Provocation on Revisionists, Traditionalists, and Jesus

Revisionists often proclaim Jesus as a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire, while denying or ignoring Jesus as the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity. 

Traditionalists often proclaim Jesus as the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity, while denying or ignoring Jesus as a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire. 

I think the outline of a solution is obvious: Both general trajectories are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. 

Jesus is a radical prophet of the justice of God who overturns Empire BECAUSE Jesus is the Incarnation of God in solidarity with humanity.

Rejecting the Reconquista for Christ's Mission of Inclusion

Earlier this week I found the Reconquista movement, with its Episcopal version, which details a plan to "re-conquer" historic denominations and take over their property, resources, and reputation with a form of exclusionary Christian faith. In these pages, we find "95 Theses" which are a syncretistic mixture of three strands of incompatible ideas: 

First, there are ancient Creedal beliefs about the Triune God, incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ, who works through the Holy Spirit to extend the mission and incarnation of Christ through the sacramental community of the Church. 

Second, there are explicitly Reformed or Calvinist or "Evangelical" framings of the Nature of God and of salvation which are historically rejected by most non-Reformed Christians (such as Catholics, Orthodox, and non-Reformed Protestants). 

Third, there are modernist exclusionary stances to reject certain social/racial critiques, political-economic ideas, and gender/sexual identities, while at the same time implicitly or explicitly affirming other modern categories of race, social structure, politics, economics, gender, and sexuality. 

This is to say they do precisely what they accuse others of doing: They use reformed and modern categories to view and mold the Ancient Creedal Faith, rather than interpreting theology and culture through the lens of the Ancient Creeds. 

God's relationship with the world and culture

This is intended to help us understand how "Scripture speaks" on various topics. I have taken topical outlines I created for preaching and teaching, and reformatted them as articles to provide minimal framing and commentary, so that Scripture passages on certain topics may be collected, read, and meditated on. This is not an exhaustive commentary on Scripture, but rather an opportunity to collect thematic Scriptures together to see the trajectory that Hebrew and Christian Scriptures take, and how they converge and diverge on various topics. This is drawn from my own eclectic reading in Biblical and Systematic Theology, as well as topical resources such as Alister McGrath’s Thematic Reference Bible, Walter Elwell’s Topical Analysis of the Bible, Nave’s Topical Bible, Bible Gateway online, and the Open Bible online. 

In order to understand how to navigate our relationship with the world we live in, and the cultures we are immersed in, we need to understand the relationship of God to our world and the cultures in it. This can be difficult, because at different times in Scripture, there are different relationships between God's people and the world they inhabit, and the cultures that surround them. Sometimes, such as during the Davidic Kings of Judah, God's people were in charge of their culture and were directed to use that culture for the full flourishing of the people in it. Other times, such as during the Babylonian Exile or the period of Roman domination, God's people were called to create their own culture in the midst of cultures that ranged from being apathetic toward God's people, to being actively hostile to them. Despite this diversity of cultural context, there are some common Biblical themes that emerge:

The Politics of God’s Kingdom

For a long time I have said: Wherever there are people, there are politics. Politics are the distinctive ways of organizing a community, ensuring justice and fair treatment for all members, and creating social structures to make it possible to live into those supreme values which the community serves. And make no mistake: Every community has its supreme values, its gods and masters, which it sacrifices for and serves. It may be power or profit or praise or pride or possessions or position. It may be God or gods or kings or supreme rulers or parties or free markets or liberty or control or ideology. But every community serves some set of supreme values. And every community creates structures and strictures and sanctions and stimulus packages to enact those values. 

So, unless we are going to live alone on a desert island, we will have politics because we will live with people. We were made for community. So it isn’t a question of IF we will be political, but HOW we will be political. And this is where I think the Way of Jesus offers a different kind of politics: A Way of Love. Not a way of imposing politics on others by force, but a way of inviting people into a politics of full human flourishing. Not a way of violence and exclusion and coercion. But a Way of healing and inclusion and persuasion. Not join us “or else death!” but join us “because of life!”

The Politics of the Kingdom of God is wholly different from the politics of the world and its crumbling fiefdoms. It calls God’s people out of partisan politics and into a deeper walk with Jesus; Out of step with the world and into step with Christ’s Spirit; Out of faith in parties and politicians and into faithfulness to the Father. Where each decision is not made to advance an ideological platform, but to love our neighbor in concrete ways; To judge situation by situation, and person by person, so we choose the most good and the least evil; The most life and the least death; The most love and the least hate; The most compassion and the least apathy. Because, as Saint Irenaeus reminds us, “the  glory of God is humanity fully alive”, but the death and destruction and degradation of any of God’s children dishonors the One who made them. So vote with ballots as a necessary evil when you must. But vote with Christlike words and deeds every day in every situation with every person God brings into your life. 

Beware of Prophets for Profits

“Think again Sunshine!” Pop-intellectual Jordan Peterson has released a video in which he takes the role of a prophet and tells all Christian churches— Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox— how to do outreach and what our message should be. It is a video in which an exemplar of unhealthy right wing “good think” lobs rhetorical grenades at unhealthy left wing “political correctness” in the name of a religion and a God he himself does not embrace. His central thesis is that young men are burdened with a version of “original sin” experienced as guilt and shame for three overstated reasons, promoted by his enemies such as Derrida and Marx, deconstructionists and cultural Marxists. 

The strangest thing about Stranger Things

We did a marathon of the newest half season of Stranger Things over the last couple of nights. As a spiritual guide, I think the strangest thing about Stranger Things is their ability to reimagine evil as demonic, predatory, grotesque, and cruel, while taking into account our newest understandings of trauma, in a way that is robustly super-natural as well as meta-scientific.  We have allowed people to reimagine wicked demons and evil spirits for an age of quantum physics. 

However, this is not the truly strange part. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Scripture

At the school I serve as chaplain, I was recently asked to provide some Scriptural reflections on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Earlier, I did an essay for my previous school on how these values are rooted in Episcopal Identity and the foundational beliefs and prayers of the Episcopal Church. Not only that, but the Christian vision of God leads us to these values, because the very idea of God as the Trinity leads us to embrace diversity, and the Incarnation of God in Christ leads us to embrace inclusion. These ideas of God are, in turn, rooted in the self-revelation of God which is recorded in Scripture. So now it is time to dig into the foundational texts of the whole Christian Faith, and the founding stories of Jesus and his Apostles, to understand how they inspire us to create communities of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice. 

Resurrecting the Matrix: An Ideological Review

I just saw Matrix Resurrections. Here are my responses in no particular order:

Stupidity as a gateway to Fascism

These excerpts on stupidity as a gateway to fascism are taken from a circular letter, addressing many topics, which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany:

Religious Fascination

I am fascinated by religion, and the process by which humans have created structures and norms and beliefs and practices which allow us to connect with the deepest aspects of who we are, the Source we come from, and the Destiny we are headed toward. I am fascinated by the sheer variety of rituals and art and foods and clothing through which people get glimpses of the Divine. I am fascinated by the constellations of overlapping and diverging beliefs about God and creation and humanity and final destiny. I am fascinated by the process of moral reasoning, through which ancient texts collide with contemporary experience to forge new paths into a (hopefully) better future. I am fascinated by how all of this intersects with our particular place in space and time, in the unfolding of history and culture, to form our sense of personal identity and collective destiny. But to truly study and embrace religion, we also have to embrace something like this insight from Acts:

A Post Pentecost Poem

We Christians love to affirm:

.

Semper Reformanda!

Always reformed

Always reforming!

Until that reformation

Reforms the way we read the Bible

Reforms the kinds of families we approve

Reforms our understanding of how God made us

Through the unfolding dance of evolution

Reforms the ways patriarchy and hierarchy 

Have silenced and sidelined

Women and Queers and Outsiders

So we can at last hear Christ

Speak through them!

.

When Reformation reforms too much

We cling to Tradition

To keep the boundary stones

Firmly in place

Predictably

Immovably

Inertly

In place...

The Great Weariness of “If Only...”

What would you do if only you had the power and knowledge of a god?

Living Vine, Dead Trellis

A poetic reflection on John 15.5 and institutional religion.

Speed Wobble

You know that feeling

When you are cruising down a hill

On a skateboard

Or maybe a scooter or bike

And you get going

Faster

And faster

And faster

Until you are far beyond

Your ability to steer?

Durkheim’s Ghost

At this time of social distance, 

We need shared rituals 

Now more than ever

Even if they are shared 

At a distance 

Over an internet connection 

Or in a choppy livestream. 

.

In an age of 

Alacarte 

Individualized 

Atomized

Disconnected 

Consumerism

We have very few communal rituals 

To bind us together

To remind us

No one is an island

Separate from the main. 

.

And the ersatz rituals we do have

Seek to monetize us

Commodify the experience 

For passive consumption 

As a lifestyle product: 

A sportsball game 

A lackluster blockbuster

A concert of prerecorded audio loops. 

.

So let us embrace 

The communal

The collective

The old fashioned

The traditional

The ritual

The participatory 

As an act of resistance 

Against the totalitarian hedonism 

We are immersed in

And the nihilistic anomie 

It inspires.  

Hope in a Hollow Culture

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 1.2) 

It is easy to lose Hope in a counterfeit Consumer Culture like ours. Outwardly, we appear to have every resource and luxury, but inwardly so many of us are hollow and empty...

Sacred Ideas within Secular Idioms

As a school chaplain I am blessed to live and work with people from all faith backgrounds, and those who claim no religious faith at all. With this in mind, I strive to make our spirituality program at my school "authentically Christian and genuinely inclusive". Thus, I try to shape our chapel program so that it has something to say to everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike. From our prayers to our Scripture readings to our mediations to our sermons, it is my hope that every member of our school community can find something that speaks to their life, and challenges them to grow spiritually and ethically. 

As a result, I frequently try to "translate" Christian texts and concepts into language that speaks more directly to "Religious Others". This is NOT as a substitute for Christian texts and prayers, but as an explanation or interpretation of them. In particular, I like to imagine what Jesus' teachings might sound like if he were talking to postmodern secular people who do not adhere to any formal religion, and who may not have space for "God" or transcendence in their worldview. 

Dark Fate and the bright future of Terminator

I come from a generational fandom of the Terminator movies. My dad loved 1984's Terminator, and took me to see it in the movie theater about a dozen times, where I fell in love with it too. My 11 year old son now loves the Terminator franchise. We have seen all the movies, and regularly tell each other "I'll be back" and "come with me if you want to live". Like the Star Wars franchise, Terminator has had its ups and downs. There are classic episodes, such as 1984’s T1 and 1991’s T2, along with the Terminator equivalent of Jar Jar Binks, such as T3, Salvation, and Genisys. 

I say all of that to say this:

On Dividing and Conquering

A fundamental means of controlling any population is “divide and conquer”. Identify those who are oppressed, abused, and excluded, and then get them to hate one another instead of joining together to overcome those who are oppressing, abusing, and excluding them. Teach them to exclude and diminish other powerless people on the basis of race, culture, religion, origin, citizenship, gender, and sexuality. Then all the powerless will be so busy pointing fingers at each other, they will forget all about those who control the levers of power and shape the system that keeps them in bondage. Give them a scapegoat to hate and they will forget all about those who supplied the scapegoat in the first place. “Us versus them” is the first and foremost way that the powerful keep the powerless under control. Because if the powerless realized their shared cause and common struggle together, no force on Earth could stop them from joining in solidarity to create a more just and compassionate society. United we stand, divided we fall.

To control people, control their stories

"Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." (Romans 12.2)

To control a population, control their imagination of what is possible. Because people will not even attempt what they think is impossible.

To control their imagination, control the stories they hear and the stories they tell. Because stories paint pictures of identity and possibility which go beyond our everyday experience into what could be. So only allow stories to be told which frame what is possible in a way that is most beneficial to those who want to maintain power.