Avdat

You have a right to be pessimistic

In the spirit of "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes," you can't help but wonder if the 21st century isn't shaping up to be a repeat of the 14th.

At least, you can't help but wonder that if you have a blog and are all too willing to pontificate about stuff you don't know much about, exploiting the (slight) advantage in knowledge that you have about the Middle Ages over (some of) your readers.

But I digress.

So western Europe had a great run from the 11th through the 13th centuries. The Vikings settled down. Not too many famines. Hamlets became towns, and towns became cities. Kings flexed their muscles way off in the Holy Land.

And then in the 14th century there were so many more people in Europe that all those hungry mouths overtook the good weather and the new, improved farming implements. And then weather got bad, and people starved. And then the Black Death came.

Now this is a cautionary tale. Even many of us who are smart enough to decry the liberal myth of progress operate, if at an unconscious level, under the assumption that things really will get better, eventually. The economy will bounce back. It always has in the past.

But I wonder if these last 200 years haven't been modernity's version of the High Middle Ages, and while it's been a nice run, it's definitely run its course. So global warming = the Great Famine of 1315-17, and the Black Death = I dunno, an asteroid?

Keepin it real

In an effort to keep it real, I like to run theses by the kids, to see what they think. So, since I'm writing a paper on the omnipresence of God, I asked them tonight, "Where is God?" Simultaneously, one answered, "In heaven," and the other answered, "Everywhere."

And there you have the Lutheran-Reformed Eucharistic controversy in a nutshell!

She Who Is

I should say a little more about She Who Is. I don't want to leave the impression that I think that the book is a politically correct screed. The book rather is a piece of constructive Trinitarian theology, in conversation with the tradition, contemporary ecumenical voices (Elizabeth Johnson is a Roman Catholic), and feminist theory.

I'm going by memory here (the book is in my carrel), but what I come away with is her persuasive argument for panentheism--the idea that God contains the world, but is more than the world.

Johnson finds pantheism--the idea that the world is God--wanting because relationship presupposes two parties, and with pantheism, there's no way the world can relate to God. Also, as a feminist, Johnson finds deplorable the fact that so many women have had their identities completely submerged into another. Pantheism, she thinks, is the evisceration of personal identity writ large.

She also finds wanting classical theism's absolute distinction between God and the world. It's a philosophical problem: how does the infinite relate to the finite? A border defines both sides. As soon as you draw a line and say "The world ends here; God begins there," God is no longer infinite, for you've demarcated a starting-point for God.

Johnson finds the solution to this conundrum in a Kabbalistic concept whereby God, in an act of self-limitation, creates a space within God's being for a creation to develop. Such a scheme maintains classical theism's asymmetrical relationship between God and the world, but allows for God to really relate to and be affected by the world, yet in a way that does not appear to compromise God's sovereignty.

Now "sovereignty" is a Reformed word that brings along traditional masculine metaphors like "King" and "Lord" trailing in its wake. But a space within God for the world to develop--well, that sounds like a womb to me! And it does to Johnson as well. Mother is the preferred metaphor in Johnson's panentheistic scheme, although friend is one she's congenial to as well.

I find this pretty compelling. But I feel compelled to ask, "Is it scriptural?" Take a deep breath before you answer that question. The superabundance of "Father" language in the New Testament doesn't negate the concept. After all, does not the scripture say, "In Him we live and move and have our being?" See, sounds like we're in God's womb, doesn't it; masculine pronoun notwithstanding.

Biblically, pantheism is a non-starter. First commandment; prophetic hysteria about idolatry, and all that. But do the scriptures' plethora of masculine, monarchical metaphors rule out panentheism, or have the scriptures been held hostage for too long by a Greek concept of a God who is the unmoved mover, incapable of change?

Church history sucks

Gary Dorrien's The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism & Modernity, despite its heft and abundance of detail, makes for gripping reading, even if you aren't a liberal, and, I dare say, even if you think liberals are the enemy. These are people who have a sense of destiny about them. They devour the great advances in natural and social sciences in the last half of the 19th century. They seize onto the task of re-writing theology in light of new knowledge for an industrial America come of age like a pit bull on a fresh leg of lamb. With the exception of the Puritans, no one in American religious history has seemed to have this joyous and urgent sense that their moment is now.

Along with that was their firm conviction that all past moments have had their time, and can be safely discarded. So you get stuff like:

• Paul diverted Jesus's religion of pure God-consciousness down an authoritarian blind alley.
• Nicene Christianity is a static, Platonic prison to which the dynamic spirit of Christianity was consigned for centuries, only to be liberated by Hegel and Darwin.
• The medieval monks took the communistic, socially transformative Christian impulse, and like a gardener wielding a pair of bonsai scissors, whittled it down into communal ascetic practices.
• The Reformation was, at best, a half-finished project. They left the cloister for the world, and promptly surrendered to it.
• Etc, etc.

Gripping reading. But as a budding Church Historian, it is rather odd to study figures from history who have so much contempt for history.

In which I hop off the cultural-linguistic bus

We've read the first half of Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is for my class on the attributes of God. Among other things it makes an argument that, by now, we're all familiar with: exclusively masculine language for God underwrites patriarchal social structures, and finding new, faithful ways of naming the Deity is an integral part of liberating women from oppression.

I have never found this argument all that convincing. As far as dismantling the patriarchy goes, balancing feminine and neuter metaphors with masculine ones seems like an interesting sidebar at best. The sharp tip of the spear, however, would seem to be vigorously enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Or enacting universal health care.

I don't think that women run meetings these days because, back in the 60s and 70s, people stopped calling Chairmen "Chairmen," and started calling them "Chairs" or "Chairpersons." I think that some women managed to put themselves in the position of running meetings, enough so that calling them "Chairman" began to sound strange.

Inclusive language is a shibboleth. It doesn't change society. It is a shorthand way of identifying a group of people with a shared set of political commitments that one hopes will change society.

Now I'm only halfway through Johnson's book, but she doesn't strike me as a kind of Wittgensteinian--Lindbeckian--Radical Orthodoxy-Postliberal kind of theologian. She's genus Liberal, species Feminist Liberation. And yet Feminist Liberals and Postliberals--many of whom can be notoriously non-Feminist (especially in the secular political sense)--do seem to share the conviction that language does not merely describe a world; it creates a world.

I used to believe that, but I no longer do. 15 years of tinkering with liturgy and writing sermons has shown me that there is a big world out there that decisively impinges on whatever kind of reality the Church tries to create in a service of Word and Sacrament. I don't think that you reform the Church or change the world by re-describing or re-imagining either. I think you need to change the world and reform the Church, and the words you use to describe it will follow.

It's starting to occur to me that my dissatisfaction with postliberalism isn't limited to the quietistic streak that some of the younger members of the movement display. I have methodological problems with it as well. That said, Liberalism, "submitting all truth claims to the bar of reason or experience," as Gary Dorrien puts it, also seems problematic.

I suppose it's good that I didn't wind up at a place like Duke. I would really be kicking against the pricks there.

I am having a really hard time taking the temperature of a place like Union-PSCE. As a PhD student I don't attend very many classes, or interact with a broad cross-section of the student body. Moreover, as a Church History student, I spend most of my time reading people who are neither liberal, postliberal, fundamentalist or conservative. I think the best category to put them in is "strange." Augustine. Columbanus. The Puritans.

What I'm trying to say is that it's nice to be back at school but not "in a school," so to speak.

The trouble with God blogging

My professor was saying that a key component of a graduate level education is learning how to analyze and critique arguments. But once you're awarded your PhD, you are expected to put the gloves back on, so to speak, and imply critiques in your own arguments rather than baring your fangs, either in print or at some conference.

I was thinking that this explains my general dissatisfaction with religious blogging. Blogs, given their spontaneity, brevity, anonymity, and lack of editorial oversight, are by nature a sucker-punching medium, more so than a "Come, let us reason together" medium. When you add blogging's built in bias toward polemic to the fact that a lot of religious bloggers are also grad students, you get a mode of discourse that's as far away from "speaking the truth in love" as you can get. It strikes me that much of what passes for sophisticated theological anaylsis in the blogosphere is actually quite infantile. The lack of charity indicates immaturity more so than courageous, uncompromising truth spoken to power, or whatever.

But strangely, this doesn't bother me at all when it comes to political blogs. Matthew Yglesias can say that the people who blog at The Corner are idiots, and I don't blink an eye. And I think there's more to it than the fact that I happen to agree with Yglesias. But am I right to hold religious discourse to a higher standard?

I'll miss the smokers

The State of Virginia recently enacted a restaurant smoking ban. This is of more than passing interest to me because of my weekend work at That Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before. A few observations:

Articles on the smoking ban legislation at the Times-Dispatch website drew more comments than usual, but quantity does not equal quality. Boil them down and they amounted to either, "You're a Communist!" or, "You stink! (Literally)"

Now the Communist argument is just silly. There is no doubt that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. Requiring restaurant owners to protect citizens from this hazard is no more unjust than requiring those construction companies to dump their debris down a chute instead of just heaving it off the side of the building and leaving it up to the pedestrians to fend for themselves. Besides, everyone in Russia smokes.

But being a waiter has endeared me to our nicotine-addicted brethren. Smokers are so much easier to serve. Because they have something to do with their hands, as well as a means to satisfy their oral cravings apart from the food and drink they're waiting on me to bring them, they're a lot lower maintenance than non-smoking customers. They're more patient, more relaxed, and not surprisingly, they tip better.

It will be better for waiters in so many ways when the ban takes effect December 1. Better for our cardiovascular health. Better for our pulmonary health. And better for our wallets, notwithstanding the observation in the previous paragraph. Most people don't smoke, and most non-smokers hate cigarette smoke. So if you're a waiter in a smoking section, you're often twiddling your thumbs while your co-workers are waiting on a full section of tables. But the improvement in physical health comes at the price of one's mental health: waiting on hungry, irritable people who'd be a lot more patient if only they had a shot of nicotine in them to calm their nerves.

My son asked me the other day if smoking was a sin. Certainly there's a strong current in Christian ethics, notably in the monastic tradition, that sees any non-utilitarian enjoyment of the created order as a sin (non-procreative sex; more food than is necessary for life). In that stream smoking is a sin.

But there's a lot of people who live in big houses, drive gas-guzzling SUVs, eat too much, and sleep around who seem to view smoking as morally and physically dirtier than prostitution. I was the Host the evening that the smoking ban was enacted, and when I dutifully asked, "Smoking or non-smoking?" the non-smoking guests often reacted with the grace of--I don't know--let's say a French labor leader who'd once again brought the government to its knees with a general strike. Fists raised in the air, a crazed look in the eyes, and the words, "You won't have to ask that question anymore, will ya!"

Smokers are people too.

Reformed revivalists

Nathanial William Taylor was President of Yale College and a Reformed theologian who modified Calvinist teaching on free will, determinism and original sin to fit the sensibilities of Jacksonian American democracy. Consider this from Concio ad Clerum. A Sermon Delivered in the Chapel of Yale College, September 10, 1828:

Finally, I cannot conclude without remarking, how fearful are the condition and prospects of the sinner. His sin is his own. He yields himself by his own free act, by his own choice, to those propensities of his nature, which under the weight of God's authority he ought to govern...

He is going on to a wretched eternity, the self-made victim of his woes. Amid sabbaths and bibles, the intercessions of saints, the songs of angels... he presses on to death. God beseeching with tenderness and terror--Jesus telling him he died once and could die again to save him--mercy weeping over him day and night--heaven lifting up its everlasting gates--hell burning, and sending up its smoke of torment, and the weeping and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, within his hearing--and onward still he goes. See the infatuated immortal! Fellow sinner--IT IS YOU.

You like that prophet Nathan move he puts on the clergy in the chapel? I do. Now, what do you expect next? "Oh, sinner, come forward now, and accept Christ as your Lord and Savior. You chose to sin; now choose Christ, that he might redeem you for everlasting life."

That would be a good guess, but that's precisely not what he says. He says,

Bowels of divine compassion--length, breadth, height, depth of Jesus's love--Spirit of all grace, save him--Oh save him--or he dies forever.

Now that's pretty cool because after having rhetorically brought the sinner to his knees, he promptly ignores him. Rather, turns his attention to God, addressing the Holy Trinity in prayer, pleading for the sinner's salvation. So the hearer, convicted of sin, isn't asked to do anything, believe anything, change anything. He is only permitted to overhear the preacher's conversation with God in which the condemned sinner learns from whence comes his salvation. And in that disclosure the Thing itself is given to the sinner.

This is very different than the typical revivalistic pitch of the Second Great Awakening, and, dare I say, of most evangelistic pitchs in our own day and time. Taylor has found room for revivalism within the Reformed tradition's insistence that, from start to finish, salvation is God's work and not our own. Not many people can pull that off. Most Reformed Christians either don't do evangelism, either for aesthetic or doctrinal reasons, or they become de facto Arminians.

Comeback kid?

Why was I wondering out loud about a Marxist comeback in a class titled The History Reformed Thought in America? Well, the professor was reading from Cornell West, who was lamenting that the American theological landscape is populated by so many Lilliputians. There are the ones who just want to read and re-read and regurgitate Barth, and then there are the Liberationists whose theology is oh-so-thin. Yes, Cornell West said that.

Which got me to thinking about the strongly Liberationist bent of my MDiv education. I couldn't see it at the time, but Liberation Theology in 1993 was a dead man walking. I mean, the Wall had come down, and with it the Marxist analysis that under-girded Liberation Theology. History wasn't hurtling toward a showdown between labor and management that would yield a worker's paradise. History had ended well short of that prophesied event, and we'd been bequeathed a realized eschatology of  401k investments in tech stocks.

But in the seminaries nobody noticed. So we read a lot of theology that castigated consumerism, and longed for the American Empire to get her comeuppance. Oh, how they longed to gloat with the heavenly hosts over the whore of Babylon's fall!

Are they gloating now? With global capitalism collapsing, will the Liberation theologians get to say, See, I told you so? Will Marx get a fresh hearing, especially in those second world nations who've made so many advances over the past two decades, only to see their gains evaporate in a haze of greedy, dishonest, unregulated speculation?

My professor says No. Except for sub-Saharan Africa and South America the rest of the world is so economically enmeshed with the dysfunctional U.S. financial system that gloating is the farthest thing from anyone's mind. "Everyone's" hoping and praying that we can get our fiscal house in order, lest we take down with us hundreds of millioons of people who've clawed their way out of absolute poverty. In other words, so many people are in bed with the Whore of Babylon, both Christian and pagan alike, that the theologically responsible reply is to mourn with the merchants and seafaring men, rather than sing, Burn, baby burn.

So what say you? What's the appropriate lens through which one might evaluate the global depression and what's the appropriate Christian response?