Avdat

In which I am corrupted by comparative religions

So, I am teaching Into to World Religions this spring. And all I can say is, Props to the Jains. You know the Jains. They're the Indians who brush the sidewalk in front of them with a broom to avoid stepping on ants or other little creatures. Also they don't tell jokes, because most jokes involve some sort of exaggeration or tall tale telling, which is really a form of lying.

From a Kantian perspective, this is a religion that hits the ethical sweet spot. If you were "to act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should be a universal law," you'd have to be an absolutist about killing and truth-telling. And why shouldn't you be? If nobody killed anybody or lied to anybody, it'd be a virtually perfect world, wouldn't it? "Be the change you want to see in the world," said another famous Indian.

And Jains are graceful folk. They fast most of their lives, and then graduate to the next level of consciousness at a time and place of their own choosing by abstaining from drink as well as food.

True, they believe in an eternal Creation and not in a divine Creator. Some would count this as loss. But we have to admit that a Godless religion enjoys some apologetic advantages--namely immunity to atheistic complaints about theodicy. What a relief, not breaking your head over the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" You can just be a doctor or a pharmacist and move turtles out of the road, and the world will be a better place.

And there's reincarnation, and karma, and body-soul dualism, so there's the usual sops to Eastern and Western metaphysics.

If you weren't what you already are, why wouldn't you be a Jain?

Plus, you get to walk around naked.

Daily Bread

Halden Doerge meditates on what it means to pray, "Give us this day our daily bread." I agree with Halden that there has to be more to it than cloaking a consumerist lifestyle in an aura of piety. However, I disagree that the only faithful response to the prayer is a lifestyle of apostolic poverty--where one literally doesn't know where one's next meal is coming from, save for the providence of God.

Apostolic poverty, in its first century itinerant evangelist mode, or in its Francis of Assisi mode, or in any contemporary manifestation, depends on the generosity of others--others who do know where their next meal is coming from. As Gandhi wryly put it, "It takes 20 people to keep me in poverty." And there is a blessing for these benefactors, just as there is for those who throw themselves completely on the mercy of God. Didn't Jesus say that there was a reward for anyone who gives a cup of cold water to his little ones?

I especially disagree with this comment, that the only time Israel lived faithfully was in the Wilderness. No. Israel was disobedient in the Wilderness. She gave into despair in the Wilderness. She worshiped a golden calf in the Wilderness. This type of romanticizing poverty just won't do. Grace, not any socio-economic or historical context justifies the sinner. Israel and the Church has never, ever gotten in right, in plenty or in want. The temptations change, but the failures are the same.

Moreover, the Wilderness was not Israel's destination when she came out of Egypt. The Promised Land was the destiny--a land not of scarcity but of abundance. Therefore I do not believe that our destiny, in this life or the next, is permanent living from hand to mouth.

What then, is the meaning of the Wilderness journey, or of Jesus' prayer for daily bread? According to Deuteronomy 8, Israel is to remember God's providence in the Wilderness in order that she does not succumb to self-congratulations in a situation of abundance. Remembering that "We didn't have a lot, but we had enough" is what keeps you from turning Zion into another Egypt, a land whose abundance is hoarded by a few and denied to the many.

This is the limited purpose of a lifestyle of apostolic poverty in today's society--to be a a sign and a living memory that calls both Church and society to do justice and righteousness so that abundance doesn't breed slaves and overseers.

Apostolic poverty's purpose cannot be that it's the only way to live faithfully in light of the Lord's Prayer, for as I've already pointed out, apostolic poverty's parasitic nature demands that someone has to be the instrument of God's providence. There's a whiff of monastic elitism in that sentiment that I cannot abide. The old monastics felt superior in terms of sexuality, the new in terms of economics. But self-righteousness is sinful.

The stress needs to lie on the word "us" as well as "daily." Rather than obsessing about how I can faithfully respond to this prayer, a healthier obsession would be about the we. In a world where some of us have bread stored up for months and years and others, not by choice but by external necessity, literally don't know where our next meal is coming from, a faithful response to the prayer will struggle with questions of public policy and international trade.

Unfortunately, these are just the types of questions that get eschewed by so many who contribute to Halden's blog, as if the hipster's pose of ironic detachment from politics is a necessary prerequisite for faithfulness to Christian community. It's not. It certainly wasn't for someone like Frances Perkins, a devout Episcopal layperson and architect of Social Security. Since I'm not above quoting myself:

She loved the concept of insurance because it married religion and science--the parable of the Good Samaritan written into actuarial tables. With Social Security, risk is dispersed through the general population through the pooling of assets. Everyone contributes, and the safety net is spread underneath everyone. With Social Security we "bear one another's burdens and fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

Christianizing actuarial tables--now that's some kind of missional feat! Not to mention the fact that Social Security has put daily bread on the table of more American widows and orphans than all poetic waxing of communitarian bloggers everywhere.

It is along these lines--the truly social and communal, not communitarian--that we ought to be thinking about the Lord's Prayer.

Last of all, there's something not quite right about a blog post on prayer that begins and ends with my faithfulness to the prayer. What happened to God? It's a prayer, not a commandment. If answering the prayer is finally up to us, then prayer is no longer a dialogue but a monologue. There's a whiff of practical atheism in the post that I don't like. I understand the concern not to pray hypocritically, but if it's a prayer, some room has to be left for God to answer it, apart from my grim determination to go into the Wilderness and stay there forever.

Jargon

Yesterday a normal human being, i.e. not a theology student, pointed out to me my use of an unfamiliar word in this here blog: hermeneutic. All disciplines have their shop talk--the military is famous for its acronyms, for example--but for sheer pretentiousness, few can compare to theology.

I feel a meme coming on! So, I aim to collect as much God-jargon as I can, especially the kind you hear around mainline seminaries, and create some kind of absurd game with it. Here's my short list, mostly from the last time I was in school, before The End of History had cut off liberation theology at the knees, but there's a few new words in there too:

• actualize
• causality
• compatablist
• contextualization
• gyn-ecological
• hegemony
• meta-narrative
• missional
• post-colonial
• post-modern
• post-structural
• post-postal (a word I just made up for the next generation of mass shootings, whenever and whatever that may be)
• praxis

This language does have some potential outside the ivory tower. When I was a MDiv student I had a friend and classmate who absolutely dreaded telling the ladies at Moe's and Joe's that he was an aspiring Presbyterian minister. So he told them he was studying "ethics" or "philosophy." And when he'd had enough to drink and felt a little more honest, he'd tell them that he was "a keeper of the hegemonic meta-narrative." Yup, that's the clergy for you.

I'm short on verbs. So please, email me the words whose definitions still elude you, but you're too embarrassed to ask the meaning of (and you'll have to ask since they aren't in any dictionary). I will guard your confidentiality like a priest guards the confessional.

Bang your head

Republicans have flogged Democrats for years for plotting a government takeover of the health care system. So Democrats took them to heart. Last year they effectively passed Mitt Romney's health care reform. It leaves the private system intact while using a new mix of regulatory carrots and sticks to achieve universal coverage.

Well, imagine my surprise when I read last week that, upon further review, Republicans think a bona fide government takeover of health care would be... OK. From the Times-Dispatch editors:

The Times-Dispatch shares the opposition to the individual mandate. On several occasions we have explained our discomfort with a policy that permits the federal government to compel people to buy a specified product. A single-payer system that relied solely on taxes to pay for medical services probably would pass constitutional muster, although we would oppose relying on Britain's National Health Service as a model.

(Sound of me banging my head against the keyboard).

Well, that non-NHS system you think would sparkle in the eyes of the Founders is what they have in Canada, a program called...wait for it... wait for it... Medicare. Only it's open to everyone, not just those over 65. But hasn't your side spent the last two decades assuring us that Canadian-style health care is on par with, say, Haiti?

I think Jesus prophesied about these people when he said:

‘To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? ³²They are like children sitting in the market-place and calling to one another,
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
   we wailed, and you did not weep.”

For when the Daily Kos and Fire Dog Lake people came screaming for the insurance CEO's heads you said, "They're crazy socialists," but when the Messiah Obama came with no public option you said, "This man is overthrowing our law!"

At this point there's not much left to say. You will never, ever please these people.

At best, they seem to acknowledge that there's problems in the system, but their a priori opposition to any government action to address inequalities prevents them from endorsing anything more than wishful thinking as a solution. If markets and charities should solve this problem, they will, won't they?

At worst (and this seems less true of the Times-Dispatch editorial board and more true with the GOP leadership in Congress), it seems to be a case of, To hell with logic or coherent arguments. The only coherence on their side is, "If the Democrats are for it; we're against it, even when they adopt our positions."

Historical criticism sucks

Adam Kotsko explains why. He attributes the lamentable tendency to reduce the meaning of the text to what it meant to "a Protestant view of scriptural authority" which (anachronistically) views the Bible as the "source of Christianity."

Quite right! But not just any form of Protestantism.

The Reformers read the Bible in conversation with the Fathers and medieval exegetes. But fundamentalist Protestants don't. And the two, fundys and higher critics, are in fact two peas in a pod.

Historical critics and fundamentalists agree that the whole history of interpretation is of no consequence for understanding the meaning of the Bible. They also agree that Biblical texts are univocal.

Historical critics believe that the one, correct meaning lies in the 8th century BCE, preserved like a pottery shard in the hot, dry Palestinian sand, and it is their exclusive provenance to unearth and display said meaning. Fundamentalists believe that the one, correct meaning lies in a Platonic realm of pure doctrine, and to them is solely entrusted the sacred charge of displaying said meaning in tedious Bible studies, sermons or tracts.

It's of a piece. Each can be more Popish than the Pope in defending their magisteria. Which would land you in hot water faster? Thinking outside the box about the phrase "kingdom of God" in a Campus Crusade small group, or tacking on a Christological interpretation of Isaiah 7 to your exegesis paper? I'm not sure.

All this, I submit, is why fundamentalism does not stand in opposition to modernity, but is, in fact, modernity's reductio ad absurdum. At any rate, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, entrusting the Good Book to either camp is like entrusting your favorite pet to a taxidermist. They'll hand it back to you with all the pieces appropriately labeled, and they'll hand it back to you quite dead.

Chemo for the Body of Christ

In the Sunday School class I'm teaching, we're reading Luther for Armchair Theologians by Steven Paulson. The second reviewer at the Amazon page for this book correctly notes that Paulson doesn't put Luther's doctrine of justification front and center; rather he emphasizes themes in Luther's life and writings that are neglected by most people aside from professional theologians: no free will, the creative power of the Word (wholly external to the believer), and how scripture interprets you, not the other way around.

However, I'm not sure whether or not this makes the book a bit less accessible to lay people, which the reviewer fears. In stressing this set of themes, Paulson conveys the polemical, even offensive edge to Luther's theology, which has as much to do with content as it does Luther's or the author's style. And I don't think you've understood Luther until and unless you either feel appalled at what you've read, or feel like you've been punched in the gut.

For instance: since, according to Luther, there is no free will that can turn to Christ, no divine spark that can be fanned into a flame, no nothing within except an abyss of God-hatred, there is no sense telling people what they ought to do to please God or how to do it. Aside from maintaining civil order, the only point of all those commandments in the Bible is to show you how you don't live, not how you ought to live.

This results in some odd sounding preaching.

Making better Hindus

Apropos (or not, perhaps) of a recent dialogue between Lee and Camassia about interfaith dialogue (a meta-dialogue, perhaps?) is the same Andrew Walls essay from his book The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. Walls' essay is a series of reflections on Baptist scholar and missionary Kenneth Scott Latourette's A History of the Expansion of Christianity. In the book, Latourette lays down three criteria for a successful Christian mission:

1. Increase in worshiping congregations
2. Emergence of new movements and institutions that owe their existence to Christ, and
3. The "effect of Christianity on mankind as a whole."

Walls notes that Latourette's criteria were just a bit too optimistic for Reinhold Niebuhr. Which should be more than enough to vouch for them since everyone hates Reinhold these days.

The third criteria is slippery. How do you measure Christian effectiveness? Walls adds to the slipperiness with his choice of Raja Ram Moham Roy, the 19th century Indian social and religious reformer, as an example.

Roy wanted to learn English and was introduced to William Carey, a Baptist missionary to India, widely regarded as the patron saint of Protestant foreign missions. Roy's encounter with Jesus through the ministrations of Carey led him to crusade on behalf of women's rights in India. He helped end the practice of sati, in which Indian widows either willingly or unwillingly immolated themselves on their deceased husband's funeral pyres. He fought for the right of women to inherit property and to end child marriages. He strove to limit the massive amount of political and social power held by high caste Bengalis. He founded schools. He held to a kind of bottom-line monotheism: all reasonable people recognize that God is One and can be worshiped anytime, anyplace.

But he was never baptized (I think). And as Roy's reforms solidified, a curious thing happened. Conversions to Christianity from Hinduism began to dry up. Hindus (especially the high-born types the missionaries coveted) no longer had to go outside their own religion for the kind of reformed doctrine and morals they were looking for.

But Walls seems to think that this counts as successful Christian mission. In this case Christianity made a positive impact on Indian society as a whole, even though that impact ironically strengthened a rival religion. Is it possible for Christ to fulfill not only the law and the prophets, but also other religions, and not only by co-opting them, or syncretizing with them, but by sending them on their way with a blessing?