Avdat

Web sites that suck: www.pcusa.org

To follow up on my previous post, in which I mentioned both Andrew Sullivan and the awful PC(USA) web site, there's a thread on Sullivan's blog about web sites that suck. So why don't you go the PC(USA) homepage and decide for yourself. Does it suck like a restaurant website?

 

 

Or like a college website?

 

 

That thing about not being able to copy and paste anything because it's in Flash makes me bang my head against the keyboard, and sadly, it's true of so many church web sites.

What I love about our front page is how the link to PC(USA) Agencies follows you as you scroll down the page. Yeah, like curiosity about the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program is generating Google searches on "Presbyterian."

A Facebook friend pointed out that the PC(USA) web site blows so bad that somebody created a Wiki to help navigate it. I had to use it to find the page on what Presbyterians believe. It's four links from the PC(USA) front page and the clicking sequence is bizarre:

Home-->General Assembly Mission Council-->Mission and Ministry-->Communications and Funds Development (Huh?)-->Presbyterian 101.

So I think it's less a matter of not knowing what we believe; maybe a bit more of beliefs being irrelevant on a web site by and for ecclesiastical paper-pushers, and maybe a whole lot of not wanting people to know what we believe--the page on predestination is another two clicks deeper into the bowels of the site.

(Although that's understandable; I mean, when the Mormons land on your front porch they don't lead off with getting your own planet and multiple wives after you die).

If you Google "what we believe," eight of the top ten returns are denominational web sites with prominent links on their front pages. Everybody from the United Methodists and Evangelical Lutherans to the Foursquare Church and Seventh Day Adventists. If it occurs to practically everybody else to put their faith front and center online, why not us?

Church growth

Running past the lovely Metropolitan Community Church of Richmond the other day, a question occurred to me: Now that the Presbyterians have joined the Lutherans, Episcopalians and UCCs in ordaining gay and lesbian people, is there any need for the MCC anymore?

Andrew Sullivan has been documenting the death of gay culture for years now, beginning with this 2005 piece in The New Republic. Is the MCC, like the music of Queen or the flamboyance of Elton John, an artifact of a time in which gays and lesbians had to form a subculture of resistance?

If so, we Presbyterians need to jump on this opportunity. I'm talking mergers and acquisitions, baby! A friendly takeover of one irrelevant denomination by another irrelevant denomination.

You're dubious; I can tell. But isn't this how other institutions grow? Two guys cook up some cool new software in their garage. They start making a little money. And then the Redmond mafia show up with an offer they can't refuse. Next thing you know, that hot little app or innovation is folded seamlessly into the latest version of Windows, and one of those two guys is on Househunters International, trying to decide which condo in Dubai to purchase.

The question is, What's the offer that the MCC can't refuse? Well, there's Montreat, of course. And we have lay elders in the PC(USA) and no high and mighty bishops. That's gotta give us a leg up over the Episcopalians.

But I think that our best selling point is the Board of Pensions. A beyond fully-funded, defined benefit plan and medical coverage that's second to none. We have hit them up hard over the years--two open heart surgeries, a renal surgery, and God-awful expensive ABA therapy--and they pay out, right as rain. If you want to know what the Presbyterian bureaucracy does really well, it's taking care of the clergy.

So we pitch the BOP to the MCC clergy, and get them to bring along their laity with the awesome accessory of Ruling Elder.

Now the MCC only has 44,000 members, and we lose that many members each year. But you gotta start small. This is how pidly a Charlotte-based bank named NCNB became Bank of America. They gobbled up all the little fish in the Old North State; then they swallowed C&S/Sovran, and then unhinged their jaws to consume BankAmerica.

If the MCC acquisition goes well, we can set our sights on the Reformed Church of America, and then the Disciples of Christ. After that, we can either acquire the UCC or bypass them, letting them die on the vine while we land the Big Kahuna: the Southern Baptist Convention. And I know we can offer them: guilt free trips to the liquor store!

You may point out that conservatives will object to a transfusion of tens of thousands of homosexuals and their straight allies into the PC(USA). But here's the thing: the MCC is a theologically traditional denomination. Read their statement of faith. It's as clear and lucid a description of Bible-believing Nicene-Chalcedonian orthodoxy as you'll find out there.

Not only that, it's easy to find! All you have to do is click on the "Who We Are" tab on their home page, and a link to "Our beliefs" pops up. I can't find anything like that on the PCUSA homepage. Either because Presbyterians don't know what they think, or because the PC(USA) website is created by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. But the home page link to the Board of Pensions is nice!

Conservatives in the PC(USA) often conflate theological and social radicalism. But the MCC is living proof that the two don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. So here's an opportunity for a grand bargain: buy out the MCC, and move the denomination to the right theologically and to the left socially. It's like revenues and spending cuts! Two great tastes that taste great together!

I anticipate one last objection: Marvin, you're talking about sheep-stealing here! This isn't evangelism! This isn't legitimate church growth.

Look. Conversion is off the table for now. The public face of Christianity these days is Fred Phelps and Michelle Bachmann. When the unchurched think "Christianity," they think that's the North American branch of the Taliban. Who wants to convert to that?

So, until we rebrand the Christian label, let's concentrate on increasing our share of the shrinking slice of the U.S. pie that self-identifies as Christian.

Plus, I'd just love to get my hands on that church in the Fan! What a handsome building!

CPE in the 6th century

On Facebook Brother Bill called me out for missing the presbytery meeting today. But the Lord's work detained me! I was reading Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks.

There's a lot of blood and guts in The History of the Franks, and more than a few head-scratchers too. Today I read about a hapless young man admitted as a novice to a monastery renowned for its severe discipline. One day the monks left the novice in charge of the wheat harvest drying in the sun. Suddenly a thunderstorm blew up. What was our poor novice to do? His brothers were too far away to summon. So he did all that he could do. He prayed.

And a miracle happened! The rain fell in torrents everywhere except precisely over the precious stalks of wheat.

The monks with the abbot came running, and they saw the dry wheat and the novice prostrate in prayer. What did the abbot do? He smacked around the novice for being a show-off and threw him in solitary confinement for a week.

Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

If Christians believed in reincarnation I could totally see this abbot coming back to be a CPE supervisor. Because it never mattered which verbatim you turned in for review, did it? They could turn any material they had on you into a turd sculpture of your ministerial incompetence and heart of darkness.

If it was a visit that went badly and you wanted advice, they never gave you advice; they gave you a lot of observations about how your dysfunctional family and your own cluelessness rendered your ministerial dexterity right up there with a bull in a china shop. Or if you turned in a beautiful verbatim, they contemptuously and openly doubted your honesty or sneered at you for your desperate need to impress your supervisors and outshine your peers. By the end of the internship, even you had to admit that a Christian coming to you for pastoral care was like taking a sick pet to a taxidermist instead of a vet.

But we're the better for it, aren't we? It was like boot camp, but now we wounded healer Christian ministers are the Marine Corps of Christianity, aren't we?

Gregory of Tours certainly thought that the novice monk's experience was good for him. Gregory reports that the man is now so hard core that during Lent he only drinks a cup of barley water every third day. BTW, Gregory refuses to identify the monk lest he see his own name in print and get puffed up with pride--for he does have a problem with pride, doesn't he?

Shorter History of the Franks (for the non-insane, non-aspiring PhDs reading this): Gregory loves miracles, so long as the miracle worker is dead. Somebody like, say, Martin of Tours, whose bones are interred in Gregory's church. Dead miracle workers are no threat to a living bishop's authority!

 

Ordination standards

A parishioner in a congregation I used to serve emailed me about the recent change in ordination standards in the Presbyterian Church (USA). The old language read:

Those who are called to office in the church are to lead a life in obedience to Scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church. Among these standards is the requirement to live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman (W-4.9001), or chastity in singleness. Persons refusing to repent of any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and/or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the Word and Sacrament.

The new language reads:

Standards for ordained service reflect the church’s desire to submit joyfully to the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all aspects of life (G-1.0000). The governing body responsible for ordination and/or installation (G.14.0240; G-14.0450) shall examine each candidate’s calling, gifts, preparation, and suitability for the responsibilities of office. The examination shall include, but not be limited to, a determination of the candidate’s ability and commitment to fulfill all requirements as expressed in the constitutional questions for ordination and installation (W-4.4003). Governing bodies shall be guided by Scripture and the confessions in applying standards to individual candidates.

The practical effect of this change is to allow congregations and presbyteries, if they so choose, to ordain non-celibate gays and lesbians to the offices of elder and minister, respectively.

My former parishioner asked me about this change, especially regarding whether or not the biblical passages that condemn homosexuality are speaking to the same kind of same-sex behavior we're debating in contemporary society.

Greco-Roman women were betrothed in their teens to Greco-Roman men in their late 20s. Men who were old enough to have a sex drive but not old enough to marry usually found sexual outlets in one of two places. Either they took a concubine, or they took a teenage boy under their wing, mentored him and also used him for sexual gratification. So the argument is that when Paul condemns homosexuality in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6, that's the kind of homosexuality he was condemning because that was practically the only type of homosexuality with which he was familiar.

There's some merit to that argument, although it's by no means a slam dunk. If you could put Paul in a time machine and transport him to the United States in the 21st century, I think you'd be hard-pressed to get him to acknowledge the justice and righteousness of same-sex marriage. On the other hand, I imagine you'd be hard-pressed to get anything out of him. I believe that the sight of a moving car and a working TV set would reduce him to a fetal tuck. Just as we'd would be if we were hurled into the year 4011.

My point is that we cannot live in the first century AD. We can only live in the present and make ethical decisions as best we know how. Of course as Christians our conscience is captive to the Word of God, but Christian living happens when ancient texts intersect with the contemporary situation, and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, faith, hope and love abound. The Westminster Confession puts it this way:

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. Nevertheless, we acknowledge the inward illumination of the Spirit of God to be necessary for the saving understanding of such things as are revealed in the word; and that there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the Church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed.

This society knows a few things about human sexuality that previous societies didn't, namely: a small number of people are attracted to persons of the same sex due to some mysterious mixture of nature and nurture. This orientation is set fairly early in life and cannot be changed without doing psychological damage. Further, it appears that very few people of same sex orientation have a vocation for celibacy, just like heterosexuals.

If we require gays and lesbians to live celibate lives on the basis of Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6, then we'll be making liars and hypocrites out of people. We know this because of the church's long and ultimately failed experiment with requiring clerical celibacy.

And this in fact has been the case with homosexuals. Gay men and lesbians have coped by marrying people of the opposite sex, which often doesn't work very well. Or they cope with anonymous sex in rest area restrooms. Or they develop a love affair with the bottle--as is the case with many Roman Catholic priests.

It seems to me that the prudent and humane thing to do is to regularize same-sex relationships in marriages or civil unions. If one wants a proof text for this opinion, I would offer 1 Corinthians 7:9: It's better to marry than to burn. People whose relationships have been formalized in that way, who are also Presbyterians and who are called to serve as elders or ministers then should be allowed to do so, with the consent of the respective governing body.

Now Camille Paglia famously argued that homosexuals don't have anonymous sex in rest rooms because they are oppressed but because they like it! OK, fine. The institution of heterosexual marriage hasn't eliminated one-night stands, and I doubt that gay marriage will eliminate homosexual promiscuity.

But that's not the point. The point is that de-coupling sexual intimacy from the hard-won emotional intimacy that grows as two people pledge themselves to each other in plenty and in want, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health is not good. That's the message the church should be sending to the world.

I'm more convinced than ever that gays and lesbians ought to be able to marry, and if called, to serve the church as elders and ministers. But I'm also more sympathetic than ever to the concerns of people who disagree with me.

Mind you, I'm not sympathetic with homophobia--with the name-calling and physical violence against gays that's still typical of teenage and young adult men. I'm thinking more about people who have seen a lot of changes in the past 40 years, not all of them good: divorce, out-of-wedlock births, elective abortions, and so forth. I think that for some people, gay ordination is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

I share those concerns. But I don't think that gay marriage or gay ordination means blessing any of those trends. Gay marriage actually pays marriage and its virtues a compliment. Gays and lesbians are saying, "Marriage is good. Deal us in, please."

This post will not convince anyone, I think. Nobody changes their mind on something like this all at once. And many people may never change their minds. What I say to those of you who disagree with me and are Presbyterian is, Please remain Presbyterian. We can agree to disagree on this. Sexual ethics are important, but it's not the article on which the Church stands or falls.

Besides, the practical importance of this change is that some congregation somewhere will ordain someone your congregation wouldn't. But isn't that already the case with regard to a whole lot of issue (theology, temperament, leadership style, etc.)?

Liberals Presbyterians need conservatives (and not just their per capita dollars!). Liberals have little passion for evangelism. We need your passion. And liberals, despite going with the culture on this issue, tend to be culturally flat-footed. We need conseratives' creativity and entrepreneurial spirit.

I imagine conservatives need liberals too, although that's up to you to decide.

In which I get up-to-speed on the Belhar Confession

I've been out of the parish and holed up in a carrel long enough that the MDiv students now know more about church politics than I do. The Belhar Confession has come up several times in Theology II this semester, a class in which I am a TA. Turns out that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is voting this year on whether or not to add it to our Book of Confessions. I didn't know what the Belhar Confession was, so I had to look it up. (Shorter Belhar Confession: Apartheid is a sin).

In this afternoon's section, in which we were considering the relationship of the Church to society and reading the Confession of 1967 in that context, one student asked why there was any opposition to the Belhar Confession since the Constitution already contains a document that condemns racial discrimination, namely C '67. Another student replied that some people fear that Belhar is a trojan horse for approving gay ordination.

Sigh. This is pure guilt by association. And faulty logic:

Some people who support gay ordination also support the Belhar Confession.

I do not support gay ordination.

Therefore I cannot support the Belhar Confession.

No, I don't think it follows either.

I suppose one could argue that since our Book of Confessions already condemns racism, why add another confession that does the same thing? But the thing about a Book of Confessions is that you have multiple documents treating the same subject. For instance, a majority of our confessions contain expositions of the Ten Commandments. Should we get rid of all except one? No, because there is value in the particular treatment that particular documents give to a given topic.

That said, I have a feeling that amending our constitution in this way is just one more symbolic gesture. Presbyterians are surfeit of symbolism, but what we need are deeds, not words. Despite our formal and seemingly endless endorsements of diversity, the Presbyterian Church (USA) remains overwhelmingly white, middle class and on the far side of 55.

One student quipped that the Confession of 1967 would have been a much more prophetic document had it been the Confession of 1957. Too right.

And that makes an interesting point about our consideration of Belhar. There's a whiff of Donatism at work here--establishing one's contemporary purity on the basis of the purity of one's ancestors. Only the Donatists had real martyr ancestors. We Presbyterians invent them by endorsing their words ex post facto.This gets us perilously close to those Pharisees whom Jesus condemned during Holy Week--the ones who decorated the tombs of the prophets of yesterday while stoning the prophets of today.

Somewhere I read that the chief predictor of a congregation's multiculturalness isn't its denominational affiliation but whether or not it was established before or after 1970. So it seems to me that if we want a truly diverse church we need to A. Establish new churches and evangelize young adults (who don't have the hangups about interracial worship and marriage that their elders do), and B. Train pastors to transform congregations imprinted by the segregationist culture in which they were founded.

That takes more than amending the constitution. That takes money. Big money. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."If we care about breaking down barriers, to say nothing about making disciples, we'll put our money where our mouth is.

It also takes a willingness on the part of presbyteries to ordain and authorize people to work in new, creative and unorthodox ways to make disciples and found congregations.

I take it that either the money or the creative thinking is lacking given that the denomination has planted but 20 new congregations in the last five years. Whether we adopt Belhar or not (and let me be clear--had I been able to attend my presbytery meeting I would have voted for it), we are not a denomination that cares much about either making disciples or creating a multicultural church. Deeds, not words, tell the story. "Ye shall know them by their fruits."

Do theologians need to man up?

I TA Theology II, and in today's lecture our professor delivered a mild-mannered rant about universalism, or more exactly, how we debate universalism. He shared an anecdote about a Presbytery meeting he attended in which a couple of candidates being examined for ordination were grilled about the concept.

If I get the anecdote right, neither candidate affirmed universalism; they affirmed a kind of middle-of-the-road, "We must hope well of all and not rashly judge anyone to be reprobate" point of view, but that wasn't good enough for a few. A few, in the presence of the candidates and especially out of their presence, mocked the candidates for an equivocating, mealy-mouthed faith in a saccharin-sweet God who's too darned nice to judge anybody.

Questioning the manhood of universalists, or even suspected universalists, is nothing new. In the fifth century Augustine wrote:

It is quite in vain, then, that some--indeed very many--yield to merely human feelings and deplore the notion of the eternal punishment of the damned and their interminable and perpetual misery. They do not believe that such things will be. Not that they would go counter to divine Scripture--but, yielding to their own human feelings, they soften what seems harsh and give a milder emphasis to statements they believe are meant more to terrify than to express the literal truth.

The sentimental might hope that all dogs go to heaven, but the tough-minded know better.

Or do they?

Denominations

Are they good for anything? After denouncing confessional boundaries within Christendom as a scandal, Karl Barth establishes criteria for when, if ever, denominational loyalty should trump ecumenism:

A Church can appeal with a good conscience to this possibility of its own relative justification only when and to the extent that it is honestly and seriously committed to it for the sake of Jesus Christ; only when and to the extent that it not merely thinks but believes it can serve him in accordance with the intentions which distinguish it from others; only when and to the extent that its particular existence and teaching and form as distinct from others are necessary to its faith and salvation; only when and to the extent that it has to recognize and confess that it is bound, not by its own confession, but by the Word of God. CD IV.1.  pp. 680 (emphasis mine).

That's a pretty high bar, no? Go back a few years to the COCU talks: was it really a matter of our "faith and salvation" that Presbyterians not have a bishop, not even the nearly fictional "representative bishop" that the proposal called for us to adopt?

It'd have to be an even higher bar for schism, would it not? Apply Barth's criteria to the recently released white paper signed by 45 disgruntled, big steeple pastors: Yes, bureaucratic ineptitude is frustrating, and in their minds, ordaining gays and lesbians would be a sin, but really, is our faith and salvation so much at stake here as to leave one with no choice but to depart? Might you really go to hell because your insurance company not only insures you and your opposite sex spouse, but a same sex couple somewhere? If so, a lot of your parishioners are already going to hell. Can a bureaucracy that stifles creativity actually destroy your faith in God?

I have a penultimate loyalty to the PC(USA) because of my ordination vows. But not an ultimate loyalty. That leads me to be sanguine about the denomination's future. It's demise would hurt me personally--our mental health benefit as administered by Cigna has been very good to our autistic son--but I doubt that it would hurt the cause of Jesus Christ in the world. Church history is littered with the corpses of dead institutions. It's hypothetical merger into some larger ecumenical body may be a faithful witness to the One Church, and if so, I would need to mourn the good ol' days, and then quickly get over it.

On the other hand, it would have to be a perilous situation indeed to justify another fork on the already bewildering Presbyterian highway. I don't think we're at that point. So I hope that those who are frustrated ask themselves the question Barth poses, "If I don't bolt, will I really go to hell for it?" before they do anything rash. I hope they stay. As I've already said, while I don't agree with them on sexualty, I do agree with them on the need for a more nimble bureaucracy, and a firm commitment to planting churches, making disciples and cultivating creative and faithful pastors and elders.

And by the way, this is another reason for keeping hell in one's theological bag o' tricks. "Can I go to hell for this?" is a great question for discernment. Asking it will keep you from sweating the small stuff.

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.

I want to be a Pentecostal

Did you know that there are Pentecostals who baptize infants? Did you know that there are Pentecostals who recite the Creed in worship? Did you know that, outside the U.S., most Pentecostals don't require speaking in tongues as evidence of a baptism in the Holy Spirit? Did you know that there are Pentecostal denominations in the World Council of Churches?

Neither did I!

Until I read An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity, by Allan Anderson. This scholarly and accessible book traces the origin and spread of Pentecostalism throughout the world, and also analyses Pentecostal theology, ethics and worship, as well Pentecostalism's relationship to the culture and to the ecumenical Church.

If it's not always and everywhere about speaking in tongues, just what then is Pentecostalism? Anderson suggests this answer: A shared conviction that the Holy Spirit can and should be experienced immediately and powerfully. This is in contrast to Roman Catholics, for whom the Holy Spirit is practically co-terminus with the Church, and with Protestants, for whom the Spirit has been reduced to a scriptural pedagogue.

And yet Pentecostalism does have country cousins in ecumenical Christianity. The mystical tradition, for instance, as Anderson points out.

To be sure, you have to look closely for the family resemblance. Mystics are quiet; Pentecostals are noisy. You tend to find mystics in monasteries; you can find Pentecostals all over cable TV. Mysticism offers an experience of God in which the boundary between the I and the Thou is erased momentarily, and the finite self dissolves into the Infinite. In a Pentecostal experience of the Spirit, one seems to retain a sense of self, only augmented by spiritual power: speaking in tongues, prophecy, exorcism, miraculous healing.

But what they share in common is a powerful and unmediated (to the extent possible in this space-time continuum) experience of God. It's not quite right to say that Pentecostalism is mysticism for the masses, but it isn't entirely wrong either. Once, while on retreat, a Cistercian monk gave me and my Presbyterian co-retreatants a good talking to about this subject. "What do you want? A letter from God (i.e., scripture), or GOD HIMSELF?" A Pentecostal could just as easily pose the same question.

Did you say exorcisms? Miracles? Yes, indeed. And why not? ask Pentecostals. The Bible is full of such stuff. Pentecostalism, like Protestantism once did, bills itself as a restoration of primitive Christianity, only in the context of a modern, disenchanted world understood primarily through scientific models of causes and effect. Outside Pentecostalism, God has either been kicked to the curb, or banished to the heavens, only permitted to come down to endorse our moral reform projects (as with "liberals" and "conservatives") or to mock the earnestness of liberals and conservatives in a moment of Revelation (neoorthodoxy).

But Pentecostals proclaim that the supernatural is alive and well. The desert is still a haunt of demons, and not just in Las Vegas! But prayer can still banish demons and heal the sick, they say.

How do we respond to this claim? My own experience and study of mysticism leads me to believe that the supernatural is not only real but can be encountered. It's local. Even if I were to lack some of the experiences and opportunities for study that I've had, I'd still be reluctant to dismiss Pentecostal testimony out of hand. And this despite the known charlatans. The weight of the testimony is just too great.

And yet we have benefited incalculably from the West's turn from a preoccupation with ultimate causes, and a focus on proximate causes. It is unfortunate that many African Pentecostals felt they had to choose between prayer and quinine, although since the latter was being offered only by their colonial overlords it's somewhat understandable. At any rate, while not all talk about the need for re-enchanting the world is sound, there does seem to be a real need for a theology of presence that can explain the experience of God's immanence in a Newtonian and quantum world.

Earlier I mentioned Schleiermacher's position that natural cause and effect is an expression of God's causality, which differs not just in degree but in kind from natural causality. Scleiermacher's thought is a game but finally less than satisfying account of God's relationship to the world because it cannot account for the supernatural surplus of Pentecostalism, or for the thin places in the barrier between God and the world that mystics are so adept at finding and poking through--both of which scripture testifies to. Are there other options out there?

But more than a theology of the Holy Spirit, we need the Holy Spirit. Period.

Same sex marriage and foot in mouth disease

Bruce Reyes-Chow, former moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), showed up at a Prop 8 rally last week and made this short speech:

According to his blog he's taken a lot of heat for it, so he's soliciting feedback at his site and elsewhere.

I think the problem here is that there is a whole range of people between enthusiastic supporters of same sex marriage and, say, the Westboro Baptist Church, but the speech doesn't really acknowledge that reality. So it might come as a surprise, and an offensive one at that, to opponents of same sex marriage who watch this speech and hear that they are oppressors and literalists.

Inertia, more than flat-out hate, is the biggest impediment to same sex marriage. I doubt that these comments will get the ball rolling in the right direction.

I'm also scratching my head about Reyes-Chow's authority to confess on behalf of the Christian Church for words and deeds which have incited violence. The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers means that we can all hear one another's confessions and assure one another of pardon in Christ, but I'm not so sure that it authorizes us to confess on behalf one another. Certainly the Church has incited violence, and acknowledging that historical truth is a no-brainer. But confessing for the Church would seem to imply that he's been authorized by someone or some group to do that. It's as if he hasn't fully stepped out of his role as Moderator, and overstepped that role at the same time. Moderators are not popes or ecumenical councils. And when you combine that with a sharply worded and un-nuanced attack on homophobia, well then, small wonder the fecal matter has collided with the atmospheric distribution mechanism.

I say that as a former minister who has stuck his foot in his mouth more times than I care to count, so, No Biggee, Rev. Reyes-Chow.