Dissonance
"The term method refers to a way or means of disclosing truth…it follows a three-step movement from the compactness of primary understanding through analytical exposition toward theological construction… we begin at the level of symbolic understanding…we engage in exposition or analysis…this leads to constructive theology” (35).
How does the theologian know? Peters would have us begin the task of knowing with biblical symbols, which one might define as gospel interpreted through scripture, reason, tradition, and experience – though for Peters the gospel itself interprets scripture, suggesting a certain essential back-and-forth that Peters does not always seem to recognize.
Yet to begin the process of theology with the symbols that are to be explicated puts something of the methodological cart before the motivational horse; in clearly elucidating how we might (or must, if we take Peters at his word) go about systematic theology, Peters here proposes a model for thinking about God which contains no awareness of why we might do such theology in the first place.
I propose that a model of systematic theology which begins with its own origins would be more powerfully explicatory and no less systematic than the project which Peters proposes, as both trees of knowledge would yield the same theological fruit.
So that where Peters says that symbols are reality detectors (36), I say that reality is a symbol detector. In other words, theology is less the church thinking about its belief and more belief thinking about why it might go to church. Theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, answering Augustine’s question of ‘what do I love, when I love my God?’ I would hope that this would be the origin of any theology, however systematic.
I would hope that explaining the significance of the gospel (82) would in fact begin with some sort of relation to, some sort of experience of, the relational God the gospel is about. By omitting persons from either end of the theological process, Peters has created for the church a method of theology which most any atheist might engage in.
Which is not to say that the method is wrong, but is to say that it strikes one as incomplete. If we begin our theological system not with the originary symbols of Christianity but with the experiences that make us Christian (including symbols). We can indeed have no experience apart from symbols, and one might well interpret the same religious experience differently depending one one’s available symbolic system, but Peters would seem to locate the meaning of that event in relation to its symbols.
Most would not do this; the true test of a hypothetical is not whether or not it corresponds to any particular symbol, be it Christian or no, but in whether or not it describes the reality of a particular experience. Symbols, even the gospel, are only meaningful insofar as they illumine the spectrum of reality evidenced by Peters’ prism.
To elucidate a broader method for systematic theology would escape the bounds of this paper, but were one to say “The term method refers to a way or means of explicating truth. It follows a four-step movement from existential intuition through symbolic illumination and analytical exposition toward theological re-construction. We begin with experiential incomprehension,” then one would at least be beginning the method with the reason for the method.
While Peters does incorporate experience in his model, he offers it little value; by restoring its more obvious pride of place, the God our theological system addresses becomes not only the historic Christ alluded to by symbols, but the lived reality of God still present and active in the world.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
on God, the World's Future: Consonance
Consonance
“The keys to a postmodern hermeneutic are suspicion and trust” (46).
At its base, at its best, postmodern thought might well be summarized as a profound realization of human limitation. The symbols that ought to lead us into the path of truth we take with us instead, using them to baptize our basest cruelties and most sinful and unwarranted desires. We trust that our traditional religious symbols will not betray us, but we betray the better angels of our traditions instead.
Too eagerly, we assume that, rather than being led to our eventual God by the metaphors of our theology, we are in fact already there and those symbols are clearly manifest in our persons and our practices, as opposed to anyone and everyone else’s.
But we cannot abandon religious symbols, for they are all in some sense that we have, we always already have them – if we allow that religious symbols can be manifested by those who are not manifestly religious, if even Neanderthals can care about how they bury the dead.
To escape religion then is not to escape the thinking that produces religious symbols, but simply to swap them out for some alternative. The problem is not the symbols, but our attitude. What the Greeks would call hubris is not confined to those who share the scandal of the Cross.
Everyone gets religious symbols; what we must consider is whether or not our own offer explicatory power, and what precisely our own best symbols are. To test these we assume that they are true, we take them on faith; symbols are in fact the currency of faith: “in God we trust.”
We take our symbols from our traditions and cast their net upon the world to see what they might catch, and we cannot fish alone; we actually belong to grand fishing traditions, fish are a prime denomination of our faith.
And all we know about money is that it cannot abide alone. To buy and sell is a relational transaction, to cast the net of our assumptions into the marketplace of all ideas. This does not work if I alone believe. We believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth. The economy of faith requires more than one person, just as it takes more than one person to haul a net, and a crisis of faith in money or in fish can bring the whole world down.
And already we see something of a yield, for we see in that other master an unholy trinity of seller, buyer, and sold, the content a serious challenge to faith in God but the dynamic a potential model of how the God of faith might function; no component of this transaction exists in and of itself economically, but each exists by and for each of the others, however much the seller might have originated the transaction, if not the want which resides in the spirit of all human buyers.
But still we must say that something fishy is going on, because ours is a family business, operated not on the principle of the wants of desire, not on the machinations of greed, but on the gifts and graces of the needful economy of love. Jesus sells himself, does more wonders than all the ads of the world could tell.
There is always plenty of fish for everyone – good enough news, we might say, to net just about anyone. So our net profit is not measured in goods or worldly gains but solely on the hiring of new hands, no matter what time they come. Many hands make light the yoke, and ease the burden to a fish breakfast by the sea. This is the ad par excellence, the copy by which read all our other copy.
And like all the best ads, Jesus is both expected and surprising, innocent and alluring, a provocateur with more lives than anyone might have guessed. But unlike all ads, better than any ad, there is no regret for what he’s selling. There is no buyer’s remorse for love, however costly it might be. Like fish themselves, love is both sold in fine restaurants and best cooked over a pit by the sea – its price is precisely what we decide it is.
The most fluid of consumables is that which we cannot possibly consume, a meal which, like fish again, offers almost infinite sustenance but rarely satiation. Is that worthless? Or is that worth everything we have?
The offering of Jesus is most suspicious indeed, too good, in fact, to correspond to any known reality. But the question of our trust is whether, in fact, this offering is too good to be anything but true, scandalous not because it fails to explain the world but because it cannot help but change it.
“The keys to a postmodern hermeneutic are suspicion and trust” (46).
At its base, at its best, postmodern thought might well be summarized as a profound realization of human limitation. The symbols that ought to lead us into the path of truth we take with us instead, using them to baptize our basest cruelties and most sinful and unwarranted desires. We trust that our traditional religious symbols will not betray us, but we betray the better angels of our traditions instead.
Too eagerly, we assume that, rather than being led to our eventual God by the metaphors of our theology, we are in fact already there and those symbols are clearly manifest in our persons and our practices, as opposed to anyone and everyone else’s.
But we cannot abandon religious symbols, for they are all in some sense that we have, we always already have them – if we allow that religious symbols can be manifested by those who are not manifestly religious, if even Neanderthals can care about how they bury the dead.
To escape religion then is not to escape the thinking that produces religious symbols, but simply to swap them out for some alternative. The problem is not the symbols, but our attitude. What the Greeks would call hubris is not confined to those who share the scandal of the Cross.
Everyone gets religious symbols; what we must consider is whether or not our own offer explicatory power, and what precisely our own best symbols are. To test these we assume that they are true, we take them on faith; symbols are in fact the currency of faith: “in God we trust.”
We take our symbols from our traditions and cast their net upon the world to see what they might catch, and we cannot fish alone; we actually belong to grand fishing traditions, fish are a prime denomination of our faith.
And all we know about money is that it cannot abide alone. To buy and sell is a relational transaction, to cast the net of our assumptions into the marketplace of all ideas. This does not work if I alone believe. We believe in one God, creator of heaven and earth. The economy of faith requires more than one person, just as it takes more than one person to haul a net, and a crisis of faith in money or in fish can bring the whole world down.
And already we see something of a yield, for we see in that other master an unholy trinity of seller, buyer, and sold, the content a serious challenge to faith in God but the dynamic a potential model of how the God of faith might function; no component of this transaction exists in and of itself economically, but each exists by and for each of the others, however much the seller might have originated the transaction, if not the want which resides in the spirit of all human buyers.
But still we must say that something fishy is going on, because ours is a family business, operated not on the principle of the wants of desire, not on the machinations of greed, but on the gifts and graces of the needful economy of love. Jesus sells himself, does more wonders than all the ads of the world could tell.
There is always plenty of fish for everyone – good enough news, we might say, to net just about anyone. So our net profit is not measured in goods or worldly gains but solely on the hiring of new hands, no matter what time they come. Many hands make light the yoke, and ease the burden to a fish breakfast by the sea. This is the ad par excellence, the copy by which read all our other copy.
And like all the best ads, Jesus is both expected and surprising, innocent and alluring, a provocateur with more lives than anyone might have guessed. But unlike all ads, better than any ad, there is no regret for what he’s selling. There is no buyer’s remorse for love, however costly it might be. Like fish themselves, love is both sold in fine restaurants and best cooked over a pit by the sea – its price is precisely what we decide it is.
The most fluid of consumables is that which we cannot possibly consume, a meal which, like fish again, offers almost infinite sustenance but rarely satiation. Is that worthless? Or is that worth everything we have?
The offering of Jesus is most suspicious indeed, too good, in fact, to correspond to any known reality. But the question of our trust is whether, in fact, this offering is too good to be anything but true, scandalous not because it fails to explain the world but because it cannot help but change it.
Editorial: What Kind of Day Has It Been
I wouldn't usually go down such a bloggish route, but so many people have asked me in so many contexts, and with such evident hope on their expectant faces and in their bright and earnest tones, I thought I might answer it definitively here.
Q: So, how do I like seminary?
A: Well, I don't guess I care for it all that much.
I do hate to disappoint good people. But there are reasons, and reasons I hope will not necessarily endure, and reasons to hope I might endure myself.
The largest problem is no doubt my massive tendencies toward lateral thinking, toward parallel thinking, in a pretty solidly linear world. Which is to say that I'm trying to see the forest while people keep throwing trees at me. It has ever been thus in my academic career. My grades each semester from high school onward betrayed a distinctively upward turn, and so did my comprehension.
The point is not my scores, which haven't happened yet, but that I'm absorbing enormous amounts of information without hardly any time to process any of it. For the eureeka moment to occur, you actually have to stop and take a bath. For any and every light to dawn, I have had to hold each time to patience, however hard and implausible such a course may seem anew at each beginning. I'm reminded, particularly, of my semester of study at the Oregon Extension, and that turned out well.
Which doesn't make me any less frustrated now, of course.
The second, and equally persistent problem, we might well call socialization. It is strange that I enter seminary with MORE of essentially the same attitude I started college with: that I'm here to take classes, and everyone else is pretty much incidental. At the same time, however, I now have an actual theological stance, an actual existential conviction, that everyone else is to some degree all that ultimately matters.
It puts one in quite the schizophrenic state of mind: when I seclude myself in my room to read, I wonder if I ought instead to be in the lounge making connections, and when I stop where someone has some kind of collectible card deck going, I feel all the hounds of academia on my heels, so that I haven't been comfortable, haven't been at rest, ever, in any context or in any situation, never mind that my self-consciousness means I feel that, not only should I NOT be doing whatever I'm doing right now, I should ALSO be doing it BETTER - I should open up more AND be more academically focused, all at the same time and in the first few weeks of term and in complete contradiction to whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
Yup, those are pretty much my expectations, and, much as I might to have an off-button for them somewhere, I haven't found that yet. Can't turn off the brain. A situation hindered only a little bit by my not taking the orientation week while I was moving in, and much more by my not taking introductory Greek along with every other warm living body this summer. It's not that I don't know anyone, that's to be expected. It's that I'm one of basically three people who don't know anyone, and the other two are pretty much never around.
Third, I am not a Lutheran, and am certainly not as much of a Christian's christian as most of the people here. A few years ago, I decided, definitively, that I no longer wanted to be a better person, ever, and now I go to class with people who want to be pastors. I said that I was getting out of Paul's race, not pressing onward to the goal, because it looked too much like a treadmill and I don't have that kind of energy, and now I go to class with many people whom, if my experience is any indication, actually want to be a little bit like Paul. Mission this, mission that, discipleship this, discipline that, and all I want to do, personally, is sit in my room and think.
And I mean, I think that's not so much not wanting to go out of my comfort zone as it is my not wanting to go outside of my interest-zone, because I realize more than I did when I was in college that life is short and I don't owe anything to anyone but myself and my God. But it makes me feel like less of a Christian, and makes me wonder why I'm in seminary at all if all I wanted was the credits necessary to land in a PhD program.
Which is not what you need to be doing to start off the first semester, because how serious are these concerns and how much of them is just anxiety in the face of newness, a perpetually human and personal problem?
Finally, and this is the most serious concern, the intellectual climate here is more conservative and modern to my more post-liberal postmodern ways. This isn't a deal-breaker so much as it is simply and certainly annoying. Everyone here sees the possibilities for Christianity in postmodern thought and then says, 'but there's danger there' and backs away and runs their little flag up some position taken fifty years ago. Which, I mean, I've lived in dissent for most of my life, but in the last few years I've met mostly only warm regard and have gone very much my own way, and I admit I've gotten more than a little used to it.
And I want to agree with everyone. If I can find a way to argue myself into agreement with you, I will in fact do it.
But now somewhere stands up there and says that 'theology is the church thinking about its belief,' and I think 'what a horrible, awful, stuffy and institutional thing to say.' Or someone says that symbols precede experience in the methods of theology, and I think, 'well, maybe, but why do it then?'.
And it's not that I overwhelmingly disagree with these things - I would swallow that theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, or that symbol and experience and theology itself cycle through our relationship to God and self alike so that to put one in front of the other is a distinction without a difference. But it is to say that I'm annoyed and tired by the process of having to argue my way there, and trying to decide if such a jaunt is worthy of mentioning in class when the discussion never goes remotely in any such direction, and I suspect I might ultimately agree anyway.
This week, I looked up the Institute for Christian Studies, the source, via my favorite professor's own education, of most all of my own idiosyncratic leanings.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how all this turns out.
Q: So, how do I like seminary?
A: Well, I don't guess I care for it all that much.
I do hate to disappoint good people. But there are reasons, and reasons I hope will not necessarily endure, and reasons to hope I might endure myself.
The largest problem is no doubt my massive tendencies toward lateral thinking, toward parallel thinking, in a pretty solidly linear world. Which is to say that I'm trying to see the forest while people keep throwing trees at me. It has ever been thus in my academic career. My grades each semester from high school onward betrayed a distinctively upward turn, and so did my comprehension.
The point is not my scores, which haven't happened yet, but that I'm absorbing enormous amounts of information without hardly any time to process any of it. For the eureeka moment to occur, you actually have to stop and take a bath. For any and every light to dawn, I have had to hold each time to patience, however hard and implausible such a course may seem anew at each beginning. I'm reminded, particularly, of my semester of study at the Oregon Extension, and that turned out well.
Which doesn't make me any less frustrated now, of course.
The second, and equally persistent problem, we might well call socialization. It is strange that I enter seminary with MORE of essentially the same attitude I started college with: that I'm here to take classes, and everyone else is pretty much incidental. At the same time, however, I now have an actual theological stance, an actual existential conviction, that everyone else is to some degree all that ultimately matters.
It puts one in quite the schizophrenic state of mind: when I seclude myself in my room to read, I wonder if I ought instead to be in the lounge making connections, and when I stop where someone has some kind of collectible card deck going, I feel all the hounds of academia on my heels, so that I haven't been comfortable, haven't been at rest, ever, in any context or in any situation, never mind that my self-consciousness means I feel that, not only should I NOT be doing whatever I'm doing right now, I should ALSO be doing it BETTER - I should open up more AND be more academically focused, all at the same time and in the first few weeks of term and in complete contradiction to whatever I happen to be doing at the time.
Yup, those are pretty much my expectations, and, much as I might to have an off-button for them somewhere, I haven't found that yet. Can't turn off the brain. A situation hindered only a little bit by my not taking the orientation week while I was moving in, and much more by my not taking introductory Greek along with every other warm living body this summer. It's not that I don't know anyone, that's to be expected. It's that I'm one of basically three people who don't know anyone, and the other two are pretty much never around.
Third, I am not a Lutheran, and am certainly not as much of a Christian's christian as most of the people here. A few years ago, I decided, definitively, that I no longer wanted to be a better person, ever, and now I go to class with people who want to be pastors. I said that I was getting out of Paul's race, not pressing onward to the goal, because it looked too much like a treadmill and I don't have that kind of energy, and now I go to class with many people whom, if my experience is any indication, actually want to be a little bit like Paul. Mission this, mission that, discipleship this, discipline that, and all I want to do, personally, is sit in my room and think.
And I mean, I think that's not so much not wanting to go out of my comfort zone as it is my not wanting to go outside of my interest-zone, because I realize more than I did when I was in college that life is short and I don't owe anything to anyone but myself and my God. But it makes me feel like less of a Christian, and makes me wonder why I'm in seminary at all if all I wanted was the credits necessary to land in a PhD program.
Which is not what you need to be doing to start off the first semester, because how serious are these concerns and how much of them is just anxiety in the face of newness, a perpetually human and personal problem?
Finally, and this is the most serious concern, the intellectual climate here is more conservative and modern to my more post-liberal postmodern ways. This isn't a deal-breaker so much as it is simply and certainly annoying. Everyone here sees the possibilities for Christianity in postmodern thought and then says, 'but there's danger there' and backs away and runs their little flag up some position taken fifty years ago. Which, I mean, I've lived in dissent for most of my life, but in the last few years I've met mostly only warm regard and have gone very much my own way, and I admit I've gotten more than a little used to it.
And I want to agree with everyone. If I can find a way to argue myself into agreement with you, I will in fact do it.
But now somewhere stands up there and says that 'theology is the church thinking about its belief,' and I think 'what a horrible, awful, stuffy and institutional thing to say.' Or someone says that symbols precede experience in the methods of theology, and I think, 'well, maybe, but why do it then?'.
And it's not that I overwhelmingly disagree with these things - I would swallow that theology is the body of Christ pondering the inclinations of its heart, or that symbol and experience and theology itself cycle through our relationship to God and self alike so that to put one in front of the other is a distinction without a difference. But it is to say that I'm annoyed and tired by the process of having to argue my way there, and trying to decide if such a jaunt is worthy of mentioning in class when the discussion never goes remotely in any such direction, and I suspect I might ultimately agree anyway.
This week, I looked up the Institute for Christian Studies, the source, via my favorite professor's own education, of most all of my own idiosyncratic leanings.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how all this turns out.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Pressed: on the Fall of Jerusalem
One might well consider the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD to be a primarily Jewish event. But the circumstances of the time precluded it being solely a Jewish event, and its impact must resonate for Christians, at the very least, to the same degree to which the destruction of the Temple affected Jewish-Christian relations. One wonders how we might have regarded our mother faith if we had not been so externally separated from it. Titus might have failed, in destroying the Temple, to more completely abolish the Jewish and Christian religions, but one can say with little difficulty that he succeeded in further separating them.
That this occurred just as Christianity was trying to define itself and define its relations with Jews might indeed have set them on more swiftly diverging courses. Not only did this force Christians and Jews to physically relocate, it moved the center of the faith for both religions outward from Jerusalem – to the synagogues for Jews, to the Gentiles for the Christians. This meant Rabbis and Bishops as well as Mishna and written Gospels and Epistles placed in the hands of Jewish and Christian congregations alike.
Not that these developments were not parallel – one can readily see that they were – but that the similar developments in both faiths allowed them to become more different and distant over time. Jesus had once spent a lot of time critiquing the Temple system, one that was now forfeit. Even he didn’t argue with the synagogues, so one imagines the Christians finding new ways to occupy their time. Mishna might have continued commentary on the Torah, but Epistles favored commentary on the Gospels. Pauline proclamations of Christ’s sacrifice won out over Jesus’s own proclamations of the Kingdom of God prefigured in the Old Testament. Paul won out over Peter even as Christians claimed the Jewish God-fearers.
How does this affect us today? Well, we don’t circumcise, for starters; we don’t keep kosher, and we certainly don’t think that Leviticus is the center of the Pentateuch. Most of us wouldn’t recognize the Shema if we heard it, and we don’t list among our creeds anything about our ancestor being a nomad. The Kingdom of God is poorly understood, many believe that Grace replaces rather than fulfills the Law, and we are able to be more distantly sympathetic than intimately opposed to our Jewish associates.
Both Christians and Jews, for example, await the ingathering of the other at the end of days, because we are affiliated but believe each other simply to be mistaken. We agree that God is one but disagree on the culture in which one God might best be worshipped. This is not to say that there are not theological differences, but it is to say that Jews and Christians no longer spend their time debating the identity of Jesus as Messiah. We’re still certain that we’ve found him (though in a more abstract way) and many Jews, for all practical purposes, have stopped looking. The hottest of the hot buttons has very much cooled; I will tear this Temple down and rebuild it in three days is not the subject of much popular commentary.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the questions we have not yet settled that have most bitterly divided Christian and Jew, and those considered determined even in disagreement that have allowed our best inter-faith relations. That the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD helped to settle those disputes seems highly probable; that the desecration by Gentile armies of the holiest of Jewish holies might have actually helped decide that they would eventually relate to each other in better ways seems more surprising, but nonetheless fortuitous.
Benjamin Shank
That this occurred just as Christianity was trying to define itself and define its relations with Jews might indeed have set them on more swiftly diverging courses. Not only did this force Christians and Jews to physically relocate, it moved the center of the faith for both religions outward from Jerusalem – to the synagogues for Jews, to the Gentiles for the Christians. This meant Rabbis and Bishops as well as Mishna and written Gospels and Epistles placed in the hands of Jewish and Christian congregations alike.
Not that these developments were not parallel – one can readily see that they were – but that the similar developments in both faiths allowed them to become more different and distant over time. Jesus had once spent a lot of time critiquing the Temple system, one that was now forfeit. Even he didn’t argue with the synagogues, so one imagines the Christians finding new ways to occupy their time. Mishna might have continued commentary on the Torah, but Epistles favored commentary on the Gospels. Pauline proclamations of Christ’s sacrifice won out over Jesus’s own proclamations of the Kingdom of God prefigured in the Old Testament. Paul won out over Peter even as Christians claimed the Jewish God-fearers.
How does this affect us today? Well, we don’t circumcise, for starters; we don’t keep kosher, and we certainly don’t think that Leviticus is the center of the Pentateuch. Most of us wouldn’t recognize the Shema if we heard it, and we don’t list among our creeds anything about our ancestor being a nomad. The Kingdom of God is poorly understood, many believe that Grace replaces rather than fulfills the Law, and we are able to be more distantly sympathetic than intimately opposed to our Jewish associates.
Both Christians and Jews, for example, await the ingathering of the other at the end of days, because we are affiliated but believe each other simply to be mistaken. We agree that God is one but disagree on the culture in which one God might best be worshipped. This is not to say that there are not theological differences, but it is to say that Jews and Christians no longer spend their time debating the identity of Jesus as Messiah. We’re still certain that we’ve found him (though in a more abstract way) and many Jews, for all practical purposes, have stopped looking. The hottest of the hot buttons has very much cooled; I will tear this Temple down and rebuild it in three days is not the subject of much popular commentary.
Paradoxically, it seems to be the questions we have not yet settled that have most bitterly divided Christian and Jew, and those considered determined even in disagreement that have allowed our best inter-faith relations. That the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 AD helped to settle those disputes seems highly probable; that the desecration by Gentile armies of the holiest of Jewish holies might have actually helped decide that they would eventually relate to each other in better ways seems more surprising, but nonetheless fortuitous.
Benjamin Shank
Dissonance: on Peter's 'God, the World's Future'
Dissonance
While Peters is right, and creatively so, to suggest a reconstructive third reading to Ricouer’s critical second one, and to do so manifestly as a hopeful gesture, one wonders if, in too easily returning to rest and reassurance he has somewhat missed the rigors and possibilities of that troublesome second glance. In finding a strange new shore he seems sometimes to have, like Chesterton’s wandering British sailor, once again discovered London.
“What is needed is a theological method that assumes that both ancient and modern understandings belong to a single and more inclusive tradition-history – to a single story – and that this…will eventually participate in one comprehensive story of humankind on earth” (16). The very sentence might make Hegel stand up and shout for joy, but this is precisely the solution that postmodern consciousness prohibits.
There is no Story. They are only stories, which may indeed be greater than the sum or their parts but which one finds it almost impossible to imagine that they will ever coalesce. What this means for Christianity may indeed be troubling, but one does not get to post-postmodernism by leaping over Derridean wastes and claiming the journey was comprehensive.
The coming of the Kingdom of God is not a super-card that trumps all others on the deck – not because it is or isn’t true but because of our ability or inability to recognize it when it happens.
The cross might seem a transcendent symbol to us because of its Pauline provenance, but what of the legendary account of the island monks who followed Christ’s teachings but because of their isolation failed to hear of his death? Was their faith, would their faith have been, necessarily diminished? Is their story denied a place, bereft of protean power because it must endure with loaves and fishes?
And while the gospel might well be key to understanding reality, as I’m willing to wager, one must recall that we have no gospel but four gospels and non-identical gospels in the mouths of Jesus and of Paul. Surely these need not participate in one comprehensive story to be meaningful or right or Christian. Perhaps we need only to know good news when we hear it, and the gospels are no less gospel for being multiple.
Christian symbols are not magic, nor are any symbols magically Christian; simply, symbols either resonate or they do not. Surely a powerful message could be conveyed by the image of an empty tomb. The Christian symbols that Peters claims to “exist at the inbetween where the ineffable God beyond touches the mundane realm in which we live” are left quite unspecified (28). Perhaps we are all supposed to be thinking of the same things, and perhaps we do.
But if we do not, then we are left in a situation where those with access to Peter’s particular set of symbols become the sole bridge by which we might access God, a troublesome arrangement. What he seems to have gained in reassurance, the rest of us might have lost in doubt. We are put back in the desert, which is indeed hard to endure.
But surely one way to beat the desert of critical doubt is not to place faith in symbols, be they Christian or not, but in the reality of feast and flesh in which God biblically dwells and to claim that faith is the orientation of an entire person rather than reliance on a particular imagination.
Another way might be to realize that there is no escape, that doubt must always accompany faith, as Peters admits, not because of a particularly modern consciousness but because of the eternal impoverishment of words; faith must always accompany doubt as well, or it would simply be disbelief. Doubt and desert are both semi-fictions, they are like bad movies only loosely based on actual events.
The desert is not desert to those who live there; to them it is simply home. With trust in God, water springs from stones; that is the very moral of the story. Here then might lie a better third reading (not that premodern plus post/modern equals transmodern)! but that the very desert of the critical cannot, by its own definition, be absolute.
I gather that Peters in his obvious affinity for postmodern thought must understand this, but by insisting that we “emerge” from the critical consciousness he first said we cannot escape, he denies the full promise of our Christian wager and settles for a mediocre Bavarian painting when we might all have instead done much better.
While Peters is right, and creatively so, to suggest a reconstructive third reading to Ricouer’s critical second one, and to do so manifestly as a hopeful gesture, one wonders if, in too easily returning to rest and reassurance he has somewhat missed the rigors and possibilities of that troublesome second glance. In finding a strange new shore he seems sometimes to have, like Chesterton’s wandering British sailor, once again discovered London.
“What is needed is a theological method that assumes that both ancient and modern understandings belong to a single and more inclusive tradition-history – to a single story – and that this…will eventually participate in one comprehensive story of humankind on earth” (16). The very sentence might make Hegel stand up and shout for joy, but this is precisely the solution that postmodern consciousness prohibits.
There is no Story. They are only stories, which may indeed be greater than the sum or their parts but which one finds it almost impossible to imagine that they will ever coalesce. What this means for Christianity may indeed be troubling, but one does not get to post-postmodernism by leaping over Derridean wastes and claiming the journey was comprehensive.
The coming of the Kingdom of God is not a super-card that trumps all others on the deck – not because it is or isn’t true but because of our ability or inability to recognize it when it happens.
The cross might seem a transcendent symbol to us because of its Pauline provenance, but what of the legendary account of the island monks who followed Christ’s teachings but because of their isolation failed to hear of his death? Was their faith, would their faith have been, necessarily diminished? Is their story denied a place, bereft of protean power because it must endure with loaves and fishes?
And while the gospel might well be key to understanding reality, as I’m willing to wager, one must recall that we have no gospel but four gospels and non-identical gospels in the mouths of Jesus and of Paul. Surely these need not participate in one comprehensive story to be meaningful or right or Christian. Perhaps we need only to know good news when we hear it, and the gospels are no less gospel for being multiple.
Christian symbols are not magic, nor are any symbols magically Christian; simply, symbols either resonate or they do not. Surely a powerful message could be conveyed by the image of an empty tomb. The Christian symbols that Peters claims to “exist at the inbetween where the ineffable God beyond touches the mundane realm in which we live” are left quite unspecified (28). Perhaps we are all supposed to be thinking of the same things, and perhaps we do.
But if we do not, then we are left in a situation where those with access to Peter’s particular set of symbols become the sole bridge by which we might access God, a troublesome arrangement. What he seems to have gained in reassurance, the rest of us might have lost in doubt. We are put back in the desert, which is indeed hard to endure.
But surely one way to beat the desert of critical doubt is not to place faith in symbols, be they Christian or not, but in the reality of feast and flesh in which God biblically dwells and to claim that faith is the orientation of an entire person rather than reliance on a particular imagination.
Another way might be to realize that there is no escape, that doubt must always accompany faith, as Peters admits, not because of a particularly modern consciousness but because of the eternal impoverishment of words; faith must always accompany doubt as well, or it would simply be disbelief. Doubt and desert are both semi-fictions, they are like bad movies only loosely based on actual events.
The desert is not desert to those who live there; to them it is simply home. With trust in God, water springs from stones; that is the very moral of the story. Here then might lie a better third reading (not that premodern plus post/modern equals transmodern)! but that the very desert of the critical cannot, by its own definition, be absolute.
I gather that Peters in his obvious affinity for postmodern thought must understand this, but by insisting that we “emerge” from the critical consciousness he first said we cannot escape, he denies the full promise of our Christian wager and settles for a mediocre Bavarian painting when we might all have instead done much better.
Consonance: on Peter's 'God, the World's Future'
“Epigenic movement is understood as creative of the new, as self-organizing, as opening up new paths and rendering possible new choices, as creating freedom for the future…” (19).
So Peters articulates the possibilities inherent in our current intellectual climate, a summer not only of warmth but of promises that warmth will globally increase. The postmodern garden does not let ideas slide into calcified autumnal systems but encourages vine to spring from vine.
Gardeners have little to do and are not asked for, because the garden is more than the individual plants seeded in the modern spring. The plants, as they always do, are getting away from us, like the stream that bursts from the ground in Genesis, the one that even God does not ask for.
Now we lay aside our hoes, our plows and let the garden make its rules and exceed our expectations. For while the rules of the garden are entirely its own, they are quite relentless. “The pull of the future,’ is as essential to the life of an organism as the “push of the past…’” Whereas the chief components of the factory lose energy each time they operate and have never in any case overcome this problem, the plants of the garden move from seed to stem to seed because this is what they do.
The garden gardens. This occurs not because Garden falls to earth from Eden (there is no going back) nor because there is a Garden toward which all plants, in rising, must converge, (there is no telos) but because all the gardens to which all plants must contribute are always already gardening. There are only gardens which demand to be understood as such; everything else, by imposing, must reduce. There can be no more comprehending of them as particular plants or permutations of the soil.
What then of the gardener, without whom this tangling of vines is naught but wilderness? Little to do is not nothing to do. The garden by definition is not finished. It is growing. That is what gardens do. How is the garden gardening? It is growing toward itself, the vines are intertwining and might choke each other. Is this the true garden, where half its plants are dead? Or is the garden toward which the garden gardens in the imagination of the gardener?
He or she has seen the plan(t)s ahead of time, not in a schematic, but in perhaps a painting by Monet which the gardener does not want to replicate but to inspirate, to breathe in and through. He or she (or he and she) wishes to move the garden toward the garden that has moved them, the garden that this garden always could have been, and could still be, because this promise of a garden is the garden’s truest self, the one that they once planted not in determination but in hope and fear and trembling.
And, in all honesty, in some naivety. Monet never hoed a row in his entire life. His promised garden is a lie; it simply isn’t practical. So the gardeners must ask themselves if they would destroy the garden or the painting, and soon see that the assumptions of the painting cannot hold in a garden or at least not in this one. They might ask themselves if they are good gardeners or maybe even bad gardeners, if they have been wise or foolish with planting and with sun and water but the answers in a way do not matter because answers do not garden or make them better gardeners.
The painting, they decide, was only a beginning (however good it was). But they are not Monet and Monet was not a gardener. They have never seen a garden like Monet’s, however much they like it. Perhaps they despair a while as they realize that a garden in the mind is much different from a garden around the self and there is no necessary link between the two; it is too much to ask, too much to accomplish. The painting will stay a painting; the garden will remain in weeds.
But they should not lose heart! Because they do not have to garden Monet’s garden; they only have to plant the garden Monet inspired in them, and this is a very nearer thing. It is a risk, a peril; they are no longer planting from a drawing. But it is also guarantee, because now the garden growing can shape the growing garden of their minds.
Losing inspiration, they have found it restored twofold, they work from plan and plant in kind. They can stop worrying about their gardening and learn to love the garden, to ask: what does it need to be most beautiful, what can we do for this strange new wonder?
So Peters articulates the possibilities inherent in our current intellectual climate, a summer not only of warmth but of promises that warmth will globally increase. The postmodern garden does not let ideas slide into calcified autumnal systems but encourages vine to spring from vine.
Gardeners have little to do and are not asked for, because the garden is more than the individual plants seeded in the modern spring. The plants, as they always do, are getting away from us, like the stream that bursts from the ground in Genesis, the one that even God does not ask for.
Now we lay aside our hoes, our plows and let the garden make its rules and exceed our expectations. For while the rules of the garden are entirely its own, they are quite relentless. “The pull of the future,’ is as essential to the life of an organism as the “push of the past…’” Whereas the chief components of the factory lose energy each time they operate and have never in any case overcome this problem, the plants of the garden move from seed to stem to seed because this is what they do.
The garden gardens. This occurs not because Garden falls to earth from Eden (there is no going back) nor because there is a Garden toward which all plants, in rising, must converge, (there is no telos) but because all the gardens to which all plants must contribute are always already gardening. There are only gardens which demand to be understood as such; everything else, by imposing, must reduce. There can be no more comprehending of them as particular plants or permutations of the soil.
What then of the gardener, without whom this tangling of vines is naught but wilderness? Little to do is not nothing to do. The garden by definition is not finished. It is growing. That is what gardens do. How is the garden gardening? It is growing toward itself, the vines are intertwining and might choke each other. Is this the true garden, where half its plants are dead? Or is the garden toward which the garden gardens in the imagination of the gardener?
He or she has seen the plan(t)s ahead of time, not in a schematic, but in perhaps a painting by Monet which the gardener does not want to replicate but to inspirate, to breathe in and through. He or she (or he and she) wishes to move the garden toward the garden that has moved them, the garden that this garden always could have been, and could still be, because this promise of a garden is the garden’s truest self, the one that they once planted not in determination but in hope and fear and trembling.
And, in all honesty, in some naivety. Monet never hoed a row in his entire life. His promised garden is a lie; it simply isn’t practical. So the gardeners must ask themselves if they would destroy the garden or the painting, and soon see that the assumptions of the painting cannot hold in a garden or at least not in this one. They might ask themselves if they are good gardeners or maybe even bad gardeners, if they have been wise or foolish with planting and with sun and water but the answers in a way do not matter because answers do not garden or make them better gardeners.
The painting, they decide, was only a beginning (however good it was). But they are not Monet and Monet was not a gardener. They have never seen a garden like Monet’s, however much they like it. Perhaps they despair a while as they realize that a garden in the mind is much different from a garden around the self and there is no necessary link between the two; it is too much to ask, too much to accomplish. The painting will stay a painting; the garden will remain in weeds.
But they should not lose heart! Because they do not have to garden Monet’s garden; they only have to plant the garden Monet inspired in them, and this is a very nearer thing. It is a risk, a peril; they are no longer planting from a drawing. But it is also guarantee, because now the garden growing can shape the growing garden of their minds.
Losing inspiration, they have found it restored twofold, they work from plan and plant in kind. They can stop worrying about their gardening and learn to love the garden, to ask: what does it need to be most beautiful, what can we do for this strange new wonder?
Friday, August 21, 2009
Editorial: A Number of Positions on Homosexuality
Well. No one has ever asked the question of me, thank goodness. And I've tried, personally, to avoid addressing the matter at all, because my curiosity centers much more around the affairs of God than the affairs of church polity. But the buzz about the current Lutheran conference, including the insinuation of some that God sent an F0 tornado down upon the very building the conference is held in (really? F0? Is that all the smiting our God goes in for anymore?) - these events, as well as long brewing in the Episcopal and Methodist churches, have prompted a lot of thinking on my part.
And now, God help us, I finally need to vent.
To wit: when considering the nature of sin and questions of sinfulness, I try always to keep in mind the principle of self-first. That is, to ponder the plank in my own eye before elaborating overmuch on the faults of others - the same principle Dostoevsky captured marvelously in the Brothers Karamazov: "make yourself responsible for all the sins of men...the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all."
So: While I do, in fact, against the general trend of American Anglican thought, still view homosexual intercourse to be sinful, my first and largest thought is that it simply is a sin toward which I am not prone. It is not much of my affair. I have plenty of others, so many that my first impulse is, rightly or not, not toward judgment. I don't have it in me to condemn. I don't have the ground to stand on, or the heart to do it. It's simply the way I am.
And to the largest degree possible, I believe it is the way which Christians ought to be. If anyone sins, to some very real degree it is our fault and our responsibility, because the line between we and they is anything but solid.
I only believe what I do about homosexuality because, having wrangled with the pertinent scriptures, I cannot see my way clear of their implications. I am not impressed by the counter-interpretations, and cannot imagine that the biblical writers were only thinking of particular homosexual behavioral instances.
The variety and contextuality of the passages are the very things that convince me that homosexual relations are sins in the eyes of God, Old and New Testament alike. Until new evidence comes to light, I do not see how a clear-eyed and pragmatic reading of Scripture can come to any other conclusion, though I understand that many believe differently.
But what I also do not see is where Scripture proclaims what precisely we ought to do about it. Clearly, after Christ we are going to stone no one. Which is not to say that sin now goes unpunished and everyone runs around doing what they want without consequence, but it is to say that the drift of Scripture places judgment less and less into human hands and more and more into the hands of God alone. In fact, it might be said that that was the very mission of Christ: our salvation is our judgment, and both of these are entirely in the hands of Our Lord.
Now of course, every community must engage in gatekeeping, and the church is no exception. Paul rightly urges the early churches to spurn those who threaten the community itself. They must be turned out. But I've heard no one say that homosexuals just by their presence in worship or in the pulpit threaten the integrity of the body of Christ.
But you can go to church with homosexuals. They don't do anything differently than anyone else. They sing the same songs, say the same prayers, preach the same sermons, serve the same Eucharist. If they gossip and backbite and slander, I'm sure they do so not because they're homosexual, but simply because they want to belong. There is nothing noteworthy about them, except, of course, that they are made in the image of God, for which everyone is at least worth mentioning.
You see, no one ever actually deals with homosexuals, anymore than anyone meets with the African American race, or the Universal Hispanic Alliance. One only ever really meets individuals. Those are the people with which you have to deal. You can ignore politics to whatever degree you are able, but you have to deal with Mary and Martin and Joe and Kate - whatever their characters, whatever their affiliations. We are all individuals always meeting, or failing to meet, other individuals. When my Methodist mentor heard about the ordination of Gene Robinson, the gay bishop recently ordained in New Hampshire, and wondered what I thought, I could only say "I hope he's a good bishop."
I believe that is precisely on the level at which Christ would have made the determination, and perhaps part of the reason Jesus never addressed the topic himself. To some degree, it's a nonsensical question. Homosexuals aren't, so far as I know, part of an institution that hypocritically judges people the way the Pharisees were, or part of an idolatrous and self-congratulatory nation that heaps wealth upon itself at the expense of widows, aliens and orphans the way Israel did. And if "they" are, their sexual behavior likely has nothing to do with it. If there's any issue unlikely to be a good basis of sorting and condemning human beings, it's sexuality, which manifests itself in people so individually, so interiorally, and so varyingly over the course of a lifetime.
I mean, it strikes me that the central question here isn't one of sexuality at all, but one of Docetism. The unspoken question I hear is whether or not we're going to let homosexuals sit in our pews, stand in our wedding chapels, preach from our pulpits, and chair our ecumenical conferences, or whatever it is that bishops do.
Thankfully, the question of church participation has been answered for two thousand years, at least since Augustine. Sinners get to preach. Wretches get to serve the Eucharist. Righteousness is not a condition for participation in the body of Christ, though it is of course something of the purpose.
Whether or not one's sins are publicly visible is only a distracting point. I hear that the number of male pastors, preachers, and priests who habitually view images of naked women over the internet is very much ungodly. Should they remain? Maybe, maybe not. I believe the least we would grant them were their proclivities known is a trial by character, an assessment of an entire person and their work. Were their habits to remain secret, I believe the very least we would offer them would be a lone accounting with their God.
I think we should extend the same two deals to closeted and open homosexuals. I believe it is their right as human beings and creations of our God. I cannot understand how straight people of any stripe could deploy one sin and condemn whole swaths of society because their sins happen to be somewhat more public. Does a homosexual make a worse priest than an embezzler, or an adulterer? Than anyone else equally qualified?
After all, the problem, from a Christian perspective, with the Scarlet Letter was not that she got one, but that everyone didn't. We don't get to treat people differently because we happen to know what their sins are, while ours remain more private.
The issue of repentance is equally distracting. We all know from celebrities, politicians, and athletes the value of public contrition, which is virtually nill. True repentance is ceasing the behavior. We are all unrepentant sinners. If we weren't, we would live in a very different world. Our confessions are as flawed and human and limited and imperfect and sin-stained as the rest of us - and nonetheless by grace we are welcomed into the body and bride of Christ, because Jesus himself welcomes us.
God loves a penitent heart, but are we ourselves not to love every heart?
It is true that, were I to hear a sermon preaching the rightness of homosexual congress, I would view that teaching as in error. But, notwithstanding that I can't imagine any such thing in the church I currently attend, it would only be about the three thousandth sermon preached in America eschewing biblical principles for the idiosyncratic follies of any particular moment. Preachers and bishops are often wrong. But they are never wrong for being who they are, but only what they say and do. Their bare presence is not a political or religious utterance until we or they make it one. Clerics are not statements. They are people, human individuals.
The idea that we cannot countenance any such is the most unbiblical teaching I might imagine. We don't get to deny anyone anything we claim for ourselves; this is the essence of the Golden Rule. If this is marriage, then it is marriage, flawed and sinful as it might be. If this is Eucharist, this is Eucharist, however compromised and imperfect the breaking of the bread. If this is positions of church authority, then it is positions of church authority, even for the sinners in our midst.
We always hear that the laws of this nation are based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, a thought which continually strikes me odd, as the Christian ethic is an entirely non-litigious one, and the lawerly scribes and Pharisees were precisely those that Christ condemned. It was the equation of law and morality that Christ overturned, because the law always fails to address the particularities of the human heart and must condemn people without considering God's own greater judgments, because it cannot know them. So, the ponderings of conferences aside, I think we might at least have a run at eschewing legalized morality within our church.
So what do I propose? I guess I would like to introduce not so much a specific policy as a series of guidelines that I wish Christians would adopt.
First, deal with your own particular sins; when considering others, be slow to judge, swift to forgive, and quicker still to love.
Second, treat in individuals rather than political bodies; love the image of God in each person, because that is the only way you're ever going to see it.
Third, accept the universality of sin and show no preference for private over public unrighteousness; many are invited, but few are chosen. The inviting must come first, and it must be authentic.
And fourth: unless specifically acting to counteract an existing policy, establish no writ concerning homosexuals or their practices one way or the other. Even the Golden Rule isn't good legislation, and polity cannot possibly address the issue of conscience, and might lead to us being similarly judged by God himself.
And no one wants that.
And now, God help us, I finally need to vent.
To wit: when considering the nature of sin and questions of sinfulness, I try always to keep in mind the principle of self-first. That is, to ponder the plank in my own eye before elaborating overmuch on the faults of others - the same principle Dostoevsky captured marvelously in the Brothers Karamazov: "make yourself responsible for all the sins of men...the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all."
So: While I do, in fact, against the general trend of American Anglican thought, still view homosexual intercourse to be sinful, my first and largest thought is that it simply is a sin toward which I am not prone. It is not much of my affair. I have plenty of others, so many that my first impulse is, rightly or not, not toward judgment. I don't have it in me to condemn. I don't have the ground to stand on, or the heart to do it. It's simply the way I am.
And to the largest degree possible, I believe it is the way which Christians ought to be. If anyone sins, to some very real degree it is our fault and our responsibility, because the line between we and they is anything but solid.
I only believe what I do about homosexuality because, having wrangled with the pertinent scriptures, I cannot see my way clear of their implications. I am not impressed by the counter-interpretations, and cannot imagine that the biblical writers were only thinking of particular homosexual behavioral instances.
The variety and contextuality of the passages are the very things that convince me that homosexual relations are sins in the eyes of God, Old and New Testament alike. Until new evidence comes to light, I do not see how a clear-eyed and pragmatic reading of Scripture can come to any other conclusion, though I understand that many believe differently.
But what I also do not see is where Scripture proclaims what precisely we ought to do about it. Clearly, after Christ we are going to stone no one. Which is not to say that sin now goes unpunished and everyone runs around doing what they want without consequence, but it is to say that the drift of Scripture places judgment less and less into human hands and more and more into the hands of God alone. In fact, it might be said that that was the very mission of Christ: our salvation is our judgment, and both of these are entirely in the hands of Our Lord.
Now of course, every community must engage in gatekeeping, and the church is no exception. Paul rightly urges the early churches to spurn those who threaten the community itself. They must be turned out. But I've heard no one say that homosexuals just by their presence in worship or in the pulpit threaten the integrity of the body of Christ.
But you can go to church with homosexuals. They don't do anything differently than anyone else. They sing the same songs, say the same prayers, preach the same sermons, serve the same Eucharist. If they gossip and backbite and slander, I'm sure they do so not because they're homosexual, but simply because they want to belong. There is nothing noteworthy about them, except, of course, that they are made in the image of God, for which everyone is at least worth mentioning.
You see, no one ever actually deals with homosexuals, anymore than anyone meets with the African American race, or the Universal Hispanic Alliance. One only ever really meets individuals. Those are the people with which you have to deal. You can ignore politics to whatever degree you are able, but you have to deal with Mary and Martin and Joe and Kate - whatever their characters, whatever their affiliations. We are all individuals always meeting, or failing to meet, other individuals. When my Methodist mentor heard about the ordination of Gene Robinson, the gay bishop recently ordained in New Hampshire, and wondered what I thought, I could only say "I hope he's a good bishop."
I believe that is precisely on the level at which Christ would have made the determination, and perhaps part of the reason Jesus never addressed the topic himself. To some degree, it's a nonsensical question. Homosexuals aren't, so far as I know, part of an institution that hypocritically judges people the way the Pharisees were, or part of an idolatrous and self-congratulatory nation that heaps wealth upon itself at the expense of widows, aliens and orphans the way Israel did. And if "they" are, their sexual behavior likely has nothing to do with it. If there's any issue unlikely to be a good basis of sorting and condemning human beings, it's sexuality, which manifests itself in people so individually, so interiorally, and so varyingly over the course of a lifetime.
I mean, it strikes me that the central question here isn't one of sexuality at all, but one of Docetism. The unspoken question I hear is whether or not we're going to let homosexuals sit in our pews, stand in our wedding chapels, preach from our pulpits, and chair our ecumenical conferences, or whatever it is that bishops do.
Thankfully, the question of church participation has been answered for two thousand years, at least since Augustine. Sinners get to preach. Wretches get to serve the Eucharist. Righteousness is not a condition for participation in the body of Christ, though it is of course something of the purpose.
Whether or not one's sins are publicly visible is only a distracting point. I hear that the number of male pastors, preachers, and priests who habitually view images of naked women over the internet is very much ungodly. Should they remain? Maybe, maybe not. I believe the least we would grant them were their proclivities known is a trial by character, an assessment of an entire person and their work. Were their habits to remain secret, I believe the very least we would offer them would be a lone accounting with their God.
I think we should extend the same two deals to closeted and open homosexuals. I believe it is their right as human beings and creations of our God. I cannot understand how straight people of any stripe could deploy one sin and condemn whole swaths of society because their sins happen to be somewhat more public. Does a homosexual make a worse priest than an embezzler, or an adulterer? Than anyone else equally qualified?
After all, the problem, from a Christian perspective, with the Scarlet Letter was not that she got one, but that everyone didn't. We don't get to treat people differently because we happen to know what their sins are, while ours remain more private.
The issue of repentance is equally distracting. We all know from celebrities, politicians, and athletes the value of public contrition, which is virtually nill. True repentance is ceasing the behavior. We are all unrepentant sinners. If we weren't, we would live in a very different world. Our confessions are as flawed and human and limited and imperfect and sin-stained as the rest of us - and nonetheless by grace we are welcomed into the body and bride of Christ, because Jesus himself welcomes us.
God loves a penitent heart, but are we ourselves not to love every heart?
It is true that, were I to hear a sermon preaching the rightness of homosexual congress, I would view that teaching as in error. But, notwithstanding that I can't imagine any such thing in the church I currently attend, it would only be about the three thousandth sermon preached in America eschewing biblical principles for the idiosyncratic follies of any particular moment. Preachers and bishops are often wrong. But they are never wrong for being who they are, but only what they say and do. Their bare presence is not a political or religious utterance until we or they make it one. Clerics are not statements. They are people, human individuals.
The idea that we cannot countenance any such is the most unbiblical teaching I might imagine. We don't get to deny anyone anything we claim for ourselves; this is the essence of the Golden Rule. If this is marriage, then it is marriage, flawed and sinful as it might be. If this is Eucharist, this is Eucharist, however compromised and imperfect the breaking of the bread. If this is positions of church authority, then it is positions of church authority, even for the sinners in our midst.
We always hear that the laws of this nation are based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, a thought which continually strikes me odd, as the Christian ethic is an entirely non-litigious one, and the lawerly scribes and Pharisees were precisely those that Christ condemned. It was the equation of law and morality that Christ overturned, because the law always fails to address the particularities of the human heart and must condemn people without considering God's own greater judgments, because it cannot know them. So, the ponderings of conferences aside, I think we might at least have a run at eschewing legalized morality within our church.
So what do I propose? I guess I would like to introduce not so much a specific policy as a series of guidelines that I wish Christians would adopt.
First, deal with your own particular sins; when considering others, be slow to judge, swift to forgive, and quicker still to love.
Second, treat in individuals rather than political bodies; love the image of God in each person, because that is the only way you're ever going to see it.
Third, accept the universality of sin and show no preference for private over public unrighteousness; many are invited, but few are chosen. The inviting must come first, and it must be authentic.
And fourth: unless specifically acting to counteract an existing policy, establish no writ concerning homosexuals or their practices one way or the other. Even the Golden Rule isn't good legislation, and polity cannot possibly address the issue of conscience, and might lead to us being similarly judged by God himself.
And no one wants that.
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