Blessed Assurance: Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, and Communists Oh My!

Oh yes, and witches.

The 1950's to the 70's were a troubled time. Out beyond the beaches of Key West, Biloxi and Galveston the Commies were setting up on Cuba and spreading their tentacles across Latin America. Back at home the tremors of social change were going to become the earthquake of the civil rights movement. There wouldn't be enough white robes, lynchings, and assassinations to keep the schools from being segregated and African Americans from having the right to vote. Then there were the original "culture wars" with Bill Buckley faced off against Dr. Benjamin Spock. The elite that had run the country was suddenly divided.

In my home town the school district was in a long legal battle over segregation, one that it would decisively loose in 1972. The heartbeat of the Richardson economy was the defense industry, and in homage to our fathers we all wore three piece suits to church. But we were watching the anti-war protests on TV, and hearing the strains of "four dead in Ohio." Nor could the hippies and the psychedelic movement be escaped. The Baptists tried to keep their youth engaged on Friday nights with glow paint, black lights, and sofas while the Methodist youth center featured sing-a-longs to John Denver and rooms dedicated to Dungeons and Dragons. Only those totally disengaged didn't know there were drugs available, both at church and in school. Long hair on boys and short skirts on girls became inevitable.

And, oh yes, Methodism was already declining in membership. From being the largest denomination in the United States in the 1950's it was steadily slipping behind the Southern Baptists.

Then when I was about 15 or 16 someone gave me a Chick publication. I’m not sure whether it was from someone in Young Life, the FCA, or a youth group leader. Maybe all three. Certainly available in the local Christian bookstore run by members of my church.

Amazingly this little tract was about two scholars, Westcott and Hort, who had created the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament and launched the movement to revise God's word.

To understand why this was such a big deal you need to consider the peculiar relationship between Americans and the Bible.

In a “new world" and especially on the frontier the authority of the Bible was almost the last ground upon which Christians could claim a sense of stability and empowerment in their possession. For New World denominations like Methodists and Baptists the reliability of the Bible became the main guarantor that a social order even existed for its far flung readers. With no priests, the barest online of a liturgy, and in many cases a disdain for creeds, God's Word was the tangible sign of God's presence - always found the home altar even among the illiterate. 

Out in the deep woods, far from cities or even towns, on the trackless prairies and often surrounded by humans whose ways seemed inscrutable, even barbarian, where could you find a sense that you lived in an ordered world? “This is my Father’s World” with its quasi nature worship, or the poems of Whittier and their gentle pantheism were fine for the mild climate of England or the well-settled Eastern seaboard. Try singing them in the face of prairie fire, blue norther, or tornado. In the face of chaos the Bible promised, and indeed created order. In a world that could turn chaotic in a heartbeat you needed promises to stand on.

And before Westcott and Hort the King James Version of the Bible had been the solid ground on which Southern Christianity could stand. The Yankees and their carpetbaggers could overturn the old social order. The suffragettes and their acolytes could shake the foundations of the family. But the KJV, build on the Textus Receptus, was a rock.

Until Westcott and Hort and those who followed with their hermeneutics and extra-Jesus began chipping away at it, noting that the "received text" wasn't received from Jesus, but from a French humanist name Erasmus.

Well by the 1960's Samuel Gipp, Th.D and Chick Publications weren't having it. They were going to tell the truth about Westcott and Hort. So they accused the scholars of: 1. being products of a Jesuit conspiracy to re-romanize England, 2. being homosexuals, 3. being socialists, pacifists, evolutionists, and communists. 4. and being "spiritualists" who flirted with sorcery and witchcraft. (Don’t search, just check out chick.com and go from there.) Eventually, because they always fall together, "world Jewry" was drawn into the conspiracy.

Westcott and Hort and their critical edition of the New Testament became the sum of all fears. They were simultaneously Jews, Jesuits, Homosexuals, Communists, and Spiritualists/Sorcerers. I only wish I could have led such an active social life.

Of course this would just be a bunch of paranoid craziness if it hadn’t been so widespread in Christian circles. Because finally someone had put a focus to our anxiety that attached it to our deepest source of security: the Bible.

These tracts were enthusiastically circulated among the youth I knew in the 1960’s and 1970’s and later, not least in my UM youth group. And I saw their influence as my own peers going into ministry chose DTS, where Zane Hodges had was trying to reinvigorate the textual debate over Westcott and Hort while maintaining a barely respectable distance from accusations about their motives. (The Hodges thesis had the Textus Receptus transmitted through various theologically pure groups in a chain leading more directly to the Holy Land than through Alexandria.)

In the Methodist circles I ran in I don't recall overtly anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish preaching, although you could sure hear it in the Bible studies, around dinner tables, and in the larger social discourse.

But the United Methodist embrace of the Chick advocated idea of a “gay agenda” was right out in public. The little Chick tract “The Gay Blade” was there, making the rounds of the youth group warning us that we were being seduced into deviant sexual behavior and a "homosexual lifestyle.” Coming from a family with no investment in the KJV,  and too focused on the prospects of non-deviant sexual behavior to really notice anything else, all this never bothered me like it does some. but it bothered some people enough to single out homosexuality as the focus of UM debate for decades.

So it is hardly an accident that in these years we saw movements within American evanglicalism that vigorously linked maintaining scriptural authority with the suppression of homosexuality. In the mind of evangelical Christians the rise of the homosexual agenda was the clearest bellwether of the decline of scriptural authority. After all, it began with two supposedly gay men.

Speaking of chains of authorization. It is time to break that link. Neither sexual orientation, nor behavior, nor any of the other supposed imagined sin or social movement is responsible for shifting sands of Biblical translation and exegesis on which Christians try to make their daily walk. The roots are deeper, and may be laid at the feet of Luther and the first Reformers. It is they that decided individual Christians should study the Bible for personal edification. And it was a burgeoning Enlightenment epistemology that told individuals that they could draw their own conclusions with regard to whether what it said was true.

You can't get that genie back in the bottle just by cracking down on one of the endless list of supposed sins that clergy might engage in. You would need a new inquisition and list of questions for boards of ordained ministry as long as the Bible itself.

We (all of us) need to find a coherent, agreed, means of moving from text to conclusion that is neither idiosyncratic nor incoherent, and is more intelligible than our current "majority vote wins" model. That model is a pure product of the Enlightenment. It is inconsistent with the epistemological claims of the current majority and lacking credibility with a large minority of the church.

A good start for thinking about this would be Billy Abraham's Canon and Authority. A good start for enacting it would be to jettison everything in our Discipline arising past that Council of Constantinople as having binding authority on the belief or behavior of any United Methodist.

Breaking news: You might want to check out the book: Holy Love, by Steve Harper - a former leader of the Good News Movement and former professor at Asbury for a personal and scriptural look at same-sex marriage in both scripture and the historical context of the UMC.

Was Jesus a Palestinian?

No. He might have been called a Nazarene, Galilean or a Jew, but there was no geographical place called “Palestine” in the time of Jesus. 

So why did Ilhan Omar retweet Omar Sulaiman’s tweet that “Jesus was a Palestinian.” And why did Sulaiman tweet it in the first place? 

Probably because this idea has been part of contemporary Palestinian political discourse for some time. Check out Amazon for books and T-Shirts. Mitri Raheb advances the same argument in his books. The point, of course, is to strengthen the Palestinian claim to a long historic association with what is now Israel and the West Bank. Such claims in the Palestinian press go back even further, associating contemporary Palestinians with the ancient Philistines who were contemporaries of the earliest tribes of Israel. 

The problem with such arguments is their futility. They will not persuade Israelis to give up the concept of Israel as an (ethnic) Jewish state. Modern Jews, without exception, are part of a thousands of year old history of associating themselves with the land of Israel. It is constantly reiterated in worship and prayer to become an indelible aspect of their identity. Moreover in a post-holocaust world where anti-semitism is present and on the rise Israel is that tangible guarantee of a sustained Jewish people. These far outweigh, when it comes to it, any historical, genealogical, or genetic facts concerning actual associations with the various places that Jews have lived.

But Jewish arguments against a Palestinian identity with the land are equally wrongheaded. You can’t really say, “We lived in Europe for 1850 years but our identity is with this land while you lived here in the land for 1850 years but can’t claim you identify with it - go back to your king in Jordan.” Which is exactly what Jewish militias did in 1948 when they expelled Arabs from different parts of Israel. Of course Palestinians identify with the land, they lived on it, and still do. 

Nor does it help when someone like Fred Menecham of the Simon Wiesenthal Center responds, “Jesus was Jewish, actually.” Because he is comparing an ethnic identity with a geographical designator. And frankly doing so in a way that is intellectually offensive. Bringing in Jesus on the Israeli/Jewish side of a land dispute, when those few Talmudic references to Jesus accuse him of sorcery and idolatry seems ingenuous. It is true that Jesus was Jewish, but since the Jews never claimed him how does that actually address the problem of who has a right to live on the land?

Probably the best thing for Jews and Muslims, and I would say Christians as well, is to leave Jesus out of this. Christians, who claim to reverence Jesus as the Son of God, are near committing blaspheme when they use his name to advance a political point. God will not be used that way. Muslims, who claim to honor Jesus as the “sinless prophet,” should know better than to dishonor him by dragging him into a tweet-storm based on a politically opportune mistruth. And Jews, who at best ignored him and his teaching in their own religious life should leave him to those who believe he was more than a misguided religious teacher from the past. 

So to my friends, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian so deeply entwined in the complex politics of contemporary Israel and Palestine I have a suggestion: leave Jesus out of it. Some of us care more for Him than to have Him dragged through your muddy mutual loathing and swamp of political posturing. If you want to honor one Christians call the Prince of Peace you might cease involving his name in your wars. 

Jews, Israel, and Christian Obligation - When Ideals Collide

Yesterday, as I write, a federal court overthrew a Texas state law strongly supported by the Jewish community, notably AIPAC and the AJC. The law would have forbidden anyone who wants to do business with the state of Texas from supporting the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions movement targeting Israeli businesses. The bill had strong bipartisan support, meaning in Texas strong support from the Christian community. 

Well not me, and I shared my concerns with Jewish leaders. From my perspective the BDS movement is unhelpful, even destructive in its broadest form. But I knew from the start that this bill was, as the court ruled, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It was, and was intended to be, a law limiting freedom of expression by punishing any business that expressed support for boycotting, sanctioning, or divesting from businesses in Israel. Since this same legislation has been passed in many other states more court cases will follow, as indeed the plaintiffs in this case have promised. More laws will be struck down. More on Texas can be found here.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2019/04/25/federal-judge-rules-texas-ban-boycotting-israel

So why would Christians and Jews who have been strong supporters of the First Amendment seek to pass a law that is clearly a violation of the US Constitution?

The reason is simple. The Jewish community and its Christian allies regard the BDS movement as a direct attempt to destroy the state of Israel. And since most Jews regard the existence of the State of Israel as necessary to Jewish identity and the continuity of the Jewish community the BDS movement is an existential threat to their community.

They don't see the requiring those who contract with the state of Texas from joining the BDS movement as opposing freedom of speech or conscience. They see it as the Texas State Government refusing to do business with anyone seeking to destroy a whole people, a sovereign state, and ally of the United States.

But look further into the article. It isn't just Jewish leaders and their Christian allies who have an interest in a foreign state. The plaintiff at the center of the court case, Bahai Amawi,  boycotts Israeli products because her people (in the Palestinian Territory) are being mistreated by Israel. One can see her point of view. Why wouldn't you, as a matter of principle, refuse to do business with companies you believe are hurting your people? And why shouldn't you be able to state those principles freely? This is America, right?

What we find at work here is a deep disjunction between American ideals and the reality of transnational ethnic loyalties. Someone like myself, whose family has been in the United States for many generations and is ethnically mixed, can hardly imagine what such loyalties are about. I have no idea what I am other than an American. And that fits with the ideals I was taught in school. The United States is a new world where the old world can be left behind. We are a melting pot where all those old loyalties and memories are supposed to be boiled off.

(An aside, Elvis Costello's beautiful "Green Song" looks at exactly this from an Irish perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwjzJeAR8-I)

But it has never really been like that. New immigrants have always kept in touch with the "old country." As late as the 1970's the IRA was active among Irish immigrants in Boston. Here in Texas Mexican flags fly over car dealerships and sports bars. So why should it be any different for Jews and Palestinians?

Nor can we fail to remember those who because of their skin color or family name or both were denied an equal place, or maybe any place in the supposed melting pot. Jews and Muslims have both been, alongside African Americans and Latinos victims of that kind of bigotry. Segregation was a far more vicious attack on American ideals than any threat from Fascism or Communism and those who perpetuated it are alive and at work today.

It is both deeply human, and a natural reaction to the universalizing and reifying tendencies of the Enlightenment, to maintain family ties and an interest in a homeland; whether real or imagined. The ideal of the United States was to make us all rootless so we could become planted in new soil. But we can now see that for many people this American soil isn't yet deep enough to sustain a healthy identity. Organizations like Ancestor.com and 23andMe exist because a lot of us are feeling rootless.

So its not surprising that much of the 20th century, and now the 21st, has been the story of wars fought to establish ethnic homelands. The melting pot ideal embodied by the United States has only a shaky following even here, and has little currency outside our unique history and borders. What was imagined as the inevitable future of a global civilization now appears to quite possibly have been a step too far too fast for many.

Of all ethnic identities. Which is why the state, whether the State of Texas, a city government, or the Federal government, needs to stay out of supporting or undermining any ethnic identity. All Americans have a right to identify with some "old world" if they can find one. And none has the right to deny that right to others.

The judge in this case asked the Texas attorney general, "What is the interest of the State of Texas in this." And Ken Paxton, not surprisingly, had no answer. Neither did Governor Abbot. And neither do those legislators both Republican and Democratic who passed the now suspended law. Because the only interest of the state should be providing equal rights to all, in particular those rights guaranteed in the constitution. It may be hoped that Texas politicians will begin to focus on that ideal.

Let's Take the Id out of Christian Identity.

The work habitually done in obedience to Christ’s commands is the character of the Church, and hence its identity as the Body of Christ, for in this work the Church reiterates the work of Christ. Scripture, creeds, liturgies, and structures are just chalk dust on a board by comparison.

I still remember back in systematic theology when John Deschner lectured on the Trinity. First there was a triangle on the chalk board. Then at each point the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit, then a whole series of correspondences of these with other aspects of the Godhead. When the whole thing was finished Schubert Ogden, co-teacher in those days at Perkins, asked, “Why is Father on top? Why not rotate the whole thing, or any of the correspondences?

Indeed. It is always a problem when you try to inscribe God onto a chalkboard. Or for that matter a three dimensional space like a cathedral. The latter is both a tribute and a profound theological statement. And deeply misleading. 

There may have been a time in a culture dominated by Aristotelian metaphysics that names like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” designated persons in static relationship to one another: something that could be inscribed in the space of a cathedral or on a blackboard. But we don’t live in that time. Both our personal experience and our science tell us that nothing is static. There is no “being,” only becoming. However deeply we look into the atom or out into the universe we never find a substance. We only find movement. We find no dancer, only a dance. To say in English (it may have made sense 1700 years ago in Greek) that the Son is “of one substance with the Father” isn’t just meaningless, it’s absurd. 

Of course the theological answer to this is the God isn’t bound by our human perceptions of reality. That, after all, is the meaning of transcendence. All we need need is new analogical language - surely exactly the work theologians are paid to do.

Yet when it comes to ecclesiology the problem is more acute. Take the most common designation for the Church, “the Body of Christ.” Here the body is clearly located in the reality we experience, as was God incarnate in Jesus. And we now know that human bodies, or bodies made of humans, are all becoming and no being. They are all relationships and no essence. Or to put it in modern psychological terms, they are all ego, and no id. The word “body” isn’t a thing, it is the designation for a set of infinitely complex movements during the shortest period of time that humans can perceive. Cut that period in half and you still find movement. Half it again a thousand times and you still find movement. You will never find some solid unchanging thing that “is” a body. 

Nor do we solve this problem by locating the essence in the Spirit of Christ, for the Spirit above all else is both dynamic and sets the body into motion. It “blows where it will” and is scarcely to be pinned down by mere theologians. 

So instead of identifying The Body of Christ with utterly insubstantial substances, we can better identify the Body of Christ by its narrative of engagement with the world; a narrative co-authored by Spirit of Christ and the followers of Christ who embody his Spirit. The Body of Christ has is no essence waiting to be uncovered, only an ever emerging self-in-action being revealed. Such character as the Body of Christ possesses, it possesses in its habitually repeated narratives of encounter with the world. 

So, for example, the Eucharist being celebrated is the character of the Body of Christ. The confessing of the faith of the church through obedience to his command is the character of the Body of Christ. The habitual feeding of the poor, healing the sick, giving water to the thirsty, and visiting those in prison gives the Body of Christ its character. 

(I note in passing that the United States “Confessing Movement,” whose name echos that of the Bekennende Kirche of Germany during the Third Reich, provides one of the richest ironies of the 21st century. The Bekennende Kirche were identified exactly by their actions in defiance of the Nazi state and thier work on behalf of those worst oppressed. They confessed with their lives and at the cost of their lives. The US “Confessing Movement” is merely the politically charged assertion of static doctrine by privileged people, a defense of soon-to-be chalk dust; notably at neither risk nor cost to themselves.)

More generally the work habitually done in obedience to Christ’s commands is the character of the Church, and hence its identity as the Body of Christ, for in this work the Church reiterates the work of Christ. Scripture, creeds, liturgies, and structures are just chalk dust on a board. They capture, one hopes, the best examples of past engagement as a guide for the future. They are useful in identifying the Church only as accounts of the processes by which it takes on the character of Christ. But when they in themselves become for Christians the character of the Body of Christ they are no better than a tomb in which the body lies awaiting resurrection.

Scripture in particular is holy only as it inspires and motivates Christian mission. If all it inspires is arguments about its meaning it is has become dead letters on crumbling pages. The creeds are holy only when they unify the church for mission. When they become the basis of false unity based on verbal conformity, or worse a bludgeon for heresy hunters they become the whitewash on an ecclesial tomb. And ministers apart from the doing of ministry, engaged only in positioning themselves in static hierarchical relationships may as well lie in those very tombs.

In our world churches are becoming the Body of Christ as they tell in their lives the story of Christ’s encounter with the world. And we see this happening around the world. We only need to see ourselves in this way, identified and unified by stories we are telling together as the Body of Christ rather than by fruitless efforts to find a common essence or ancient urquelle. 

Do you see someone feeding the poor, visiting the imprisoned, healing the sick, comforting those who morn? Do you see the faithful administering of the sacraments and the praising of God?  There, in that work, the church is becoming the Body of Christ; because Risen Christ is at work through and among the citizens of his Reign. 

Our Globalist Fantasy

Bob Dylan‘s song “you got to serve somebody“ marked his enigmatic conversion to Christianity. It became popular, and was covered by numerous other artists, because it said something we can all relate to. Schleiermacher himself couldn’t have said it better. No human can escape the web of human interdependencies. And no human can escape that sense, If only fleeting that there is something greater upon which we depend as well.

The genius of the Enlightenment was to seek to make the human response to those human interdependencies, and the absolute dependency on God, entirely voluntary. Humans would no longer be in the thrall to self appointed authorities, whether civil or religious.

American Methodism was a full expression of that Enlightenment ideal. It was born in a twin movement of independence by Americans from the British civil authorities and the church of England. But ultimately American Methodism could not escape from the third grand movement of its opening era; imperialism. With inconsistent exceptions it sent missionaries into the world to create an empire of the spirit. They offered freedom from sin in Jesus Christ but almost simultaneously placed people in thrall to their own Methodist discipline and more broadly Western civilization. At least initially missionaries lacked the perspective to understand either the limitations of their own culture or its implicit diminution of human freedom that it brought. 

Put in an other way, the missionaries mistook a voluntary response to the call of the gospel with actual human freedom. 

You gotta serve somebody. The American Methodists offered Christ as Lord, but without much subtlety insisted that new converts to the Lord’s service also follow their orders. Initially they made no distinction between Christ and their particular culture of obedience articulated in their discipline. 

Still, eventually the missionaries recognized, under the influence of growing bodies of indigenous Christians, the problematic nature of the mission. By the 20th century things were changing.

As indigenous Methodists began to claim their freedom, the more cognizant of the missionaries became partners. Methodists across the world, supported by missionaries, rightly insisted that their hard won national autonomy from western empires be matched by autonomy from American Methodism’s empire of the Spirit. The exceptions, and none went uncontested, were those Methodists who needed the shelter and support of American Methodism in situations of continued religious and political oppression and instability.

The result, by 1968, would be a United Methodist church both managed and supported entirely from the United States but with small and growing appendages in Europe, a few African countries, and the Philippines. All the other former dominions of the old Methodist empire were autonomous. It was this situation that would give birth to a new form of the old imperial fantasy. It would be called Global United Methodism. Many missionaries cringed. 

This globalist fantasy came at just the right time to give comfort to American United Methodists observing their own national decline, and to American conservative/traditionalist United Methodists marginalized by the structures of the new UMC and the rapidly changing American culture. Because even in 1968 it was clear that the growing appendages of American Methodism were mostly theologically conservative in the American sense of the word.

Unfortunately exactly what was meant by “Global” wasn’t clear in 1968, nor is it clear now. 

The structure of this new “Global United Methodism" was extremely American-centric. Central conferences were given some measure of cultural autonomy. The American church, despite its own cultural variations, continued to be considered the cultural norm from which the Central conferences varied. All of the major boards and agencies remained in the United States. The result is that today United Methodists are politically interdependent to the extent that political power is distributed according to membership, but remain highly dependent financially on the US churches. Participation in the Global UMC was theoretically voluntary but with all property and funding controlled at the center participants were hardly free.

So, we must ask, what does “Global” mean as a description of the United Methodist Church? Pragmatically it has meant primarily: 1. Political structures are uniform across its not-really-global reach, 2. Property and funding are controlled from the center, which is presumed to unify. 3. doctrinal and social principles are shared, if not uniformly adhered to, and 4. US boards and agencies extend their mission globally. 

And what does “Global” mean theologically? 

Nothing really. 

Self-identified traditionalists have focused almost entirely on participation in three supposedly unifying aspects of being church: credal uniformity (including distinctly Wesleyan notes), uniform adherence to traditional western family structures, and a uniformly enforced discipline regulated by a democratically elected General Conference. Only the third of these is distinctly United Methodist in either content or tradition. In the end only thing that binds us together into a distinct Church is law. 

Progressives, in so far as they offer a vision of a global church, offer vaguer ideas of being “one in the Spirit”  that are no more distinctively United Methodist than the theology of the traditionalists. But instead of a uniformly enforced discipline they focus on “partnerships” as the media joining politically autonomous churches together, leaving us only egalitarian structures of shared power to hold us together. 

Both traditionalist and progressive ideas of a global church are actually fruitless fantasizing because they have no theological foundation.  National Methodist churches that gained their autonomy from US domination are not going to submit to a common discipline just because it is controlled from a different continent. And a global church isn’t created by pragmatic arrangements for power-sharing. You gotta serve somebody, but I'm guessing that no one wants to serve law and power. 

What neither fantasy takes seriously is the inculturated nature of Christianity. The church is inculturated precisely because as the body of Christ it is and expression of the incarnation, which is non-different from the inculturation of God. Given that we now have, as God promises and demands, a diversity of cultures, the theological basis for a global church will need to be intercultural. Culture is the root of difference, and intercultural dialogue is the key to an always emerging unity. And this implies a theology of a sort we haven’t yet imagined, a theology that is inter-incarnational. More on that in another post.

You gotta serve somebody. Maybe we can find a way for it to always be Christ.

A Woman's View of a Woman

is different from a man’s.

But we theologians often confuse abstraction with insight. 

I had a chance to spend an hour with the Bertha Morisot exhibit at the DMA. She was a pioneering impressionist, indeed a creator of the movement, who died far too young. Particularly when you see how she was pushing boundaries in her use of the canvas as a space. Her later works, all from the late 19th century, have a remarkably contemporary feel. More than a Monet. 

But what I noticed most is how she painted women, and how in almost every case we see something in the faces that draws us toward a deep sense of interiority. These women are alive, but inside and not for show, however showily they are dressed. They are someone in themselves. Going further, I would say she allows them, grants them, or maybe just depicts a selfhood it is hard to imagine one of her male contemporaries even seeing, much less conveying so directly to the viewer. Indeed only her genius makes them accessible to us. 

This is hardly surprising if you think about it. For all the pretense of Enlightenment objectivity there is surely nothing so conducive to revelation as shared experience, and no experience so difficult for a man to share in a gendered society than the experience of being a woman. Indeed the curators note that her subject matter was in part determined by her inability to see and explore the experiences of public life available to her male peers. 

This was particularly on my mind because on Wednesday I was asked to speak to hospice workers on how culture influences the experience of dying. 

Of course I cannot pretend to have shared in multiple cultural experiences of dying, or indeed in even one (though I’ve been rather close.) But I have studied enough of the religions and cultures of the world, and have attended to the dying and the dead of different cultures, to be confident that there are differences. They arise from the different ways in which people understand what it means to be a human in society and the larger world, from our different understandings of what it means to be embodied in the first place. 

The person whose final conscious hours are spent draped in brightly colored cloth at the edge of the Bagmati river, soon to be washed in its waters and cremated in the great Shivite temple at its edge, is experiencing dying differently from an American Christian, anxiety stilled and pain quieted by medications, surrounded by family in a airy room in a hospice center. Only at the barest physiological level will their deaths be similar. Their experience of these physiological changes will be entirely dictated by their different cultures, not to mention personalities and experiences. 

As it will be different from the sin-wracked penitent in mid 16th century Mexico City hoping that the excruciating pain from a gangrenous wound and the final rites from a dubious priest will save him centuries in Purgatory. Or his enlightened descendent two centuries later who, having cast out the Inquisition, will hope for a speedy and painless death before his life goes on trial in the Court of Reason, the only admirable attribute of such a God as might exist.

We theologians all too easily forget that there is no generic human. Theological anthropology is a farce if it believes it can construct such a thing apart from knowing the mind of God. But claiming such knowledge is farce enough and in any case, surely God as revealed in Christ is God of the particular rather than the generic. The new Adam like the old bears in his loins not only male and female but all the million tribes that would emerge in his image but looking nothing like him. He knows each of us individually not because we are all like him, a first century Palestinian Jew, but because he has chosen to be like all of us in all our incredible variety.

From a scientific standpoint there may be some common biological basis that justifies distinctions between sexes, or sexualities, or even races. But science show us that it is not simple, and is dwarfed by culture when it comes to the experience of being a person: a self within society and the world. Surely my grown daughter, as educated and cultured as Borisot, but out on the town in just those dives and cabarets Borisot could never see will sense not only kinship, but alienation from her languid, pastel fin-de-siecle Parisian woman’s world. 

We will never find the human whom God loves by a process of removal; trying to pick off the grains of dust from which we were made. When all the dirt is gone there will be nothing left but the gnostic fantasy underlying so much contemporary theology. There is no human without the dust, and if this dust doesn’t suit you (and St. Paul found it as frustrating as any of us who find its integrity dissolving before our eyes) you’ll have to wait for another body from your maker. 

But will it be human as we know ourselves to be human? You will not dwell in your Parent’s garden, nor know the pleasure of their flesh. Freed from dust you will also be freed from the only self you’ve ever known. The scripture teaches that humans will be transformed into celestial creatures fitted for the New Jerusalem and God’s reign. But their attention will be fully and only fixed on God, not on one another. Thus they will lack what completed Adam. Unless. 

Unless the myths of visitant angels and the intercessions of the saints are true, and over-clothed with Christ we retain in eternity the dust and division from which we were made as He retains in eternity the nail-holes in his hands and feet. 

Or perhaps we will be only memories, for a time among our familiars on earth and forever in the Mind of God; a coherent swirl of dust molded and purified by currents of Divine Love. Still dust.

But until we know God even as we are known by God, we were made to know one another, and a woman’s view of a woman will be unique. And far more worthy of our attention than a theological anthropology that has not looked for a moment on what Morisot saw. 

The Lost Enlightenment

To the extent that the current leadership of the United Methodist Church was trained in American theological seminaries, then those of us in theological education must admit that we have failed. 

We have failed to train leaders capable of engaging in fruitful dialogue across complex cultural and theological divides. Indeed their skill level appears to be just a little lower than that of our current US president and his North Korean counterpart. 

I expect one reason for this is that while Enlightenment paradigms still dominate our construction of theological knowledge (objective, rational, historically conscious, and divided into theory and practice) we have actually lost touch with the most important shift in human consciousness of the Enlightenment.

That shift was to recognize that knowing, while it may begin with the work of the individual mind, is inevitably social. It is democracy, not science, that is the greatest fruit of the Enlightenment. Indeed the bedrock of science is the demand that it be democratic: that it engage in public observation and public reason for its products to be considered worthy of consideration as shared knowledge of reality. All else is mere esotericism. 

The core of a truly enlightened education isn't universal truths. It is the necessary skills to engage in a universal discourse on the nature of reality. To be enlightened isn't to know the answers, it is knowing how to seek them with others.

One need only read the references and authors of a modern scientific paper to see just how universal that discourse can really be. One recent proof of an important mathematical theorem (Fermat’s Theorum) drew on well over 2 dozen scholarly works by authors ranging from China and Japan across to India, Africa, Europe, the Americas and England. It is quite typical of the genre. No biologist, physicist, mathematician, for chemist would dare be unfamiliar with the work of her peers around the world. 

One only need look at a contemporary American work on theology to see how narrow our world of discourse really is. Even references to Europeans are likely to be few, and typically those published in English. In certain specialities Latin American references might be found. Africans? Almost never. South Asians? Almost never. East Asia? Even fewer. Southeast Asians? Even fewer. Which American scholar has ever learned an Asian language or an African language? Which theology school gives more than a cursory glance (if that) to theological work being done in Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, Korea, or India? How many graduate schools of theology teach Swahili, Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, Korean, or Hindi? 

We’re quite at home with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew: happily in engaging in a discourse with the dead (who almost always agree with us.) And our graduate students must learn German or French, usually to access theologians long passed from this world. It is hardly surprising that we have no idea how to talk to those who are living. And that is our graduate schools. Our students in MDiv and DMin programs? Those who we expect to lead the church? 

They will graduate with little or no cross-cultural experience, no contemporary language skills to speak of, and a knowledge of the largest and most populous Christian continents gleaned from a couple of weeks on a mission trip. If that. 

Of course a chosen few, bishops for example, may travel widely. Most will have the cross-cultural knowledge that can be gained by a few days in a conference room of an international hotel chain and an outing for photo ops among the indigenes. They may actually have long conversations with their counterparts, but even these will be distorted by the ubiquity of a Western education among non-Western leaders and vast differences in financial resources.

This must change. First, at the core of theological education we need to have engagement with the voices of theologians, speaking out of the Africa, Latin American, and Asian contexts. And no - Saint Augustine doesn’t count as African. Their works need to be in our libraries and in our syllabi, and their voices need to be heard on our campuses. 

Second our students need to learn cross-cultural skills as fundamental skills in pastoral ministry and congregational and church leadership. 

Third, substantial, intentional, supervised cross-cultural engagement needs to be a required part of theological education. 

And finally our classrooms must be diverse. They must become the laboratory in which students learn to engage with fellow Christians and pastors from other cultures and other theological convictions. They must become the beit midrash where the universal capability of humans to learn from their fellow humans is fostered rather than marginalized. An international student presence isn't an option, it is a necessity if we're going to prepare leaders in ministry.

In our time the church does not need to train men and women toward sectarian purity. That is available as the cultural norm. We need to train leaders with both the confidence that knowledge, not least knowledge of God, will emerge among us if we engage in open dialogue with others.  Faith is a hope in things unseen. 

Inside My House

Inside my house everything looks great today. Everything is in order. 

I have just thrown out all trash, rearranged the furniture and made it all just fine for me. Outside it is cold and wet and unpleasant. And full of such unpleasant people. It is a good day to stay inside.

Of course living indoors all the time one has to make adjustments. Especially if it is a very old house. For example, the floors are not very level. So my furniture is propped up on newspapers or wooden blocks to keep it stable. There are cracks in the ceiling and the walls, so I have to constantly plaster them up or cover them with wall paper. The roof leaks, but this is easily enough cured with a bucket. Or two. 

And why would I want to do anything else? Understanding the cause of these problems would require that I go outside into the rain and the cold. I’d have to go outside to see why the earth is shifting and my foundation is cracking. Did I mention the unpleasant people outside?

Of course, sometimes I am interrupted. My neighbors knock on the door and tell me they can see that shingles are missing from my roof. They can see one corner of the house is sinking. 

This isn’t news I want to hear. I try to explain through the crack in the door how cozy and warm and well put together my house really is. How excellent every part of it is. How tasteful the decorations.

But maybe I shouldn’t tell them so much, because with the door open I feel the chill and the rain. Did I mention how unpleasant they are? 

You see their problem is precisely that they are outside the house. They are out in the wind and the cold and the rain. Instead of looking at my house from outside where they will see all of these unpleasant things, they should see things from my perspective, they should see that all is good.

I could let them in. As long as they behave like the guests they are, and don’t bring their unpleasantness inside. I mean why should they bring all their shivering and dripping with water and talk of shaking ground and shifting foundations. If they come in like that it wouldn’t really be my house would it? It wouldn’t be cosy, safe, and warm. 

You see what I fear: first it will be a few of them, then many, and pretty soon the door will be propped open. Then there will be more and more with them. Then the wind and rain will blow through the open door. Then it wouldn’t be cosy, safe, and warm.

Of course I wish I could help them, I really wish I could help them. So I will help them.

Out. 

They’ll be happier where they are at home; out in the cold and rain. They are used to it. And I’ll be happier where all is cozy, safe and warm.

Then all I need is locks. Locks on the windows and locks on the doors, an attic full of wall paper and paint and a kitchen full of buckets. And every so often to throw out the trash.  

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.