Avdat

What I did last summer

I wrote up this little article about my Iona experience for the church newsletter.  No mention of vomit-filled shoes naturally, but you can't say everything in one little article!

            On June 6 I traveled to Scotland for ten days as part of a continuing education project sponsored by Columbia Theological Seminary.  I attended a conference on Celtic Christianity at the restored Abbey on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland.

            Iona is an important site in the history of Scottish Christianity.  The Irish monk Columba came to Iona in 563 AD to establish a monastery.  Monks fanned out from there all over Scotland, converting its inhabitants to Christianity.  The monastery had its share of ups and downs.  It was plundered by the Vikings in the 9^th century, and rendered obsolete when Scotland became Protestant in the 16^th century.  But it has endured as a religious and historical pilgrimage site.

            In the 20^th century, George MacLeod, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, began a unique project.  He brought together seminary students and skilled tradesmen to restore the ruined abbey.  He wanted to bring the gospel and the church into closer contact with the problems of ordinary working class people.  He was also experimenting with new forms of Christian community.  Out of MacLeod’s experiment came the Iona Community, whose members live all over the world, devoting themselves to peace, social justice, and worship renewal.  Members are accountable to each other for the use of their time and money.  While the government now owns the abbey, the Iona Community is responsible for the worship services and seminars that are conducted there.

            In the week that I was there, I worshipped twice a day, attended seminars in which we read Irish and Scottish prayers and poems from the Middle Ages, went on a hike across Iona, visited the spooky and awesome island of Staffa, where Mendelssohn was inspired to write his Hebridean Overture, and hung out with people from all over the English-speaking world.  It was a great experience. 

            People in the Middle Ages lived a lot closer to nature than we do, for good and for ill.  More so for them than for us, the Creation was a realm which revealed God’s plan for redemption, but could also be a menacing place in which divine protection was needed.  We who labor on keyboards and not in fields can find a more holistic spirituality in the writings of the saints who’ve gone before us.  And, in an age in which nature may be bucking human attempts to keep it on a leash, we need the wisdom of our ancestors in faith whose use of the Creation was bridled by a reverent awe.

            Our stereotype of monasteries is that they are places where people go to flee from the problems of the everyday world.  But the monasteries that Irish monks established on Iona and elsewhere were on the front lines of mission. 

            In a book the Session recently read about healthy mainline congregations titled Christianity for the Rest of Us, one of the more curious details was that congregations that are growing in numbers and vitality tend to require a lot of potential members in terms of time spent in worship, Bible Study, prayer and volunteering, before they can join the church.

            What both examples teach us is that high-commitment Christian communities can have a higher impact on transforming society than low-commitment communities can.  In some sense, we do need to be a people set apart from the world, but only in order that we can better serve the world. 

            In the 21^st century we are still seeking new models of Christian community that can faithfully advance the cause of the gospel in the world.  Fortunately we have history to learn from, and the Holy Spirit to lead us into the future.

Søren Kierkegaard, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you

I'll admit, it is a novel argument:  Barack Obama is wrong for America because he doesn't hate America enough. 

But call me unconvinced.  Many and varied are the theological critiques of American empire:  William Stringfellow, John Dominic Crossan, Stanley Hauerwas and even N.T. Wright.  What these extremely different critiques have in common is sound and creative exegesis and theological reflection, sharp cultural criticism and, in Stringfellow's case, no small amount of righteous indignation. 

But what we get from Scott Stevens' post at Faith and Theology is a smug, broad-brushed anti-Americanism that's actually in the service of the various features of American life he purports to find so distatesful.  If Stevens were the Deuteronomic historian he'd save his most withering criticism for Hezekiah and Josiah, whose papering over the rot in Jerusalem merely delayed the inevitable.

It's theological Naderism.  I'm quite impatient at this point with people who still don't think there's a dime's bit of difference.

When I read the post, the first thing I wanted to do was gouge my eyes out.  Then I wanted to write a long, furious critique, but "Wilhelm" in the comment thread beat me to it.  Then I delved deeper into the comment thread and discovered a conspiracy theory:  the post is in fact a send-up of all forms of political theology.  Now my head hurts.

Field trip

Last Wednesday a group of us set out for the island of Staffa, home of puffins and the muse for Mendelssohn's Hebridean Overture.  Our boat made straight for the island, and as I was in the stern, I didn't get a good look at it until we were almost upon it, and the boat turned to make its approach to the landing:

My first impression was that a multi-mouthed sea monster has reared up from the waves to swallow us.  This was reinforced when we got a chance to explore Fingal's Cave.  The sound of the seawater filling and then receding from the cave, plus the splendid isolation of the island is what Mendelssohn tried to capture in his Overture.  Looking up, the algae covered roof of the cave looked liked the monster's poorly capped molars:

The rock formations on Staffa are extraordinary.  Some of us commented that they looked like someone had poured concrete into hexagonally-shaped cylinders and stacked them on top of each other.  A strange image came to mind--God has created this island as an eight-year-old kid at the beach might make a sand castle by filling his bucket with wet sand and dumping the formed contents upside-down:

Wikipedia states, "It consists of a basement of tuff, underneath colonnades of a black fine-grained Tertiary basalt, overlying which is a third layer of basaltic lava lacking a crystalline structure. By contrast, slow cooling of the second layer of basalt resulted in an extraordinary pattern of predominantly hexagonal columns which form the faces and walls of the principal caves.^[1]The lava contracted towards each of a series of equally spaced centres as it cooled and solidified into prismatic columns. The columns typically have three to eight sides, six being most common. The columns are also divided horizontally by cross joints.^[7] Similar formations are found at the Giant's Causeway In Ireland, on the island of Ulvaand Ardmeanach on the Isle of Mull.^[6] "

While I was taking in the view below, the person next to me commented that she just didn't understand how people could witness such beauty and not believe in God:

I replied that that the difference between believers and non-believers might be that while the latter would certainly feel awe in the face of such beauty, the former would feel awe and gratitude.  I can't help but think that it must be something of an impoverished existence to be stunned by the sight of the seas pounding on the rocks and yet have no one to thank or glorify for it.

On my last overseas trip, to Israel, we had the chance to view another jaw-dropping geologic formation, the Machtesh Ramon in the Negev Desert.  At the visitor center on the lip of the crater we watched a movie about the formation of this vast hole in the ground.  It stated that if you compressed the history of the universe into a year, then human beings and our hominid ancestors have only been around since December 30.

If there is no God, then that's a lot of beautiful sunsets, lovely flowers and awesome geology that no one has taken aesthetic delight in until just now.  That doesn't seem right to me.  If there isn't a God who's been saying, "Good, good, very good" for all this time, well then, there ought to be.

That's not a very good argument for the existence of God. Heck, it's not an argument at all.  It's more a sentiment.  But it's what I came away from Staffa with.  That, plus a close encounter with a puffin:

Hermeneutics

Via the Huffington Post, here's a bit of Rev. John Hagee's "Adolph Hitler, servant of the Lord," sermon:

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Now there's a couple of problems here that recall my earlier post about Hart's The Doors of the Sea.  First, Hagee does not preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  He more or less collapses the two.  With Hagee there is no hermeneutical leap, certainly not over something as broad and deep as Lessing's ugly ditch of history.  The hunter equals Hitler.

This is especially tempting for people with no historical consciousness who've been to the Holy Land.  When you read "Zion," you think the Western Wall.  When you read "The Abomination that causes desolation," you think The Dome of the Rock.  When you read all the prophetic material about the Babylonian captivity, you think 1948 and 1967.  You fail to see that the Bible, while not about today, is nevertheless relevant for today.  You think it's about today.

I find myself lapsing into this kind of thinking, especially after visiting Israel.  This week's OT lesson is God's words to the servant to rouse the exiles and lead them home,"to apportion the desolate heritages." You can't help but think of this miracle that the Zionist pioneers wrought, a miracle you've seen flowering in the Jezreel Valley. 

Only, in 1948 and 1967 the heritages weren't desolate.  They were full of Arabs who'd lived there from time out of mind.  There's the rub.

Secondly, Hagee's neo-Calvinst determinism collapses the distinction between world history and God's providence.  It's one thing to say that God can bend evil toward the good.  It's quite another to say that God sins in order that grace may abound.

Now obviously there is some relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of the modern state of Israel.  A time line will show you that the latter came on the heels of the former. 

The architecture of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem suggests a relation.  You move through this prismatic shaped structure that's built in the side of a mountain, switching back and forth between rooms exhibiting unspeakable horror, until you arrive at the end, a balcony that overlooks suburban Jerusalem.  You, emotionally exhausted, survey Jewish homes scattered on the hills around Zion, as numerous as the sands of the seashore, and you intuit a relationship. 

Maybe the relationship is that the Holocaust makes the Jewish state a necessity.  Maybe the relationship is that God rescued a remnant from his covenant people in the European diaspora. 

But the problem with Hagee's straight lines is the crooked God that such lines yield.  His hermeneutics lack subtlety.  There's no room for mystery, for hope, for hard questions. Only an evil God whose marionettes like Hitler propel a pre-determined plot forward, and no innocent victims, just those who defied God's will and suffered the consequences.  Certainly not a good God whose sovereignty is hoped for and provisionally demonstrated in creation and resurrection.  Certainly not a God who hears the cry of innocent blood shed.

Exorcizing the ghost of Zwingli

In a neat article titled "Books in search of an author" in the May 6 Christian Century (alas, no web link), John Wilson of Books & Culture wishes for someone to write a new historical theology of the Eucharist.  The not-so-hidden agenda of said book would be to make a plausible case to Evangelicals for the Real Presence, and invite them, and the rest of us as well, to clean up our slipshod approach to the Lord's Supper.

Lots of questions remain of course. Which theology of real presence?  Transubstantiation?  Consubstantiation?  Virtual representation?  Nonetheless, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is a worthy one. 

So, who's game for that?

A Christian case for democracy

I have been critical of Craig Carter on several occasions, but this is a pretty interesting post on how Christians can make a social witness without capitulating to secular logic.

Thinking out loud toward Sunday

It's not entirely clear that Karl Barth advised ministers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Still, it's not a bad homiletical strategy.  Applied this week, it seems to cry out for some reflection on a creation God deems "very good," and the bodies of children floating in the storm surge of the Burmese cyclone and crushed in the Chinese earthquake.

I'm not sure where my sermon is going yet.  But in addition to the Bible and the newspaper I'm relying on David Bentley Hart's The Doors of the Sea, a short volume about theodicy in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. 

In response to the book's subtitle, "Where was God in the tsunami?" Hart is surprisingly sympathetic toward atheistic complaints that such disasters must needs overthrow faith in a loving, omnipotent God: 

After all at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world would want to disparage.  For the secret irony pervading these arguments is that they never would have occurred to such consciences that had not in some profound way been shaped by the moral universe of a Christian culture.

And he is surprisingly harsh in dismissing Christian apologists who (apologizing for what?  Their faith in God?  God's ways in a world of tsunamis?) would justify the calamity by appealing to God's inscrutable plan, or simply chalking it up to rough, divine justice.  I found myself remembering this post from my Ivy Bush days which cites the Calvinist Jesuit John Piper as an example of all Hart finds wanting in Christian discourse in those shocking, waning days of 2004.  Hart uses Ivan Karamazov as a blunt object to smash such apologies to smithereens.

Hart's argument is that we need to reclaim the biblical worldview that the world, though created good by God, is nevertheless in servitude to evil forces.  The world that is is not the world that God intended it to be.  And examining the fossil record or feasting one's eyes on the fauna that rings the Indian Ocean cannot teach us this.  Only when history is seen in light of Revelation do we see it as fallen, yet hoping for redemption.

God's sovereignty, as Hart sees it, cannot be understood in terms of God being the author of all that happens, for even if God's willed it for a greater good, that would still make God the author of evil, and any morally serious person ought to revolt against such a God, as indeed Ivan does.  God is the prime cause of everything, but things can and do run amok in the chain of secondary causes that God's sovereignty permits. 

For Hart, God's sovereignty must be understood as God's ultimate victory over all that has besmirched this world, including the corpses of children buried in rubble and floating in the flood waters.

Hart's argument wraps up with a bracing defense of God's impassibility and a passionate complaint against Calvinist determinism.  You can see the latter quietly developing through this short volume, but when the wave finally breaks, it's rather powerful.  What's interesting is that both God's impassibility and Calvinist determinism are in great disfavor in mainline Presbyterian seminaries these days!

At that old Ivy Bush post, I remarked that Calvin's high doctrine of providence was a pastoral argument.  It was meant to reassure suffering people that their lives weren't in the hands of a capricious fate but of a loving and sovereign Father.  Hart decries how that same argument, in the hands of Piper and his ilk, is used to reassure not the survivors of natural disasters, but those of us who watch from the comfort of our living room Lay-Z-Boys:

(W)ords we would not utter to ease another's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety...

Only a moral cretin at that moment would have attempted to soothe (a survivor's) anguish by assuring him that his children had died as a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels, and that in fact their deaths had mysteriously served God's purposes in history, and that all of this was completely necessary for God to accomplish his ultimate design in having created the world.  Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words...

And this should tell us something.  For if we would think it shamelessly foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real... then we ought never to say them.

It is often remarked that Job's friends did well when they sat in silence with him for seven days.  Where they went wrong was when they began to open their mouths, for rather than comforting Job, they went about justifying God's ways in the world.  This earned them a sharp rebuke from Job and in the end, an equally sharp rebuke from the very God whose ways they sought to justify.

Hart admits that in the face of such massive suffering, silence might be the best option.  But he ventures to speak nonetheless.  So I have to speak on Sunday.  I still don't know what I'm going to say, but I think that I'd better not say anything unless I can imagine that between the Bible in my right hand and the newspaper in my left, an earthquake survivor stands in my presence waiting to hear what I have to say.

Speaking of laws and lawyers...

So, in deference to Doubting Thomas and Rob Bell (I'm such the hipster Christian!) we had our own little Doubt Night tonight.  You could write your doubts on a piece of paper and we'd talk about them.  As expected, there were more than a few doubts about the historicity of the Bible, which prompted me to share (yet again!) Tom Wright's argument that the discrepancies in the gospel accounts of the Resurrection actually confirm the big picture because it proves that the writer's hadn't gotten their stories straight ahead of time.

Well, I've used this line in a sermon once, and one parishioner, an assistant DA, just loved it.  But tonight there were two attorneys present.  Neither were prosecutors.  Each could barely conceal looks of impatience morphing into scorn.

"What?  Is that something only a prosecutor would say?"  I asked.  But they only glared at me.

I'm no good at this apologetics stuff.  Back to Barth, and beating people over the head with doctrine.  Like so:

Doubting Thomas

Glenn W. Most has written a most interesting book on Doubting Thomas.  It combines a close reading of the story in John 20 with an examination of how the synoptic gospels handle issues of doubt and faith after the resurrection, as well as interpretations of Thomas by the Church Fathers, Gnostics and medieval and renaissance artists. 

Most shrewdly observes that no where does it state that Thomas actually touched the wounds in the body of the resurrected Jesus, yet we tend to mis-remember the story as if he did.  This is due in some part to a long history of interpretation that insisted he did probe the wounds in order to refute the Gnostic denial of a resurrected body.

But there's also the problem of visually representing a modal verb.  Simply put, it's easier to paint a finger entering the hole in Jesus' side than painting an invitation to put said finger there.  We remember the story as we've seen it on the canvas and in stained glass.

In the chapter on Thomas in art, Caravaggio's portrait is the hub around which the discussion spins.  Most doesn't shy away from pointing out the contrast between Jesus' delicate, wounded body and Thomas' crude violation of it, represented by the vulva-like slit in Jesus' side, and the stiffly erect shape of Thomas' probing finger.  Are we meant to feel revulsion at Thomas' impertinent request?  Or, noticing Jesus' hand on Thomas' wrist, which may be restraining Thomas' hand or pulling it toward the wound, are we meant to see something different, a discovery that leads to the miracle of faith?

Most observes that Thomas' forehead is furrowed in a way that seems to indicate astonishment, even wonder, while the other two disciples' brows are wrinkled in a manner than connotes extreme concentration.  One thinks of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson, which is also pictured in Most's book. 

Perhaps for this reason, Most argues, the Italian Cardinal Ottavio Paravicino wrote of Caravaggio that he had painted "some paintings which were in that middle between piety and profanity, such that I would not have wished to see them (even) from afar," for in his Doubting Thomas, the artist has represented "the irrevocable conflict and the indispensable interdependence between" faith and doubt, scientific belief and religious skepticism, and the knowledge that arises from a leap of faith and that which is the result of "scrupulously punctilious inquiry."

Most concludes by observing that we live in a relentlessly skeptical age, and yet our relationships demand that we suspend for a time the very skepticism that has generated such advances in knowledge in favor of a trust that cannot be justified on rational grounds alone.  Thomas thus represents both the doubters and believers among us and within us.

Sedition

I have only read one newspaper article about Rev. Wright's preaching, and only scanned the transcript of Barack Obama's reaction to the flap.  So I'm hardly in position to offer an informed opinion.  But this is a blog.  You want informed opinions?  Go to a library!

The whole affair reminds me of the Reimagining Conference in 1994.  Feminist scholars, clergy and lay people got together and worshiped.  The Presbyterian Layman showed up with a microphone and re-printed, with a great deal of accuracy, as far as I can remember, just what was said.  And people were shocked.  "This isn't equal rights for women; this is paganism!"  was the reaction.

Jeremiah Wright's preaching has done for black liberation theology what Reimagining did for feminist theology.  It's out in the open now.  And a lot of people are appalled.

I tend to take it all in stride.  I do think that God has a preferential option for the poor, and I do think that there is a place in the faith for incendiary rhetoric.  Amos and John of Patmos come to mind.  "Fat cows of Bashan" and "Whore of Babylon" is rhetoric  that was as offensive to the powers-that-be then as it would be at, I don't know, a Reimagining conference today.  We can have a debate about whether the sins of the United States deserve such caustic condemnation, but not about whether such condemnations are out of bounds per se in Christian discourse.

Barack Obama need not apologize for worshiping at a church where such rhetoric reverberates in the pulpit.  That is the way it is with prophets. 

Back in the day, they didn't know what to do with the prophet Jeremiah, whose mockery of the Temple in Jerusalem was tantamount to mocking the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Some of the folks on Judah's version of Fox News wanted him executed for sedition. 

But the old, conservative farmers, the ones who listened to Rush in their tractors but whose conservatism was one primarily defined by long memory, got together around the pot bellied stove at the gas station and said, "Well, remember that fellow Micah from Moresheth?  He said some outlandish stuff.  Crazy stuff.  Said God was going to plow Zion like a field.  But the King listened to him, and repented.  So let's not be hasty."  (scripture citation)

So it remains to be seen how hasty we are with our prophets, and with pretenders-to-the-throne who listen to them rather than taking off their heads.