Who did I think I was?

Okay, two rules:

1) This will be short,

B) this will be the beginning of more regular postage.

Promise.

Sitting at IHOP a couple of days ago and I found myself reading and meditating deeply upon Romans 8. I decided then and there, in true keeping with the ‘anything goes’ espirit de summer, to pay no attention to amount ingested, how “far I got” from my starting place at Romans 8:1, or to even be conscious of “how many verses I read this morning”.

That triggered the realization in me that there is a lot packed into our Scriptures.

Why rush?

When I taught at the School-Which-Shall-Not-Be-Named, there was an, ahem, very ardent Republican lady with whom I occasionally crossed paths. We would always share good banter, never anything serious or heavy (at least to me; I’m sure I wasted valuable real estate on her “God Please Open These Sinners’ Eyes” list).

Well, all in good fun (I think…), this lady one time told me that she and I were one day soon going to sit down and talk politics, Bible-to-Bible, and hammer out which position, hers (ardent GOP) or mine (not-ardent-for-either), was “more Biblical”.

The reason this exchange stuck in my mind is that, almost immediately, I realized that I don’t know my Bible well enough to make that argument on one side or the other.

I didn’t then and I don’t now.

Nor do I think I ever shall.

I hope I’m never that convinced of my own grasp of God’s Word, as well, I really do hold that if we have even a moderately high view of Scripture, as we go through life we’ll invariably be confronted with our own shortsightedness with regard to it. We’ll grow, change, and even laugh at what we used to believe they said about God.

So back to the Maison des Pancackes.

I’m reading Romans 8 and all I can do as I go is ask the inspired writ as I go, “what does this mean?” and “why?” or even “why not?”.

Alongside. Every. Verse.

Just yesterday I returned to church after about a five-week uhhh, sabbatical from there.

The question I asked myself almost as soon as I got done talking to Ryan was, “what in the world was I doing, thinking I knew God, the Bible, and His world well enough to imagine I was getting the whole picture doing Christianity by myself?

Who did I think I was?

As most who know me well are aware, I’m sort of a student of church history and what those who’ve had the same Book and Savior as us have done with It. The more I study and think deeply upon just what we are to do with this “Jesus Thing,” I stand ever more convinced of the need for deep and profound humility before God, our tradition, and the Scriptures.

The Spirit of God, alongside the Scriptures, has been at work in God’s people for some two millennia now-and we haven’t exhausted the meaning or power of Holy Writ just yet.

I’m not sure I should alter Augustine this way, but he famously said that “When you’ve found yourself a god you understand, you have built yourself an idol.”

I wonder if it’s okay to say something similar about the Scriptures?

I know I err more often than not on the side of epistemic impotence, but I really did shudder at my friend’s presumption of knowing the whole of Scripture that well, and it made me wonder if she had not in fact erred on the side of building herself blueprints for an idol.

May the Scriptures never conform… to anything.

Not a song, political platform, doctrinal presupposition, or anything else.

May they define, not deviate.

May they always shape, mold and polish.

And may they always inspire thanks to our holy God.

Of John Lennon and 18th century European capitalism

I haven’t traced the thinking all the way yet, but in college Farthing told us that one could trace the origins of European capitalism to none other than the Swiss Calvinist community that grew around John Calvin in Geneva. Due to their high read on predestination and God’s sovereignty, they determined that the better they could perform in their business dealings the more likely it was that God had predestined them to salvation. (Some motivation, huh?)

Due to that I’ve long since understood theology as something that happens over time, like the fermenting of a fine wine or the shaping of rocks as the elements see fit. Attended with precision and care, it won’t be rushed. (This is also one reason, by the way, that the en vogue talk of the Early Church just up and deciding to one day “make up” a bunch of theology around Jesus over some long weekend is so laughable.)

Well, this morning on the way to work I was reflecting that as the years keep wearing on I’m beginning to be able to trace (on a much smaller scale, obviously!) similar theological growth in my life. Stick with me a minute or three and I’ll explain.

I came up in a tradition that placed a heavy emphasis upon the ability all believers have to hear and discern the voice of God with ease and with certainty.

Well, I’m too screwed up for that to work, and I’ve come to believe firmly that you and everyone else are as well.

So since 2004 or so I’ve been processing the theological conviction that while God may in some ways reveal Himself anew today, it will always be via some combination of a) His word, b) the community of believers, or c) the wisdom of others who’ve known Him well for some time. (No one of those all by itself is complete to such an extraordinary task, by the way.)

With a conviction such as that, then, questions like ‘how might you discern God’s will?’ or ‘how might you figure out what God has to say today?’ are certainly ones that oughtn’t be shunned.

I’ve determined that the way that works is this: reading lots of books. Talking to friends a great deal. Working hard to determine the highly specific ways in which whatever is going on at church might speak to my life. Studying the wisdom of guys who’ve wrestled through such issues in ages prior. Trusting wisdom from my roommate, Ryan, or any other close friends.

There are plenty of options there, but a few that are dealbreakers.

I don’t consider some impression “revealed” to me, in my “heart of hearts” or somewhere in the depths of my mind, anything worth building on. Not until I’ve talked through it with others at least.

I don’t consider myself “healthy” spiritually if I’m consistently ditching church.

I don’t consider just reading the Bible “enough” to keep me afloat spiritually, and I’d take time talking theology with friends over time spent studying the Scriptures all alone most days.

There’s more I could say, but here’s the part you care about: what becomes “your theology” happens over time. Good or bad, well-founded or heretical, theology happens over many seasons of life and is marked with the palette of the most difficult experiences we endure.

The trick I guess is to strain the deep blues out of what we’ve come to consider “true” about God and build instead upon what seems to be firm clear-minded, community-tested and mother-approved.

John Lennon famously said that “life is what happens while you’re busy making plans.” 

Find a friend, hold a mirror up to what you believe about God, the Scriptures, revelation, the spiritual life, etc., and then consider how much of the theology around which you’ve built your life has already been written while you’ve been busy “making plans”.

And go buy some books.

How ‘The Daily Show’ helps me study my Bible

You probably don’t watch “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”.

That’s too bad.

Don’t take me too seriously on that, and don’t think I endorse everything afoot on the show. But having become an avid fan of the show in the waning days of this charged political season, I’ve done no small amount of reading about the creative engine that runs this Emmy, Grammy and Peabody-award winning show.

Before I justify the silly title of this piece, I think a quote or two are in order.

Back in October of 2004, Jon Stewart had a now-legendary appearance on the since-defunct CNN show “Crossfire”. (Here is video, and here is a transcript.) In the course of Stewart’s demolishing the show’s pretense of being a valuable addition to public discourse, one of the hosts inadvertently cast light upon a truth I have begun holding more and more dear to my heart.

Early in the discussion, Stewart makes it plain that the hosts of “Crossfire” appear to not recognize the difference between his show, on the Comedy Central network, and theirs, on the globally-recognized, industry-pioneering and standard-setting Cable News Network (CNN). He brings this out most powerfully by simply reminding his hosts the following:

STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls.

If you are unfamiliar with Stewart and his show, the quote below, from this exceptional Rolling Stone article, given by the host of a spinoff of “The Daily Show” and fellow writer, will further elucidate my point:

[Former 'Daily Show correspondent Stephen]COLBERT: I make up facts left and right. Liberals will come on the show and say, “Well, conservatives want this to be a theocracy.” And I’ll say, “Well, why not, the Founding Fathers were all fundamentalist Christians.” And they’ll say, “No, they weren’t.” I say, “Yes, they were. And, ladies and gentlemen, if I’m wrong I will eat your encyclopedias.” And the person folds, ’cause they don’t realize I have no problem making things up, because I have no credibility to lose.

Bear with me for just two more, from both of these guys together:

STEWART: What people in Washington don’t understand is that we’re not running for re-election. We don’t have to parse every word for fear that it appears in our opponent’s commercial and suddenly renders us impotent.

COLBERT: We claim no respectability. There’s no status I would not surrender for a joke. So we don’t have to defend anything.

All of this quite simply reduces to this: these two guys make no claim whatsoever to ‘respectability’ as journalists… because they aren’t journalists. First and foremost for them is to elicit laughs, within their particular plot of the comedic landscape. That just so happens to entail their pretending to be journalists. But firstly, they are people-going-for-a-joke-ians (or, translated from Hyperhyphenian, “comedians”).

 

 

Just as we’ve got to guard against treating Stewart and Colbert as Real Journalists, I wonder how much of our bad theology, and even outright heresy, we can trace back to the simple forcing of something from the Scriptures which they fundamentally, well, aren’t.

I have had the exceptional privilege to study the Christian faith, our Scriptures and our traditions more than most. So doing has afforded me many an opportunity to observe people mishandling (if not manhandling!) the Scriptures in ways that do extraordinary violence to anything resembling coherence within the word of God and even simple common sense.

To take what is probably the most contested discussion of all (but also by far the richest one for our purposes), consider the Creation narrative in Genesis. Was it intended as a scientific treatise, to tell us in precise terms ways in which God spake the world into existence? If so, centuries of fierce arguments over how to work through that interpretation dot the landscape of today.

Or is it a polemic written by Moses to ridicule other, non-Israelite belief systems of the time? If so, what else is there to see in Genesis 1-6, using those particular lenses? (And what else all of a sudden isn’t there?)

Or was it mere myth, of the ‘here’s a quaint little bedtime story’ sort? If so, that forces us into a virtual minefield of interpretational baggage to untangle.

And don’t expect ThisSpace to be the forum for untangling those issues. Yet the answer to a question about what Genesis is intended to be has EXTRAORDINARY ramifications as to how you handle the Scriptures along the way. The basic question that you’re answering is, “for what can I use Genesis responsibly, and for what ought I not?” Tough decisions, with serious ramifications, have to be made there; otherwise you’ll look like someone that thinks Jon Stewart is the Walter Cronkite of our generation.

Notice in the Stewart and Colbert quotes above that those who criticize them are forced to find grounds on which to criticize them besides the obvious (i.e., that they aren’t very good journalists). That’s a fight Stewart and Colbert have no interest in fighting anyway, thus the adventure in missing the point entirely that has so befuddled their detractors.

The simple lesson then is this: consider carefully what it is the intent you so boldly presume upon a piece of art, a person’s behavior, some quote, a public official or piece of Scripture. Nobody wants to read their Bible with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert reading over their shoulder, do they?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How No News is News

The promise and the impotence of our much vaunted, scarcely imagined Age of Information Utopia and All Knowledge are tied together in an inexplicably bound state.

Or, shorn of pompous verbosity, the Internet ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

I don’t know how well you remember your history, specifically that of Western philosophy, but the intellectual inheritance that marked the fundamental incubator of the American Experiment included a staggering faith in humanity’s inherent ability to outgrow the ugliness of human nature. The god of that faith was enshrined as Progress, and plenty of folks in this day and age feel like we are living in a time of truly unparalleled blessings from that particular deity. We never shook that idolatry ground so deeply into the American psyche; instead we’ve spread it around, like your favorite communicable disease, to anyone with an open hand. In my personal life, however, I’m starting to key in on its bankruptcy.  

I guess you’d say I’ve grown up as a child of the Internet, the Information Age, whatever. Way back in the mid-90’s I was one of the very first kids I knew to have internet access along with a decent computer at the house. I was certainly ahead of almost all my peers in learning how to ahem, “procure” music digitally in those halcyon days of Napster, and without a doubt I was the first person you knew to order a pizza online.

Now I wasn’t unique, however; lots of folks (including you, I’m guessing) had computers at the house and some alphanumerically mangled AOL screenname. If in fact you share that same experience, have you ever stopped to ponder how that has marked you and made you any different than other folks who’ve gone before us? Aglow in the good graces of Progress’ viceroy, Information, you’d think you and I would find ourselves a little more free.

We’d be smarter. We’d have wider tastes in art, music, culture, ideas, etc. We’d understand each other well enough to quit killing over religion. We’d be less lonely. We’d be able to keep up with both socks. We’d hack with more efficiency at the Big Questions.

Well, I’m here to confess that I’ve found myself widely astride all the deficiencies above (and plenty more!) the past few years, despite, as an American, having more in my ‘favor’ than most humans who ever prior walked this planet.

I’ve observed that, despite unfettered much easier access to an almost infinite library of music, this music freak is still largely taken with the same stuff that grabbed him in college.

I’ve observed that, despite a truly immeasurable wealth of content available on the Internet, I still gravitate to the same four or five sites every day to troll for fresh thoughts. 

I still like the same sports teams, Subway sandwiches and deodorant I’ve always considered the best.

And I’m still alone.

Probably the only place in my life where I am conscious to try and stretch myself is in the books I read, but I think that is probably more a function of just being tired of seminary-type books than true zeal for any particular far flung topic.

I have been reading more and more of late that Thinkers On Such Things (TOST) are starting to produce the first truly scholarly, wide-ranging studies about the Information Age. Most of them are concluding that about all this wide and sweeping revolution in how people interact with ideas and information seems to be accomplishing is to cause folks to become further entrenched in their beliefs-right or wrong, asinine or silly, intellectually rich or utterly bankrupt.

Or, in the interest of ecological awareness, let me reduce the above to just one sentence: Despite being in the first wave of a true paradigm shift in world history, people aren’t changing; they’re just bogging further down in the muck of their already-established ideas.

Basically, the Internet has just made it easier than ever before to find documentation for why “I” am right and “they” just suck.

I’d say then that what I’m starting to believe, as this particular phase of my academic career winds down, is that there really isn’t some grand or sweeping way of handling the world to be found outside the worldview we can glean from the Scriptures. It seems like every big idea or bright and wonderful thing I encounter somehow has resonance with the Word of God. Through the guidance of the Spirit, I am able to process the fact that there really is nothing new going on in the world, except a fresh need for God’s mercies every morning to save us all from our selfishness and shortsightedness.

I’d like to see you try and say that about anything else out there.

Alright, glad to have all that settled.

What’s next?

The things I carry

or, All that you can’t leave behind.

I used to know my Bible a lot better.

Probably a function of my obsessiveness, or legalism, or just general mental disturbedness, but I knew my Bible, chapter and verse, like a freak. (I still remember my college roommate joking early in our acquaintance that I knew the entire New Testament, cover to cover and verse to verse. That wasn’t as much a joke as I think he thought!)

I’ve noticed recently more of that inner voice saying, ‘that’s Biblical, but I just don’t know where…’.

That’s a little disturbing.

But maybe, to turn things around, it shouldn’t be.

Very early in my seminary career I started wrapping my mind around a shift, of sorts, in nomenclature as concerned Christians interacting with their world. Dear Dr. Krieder forever rocked my socks by describing certain musicians (knowing him, they were probably U2) not as “Christian musicians” but as “Christians who do music”.

That has proven no small distinction. Stick with me and I’ll show you why.

It seems that the final, highest goal in formal Christian education (it certainly is at the school where I teach) is that teachers teach from a fundamental Christian worldview. This is a pretty tough thing to think through, but it basically boils down to this: your Christian faith should so inform your perspective on the world and how you interact with it that it just sort of comes out, and lives in, the way you handle ideas. Think of your fundamental Christian perspectives (keep your finger right here; you’re gonna want to come back to this page) functioning sort of like glasses, or contacts, or even the very corneas of your eyes, so much that you can’t consciously separate it from how you process new information on your world. And then, because of that, distinctly Christian “fingerprints” are all over everything you do.

Put even simpler: your Christian faith isn’t something you have to just “turn on” or “turn off” or “revisit,” and how developed your faith is one way or the other shows up in everything about your life.

Hence my spin on forgetting Bible verses.

I think that perhaps some progress I’ve made in my maturity as a Christian could be found in that. Now of course, I’m not trying to say that there never is and never was any value in memorizing Scripture… But the whole point of our time together is to wonder this: which is of more value, learning more Scripture by rote and being able to adroitly unfurl it from the depths of your intellectual satchel, or being so changed by it that it lives inside you and nourishes you even unconsciously because you’ve already digested it so well?

So then, all that said, take a look at the things I carry:

Art and beauty: All things done well and excellently are things the Scriptures encourage us to harvest for clues about God that will encourage us further toward a life of grateful reflection upon Him. Because I am a Christian I understand this world as a place where God’s handiwork is on display anywhere I look and thus I appreciate beauty far more deeply. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Dignity of human life: I take great offense, because I am a Christian, at any devaluing of human lives or people made in the image of God due to their station in life. The poor, a janitor, a prostitute or a some greedy old tycoon are all of equal worth in the eyes of God to that of even His Son. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Lordship of Christ: Because I am a Christian, I believe that He is in control-regardless of human machinations otherwise, my own weak faith, or hostility toward my our values. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

Truth: Since I am a Christian, I believe that all truth is God’s truth and that anything I can find that I know to be true should be a cherished nugget pointing me back toward Him. I am not quick to stamp things as “true,” but once I realize such a sighting, I rejoice. This is a scriptural idea, so attested that some list of Bible verses plucked from context defeats that very point.

I’m not really sure which Dixon I’d prefer to have in my crew, the one writing today or the one with the biggest, thickest Bible keychain.

Actually, I think I do know now.

If we can’t say that we’ve wisened as the calendar pages have ticked onward, I’m not sure we should want to be around ourselves. (I feel like that too is a scriptural idea, by the way.)

Yup, you got me there, I said it: sometimes forgetting Bible verses is a good thing.

Maybe that is because if they really are what we say of them, then in fact they truly are… all that we can’t leave behind.