Loving Driscoll, Coulter, Jakes and Osteen.

There are so many people who claim to speak for "Christianity" that I wish to have nothing to do with. I wish they would go away or that someone with authority would tell them that they are not Christians and that they do not speak for Jesus.

But that's not going to happen.

And so I am constantly trying to distinguish who I am and where I stand in opposition to these people. I claim Jesus as well, or rather I hope he claims me, but I do not want to be associated with those who are destructive and hurtful. I might even go so far on my worse days to call their actions (if not their persons) evil. And yet we claim the same Jesus.

What is a boy to do?

On the one hand, I do not support their words or actions. But on the other, they likely wouldn't support mine either. So let me ask you this: regardless of whether or not you agree with me or with some of the names in this title, does your agreement dictate who is or is not a Christian? Are there Christians who disagree with me or I with them? Does that mean they are not Christians? Are there Christians who have done horrendous things throughout the centuries? Does that make them not Christians? Is Christianity predicated on universal agreement with our actions? Is it morally democratic?

Even though I oppose the actions and positions of certain people, I cannot exclude them from the kingdom of heaven because of it.

As if it was my decision to make anyway. But I think we expend vast amounts of energy trying to disallow the perspectives of those with whom we disagree in the hopes that our evangelistic efforts will not fail because of their celebrity. What if instead of this expense we accept these destroyers as fellow destroyers with us, because none of us is above the crest of sin. Nor are we above the authority of others.

Now, I am not saying that we should stop calling these people out. Far from it. When we are actively including even those we find abhorrent into our fellowship we should be all the more diligent in opposing them and calling them to account for their destructiveness because it is our destruction as well as theirs at stake. But we are to do so as fellows, not as others. We may need to articulate how we differ from them, but that difference should never be intended to "other" them. 

I am arguing for a radical inclusiveness that transcends ideological boundaries.

Turns out, this is what we see from Jesus and his followers in the NT. People were included into the kingdom of Jesus despite obvious disagreement. Think about Simon the Zealot chilling out with Matthew the Tax Collector. Neither stopped being what they were (or at least the text does not say so), but rather they partook in the same life together, despite their obvious differences and opposition. 

But I am also arguing for a change in attitude by both the Fundies and ex-Fundies.

Instead of an attitude of hatred and exclusion our attitude must be that of brothers and sisters. We are family, and like any family there will be those who walk into destruction. But what kind of a family is it that does nothing to help those who do so? They are a family in biology only. So yes, I love Driscoll, Coulter, Jakes and Osteen, even though I think they are wrong and destructive. I count them my family-and I will continue to call them out as such. Not as enemies.

The Truth is Human, too

One of the most compelling, ironic, and terrifying passages in the bible for me is John 18. It may sound weird, but I think verse 38 should be seen as one of the most serious warnings for us who study such things.

John 18 finds Jesus before Pilate. After a series of questions, Pilate utters those immortal words- "What is truth?" 

The most obvious aspect to this verse is the irony. In several places (most notably John 14) Jesus has claimed to be the truth. And when he states that "everyone who belongs to the truth listens to me" we should hear his assertion of chapter 14 reverberating through our minds. And so when Pilate asks rhetorically what truth is, we should want to scream "He's right in front of you!"

Yet while we have, over the centuries, established a theological connection between truth and divinity, we balk at the connection between truth and humanity.

See, evangelical Christians are quick to assert that Jesus is the truth. Even if we don't get this turned around, we still maintain that truth is only to be found in Jesus' divinity, and not his humanity. This, I think, is founded on a mis understanding of the warning of Pilate's question; we assume that truth from a human perspective is what Pilate wanted, and it was for this reason that he failed to perceive the truth before him.

But it was not human truth that Pilate was after; it was divine.

In the verses preceding the philosophical despair, Pilate has been asking Jesus if he is a king-he is aware that Jesus is not a human king (see vs 36-37). He is asking if Jesus considers himself a "god" in the Roman sense. When Jesus turns that inquiry on it's ear, Pilate disengages, uttering his infamous words.

This parallels the debates of the early church.

Who was Jesus? Was he a man? A "god?" An Aeon? Was he Messiah? Was Messiah a man? Was he YHWH? The conclusion of millennia is that he was/is both God and human. This has been a foundation of the Christian faith- that Jesus was the Messiah, and as such was both fully God and fully human.

But if this is so, what of the truth of Jesus' humanity?

In Jesus we point to God's unique apprehension of truth. Yet we ignore the complete picture of Jesus; we elevate his divinity at the expense of his humanity. While he is uniquely the truth, the human aspect of that reality cannot be overlooked with pious eyes towards the heavens. This, I think, is actually the warning of Pilate's words. Of course we must take the obvious road as well as the other. But the irony goes deeper than that. We cannot ignore that in Jesus truth is to be found by humans and in humans. Truth is not reserved for the Platonic Forms, but is instead the property of humanity through the revealed incarnation of Jesus the Messiah.

Your humanity does not preclude you from the truth. It enables you to engage it.

Because you are human you may know the truth that sets you free, but it is not found by looking at the sky. It is found by looking at others. It is found by looking at Jesus.

Faith pt III: The Aspect of Trust.

This is going to be a short post. I have a sick baby and my brain is more engaged with that than the work of thinking.


While listening to the sermon at church today, I got to thinking about how trust is a crucial aspect of faith that has nothing to do with belief.

Trust does not need belief.

That's part of biblical faith that defies our ideas about belief and being right; you don't have to be right to trust. I know that sounds dangerous-and maybe it is-but trust does not depend on our construction of reality.

The world you inhabit by trust is not one that you built in your mind.

Trust requires action; requires obedience. Faith calls into action through trust what belief preserves us from. Where belief renders action a secondary priority, trust is the mechanism by which faith is empowered.

We trust in that which we do.

Hebrews 11 states that it was by faith that the "heroes" were able to do great things. But when we look at the way faith is described in the bible, it is always coupled with the motion of trust; "trust in the Lord with all you heart and lean not on your own understanding" (Prov. 3). In this way, belief may be understood as our own understanding; it is not that we give up the search for understanding (which is what we are asked to pursue), but rather we do not trust on a certain type of understanding-our own.

Trust as in marriage.

And so to continue the thought of faith as a type of marriage relationship, the way in which a marriage is faithful is if trust is engaged between the parties. To do faith according to the bible necessarily relies on the trust that keeps a marriage together. The trust that faith brings does not rely on belief, but rather on the faithfulness of the other.

In the sense of a God-Human relationship, faith trusts in the faithfulness of God.

The Objective Fallacy, or, Taking Back the Bible

The fallacy of thinking that we can read anything without doing the work of interpretation has reached critical mass. I find this fallacy most often attached to the bible. Too often I hear Christian leaders claim for their interpretation of the bible absolute authority. It sounds like this (tell me if it rings any bells):

"This is not what I say, it's what the bible says."

This says two things right off the bat. First, it says that the person talking is not honest enough to own their interpretation. Second, it says that they are not actually confident in their own reading and to cover up for their doubt they claim "Scriptural Authority" so as to not deal with objections or arguments. This tactic is both dishonest and destructive.

This is the Objective Fallacy.

The objective fallacy is according the weight and significance of objectivity to something that is highly subjective. It is claiming absolute authority for something that is unworthy of it. It is lying about the authority of your words in the hopes that people will accept your words without holding you responsible for the results they have on the world.

Any thinking person should realize that the words in the bible did not fall from the mouth of God and plop directly into your ear canals. They were written by humans, copied by humans, translated by humans over centuries and millennia.

Society has changed.

The world of the bible is, in one respect, the world of today. People are still people, food is still food. But the social patterns and ways of speaking are very different. This is nowhere more evident than when it comes to reading the bible and understanding exactly what is meant by the words and phrases. On the one hand, we can get a pretty good idea about what certain things mean (death is still death, love is still love). On the other, we're really not sure what many of the phrases in the bible mean to our world today. Additionally, even the words of today require interpretation. I can speak normal, present day English to you and you will have the task of interpreting what I say and mean.

And there is a good chance you will misunderstand me.

My wife and I do this all the time. She will have one thing in her head and I an entirely different thing, and while we each think the other is talking about what we are talking about, we end up on completely different pages. The end result is frustration followed by realization that we were misunderstanding each other. The task of the interpreter is to engage such conversations from within and bring clarity and understanding to them.

And the bible is the same.

I have written about how the bible needs to be interpreted in another blog post, so I won't retread it all here. But I will say that no one reads the bible without interpreting it according to what they know or without the aid of the Holy Spirit. It is neither one or the other, but it is both and the other. However, to ignore your role in the process is dishonest and destructive.

And I am sick of that destruction.

It's time to take the authority of the bible away from those who abuse it and make it guilty of their own error. If you are a pastor or teacher who says things like this, STOP! Own your ish (as my friend Satoshi says). Don't profane the word of God for the sake of getting your way. For the rest of us, stop listening to people who say things like "It's not me, it's the bible." Take back the bible from those who have laid hold of it through violence and have continued to do violence to and through it. Claim your interpretation; do the work; own your ish. And then listen humbly to others who differ from you and see where the Holy Spirit convicts you.

The Cynical Confession of Cynicism

It is, at times, easy to hide my cynicism from myself. I seem to have mastered the art of concealing my attitudes and feelings about certain things in life from myself and thereby from my conscious stream of communication.

Yet sometimes my cynicism makes of itself an obvious presence. Sometimes, given the right circumstances, my cynicism comes pouring out in an obfuse torrent that takes me quite by surprise. This weekend provided one such opportunity for cynicism to flourish, and it yet again surprised and, to be honest, scared me.

The details are somewhat irrelevant, but the epicenter of my cynical ranting was the continual and pervasive proliferation of American Conservativism masquerading as Christianity. This pretension is where I grew up, or rather it was the attitude I took upon myself while undertaking that heavenward development. The circumstances of my extraction from said mental location are numerous and vast, and cannot be adequately explained in such a blog as this, save to say that it has been a slow movement of pain and recognition of betrayal that may or not actually exist beyond the horizons of my brain. But now I harbor such a deep disdain for anything that smacks of such leanings that I cannot contain my feelings and they come roaring out in an undiscriminating profusion.

If it were not so...

Nevertheless I wish it were not so. I wish that I was able to stand at some safe, perhaps even unbelieving, distance from such proceedings and see not a murderous conspiracy of empowered men and social classes to consolidate their control or finances, but instead see the good intentioned souls who wish only to preserve the life and breath of those near and dear to them.

And it is of this wish that I often choose to remain mute.

It is of this yearning for sight that my eyes remain closed and my fingers stuck firmly into my ears so as not to hear or see the events as they unfold around me. I wish I did not know the things I know and had not heard the things I have. Ignorance seems all the more blissful to cynics like me.

And so it is that I chose to hide my cynicism from myself (with the intention that others should not see) so that I may have a voice with those whom I wish to speak. I know that if I just let the cynic out for the evening those who need to hear what I want to say will never give me a bent ear. And so over time I get so used to living in my facade that when the cynic comes out I am surprised and afraid. I do not want to be that person. I want to live in forgiveness and not in cynicism. But how can I ignore the continual barrage of empty rhetoric and sloganeering that only tears off the scabs of those I know and love?

And how can I still love a God and a bible that have been so thoroughly claimed by such brutal and destructive means? How can I hold onto my love of a relationship so depraved and counter to its own designs as Christianity? Either I assert that I am not those people and that Christianity is something else, or I claim them as my people and sacrifice all of my own integrity in the process.

And so I am a cynic, and the circle ends where we began.

The truth is that I am those people. I'll never live beyond the shadows of the pillars I've known all my life. It is an uphill struggle to remain hopeful and optimistic while working towards something that is so unlikely as a reconciliation of humanity. Maybe normal, non-crazy people can "take back the bible" from the extremists and fundamentalists. But that can't be me, because I'm as crazy as the next guy. But I do hope for a reconciliation of humanity. This seems to me to be the bible's hope as well.

The question for me is on who's terms?

None of us speak for God, and none of us are right about what we think about God. I'm sure I'll get a response to this post that answers my question with "God's terms," which will of course mean "my terms." And I'll agree with them, meaning I agree with what they say but not with what they mean. As cynical as ever.

How do I get beyond my cynicism? Do I own it and let it drip from my fangs? Do I hide it as I have been and cut off my right hand so as not to offend someone else?

I think the cure for cynicism is forgiveness, but I've yet to learn how to do that effectively.

On the Wrong Side of History

Have you ever wondered what history will make of the things you are concerned with? This is of course, not to trivialize the things that are real issues (such as earning enough money to buy food, getting enough sleep, etc) that no one in history will ever know about. What I mean are the large scale debates and arguments that seem to have captivated the imagination of our society.

How will history judge our reading of the bible?

Certainly there have been times throughout the course of human existence when the bible was read wrongly. The easiest example of this in recent memory is the position of many in this country (USA) towards dark skinned peoples of African descent; less than human, destined by God for slavery, etc. These positions were argued from the bible; people really thought that this was the bible said. To almost anyone reading such nonsense in the present it is unbelievable. How could anyone think this way? How could anyone read the bible this way?

It's actually easy.

You willingly (or otherwise) are unaware of your own context. You refuse to admit that your experience and opinions about what will better your situation have any bearing on the way you read the bible. But they do, and your best hope at being faithful is to admit that they do, study them, and try to discern how they impact your reading. Once this has been "mastered" find someone who reads it differently and compare the differences and see what informs those differences.

So what about now?

What is the slavery of today? Gender issues? Sexual orientation? Gender roles? Food ethics? Consumer ethics? How do we allow the bible to read us so as to convict us of our wrong-sided-ness? How do we end up on the right side of history (understand I am using the term differently here than "winning")? Confess our filters. Seek out and acknowledge what biases our assumptions leave us with.

And above all, ask yourself if your opinion is influenced by what will gain you something. Are you only looking out for #1?

The Concept of God

It's almost funny how many times I've had a conversation with someone that includes, at one point or another, their confession to having a problem with "the concept of god." Almost funny.
It's funny how things can be almost funny but upon further inspection definitely not funny. How that's funny is beyond me. "Funny" is a funny thing. My response to this almost funny admission has become something akin to well oiled machine:

"That's because God is not a concept."  

I know this seems obvious, but it is worth exposing and highlighting the ways in which our imaginations work against us by insisting that we construct concepts for things we are unsure of. We conceptualize as a way of making sense of things that do not fit within the limits of our constructed reality. It is our cognitive defense mechanism to guard against mystery, and thereby against potential danger.

But why do we need a concept of God?

I think it is because we need a God who is apprehensible to our imaginations. We need an imaginable God. But we are unsure where to find the material needed for our construction of an imaginable deity. This is because we have heard so many theories and concepts about the notion of God that we are unable to decide where to begin. Even the best intentioned of us who attempt to construct an understanding of God from the bible are so filtered and swayed by competing theories and philosophies that we are unable to determine a point of departure.

So how do we stop conceptualizing about God?

And what do we replace the concept of God with? First, we need to realize that God is not a concept but a person. Not a human, of course, in the strict sense, but a person nonetheless. This in turn reveals the answer to the second question: relationship. It is not possible to have a relationship with a concept. And if your relationship with God seems misaligned with your concept of God, it's because your concept is misaligned with God. Or rather, your concept is something other than God. In fact, our concepts are actually a projection of ourselves. We are the concepts of God we seek to have a relationship with. But it cannot be done. There is no one-sided relationship.

So if you, like so many others, struggle with the concept of God, good! You're on the right track.