Avdat

A Christian Dao?

We did Chinese religions in class last week, and the homework assignment was to read the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and write two pages that answers the question, "What is this text?"

It's not an easy assignment. If your working definition of great religious literature is "profoundly obscure," you'd be hard-pressed to find a better example than the Daodejing.

In one of the best essays I read, a student wrote that what he loved about the Daodejing was the lack of coercion or compulsion here that seems to be in every other religion. He's right. Animism is all about wearing amulets or memorizing spells to manipulate the spirits or the ancestors into blessing your fields with a bumper crop, not a blight. In their classic forms, Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity are all about subduing desire, whether it's socially conditioned or biologically generated. And then there's the other-directed compulsion--everything from religious wars to blue laws and whatnot.

If you haven't read it, the Daodejing insists that an impersonal absolute, the Dao, is the warp and woof of the universe. Further, much of what passes for civilization, making a name for yourself, governing nations, winning wars, starting a business, etc., is so much futile swimming upstream. It's painful and stressful because you're going against the grain. Why keep hurling yourself against "the uncarved block?" It's an immovable object, and you are no irresistible force.

Just go with the flow. It's given to the crocuses to come up every spring. The trees blossom of their own accord. The house wrens turn up every April 15, right as rain. They're in tune with the Dao. And you'll blossom too, if you throw away your paddle and drift downstream.

I suppose that the natural point of contact between Daoism and the West is Stoicism, which commends conforming oneself to nature and fate, but there are hints of it in Christianity too:

So I had a dream the other night

And in this dream, I had returned to summer camp. Only the camp was in the basement of the White House. And there, in the cot next to me, was my good friend--Barack Obama! And he was going on and on about something in a hostile tone of voice. In fact, he was being kind of ugly. And I thought to myself, "You aren't the same guy I hung around with at camp last year. You've changed, man. You've changed."

OK, I'm on the couch for the next 50 minutes. I welcome any and all analysis of this dream, Freudian, Jungian, Object Relations, etc., as well as the usual political analysis--Democratic, Republican, Green, Tea, Socialist, Anarchist, etc.

Jargon watch, week of February 7

• Instantiate, instantiation
• Concresce, concrescence, concrescing

Instantiation was one of Carl's favorite words, and I can't believe I didn't include it in the original list. But it came up yesterday, so better late than never.

Hatin' on yoga

For this World Religions class I'm teaching, I troll the web for good stuff to put on Blackboard--extra credit stuff for the students. Last week I put up this indictment of yoga that Albert Mohler, former President of Southern Baptist Seminary, penned last fall. Riffing on Stefanie Syman's book The Subtle Body, Mohler maintains that yoga as exercise is inseparable from Hindu spirituality. For Mohler, either you aren't doing yoga or you're dabbling in the occult:

To a remarkable degree, the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are called to meditate upon the Word of God — an external Word that comes to us by divine revelation — not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.

Um, there's actually this thing called the Christian ascetic tradition. They never really were down with Origen's theology, but they were totally in the tank for his "the body is the workbench on which the Christian could fashion a heaven-bound soul" meme. But monks, by and large, weren't Southern Baptists, so Mohler can safely ignore them.

In a rather smug-sounding follow-up post, Mohler notes that his anti-yoga screed resulted in an inbox of hate mail, none of which addressed the biblical or theological issues, most of which was composed by women.

Did you notice that misogynist bridge linking observations one and two?

It does seem necessary to bring a bag full of proof texts to any debate with a Southern Baptist. Here's my two, Ephesians 1: 9-10 and Exodus 12: 36. Regarding the first, I assume that all means all, thus there is nothing that, in principle, cannot be integrated into the kingdom of God, although all things will certainly have to be modified a bit. Including yoga.

That second text is most helpful and has a long history of being applied to just such situations. Just as the Hebrews plundered the Egyptians, Christians can appropriate non-Christian cultures and intellectual traditions for their own purposes.

A case in point is the doctrine of the Trinity, which Mohler would certainly affirm, but which cannot be read straight off the pages of the Good Book (just look in your concordance for the word "Trinity"). The Cappadocians and Augustine constructed a doctrine of the Trinity out of Neoplatonism, which was basically mysticism for pagans, without undue damage to their immortal souls. I'm sure today's Christians can use yoga to accomplish the far more modest goals of relaxation or weight loss without skating too close to the edge of the abyss.

Bear with me for one more historical example. Pope Gregory once wrote a letter to another Augustine who was busy converting the Angles and Saxons in Briton. He advised Augustine not to tear down pagan temples, but to fumigate them with holy water and incense, and re-open them under new, Christian management.

Now what the Pope didn't know was that Angles and Saxons didn't worship in temples, but he can be forgiven for assuming so since he lived in a city full of 'em. But the point is that the exterior form is irrelevant. It's the interior substance that counts.

In the end, what makes anything Christian or not is the God to whom it is referenced. And that's why Christians can do yoga.

Mohler's real fear is multiculturalism. He assumes it leads to syncretism and finally to apostasy. And Mohler's denomination has roots in a regional theology that equates Christianity with white supremacy. True, the Southern Baptists have formally repented of their institutional support for slavery, but I suspect they're the opposite of the Anglo-Saxon Christianity Pope Gregory was trying to create: they've changed on the outside but not within. So white Americans contorting themselves like brown-skinned Asians must be disturbing.

It's in this light that we should ponder Mohler's inclusion of Syman's anecdote about Michelle Obama incorporating yoga into the White House Easter Egg roll. People who already think that a black guy with a Muslim name in the White House is the abomination that causes desolation will get the point: the First Lady is a Jezebel, polluting the city on a hill with foreign deities.

These people already pray for the President in a highly ironic sense. So I wonder if the end of 2 Kings 9 will be the new obscure but highly significant proof text for fundamentalists. It's just not Prayer of Jabez times we're living in.

Ph.D. and Gender

Matt Yglesias posts this chart that breaks down newly-minted Doctors of Philosophy by gender and field of study:

I had no idea that my field, religious studies, would perform so poorly. I attribute my ignorance to:

1. Getting a Ph.D. in a theological seminary whose high percentage of female Master's Degree students skews my perceptions and,
2. Being a lifer in the white male club, which inevitably leads me to see the gender equity glass as half-full.

Of the three of us who entered UPSem in the fall of 2008 seeking Ph.D.s in the History of Christianity (me, Sandi and Christian) 33.3% of us are women. So yeah for my cohort for beating the national average!

(Unless you see us more as historians than as religious scholars, in which we underperform. But people keep telling Christian that he's not a real historian since he's a historian of religion, so we'll go with the religious studies category. Which really chaps Christian, and me too, come to think of it. Under the frumpy sportcoats with leather patches on the elbows, are labor historians and military historians really just union bosses and admirals in disguise?)

The most interesting analysis of this graph comes from someone named David Adams in the comment thread at Yglesias' blog:

It doesn't surprise me that fields with a low tolerance for ambiguity (both in terms of having very precise and objective answers (physics, engineering, CS, math, astronomy) as well as having no objective answers at all and therefore an implicit requirement for false certainty (philosophy and religion)) would attract the type of jerks who think they know all the answers and therefore to whom any difference of opinion reflects poorly on the Other (of which women are the most obvious--though I'd be curious to see other measures of diversity charted in the same way).

Fields that require a tolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty (and biology fits the bill among the hard sciences as the workings of our cells and ecosystems are far more complex than interactions of particles, elements, or stars) will attract folks more open to diversity in their colleagues and diversity of opinion in general, and therefore more welcoming to colleagues unlike themselves with correspondingly different intuition about the subject matter.

I don't think it's stretching things too far to see the chart as a proxy for how exact and precise the "answers" to questions posed by the field are required to be.

Put differently, "Ambiguous research topic yields a diverse pool of researchers. Unambiguous research topic or mandatory false certitude yields a pool of white, male, douchebag theologians."

Roger that.

Today's sermon

            As Christians, God has blessed us with a rich variety of spiritual practices which we can use to deepen our relationship with God. There is this meal set on the table before us, in which Jesus Christ, truly present in the power of the Holy Spirit, imparts himself to us, so that it is no longer you or I who live, but Christ who lives in us. There are the words of the psalms and our favorite hymns which give voice to the deepest longings of our hearts in the face of the Eternal Mystery. There is fasting, which is mentioned in this morning’s Old Testament reading, not as popular a spiritual discipline as others, I suspect, but nonetheless quite valuable. As Jesus explained to Satan during his long fast in the wilderness, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. Emptying our stomachs for a time is an opportunity to be filled with the bread of life.

            What happens when none of that stuff works anymore?

Should I stay or should I go?

It's not just Mubarak who's asking the question these days. 45 big steeple Presbyterian pastors recently signed their names to a proposal for a "radical (transformation)" of the denomination which could pave the way for a schism.

There is much in this letter that I welcome. I agree with the signatories that, "We need new processes that identify and support the next generation of leadership differently than the current model, which unintentionally weeds out the entrepreneurial persons we so desperately need in our congregations." I am weary of bloated bureaucracies that cannot re-tool themselves for the emerging missionary field, and bureaucrats who sulk when recalcitrant congregations force the next best thing, retrenchment, by withholding mission dollars.

And I do agree that there are theological problems with our denomination. Liberation theology has yanked the blinders of race, gender and class off of our interpretations of scripture and tradition. It's an indispensable corrective to theology as usual, but it is not a stand-alone project.

Unfortunately, that seems to be what has come to pass in mainline Christianity. I agree with a colleague and mentor of mine who believes that mainline Christians have stopped asking first order questions such as, "Is there a God? Is this God my friend or my enemy?" (Or Gauguin's question, "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?") and we have settled for second order questions.

But there is more to the gospel than peace, justice and identity politics. Not less, to be sure. But more. When Paul writes to a mutinous congregation in Corinth, he doesn't appeal to them to be reconciled to himself, but rather to God. Who is this God to whom we need to be reconciled? And by what means? Mainliners kind of mumble about these questions.

All that said, I do support same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay and lesbian Presbyterians. And so I am out of luck.

Dallas Cowboy fans have so much to teach us

While chatting with brother John this weekend I had an epiphany. NC State fans and Washington Redskins fans are a lot alike.

Both teams have strong traditions. Neither fan base has had much to cheer about in a long, long time. In theory, there is nothing standing in the way of a return to glory. And yet incompetent management (former State AD Lee Fowler is the Wolfpack Dan Snyder), going to the well once too often (Joe Gibbs=Sidney Lowe), and something inexplicable conspire to frustrate the aspirations of both.

Frustration is an understatement. Impotent rage is more like it.

When the Redskins botched that game against Jacksonville last fall, you could almost hear silverware clinking together in the air as Virginians everywhere rifled through their kitchen drawers for a knife to open up their wrists with.

I can't remember which game it was a few years ago--I believe it was against Wake and Sendek was still coaching State--but due to a combination of bad calls, bad coaching and bad playing, the Wolfpack had once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The students on the front row were stunned, but the fat cat alums right behind them--the ones who remember the glory days--were apoplectic. They didn't look like Egyptians marching in the streets. They looked like Iranians in 1979--wide-eyed, fanatical, consumed with hatred. Only the hand of God prevented the mob from slaying everyone on the court that afternoon.

You don't see Dallas Cowboy fans acting like this. And it's worth asking Why.

Theology in one hand and the newspaper in the other

I couldn't help but read this paragraph from the assigned readings for this week's Theology II class in light of the ongoing unrest in Egypt:

(N)o type of social order is to be maintained if it no longer tends to maximize the enjoyment of the members of the society. Also, it is impossible for any form of social order to continue indefinitely to be instrumentally good. God, far from being the Sanctioner of the Status Quo, is the source of some of the chaos in the world. "If there is to be progress beyond limited ideals, the course of history by way of escape must venture along the borders of chaos in its substitution of higher for lower types of order" (A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality). (God is said to be the source of only some of the chaos, since only some of it can in principle lead to a higher type of order and thereby a richer form of enjoyment.)

John Cobb and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition.

My prayer is that what is being unleashed in Egypt is a holy chaos that contains a blessing for Egypt's people, her environment (including her great river) and her neighbors. And a special blessing for her Christians, Copts, Evangelicals and others, who are so vulnerable.