Avdat

Marketing

 A bug-bitten and sunburned Jennifer is cranky about the new United Methodist ad campaign. "How does this distinguish the church from the Rotary Club or Amnesty International?" she asks.

It's a good question. A secular humanist obeys the second tablet of the law. A Christian obeys the first tablet too. Trouble is, we Christians have tended to kill each other over the interpretation of the first tablet, so the solution has been, "We aren't going to talk much about that stuff anymore. We're just going to join hands and do good works." But that doesn't work because that hour you're wasting in church could be better spent emailing your Congressman, right?

What would be a better ad campaign? It would have to be true to the mainline ethos, which does involve a lot of good works. Habitat for Humanity, Katrina relief, Mexico mission trips and the like. But it would also have to put Jesus front and center. Because we are a Church, after all, and not Rotary.

I can imagine something illustrating Christocentric practices. To make it Christocentric, you make Jesus the subject of every verb in every sentence. Something like "In the United Methodist Church (or Presbyterian Church, or whatever), Jesus is teaching us the mystery of gratitude and sharing." And you have images of gratitude and sharing that look like whatever mainliners do when they are being grateful and generous, like a soup kitchen ministry or whatever.

And I think I'd consciously us the word "mystery." We live in neo-gnostic times. People are into a privatized spirituality grounded in new insight. "Mystery" is a Biblical word that might appeal to gnostic seekers. It might be a way to co-opt those somewhat under the spell of the spirit of the age for the more communitarian and justice-oriented mainline Christianity. But, because we are more communitarian, the object of every verb would be "us," not "me."

Sound and fury

I find myself thinking a lot about the North Korean nuclear and missile tests this week. There are lots of Korean students on campus, and a group of classmates are traveling in Asia this month. No doubt their emails from abroad and my international classmates heighten the situation in my mind.

I also find myself reading the usual liberal blogs, and noting a dearth of posting on this seemingly important topic. But there is no shortage of posts on the Sotomayor nomination. Which is interesting because a North Korea with full nuclear capability is really a game-changer, but replacing one left of center judge with another left of center judge on the Nation's High Court is not.

I imagine the imbalance is due to this fact: there are no good options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear program. So there's not much point in blogging about it. But the Sotomayor nomination gets into the realm of identity politics, where there is no shortage of shrill and stupid opinions. So one can blog til the cows come home about the idiocy of opposing a Supreme Court nominee based on her predilection for Puerto Rican food.

I will grant that there's no small satisfaction in shooting fish in a barrel. But in the end have you written anything worthwhile?

It's all in your head

I heard a fascinating article on NPR yesterday suggesting that mystical experiences may have a neurobiological basis, leading neuroscientist Michael Persinger to exult

that God and all spiritual experience are a product of your brain.

"What is the last illusion that we must overcome as a species?" he asks theatrically. "That illusion is that God is an absolute that exists independent of the human brain — that somehow we are in his or her care."

The article is part of a longer series on the Science of Spirituality which you can peruse here. I haven't heard the entire series, and perhaps I should withhold comment until I do, but the earlier quote seems problematic for a couple of reasons:

One, most religious believers don't have mystical experiences, but they believe anyway. In fact, there's been spirited (pardon the pun) debate in Christian and other religious circles about how much credence one should give to dreams, visions, ecstatic states and whatnot.

Secondly, and this gets to the follow-up quote in the article, if my mystical experience of God is just a seizure, and therefore God does not exist as an objective reality, then does that mean that dark forests, which the reporter saw when she donned the "God helmet," also don't exist as an objective reality? One might counter, The difference between God and dark forests is that the latter are empirically verifiable. Ah, but only with your brain, the same brain that can apparently be manipulated by chemical imbalances or magnetic waves to yield a false positive for God. How do you know your brain's not being manipulated when you see a dark forest, or a computer screen, or anything else? How do you know you aren't hallucinating right now? Why didn't Agent Smith get to Barbara Bradley Hagerty before she blew the cover on everything?

Scientists really ought to read a little more philosophy. I doubt that the question of the mind's relationship to reality can be settled merely by dissecting the brain.

Preachin' & meddlin'

My intellectual deployment to 17th century New England has been extended. I'm taking a May term course on religious and cultural life in colonial America, and the first book we have to read is Harry Stout's The New England Soul.

Curious thing about those Puritan preachers: they stuck to salvation during their Sunday sermons, but used weekday, fast day and other occasional sermons to comment on politics and culture.

The division of labor wasn't due to any wall of separation they'd raised between Church and State, or politics and religion. They were Puritans, after all. Theocrats. The State was but the coercive arm of the Congregational religion.

No, the concerns were doctrinal: election and covenant. Eternal salvation was a matter of God's covenant of grace, which God initiated without regard to human merit. But God, the Puritans believed, also made other, federal covenants with the people, and disobedience could trigger covenant sanctions (Indian wars, smallpox, etc.) But in order to avoid any confusion between the two types of covenants, they talked about temporal rewards and punishments outside of Sunday, and reserved Sunday for conversion.

I can't help but wonder if I'd stuck to salvation on Sunday and did religious cultural criticism on Wednesdays if I might have avoided a sticky wicket or two in my ministry.

In fact, I'm sure of it. I have a colleague and good friend who served a church as an associate pastor. This congregation had a sort of unwritten rule that the Sunday sermon was to be relatively apolitical, but the weeknight program could be a no-holds-barred examination of any and all issues, no matter how controversial. But the congregation called a new pastor who, fancying himself a prophet, preached highly politicized sermons. The problem wasn't his politics, or that he thought about political issues theologically. It was that he'd violated a congregational taboo by mixing them in the wrong location.

The Old Testament ceremonial laws may have expired with the coming of Christ, but the concern they were trying to address, namely, the problem of things being out of place, abides. And yet, this is not quite the same as the Puritan concern to distinguish between conditional and unconditional covenants.

Thoughts?