conservative. Scholars with a decades long investment in classical theology and philosophy are not only reluctant to give up what they have mastered, they insist that their students be equally indoctrinated before being allowed to take up the mantle of teaching. 

Church bureaucracies are equally conservative. Their power is gained, maintained, and perpetuated by their control of doctrine and law. A United Methodist bishop, DS, or pastor knows that mastery of the Book of Discipline is far more necessary to a successful ecclesial career than dwelling in the story of God with Creation that is the beating heart of scripture. From very early in their careers young preachers learn that the masters of their fate will quiz them on dross and grow suspicious if their words glint with gold. 

And, to be fair, these schools and ecclesiocracies serve constituencies equally unchanged, or better resistant to being changed, by the outworking of God’s providence and human freedom. Just as the bishops and nobles of the Ancien Regime saw only revolt against the established order of God when the peasants claimed their power, so many contemporary American Christians resent and resist that which breaks their hereditary privilege. Who can blame them? Leaving a legacy feels a lot like dying. So we tend to insist that generation after generation of preachers conserve our sense of a privileged place in God’s unchanging order. Until those preachers enter into and are equally invested in that order. 

It is quite hard to remember that the law written on human hearts, with all of their frailties, is the only law God gives. 

So the reinforcing of the current order with laws inscribed in stone is not a sign of perseverance, but of an approaching collapse. When the old nobility gathered on their landed estates while the riotous crowds controlled the streets of Paris it wasn’t a consolidation preceding a restoration. It was the last gasp of a dying world. And the same is true in the United States as chiliastic Christian movements gather in their megachurches and anxiously await God's restoration of the established order. We have not yet learned to be still. 

Of course the entire world isn’t dancing on the bones of the last western men. There are Christians and cultures different those I dwell in. Ever since Pentecost Christians have spoken in many tongues, both within their hearts and minds and in their witness to their neighbors. If we are those who narrate our faith with our lives, for us to tell a story that includes the condemnation of other stories and constructions of faith will hardly be good news. It is hard to feel warmly toward those whose understanding of God’s providence excludes us and our friends. But Jesus says, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Thus it is good to remember that we, like they, are incapable of understanding much less emulating the wideness of God’s mercy. 

We have our task, those who live in the legacy, but not the world, of the last western men. And it is to tell our story of a world so animated and guided by that “deep law” that our neighbors, not least the fawns and centaurs, the halflings and the dwarves, and of course the humans will be drawn into that story of love. And other worlds that are not ours? 

From: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

"And of course, as it always does in a perfectly flat place without trees, it looked as if the sky came down to meet the grass in front of them. But as they went on they got the strangest impression that here at last the sky did really come down and join the earth-a blue wall, very bright, but real and solid: more like glass than anything else. And soon they were quite sure of it. It was very near now.

But between them and the foot of the sky there was something so white on the green grass that even with their eagles' eyes they could hardly look at it. They came on and saw that it was a Lamb.

"Come and have breakfast," said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice. 

Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted. 

 
"Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?

"Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door into Aslan's country is from your own world." 

 
'What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?" 

"There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb."

Dual(ing) Narratives

Well - quadruple or quintuple narratives.

I’m writing this in Bethlehem, where I’m helping lead a group of students in both the footsteps of Jesus and the complexities of the this land. This is my 23rd year of visits to this land, and the 14th leading groups of students.

This year our students started with a couple of days in Jerusalem being guided in what is often called a “dual narrative” approach to understanding Israel and Palestine. This isn’t my favorite approach, but then I don’t always call the shots. I prefer that our Israeli and Palestinian partners decide how to represent their experience. 

As for my own experience? In my years coming here I’ve heard far more than two narratives. I’ve heard dozens. 

For example. In Israel there are two Israeli narratives at least. One is the narrative of how people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds can build a new nation together out of the detritus of a thousand years or more of colonialism. The other is the narrative of how a Jewish state cannot exist without marginalizing a dangerous non-Jewish Arab citizenry while holding their terrorist Palestinian brethren at bay. 

But there are also different narratives in Beer Shiva and Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem. Different narratives among the Ultra Orthodox and the Secular Jews. Different narratives among the pioneering families and the just-arriving immigrants. After all, this is a country with a dozen or more political parties, none of which has ever won a majority of the vote and all of which await, again, a general election to shuffle the deck for a new deal from which the future may be drawn. 

But there are other narratives as well, such as conflicting narratives about the meaning of Israel as a Jewish nation, and in particular how you define who a “Jew” really is. So (to illustrate) on the 3rd of January the Jerusalem Post ran a long article on how more than half of the past year's immigrants met the state requirement to be regarded as a Jew (one grandparent was Jewish) but were not Jews. They were in fact  Russian Orthodox Christians or just atheists. Apart from these Christian “Jews” (not to be confused with Messianic Jews) there are huge numbers of practicing Jews whom Israel’s chief rabbinate doesn’t recognize as Jewish! 

Here in a Jewish state Jews sometimes cannot share graveyards and wedding ceremonies and even neighborhoods, while Christians divide themselves into feuding sects based on ancient ethnic and theological divides. The key to the shrine atop the burial place of Jesus is held by a Muslim family, because the ancient Christian communities don’t trust one another to hold it. 

In Palestine (aka West Bank, Palestinian Territories, Occupied Palestine) there is also more than one narrative. At the very least there is the Hamas narrative that Palestinians cannot possess their full identity without the destruction of Israel, and the Fatah narrative of a negotiated statehood that recognizes Israeli nationhood. There are also different narratives concerning the history and future of Christian Palestinians in the face of gradual Islamization. In a single day I have heard one Palestinian leader calling for a two state solution as the only way forward, and one calling for a single state with full rights for Palestinians as the only way forward. 

And there are varying narratives about national identity as what were refugee camps become third and forth generation cities and towns. And there are very different narratives in Gaza and the West Bank and in the vast Palestinian diaspora marooned in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon or adrift in Europe or the US. Listen to three taxi drivers and you will hear three different narratives - each claiming to be authentically Palestinian. 

And all of these contemporary narratives are linked to older narratives about just what happened and is happening since the beginning of significant Jewish in-migration to the old Turkish Vilayet of Damascus, the Palestine, the Mutassarifate of Jerusalem, and the Mandate. After all, what happened in what is now Israel and Palestine can’t be separated from larger narratives that include the Napoleanic wars in Europe, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Zionist movement, the first and second World Wars, the Holocaust, and declaration of Israel’s statehood and the formation of other middle eastern states by the colonial powers. And those are not single narratives either.

Every narrative in this land is a source of identity and self-understanding. Palestinians and Israelis tell themselves into existence as peoples distinct from their ancestors. Yet their ancestors are retrospectively drawn into the narratives in odd ways, ways they might not themselves recognize were they to come to life. 

Would the Sephardic Jew of two centuries ago, settled under the Ottoman Caliphs for hundreds of years, seamlessly integrated into Arabic speaking society of the region, imagine herself an important link in a narrative chain of continuous Jewish presence vital to the narrative of a modern Jewish State? Would an Arab farmer two centuries ago, making an existence amid olive groves and garden farms trace his lineage the “people of the land” whose continued existence for thousands of years provided a key rational for a modern Palestinian identity? 

Every narrative is a prison into which we drag the past to provide company even as we silence its varied voices to hear only that which fits the story we want to tell about ourselves today. Every narrative prevents its teller from becoming anything other than the story allows, as all the stories we tell of our lives define the limits of our imagined individuality and peoplehood. It is the same for all of us; Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, and (good to remember) United Methodists. We build prisons from the stories we tell about ourselves. 

And not surprisingly those who choose to step outside the most widespread and long-standing narratives are reviled on all sides as traitors rather than pioneers of new possibilities. The artists and teachers and common citizens who shake the bars of their narrative prison are seen as the authors of a chaos in which stories from the past and present might break free. They are seen as traitors who by offering new possibilities destroy the old, secure, identities so lovingly tended for so long in the hard ground within the prisons we call our nations. 

Even we who visit these lands don’t really want to hear these creative voices, because their freedom would shake our entrenched ideas about this “holy” land. Their shattering of the dual narrative disturbs how quickly we can set aside our narrative of inevitable conflict, or of pre-defined justice, so we can go about our personal walks among the ruins with Jesus. 

Maybe that is why dual narratives, whether in this land or back in my own United States, are ultimately embraced as a comfort. They hide the complexity from which both the destruction and creation of identity is found. 

But it is the creative people, those who draw from the deep primordial silence from which all the imprisoning voices that clamor to define us have been banished, it is they who will give us the stories of peace. I hope we hear, however faintly, those stories in the next few days. Sing to the Lord a new song - not because the Lord does new things, but because these songs open the only pathways by which the Divine can traverse the human heart and do new things. 

The Birth of Humanity

Occurred on the day we celebrate as Christmas. On that day God revealed to us that we do not in fact travel a path from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but from eternal life to eternal life.

In his book The Anticipatory Corpse Jeffrey Bishop (MD PhD) offers a brilliant history and analysis of how modern medicine, and modern society, came to understand the human person as a living machine that began dead and inevitably becomes dead. Medical science, and indeed science generally, is bounded on what Marcelo Gleiser (physicist and philosopher of science) calls The Island of Knowledge, an island that can neither see transcendence nor grasp life as anything more than a self-reproducing machine. 

In the eyes of science the human body is a wonderful machine to be sure; one whose fantastic origins through a combination of matter, energy, chance, and natural law are fascinating. And the way it creates the human person who inhabits it is equally wonderful if still not understood process. But vitalism, the idea that there is some mysterious something other than the functioning of the machine has been banished from science and medicine. And indeed, under the assumptions of modernity it would be intolerable in an age of organ transplants, ICU’s, and living wills. 

The power and control we wield over human bodies kept functioning by machines would be unbearable if when we chose (whether as patients or doctors) to die we were also choosing to end something we did not create, do not own, cannot measure and may only have the power to destroy. And so we locate life in some part of the machine and it's particular function; earlier in the heart, and now more commonly in the brain. Complex rationalizations of what constitutes a functioning human machine allow us to both manipulate the moment of “death" to best serve the purposes of medical science and legally identify the moment when organs that once belonged to one person can now belong to someone else.

This death to death story of human life told by biological science and affirmed by medical science is usually just the vague, uneasy background of human existence. A characteristic of the machine, as scientists note, is its ability to both be self-reflective and to focus that capacity on solving the problems immediately posed by the tasks of maintenance and reproduction. We’d all be morose philosophers if the machine that is both our person and personhood didn’t find food and sex so much more interesting, and entertainment an acceptable substitute for both. In a pinch (and here we have the birth of both theology and philosophy) a thinking machine unable to distract itself with food, sex, and entertainment turns its thoughts about death, life, and the meaning of life into complex puzzles to be solved (another form of entertainment) - again avoiding the confrontation with its own inevitable self-destruction.

Alas, in our time the human machine, even with its marvelous abilities in the field of distraction, is proving incapable of facing the environmental challenges posed by the decisions forced by modern medical science on one hand and the despair of a modern economy on the other. Always destined to self-destruct by our ever shortening telomeres, we increasingly choose to either rush the process through suicide, hide from it with drugs, or desperately delay it by ever more complex methods of repair and replacement. (Not that I object to delay. In the foreseeable future I’ll need a new heart valve, and I’m not anxious to pursue the other option.)

Yet there is this other story, one fewer and fewer people in our society have ever heard or truly know. It is the story of how we humans came to live on the Island of Knowledge, and indeed how it came to exist at all. It is the story of the true origin of our personhood, and of its true end. The story in no way denies the story of science. It begins with dividing cells, fetal formation, and ultimately a birth. It ends with a death and a burial. And yes, although the body disappears to make a point about what it means to be a person, there is no hint that it doesn’t ultimately decompose. Wherever it went, Jesus didn’t take it with him, because he was before it was, and is after it is gone.

He’s the story, the true human story, the story that doesn’t begin with the emergence of a self-conscious biological machine, but with the love of God. And which does not end in death, but in the love of God. And Jesus' story is all our stories. He is the true human, the one in whom we can know who and what we really are.

Philosophers and doctors may debate (and there are good reasons to do so) the moments at which the capacity for personhood emerges in the biological machine, and when it becomes impossible to sustain. We will have to make decisions that are impossible on the basis of knowledge we cannot possess. But if they are impossible they need not be unbearable. Because they cannot change this: the origin of each of us, and our end, is the eternal love of the Triune God. And it is with us even now. Who was born on Christmas? We were. We all were. 

Christ is Never Naked

I’ll  offer a prediction. The upcoming split in the UMC over same-sex marriage and ordination will be the first of many to follow. 

What has drawn and held the UMC together for the last 150 years hasn’t been doctrinal unity, but the mutual advantages of growing social power for Christian witness. Now UM social influence is waning to the point that groups within the UMC see internal cohesion and external alliances as more advantageous than the current UM unity; unity that has little to commend itself to either the most ideologically committed or the most individually powerful. 

For the WCA and related United Methodists an alignment with conservative Christians in a broader evangelical coalition gives far more direct access to political and social influence than continued association with a socially liberal and politically impotent UMC. And a close alliance with African United Methodists insures the appearance of vitality and relevance on a global scale. 

Meanwhile progressive United Methodists, having chaffed under the restrictions of a Social Principles creed dominated by conservative values, will find alliances with other progressive Christian denominations  and political groups a far more effective path into exercising the kind of social and political power they long to have.

And in the rest of the world? Unity is already hard to maintain, and its main advantage has been a link to the resource-rich American church. When that church divides, and its resources divide and diminish with it, expect United Methodists globally to divide along their own particular fault lines. It is too much to expect that only US United Methodists have disagreements over Biblical authority, sexuality, and gender roles.

And the root of these coming divisions will be a fundamental misunderstanding of human diversity and the roots of heterogeneity of doctrine and practice. 

When Christ was born we are told that his mother wrapped him in swaddling clothes. When he died he was disrobed but not naked, for even on the cross the culture of Roman occupied Judea couldn’t abide such a thing. Even in the grave, much as in the cradle, he is clothed. And what do we see in the empty tomb? The clothes. The Christ never appears to us unclothed.

This places Jesus in the world God created for Adam and Eve and their descendants, a world in which the naked man was unimaginable. Noah’s nakedness was an unbearable scandal, and even Paul in imagining death and its aftermath does not want to ever be make, but to be over-clothed in Christ. 

When Noah emerges from the Ark he plants a vineyard, the surest sign that he isn’t just clothed, but is clothed in culture (albeit one that carries with it the danger of nakedness - subject of at least one country-western song.) And when Paul longs to be over-clothed he speaks of tents or tabernacles; perhaps the products of his profession but more likely to that ancient product of Israelite culture created simultaneously with its covenant with God. The covenant is never seen naked, is it? (Indiana Jones got that right.)

Even the sex of Christ, which would seem to be a universal biological fact, comes to us only in the form of sexuality and gender. We don’t see Jesus’ genitalia, only his gendered interactions with other men and women in a 1st century Jewish context. Indeed, biological sex is left behind in the Garden with God’s clothing of Adam and Eve, a quintessential creation of culture, and mere biological sex is evermore hidden by the cultural clothing of gender and sexuality.  God made us male and female. Culture made us men and women, husbands and wives. 

It is worth looking closely at Genesis 2:21 to 2:24. First a description of the event of Eve’s creation, then Adam’s personal appropriation of the event, then an interpretation into Jewish culture. 

Doctrines, witness, and worship are simply the necessary clothing of a God Incarnate whom we can look at in no other way. They are the dressing by which Christian communities in various times and places have made Jesus present-able to themselves and others. Otherwise, as Peter, John, and James experienced, there is only blinding light and the command to listen to a voice once again clothed and comprehensible in a familiar human language. 

Belief and practice are inevitably bound to the languages (and hence cultures) through which they are articulate. They never give us access to the naked Christ because he is decently, and for our own protection, hidden from sight. All we can ever see is Christ clothed in culture. And not surprisingly he is thus seen in a variety of different kinds of clothing. 

Some believe the diversity of belief and practice, the diversity of cultural clothings of the Christ, is a result of sin, or at the least our human finitude. This is wrong. In the narrative of scripture cultural diversity isn’t created by sin. Sin, in the run-up to Babel, is manifest in the human drive to avoid diversity, to live as a culturally homogenous people in a walled city. The diversity of languages and thus cultures that God inaugurates is the cure to sin. Cultural diversity is the root expression of God’s righteous demand that humans be obedient to the Divine will that we be fruitful and multiply and cover the face of the earth. 

When we understand this we can see that our efforts at doctrinal purity and unity of witness and worship are the repetition of the sin of Babel by the community of believers. They are an effort to build a walled city in which we’ll be united and never scattered. And so it is hardly surprising that God is scattering us, and will continue to scatter us among the nations until we exhaust our sinful desire for uniformity and purity and turn from Babel toward Zion. 

The only unity we can ever enjoy is spiritual, masked by flesh and robed in culture. And only scattered through the assembly of the nations in all their diversity can we hope to see the glory of the Lord. 

And when if we recognize each other it won’t be by our clothes, but by the fruit of love. 

To Stake A Claim

The problem with staking a claim is that in the end you are staked to that claim.

Perhaps the greatest characteristic of the age we live in is the primacy of doubt and the admission of limits to knowledge as the key markers of credibility. Nowhere is this more marked that in the intellectual enterprise called science, which is built on questioning every assertion, seeking evidence, and always assuming that knowledge is incomplete.

Nowhere is this less evident than in theology, which seems to be based not on theories but on doctrines, not on the expansion of knowledge but on defending doctrinal borders.

In our time this is most evident in Christian evangelical theology, which has confidently advanced doctrines of human personhood, and the origin, purpose, and end of the natural order with no basis other than shifting interpretations of supposedly inerrant scripture. 

The result has been what would be, if dogmaticians were capable of embarrassment, a series of embarrassing drawbacks from claims that finally proved so inane in the court of public opinion that they had to be withdrawn simply to maintain the credibility of Christian witness. A few of these? 

There was the claim, still extant in some Evangelical circles, that the King James Version of the Bible  represented the oldest and best textual tradition. (This claim was still being taught into the 1990s by Dallas Theological Seminary) Closely related was the claim that the Bible read in its plain literal meaning was true, and flowing from that a series of embarrassing claims about the age and natural history of the world. (The Institute for Creation Research in my home town still holds a candle for many of these claims.) 

As it stands most Christians have backed down from a literal seven day creation to long periods of creation following roughly the plan of Genesis, to guided evolution, to creation science. The final redoubt of Evangelicals, apparently unassailable, is an arcane mathematical analysis of probabilities that is supposed to demonstrated that Someone or Something other than natural law guided the unfolding universe. But in building this redoubt Evangelicals have simply flown into the hands of science, and far from offering dogma, are offering just another theory in search of further experimental proof. Why not admit that the so-called doctrine of creation is really just a theory of creation subject to revision?

And what about the nature of the human person? Having failed to stake any defensible claim about the natural order can Christian theologians stake some kind of claim about the nature of being human? Well they have certainly tried. Fortunately the most embarrassing claims about human nature, that persons of non-European descent were sub-human, was rejected rather early in the modern era by some Christians, and by the early 19th century by most Christians including Evangelicals. But of course a few held on, notably Evangelicals in the southern United States and perhaps the last public holdouts - the loathsome bigots who used theology to justify apartheid in South Africa. So why not admit that theological anthropology is actually just a theory of human personhood that may be subject to revision?

And then there is marriage. Until the modern era almost all Christians regarded marriage to be indissoluble within the Divine order, and many Evangelicals and all Catholics still regard divorce and remarriage as a willing and continued state of sinfulness disqualifying such a person from leadership in the church. Yet in the last few decades Christians, including those who held on longest to the traditional view of a lifelong marriage commitment have changed their minds. A divorced and remarried Protestant pastor isn’t nearly as remarkable as the unrepentant attitude of those theologians whose minds were changed only after causing immeasurable heartache for countless people by calling them sinners and adulterers. So why not admit that the traditional view of marriage was actually a theory about human relationships subject ultimately to revision? 

The more serious and difficult area of human personhood is one where Protestant Christians are divided most. The vast majority of Evangelicals have staked a claim in relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Most Evangelical Christians still believe the differentiation of social roles according to sex is part of God’s created order. And thus many if not most Evangelicals will not ordain women. However, American Evangelical theologians have mostly fallen back from this and have modified their theology of gender, even recognizing that gender roles are a cultural rather than a divinely ordained construct. Why not admit that for 2000 years the theological assertion of distinct gender roles was actually just a theory of human relationships based on cultural norms and thus ultimately subject to change. 

And what about human sexuality? Here we find that Evangelicals continue to take a hard dogmatic line. Some, notably United Methodists recognize that there are individual humans who identify themselves as possessing a sexuality, not merely a sex. In other words they recognize that humans self-identify as straight, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-sexual, or queer. But their dogmatic construction of human personhood does not allow them to admit sexuality as an essential attribute of human personhood. Unlike sex, or even gender, it is not part of God’s plan for humanity. So while self-identified LGBTQ persons must be accepted (like all sinners) into God’s house their self-understanding must be dogmatically denied. But really, isn't this just another theory that may be and probably will be revised in the future? Aren't we facing, as we were with gender, concepts of the human person rooted in culture rather than revelation? And if so, why make one stance on human sexuality an essential doctrine of the church? 

Scientists have, as they have demonstrated over the last century, the humility to admit that human personhood is more complex than than their own earlier understandings. The AMA has admitted that its earlier characterizations of homosexuality as deviant were wrong. Scientists recognize that older understandings of human sexuality are inadequate and that more study is necessary before theories can be fully formed, much less tested experimentally. Thus the latest scientific studies yield complex understandings of the origins and innateness of sexuality. And as one might expect, a healthy disagreement among colleagues that leads to more research rather than institutional fracture. (Scientific American has a book that explores this in depth: The New Science of Sex and Gender. As one might expect it explores a variety of viewpoint rather than simply reinforcing a long standing dogma.)

But evangelical theologians will have none of this. They have a confidence in their ability to interpret revelation that appears completely unjustified in light of their previous mistakes in understanding the natural and social orders. So evangelical theologians have staked a dogmatic claim that sexuality is not essential to human personhood, and that what is called homosexuality is just a decision about human behavior made under the influence of sin.

And to be fair, their progressive opponents have staked similar dogmatic claims, in some realms more and in some realms less acceptable but equally likely to be embarrassing in the end.

The result is the appearance the Christians possess an unjustified epistemological hubris, an unjustified confidence in the human ability to fully understand God's order. 

Small wonder that our contemporaries increasingly find the Christian religion unpalatable. It lacks the basic humility of its founder and assumes the pride of his adversary.

Or if that is too strong: it is because whenever Christians have ventured beyond their knowledge of Christ and him crucified they have embarrassed themselves. As theologians we keep trying to speak of things about which we have no knowledge, and then when we inevitably are forced to change our minds it looks like another case of foolish pride.

The truths about creation, human society, and human personhood that we know don't arise from Biblical descriptions of God's order, which are inevitably reducible to the culture in which they are advanced. They arise from our knowledge that Christ has redeemed everything from bosons to galaxies, from hunting and gathering bands to empires, from the child in the womb to the last breath of life.

Theology must give up the absurd claim to be the Queen of the Sciences and become just another servant of humanity, offering the one thing it knows to a world in desperate need of just that knowledge. I expect that when we quite trying to know everything we'll find what we actually know is respected for the genuine contribution to human knowledge of reality that it is. That is certainly my experience in the University. And if this takes away our aura of certainty, it will thereby restore our credibility. 

The Christian Extinguishing of Identity

“We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.”
“There is neither Jew nor Gentile . .”

Those present at Pentecost were all Jews, and yet hearing their native languages at the Temple was clearly remarkable. It affirmed a real diversity, anticipated in prophecy, but obscured by the dominance of Hebrew as a unifying liturgical language.

Paul’s letters dating from little more than a decade later attest to the diversity of the Christian community even as they seek to define a transcultural unity in Christ. But note the negative in the quote above from Galatians. Being one in Christ means giving up an identity, specifically a Jewish identity tied to being part of a people created by the Covenant at Sinai. The word Gentile (sometimes mistranslated as “Greek”) isn’t ethnic, it's simply a generic term for non-Jews. “Neither Gentile” doesn’t negate anything anybody cared about. “Neither Jew” does.

Being Gentile wasn't intimately bound up in idolatry or immorality, the only things forbidden to those reclothed in Christ. Nor did Paul expect men and women to quit acting out the sexual identities. He didn’t expect slaves and masters to cease the relationship that defined them socially.

Only Jewish identity, an identity centered on the covenant at Sinai, was  extinguished by accepting Christ as Messiah. Paul’s history of salvation in Galatians and Romans leapfrogs Sinai to move from Abraham to Jesus. Yet Sinai, present in the Jewish community as the written and the oral Torah, is exactly what makes a Jew a Jew.

True, in Romans Paul affirms that because of the covenant at Sinai Jews have many things. But note well that Paul redefines the covenant at Sinai, the “Law,” in a way that no Jew as a Jew could possibly affirm. And all these things the Jews have fade into obscurity in light of Christ. He grants the Jews their covenant, but only by redefining it in Christian terms. And what he gives the Jews on one hand he takes away with the other.

This is a major shift away from the Jerusalem Council which allowed a way into the Jesus movement for Gentiles. At Jerusalem Gentiles were to be accepted into the Christian community, but on Jewish terms. They would have to follow the covenant of God with Noah as understood in the rabbinic tradition.

By the time Paul is fully engaged in his mission to the Gentiles he has significantly changed the ground rules. Gentiles are now the dominant culture, and Jews are only allowed in on Gentile terms - as the introduction to the book of Romans makes clear. Paul frames his mission in terms of the Gentiles, and in Paul’s churches it is the circumcised who must conform, not visa versa.

The result was inevitable as Gentiles came to dominate the church: Jewish Christianity disappeared, because the gospel Paul proclaimed undermined and in fact denied Jewish identity at its core.

It would be nice if, in fact, Christianity was a genuinely new identity that equally undermined and replaced all the old ethnic identities. Such was the argument of Tertullian, but the claim was specious. By the time of Constantine Christianity had become a new religion laid on top of first Greek, then Roman cultural roots. Later ethnocultural groups were likewise affirmed. A small tweak in their pagan customs and they too could be Christian. Sure, there would be efforts at hegemony in terms of using the Latin Bible and mass, but this was less cultural hegemony than a means of concentrating power in the hands of the emperor and the Bishop of Rome.

Until the era of modern missions and their hegemonic advancement of European culture, it was only Jewish identity that was extinguished by conversion to Christianity. And the reason for this is that the essence of orthodox Christianity has been the repudiation of the covenant at Sinai as a witness to God’s righteousness. True, a Jewish Christian could always keep the law as a cultural memento, in the same way I as a Texan can still wear cowboy boots up to the altar to receive communion. But keeping the law doesn't mean what it means to those for whom it is God’s witness to God’s righteousness. It doesn't mean what it means for those who understand that living out the covenant at Sinai is precisely how the Jews are a light to the Gentiles and a blessing to the nations.

Given these reflections Messianic Judaism can now be seen more clearly for what it is: a modern way of being Christian. Modern because it appears to treat Jewish identity in terms of cultural mementos and ethnic legacy rather than as participation in God’s mission cemented at Sinai. It is a Judaism that, by accepting the Pauline perspective, reduces the Law as understood by rabbinic Judaism to mere customs. Because in the orthodox Christian understanding the Law is a witness only to sin, while it is the Messiah who reveals the true nature of righteousness “to faith for faith.”

In short, Messianic Judaism is possibly only because it redefines Judaism in terms that most Jews cannot recognize. And in fact a constant theme in my dialogue with Jewish partners has been exactly this; I’ve never met a rabbi, orthodox or otherwise, who would affirm that Messianic Jews are Jews.

And yet - well modernity brings another complication - the redefinition of Judaism precisely as an ethnic identity tied to the promise of the land that need not be enacted in affirmation of God’s covenant at Sinai. The Zionist movement of the 19th century, coupled with the Nazi effort to exterminate world Judaism, and completed with the birth of the modern nation of Israel brought about new complexities in Jewish self-understanding.

Both rabbinic Judaism and European and American anti-Semites defined Judaism based on ancestry rather than belief or practice even if they disagreed on just how the identity was passed down. (The rabbis had stricter rules.) Zionists added the promise of the land, but without necessarily the cultic worship originating at Sinai. (Yossi Klein Helevi has documented the crisis posed when modern Israel actually came into control of the Temple Mount.)

In the state of Israel the concept of a “secular Jew” became possible, so that for the purposes of state of Israel one is Jewish based on parentage rather than either belief or practice, and being a Jew is the only qualification for becoming a citizen of Israel. The only exception, and one that is fascinating, is that even for the state of Israel a Jewish convert to Christianity ceases being a Jew. One can be an atheist and a Jew, or a Buddhist and a Jew, but not a Christian and a Jew.

And there is a reason for this exception that bears consideration: the fundamental conflict between the claims at the heart of Judaism and Christianity. Christianity is defined by its claim that the Messiah has come in Jesus. A fundamental claim of rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism of the Talmud, is that the Messiah has not yet come. Or as one rabbi at a large synagogue in Dallas put it to me: "The day you accept that the Messiah has come you cease to be a Jew."

Which really gets us right back to what the rabbi Paul said, “in Christ there is neither Greek, nor Jew.”

The challenge for Christians is to now develop a theology that doesn’t effectively lead to the extinction of Jewish identity - whether now or in some anticipated future when all the Jews will acknowledge that the Messiah has come. And that, it seems to me, will require we that learn to affirm that Sinai, and not just Golgotha, is a witness to the righteousness of God. But of course when we do that we’ll have opened the way for other witnesses to the righteousness of God beyond the narrow history of the children of Abraham.

Freedom and Speech

There is an utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Two Washington Post editorials on October 29th, one by Dana Milbank and one by Huge Hewitt nicely capture the dilemma currently at the heart of our nation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/?nid=top_nav_opinions&utm_term=.890704dbf1fe.

On one hand there is surely a link between accepting anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews and violence against Jews. On the other hand it isn't a strict causal link. America is full of anti-Semites. I know quite a few. But they would never murder anyone. And America is full of haters - and again at least some appear on my Facebook pages. But they aren't mass murderers. I know lots of people that deplore Ted Cruz, I'm one of them, but I came into the same room I'd just ignore him.

(This is best with any politician. Their egos feed on notoriety, so calling attention to them, even making their lives miserable, just throws gasoline on the fire of their egos. They'll be the first to tweet what happened in happy self-satisfaction while the votes and donations keep rolling in. The problem with the Maxine Waters strategy isn't merely that it degrades political discourse, it's fundamentally ineffective as a political maneuver. The only way to hurt politicians is to vote against them. Otherwise they only care if you spell their name right.)

Mass murder is a lot like forest fires. 99.9% of the time the hot exhaust pipe, the dropped cigarette, the flying ember from a campfire just cool down and burn out. It's the .001% of the time when they just catch the dried leaves that they cause the conflagration.

With some of these correlations between constant causes and rare effects there are individual causes we can legislate. Take our various smoking bans, or those related to food additives. But when it comes to speech the problem is tricky: 1. because we believe that freedom of speech is of such superlative value that only a direct and demonstrable cause of violence justifies curtailing it. 2. And because we still live in the macho fantasy of "sticks and stone may break my bones but words will never hurt me." The first provides a legitimate reason to be wary of restricting speech. The second simply provides verbal bullies an excuse to blame those whom they harm for being hurt.

As an American society we still haven't negotiated between the reason for free speech and the excuses for its abuse. And the only way that we can negotiate between these two is to so marginalize hateful speech in the public realm that no politician would dare use it. But we don't.

A significant portion of the American public across the political spectrum not only embraces hateful speech it valorizes it, seeing it as a way of speaking "truth to power." And as listeners when we are confronted with hateful language we double down on the power of hate by posting and reposting words we ourselves would never say. Does it all seem a little vicious? We cheapen the value of free speech by dismissing those who name the viciousness as PC whimps and snowflakes. "Sticks and stones" we chant like 5 year olds, "if you can't stand the heat. . . " we sing.

Whether its the mockery of religion by Bill Maher and the late night comedy shows, or the Islamophobic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the alt-Right we've become a nation of exorcists: shouting out the religious demons we think we see in public life and public persons while our supporters stand by and applaud our performance with shouts of "Amen!"

I'll let you in on a secret. The demons aren't out there. Not out there beyond our borders and not out their among our political opponents. They aren't out there in the political parties or out there in the politicians, or the media.

The demons are within us. We are a nation of the demon possessed. We can shout our mockery and curses and our condemnations at others all we want, but the demon simply burrows deeper into our hearts. It feeds on our anger and outrage and grows with our curses and our taunts. And if we think that we personally, because of our righteousness or our innocence, are not possessed then we are fools. Neither Sin nor Satan have a political ideology: they will possess any who live by anger, arrogance, or hate and draw them toward their doom. And they love to chant, "and words will never hurt me."

It may be, of course, that our nation can limp forward, muttering its curses under its breath with each labored step, while its relative freedom of religion is merely damaged but not destroyed by its freedom of speech. But not as long as we hold on to the fantasy of sticks and stones. That fantasy will destroy us as those with bigger verbal sticks and harder verbal stones gradually take over our society, and having subverted the freedom at the root of our freedom destroy the freedoms that are left.

Or we could vote them out of office, using that utterly silent but totally effective power by which alone a nation finds redemption.

Religious Freedom

Opening and Closing Remarks to the First DFW Summit on Religious Freedom

We live in society more diverse and complex than was imagined by the founders of the United States. And this isn’t just a matter of demographics over the entire nation. We each personally experience this diversity and complexity in what appear to be ever accelerating forms. Moreover this experience is becoming a global human experience. Almost no one in the world lives in a monoculture any more.

It's worth thinking about this diversity as it is manifest in the public spaces in the United States.

• First there is greater ethnic diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in the public space. 
• There is more religious diversity than ever, and it is more and more evident in our shared public spaces. 
• There is more ideological diversity that we have known, with the traditional binary of conservative and liberal being fragmented into different groupings that only partially claim or own the legacy of those names. 
• And finally there are new forms of diversity as humans re-imagine what it means to be human. Most notably the sexual differentiation of male and female is being reimagined in terms not just of sex, but gender and sexuality as well. So that individuals may identify Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Trans-sexual, Queer, Twin-Spirited and other. 

This last form of diversity reminds us that in our post-enlightenment culture the centuries-long consensus in the West of a divinely mandated order bound by golden chains beneath God’s feet has been largely obliterated by the reality of cultural difference. The imago Dei is contested in both its meaning and substance.

One may wish to blame the rise of materialism and science for this, but the critiques of the Western conception of humanity and thus human diversity would as inevitably come from the Islamic world, or the world of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and various forms of animist thought. What Christians have thought to be foundational to civilization itself is really just one possibility for organizing concepts of the human person in what may be not so much civilization as an unusually well-armed and organized barbarism. 

This diversity of diversities brings forth new religious options, and new ways of being religious. And all of those who adopt these options wish to exercise their freedom to express their particular religious beliefs and ethical mandates in public along side the older more recognized forms of religion. 

This means that we live in a period of constant negotiation between conflicting narratives of religious expression, and conflicting narratives between religious expression and public rights. And importantly, we live in an era in which governments at every level are called upon to mediate these conflicts. 

And so we call upon the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment for guidance in law, and ultimately as the arbiter in disputes. And that is why we need to talk to one another. All social progress depends on dialogue between competing understandings of the common basis of our social imagination. The greatest danger we face is any effort to delegitimize voices in our public discourse, to push anyone away from the tables at which we negotiate our future. 

Perhaps that is why right after the 1st Amendment restricts Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, the 1st Amendment forbids Congress from prohibiting freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. We are here in Southern Methodist University because SMU understands its mission is to uphold those freedoms the responsibility they entails. 

Closing Remarks:

After a full day of workshops, speakers and panels it is becoming clear that the foundational documents (the US Constitution in this case) have their own foundations. What lies beneath our constitution are sets of ideas more complex that we usually realize.

So when you have a dispute over what it means to be human in society, and which rights adhere to our humanity the question arises: who decides and what basis? 

The Enlightenment basis of the US Constitution understood what it meant to be human largely on the basis of the Jewish and Christian traditions laid over those of Greek and Roman philosophy. This logically followed the Renaissance of classical learning that helped spur the Enlightenment. A brief quote from the US Declaration of Independence shows this.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  

Let’s begin with the final line fo the first paragraph, “A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires. . . “ This is a statement thoroughly rooted in the Enlightenment ideal of rational discourse as the basis of human decision making. Individuals and societies do not undertake to act without having and declaring their rational reasons for doing so. To fail to do so is indecent, an offense against humanity and the human mind. 

In the preceding line we can see how the classical Enlightenment understanding of humans is built on the Western theistic tradition. It refers to "The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God" as if they are indivisible, which seems only logical. Yet it is now contested. 

The Enlightenment opened the door to a new way of understanding what it means to be human, one based on the scientific exploration of what it means to be human. And that exploration, in order to realize its own integrity and freedom, disestablished nature's law from any purported lawmaker. And with this we find the rise of evolutionary, biological, medical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological definitions of what it means to be human that are not only incompatible with those of the Western Theistic tradition, but deny its relevance entirely. There is only nature, no God. 

But there is something else implicit in these short paragraphs. The Enlightenment pushed us toward concepts of human persons as free to choose their own company and destiny. They may dissolve political bonds and forge new ones with the blessing of Nature’s law and even God. But there is more than that to their autonomy. It is personal, all are equal and endowed with inalienable rights. The new citizens of the United States were no longer tied to their old hierachires, the old-world ethnic identities, clans, and religions. They could choose their personal identity and the social groups they wished to relate to. Eventually they would claim the right to choose their own sex and sexuality as well as to upend all established views of gender. As they continue to do. 

So as we discuss religious freedom we do so in an American culture that accepts three different authoritative basis for understanding the human person: 1. the classical Western tradition, 2. science, and 3. individual choice. And these three both assert themselves, are called upon in public debate, and come into conflict in our time. And all three are in fact being continuously re-negotiated. We don't agree with our founding fathers about what Scripture teaches about human nature. Science has and is changing continuously with regard to its normative understanding of the human. And even what it means to be an individual is in question as we try to understand ourselves as essentially social beings.

What we do not have is a social consensus expressed in legislation regarding the relative values for decision making of these three independent authorities. And given that, we rightly suspect that the courts that ultimately arbitrate real cases may be more influenced by the ideological commitments of the judges than existing laws.   

But if this creates conflicts, some of which Judge Starr referred to in his lecture at lunch, it also creates the demand that we continue to talk together and work together. Because only through dialogue that we reach a consensus on what is essential to our humanity, and thus the meaning of human freedom and human dignity. 

Our American English language is promiscuous to a superlative degree. As we have interacted with new and different cultures over centuries our language has continuously become enriched with new ideas and re-constructions of the world. We aren’t unique in this regard. The most basic of human actions is speech, and since the dawn of humanity we humans have spoken with one another until a common language emerges. I’ve seen this first hand as children in my granddaughter’s preschool, who speak German, English, Turkish, and Chinese at home manage quite nicely to work out how they can both communicate and work together. You can see this process in where youth gather in Europe mixing English with German, Spanish, French, and different Slavic languages. The idea of linguistic purity is as nonsensical as that of racial purity. That which humans universally can do they will universally do with one another; whether it is speak or procreate. 

To create new languages that better express a shared experience than any one older language is our greatest gift. But it only comes to us through speaking to and listening to one another across cultural, linguistic, and experiential boundaries. And more, it almost always comes about in face to face engagement that allows the full richness of our abilities to express ourselves. 

And that is why, to repeat, we are here in a university, have been here today, and will come back. Because our university is dedicated to that process of creating the language by which the Americans of the 21st century will understand themselves as humans together, and continue to defend their freedom of religion.

The Proper Product of Humans is Humanity

The most important story of humanity up to the present day has been the story of socialization; humans creating ever larger and more complex societies. 

Social anthropologists, historians, psychologists, sociologists, and economists may study this process from many perspectives, but the underlying object of study is the same: the long and continuing emergence of the humans as a social creatures in the widest sense. The emergence of humanity.

There is another perspective, however, one that emerges in the modern era and is closely linked to the self-understandings of modern humans. This perspective understands humans primarily in terms of production and consumption of things. Humans are tool makers, makers of art, makers of ritual, and builders of villages, towns, and cities. And they are consumers of the same.

This focus on production and consumption can lead us to forget that production initially served only one human purpose: the creation of societies. The earliest tools were used not merely to obtain food, but to obtain enough food to share. Plastic arts, rituals, stories, and the earliest shelters were all produced to draw people together even as they provided the means for doing so. Even weapons and war were products with the distinct purpose of protecting or allowing for the expansion of societies; and were often a direct means to the end of creating stronger social bonds.

The rise of the industrial age has obscured the relationship between production and the creation of the social human, or properly humanization and thus humanity. As production reaches new levels of sophistication individual products become less directly related to human uses, much less socializing uses. The final assembly of a automobile or a mobile phone both uses and obscures tens of thousands of component products with no apparent relationship to humans or humanity. And it obscures the fundamental purpose of both for communication between humans. 

An almost inevitable result is that more and more humans, perhaps the vast majority, are valued and value themselves not as producers of humanity, but as producers and consumers of artifacts. Add to this the fact that our products, which should serve to allow us the leisure for greater and greater human interaction, also provide the means for greater and greater isolation and we have the phenomenon of humans products implicitly supporting and even forming anti-social, anti-humans.

For those of us who are religious, that includes our products. The ritual worship we produce and the teaching we offer doesn’t necessarily support the creation of greater and more expansive societies and the deeper and deeper humanity of those within them. It can as easily reinforce tribal and even clan structures, or even (as it often does) isolate humans from their fellow humans - particularly when the focus is on personal salvation and personal success. 

My notes above clearly offer a way of attaching value to those things we humans produce: they have value only so long as they humanize. But such valuation and re-evaluation isn’t our greatest challenge. We are quickly coming to a time when more and more of what humans produce will be produced by machines. And I don’t just mean the things humans produce, although in that realm alone the dislocation humans as producers will be vast. 

Take a typical artistic product, something we humans believe is pretty exclusively our realm. 

This last few months I decided to produce a series of educational videos. In the old days of just a few years ago I could hardly have produced anything worthwhile on my own. Even if I possessed a video camera the process of editing, copying, and distributing video involved a host of professional video producers; each an artist with their own expertise. It would have been impossible without a community.

But last week I recorded my lectures, by myself, with two cameras (and two perspectives) in front of a green screen, using a teleprompter and with three studio lights. Old fashioned increases in theproduction of things, largely created by eliminating human workers and using automation, made the equipment available to me for less than $500.00. And instead of a human community, the final video could be created on my computer using smart technology that replaces, or allows me to replace, all of those artists who would have edited, color balanced, audio balanced, created backdrops and sets, etc.

Of course the final product lacked something. It was acceptable, but missed what is inevitably added by community. Its easy to forget there would be no Picasso without Paris, no Van Gough without Arles, no Rembrandt without Leiden. 

But most of us aren't them. So what about replacing me? Almost trivial given my acting skills. Computer programs exist already that could have created a digital lecturer giving my lectures in a digitally created environment. They are expensive now but they won’t be in the future. And writing the lecture? Without doubt computer algorithms are already absorbing everything written on religion into vast data banks and will be able to create not only sensible but even brilliant lectures. 

So if I value myself as a producer of lectures apart from the learning community that gathers around them,  then mine is a rapidly diminishing value. 

Do you value yourself as a salesperson? You are already being replaced by an algorithm that specifies where a computer will place products in a digital world, or a robot in a de-humanized store. 

Do you value yourself as a politician? Get serious. At any level above city councilman you could be replaced by a sophisticated Max Headroom whose image is entirely the product of marketing surveys. And those marketing surveys are increasingly surveys of digitally reproduced and refined versions of imagined humans. Why do you think a poll of only 1200 people can be accurate within 5%? Because a smart machine recreates an entire population of voters with its algorithms. And like you, but more efficiently and with no feelings of remorse or ethical distractions, Max would also vote for whatever attracts donors and insures reelection. 

Do you value yourself as a voter? A decider? Without a community of diverse humans and their views and interests you are a puppet of machine-driven marketing algorithms that know your habits and desires better than you know them yourself.  

And you marketers? Yeah, you are gone too. The focus group of the future will be an artificial intelligence evaluating the interactions of algorithms representing market segments and determining which product most appeals to them. And the product will be designed by a computer that observes consumption trends, analyzes them, and proposes new products. 

No matter what you produce, if you derive your value from production of things you are doomed to be valueless in the coming age of smart machines. With one exception, and only one exception. 

The only way to produce human society and thus full humans is through human interaction and relationships. Our true human value is manifest when we come together we make one another into a community, a society. These relationships may be mediated by things we produce - all forms of art, ritual, religion, teaching, therapy, and media come to mind. Yet the value of those things is derivative of and directly linked to our human engagement with each other. Producing things has human value only in so far as they are useful in the work of creating humanity.

And the corollary, the use of products has value only when they are used in the work of humanization. 

The reader can imagine the revolution in economics that is coming when most of us have no work producing things and all human activity must be re-valued. We will either begin to offer compensation to the humanizing, but largely uncompensated tasks now done by volunteers in their spare time, or have most of the population living idly on the dole. 

We will either begin to offer compensation for the kind of art that humanizes or see it disappear while smart machines create all the decorations and entertainment we could possibly want. 

We’ll either recognize that every human person has the capacity to humanize the rest of us, even if only by the demand on us to be humane. Because if we evaluate those who cannot efficiently produce stuff as worthless we will very soon join them in being worthless. 

Doctors, lawyers, politicians, computer programmers, CEO’s, CFO’s, pundits, and academics. All you thinkers. Do you think you are on the right side of Ayn Rand’s objectivist political philosophy? Well in the future you’ll just be a second-hander like everyone else because machines will out-think you. 

Schools and universities? We’ll either turn away from training producers of products back to the study of, and work producing, humans in human societies or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either create humanizing communities around service, learning, and the arts or we’ll be rendered irrelevant. We’ll either serve the human task of producing humanity or we’ll disappear.

And the church? We are not immune. Many of our pastors and much of our worship will be replaced by computer algorithms and intelligently created animations. After all, a pastor who knows only a tiny fraction of the congregation face to face, and who is known only through an image on a screen will be as easily replaceable by an advanced Max H. 

The best worship leadership in the world, from choir and organ to praise band and laser light show, detached as they usually are from their audiences, will soon be created and streamed by smart machines. Indeed, most of the music coming from the major Christian publishing houses is so formulaic as to almost demand automation, and the look and feel across thousands of churches varies so little as to be negligible. 

Its easy to imagine a future where Pandora or Spotify will deliver to thousands of churches 3-D holographic worship leadership tweaked to the personal preference of the worship committee - assuming the committee isn’t replaced by careful surveys of congregational taste created for and evaluated by smart machines to maximize attendance and giving. 

The reality is that offering motivational entertainment for a market share already drawn to the higher production values of Hollywood will be literally worthless. The Christian church will either create community and foster humanity or have no value. It will be entirely our choice. Because the only proper product of humans is humanity. 

And the Gospel? The story of God’s love for the world is the greatest humanizing story ever told. But only when it is delivered in person. And that is the future of the church, or it has no future.