On Fighting

I have really been enjoying the contributions on Duke Divinity’s faith and leadership blog. They always have thoughtful, current, and relevant topics for living in the world today, like “The Secular is not the Enemy”

Karl Barth once wrote, “We do not have the Word of God otherwise than in the mystery of its secularity.” Whenever we draw the line too sharply between God and secularity, between the church and the world, or between faith and public life, we inadvertently reinforce the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. That is, by morally and spiritually separating God, the eternal and immortal, from the world of substance and stuff.

C. S. Lewis, wrote: “People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less.” When we write-off whole tracts of humanity as secular we may be missing the wisdom of the God who cannot be contained in any creed or ideology. It is fitting and prudent, humble and sane, to be ready to hear what God may wish to say to us from unexpected corners of the larger world.

For some strange reason we in the Church sometimes get the idea that everyone else is the problem, or should be avoided. I can’t put my finger on why, but I know that I have felt that way in the past. No where is this clearer than the contempt of friends in church when you start having a social life outside the church. This fight between the Church and the world is exactly what should not be happening. Of course there shouldn’t be fighting within the Church either – but we see that as well, we’re not perfect. At least we consider one another family, and fighting within the family precludes leaving the family (one would hope at least).

The world is not the enemy, Jesus plainly showed us that the accuser, the power behind the institutions and high places that de-humanizes is the enemy. He fought that enemy through his ministry and personally. The fighting that the world does with the Church is de-humanizing at times. The Church should be responding in kind. We need to treat the world humanly with love and compassion, showing them who they are and what they are doing. We are not to respond with in kind with fighting.

Both factionalism and schism seem to forget that, according to the gospels at least, we are not recognized as children of God (literally as children of our heavenly Father) by the correctness of our views, but by the quality of our mercy.

Silence and Nonsense

Scott Stephens reflecting on Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and the Jesus’ trial:

It is in control of his life, and it couldn’t care less. And that’s the obscenity of the entire ordeal. There is no slick dialogue or high courtroom drama in The Wrong Man – just the brutal enactment of an insane system that is convinced of its own rectitude.

And of course the parallel:

The Gospel narratives depict Jesus as being paraded, like some freak at a carnival, before Pilate and then Herod, both of whom taunt and goad Jesus to accept their supposed power over him and thus to join in their insanity. They want Jesus to be part of their world, to quiver before them, or at least to rage against them. But instead, Jesus remains silent.

This is why “turn the cheek” is so powerful. It exposes the schemes of the world for what they truly are. Silence in the face of nonsense, a refusal to play the power games of the world is where God’s power lies in the Church. We are in the world, but not of the world. We refuse to play by their rules. We have new rules that belong to the coming Kingdom age. The values of the God’s Kingdom inform our behavior here and now. This is not about some ethereal ethic reached by the common reasoning of all peoples. This is about belonging to the story of Israel, God’s story about redeeming creation. Being faithful to that story is what counts, not being faithful to a list of things you will or won’t do.

Stephen’s concludes nicely:

Like Jesus’ silence, the Church’s refusal to participate in the state’s normalized madness would go a long way toward removing the quasi-moral veneer, the unquestioned confidence in its own rectitude, whereby the state confers upon itself and its functionaries the power to pronounce any alternative as ‘mad’, abusive, extreme, impractical, or (worst of all) not conforming to ‘best practice’.

I hope any Christians in the political world can grab a hold of this concept. For that is the only way they will be have an impact on the world – by not being of the world. Refuse to play to that tune, play to God’s.

Art, and Beauty from Dostoyevsky

Daniel Siedell’s article in The Other Journal has a simple thesis:

Dostoyevsky once said that beauty would save the world. Most Christian writing on the visual arts, however, is a betrayal of the depth and profundity of the Christian tradition that Dostoyevsky represents. It reflects the negativity and superficiality of contemporary cultural discourse rather than the living tradition of the church as Christ’s presence in the world.

I think everyone realizes that art is dangerous. That is the whole motivation in reacting against it. It is why books are burned, it is why dreams empower, and it is why we ought to give art its due. Somehow, I was never taught in school that the Protestant Reformation had a horrible side-affect on Christian art. Churches, stained glass, monuments, paintings, and sculptures were all destroyed by Christians to remove the art that they disagreed with. I was deeply saddened to find this out while trying to learn and appreciate more art.

…an aesthetic experience can do unexpected things to you. And given our own differences in experience that the work of art engages, our responses to the work will be different. Much Christian writing about art begins with an immovable, monolithic, yet surprisingly facile “Christian perspective” or “Christian worldview” which is then used to “explain” the art. This approach, however, makes the art only instrumentally important as grist for the Christian worldview mill.

I wouldn’t dare box it in like this, but, art is a moment, or expression of this world captured for all to see. If we are so closed to what happens in the world because of the little mill we have set up to churn out all our experiences into neat little blocks, that make neat little walls, and neat little rows – our worldview is patently false. No one who has lived life has ever said it was all neat and and straight. We must be open to experience what the world throws at us, and have that reflect on our lives, devotions, goals, and theology. Siedell is right to ask, what if it were reversed? What if there is no Christian worldview yet, and you only have the interaction with art, or the world in front of you? What would you possibly do? That is exactly the position the early Church was in. They had their faith in their killed, buried, and resurrected leader Jesus, who ascended. Yet in his leaving he empowered them to see the world in a distinctly new way – as he did. And look what they did with it. They weren’t delivered clay tablets with anything written on them. There was no Church handbook, mission statement, or statement of beliefs. They saw the beauty in what God had done through Jesus for them and for the world. They saw the beauty of God’s plan unfold in front of their eyes, in the real world. It was ugly sometimes, it wasn’t of this world. See otherworldly beauty in art. Make otherworldly beauty in art.

I think Dostoyevsky is right. Beauty will save the world.

Ah, Rest

The legs are loving the fact that I’m finally giving them a chance to rest. I am working on my paper for Dallas as I write this. I hope to finish it this weekend and get it off for trusted friends to look over. I am sure they will be surprised, and perplexed on the topic as I am now.

For whatever reason I have a strong rebel streak in me. It manifests itself in most areas of my life now, though I still have some check on it. I wonder with a little more experience, confidence, and freedom just what might happen. I am determined to, as the song goes, drink life from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain. We’ll see where it ends up.

High Places and Institutions

When I talk about fighting the power of evil in high places, and fighting institutions with a Gospel message, this is what I’m talking about.

New Article Up

It’s that time again for another Glad Tidings article. The last one was titled Jesus at the Center, and this one follows off of that as The Future at the Center. Enjoy.

Team Behavior

For nearly all of my life I’ve been involved in organized sports. I’ve played baseball, basketball, and ultimate in more formal settings, and soccer and football in informal ones. And now, in my short life, I’ve been fortunate to work for several, diverse, employers. Being the observant fool that I am, I cannot help but make a big correlation between the behavior of sports and management teams.

Imitation

Whoever takes a position of leadership, de jure or de facto gets imitated. If they are nit-picky, verbose, and overly analytical your entire team will become that. If they are engaged, calculated, and careful how they speak your entire team will become that. The same goes for companies. The most influential culture gets created by the leaders. If they work with one another in personal attacks and silly arguments – that will be your company culture. If they work with ad-hoc, loose, and overlapping responsibilities – that will be your company culture. If there are clear, and refined boundaries for ownership, responsibility, in the management team the rest of your company will imitate it.

This works for both better and worse. It is why ‘groupthink’ can be such a systemic problem. The worldview in which decisions are made is never re-assessed. New data is simply slammed into the old view, resulting in poor decisions and frustration from everyone.

An Example

This past weekend we played at Bellcrack in Philadelphia. We played extremely well while losing. We were outmatched by many teams, but we kept our composure and made good decisions. But while we were winning some players started getting excited and very vocal. Once something went wrong, they took a leadership position by speaking out, and speaking out in areas they don’t know very much about. It really turned the team dynamic sour, and turned into arguments about fine points that just did not matter on the field one bit. People started imitating the vocal ones by being vocal themselves and taking the bait entering into arguments. Not because they were leaders, not because they were excellent players, only because they appeared to be leaders by being vocal. So the entire team got analytical and snippy, instead of letting the actual captain set the tone. Unfortunately our captain ended up getting sucked into the arguments as well and we would play worse and worse.

Bonhoeffer on Love

They’re talking about love at Inhabitatio Dei, from Bonhoeffer. I have a great of respect for Bonhoeffer, living as he did, through dark times, admitting that darkness was there and offering a faithful alternative to overcoming it through Christ. I admit that I have not spent a lot of time in more purely theological or philosophical pursuits. I mostly deal with historical and biblical questions. But this I could not pass up, I found it extremely moving and relevant in my own life and relationships.

In the self-centered community there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning from immediate union with other flesh. This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or — what from this self-centered perspective is after all the same thing — in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence. Bonhoeffer

I find that in relationships I can falter into this way of thinking. Being with someone is having a certain degree of power over them. For them to fulfill me. Of course this is not at all in line with the attitude and life of Christ, it rather exemplifies our fallen nature.

Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those from whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life. Bonhoeffer

If Christ is the one who comes to those who are lost, the true head of the Church, the one behind the Spirit working in the world – then today Christ is the one who shows people the way, however much of a servant you or I might be in the situation. Since it is God’s sovereign rule that will bring in the Kingdom, it is his job to put together whatever good works you and I might do. But our good works do not include controlling people through our relationships with them. We are focused here on the specifics of a romantic relationship – but it applies just as well to relationships within the Church. There is no way that we can dominate one another and glorify God and Christ. That would be the anti-Gospel.

The longing to be completed through immediate contact with another is the reigning mythos of romance in our age. It is the object of voracious, often violent pursuit at all costs, and as Bonhoeffer points out, “Emotional, self-centered love cannot tolerate the dissolution of a community that has become false, even for the sake of genuine community.” The hallmark of the love of our age is that we cannot bear to see it fail (or rather, not succeed in the way we want). ’Love conquers all’ has become a sentimental maxim that really just means no one should ever break up with me. The kind of love that animates our romantic imaginations today, as Bonhoeffer says, “is by its very nature desire, desire for self-centered community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others.” This describes how I have gone after romance in my life if anything does. And I suspect that I’m not alone in this.

May we all realize how this has impacted us in our lives.

Jesus and the God of Israel

I just finished Bauckham’s newest last night. Coming from my tradition, this is a hard book to swallow. However, I must give his central thesis a good look. It uses the appropriate hermanuetical method – basing the method of “How to define who god is” on Second Temple Judaism. In the face of paganism and idolatry, the writers of the time period used certain literary techniques, and exegetical motifs to show the world that YHWH was, is, and will be the one true God. Bauckham’s thesis when applied to the writings of the New Testament shows that Jesus is “brought into the identity of God”.

There is much in the book that I don’t find entirely convincing, and there is a serious point of contention between being a part of the ‘identity of God’ intrinsically and/or extrinsically (I tend to think he starts to flip flop without any argumentation concerning Jesus). But, again, his main point, in my view stands up. And this is a serious argument that I need to take into consideration. So serious that I’m writing a paper on this book (along with Hurtado’s “How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?”) for the Dallas conference. I’m sure it will be hard for them to swallow.

I hope that the paper will not put people off, but rather allow dialogue to take place. It is a serious argument that cannot be hand-waved away.