The Death of Pastor Billy Joe Daugherty

Tulsa World: The Rev. Billy Joe Daugherty dies.

Today I feel like we’ve all lost a friend, whether you agree with him theologically or not, Billy Joe cared about people. He wanted to bring them the good news of the gospel, and no one can be faulted for that. While I myself had some serious grievances about his theology at times, and still do, He attempted to work for the gospel.

I worry for the church, and all those who might feel an inexplicable act of abandonment has happened here. But I wish to extend comfort to those in grief, and say that while this loss is here, Billy Joe was not abandoned by God. He was most charismatically present to Billy Joe precisely in His weakness, and He can be most present to us, precisely in this loss, because we know that something else is really happening here. That’s what the Resurrection means.

He’ll be missed, but let us remember that this is not the end, not for him, nor for us. We mourn with they who mourn this, in solace, and with patience, knowing that Death is our enemy. Yet we can know that this death, like all death, will not have the final word.

I’d like to close with this short piece by Chrysostom on the Resurrection:

“Let no one fear death, for the Saviour’s death has set us free. He who was held by death, eradicated death. He plundered Hades when He descended into Hades. He embittered it, when it tasted of His flesh, and this being foretold by Isaiah when he cried: Hades said it was embittered, when it encountered Thee below.

Embittered, for it was abolished.
Embittered, for it was ridiculed.
Embittered, for it was put to death.
Embittered, for it was dethroned.
Embittered, for it was made captive.

It received a body and by chance came face to face with God. It received earth and encountered heaven. It received that which it could see, and was overthrown by Him whom he could not see. Where, O death, is your sting? Where, O Hades is your victory?

Christ is risen, and thou art cast down.
Christ is risen, and the demons have fallen.
Christ is risen, and the angels rejoice.
Christ is risen, and life is liberated.
Christ is risen, and no one remains dead in a tomb.

For Christ having risen from the dead, has become the first-fruits of those that have fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power, for ever and ever. Amen.”- Chrysostom

Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.

From a Conversation

I had a conversation earlier, and this came up, my friend asked me to put it online, so here is what i was saying as we were talking about sin, anxiety, and separation from God.

that’s what grace means:
every obstacle we set up, he just sees as something easily overcome by his overflowing inexhaustible love.

Everything we set up, every obstacle, every barrier, every level, He overcomes, in Himself, by Himself, because His sovereignty is manifest in forgiveness, his righteousness in redemption. We are obstinate but He glorifies Himself precisely by piercing our obstinacy and showing us the depths of our weakness. He is shown to be glorified precisely by exploding our departure from Him with His own presence, by piercing our sinfulness with redemption.

When we see that love, and see how majestic it is, we acknowledge our failure to understand it properly, and we see ourselves as failures before it, but failures brought up by loving patience, to be given a place despite our protest and weakness.

Rowan Williams Visit to Rome

The future of two faiths, slightly estranged.

For those who have not heard, or are still confused about what’s at stake, the issue is this: Pope Benedict XVI decided to make it easier for entire parishes and groups to enter into communion with the Catholic church while seemingly able to retain their distinctive culture. It’s a godsend for many Anglicans who feel that the ordination of women and gay bishops and priests is theologically a violation of their beliefs.

However, the heated dialogue that has ensued over the statements made by our beloved Pontiff, have created a flurry of both excitement and frustration. Rev. Jo Bailey of Duke University says the statement made by Rome is both “confused and confusing”. Talks between doctrinal officials and traditionalists have created all sorts of ambiguities and issues.

Some feel that the move by Rome has pulled over a fast one on Archbishop Rowan Williams, who is the head of the Anglican Church. It certainly comes as a surprise to most Christians who had seen interfaith dialogue increase, but certainly had not expected this.

Apparently, Time is claiming that Anglican traditionalists had met with the Vatican in secret, behind Williams back. While the statement has many positive ramifications for the Catholic side of the faith, and those Catholics who were at one time Anglican, this may have potentially vitriolic effects on the Anglican side of the church. While many have been up in arms about the directions the Anglican church has taken, this move by Rome and at least a sizable number of traditionalists might complicate rather than facilitate matters.

There has been dialogue over the last 40 years to slowly merge the two faiths closer together, but this latest move by Rome might be taken as a claim to rivalry, instead of an open door. Though, at least for many Anglicans, the move is seen as a refreshing turn in the right direction. For those concerned about the directions that the Anglican communion had been taking, or who had converted from Anglican/Episcopal rites to the Catholic faith, this is an exciting turn of events, and while there is work to be done, it’s going to turn out for the best.

I think Time is right to highlight the complexities that the statement proposes, but we should be more generous, since the issue at hand is happening between two faiths that are concerned with growing closer together, not further apart. Further, while the issue is complex and may cause some intense dialogue I do not think that this will result in a dramatic splintering or a further schism, as some have suggested.

I think that while the statement made by the Vatican might have been a bit hasty, this was not a secret Vatican mission to expand ecclesiastical borders and expand an empire. There was a strong demand from within the Anglican communion for a streamlined way to return to the mother church, while retaining some of the distinctive flairs of the Anglican rite. Now it is fair to ask if this might be used as a way for the liberal Episcopals to jettison pesky conservatives and get on with being a church for the people, and I think this statement may very well do a bit of that. However, the Vatican’s statement also highlights the very real issues in the Anglican communion and it just shows how poised the issue has been for split already.

I think it’s a mistake for some Catholics to hope that the inclusion intends to homogenize the Anglican rite into an anglicized Roman rite, including the reemphasizing of celibacy in the rite, or a stronger emphasis against a more democratic leadership.

Whatever happens, I think time will tell, and we’ll just have to wait and see what kinds of issues are resolved on practical levels, including who owns the church properties themselves, and who will be in charge of ordination in the new rite.

I know that this is a dream becoming reality for a personal friend and I. He had joined the anglican church after finding his charismatic-non-denominational church to be unappealing. But when the church announced the officiating of openly gay clergy and women, he felt like something had bee stolen from him, the tradition he desired had been cut out from underneath him. I’d always hoped something like this might happen to allow Western, especially American Christians to find a beautiful and orthodox faith that included marriage for those who wanted to be married.

I think the Church should respect the unity and diversity of her rites, and pushing too hard on either celibacy or church government in the Anglican rite could cause problems for traditionalists hoping to hold on to the distinctive character of their culture and liturgy. It seems though that at least at first sight, the Apostolic Constitution seeks to preserve the distinctiveness of the Anglical Patrimony.

While I see this as a way for Catholicism to flourish in the European West only time will tell.

And this is Just in: The meetings in Rome happened, so I’ll be giving a brief update of the situation here.

The Vatican announced that the talks were “cordial.” This was the first meeting between the Pope and the Arch Bishop since the surprise announcement by the Vatican last month. However, the talks seem to have gone well, at least from an outside point of view. One of Dr. Williams most senior advisers the Rev Canon Jonathan Goodall will remain in Rome to establish further dialogue. The talks are designed to build even closer ties between the two faiths.

In an act of good faith, of profound charity and symbolism, the Pope gave Archbishop Williams the gift of a pectoral cross – the large cross which bishops wear around their neck. “It is one of the signs of episcopal leadership, along with the mitre and staff.”- source 2 under further reading.

It is most assuredly a sign of friendship and fraternity, but also means that the Holy Father recognizes Williams as a bishop. Williams was reported as respectful without being deferential on the matters of import, and hopes that despite the disillusioned Anglicans, official talks will resume and have positive effects for both churches uniting against secularism.

For More reading see:

The Anglican and Catholic Churches: Friends or Rivals? – TIME.

Archbishop of Canterbury Visits Rome

Catholic Culture Article on the Original Statement by the Vatican

Public Theology: Jurgen Moltmann: The Theology of Hope

Public Theology: Jurgen Moltmann: The Theology of Hope.

 

Above is the link for the full text of the Theology of Hope by Jurgen Moltmann.

 

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m excited to, seeing how it’s free at this website. If anyone has read it I’d love to hear your thoughts.

 

The text is the full text of the book, so enjoy. I know I will.

Imagination and Suffering Christianly

We can say this:

At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.”

God has not chosen to abstain from us, and to stand aloof, the cross is where we know that God is on our side. An ugly world stood in need, and we “held him of no account.” (Isa. 53:3) Jesus shows us how God imagines the future, through the fact of his resurrection, God’s imagination about our world is one that sets all things right, that faces the realities we face, and stands alongside us.

We have one who stands in our midst alongside us, showing us that this suffering is not the end, that our suffering is not the end. There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too. He has asked us to enter his life, his teachings, and take upon ourselves his yoke, his burden, his love.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. Christian imagination is as much about ecstatic joy as it is about ecstatic engagement with the reality of suffering. While it leads us to aesthetic beauty and works of art, it leads us into the shadow of the cross, it is from the sufferings of Our Lord that we learn to see the world rightly. Christians do not assume we see reality, rightly, in fact we must assume that learning to see reality rightly is the first task of our imagination.

The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

The Strokes Cover

So, I’ve recently realized that lots of my thoughts come out here, about theology, politics and such, but I haven’t given my readers some inclinations about things i like, so i figured I’d break up this little bit of intensive writing to show you what i like.

I like music, rock, some hip hop, downtempo/trip hop, jazz, gregorian chant, are a few of my favorite styles.

In light of that, here’s a video I really really like.

I love  The Strokes, and I hope you like this cover as much as I do.

Hanging Laundry is Communist!

U.S. residents fight for the right to hang laundry – Yahoo! News.

Despite green being the in thing, rednecks across america are having to fight for the right to be themselves. Housing associations across America have gathered together to put a ban on hanging laundry to dry out in the sun, stating that the pure fresh air and non-appliance powered method is outdated and Neanderthal-like. “People haven’t dried their laundry in the sun since the industrial revolution and it’s not time we started now” said a spokesperson. Another mentioned “It’s our God-given right as Americans to flaunt our technology and show the world we can be as lazy as we want. God bless America.”

Neighbors everywhere have stated outrage at the simple energy saving methods being employed by Carin Froehlich, declaring she’s just not capitalist enough, and that her choosing to opt out of contributing to America’s energy needs are hurting the economy. The complaints have ranged from “I just don’t like seeing clothes on a line” to “that communist might as well be burning flags on those clothes lines.” Froehlich has declared “If my husband has the right to own a gun, i should have the right to hang my laundry out to dry.” Many people in touch with the pulse of America’s future however feel that this rejection of modern technology and increased energy bills are irresponsible, and hurting America’s image as a self-sufficient nation.

Despite the protests of the housing association and the accusations of communist affiliations, Forehlich says she’ll continue to hang her laundry.

Although, we did find this flag among other articles hanging out to dry on the line:

I’m On a Boat button by beanforest on Etsy

I’m on a boat button, this is amazing!

I’m On a Boat button by beanforest on Etsy.

6 Things American Christians Must Remember

6 Things American Christians must remember.

America is not the church, and we cannot swear unquestioned allegiance to this nation without compromising what it means to be Christians. Power never conquers, it consumes from within. Rome, Germany, America. These are all empires who have extended beyond their reach with tyrannical power, and it has ultimately led to their downfall.

1) Power overstretched becomes a means of oppression everywhere.

Rome’s tyranny imploded on it, when the very people that it had attempted to conquer were brought in as mercenaries to fight against the conquering barbarians. Nazi Germany licensed the gestapo as a police force who became executioners of Poles and Serbs abroad, and when brought back home quickly caused the deterioration of Nazi support from within by terrorizing their own people. America has forgotten that what goes around, comes around. We may feel that the war is something we read about online, or watch on television, but its effects are all around us here, as we live in an increasingly militarized state. The oppression we’ve imposed on foreign nations is beginning to show up here at home in surprising and increasingly problematic ways.

2) We should be focused more on democracy and peace than giving in to the war cult.

We’ve surrendered our focus on democracy, on fair representation and on a better society to live in fear. We want to launch a coalition against terror, when we fail to realize we’re perpetuating the terror we seek to eliminate by by allowing our military forces to over extend their reach and let their means outstrip their ends. Christians everywhere need to remember that history has never looked favorably on Christians supporting war, and we too must remember that our first loyalty is to the church, a community of peace, justice and self-emptying love. Christians do not live in fear of their enemies, but know that God has already set us at peace, and made possible a community that seeks the best of even its destroyers.

3) War is not the Christian way.

We have to remember that war is a power of the world. The cross calls us to a very different life. It calls us to a life of cross bearing discipleship. Whether you are a pacifist or a just war supporter it makes little difference to the facts that this war is not just, it never has been, and it never will be. Whether you care to support peace or not makes little difference to the fact that it is the Christian way and the early church shows us most clearly what it means to life in a society at war. We are a people who are in every nation, yet give unquestioned allegiance to none. We are a people who transcend nations, and there are Christians in the countries we’ve come to occupy who might be suffering at our imposition upon their homes, their lands, their lives.

4) The war on terror is not a war on Islam.

America is not at war with Islam. Some people see the recent explosion of Islam as a problem, and see this war as a way of limiting the spread of its influence. This is not a religious war, it’s about expanding the power of our national influence. There’s nothing sacred about this war. Further, we have American Muslims fighting their middle-eastern counterparts. We cannot as Christians allow ourselves to be comfortable with the idea that the killing of the “extremisits” is the right way to go about things for the proper Christianizing of the Middle East. We should never be comfortable with the use of coercive force to spread the Christian message of peace. That’s like explaining chastity with pornography. You cannot spread a message of the loving redemption of the world God created if your hands and lips are stained with the blood of your enemies.

5) America will end.

This may come as a shock to some of my readers, but America will end. Every empire in history has ended, been reimagined, recultured, exported, subverted, destroyed or forgotten. As Americans we must remember that America is not the church, and America will end. We live in America, but America is not God’s representative on earth, nor is it our job to make that so. Our kingdom is not America, nor America’s well being, we live for another kingdom, the community of the Crucified God. Ultimately we live for a world where justice, peace and mercy are normative, and we must live lives that act accordingly now, because this is how our kingdom flourishes, even in the midst of uncertainty, oppression and bloodshed.

“I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”-Napoleon

6) We must be Christians and love our enemies.

Our task is to live lives that make sense of the church, because our story does not begin with the declaration of independence, but with the Trinity’s self glorifying love. Our story begins in being image bearing creatures who recognize God in and through our neighbor, as well as our enemy.

Christians are the people who can acknowledge that the neighbor is the enemy, and we must love our enemy as ourselves. We must pray for them in love, knowing that Christ is their Lord already, and we must treat them as such. We must weep with them and for them, we must empathize with the tortures they have suffered, and acknowledge we’ve created societies that speak and trade in blood. We as Christians must repent for the bloodshed of our nation, and cry out for those oppressed by our occupation of their lands, we must pray for those in Guantanamo Bay, and those who have been mercilessly tortured by our agencies.

If we cannot shed tears for our enemies and weep for the oppressed, we must ask ourselves whether we have truly come to know the love of Christ, and recognized the deep and unrelenting call to peace that Jesus sets before us. We must ask whether we know how to abandon our interests, and pursue love and peace, justice and mercy above all else.

Open Theism?

The Tears of God:

The holocaust is the bastion of contemporary theology, and forms the backdrop for a radical concern for the divine immanence. And we must wrestle with a world that feels God has abandoned it. The holocaust is the lance poking into and questioning classical theism, and its knight fueling the whole debate are questions of the emotional state of God.

I’ve written in favor of the passibility of God in the past, yet, I think I might have to reconvene and modify my position. I’ve launched an investigation into the idea, to really understand what’s at stake in the whole debate.

I think that there is a confusion of language where impassibility has come to mean incapable of emotional response or interaction. If this is the case, then surely this is not what the Bible portrays, not in the pentateuch, in the prophets, or in Jesus. Mayhap the doctrine inherited by the early church after the immediate age of the apostles is guilty of excessive neo-platonism, but might we be guilty of even among those who are radically concerned with orthodoxy being too concerned with immanence at the cost of transcendence.

What does the transcendence of God mean to and for our age? Is open theism just a symptom of our general lack of ability to speak effectively about transcendence?

If we speak of impassibility and it is synonymous with non-emotion, and divine apathy, then we must discard its value in theological discourse, because it is simply not worth laboring over in an attempt to rescue. But if by some similar term we mean that God’s life is not subject to us involuntarily, then we are correct. He is not our buddy, or our magic toolbox for fixing our problems or solving ourselves.

What’s at stake is that the world is asking for a God in her midst, and Jesus Christ is this very thing, but in non sacramental churches this has to take the form of a reformulation of the project of liberal theology that ended with Feuerbach. God has to become anthropologically stated to be immanent in many protestant circles.

Our world is looking for a God that can relate, and too often, churches across the developed world have forgotten that these “formulated truths” are much more than that and that from them we find a way of living and being in the world. I think that open theism is a necessary development of the non-sacramental communions, and maybe a welcome step towards reorienting the doctrine of God away from scholastic notions and bringing fresh life into it through considering the divine emotional life as a source of theological reflection, and drawing from it liturgy, action and response in love. The only thing we must do is to remember the divine love in such a way that it remains wholly outside human love while not unrelated to it.

While not myself a Calvinist, nor a hyper-Calvinist, I think that there is something to be said for retaining the otherness of God that the new Calvinism in Christian circles is doing. It may be horrific in some cases, but in others, like David Crowder’s music, it’s reminding Christians that we are fallible sinners. Yet, this might be best appropriated in terms of Von Balthasar’s objective divine love from the outside, not in terms of ideas about the doctrine of God. We cannot speak about God in the positive in abstract, all we know we know in Christ, and Trinity. I think Von Balthasar is the right way to go about the project of the otherness of God for the future of theology in the 21st century.

I think that impassibility is best seen as a synecdoche, as part of a whole rather than an isolated doctrine. And that what is really meant is not divine emotionlessness, but a concern for the idea that God is not contigent upon human beings for His being in essentia. Yet this whole problem is solved bot by scholastic formulations as much as by a strong doctrine of the immanent and economic Trinity. This whole shifts the locus of study from the abstract doctrine of seeming non-relationality to the location of the speaking of the divine word to us in the cross of Jesus Christ. It is there that the word of God about Himself to man is made known, and that man’s word to God is also spoken, God speaks faithfulness to humanity. Man’s word to God on the cross is trust, is faith, is hope, and all these from love of the Father, and so Christ unites faithfulness with hope, faith and love, into a mutually kenotic act towards man and God.

Historically the God of the prophets was unknowable, Heschel says that even if the prophets asserted the unknowability of God they would have insisted on the possibility of understanding through reflective intuition. (The Prophets, 288). So too, for Christians we can assert the divine transcendence as a united grammar, as a way of understanding the nature of God in which impassibility is only part of the divine whole, and the whole is understood best by reflective intuition. The impassibility is not a static unchangingness, but a dynamic perichoretic faithfulness of the persons of the Trinity to each other, it is their love that is eternal, and unchanging towards each other. The impassability is not to be conceived of a God in oneness, but in threeness, who is united in three-in-oneness. Therefore, we can jettison impassibility, as a convoluted term, but we must in some way retain the idea that God’s faithfulness to God and humans is essentially unchanging, and this we do through our basic language in the aforementioned terms, and the objective nature of divine love, not through stating that god is passable, but in dismissing the necessary intellectual exercise altogether in favor of ways that this actually applies, not in static conception but in the dynamic interaction of God and humans.

Any reflective Christian knows that knowledge of God is by interaction, by living with God and neighbor. It does not happen in analysis or induction, but living together. So too, our doctrine is crying out for the relational God in a world that is experiencing a new exile. The postmodern era is a new exile, for a people who have not found themselves grounded in the narrative of the exodus, so the linguistic strains differ, but the holocaust is the departure of the presence of reason from the world, and our world is trying to reconcile with the departure of a presence it thought might usher in the millennium through right worship in the morality of human beings and their application of reason.

I think, in closing, that the impassibility of God is a truncated doctrine filled with neo-platonic problems, and that the best thing to do is retain the otherness of God without attaching it to neo-platonic philosophy. So, I retain my original position that God’s impassibility is at least always suspect in Christian theology if not wholly rejected. The mystery of divine faithfulness and love as wholly other maintain the otherness of God in a far more constructive way that might lend itself to liberalism, but not easily if done rightly, and if God is love, it is our task to being there, and make the task of our theology assessing the scripture without too close a philosophical assumption to guide us. Anything we wish to say about God must always be mediated in Trinity, and Jesus. The life and times of Jesus Christ reveal God to us, he is the lens through which we read the bible, and our theology, any word we wish to say about the Father will not be true unless mediated to us by the life of His son, for no one knows the Father except the Son.

An immutable/impassable God is in the worst case a self-indulgent and self-contemplating monad who has no relation at all to the real world outside Himself, and it immediately undoes Trinitarian concepts from the outset. Like Aristotle’s theology assumed, it will breate an unmoved mover, a Calvinist deity, absolute, unchanging, wholly other ad nauseam. At best, the doctrine uses problematic language that begins not with inquiry into the person of Jesus or of the trinity, but one that begins in a philosophical inquiry about the nature of God, that separates the being of God from the story we know He is found in, the story mediated to us by the scriptures of the church. Christians cannot settle for a static God, even if that static response is absolute and undying love, it is invalid. Impassability and immutability remove the ability for divine choice, divine election, and divine agency if carried to their logical conclusions. Incarnation was a choice in the Godhead, a choice out of a dynamic love that relates to the outside world because it always has related to the outside world since creation.

Incarnation is a choice out of covenant faithfulness that forever altered the godhead from unknown to known. God wept for the world, not involuntarily, but voluntarily, it is the divine emotion that is able to by choice be ever capable of eternal compassions. Humans resort to callousness at a point, the divine love does no such thing, out of an eternal choice to make His love known where there is the greatest and most infuriated opposition to His love. He can and does relate to the human condition since God is now eternally both Himself and this Man Jesus, such that a real event has taken place in God, and the Divine is intimately married to humanity, that’s what the incarnation means, that’s why sacraments are important. They’re tied into what the incarnation means and speaks to us. In them we can feel the tears of God, and the Divine joy, in them we know that we are loved, not just as a matter of principle, but as a powerful and intimately connected choice, as a reaction to the necessity of man.

You cannot eat an immutable God. Case closed.

Nationalism and Christian Faith

Nationalism in America’s churches is in many ways more explicit and more unnoticed by participants than even 1930’s Germany. The church I work at has decided that it’s far more acceptable to say the pledge of allegiance than to take communion on a regular basis. This shows a church that has lost its way, a community not gathered around the cross, but around a constitution, around not God’s Word, but the republic.

The church I attend is confesssional, it has creeds, it has liturgies, the sad fact of the matter is that these liturgies are America’s ideology. Our creeds are not the Christian creeds, but the creeds of America. Our pastor stands to decry a godless society week after week in love and patience, but, cannot even begin to articulate the problems which we really face. I’ve heard sermons about the evils of evolution and how serving Jesus is like being in the American service, I’ve stood in silent horror as my brothers and sisters salute a flag, pledging allegiance to a bloodthirsty nation in the very community that was built as a community of peace, and cross bearing discipleship.

I’ve heard our pastor thank veterans for defending our freedom, when really, there hasn’t been anything near a just war in the history of America, and the only war that comes remotely close is the European theatre of WWII. But even that was invalidated by our decision to as a nation commit the greatest act of terrorism ever known to history. There’s no defense of freedom in the wars we fight today, or in any of our wars, it’s never been about the defense of freedom it’s been about the unnamed expansion of empire. It’s been about cultural indoctrination and the self-entitled right to supremacy assumed by the American people.

The “tolerant” Americans have sought to excuse themselves from their imperialism by calling it other things, including: a war on terror, defending our freedom, liberating the oppressed, taking out a threat to our national security, disabling a mass murderer, bringing democracy to a people in need of freedom. The rhetoric is all the same and all underlies what’s really going on. America is a darkened face, and a nation willing to commit seedy acts to save her image, to save face. Just like Two-Face and Batman in the Dark Knight, our image has been marred by the publication of torture acts, of really looking at the things we’ve done in order to save “this fair city” from “madmen”.

America’s two face is the presidency and the CIA, agencies we love to praise, that we now have no choice but to see as disfigured and disfiguring aspects of our society. So we’ve created the idea of “the troops” and “freedom” as our heroes, who bear the weight of our guilt, for better and for worse, we shove off the blame on the president, the vice president, the government agencies, the powerlessness of the american people. The mask we’ve taken on for ourselves is a deliberate and overtly intentional rebranding, a way to distance ourselves from the war we find ourselves in. Yet it doesn’t change the reality that is Two-Face, the reality that our white knights have turned out to be monsters.

Our nation is a people determined to be free of guilt, obsessed with ignoring the past to live in the eternal present. The death of metanarrative and historical unity in American culture is a sign of the ways in which the American project is mediating its own failure to itself. We have become dejected and rather than acknowledge our place in history, we’d rather displace ourselves from it in what Foucault called differance. Trying to make ourselves differ from the past and even our present, making America an ideal, an invisible unity, a sinless body removed from the sins of individual persons.

America’s ecclesiological apologetic for itself is that it is an invisible body, perfectly unmarred by the sins of the past. The ideal still lives on, despite historical failures, because these were the failures of presidents, of leaders, but not of America. Underlying America is a strong belief in her invisible unity, despite her radical inclusion of most peoples (although there are some dissenters like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh). But nevertheless, the claim of America’s idealistic unity and legitimacy as this ideal society in the minds of both conservatives and liberals stands.

As Christians, we do not hope for America, we do not hope in America, we do not take oaths of allegiance, to church or state, baptism is our yes. We need take no oaths of allegiance to the church, to the bible, to the Christian flag, to Jesus. Baptism is our yes, so let us live as though it matters. Pledging allegiance to the Christian flag is rarely if ever done without pledging allegiance to the American flag first, and it just goes to show where the priorities are.

I think that this video shows the problem in explicit detail so you know i’m not just making this up.

the only difference between that first video and the one that follows is not all the children in the first video have flags, but the sentiment is the same. The only difference between American and German fascism is that Americans are gathered around the invisible church that is “Christian America” rather than a charismatic leader. Fundamentalist churches have displaced the invisible church with the visible america in need of “restoration”. My only question is, were we a Christian nation while we moved in slaughtering indians, or after that, when we decided to import slaves to create our livelihoods? Was it at our earliest founding, by Catholic missionaries? Or was it when Puritans decided to betray the natives who had taught them to work the land?

What separates the “Christian” nationalism above from the one presented below?

What would Bonhoeffer say? What would Karl Barth say? What might St. Paul say? Augustine?

Just a Question

i think that this cartoon is highly illustrative of the problem we face in america as Christians. Everything is economics, from health care reform to senate agendas, to everyday life. The phenomenon of the cultural american mind is that it is one of price and benefit, business ethics and the absence of any other ethic from all discourse. The only language our society speaks together anymore is not philosophy, music or even science, literature or politics, it’s economics. The prevailing talk in the whole health-care debate has been economical, because our society has lost the ability to speak publicly in any other terms in so many areas.

So, is it rape or shoplifting? while a jury might vote rape, it would seemingly make no sense in a society that carried to its logical conclusion would obviously vote shoplifting.

America is a heap of contradictions, slowly crumbling from the inside, protestant piety and subjectivism established on the grounds of an unlimited market which has had immense cultural influences and an impetus towards ever greater tolerance all lead to make a society where this question even becomes a possibility. Our culture is radically obsessed with the economics of the body, rather than its meaning.

As Christians our task is to invalidate this modality of thinking. The body has meaning, real meaning not as an object of economic inquiry, but as a living person, someone to be respected and cherished as an individual life.

This cartoon merely reaffirms Jenson’s point in His Systematic Theology II, chapter 6 Sex and Politics

The Inspiration of Scripture and a Fascist Text

Theologies of biblical inspiration are idol factories churning out new and ever changing modes of the same sin, the absolutization of worldly things over against the revelation of God. What a ridiculous position to be in, where a text has the power to judge the son of God, where words that should witness to the divine act of love, are separated from this and used as tools of violence in a world that cannot discern its idols.

We cannot trust our examination of the text’s inspiration. We do not ask how it speaks to us as much as we know it does speak to us because we are seized by it and drawn into the witness of the divine act of love. To ask how it speaks to us, or how inspired it is is to immediately separate ourselves from the situation of faith, and no longer let it have credible voice to challenge our idolatry in the encounter with the image that destroys all others.

Looking at the text is not an acceptable substitute for looking with the text at the world that God has changed through the action that the text bears witness to. This is why the fundamentalist churches are increasingly challenged to speak to the world about Christ. They have forgotten how to look through the text, the absolutization of the text cannot help but make it opaque over against the world that God has sought to change through its witness to the church about this man Jesus.

The text is not God Himself, and to make the text an encounter with God is to forget the Word which God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. You cannot serve the text and Jesus, either the scriptures serve him, or you do not worship Jesus the Messiah of God.

America’s fundamentalist theology is an obsession with control, with coercion, with unquestioned power. Fundamentalism belies America’s obsession with the idea of a fascist state. Looking at the text as an opaque governing body undoes the theo-dramatic beauty of the divine act of the cross and has to reduce it to a blood thirsty God who needs a sacrifice to sedate his fetish with the suffering of the innocent, be they animal or human. Nothing could be more horrific. American theology took this turn due to the absence of God’s action in creation and an objective divine revelation, in the absence of these, coercion and violence are subsumed under the guise of conversion. Thus, Evangelicalism becomes another word for imperialism. Providence as a necessary doctrine still assumes historical intervention, rather than intimate involvement. Penal substitution as the only controlling metaphor for the crucifixion betrays a culture obsessed with war and bloodshed, because the secret of these theologies is their domination by anthropology. In this sense, Feuerbach was right.

This text has become opaque through the nihilism inherent in the Enlightenment. The word for word mechanistic inspiration of scripture is just another word for lack of faith, another word for violence, ultimately it is the most sacred liturgical object of nihilism.

The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com

The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com.

Walter Brueggemann on Psalm 31 and Steadfast Love

Walter Brueggemann is a recently discovered voice of inspiration. This sermon was given at Duke University Chapel on May 15th 2009. I cannot help but be laid bare by this sermon. I love it. This is the work I’ve done for two years, this is what I hope I am like someday when i’m all grown up.

I think Bruegemman is exactly right when he mentions that this is not an ordinary life, it is a life of yieldedness, of faithfulness and waiting. It is a life of trust, of candor and of suffering. The Christian life is extraordinary.

My favorite lines from the homily:

“My Times are in your hands”

“She tastes the bread and it [The Bread of the Eucharist] tastes like faithfulness”

What do you think of this? Any responses?

My Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

It’s an abomination to thank anybody for murder. Whether they are soldiers in this country or any other. Murder is murder. Our exalted rhetoric about the defense of freedom is an abomination, it’s horrific. I do not thank them, not as veterans of this nation, because more than words of thanks they need love from a community that hopes they shall be set free from their burden someday. As humans I stand with them enduring the weight of the evil that comes with killing in the name of a nation state, and its purported ideas of freedom, justice and free consumerism for all. They have fought for empty ideals, vanity and desolation. They are the ones who must live with blood on their hands, and we are responsible too for the blood which they shed. We are guilty of creating societies where bloodshed is praised as heroism, and where the murderous are exalted. We should not celebrate as much as weep. The taking of a single life does infinite damage to the psyche.

On Teaching Scripture

I was recently having a conversation about this issue and hope that this might spur some dialogue.

I think that the teaching of scripture is about the formation of disciplines in the listening audience. It’s teaching them to think in and with the narrative that scripture presents to us. Teaching scripture is less about looking at the text and more about looking with the text at the One it witnesses to.

Theology is at the heart of our preaching whether practical or speculative, whether historical or spiritual, it’s the content of our message that will determine what values are being formed in the congregations we are teachers for. Theology has a very practical voice, as theologians and teachers our imaginative challenge is to understand the text’s voice in such a way that it speaks not to a reality out there, as to the realty we participate in here and now through the revelation of the cross and our call to take up crosses and die as a peaceful community bearing the marks of Christ in our bodies.

Now, while I agree that putting the bible into the hands of individuals is a danger if there is no central visible authority, including the creeds and the sacraments, i think that this can be a somewhat productive exercise if it leads to communal dialogue and poring over the witness together. The scriptures challenge us to wrestle with them, and to know them we must face the challenge that is this haunting book, we must walk away from it, both with smiles and with tears, with rejoicing and great sorrow. Our knowledge of scripture is not and never a mastery of a text, it is a humble reception, a yeilding, and a self-disclosure, as we open ourselves to this story, we will find it opening itself up to our interpretation. This witness shows us a world that is often broken, unjust and painful, we have to be able to recognize it for what it says and live in the haunting world of the text. This text shows us humanity as a broken object. Yet, it teaches us that despite our ideas about the world we find ourselves in, we know the character of God and His faithfulness, and that in itself challenges us to live a different life.

Teaching the scriptures is not atheological, as many of our contemporary low churches would have us assume. Nor is it all theological in a sense that we turn the church into a class of elite super-nerds bashing each other with the text. The first message of this text, the primary message is the crucified God who has shown us that He is for us, who has suffered that we might know the faithfulness of this God. It is not the pastoral task to innovate fresh revelation as has been assumed by some charismatic and third-wave circles. Our task is to understand that what has been given to us is the fresh revelation, and we must look with the text to understand the one it witnesses to. The text speaks in ways that challenge our imaginations to conform to an ever increasing consciousness of a world outside ourselves, a time outside our nations, and a history initiated at creation which culminates in new creation.

The way to live and do theology is prayer. Theology is liturgical at heart and it should seek to create liturgies public and personal for Christian living. Theology is not a set of rational philosophical tenets with no corresponding voice in the world we find ourselves in. Our theological preaching is a dialogue with the Crucified God, and it forms the worldview we live in, as a backdrop, that sets all things within itself. All Christian action, all human action is theological, we must merely ask ourselves which gods and powers we are serving with our preaching and with our lives. The speaker of the message will determine the way its content is read and received, our best task to show the world that Christianity matters is to be that community so shaped by this text in love that we come to trust one another, speak truthfully together, and share the common discipline of following a path alternative to the one the cultures of the world would ask us to follow.

As a charismatic, i would challenge the contemporary “prophets” to remember that the prophetic task is not soothsaying, divination or even a “word from the Lord”, the prophetic task is reading this text rightly, that we might nourish and evoke a consciousness that is alternative to the one the world has to offer. The pastoral task is not to show people they can be more blessed and baptize their greed in Christian language, nor is it to Lord power over them. Our task is to serve them by wrestling with the text, and come along side them, calling them into encounter with the magnificent beauty that is The Lord God of the Cross. Our task is to call them to look with scripture at the world that God has changed and to see it accordingly, to imagine our world, with converted imaginations. Teaching scripture is about knowing the fresh revelation, the self-interpreting word of God which is Jesus Himself and the undeniable glory of his sufferings. The fathomless beauty, the yawning abyss of divine love, which can only open itself wider and wider, to bear all things. Our task is to point to this, and let it shape the way we think, teach, preach and live.

“There can be and should be no non-theologians in the body of Christ.”

-Karl Barth.

A great book expressing this very thing is Stanley Hauerwas’ book A Cross Shattered Church