The Peripatetic Pastor

The Digital Humanities and the Bible

2012-01-11T01:00:00.002-05:00

Semiahmoo, January 10, 2012. In this morning’s Times, Stanley Fish has a provocative piece. His piece—he admits reluctantly that what he writes is a blog—responds to a to a new book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. Fitzpatrick’s book is an examination of what has come to be called “digital humanities”—the humanities in the era of the internet. As Fitzpatrick explains and Fish acknowledges with half a sigh, the literary forms privileged by the internet deconstruct the two essential elements of the older humanities, author and text. “Blogs, links, hypertext, re-mixes, mash-ups, multi-modalities,” to take Fish’s list of internet literary forms, aim not at a finished text but at a continual process of comment and response. Thus, “. . . the notion of ‘text’ loses its coherence; there is no longer any text to point to because it ‘exists’ only in a state of perpetual alteration. . . .” And where there is no text, there is no author in the conventional sense. Writing becomes collaboration.

This vision—presumably Fitzpatrick’s—is “theological,” says Fish, “because it promises to free us from the confines of the linear, temporal medium in the context of which knowledge is discrete, partial, and situated. . . and deliver us into a spatial universe where knowledge is everywhere available in a full and immediate presence to which everyone has access as a node or relay in the meaning-producing system.” This, says Fish, is tantamount to the sort of vision that Milton describes in Paradise Lost as “a mystical dance” of meaning and motion in the presence of God.

Is this one of those period shifts described by Walter Ong in the way humanity approaches knowledge and, therefore, in the way that the human race fundamentally thinks? Perhaps. Ong, writing thirty years ago, suggested that the significance of the transition from print to electronic media was yet to be manifested, and in this, as much else, he was right. At the time the electronic media consisted mostly of the broadcast sort, radio and television. The PC revolution was only beginning, and the internet did not yet exist. Even now, the ultimate effect of the revolution in communication of the past few decades cannot be measured with certainty, but it is certain that the effect will be both broad and deep.

And it will be, in a sense, old as well as new. Every revolution of the sort we are living through not only destroys but restores. In moving towards a process that no longer privileges author and text in the way that author and text were privileged in the heyday of print we are taken back to the Bible, not for what it, the Bible, says but for what it is. For much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, the notions of author and text are problematic. Isaiah, to take one example, is not so much the name of an author as a title for a collaborative process that brought the book into being. And Jeremiah is not so much the name for a single text as for the collections of texts that are grouped under the prophet’s name, the Greek quite different from the Hebrew.

Because those of us who grew up under the hegemony of print assume that author and text are normative, we are uncomfortable with books that lack clear authors and texts that lack clear boundaries. We—I’m speaking of and for Christians, especially Christians in conservative churches—struggle with the conclusions long reached in biblical studies that the Bible was not so much composed as accumulated, accumulated over a long stretch of time by many hands. Perhaps in the new age of digital humanities, what we once found strange will seem, well, normal. Perhaps.

God Cares

2010-02-19T09:34:00.000-05:00

Romans 3:21-26

Now we have to talk about sin. It's not my favorite subject either. We don't even have to call it sin. Let's call it evil. Almost everyone would agree that the world is full of evil. We each have our own pet list of particular evils and our own explanations for why evil exists. Bad government. Bad religion. Bad parenting. Bad genes. Each of these has its own supporters for explaining the evil of the world. But most of us think deep down that the stain of evil is much more a problem for other people than for us. We think that compared to them--whoever the "them" are--we are pretty good. We are pretty happy with the way we are.

But the Bible and biblical faith won't let us off so easily. For two reasons. The first is the that the Bible teaches us that we are caught in a matrix of evil that includes the whole human race. We are in this together. The Bible sometimes calls this the "sin of Adam" (check out Romans 5:12).

A pretty good case can be made for this entirely apart from the Bible or religion. Consider the impact that the human race has had on the earth and on every other creature. Consider how for every age we can document, people have ripped each off, gone to war, taken advantage of the weak. This has been true regardless of how sophisticated we may have become in other areas of life. Our scientific expertise hasn't changed our behavior, just our efficiency in killing and maiming each other.

We are part of this, all of us. It's a worldwide web of evil. Even if we don't want to participate in evil, we do, just by being part of the world order. There is no need to belabor this point. But it's important to see that the Bible doesn't regard evil as a matter simply of what you or I do; it's a vast system in which we are caught like flies in a spider web. From God's point of view, we are all in this together.

That first. The second reason to be dubious about our claim that we are better than most is that we are very good at fooling ourselves about own evil. We tend to overlook what we do that harms others, and we tend to exaggerate the evil that others do to us. Jesus called this failing to see the stick in our eye while we try to remove a speck of dust from someone else's eye. Deep down we know this to be true.

If we can agree about this or, at least, about most of it, here's the good news and the bad news all rolled up together: God cares. This is the point that the Apostle Paul is making in this scripture passage from the letter to the Romans. Paul has just said what I said above, only he does it in more colorful language: "There is no one righteous, not even one," and so forth (see Romans 3:10-18). But then he raises the big elephant-in-the-room question: what about God? If there is a God, is God righteous? Can God be trusted? Does God care?

The answer Paul gives is yes. God cares. He gives this answer in complicated language, but it basically comes to this: God cares about justice. He doesn't just forgive, as if evil doesn't matter. If God did that, then the suffering of countless children, the terrible things that have happened to people throughout the ages, would not matter to God, and then God could be accused of being evil himself.

But this is not the case. God cares. And this means two things. First, that God will bring his justice to bear upon the world. Paul leaves the matter of exactly how God will do this in the future to God, but in raising this, he gives us an implicit warning not be on the wrong side of God's justice. To be on the wrong side of God's justice is to be on the wrong side of history. And baring some kind of intervention, we are all there

That's the bad news. But there is also good news. The good news is that has provided us with a way to be on the right side of history. This is the deep truth of our faith. To catch it, consider the image that Paul uses in this passage. He says that it's as if God for the sake of all of us took the one righteous person, Jesus, and laid him on the altar before All Justice and said, "Take this offering for the sake of my children."

God cares. God cares not only about justice. God cares about us.

2010-02-05T13:59:00.001-05:00

Getting to God (based on John 14:5-14)

I hope that you found the invitation to follow Jesus intriguing. If you follow Jesus long enough, you will notice that he sees the world differently than most people. What did Jesus see that others don't see? Human need, for one thing. Jesus often noticed people who had been ignored by most people for most of their lives. Perhaps he saw them because he wasn't afraid of them. He was so centered in who he was that he was not threatened by the needs of others as we often are. But I think that there is something more to it than that. One of the reasons Jesus was able to see other people was because for him the universe itself was open in a way that it is open to very few people—maybe to no one else before or since. Jesus simply saw more than the rest of us, and at the heart of what he saw was the presence of the one he called Father or rather Abba, which is the Aramaic way of saying Poppa. It's this relationship--his relationship with the Father--that is the key to understanding everything Jesus did and everything he said.

At this point I don't expect you to believe in God. Proofs for God are not lead pipe cinch arguments; on the other hand, neither are disproofs of God. Belief in God is less a matter of argument--although these are interesting--as it is a matter of experience. It's in the experience of God that we come to know God, and once we come to know God, there is little point in arguing about whether or not he exists. He's there. It's a whole lot like our relationships with friends and family. We can't see their thoughts. We can't know directly that they are even having thoughts. But, except in freshman philosophy classes, this doesn't matter much. We know them. We live with them. To the extent that any human being can understand another human being, we even understand them. And more than that, we love them.

Jesus has exactly that sort of relationship with the Father--God. His disciples found this a little puzzling. They wanted to have the same relationship with God that Jesus had. In this passage from the gospel of John, they ask about this. "Show us the Father," says Philip, one of the disciples. He wants to have the same sort of relationship with God that Jesus had. But this Jesus cannot give him (or us either). There can only one relationship of Father and Son. But no matter. We can come to know the Father by knowing Jesus. It's like Father, like Son. This is one of the most audacious and, at the same time, fetching concepts in the entire scope of Christian teaching.

Consider for a moment two different ways to get to know God--granting me for the moment that there is a god. The first is the way that people usually take. They look at all that is, at the existence of the universe, at who we are as human beings, at such concepts as truth and justice and beauty, and they make some educated guesses about who God must be. He must be all powerful, all knowing--that sort of thing. The problem with this is that even if our guesses about God are right, we end up knowing about God but not knowing God. We don't get to know God's heart. If we want this second kind of knowledge--the knowledge of God as a person, God's heart--then the way to such knowledge is to get to know someone who really knows him, who, as a matter of fact is one with him. And that person is Jesus. This is the essential claim of our faith: that if you want to get to know God, get to know Jesus.

There is one more part to this, and this is all a bit mysterious, although every Christian has experienced it: you can have a relationship with Jesus right now. With historical characters, you can read what they wrote (this doesn't quite work with Jesus; he didn't write anything), learn about them from other people, and after a while feel like you know them. But for Jesus--this is what Christians claim--it's more than that. In a mysterious, not entirely explainable, way, Jesus is here, right now, present, alive.

Are you ready for this? If you are, you have taken a huge step towards joining us in the faith. But maybe you are not ready yet.

Simply the Gospel - 3

2010-01-25T09:11:00.002-05:00

As I said in the preface above (the second one), I am going to begin with Jesus. What I propose about Jesus are two things. Neither of them require you to believe anything supernatural about Jesus. You don't have to believe that he was the Son of God or the messiah or anything else--not just yet. Here are the two things:
1. That Jesus taught--not only taught but personally lived out--a way of life that's different from most other teachers, different from the Buddha, from Muhammad, from modern day gurus.
2. That Jesus' way of life--the Jesus Life--works. Or, at least, it offers a way of life that not only makes a difference in individual lives, but if it were lived out, would make a huge difference in the kind of world in which we live.

So what I propose to do (in my sermon in Lent, at least) is describe that way of life, not in my own terms, but in the terms that Jesus used.

Here's what he said: "Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? Or what can you give in exchange for your soul?'" (Mark 8:34-37)

This passage lies at the heart of what Jesus taught. This is why it is at the center of the gospels of Mark and Matthew. At the heart of this teaching is a paradox. The paradox is that the harder you hang on to your life--to what you have and want--the more you will lose them, and the more your open yourself up to the world and to others and even to God, the more you will have of yourself.

What's more, this is a peculiar kind of truth. Some truths can't be evaluated or even fully understood just by thinking about them. You have to live them, try them out. This is that sort of truth. But I am not asking you to buy this truth as a whole way of life. Not yet. I am asking you to try it out in part of your life, to test it. It's likely that you are doing some of this already. We know this truth instinctively, although we often drift away from it.

Remember the movie Wall.E? In Wall.E human beings have become fat, bloated consumers. They do nothing all day. They simply receive. In a soul sense, they are dead. The one earthling that still has soul is Wall.E, the garbage robot, who not only does faithfully what he was created to do, but lives outward. He seeks other living things. He gives of himself. Sometimes movies preach better than churches. The New Testament has a name for this way of life: it's called "love." Not love in the getting sense, but love in the giving sense. The life lived outward.

One more thing: Jesus not only taught this, he lived it himself. This is what frightens us. After all, the cross in the case of Jesus was no metaphor. It was the real thing. He died a horrible death as a very young man. It would seem that to follow Jesus in any literal sense would be to choose a very hard life. Do we really want to do that? Well, yes and no. If you step out after Jesus, you can never rule out a literal cross in your future. So this way is risky. But, as Jesus said, "What will you give for your soul?" Do you want to live a safe life or one that risks everything for the sake of your soul? That’s the Jesus question.

How will you answer it?

Simply the Gospel - 2

2010-01-25T08:58:00.002-05:00

For those who are not (yet) Christians

". . . They have never been offered a version of the Gospel which it took even the slightest effort to reject. They are thus able to buy their atheism or agnosticism on the cheap." Terry Eagleton, 98

I want to invite you to faith. I want to invite you to faith not just because I think this faith is right. If that is the way we approach it together, then it becomes a matter of opinion, yours and mine. No, I want to invite you to this faith because I believe it is the greatest adventure on which a person can embark. It has within it the secret of life. If it's life that you are looking for--the fullest sort of human life--this is the place to go.

But more than that it's the only way of life with a real destination. I don't expect you to believe that. Not yet. In fact, that's the last thing on the agenda, but I thought I should mention it.

A few more things. I am not going to begin where you think I might begin. I'm not going to begin with the Bible. I am not going to try first to prove to you that the Bible is the Word of God so that if you buy that premise, you will have to buy all the rest. I will use the Bible as a guide to what is authentic and not authentic in the faith. One of the things we will have to do in this discussion is separate the authentic gospel from all the imitation gospels that you can find in the air around us and often in the church itself. The Bible helps us to do that. But I am not going to ask you to “buy” the Bible. Not as part of this presentation of the gospel. So save your objections to the Bible for another time.

Second, I am not going to begin with God. Usually in series like this, this is how the argument goes. Arguments for faith typically begin with God, often with an argument for God’s existence or some other kinds of evidence God that God exists. But I am not going to begin there. Taking this approach usually ends up taking us in the wrong direction. More precisely, to the wrong kind of God—the God of philosophers, not the God of Jesus. And, besides, the arguments never quite work. For a fascinating approach (a skeptical one) to these arguments see Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

One more thing--this may set your mind at ease. I am also not going to talk very much about sin, at least not in the usual way that people talk about sin. It's not that sin isn't important--it's part of the story--but rather that sin is not a very promising place to begin in this culture, which really doesn't believe in sin. In our culture, people believe in bad karma or in being messed up psychologically or in bad parenting, but they don't think much about sin. So, we'll get to sin in due time, but it's not where we are going to begin.

Instead, I am going to begin with Jesus. And not with Jesus, Son of God, Messiah, either. I am going to begin much more simply and humbly, with Jesus, the teacher. I have the example of the Gospel of Mark on my side in this. Although Mark declares in the very first verse that his gospel is about Jesus the Messiah (the Christ), it's not until the eighth chapter that anyone openly declares this, and not until Jesus dies that anyone declares Jesus to be Son of God. For the most part, Mark presents Jesus as an intriguing, powerful, often challenging teacher and healer. We will follow Mark's lead in this. What I would like you to buy in the first place is simply that Jesus presents a distinctive and intriguing way of life. Give me that, and much of the rest will fall into place.

I also hope to meet the challenge laid down by Terry Eagleton in the quotation above: I would like to present the faith in a way that will not allow you to buy atheism or agnosticism on the cheap, to present a form of the faith that not only will be difficult to reject but will be true both to the faith and to life. Whether I succeed or not will be up to you to judge, but no matter what happens, you will have given me a chance to think through the faith for myself. Thank you for that.

Simply the Gospel

2010-01-25T08:53:00.002-05:00

A Note for Christians
Suppose you have a non-Christian friend who one day, to your surprise and delight, asks you about your faith: what this faith of yours is all about? Where would you begin? How would you approach the subject? You would, of course, want to tailor your response to the kind of person your friend is. Not everyone is alike. Still, given the time and place in which we live some approaches are likely to be better than others.

Many others have tried their hand at this sort of thing. One of the most famous attempts is C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC talks in the middle of World War II, 1942-44. If you listen carefully to what Lewis has to say you can hear the bombers overhead and air raid sirens screaming. Lewis began his exposition with the uncanny fact that people everywhere and, as far as we know, in every age have had a sense of right and wrong and have had, in addition, the sense that we do more of the latter than the former. He takes this as clue to the existence of Someone who cares about moral order, and this in turn gets him to God. From there, Lewis sorts through different kinds of gods, moves on the existence of evil, Christ, the atonement, and finally, the Christian life. The success of the strategy is patent. Mere Christianity continues to be read more than fifty years after it was published.

In 2006, the New Testament scholar, N. T. Wright attempted an update of Mere Christianity, called, gesturing to Lewis, Simply Christian. Wright begins in the same place as Lewis: with the moral sense imbued in almost all human beings. He adds to this three other hints at divinity: a thirst for transcendence, love, and beauty. It's not a tightly presented argument in the way that Mere Christianity is argues the case. Wright uses these four "echoes," as he calls them, to set a mood. His exposition comes in the next section of the book, where beginning with God, he lays out the faith in biblical order: Israel, Jesus and the Kingdom of God, Rescue and renewal, Spirit and spirituality. It is also a worthy effort, though, I suspect, its shelf-life will be far less than Mere Christianity.

In thinking about this series of messages, I happened (in my own library) on a old volume that achieved neither the popularity of Mere Christianity or Simply Christian, but which in its own way seems to me to address the issue of what the Christian faith is in terms more readily adaptable to our time. It's called The Center of Christianity, and it was written by John Hick, a prominent philosopher. Since writing Center of Christianity Hick has distanced himself from the faith, but in this little book he gently presents the heart of Christianity in a way that I think a secularized citizen of the 21st century might be able to hear it.

It does one more thing, in my estimation. It provides a way for those of us who are Christians to tell the story of our faith that makes sense to us. Everyone of these books, Mere Christianity, Simply Christian, and The Center of Christianity is written not only to those who don't believe but to those who do. How one approaches the faith is determined by and determines what kind of faith you have. For Lewis the intellectual argument that derives from a universal moral sense is crucial. Lewis's faith was, above all, intellectual, suited for the halls of Oxford and Cambridge in mid-20th century. For Wright the faith is first of all the story told by the Bible. His life has been given to elucidating the Bible. For Hick, the center of faith is a relationship with Jesus, but not just any relationship. It's less about who Jesus was in theological terms--the Chalcedonian formula--and more about Jesus as a teacher who guides us into a certain kind of life.

The posts that follow, I would like to lay out this approach. I encourage you to respond with your suggestions and cautions. I am looking forward to the conversation.

TUNE MY HEART TO SING THY GRACE

2009-05-28T12:05:00.005-04:00

“The more you focus on something—whether that’s math or auto racing or football or God—the more that becomes your reality.”

What first caught my attention was the quotation. It’s from Andrew Newberg, a University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist. He was speaking to Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the author of the book, Fingerprints of God, and the National Public Radio religion correspondent.

He—Newberg—was talking about what is called the plasticity of the brain, the way the brain is shaped by what we do with it. In the same NPR story, another scientist, Richard Davidson says, “You can sculpt your brain just as you’d sculpt your muscles if you went to the gym.” But perhaps this is the wrong metaphor. It’s not that we sculpt our brains so much as that we tune them. “Scientists have found,” says Hagerty, “that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.” They are tuned for God.

I write this the Friday before Memorial Day—the traditional beginning of the summer season. This is the time when things begin to slow a bit. Fewer classes. Fewer preparations. More time to reflect, to read, to pray, to plan. The question strikes me: how has my brain been sculpted over the past busy months? What have I been feeding it? For what is it tuned?

I would like to say that it is tuned for God, but I am afraid that if I were hooked up to Andrew Newberg’s scanner, I would discover that my brain is fine-tuned not for God but for the computer—the very computer on which I am writing this piece. I am not alone in this. Our brains are tuned to the virtual worlds of the electronic media: computers, iPods, televisions, cell phones. These are our reality.

No wonder it is hard for us to pray. Our brains are adapted to the jangle and jump of our electronics, not to the still, small voice of God. But I am determined not to let this continue to be the case. There are things we can do. Here are a few of them.

Get outside. Leave all your electronics behind. The phone too. Go to a park, take a walk, sit for a while listening the birds. Meditate on this line from Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

Read something old. The Bible. Augustine’s Confessions. Calvin on prayer. Something that stretches you. Read poetry: something from Mary Oliver or Wendell Berry. Read slowly. Reflect on what you are reading. Write notes to yourself in the margin or in a notebook.

Pray. Simply spend time in the presence of God. On your knees. Or while you walk. Or while you drive. Pray the psalms. Pray the prayers in the Common Book of Prayer. Use a prayer guide. Write out your prayers.

Discipline yourself to turn off whatever you can turn off whenever you can: the computer, the phone, the television, the radio. Seek silence. Seek simplicity. Seek stillness. Get yourself out of the 24 hour news cycle. The news doesn’t change that much.

Spend time in conversation with friends and family. Laugh. Tell stories. Let go of anger. Let go of opinions. Love each other.

In these ways let your mind be tuned to God and to what God has made. Make this your daily prayer:

Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace;

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.

Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;

Praise his name—I’m fixed upon it—name of God’s redeeming love.

Young, restless, and revolting

2009-05-04T15:30:00.002-04:00

There’s a movement afoot, and you should be aware of it. It’s young, passionate, intensely theological, and–this is the surprise–Reformed. Calvinist, in the T.U.L.I.P, five points version. The movement is flourishing in Washington DC, Seattle, Louisville, East Lansing and other trendy spots. You can find an brisk overview of the landscape of the movement in a recently published book by Collin Hansen, editor-at-large for Christianity Today (Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalists Journey with the New Calvinists. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2008. NB: Although Hansen affects a breezy, journalistic style, the book is more advocacy than reportage.)

The heroes of the movement are, besides John Calvin (curiously not much mentioned and then seemingly only out of duty), Jonathan Edwards, the 18^th century American preacher, and, above all, John Piper, the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. (Piper is the author of many books. He has a very active website called www.desiringgod.org. Check it out.)

If, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once claimed, minds tend to be of two types, foxes, those who know many things about many things, and hedgehogs, those who know one great thing, Piper is a hedgehog. The one great thing he knows is the answer to the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Question: What is the chief end of man? Answer: To glorify God and enjoy him forever.

What is singular in Piper is the way he construes those two things: glory and enjoyment. For God, this means, according to Piper, that God seeks above all his own glory and delight. Or, to put this in another way, nothing delights God more than God’s own glory. For humans this means that the greatest delight is the pursuit of the glory of God. Piper calls this last, “Christian Hedonism.” The problem with the usual hedonism, Piper claims, is not the pursuit of pleasure but the pursuit of a too-limited pleasure, the pleasures of the body rather than the pleasures of the soul. The enjoyment of God is the highest good.

There is much that is right about this, but it has always seemed to me that the theology of John Piper is one click off. This is of no great consequence for those who are foxes. Being a click or two off in one area doesn’t mean that the same person a click or two off in another area. But for hedgehogs like Piper, for whom everything is connected into one single idea, error accumulates. Like a compass set a few degrees off, the farther the argument travels, the more distant it gets from the facts on the ground (or, in this case, in the Bible).

An example of this sort of direction drift comes from a Piper article on the theology of suffering, “The Suffering of Christ and the Sovereignty of God” (available on the www.desiringgod.org website). So why does God allow suffering? In particular, why does Jesus have to suffer? The answer—you won’t be surprised at this—has to do with the glory of God.

The argument runs like this. God created the universe to display his glory. The greatest glory of God is displayed in his grace. The grace of God is displayed most beautifully in the cross. Therefore. . . , but let Piper draw the conclusion:

. . . The death of Christ in supreme suffering is the highest, clearest, surest display of the glory of the grace of God. If that is true, then a stunning truth is revealed, namely, suffering is an essential part of the created universe in which the greatness of the glory of the grace of God can be most fully revealed. Suffering is an essential part of the tapestry of the universe so that the weaving of grace can be seen for what it really is.

“Suffering is an essential part of the created universe.” An essential part! So God created a world of suffering for his own glory. Children have limbs hacked off in Sierra Leone for the glory of God. Something has gone horribly wrong in this theology. The problem is one that appears and reappears in some strains of Calvinism. In attempting to make (“make” here in the theological sense) God sovereign, these Calvinists have no room in their theology for the tragedy of human existence and for the suffering of God. They have allowed a theological argument to drive them into unbiblical conclusions.

It’s exactly this sort of theological problem that appears among the new and trendy, restless and reformed, hipsters in Collin Hansen’s book. Towards the end of the book, he comes to Mark Driscoll, the enfant terrible of the new Calvinists. Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle (not affiliated in any way with Mars Hill in Grand Rapids). He has become somewhat famous for combining two things: a conservative theology and a kind of liberal lifestyle. He is a Baptist who drinks. Drinks, and uses coarse language in the pulpit. He does this while telling people that men are the head of the household, and gays are wrong, and God hates us in our sin.

In an interview, Driscoll accused another new brand of Christianity for being too soft. In the emergent church movement, he claims:

There is a strong drift toward the hard theological left. Some emergent types [want] to recast Jesus as a limp-wrist hippie in a dress with a lot of product in His hair, who drank decaf and made pithy Zen statements about life while shopping for the perfect pair of shoes. In Revelation, Jesus is a prize fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.

You get the picture. This is a posturing, male-oriented, swaggering Christianity. It has a misogynistic underbelly. I read Hansen’s book on the plane between Detroit and California. I put it down with disgust. I picked up another small book, Five Pillars of the Spiritual Life (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2008) by Robert Spitzer, a Jesuit father and the president of Gonzaga University. One of the paragraphs near the end of this fine and inspiring book goes like this:

Knowing that the religious authorities sought to persecute him, Jesus set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem because he had a plan, a plan to give himself totally through his self-sacrificial death. . . . In the gift of His love, he becomes our scapegoat, our paschal lamb, and the blood guaranteeing the covenant of eternal life. Consider that he gave himself over to take the place of a sacrificial animal in actualizing unconditional love in his very person so that the new covenant would not only forgive sins, but bring eternal life to all who accepted it.

To paraphrase Driscoll, this is a guy and a God I can worship. His is not the strength of the sort of bullies who turn out in the end to be weaklings, but the quiet strength of those who do what needs to be done.

May 4, 2009

Stones Crying Out

2009-03-31T13:14:00.004-04:00

Next week (April 5) is Palm Sunday. The reading--the Palm Sunday story--is Mark 11:1-11. Our Lenten Fellowship Groups have been discussing the readings for Lent the week before we read them and comment on them in church. This past week the groups were poring over the Mark account of Jesus' ride into Jerusalem on a colt.

One of the Lenten Fellowship Groups raised a couple of interesting and important questions about the text for this coming Sunday (April 5; see the comment section of the blog):

1. In Luke 19 what does Jesus mean by "the stones crying out?" Does this mean that if Jesus had not had his triumphal entry, that something else would have taken place to announce his kingship? We suppose that it could mean that the time was so ripe that something had to happen because the prophesy had to be fulfilled.

2. The accounts in Mark and Luke differ in what happens after the triumphal entry. Does the chronology of these accounts meaningful or true to the way they really occurred? Of do we know?

Let's begin with the stones. The little side story about the Pharisees wanting Jesus to restrain his followers, perhaps because they knew how dangerous this sort of demonstration could be, is only found in Luke. Jesus responds by saying that if his followers were silent, the stones would cry out. This may be a glancing reference to Habakkuk 2:11: "The stones of the wall will cry out." But we don't need Habakkuk 2:11 to catch what Jesus had in mind. We have only to look a few verses later. In Luke's version of the Palm Sunday story, as Jesus arrives near Jerusalem, he begins weeping. Out of his tears he prophesies the siege of Jerusalem--an event which actually occurred some 40 years later. He ends his description of the siege with these words, "They will not leave one stone on another, because you did recognize God's coming to you" (44). There you have it: the stones, the debris of fallen Jerusalem, cry out the judgment of God.

The second question is concerned with the differences among the various gospel accounts for this story (and others). This is a very large question, but here I have only a couple of comments. Each gospel has its own "take" on the Jesus story. There is broad agreement--much more agreement than many critics admit--but there are also differences. Mark is probably the earliest gospel. Both Matthew and Luke used Mark as the basis for their gospels. John's gospel is separate and requires much more comment. I will leave that for another time.

In the case of Luke's account of Palm Sunday, he has taken the Mark account, added material from other sources (the comments of the Pharisees and Jesus' comment about the stones crying out, for example), and then compressed it into a single account that includes not only the story of the entrance into Jerusalem but Jesus' lament for the fall of Jerusalem. This is a creative process, which is not to say that Luke makes it up. He takes the traditions about Jesus and combines them in a way that present his (Luke's) particular way of understanding Jesus and the gospel.

This is not so different from what modern historians do. Telling a historical story requires two things: sources and imagination. The sources only tell us so much. We also have to imagine ourselves into the story. Each gospel writer does this in a different way.

2009-03-20T11:17:00.003-04:00

Each summer I lay out the sermons for the coming year (September through June). What will I preach for the fall, for Advent, Epiphany, Lent, and Eastertide? What themes fit the times and the congregation? What has not been said lately? Am I beginning to repeat myself? I ask myself these and other questions. I read books. I go for walks. I take suggestions. I hope to have a whole year plan with details about each sermon: title, text, and a descriptive paragraph.

I succeed with this exercise in varying degrees. For the fall and Advent seasons I usually have titles, texts, and descriptions for each sermon written out and handed to the music staff by the end of July. For Epiphany and Lent perhaps a little less detail, themes and texts, say, but not titles or descriptions. For Eastertide, even less: a suggestion or two for a series. As the year goes along I fill in the gaps. So it has been for this year. We are in the middle of our Lent series, Reasons for Jesus. Eastertide and the season after Eastertide (Pentecost and beyond) are coming. Today I am working on the last series for this academic year, 2008-2009. Filling in the gaps.

What I have in mind is a series on the life of the Apostle Peter. We did this sort of thing last year in the same season with David. With both David and Peter their successes and failures are of a piece. What made them great often brought them down. Pondering their lives makes us ponder our own. What is the arc of my life? Of yours?

Soon I will be about this work for next year, 2009-2010. What themes, texts, issues should be addressed in our messages for the coming year? Let me know what you think. We are in this together.