Avdat

Stuff evangelicals like

Stuff Christian Culture Likes is a hilarious sendup of the way that conservative Evangelicals in the U.S. eat, drink, worship and play. Some of my favorite entries include:

• Getting rid of their secular music
• Focusing on that one scene that ruined the movie ("Many youth group screenings of The Princess Bride have been conducted while youth group leaders hovered by the VCR so they could fast-forward over the part where Inigo Montoya calls the Six-Fingered Man a son of a bitch. At day camps this writer worked at, parents said Bambi was too violent to be shown so The Little Mermaid was shown instead. When the parents protested again, it too was banned because Ariel disobeyed her dad.")
• Numbers
• Backrub chains
• Christifying logos 
• Fall festivals ("Hay bales, cornucopias, and pear-shaped people wearing overalls and straw hats are guaranteed. More than likely there will be a beanbag toss, bowls of Werther's Original candy, and a plywood board with scarecrows painted on it that you can stick your face through and take pictures. The church elders will wear rope belts and bob for apples, trying to be good sports when they really want to be home watching the world series."), and
• Astroglide! Heh.

 This kind of satire actually reveals a lot about Evangelicals conflicted relationship with culture. Evangelicals arose from fundamentalists who got tired of circling the wagons. They wanted to engage the culture, even on its own turf, but never shook off their skittishness about whether such an enterprise was altogether wise. So Evangelicals never integrate; they imitate. They're wannabees. Stephy's blog is the most devastating of takedowns because if Evangelicals can be satirized in this way it means that they aren't cool. And what Evangelicals want to be more than anything is cool. But you can't be cool and want it that bad!

Moreover, Evangelicals' Bible-only way of theological reflection deprives them of models of how to make wise use of secular wisdom. Calvin's humanism and Augustine's Christian Platonism are unknown to a lot of these folks. So what you get are Evangelicals plundering Pharaoh's everyday ware, and not his silver and gold. Evangelicals passed on Modernity's greatest gifts: human rights, equality, toleration, the scientific method, and seized on the most baroque elements of consumer capitalism: jumbo-trons, five dollar lattes perched on the pulpit, the prosperity gospel, etc.

Why aren't mainline Christians satirized in this way? Maybe there aren't enough of us left to matter. Maybe it's because we're so captive to the culture that we don't represent the kind of sub-culture open to ridicule. That's what Stanley Hauerwas and his fellow travelers have been saying for a quarter century now.

But not every sub-culture is ridiculed. The Amish aren't. They may be our "noble savages," romanticized for embodying a more peaceful, agrarian, pre-industrial lifestyle, but however inaccurate, it's still a form of homage, not scorn.

And perhaps the mainline culture of Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, Bach fugues and long, boring sermons, in its own way, merits homage and not scorn in the eyes of the world.

We mainliners are neither hated by the world, as the early Christians were, nor satirized by the world, as Evangelicals are. But that's not an altogether bad place to be.

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."

Christendom: what really happened

In The Origins of Christendom in the West Alan Kreider has written an interesting essay on what it meant to convert before and after Constantine.  Prior to its legalization, Christianity was a rather exclusive club.  You couldn't just join up.  Other Christians had to vouch for you at the beginning of an arduous and lengthy membership process (up to three years!)

The initial focus was almost exclusively on morality and ethics.  As the time drew near for baptism, the focus changed to doctrine--the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection that were the underpinnings of Christian practice.  Finally, after a season of intense study and extended fasting, you were presented for baptism in the wee hours of Easter Sunday morning.  It was a cathartic experience:  the cold, naked, hungry, exhausted convert was doused with water, and remade. 

And it wasn't just the physical drama--although I'm sure that helped.  Now you were cut off from society at large, unable to be a soldier, a gladiator, or an actor, and unable to participate in the patriotic duties of revering the Emperor.

It's unclear whether Constantine's conversion to Christianity was the cause or the effect of Christendom.  Paganism was a spent force long before Constantine had his vision, the last new pagan temple being constructed around 285.  The Emperor didn't embrace Christianity until a generation later--finally going where a great many of his subjects had gone before. 

But as the religion became tolerated and then favored by the State, the ethics/doctrine balance in the new Christian curricula was turned on its head.  Now, as Christianity was the ideological glue that held the Empire together, you had to get clear on the ideology first.  Morals would come later.  And both would come after baptism, not before.

So by the time you get to Caesarius, a 6th century cleric in Gaul, he's preaching conversion to the already baptized, which now means abandoning a lifestyle of nominal Christianity, often mixed in with elements of Roman or Frankish paganism, and entering a monastery.

Krieder writes,

Recent studies of missiology recognize that the Christian message must be inserted into a cultural framework... If the assimilation is done thoughtlessly or too quickly, the result is "syncretism"--a bad thing; if it is done properly, the result is "a truly critical symbiosis"--a good thing.  For the latter to happen, there needs to be a second stage which Hans-Dietrich Kahl has called innerkirchliche Nacharbeit (intra-ecclesial follow-up work) of catchism and life formation.  In the Europe of the 6th to 8th centuries this second stage never materialized.  In Merovingian Gaul there was virtually no catechesis; the councils of the period were tediously interested in church property and episcopal rights, but they showed no interest in encouraging the priests to teach the people.  Nor is there a record of a "formal, ecclesiastical post-baptismal catechesis for children."

Now we're getting somewhere. 

A lot of people see the cure for what ails the post-Christendom church as a new, antagonistic attitude toward state and culture.  That's a bit off.  The modern state is both larger and smaller than the Roman Empire, but by no means analogous.  It's larger in terms of its intrusion into the economy and society, but smaller in terms of the religious and ideological devotion it demands.  The Pax Americana is not the Pax Romana, and the United States of America is by no means the whore of Babylon, although she is in need of repentance. 

And there's no warrant in the lean, mean, pre-Constantinian chuch for picking a fight with liberalism, for as I've already argued, the most creative thinkers of that period plundered the reigning ideology of Neo-Platonism.  They did not shun it.

But there does seem to be some valid analogies between our situation and that of early Christendom--the failure to do the "intra-ecclesial follow up work."  We have sort of banked on cultural familiarity with the names and events of the gospel to educate our children, and socialize the newcomers on Sunday morning.  In the mainline Church, this has meant many and various calls for "justice and peace" on the assumption that everyone knows what that means and where it comes from.  But without a disciplined and sustained process of Christian education, people don't.

Now we might want to cut the first bureaucrats of Christendom some slack.  Civil society was collapsing.  Wars raged.  New people were turning up in what was left of the cities and all over the countryside.  In the chaos, some preoccupation with property rights was understandable. 

The same thing is true in a lot of corners of our culture.  In inner city ghettos and dying Appalachain towns, a minister is going to be hard-pressed to craft the perfect Sunday School lesson when there are so many social service needs, and he or she might be the only community leader who's both smart and compassionate enough to give a damn about hungry kids, and get them fed.

Still, I think that the way forward is for the Church to celebrate those aspects of culture that are good (the gender, racial and individual equity that is the bedrock of liberal ideals) while working harder and harder to teach its faithful what the good life truly is:  forgiveness, fidelity, generosity.  And this teaching needs to happen on the front end:  prior to confirmation for children, and prior to baptism, or a transfer-of-letter for adults.

Getting in touch with your inner JW

Sunday, I canvassed an apartment complex for Obama.  I was joined by a retired biologist.  I always get nervous before I do this, but once I hit the first door, I remember how easy it is.  And fun!  I had a variety of conversations.  Some through closed doors.  Some through window blinds propped open.  Some face-to-face.  But everyone was kind.  I even registered one woman to vote! 

You should do it too.  Instead of just sitting around reading blogs, or coveting yard signs.  No yard sign ever changed anybody's vote.  Sure you want your property to be adorned with the requisite bling, but bling ain't gonna win this election.

If going door to door is too creepy for you, then you can make phone calls.  From the privacy of our own home too.  No phone banks at Headquarters.  The Obama campaign website has this great "Neighbor to Neighbor" tool that gives you names and phone numbers of people in your neighborhood, or a battleground state, to call.  Plus a script.  You should do this also.

And why don't congregations do this more?  The canvassing, especially.  We canvassed our neighborhood, simply asking people, "What should we do with our new fellowship hall?"  We thought that we'd find lots of kids in our neighborhood, but what we found was lots of senior citizens, and others concerned about lonely seniors.  And now the congregation I was formerly serving is hosting a meal and programming for Seniors five days per week.

What if congregations sent members door to door with one question.  Not, "If you died today, where would you spend eternity?"  but, "Is there anything you'd like us to pray about?"  Write it down, pray about it, and return six weeks later to check in.

I'll bet that good things would happen.

Our hope is in the hick towns

Peter Brown describes the moribund religious life that Augustine settled into upon his return home to North Africa:

The Catholics in Hippo were a harassed minority.  The rival church, that of the 'party of Donatus,' was predominant in both the town and the surrounding countryside...

The local Catholic church in Africa had come to a standstill: divided by schism, exposed to the Manichaean heresy, its bishops had settled down as local dignitaries with limited gifts and ambitions.  They were content to secure official privileges and seemed capable of displaying energy only in litigation.  In church they would be content to celebrate the liturgy:  outside it, they would arbitrate lawsuits.  In every way, the rival church, that of the Donatists, was more active.  The greatest African exegete was a Donatist... Only the Donatists seemed to have undertaken the difficult tasks of converting the hill villages around Hippo and in the interior.

There's a lot here that seems so contemporary.  We Mainlines are missionally outclassed by our Evangelical rivals.  (Now careful; don't press the metaphor too far.  I'm not accusing Evangelicals of being any brand of heretic; just more vigorous.)  Meanwhile we mainline pastors mail it in, more or less.  We lead worship on Sunday, offer a blessing at Rotary on Wednesday, read the Layman or the Witherspoon Society, and follow closely how the latest ordination kerfluffle will be adjudicated by the Permanent Judicial Commission. 

But Hippo had a crafty bishop, a Greek who could both size up talent, and see his congregations through that Oh-so valuable lens of an outsider.  When Augustine and his friends returned from Italy, he had him more or less impressed into service as a priest, and kept elevating him, sometimes contrary to canon law, to higher and higher positions.  Augustine, for his part, marshaled his formidable rhetorical skills for two tasks:  teaching the Creed and refuting the Manichees.

Brown closes this chapter by inviting us to wonder at it all.  A decade before, this group of North Africa's best and brightest had left for Rome, in search of power and glory.  Now they've returned to the hick towns of their birth.  And from such a remote outpost, North Africa being the Kansas of the Empire, known for wheat and not much else, they changed the Church forever.  "It is in such ways that all roads no longer ran to Rome," concludes Brown.

I can't help but hear in this tale how Augustine's life, and indeed so many lives, resonate with Liberation Theology's maxim that God is at work on the margins.  Hebrew slaves toiling in Egypt.  A manger in a shed in an Imperial backwater--Palestine.  Even Geneva was for Calvin more like Appalachia, and less like an Alpine retreat, and he longed to be back in Paris.

And I can't help but take heart for my own denomination and its "brand" of Christianity.  If you're an entrepreneurial Evangelical, you can found a Church in an elementary school next to the planned community/golf course in Florida without much trouble.  You, unlike your mainline brethren, aren't saddled with churches in dying towns out on the prairie, or big hulking downtown sanctuaries gutted by white flight.

But we mainliners need to look at these down on your luck places as blessings. We are surfeit with sites that could be the next Bethlehem, or the next Hippo, or the next Geneva.  What we need is a crafty presbytery exec. or two who's willing to break the rules and settle 4-5 bright, spiritual men and women who've seen the world and their faith's lived to tell about it in the same de-populated county, or the same urban slum. Let these 4-5 pastors preach a sermon series on the Creed, and see what God can do.

Is it safe to let the white guys rule again?

You never know what you'll find in the mailbox.  A few weeks ago I opened it up, and there sat another pamphlet from the denomination's Office of Theology and Worship.  But this one was titled "Rebuilding the Presbyterian Establishment."  Yes.  This one was bound to be a keeper.

I serve in a denomination run by moderate to liberal baby boomers.  "Establishment" for these types is almost like the N-word.  Put a definite article in front of it, and it'll take thirty years off the typical Presbyterian pastor.  His hair will reappear and grow; his beard will lighten, and he'll forget all that active listening crap he learned in CPE.  He'll start shouting at you.

Plus, haven't we all had it pounded into our heads that Christendom is dead?  I mean, dead and buried.  And boy didn't she get what was coming to her!  Burn, baby, burn!  Just like we used to do to the witches! 

I like contrarian arguments for their own sake, even if I deeply disagree with them.  So I read the pamphlet, and rather enjoyed it, even if I didn't agree with all the diagnoses or recommendations.

Beau Weston, a sociologist at Centre College in Kentucky, says that the Presbyterian Church used to be run by a coterie of white men who all went to Davidson, whose families all vacationed at Montreat, who went to seminary at Union or Princeton and became ministers or elders in large steeple churches.  These people loved the church.  Shoot, it was their family.  And when liberals and conservatives went to war in the denomination, you could rely on these guys to make peace because they loved the church more than any ideology within it.

That network got shot to pieces in the anti-Establishment 60s.  It deserved it, to some degree.  It was exclusive, snotty to outsiders and perhaps suffocating to insiders.  The denomination established strong AA-EEO policies related to age, gender and race in leadership, and instituted rotation of elders in congregations.  It didn't abandon the Westminster Confession, but relativized it by adopting a Book of Confessions. 

Weston's argument is the same argument against affirmative action in secular society:  Qualified people get overlooked in the zeal for more diversity.  In the case of the PC(USA), that would be the middle-aged white, male pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Pleasantville.

It's safe now, Weston writes, to let the white guys run the church again.  They're sufficiently sensitized to gender and racial equality to not lord it over anyone.  And besides, they can do the best job.  If you can succeed at First Church Pleasantville, or as an administrator at Young Life, you deserve a seat at General Assembly, on General Assembly Council, and on important Presbytery committees.  You're probably a good administrator, a good preacher, theologically substantial, and politically astute.

Those are the people we need adjudicating disputes on human sexuality, and making tough decisions about the allocation of mission resources.  But they've been shut out.  So they retreat to their churches or para-church agencies, leaving the less-qualified and more shrill to chart the denomination's course.

Now that's an argument that steps on a lot of toes!  I can think of any number of people, most of whom always have something to say about every issue at Presbytery, that would hate this little write-up. 

But check out the hissy-fit they threw at the Presbymergent blog over Weston's pamphlet.  A lot of visceral reaction to the word "Establishment," mainly in the form of shrill but vapid calls not to go back to the 50s, and to press ahead against hierarchy, "relentlessly and recklessly pursu(ing) the Kingdom of God."

Look, Emergent people.  Lighting candles and constructing prayer stations does not a movement make.  Or a church.  Or a denomination.  Movements needs institutions to sustain them for the long haul, and institutions need good leaders (An Establishment?!) as well as periodic, fresh injections of movement energy to prevent them from ossifying.  It is a symbiotic relationship. 

If a new church is emerging, the question is, Where and How are you going to mine the talent that will help nurture these impulses long enough so that they can truly bear fruit?  Weston's answer is, The talent is right under our nose, but our bureaucratic structures don't allow for that talent to be tapped.

That's the argument.  It's not an argument about going back to the past.  Now support it or refute it, but don't freak out over the word "Establishment" and knock down a strong man.

Or at least lighten up, and learn to crack a wry smile at contrarian arguments.

You Tube Friday, San Jose edition

Because General Assembly is meeting this week, and what's GA without a little love 'n' justice?

Open letter

Dear members of First Presbyterian Church,

I understand that you are upset that a local businessman wants to establish a Coyote Ugly Saloon in your neighborhood.  I can sympathize with your bewilderment and misgivings.  I too did not know that a woman's navel could be pressed into service as a shot glass until I became more familiar with this establishment, thanks to the Charlotte Observer handy link to their website.  Like many of you, I am a happily married man who has engaged in monogamous, procreative sex.  In short, Coyote Ugly is not my scene. 

That said, I am perplexed by your determination to strangle this new business in the crib.  We mainline Christians are chronically shot on young adult members.  A bar like Coyote Ugly is bound to bring gobs of young adults to the very gates of your facility.  This is an opportunity for ministry, an opportunity that I fear you may be missing. 

You have to wonder if the thrill of slurping tequila out of a scantily clad drunk woman's belly button is worth the one-two punch of shame and a raging hangover that inevitably finds its mark the day after a night at Coyote Ugly.  More to the point, what's the real attraction of such a bar?  Boredom?  Pain?  Loneliness? 

The Church does provide a way to scratch all three itches.  As for boredom, there is the adventure of following Jesus Christ in a world that rejects his ways of justice, peace and fidelity to the Father. 

Regarding pain, there is a balm in Gilead.  The Spirit is our Comforter and ministers to us in the Word and the Sacraments and in casseroles baked and shoulders to cry on. 

Concerning loneliness, the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace that prevails among disciples is certainly more healthy and enduring than the one-night stands that sprout like weeds in springtime at Coyote Ugly Saloon.  Why, I met my wife at Church!

So, why not let the lost sheep of our generation, the lonely, the hurting and the bored, congregate in your neighborhood, and offer them something better?  Rather than packing out the City Council meeting, why not establish a Coyote Ugly ministry?  Why not beef up your offerings of A.A. groups, and singles ministries? 

It has been done before.  Jesus showed up for worship on the Sabbath, but he also ate in the homes of sinners.  Please forgive me for appealing to that hackneyed wrist bracelet, but there's no doubting what Jesus would do and where he would go if a Coyote Ugly Saloon was established in his community.

The Son of Man came to seek out and save the lost.

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.

I'm up for it

Tomorrow is National Bike to Work day.  HT.

I'd do this every day, but in mainline congregations of older members there's an expectation that the minister make pastoral calls in pressed slacks and clean shirts, preferably free from sweat rings extending down the sides of one's trunk.  And, unlike some of my relatives who work for corporations, or megachurches, there's no shower facilities here at good ol' John Calvin Presbyterian Church.

But since all that's on my schedule tomorrow is sermon writing plus a little disc golf with a teenager, it fits my lifestyle for this particular day.

I think it's worth wondering about how certain cultural expectations are at variance with good common sense.  I hear that everyone but lawyers have abandoned suits in south Florida, but honesty, they could be done away with in most places in the United States, at least in the summer.  Even far northern cities like New York and Philly are south of those latitudes from whence came the bulk of immigrants accustomed to wearing wool even in July.  And not only are they far to the south of Great Britain, Ireland, Germany and eastern Europe, but they're hot and miserable in summertime.

I know.  Part of what makes fashion fashionable is willingness to submit to a certain amount of physical or financial discomfort.  But heat and humidity and the prospect of even more on the horizon, thanks to global warming, do make me wonder when convention has taken leave of its senses...