Monthly Archives: June 2011

On the Verge: A Journey into the Apostolic Future of the Church

by Alan Hirsch and Dave Ferguson

366 pp. $19.99  Zondervan

Perhaps, at their roots, all church planters have to be Platonists.

I’ve been aware of the church-planting movement since I started seminary in 1999: while the “cool kids” were all about striking out into promising urban and suburban areas, gathering a core of dedicated go-getters to be the nucleus of the Next Big Thing, the old-school traditionalists like me tried to make a case for the humility of moving into an established congregation (perhaps even in rural and poor urban areas) and earning one’s place therein.  It wasn’t really a fair fight back then: as students and some faculty spoke with derision about “maintenance ministries” and waxed eloquent about “vision casting,” all my kind had to fall back on was the nuanced and difficult language of theology and history, languages that we hadn’t really grown into yet.  In the face of marketing slogans, we really didn’t stand a chance.

All of this came back to me as I read through Alan Hirsch’s and Dave Ferguson’s On the Verge. Within forty pages of starting the book, I realized that I was going to drown in the MBA lingo, that the writers had a tenuous grasp (at best) of Church history, and that I had three hundred pages of both to go.  As I’ve noted before in other book reviews, I’m probably one of the worst people to review a book like this: I’ve spent the last fifteen years drifting from one small, poor congregation to another (though I did do a brief stint as a Sunday school teacher in a would-be megachurch before they chased me and my wife away), and even a decade away from seminary, my first reaction to church-planters is to be suspicious of their ego rather than to fawn over their go-getter demeanor.  But once again I’ll note that those things might just make my review one that spots things that other people overlook.

Now back to Plato.

As I plowed through the neologisms and the slogans, I actually never would have thought of old Flat-Head while reading this book, except that one of Alan Hirsch’s chapters (he wrote the first run of chapters and Ferguson the last run of chapters, though each chapter ends with an “amen” response from the other writer) he makes the common Emergent/Missional move of attempting to establish credibility by being a “Hebraic” thinker rather than a “Hellenistic” thinker (and completely botching both, but more on that later), and with the Greeks in mind, the next few chapters made me realize that church planting, in its structure, is not unlike what Plato proposes in Republic: rather than attempting to reform cities, the best way to establish the real form of civic dikaiosyne is to start over, with a clean slate, so that the laws and the culture and the overall workings of the new polis were not at the mercy of tradition and history and other accidents not as illuminated as the philosopher-king but were part of the palette of the city’s grand artist.  A generation later, of course, Aristotle articulated what I call the great conservative vision, looking not to abstract ideals for the measure of goodness but to the embodied virtues that the best citizens of one’s polis already exhibit and examining what already makes them excellent.

I note this bit of ethical history to say that, although I wasn’t literate enough to grasp this as a young seminarian, the debate between church-planters and congregation-sustainers was, and remains, a reiteration of that old Greek dispute.  And in Hirsch and Ferguson’s book, the Platonic moves are obvious ones: both authors encourage teaching an elite core of leaders to imagine reality differently (54-55) on a philosophical level (a concept for which Hirsch appropriates, in good MBA fashion, Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm” language) while setting forth practice (178) and stories (152-153) and even modern hero-stories (153-154) for the rest of the community in order to “act our way into a new way of thinking” (179).  Those who demonstrate that they are the “innovators” (a group that, for Hirsch’s Malcolm-Gladwell imagination, consists of 2% of the population) can become paradigm-people, but for the most part, people enter into the “ethos” of the community by means of the programmatic practices set up by the ideas-people.

Of course, such things are not insidious: the nature of communities is that some people have the ideas, some people defend the ideas that the founders establish, and most people go about their lives producing and consuming for the sakes of family and comfort, sustaining the life of the community by means of their daily work and contributing to the complex culture of the community in their better forms of leisure.  That much one can find in the Torah and in Plato and in Confucius.  What makes Hirsch and Ferguson think of their project as a departure is that they, in the spirit of the corporate consultant, encourage a culture of saying “yes” (218-219) to ideas from the rank and file rather than insisting that all ideas come from the “professionals” (which do not seem to include the consultant-types who write church-planting books, but I’ve already gotten in trouble casting suspicion on consultants, so I’ll stop there).  As long as the new ideas operate in the spirit of the Missional Paradigm (what Hirsch brands as mDNA, ignoring perhaps that the letters in DNA stand for biological words), they’re good to go.

Of course, folks who know the Greek philosophical tradition know that Plato has anticipated this as well: the abandonment of the patriarchal family in favor of the city-household in Republic means that leaders can come from any class so long as they’re educated within the system that the good city sets up, and once Plato has established the central ideas and educational system of Callipolis, he reads like a Ron Paul Libertarian when he finally gets to the operations of the marketplace.  On the Verge‘s call for flexibility within the paradigm-determined culture is only an extension of the same.  I mention all of these points of continuity first to note that Hirsch’s call for an abandonment of “Hellenistic, specifically Platonic” conceptions of learning (177) in favor of “a Hebraic understanding” (177) of things rings strange to anyone who’s actually read any Plato, Aristotle, or really much Greek writing at all.  Hirsch attributes to Plato the classroom model of education (something that really doesn’t make sense until the advent of the printing press) and the conception that education needs to begin with the impartation of facts from lecturer to student (something that Plato opposes in the Meno among other places) among other things, and along with his loose grasp on the Roman office of Pontifex Maximus (on page 33 he implies at least that said office began with Emperor Constantine), he damages his credibility with anyone whose education has included any exposure to actual translations of actual ancient texts.  I think that we Christian Humanists might need to start offering ourselves as consultants when Emergent and Missional folks write their books: for a small fee we can make sure that they don’t alienate people with liberal educations.  Yes, I think that might work.  But more on that later.

My main concern with this book is neither its shaky grasp on classical philosophy (that’s all too common) or its reliance upon corporate slogans and neologisms like “chillax” (93) and “simplexity” (186) and “movementum” (255) but that it exhibits at all points a pervasive anti-Catholicism that, if taken seriously, would alienate Christians in 2011 from a rich tradition and a political imagination that extends beyond the world of advertising consultants.  As a wannabe Hauerwasian, certainly I can’t deny a certain tendency to lay the evils of the Christian era at the door of Constantine, even if I use his name more as a figure than as a historical claim.  But when I say “Constantine,” because the tradition of Yoder and Hauerwas has shaped me, I have in mind the strange coupling of military cultus (whether from warrior-cultures or from soldier-societies) with the Way of the one who died on the Empire’s cross.  When Hirsch says “Constantine,” he means the local Catholic parish.

Among the things that Hirsch and Ferguson cannot see because they imagine the Catholic Church as always “cultural” are the Catholic hierarchy’s resistance to the Pinochet regime when the Capitalists were singing the torture-regime’s praises (as detailed in William Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist and as ignored in Hirsch’s first chapter), the invention of modern global missions by the Jesuits (as told in any respectable Church history and as ignored in chapter nine, a Ferguson chapter), and the fact that Patrick’s mission to Ireland was in fact not the first Christian mission to venture outside of the Roman Empire (as Ferguson claims, and knocks me out of my chair, in chapter ten).  Their assessments of “traditional” churches such as the Presbyterians and the Baptists are not much more flattering, and their scorn for the “institutional” megachurches is not hard to detect, but their special place in the outer darkness always seems reserved for the Catholics.

Although that’s about the extent of the open anti-Catholicism, the ethos of the book (I’m trying to use this in the Aristotelian sense rather than the MBA-lingo sense) suffers because nothing from Church history before 1990 seems worth talking about.  There are no martyr stories in the book, but there are plenty of stories from the Hallmark, Google, and Starbucks corporations.  The rich traditions of medieval philosophy and Reformation Biblical commentary make no extended appearances, but there are plenty of quotes from late-twentieth-century CEO’s and management gurus to be had.  And there are no mentions of Dante or Dostoevsky, but Dave Ferguson does write in praise of James Patterson (208).  I won’t say that Hirsch and Ferguson have anything but the best motives for putting forth their blend of management theory and self-help philosophy, but to misappropriate Gertrude Stein when she talked about Oakland, when I finished the book, I felt like there hadn’t been much there there.

To be fair to them, both writers insist that Jesus must be the center of what they’re doing, and they criticize those movements for whom “mission” has taken the central place that Jesus alone deserves.  Moreover, when they do slow down to write about Jesus (rather than about paradigm shifts and chillaxing and movementum), they do note that the biggest challenge to discipleship in the twenty-first century West is consumerism.  My concern, I repeat, is not that they fail to name Jesus but that there’s little sense of how the calling of Jesus upon the Church translates into their MBA lingo.  I see the former in some passages, and I see the latter in many more passages, but the logical connections between the two I simply do not see.  Perhaps someone with a business or advertising background could help me here, but I just don’t get it.  And if I’m the worst sort of person to be reviewing this book, perhaps my failure, as a non-specialist in the vocabularies of management theory, to comprehend their project should be a sign that their call for a flight from “the professionals” might in fact be a call for a shift in power from one sort of professional (the theological scholar) to another (the management guru).

The good news, for those of you who are mad at me for writing bad things about these church-planting gurus, is that, in their words, folks like me will “self-select out” (265) of where the action is and consign ourselves to irrelevance while the great “people-movement” that they’re spearheading is taking on the world.  And I think that’s great.  I suppose my comfort comes from the fact that, when those folks who find themselves burnt out by the go-getter culture of church planting, where nobody is allowed to get old or to slack in their “kingdom productivity” (207), my office door will always be open to hear their stories, and I’ll always try to have copies of Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross and Dante to lend to them.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 3 July 2011 (Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A)

Genesis 24:34-38, 42-49, 58-67 and Psalm 45:10-17 or Song of Solomon 2:8-13 •Zechariah 9:9-12 and Psalm 145:8-14 •Romans 7:15-25a •Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

I’ll admit that I’m not sure what to do with some parts of the Bible.  I try always, when I teach Christians and when I have conversations with folks who are not believers, to emphasize that loathing of the human body does indeed show up in some of the Christian tradition’s texts (it’s hard to deny in some monastic texts) but that at the core of the tradition is a continuation of Elohim‘s declaration, upon creating human bodies in Genesis 1, that bodies are, to quote a bit of King James English, “very good.”  But then I get to a passage like Romans 7, and I see Paul pointing to his limbs or members as the sites of evil and begging God for rescue from “this body of death,” and I’m just not sure what to do with it.

My own main temptation is to play the “whatever is going on here” game, something that I despise when I hear other preachers do it.  (I often despise most those vices that come most easily to me.)  That homiletical move says, “Whatever is going on here, it can’t be the plain meaning of the text.”  There are several places where I could make this dodge, some of which I’ve heard in sermons and some which a bit of deconstructionist reading could open up for me.  I could cook up a shaky historical referent for “body of death” which makes it something other than Paul’s physical arms and legs and… other members.  I could say that Paul is speaking in some sort of dialogical persona, that the next several verses of the epistle are a response to “sub-Paul” rather than an expansion on this thought.  I could go even further and say that this section is a paraphrase of wrong-headed people that Paul then answers in Romans 8.

I can understand those impulses, especially when so much of the world of Biblical studies seems dedicated to playing “gotcha” with the Bible.  Do we catch the Bible being too harsh for modern tastes?  Gotcha!  Now we can ignore whatever passages are inconvenient!  Do we catch the Bible speaking to a rhetorical moment that differs from our own?  Gotcha!  Now we can say, whenever it suits us, that the Bible knows nothing about our moment and therefore does not bind us in any moment!  And so on.  I’ve heard more than one sermon that attempts to do an end-run around these sorts of things by leaning so hard on historical and structural details that the reading becomes stunted and unbelievable, the “whatever is going on here” sort of reading that makes me think that the preacher has become afraid of the Bible or uneasy with it at best.  (I’ve probably done the same in some of my own sermons, but a short memory of my own shortcomings is one of my signature vices.)

So if I were to read this passage truthfully, knowing that the sophisticated modern audience might find (another) occasion to reject the Bible as a whole yet remaining unabashed in reading the text truthfully, perhaps this is what I’d find: Paul does indeed name his own limbs as a site of evil, but at the same time he holds that his will and his mind are “within,” not somehow disconnected from the limbs but also some place that he can locate spatially, some place that calls for the gesturing hand to point to the body.  The war, in other words, is a war between the parts of his own self rather than a battle between non-local, non-embodied realities and the body.  So folks are right to see in this warfare an echo of Platonic traditions, but this is the real Plato, the one who wrote the Phaedrus and the Symposium, the one who sees desire as powerful and perhaps even rebellious but certainly never “external” to the person.  (Those who think that embodied desires stop affecting things at death in Plato have not studied the reincarnation passages of Phaedrus and Republic closely enough.)  Paul, who’s never afraid to use the intellectual tools at hand to understand the grand cosmic miracles of Christ, is noting that, while the core of desire has necessarily shifted now that Christ has indeed established Himself as Lord, nonetheless the dynamics of desire are still at work.  The difference, for Paul, is that unlike in Plato’s world, in which a strict regimen of philosophical training can only promise a lower probability of indulging the desires of the limbs, Paul asserts a distinctly Christian (and therefore Jewish) answer to Plato’s question of warring desires: the resurrection of the Messiah does not merely corral eternal chaotic desires.  Christ exposes sin as rebellion rather than origin and sentences those desires that refuse divine rule to death.  In the tension between already and not-yet that runs through the whole of the Bible, the disordered desires of the limbs remains potent for the time being, but they cannot make claims of originality (they come into the world because of what we Christians call the Fall) or security (they will pass away when the Kingdom of God comes into its fullness).

So even for a mediocre preacher like myself, there’s no real need to run away from the Scriptures.  Those inclined to play “Gotcha” will keep on doing so (I’ve got Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” playing in my mind right now), but those who are faithful will keep on believin’.

Praise be to Christ Jesus, who allows us to tell a story of redemption that reaches to the utmost of creation and to the inmost darkness of our own souls.

General Introduction
- The perils of Vacation Bible School
- Introducing our guest
- Listener feedback
- Grubbsy’s new job

The Topic at Hand
- Indiana Jones, of course
- What tools archaeologists actually use
- Other people’s junk
- Archaeology as destructive science
- Slow but steady

The Pre-Archaeological Imagination
- Hebrew slaves and the pyramids
- Anglo-Saxon David and Goliath
- What does archaeology contribute to our sense of history?
- The everyday life of the ancients

The Effect of Archaeological Exploration on Biblical Commentary
- The Enuma Elish and Genesis as polemical text
- The prophets and the cave paintings
- The Bible as sacred texts among texts
- Gilmour goes Calvinist
- Greek philosophers plagiarize the Bible

Christian Biblical Studies and Mainstream Archaeology
- Their rocky relationship
- The argument over the Exodus
- The failures of the Israelites
- The liberal Protestant response
- Polyvocal history
- Reactionary conspiracy theories
- How archaeology helps us read Lewis and Tolkien

Luke’s Particular Dig Site
- Khirbet Qeiyafa
- David and Goliath
- Did David even exist?
- When did Israel become a kingdom?
- The big city on the border
- Naming as interpretation

Hoaxes and False Proofs
- Noah’s Ark
- Filmmakers and archaeologists
- Ancient recycling
- The Naked Archaeologist and the nails
- Joseph Smith’s bad archaeology
- Phony archaeologists as flattering to the profession
- News coverage of the sciences

Our Advice
- Treat archaeology as a tool, not a final answer
- Don’t ignore archaeology
- Recognize that archaeological interpretations frequently change

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005.

Calvin, John. Commentary on the Psalms. Trans. David C. Searle. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2009.

Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Dodge, Arthur J. Homer or Moses?: Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture. Philadelphia: Coronet, 1988.

Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Viking, 2003.

Philo. The Works of Philo. Trans. C.D. Yonge. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2005.

• Tripp Fuller issues a manifesto on seminary education.
• Did you hear the one about the Hegelian who went to Saint Louis?
• An encomium for Stanley Fish
• The science of self-control (and why we should have listened to Homer)
• The historical ignorance, philosophical illiteracy, and right-wing politics of the nü atheism
• Depressing news on the research-1 university
• More depressing news on the research-1 university
• Why the research-1 university should have listened to Newman
• 

Working with Words: On Learning to Speak Christian

by Stanley Hauerwas

295 pp.  $37.00 Cascade Books

I often review books that publishers and book-review Internet books send my way, but it’s nice once in a while to take a look at a book that I read because I heard about it and bought it.  The nice parallel here is that Stanley Hauerwas’s recent book Working with Words came about because of people like me, folks who enjoy reading Hauerwas’s essays and sermons and who have learned to “speak Christian” to a large extent because of his influence.  (I still maintain that I’m not visible enough to constitute part of this particular “mafia,” but I do consider it a compliment when folks assume that I might be.)  The result of such a book is a collection that does not seem to have any overarching “point” at the outset beyond celebrating the intellectual influences and persistent questions that have animated Hauerwas’s significant writing career.  At the outset of my review I’ll say that this is some of Hauerwas’s best stuff, and that’s saying something.

The end section of the book (my own favorite section) features a series of essays (some co-authored) on Charles Taylor, H. Richard Niebuhr, Alasdair Macintyre, Thomas Aquinas, Papal Encyclicals, Methodist theology, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Each one features the sort of careful thought and rhetorical swagger that has made Hauerwas such a fun read over the years: to the extent that I’m familiar with each of these texts and writers, I can say that Hauerwas opens up new ways to engage them while remaining true to what their own projects are after, and to the extent that I’m unfamiliar, I came away from each wanting to read more.  The essay on Encyclicals particularly struck me as really good material: Hauerwas makes a compelling argument that labeling some of the encyclicals as “social teaching” and others as “teaching on sexual morality” ignores the fact that the Catholic tradition resists a strong separation between the two precisely because its imagination has not been co-opted by Capitalism the way that most modern politics has.  As one of the few intellectual traditions genuinely to resist Liberal Capitalism as well as Dialectical Socialism (because, as a tradition, its memories extend farther back than the inventions of Capitalism and Socialism), the Catholic intellectual tradition thus becomes one of the places where both a strong claim for private property and a strong claim for civil government as an absolute check on mercantile overreach can make sense (240).  In all of this, because this is Hauerwas I’m reading, the reason for the Church’s authority on these questions is not some sense of disembodied “expertise” (a la the Acton Institute’s party line on why Catholic bishops should not call for economic regulations) but because God is God over the markets just as much as God is God over all of creation (239).  The conclusion of the essay, in which Hauerwas proposes that abortion, fair wages, and family are only intelligible in traditions where “woman” is a theological category (254), is a provocative and eminently Hauerwasian place to end, bringing a question forward that I had never thought of as informing such a range of social-intellectual problems.

For a long time medicine is one of the places where I’ve disagreed with Hauerwas, having read his book on theology and medicine when I was a seminarian.  Perhaps because I’m a decade older now but perhaps because the argument is clearer here, his essay on the secularization of medicine in this anthology has almost convinced me that Hauerwas might have been right all these years.  Hauerwas lays out a thesis that the particularly American problem of medicine is that it’s lost the conservative vision that animated Classical Greek and later Christian-era medicine, namely the refusal to abandon human beings (155) even though each one of us is incapable of “getting out of life alive” (155).  He makes perhaps the most controversial suggestion I have yet to read regarding the ongoing debate about health-care expenses and funding, namely that Christians should seriously consider undergoing a sort of medical martyrdom, refusing massively expensive life-prolonging medical treatment as long as the system continues to render the poor and uninsured (often the same group) invisible to the best physicians (162).  Such a martyrdom would not solve the “problem” of medical funding, but for Hauerwas solving the world’s problems has never been nearly as important as bearing faithful witness to Christ and the gospel of the Kingdom of God.  Hauerwas suggests early in the essay that the imagination of supply and demand has made thinking faithfully about medicine nearly impossible (158), and he suggests the new sort of martyrdom precisely as a way to jar the imaginations of our neighbors the way that the martyrs of old jarred the imaginations of pagan Rome.

Perhaps the most helpful essays for my own thinking (which were different from the ones I enjoyed most, specifically the late pieces on Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair Macintyre) were the pieces early in the anthology on Augustine’s Confessions and the book of Acts.  Because I think of Hauerwas’s essays (as opposed to his sermons) mainly as engaging theology as it’s fallen from a sort of Thomistic golden age, seeing a sustained engagement with much older sources was refreshing and helpful.  Contesting a critical commonplace that Acts is a sort of pro-Roman-Imperial sop thrown to the powers that be in order to ingratiate Christians with power and stave off the wrath that falls on the genuinely revolutionary, Hauerwas does a reading of Acts that puts Caesar not in the role of legitimate authority but usurper of the authority that rightly belongs to Christ (57).  On the way there, he notes that the risen Christ, and the mission of bearing witness to the risen Christ (Acts 1:8), constitute a story so revolutionary that even within the so-called benign text of Acts agents of Empire accuse the followers of the Way of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6).  For the text of Acts, as read by Hauerwas, ultimately the resurrection becomes the central political starting point, and the reactions of Empire to the Gospel as well as the faithful journeys of the saints require the resurrection of the Christ to make sense of them (48).  By the time I had finished this essay, I was eager to re-read and once more to teach Acts in a Sunday school setting.  Perhaps I shall some time soon.

The Augustine essay started out in a way that made me question my own judgment in buying this book (it’s the first full-length essay in the collection), but by the end of the opening piece, I knew I had once more struck Hauerwasian gold.  Hauerwas begins the piece with the strange claim that theodicy, the project of reconciling the reality of evil in the world with the confession that God is love, is inherently an imperial project (13) rather than the sort of thinking that anyone who’s read and internalized the Psalms would undertake.  Unable to decipher this riddle from Stanley the Sphinx, I continued to read on, only to be confronted with a further assertion that pointing to sin in the world can only happen when the larger narrative of fall and redemption is already in place (16).  Now the critique of theodicy started to make sense: because most versions of theodicy have something other than the reconciliation of Creator and Creation at the heart of their conception of “good” (both what a good God acts like and what a good world looks like), they relate only tangentially to the dispatches-from-the-front lamentations and praises of the Psalms, and they usually involve human beings’ presuming to know what cosmic justice and goodness looks like rather than taking on the humility of Job in the face of the divine interrogation on goats and Leviathans and what not.  Therefore, Hauerwas asserts, sin can never be an explanation of the evil in the world (26) but only an agnostic outcry: what efficient causes led to evil we cannot say, but we’re sure going to let God know that it sucks living in a world where evil is dominant.

If this review seems disjointed, it’s because the book itself never does pretend to have a unifying “project.”  But for folks who still think of ourselves as learning to think and to write faithfully, this set of latter-day Colloquies takes on some of the big questions of our day, some of the figures who have influenced my own thought as well as Hauerwas’s, and some of the more enjoyable genres of theological reflection (the sermon and the essay rather than the system or the treatise) and offers the reader some wonderful opportunities to learn.  The volume is probably a bit overpriced (I got it at a significant discount from Wipf and Stock’s monthly email newsletter), but the education that it offers is worth a few shekels.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 19 June 2011 (Trinity Sunday, Year A)

Genesis 1:1-2:4a and Psalm 8 •2 Corinthians 13:11-13 •Matthew 28:16-20

This will be a brief post because I’m visiting with my wife’s parents, and I’m not going to demand much time for writing while I’m among them.

This week’s Gospel reading stood out to me because of a conspiracy to truncate it at VBS this year.  I won’t say which publishing company it was (but I will say that their slogan should be “Jesus with half the calories!”), but our memory verse for the last night of the week was a mysteriously short version of Matthew 28:19-20, one that had an ellipsis where the classical baptism formula should have been.

Of course I gave our children’s minister a hard time about it (I’ve always had a good bit of sport at the expense of Jesus with half the calories), but when I think a bit longer about the elements of the Great Commission, I realize that I don’t often trace out the connections between the making of disciples, baptism in the name of the three persons of the Trinity, and teaching those baptized everything that Jesus commanded.  I’ve noted more than once that this or that group within American Christianity seems to lose one of the three (and who couldn’t easily name groups less than fully concerned with the Trinity or who become so focused on conversions that the making of disciples is an afterthought?), but what struck me this time through is that the shape of Jesus’s authority, that which the Father gives fully to the Son, works its way out in the finale of Matthew in this range of imperatives.

Also notable, now that I slow down and think about the words, is the curious phrase “in the name of.”  I’ve asked Sunday school groups on several occasions what it means when people end prayers with “in the name of Jesus,” and beyond an awareness that such a formula seems to be at the heart of the unwritten liturgy of Evangelical prayer, there’s not much sense that many of us think about it.  My own best stab at making meaning of the stock phrase is that, when we pray, we do so with the boldness that comes with being the body of Christ and therefore praying not as the nameless numbers that late-modern Capitalism makes us but as people who bear the name of the true King.  Perhaps the baptism formula points to a similar truth, one articulated by Augustine in his disputes with the Donatists, namely that baptism does not rely on the righteousness of the one doing the dunking (yes, I am a Campbellite) but stands as an act of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit.  Therefore those whom Jesus sends not only derive the authority to proclaim but also the mandate to baptize from the Spirit, meaning that we act as the body of Christ as we baptize new friends into that body, and like Christ, our mission is not our own but that of the Father.

As we lead others in the way of the Disciples, may we always remember that God baptizes them for the sake of obedience.

Due to VBS ramping up at Athens Christian Church this week and Nathan Gilmour’s traveling north (where Internet time is even more limited than it tends to be at home), lectionary posts will resume (hopefully) in the last week of June.  Thanks again to all of our great Christian Humanist readers, and keep your iTunes subscription open–a special summer episode of the podcast will be coming your way soon!

Alright, folks.  I said we should have one, so I’ve written one!  Since our readership is more given to the oldies and the goodies than the latest and greatest, here are your questions for the Christian Antiquarian Book Nerd Survey!

1. A book that reminds you why you love old books so much

2. Your favorite book translated from a language that living human communities don’t speak conversationally anymore

3. A classic you won’t apologize for loving

4. A classic you still find yourself apologizing for loving

5. The best book to give an aspiring Christian Humanist

6. An old book that gets the answers wrong but asks very interesting questions

7. The book that most often leaves you saying, “People wouldn’t be so confused about this question if they’d only read…”

I know, I know–they’re idiosyncratic questions.  Answer ‘em anyway.

Leave your answers in the comments section–I’ll try to get mine in early!

God loves Black people, and so should the Church.

God loves heroin addicts, and so should the Church.

God loves Capitalists, and so should the Church.

God loves those who bully the weak, and so should the Church.

God loves LGBTQIAW* people, and so should the Church.

God loves women, and so should the Church.

God loves people with cancer, and so should the Church.

God loves consumers of child pornography, and so should the Church.

I imagine that some, upon reading that list, would probably be screaming that I’m making false analogies, and that’s precisely the point. Any of those statements stands true in isolation, but because human beings are analogy-making critters, any two of those placed next to each other could inspire one person to point to the pair and say, “Exactly!” and another to scream that I’ve demonized, trivialized, relativized, dogmatized, or in many other ways abused that particular Greek suffix.

The fact of the matter is that analogy is necessary when one attempts to live faithfully within a historical tradition.  The Bible’s central questions, as best as I can get to them by means of historical reading, have changed shape in the centuries between my lifetime and the composition of the Bible: modern biology has reduced the grand theological separation between Jews and Gentiles to a matter of simple “racism,” and the fall of centered empires like Rome and Babylon and the rise of grand mercantile and Capitalist systems in the last couple centuries means that whatever it means to be a barbarian or a Scythian is likely going to boil down to a Schwarzenegger movie. So we make analogies, and not only when we talk about local congregations.  (My own Stone-Campbell background won’t let my poor fingers pluralize the word “church.”)  Martin Luther King, Jr. famously linked “black and white” to “Jew and Gentile,” and the analogy between Galatian congregations and American cities lay before the American people. Because most people thought it a valid analogy, King’s imagination has largely become the American imagination. Ward Churchill called for people to realize that, for many people in the world, the people working in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011 were “little Eichmanns,” and the general public did not take the analogy as valid. Analogously (you get that?), when one moves back and forth between the Bible and early Christianity on one hand and the twenty-first century’s evangelical congregations on the other, the questions that face both liberals and conservatives tend to be questions of analogies.

Unfortunately, analogies examined in the heat of battle become occasions for offense.  When there are only two “sides,” and when the conversation has become a “struggle” (two more analogies, but I’ll try to restrain myself here), to propose an analogy that adjusts the relationships between the realities involved is going to offend people.  And offended people, far too often, call for a cessation of examination in favor of swift, decisive action.  No analogy has popped up more frequently in the last couple months, at least among my circle of contacts, than the analogy of college admissions.  If that analogy seems unfamiliar, perhaps that’s because the analogical character of the move has become obscured.  In this analogy, as I’ve seen it used, a college or a congregation or an ordination agency can only do two things, both derived from the world of college admissions: they can either “accept” or “reject” LGBTQIAW* people.

(I realize that the actual work of college admissions is probably more complex than this, and I apologize to any college admissions workers whom I’ve insulted here.)

Without even looking at a Bible, I can think of times when Jesus insisted on fellowship with, insulted, embraced, instructed, corrected, rebuked, and healed people.  That’s without looking.  The problem with the accept/reject paradigm for thinking about the question is not that it’s an invalid analogy in itself; it’s that accept/reject does not do justice to the broad spectrum of human possibilities (not to mention those that come into play when one is dealing with Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah) open when we encounter another person.  Any of these, if we take Jesus to be an exemplar of love, can be the means by which Jesus loves a mortal, and to assume that there are only two choices, to equate “love” with “accept” and to put every other possible human response in the category of “reject,” is to refuse to answer the complex and difficult questions of what constitutes love, what constitutes total exclusion, and what constitutes apathetic disregard when a neighbor who needs healing.  None of these is a settled question at the outset, and ethical deliberation on the shape of love does not mean that love is absent; it means that the ones deliberating want to make sure that love, which takes different shapes for different folks, is actually what’s being proposed.

To make this clearer, imagine a situation in which engagement with conservative evangelicals, in the fullness of their identity, boiled down only to “accept” and “reject.”  One could either “accept” evangelicals, granting that every one of their (our) political-party loyalties, anxieties, bigotries, and moments of self-righteousness is inherently good; or one could “reject” them (us), saying that nothing that they (we) do can ever be any good simply because we are evangelicals.  Now most folks, I hope, recognize that such an approach oversimplifies, that there are overlapping commitments and natures involved in the life of every evangelical, that one can appeal to a person’s sense of justice as a member of a biological family; to one’s sense that to be an American citizen means something; or to troubling moments in the synoptic gospels in the pursuit of changing someone’s mind without insisting that the person stop being an evangelical.  To come back to the question at hand, many current approaches to things put the conservative evangelicals on one side of a line and LGBTQIAW* people on the other, point to the folks on one side, and say, “You must give up entirely on the core of who you are so that the people on the other side of the line have to give up nothing of who they are.”  If these are the terms of engagement, it’s no great feat to imagine why the “struggle” seems intractable.

Perhaps only my circle of contacts uses this rhetorical device, but I’ve seen more than once the rejection of deliberation because it’s too slow, because every day spent deliberating on better analogies than the college-admission analogy means another gay teen is going to commit suicide.  But as I did in my message to conservatives, here as well I must take a stand in favor of genuine ethical deliberation: to neglect such deliberation in favor of unilateral legislative action or of rejecting those who disagree as un-Jesus-like does little but to establish the liberal credentials of the “hardliners” (you know who you are) and to throw the fates of those same teen suicides to the majority rather than trying to change the minds of people in particular places, something that may turn out better in terms of public policy points but will not do much at all to bring reconciliation between these people and the communities from which they feel alienated in the first place.  If anything such moves will only add resentment of heavy-handed political maneuvers into an already-difficult sphere of relationships.

I’ve often said that having someone who stands against one’s personal ideology in the White House is good for one’s soul, and if someone asks me to defend that statement, I need only to point to conservatives’ strong interest in truth and the accountability of elected officials while the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in the center of the news and the subsequent strong interest in truth on the part of liberals during the lead-up to and aftermath of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.  I’ll leave our good readers to note what happened to this strong concern for the truth in both camps when their own dude was at 1600 Pennsylvania.  I bring this strange set of relationships to truth and government accountability to the table because a similar thing happens when one must read the Bible alongside people whose ideology differs.  I’ve been in more than one conversation in which a conservative has told me that the folks in the Bible would not have said what they did about the wealthy if they knew what sorts of good Capitalism would do for the global population, and I’ve had more than one liberal tell me that the Biblical writers could not have had any idea what a devoted romantic relationship between two consenting adult homosexual partners meant given the strange sexual norms of their day.

Again, why do people wonder why ideologues tend to talk past one another?

My point here is not that I’m some sort of Biblical purist (I do, after all, have money in a retirement account managed by my college’s sponsoring denomination, so my own savings are implicated in the global market system), much less that nobody “really” takes the Bible seriously.  What I am saying is that, if the struggle for a better life for LGBTQIAW* persons means, on some level, reconciling them with the communities from which they’re alienated rather than simply mandating, by means of government or economic force, their incorporation in Christian communities in official capacities, then part of the work of reconciliation has to involve living humbly with the Holy Scriptures which do claim the allegiance of all involved.  And that is going to mean the hard rhetorical work of convincing folks that your own readings of the Bible are valid readings.

What makes me think that some liberals are not all that serious about actual reconciliation with the conservative evangelical communities from which LGBTQIAW* people are alienated is that, when the text of the Bible comes up, too many times I see them brush off the exegetical questions with non-engagements like “I’m not a literalist” or “the Bible has nothing to say to this” or “it’s allegorical.”  I’ll put this as plainly as I currently see it: to pretend that the Bible has nothing to do with people’s sex lives indicates an utter lack of respect for people trying to live the whole of their lives by the same Bible.  To say “it’s an allegory” is the beginning of the discussion, no the end of it.  And being “not a literalist” is not the same as being “not a Cubs fan”–it requires of the one self-labeling some sort of account for this or that reading.  Those sort of maneuvers no doubt have the effect of ingratiating the movers with certain cultured despisers of religion, but they also indicate no desire to bring the communities who currently seek to do something other than simple “acceptance” into the deliberation.

Ultimately, then, the analogies that govern speech and writing about LGBTQIAW* people and the ways that participants engage with the Bible are going to tell everyone involved which people are serious about reconciliation and which would just as soon throw the “other” in front of a truck and have done with it.  In the meantime, as I did with the conservatives, I will ask, as gently as I can, that certain talking points undergo some revision:

• Yes, pederasty was far more common in Roman-era cities than was consensual sexual relationships between grown men. But please stop writing that early Christians would have had no concept of such things. Everyone who’s read Homer knows of Achilles and Partroklos, and most people who teach Virgil know of Nisus and Euryalus. Early Christians had paradigms at their disposal, and they rejected them. To reject that rejection is to take a stand against informed precedent, not against uneducated primitives.
• I know I said I wouldn’t address the Sojo controversy directly, but please try to approach this with some historical perspective.  A non-profit advocacy group’s asking that questions of sexuality undergo deliberation in the editorial section rather than being part of the advertising on the website is no doubt less than full and enthusiastic support of the LGBTQIAW* cause, but think carefully before comparing it to Martin Luther’s call for the peasant rebellion to be put down murderously, the refusal of white ministers to support Martin Luther King’s efforts in Alabama, or other well-known historical phenomena.  Bad historical analogies are just as damaging to a cause as any other sorts of bad analogies.
• Teen suicide, for whatever reason, is an awful thing.  But to say that teen suicide is a reason to stop deliberating about questions of moral import is to put the fates of those teens in the hands of the majority, and that doesn’t strike me at least as particularly morally responsible.  Give the families of teens the dignity to treat their suicides as complex human acts rather than mechanistic byproducts of policies that you don’t like.
• Not everyone who does not vocally lobby for “acceptance” is “homophobic.”  To deny good-faith intellectual differences and to attribute any difference to psychological disorders in your opponent no doubt feels good in the moment, but it does little to convince the other people that there’s something worth considering in your actual ideas.  If your ideas are good ones, contend for them on the level of ideas and leave the confession to the priests.

I think that this series will end here for now.  Certainly I might write follow-up posts in the weeks to come, but for now, to everyone discussing these things, I humbly ask, as someone who’s been called both a Communist and a Fundamentalist in Facebook interactions (sometimes only days apart from each other), for a bit of linguistic awareness in these disputes.  The central questions that I never see answered, namely the adequacy of analogies deployed in these conversations and the most adequate articulation of love in the conduct of the Church, strike me as places where people could at least articulate the strong differences that motivate the policies of the communities in question and perhaps, if there be grace, open up some space for people to change their minds as the truth becomes clearer.

Until then, I do thank our regular readers and anyone else who’s come along for reading, and once again I invite feedback, criticisms, and questions better than the ones I’ve proposed in the comments sections of all three posts.

* Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Interested, Allies, and Whatever letters they’ve added since I started typing this list.

I really enjoy bringing well-known texts and doctrines into larger historical contexts when I teach Sunday school, largely because in my own experience knowing about the texts and other realities that surround the Bible and later controversies that involve the Bible, rather than settling the question, opens up the complexity of the situation and allows some room for people to understand that the folks who ended up on the side of things where I didn’t (think Ba’al cultists, Pharisees, Pelagians, Tridentine Reformers, or nineteenth-century theological modernists) weren’t mustache-twirling villains but complex human beings with the same hopes, anxieties, and aspirations that constitute you and constitute me. That doesn’t make the content of their ideas and practices right, much less a matter of indifference; on the contrary, it alerts me (and hopefully those I teach) to the tragic truth of human existence as creatures of God living in a fallen world, namely that moments of historical crisis don’t become moments of historical crisis because the decisions are easy and clear. If the path were well-lit, or if the path didn’t go along a hundred-foot cliff, human existence would be far more boring but much safer as well.

Unfortunately, the historian is often the least welcome person in the room when the chips are down, when people have to decide on questions of community policy. To acknowledge complexity and to forestall the laying down of rules are the stuff of the academic inquirer, but policy must be such that people can abide by it, and that means a couple things: first that, even if provisionally, a community must take some sort of stand. Second that a stand taken after the phenomenon becomes history is not a policy stand at all.  Such stands, if history is any predictor, will likely alienate somebody, but such is the responsibility that comes with legislating for any community. (This is why Article Five is my favorite part of the U.S. Constitution.)

I note all of this to say that I understand the impetus to resist “Open and Affirming” policies for congregations and denominations and colleges: although in their less honest moments proponents of said policies will say that “accepting” (more on that word in my next post) LGBTQIAW* people with no strings attached implies a sort of neutrality in the theological debate in favor of “loving people,” anyone who thinks about such things for more than a couple consecutive seconds will realize that putting such a policy in place is not by any means neutral, a place where deliberation can take place for the sake of truthful answers, but implies certain answers to the questions at the outset.  Perhaps most importantly it assumes at the outset that “to love” means “not to transform.”  But more on that next post.

I would not by any means suggest that such resistance is a bad idea at the outset but that it might betray the fact that most of the battle for Biblical standards might already be lost. Although some more secular-leaning conservatives have staked out a position on historical or even biological grounds resisting more thoroughgoing LGBTQIAW* marriage, ordination, and other official participation in various communities, most Christians who resist such things do so for reasons of Biblical faithfulness. And the problem, historically, with such a stand is that the same folks who stand so strongly against LGBTQIAW* participation often know of and affirm openly people whose sex lives are just as blatantly anti-Biblical but whose circumstances have not barred significant participation at all levels of the twenty-first century Church.

Mainly, of course, divorced and remarried people come to mind. Few Christians (especially conservative Christians) will trumpet and applaud the frequency of divorce in the Church, but in the face of Jesus’s teaching that one who divorces and remarries commits adultery (he qualifies this in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark), most conservative Christians whom I know do not acknowledge begrudgingly that people in second marriages might be vaguely tolerable but evaluate them basically in the same terms that they evaluate first marriages (the only ones Jesus acknowledges): in other words, if it’s a good marriage, it’s a good marriage, and if it’s a bad marriage, it’s a bad marriage.  And although the sequence of things certainly influences our judgments, most of us (and I’m included here) will celebrate a really good and faithful second marriage just as quickly as we’ll mourn the deterioration of the love and faithfulness to a first marriage.

Certainly there are evangelical congregations out there who deny leadership, ordination, and perhaps even membership to remarried people, and to those folks I will tip a hat on consistency. But I’ve never been a part of any of those, and I imagine that such communities become rarer every year. (If I’m wrong, readers, do comment.) The fact of the matter is that, for the congregations where I’ve been a member, divorce has been talked about as a tragic reality, to be certain, and something against which folks will counsel if the moment does not seem strongly to warrant such a separation, but never in those congregations has one’s “coming out” as a divorced person barred full membership.

I point this out not to say that divorce or any other question of sexuality should be off the table for Christians; I do note that, in one category of sexual-relationships-opposed-in-the-New-Testament, even the conservative evangelical congregations of which I’ve been a part have managed to grant the tragedy and even the sinfulness of the situation but to welcome the human beings to be members and sometimes even leaders, without demanding that they sever their ties to the people they brought to the congregation (or even people whom they met there) if they are to participate fully in the life of the congregation. That’s a historian rather than a legislator talking, but again, the historian’s role is to bring forth the human in one moment for the sake of seeing the human in another, by analogy.

Ultimately, the way that congregations and denominations and colleges deal with questions of sexuality always have been and likely always will be contests of analogy: will this particular way of existence be analogous to being a Gentile or analogous to being a false teacher? Will the Church’s response be one in which shunning, letting a believer know that her or his way of life has become a blasphemy to God, is the paradigm, or will the Church’s response be one in which table-fellowship, letting believers know that the old distinction does not any longer bind those in Christ, rule the day? And to bring the matter into the present day, will “coming out” as a LGBTQIAW person be analogous to “coming out” as a consumer of pornography, the sort of person to whom the Church shows love by steering them away from that particular form of sexual desire and towards other, faithful ones; or will the Church’s response be analogous to how we welcome divorced persons, where we lament the circumstances that brought the person there as tragic ones but welcome the person, sexuality and all, into the congregation?  As I said in the outset of this series, I’m not at this turn going to offer answers to those questions, but those contests of analogy, I think, are going to be the interesting ones to ask going forward.  If better questions are going to arise, I do think that discussing divorce and LGBTQIAW* questions side by side should yield some good questions about both.  My hope is that at least acknowledging that the contest of analogies is going on might allow folks who disagree to continue disagreeing longer without giving up and consigning the other party to the bin of “irredeemable” sinners.  Perhaps it’s a silly hope, but it’s mine.

In the meantime, although I do not wish to offer answers, I do want to address a few conservative talking points that I think of as especially worthless in these exchanges:

• To compare sexual desire to an impulse to steal or murder does not do much to help people think through these questions. The thief or the killer steals or kills as a means to achieve an end; the desires that power our sex lives are themselves the ends.  (If you don’t believe me, ask yourself what a spouse should be “getting out of it” when she or he makes love to her or his spouse.  If you can answer that with the same sorts of answers that you give to the question “What do you get out of it when you go to work on Monday morning,” to quote Michial Farmer, “you’re not doing it right.”)
• To say that everyone whose desires are not heterosexual “chooses” to be lesbian or gay simply does not adequately describe the stories that most human beings tell about ourselves.  I did not “choose” one day to desire women; that constellation of desires happened to me.  Such a concession is not to say that my desires or anyone else’s are simplistically genetic or reducible to formulaic psychological explanations; it is to say that making them a matter of volition absent the circumstances that constitute just about every human story ignores the character of the actual phenomenon at hand.
• Sexual desires do not constitute a “lifestyle” the way that being a skater, a baseball fan, or a collector of books (I’m two of the three) constitutes a “lifestyle.”  Whatever else one ends up saying about sexual desire, it’s part of the core of existence, a place where spiritual reality happens and where ecstasy, grace, perdition, and redemption are not far away.  Again, if your devotion to the Atlanta Braves is roughly equal to your sexual passions… no, I won’t even quote Farmer here.  The point is that proclaiming that sins have been forgiven and that vices might be transformed so that virtue might arise is as central to the Christian life as anything I can imagine.  Such are the moments of grace that Christ bestows through the Church.  But to pretend that sexual desire is not as central to a person’s soul as sexual desire is does not do anyone any favors; if anything, it proves that Christians do not take sin very seriously at all.  In other words, to “stand against” without offering real, concrete means to “walk forward” is only to confirm that the Church does not offer any sort of salvation that means anything to the living.

I’ve already offended some people, I’m sure, by making this a matter for inquiry rather than pronouncing dogmatically one way or the other.  Although some questions I’ve resisted answering, this one I cannot leave unanswered: I inquire here because Christians disagree strongly enough to declare those who disagree part of another tribe entirely, and such cannot stand in the Body of Christ.  The pursuit of better questions here is the pursuit of truth, and although I do not pretend that I’m asking the best ones available even to our historical moment, I do want to give it enough of a try that I can say, with good conscience, that I’ve attempted to start making peace.

* Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Interested, Allies, and Whatever letters they’ve added since I started typing this list.