Of course, one might also say that Calvinist thought as a whole sounds as though it would in fact inhibit human agency. While one cannot disagree that “sin is pervasive in scope, debilitating in force, and stubbornly persistent,” one must surely become perplexed by a system of rhetorical theology which sees each and every human being as simply complacent or despairing.
One might also be, presumably, ignorant, frustrated, or provisionally optimistic. Recognizing that mankind is split along more than the saint and sinner axis is the requirement of a sin-talk that would do justice to the dynamic and multifaceted natures of both sin and grace. Jones starts down this corridor in places but fails to walk far down along it, presumably because of the dualistic thinking inherent in her tradition. To put it another way, Calvin might limit Jones’s agency even as Jones abdicates that agency herself, which is as close as I could come to comprehending the metaphysical somersaults concerning Calvinist original sin and our odd responsibility for it.
It must surely be difficult to comprehend that of which we can simultaneously say “sin is an imputed judgment that we are responsible for imposing upon our otherwise good natures. We impute it to ourselves” and “it is it a judgment we cannot escape, for each passing generation imposes this judgment upon the next.” So who, in original sin, is the responsible agent? Small wonder that Calvin resorted to high rhetoric and powerful metaphor if such was indeed his (theo)logical claim.
And small wonder if Jones’s feminist remapping of original and conscious sin would fail to conjure equally vivid metaphors to embrace the gracious life of faith against current patriarchal oppression. She simply seems not to have the ammunition. “Of what does faith consist,” she asks, “if not the gifts of sanctification and justification?” One would hope that faith would also consist of trust of, obedience to, and love for the One who bestowed those gifts to start with.
And one would also hope that a feminist remapping of sin would also lead to a Christian remapping of patriarchy but this indeed seems not to be the case, as talking about oppression as sin for her simply means “invoking a powerful sense of hope.” This is, to be sure, a good thing, but it is no more than the more fervent secular feminists would inspire. And while God certainly does will the flourishing of all persons, Jones does not describe why patriarchy prohibits this beyond the narrow examples of her Tuesday-night women.
She offers no definition of sin on her own but simply equates sin and oppression as such without ever saying precisely why. Perhaps this occurs in other chapters, but here it fails to offer a powerfully Christian alternative to secular feminist claims. She reminds us both that “these systems will be transformed in the years ahead” and that “emerging modes of social relations will carry marks of the past within them and harbor novel forms of oppression and domination, and that eradicating all forms of social sin is impossible.”
What, then, is the transformation? And who will do it: God, us, God through us or us through God? And how? Will there be particularly Christian solutions to entrenched social problems or will Christian rhetoric simply aim to baptize the solutions seen by the secular world? Yes, the Christian needs a “sheath, a skin to hold her together, to author her new becoming,” but what does this skin look like? Is it more women’s groups such as the one Jones participates in? It is the body of Christ compromised by the expectations of modernity? Is it the roles for women advocated by secular third-generation feminism?
And how do we get from a position of agency within society where “we are continuously invited to start over again…authoring the theological space of our becoming” to “a theological landscape where women flourish, difference abounds, power is shared, and justice is enacted as we are held together, fluid and multiple, in the envelope of God’s grace.”
It seems to me that we cannot do so without a less polar approach to thinking about sin and grace, and without a vision of human agency where grace becomes the fluidity that allows us to meet the constant adaptations of sin.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
On Sin and Grace: Consonance
Consonance
“Such a mirror might be held up…we behold a double image, not of one face but of many, infinite in number, moving in an endless variety of directions. Imagining the glass as uncracked, we see…flourishing in the context of faithful community, wrapped in the gifts of faith.”
The trouble that Christian and especially Protestant thought of sin has long been to make it surpassingly more interesting than grace. As a female friend of mine remarked when eating chocolate, “Nope, this isn’t God’s goodness. It’s too good! It must be sin!” One can see the same tendency in Milton’s leading character turning out to be, in fact, the Satan who would notoriously rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Static, Platonic notions of grace have long led to a heaven no one wants to live in and here in Calvin we see grace held up to us as a mirror which reflects only the way we ought to be. But if “Calvin defends the breadth and imprecision of his discussion here by explaining that sin is not a stable or static state but more a furnace burning with ever new flames or a spring unceasingly bubbling up from the earth…always changing, assuming ever new forms and traveling into ever new terrain,” then one could hope that, when pressed, love might do similarly exciting things.
The image of grace as a fractured mirror helps to explore such newly evolving territory. Grace at last becomes a multiplicity embracing a plurality of options even as it defines a field of options to choose from; life for Christians becomes selecting choices from the menu offered at the banquet of experience. Love becomes a fire burning with ever new flames, and grace becomes the spring bubbling up from the ground of all our being.
Grace is the boundary the defines a field of options, and the field of options consists of the selves awaiting in our preferred and promised futures. The Lord’s injunction that we shall be holy as the Lord is holy becomes a promise as much as a command, and while perhaps Jones might not want to take the notion so far, one would hope that whereas sin is the bondage of our will, righteousness would be that which sets our will free and increases our options in God.
‘If you but love God, then do as you will’ says Augustine, and one has no better a vision of heaven then this, not because grace is libertine but because it is liberating and always leads, one would hope, to a surfeit of options. This would be true both for men pressed into masculinity and women constrained by femininity alike – in the mirror of grace we face not simply the reverse of gendered constructs but indeed our truly human side.
Grace always changes. Grace assumes new forms and travels into new terrain. The images of grace are whole and holy, multiplicities unfractured by their separation – and here we note the postmodern allowance of disparate things to remain disparate yet contribute to a more harmonious whole. Sin fractures the glass precisely as it eliminates the future possibilities of humankind. The road of sin narrows as it goes unto desolation; the road of grace begins small but expands to embrace the humility, dignity and authority of agency.
Grace demands responsibility because it offers up to humans our first true choices. Grace implicates us in the story of our own sanctification not because we can become righteous on our own but because it makes all righteousness(es) possible. In my estimation the oppression of women is sin as such precisely because and to the degree that it limits the agency of women and denies them responsibility in the first place; this applies, obviously, to all disaffected, disenfranchised and marginalized people even as it embraces those who remain so caught in the system of sin that they deny the agency of others and act as oppressors in their own right.
That sin touches all must also imply the possibility that graces touches all or at least extends toward all, whatever they might make of it. Otherwise, Satan would presumably welcome both oppressors and oppressed into her dominion; I am sure she holds no preference otherwise. What grace and God prefer, however, is that we run out the scripts of righteousness precisely because they are both more compelling and more liberating than the monotonous and banal self-righteousness, self-deluding, and self-denying script of sin that the darkness would have us repeat ad infinitum.
“Such a mirror might be held up…we behold a double image, not of one face but of many, infinite in number, moving in an endless variety of directions. Imagining the glass as uncracked, we see…flourishing in the context of faithful community, wrapped in the gifts of faith.”
The trouble that Christian and especially Protestant thought of sin has long been to make it surpassingly more interesting than grace. As a female friend of mine remarked when eating chocolate, “Nope, this isn’t God’s goodness. It’s too good! It must be sin!” One can see the same tendency in Milton’s leading character turning out to be, in fact, the Satan who would notoriously rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Static, Platonic notions of grace have long led to a heaven no one wants to live in and here in Calvin we see grace held up to us as a mirror which reflects only the way we ought to be. But if “Calvin defends the breadth and imprecision of his discussion here by explaining that sin is not a stable or static state but more a furnace burning with ever new flames or a spring unceasingly bubbling up from the earth…always changing, assuming ever new forms and traveling into ever new terrain,” then one could hope that, when pressed, love might do similarly exciting things.
The image of grace as a fractured mirror helps to explore such newly evolving territory. Grace at last becomes a multiplicity embracing a plurality of options even as it defines a field of options to choose from; life for Christians becomes selecting choices from the menu offered at the banquet of experience. Love becomes a fire burning with ever new flames, and grace becomes the spring bubbling up from the ground of all our being.
Grace is the boundary the defines a field of options, and the field of options consists of the selves awaiting in our preferred and promised futures. The Lord’s injunction that we shall be holy as the Lord is holy becomes a promise as much as a command, and while perhaps Jones might not want to take the notion so far, one would hope that whereas sin is the bondage of our will, righteousness would be that which sets our will free and increases our options in God.
‘If you but love God, then do as you will’ says Augustine, and one has no better a vision of heaven then this, not because grace is libertine but because it is liberating and always leads, one would hope, to a surfeit of options. This would be true both for men pressed into masculinity and women constrained by femininity alike – in the mirror of grace we face not simply the reverse of gendered constructs but indeed our truly human side.
Grace always changes. Grace assumes new forms and travels into new terrain. The images of grace are whole and holy, multiplicities unfractured by their separation – and here we note the postmodern allowance of disparate things to remain disparate yet contribute to a more harmonious whole. Sin fractures the glass precisely as it eliminates the future possibilities of humankind. The road of sin narrows as it goes unto desolation; the road of grace begins small but expands to embrace the humility, dignity and authority of agency.
Grace demands responsibility because it offers up to humans our first true choices. Grace implicates us in the story of our own sanctification not because we can become righteous on our own but because it makes all righteousness(es) possible. In my estimation the oppression of women is sin as such precisely because and to the degree that it limits the agency of women and denies them responsibility in the first place; this applies, obviously, to all disaffected, disenfranchised and marginalized people even as it embraces those who remain so caught in the system of sin that they deny the agency of others and act as oppressors in their own right.
That sin touches all must also imply the possibility that graces touches all or at least extends toward all, whatever they might make of it. Otherwise, Satan would presumably welcome both oppressors and oppressed into her dominion; I am sure she holds no preference otherwise. What grace and God prefer, however, is that we run out the scripts of righteousness precisely because they are both more compelling and more liberating than the monotonous and banal self-righteousness, self-deluding, and self-denying script of sin that the darkness would have us repeat ad infinitum.
On the French Revolution
On The French Revolution
Christian historians have noted the locus of Christian influence shifting geographically over time. What began in Jerusalem soon shifted east toward Antioch, then west toward Rome, and north into France and Germany – even as the cultures, beliefs, and practices of those local peoples influenced Christianity going forward.
What the French Revolution did was to – rather abruptly – shift the axis of import of the Christian faith away from Northern Europe and into North America. That the turning point was in this case a secular cataclysm rather than a doctrinal dispute points toward the shifting nature of Christianity itself, and the change that would be produced.
The shift was largely secular, and the trend was to be for secularization. The French Revolution occurred for blatantly political reasons: tensions between monarchy and nobility, authority and reason, and the economic clash between aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie. It produced overtly secular results: national rather than individual or religious sovereignty, the ostensibly purely rational critique of all things, the self-sustaining properties of the natural, secular world and the assertion of self-evident rights of national citizens.
The advent of the Enlightenment was the advent of the flame of Reason in the western world.
Yet the secular revolution swiftly took on proportions that could only be called religious. It may have been a mistaken notion when Samuel Miller preached a hope that the French Revolution would kindle a general conflagration sent to illuminate the darkest corners of the earth, but it was an understandable notion nonetheless. The de-Christianizing zeal displayed in renaming Notre Dame the Temple of Reason and populating it with Greco-Roman motifs and other idols certainly sounds like religious devotion in retrospect.
The remaining Christians of the day would have done well to note that ideals without mediation of accountability or pragmatic applicability inflict casualties no matter their origin, as the indiscriminate violence, fanatical ideology, citizen armies, executions, terrorism, and propaganda of the French Revolution soon showed. Toynbee was right, then, to later characterize this convulsion not as the abandonment of religion but simply “the fanatical worship of collective human power.” With the French Revolution, the nation had claimed for itself the shared public space long claimed by Christianity, or at least by Christendom.
This then might mark the greatest impact of the Enlightenment on Christianity: its privatization. The countervailing forces to the French Revolution inevitably imbibed some of its most prevalent characteristics: religion retreated from the public, intellectual and academic spheres and became personal and evangelistic as the theological responses to Enlightenment claims came up short of their mark.
Thus, while one is certainly wise to note the vigorous apologetics and Catholic reconsiderations that the Enlightenment produced, these can hardly be said to be its most powerful contributions or reactions. Rather, revivals, evangelism, faith healing and mission all appealed to the emotional sides of human nature more than the rational. Schleiermacher carried pietist upbringing into his later theology and called for a sense of dependence upon God even as biblical higher criticism called into question many of the assumptions that interpreters of Scripture had always held.
Meanwhile, sectarian movements sought to leave the influence of the world behind, whether in Protestant form through the Christian Brethren or in Catholic form through the reverence of the otherworldly Virgin Mary.
In other words, Christianity had become a fire nicely adapted for the pistons of the energetically individualistic and Romantic engine that was to be America.
Christian historians have noted the locus of Christian influence shifting geographically over time. What began in Jerusalem soon shifted east toward Antioch, then west toward Rome, and north into France and Germany – even as the cultures, beliefs, and practices of those local peoples influenced Christianity going forward.
What the French Revolution did was to – rather abruptly – shift the axis of import of the Christian faith away from Northern Europe and into North America. That the turning point was in this case a secular cataclysm rather than a doctrinal dispute points toward the shifting nature of Christianity itself, and the change that would be produced.
The shift was largely secular, and the trend was to be for secularization. The French Revolution occurred for blatantly political reasons: tensions between monarchy and nobility, authority and reason, and the economic clash between aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie. It produced overtly secular results: national rather than individual or religious sovereignty, the ostensibly purely rational critique of all things, the self-sustaining properties of the natural, secular world and the assertion of self-evident rights of national citizens.
The advent of the Enlightenment was the advent of the flame of Reason in the western world.
Yet the secular revolution swiftly took on proportions that could only be called religious. It may have been a mistaken notion when Samuel Miller preached a hope that the French Revolution would kindle a general conflagration sent to illuminate the darkest corners of the earth, but it was an understandable notion nonetheless. The de-Christianizing zeal displayed in renaming Notre Dame the Temple of Reason and populating it with Greco-Roman motifs and other idols certainly sounds like religious devotion in retrospect.
The remaining Christians of the day would have done well to note that ideals without mediation of accountability or pragmatic applicability inflict casualties no matter their origin, as the indiscriminate violence, fanatical ideology, citizen armies, executions, terrorism, and propaganda of the French Revolution soon showed. Toynbee was right, then, to later characterize this convulsion not as the abandonment of religion but simply “the fanatical worship of collective human power.” With the French Revolution, the nation had claimed for itself the shared public space long claimed by Christianity, or at least by Christendom.
This then might mark the greatest impact of the Enlightenment on Christianity: its privatization. The countervailing forces to the French Revolution inevitably imbibed some of its most prevalent characteristics: religion retreated from the public, intellectual and academic spheres and became personal and evangelistic as the theological responses to Enlightenment claims came up short of their mark.
Thus, while one is certainly wise to note the vigorous apologetics and Catholic reconsiderations that the Enlightenment produced, these can hardly be said to be its most powerful contributions or reactions. Rather, revivals, evangelism, faith healing and mission all appealed to the emotional sides of human nature more than the rational. Schleiermacher carried pietist upbringing into his later theology and called for a sense of dependence upon God even as biblical higher criticism called into question many of the assumptions that interpreters of Scripture had always held.
Meanwhile, sectarian movements sought to leave the influence of the world behind, whether in Protestant form through the Christian Brethren or in Catholic form through the reverence of the otherworldly Virgin Mary.
In other words, Christianity had become a fire nicely adapted for the pistons of the energetically individualistic and Romantic engine that was to be America.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Notice: Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving all, and a wonderful start to the holiday season. I'll be doing research for longer papers all this week, so there won't be anything until next Monday, when I return with a full slate.
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
The Curious Monk
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
The Curious Monk
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sermon: The Gospel According to James, Bond
The Gospel According to James, Bond
Standing here to preach today, I am supposed to see the faces of people thinking about a holiday. I might even expect to see mostly, the great Thanksgiving dinner that is about to happen. To get inside your heads, I’m supposed to mention a certain level of preoccupation, as hearts and minds keep drifting toward the warmth and food and family that is to come. Standing here this morning, I ought to perceive those happily distracted people who all have car keys in one hand, and recipes and cranberry sauce in the other and one foot already out the door.
But I don’t happen to see that. Instead, I see a people who only happen to look like ordinary Americans. I see people who go to work just like everyone else, people who pay their taxes just as though they were ordinary folk. I see those who, like me, buy groceries, walk pets, garden and take out the trash just as though we were indistinguishable from the people who lived next door. You wouldn’t know us apart from anybody else, necessarily.
But once a week we have these strange meetings. And if you catch us off guard, you might find us speaking what sounds like a foreign language or using mysterious hand signals. We’ve developed our own hierarchical structures within autonomous international organizations.
So: I see people who share a common and covert agenda, people whose political loyalties are consequently suspect. I see double agents.
Because when Thanksgiving rolls around, I don’t think turkey, necessarily, or even football. Instead, whenever Thanksgiving comes, I think: James Bond. Over the last decade of Thanksgivings no less than four separate television channels have elected to show a James Bond marathon. And my father is a fan. And my friends in college were fans. So I’ve become something of a fan myself. And the gift of television means that wherever I am, no matter who I’m with, when this week comes again, I can watch our international hero trot all around the globe seeking out all the evil masterminds one could ever hope to find.
(This year, by the way, it’s on SyFy.)
And if you think it odd to talk about James Bond in a sermon, consider this: when introducing himself in the New Testament epistle of the same name, James introduces himself as a bond servant. In the James Bond novels, the agent double-oh seven overcomes villains who bear out, in one form or another, each and every one of the seven deadly sins. It is not an accidental connection.
Still, it is a strange one, isn’t it? Out of all the weeks that network executives might have chosen, they choose this one year after year. And while it’s true that James Bond would indeed to have a lot to be grateful for – women, travel, technology – the one thing he never seems to be is glad. It’s just kind of all the same for him, which is why it took me such a long time to follow a James Bond plot the whole way through. Everything’s all on the same level, so it’s hard to tell very much of it apart.
And the most prevalent term that the author Ian Fleming uses to describe Bond is acedia. This is that restless laziness you get when all the joy is drained from everything and all the days seem the same. And it is the sin that our desert fathers considered to be one of the most deadly.
Acedia is prevalent today. In her memoir Acedia and Me, the poet Kathleen Norris describes acedia as the news crawl at the bottom of cable television stations: news of genocide is placed alongside the evening sports scores and the local weather, all just kind of…the same. On the same level. No one cares about any of it, very much, because it is all just…information. Acedia.
No, we are a different kind of double agent. Norris notes that monastics have long considered simple gratitude to be a potent antidote to the distractions of acedia, and we might start there. But our secret identities are a little different, too. Because our secret identities are…ourselves. Really fooled em, didn’t we? It’s not too hard for most of us to be anonymous, some of us for decades at a time.
A contest concluded this week over at Wired magazine. To test the capacities of our informational age, one of the Wired staffers had proposed that he would change his identity. He would keep all the same habits, all the same information and would even remain online, but all under a different name in a different city. And if anyone found him, if anyone figured out who he was, he would lose and pay out five thousand dollars to whoever found him. And he did lose.
And I thought: lucky guy! He disappears for a few weeks and he has thousands of people looking for him! He gets found out! How many of us get to actually be found out, uncovered just where we happen to be hiding in their lives? It’s only happened to me once that I can remember, and that was when our vicar shouted my name across a downtown street. It was like being shot! And that’s also when I decided to start coming to church here. The man found me out, knew my name.
That’s what agents do, right? Find out who other people really are.
Now it’s not always so easy as a name. Two of my married friends have this little girl, three years old. And they’re Christian, and they try to teach their kids to be Christian, so one day the little girl walks up to me and asks, “What’s a soul?” So I stand there – with all this theology flying though my head – and I say “Your soul? Is the secret inside you that whispers who you are.” Best I could do at the time. But it really matters, I guess, who you think is doing the whispering.
Yes, we’re a different kind of double agent.
In the film the Manchurian Candidate, the evildoers hypnotize their spies so that they forget who they are and what their mission is. This way, the spies can go even deeper undercover and infiltrate the highest levels of the United States government. The key for the Manchurian candidates is that something just happens to trigger that mission and activate the agent. There are particular gestures or phrases that, when they happen…activation.
We’re a different kind of spy. We actually are glad that we have men or women, and travel, and toys, and we’re glad when we don’t have those things. And while the Methodist Book of Resolutions recently called for a Christian counter-globalization, Christ’s kingdom has little to do, necessarily, with missile deployments or monetary funds or agreements about carbon dioxide.
Rather, the spies for Jesus have an alternative agenda. Whatever happens to the planet, we make people warmer. We change the climate of the human heart. As our spymaster himself once said to his own power-mad villain bent on world domination: “Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.” Still trying to convert the man.
But these end scenes never turn out well, do they: the villain gives a confused, rambling speech, our agent hero gets off a few wisecracking lines, and no one changes their position in any way whatsoever. ‘What is truth?’ Pilate says, and washes his hands. Pilate goes in and out of the building, he’s restless and off-balance and doesn’t seem to know exactly what to say – he is, in essence, the very portrait of acedia. It is all the same to him.
But it is not all the same to us. We may be international men and women of mystery, but our theme song is not the Communist Internationale, it’s ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Our training is in the technology of salvation – and wherever we go, we inflict collateral healing. In our wake we leave not dead bodies, but living spirits. Our casualties are those people whom we make more alive. By discovering everyone’s secret identities, we help them step into themselves.
Now there’s a question, isn’t it? This Thanksgiving, as we gather with all our various family and friends, have we made them truer versions of their selves? Are they actually better off for having spent some time with us?
Now the Lutherans would tell me to make sure it’s Jesus doing all this, and I think that’s right. And the Methodists would tell me to make sure it’s us doing some of this, and that’s a little bit right, too. But I think the salient fact, our Episcopal hope, of this entire transformation is that we’re all going to get there. One way or the other, our mission will succeed.
There’s a phrase we often use to talk about the kingdom of Christ: already, and not yet. Now we see that and think: already but not yet, a promise unfulfilled. But that’s not the sense we get from Revelation. Rather, when we talk about the one who is and who was and who is to come, the one who loves us and freed us, we understand that God is so faithful and God’s promises so good that it is as though they have already happened. The logic of the kingdom of heaven is such that it becomes “not yet, therefore, already.”
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? But then, our kingdom is not from this world. And we’re glad to see it here. We’re glad to feel ourselves, just a little bit, coming in from the cold.
So I don’t know what it might be. I don’t know if it would be these words or the gestures over the Eucharist or when we all say alleluia, or something outside this church entirely, but because the kingdom of God has nothing whatsoever to do with what we do, but has everything to do with who we are – and whose we are— I know that at some point, and soon, we must surely all consider ourselves…activated.
Amen
Standing here to preach today, I am supposed to see the faces of people thinking about a holiday. I might even expect to see mostly, the great Thanksgiving dinner that is about to happen. To get inside your heads, I’m supposed to mention a certain level of preoccupation, as hearts and minds keep drifting toward the warmth and food and family that is to come. Standing here this morning, I ought to perceive those happily distracted people who all have car keys in one hand, and recipes and cranberry sauce in the other and one foot already out the door.
But I don’t happen to see that. Instead, I see a people who only happen to look like ordinary Americans. I see people who go to work just like everyone else, people who pay their taxes just as though they were ordinary folk. I see those who, like me, buy groceries, walk pets, garden and take out the trash just as though we were indistinguishable from the people who lived next door. You wouldn’t know us apart from anybody else, necessarily.
But once a week we have these strange meetings. And if you catch us off guard, you might find us speaking what sounds like a foreign language or using mysterious hand signals. We’ve developed our own hierarchical structures within autonomous international organizations.
So: I see people who share a common and covert agenda, people whose political loyalties are consequently suspect. I see double agents.
Because when Thanksgiving rolls around, I don’t think turkey, necessarily, or even football. Instead, whenever Thanksgiving comes, I think: James Bond. Over the last decade of Thanksgivings no less than four separate television channels have elected to show a James Bond marathon. And my father is a fan. And my friends in college were fans. So I’ve become something of a fan myself. And the gift of television means that wherever I am, no matter who I’m with, when this week comes again, I can watch our international hero trot all around the globe seeking out all the evil masterminds one could ever hope to find.
(This year, by the way, it’s on SyFy.)
And if you think it odd to talk about James Bond in a sermon, consider this: when introducing himself in the New Testament epistle of the same name, James introduces himself as a bond servant. In the James Bond novels, the agent double-oh seven overcomes villains who bear out, in one form or another, each and every one of the seven deadly sins. It is not an accidental connection.
Still, it is a strange one, isn’t it? Out of all the weeks that network executives might have chosen, they choose this one year after year. And while it’s true that James Bond would indeed to have a lot to be grateful for – women, travel, technology – the one thing he never seems to be is glad. It’s just kind of all the same for him, which is why it took me such a long time to follow a James Bond plot the whole way through. Everything’s all on the same level, so it’s hard to tell very much of it apart.
And the most prevalent term that the author Ian Fleming uses to describe Bond is acedia. This is that restless laziness you get when all the joy is drained from everything and all the days seem the same. And it is the sin that our desert fathers considered to be one of the most deadly.
Acedia is prevalent today. In her memoir Acedia and Me, the poet Kathleen Norris describes acedia as the news crawl at the bottom of cable television stations: news of genocide is placed alongside the evening sports scores and the local weather, all just kind of…the same. On the same level. No one cares about any of it, very much, because it is all just…information. Acedia.
No, we are a different kind of double agent. Norris notes that monastics have long considered simple gratitude to be a potent antidote to the distractions of acedia, and we might start there. But our secret identities are a little different, too. Because our secret identities are…ourselves. Really fooled em, didn’t we? It’s not too hard for most of us to be anonymous, some of us for decades at a time.
A contest concluded this week over at Wired magazine. To test the capacities of our informational age, one of the Wired staffers had proposed that he would change his identity. He would keep all the same habits, all the same information and would even remain online, but all under a different name in a different city. And if anyone found him, if anyone figured out who he was, he would lose and pay out five thousand dollars to whoever found him. And he did lose.
And I thought: lucky guy! He disappears for a few weeks and he has thousands of people looking for him! He gets found out! How many of us get to actually be found out, uncovered just where we happen to be hiding in their lives? It’s only happened to me once that I can remember, and that was when our vicar shouted my name across a downtown street. It was like being shot! And that’s also when I decided to start coming to church here. The man found me out, knew my name.
That’s what agents do, right? Find out who other people really are.
Now it’s not always so easy as a name. Two of my married friends have this little girl, three years old. And they’re Christian, and they try to teach their kids to be Christian, so one day the little girl walks up to me and asks, “What’s a soul?” So I stand there – with all this theology flying though my head – and I say “Your soul? Is the secret inside you that whispers who you are.” Best I could do at the time. But it really matters, I guess, who you think is doing the whispering.
Yes, we’re a different kind of double agent.
In the film the Manchurian Candidate, the evildoers hypnotize their spies so that they forget who they are and what their mission is. This way, the spies can go even deeper undercover and infiltrate the highest levels of the United States government. The key for the Manchurian candidates is that something just happens to trigger that mission and activate the agent. There are particular gestures or phrases that, when they happen…activation.
We’re a different kind of spy. We actually are glad that we have men or women, and travel, and toys, and we’re glad when we don’t have those things. And while the Methodist Book of Resolutions recently called for a Christian counter-globalization, Christ’s kingdom has little to do, necessarily, with missile deployments or monetary funds or agreements about carbon dioxide.
Rather, the spies for Jesus have an alternative agenda. Whatever happens to the planet, we make people warmer. We change the climate of the human heart. As our spymaster himself once said to his own power-mad villain bent on world domination: “Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.” Still trying to convert the man.
But these end scenes never turn out well, do they: the villain gives a confused, rambling speech, our agent hero gets off a few wisecracking lines, and no one changes their position in any way whatsoever. ‘What is truth?’ Pilate says, and washes his hands. Pilate goes in and out of the building, he’s restless and off-balance and doesn’t seem to know exactly what to say – he is, in essence, the very portrait of acedia. It is all the same to him.
But it is not all the same to us. We may be international men and women of mystery, but our theme song is not the Communist Internationale, it’s ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Our training is in the technology of salvation – and wherever we go, we inflict collateral healing. In our wake we leave not dead bodies, but living spirits. Our casualties are those people whom we make more alive. By discovering everyone’s secret identities, we help them step into themselves.
Now there’s a question, isn’t it? This Thanksgiving, as we gather with all our various family and friends, have we made them truer versions of their selves? Are they actually better off for having spent some time with us?
Now the Lutherans would tell me to make sure it’s Jesus doing all this, and I think that’s right. And the Methodists would tell me to make sure it’s us doing some of this, and that’s a little bit right, too. But I think the salient fact, our Episcopal hope, of this entire transformation is that we’re all going to get there. One way or the other, our mission will succeed.
There’s a phrase we often use to talk about the kingdom of Christ: already, and not yet. Now we see that and think: already but not yet, a promise unfulfilled. But that’s not the sense we get from Revelation. Rather, when we talk about the one who is and who was and who is to come, the one who loves us and freed us, we understand that God is so faithful and God’s promises so good that it is as though they have already happened. The logic of the kingdom of heaven is such that it becomes “not yet, therefore, already.”
Doesn’t make much sense, does it? But then, our kingdom is not from this world. And we’re glad to see it here. We’re glad to feel ourselves, just a little bit, coming in from the cold.
So I don’t know what it might be. I don’t know if it would be these words or the gestures over the Eucharist or when we all say alleluia, or something outside this church entirely, but because the kingdom of God has nothing whatsoever to do with what we do, but has everything to do with who we are – and whose we are— I know that at some point, and soon, we must surely all consider ourselves…activated.
Amen
Friday, November 20, 2009
Editorial: But What About Evolution?
By asserting the cosmos as creation, Christians must assume that the language or book of God takes preeminence over the language or book of the world. The holiness of God implies the antiquated notion that creation itself is analogy, as must be all the adjectives that creation can produce to describe itself, including scientific and historical ones.
So it follows that to contemplate a lively and evolving creation is to consider (but not to determine) a living, dynamic and involving God. For creational theists, evolution, the unrolling of a book, must necessarily entail the involvement, the rolling up, of God into creation. Evolution implies incarnation, albeit incarnation more broadly understood than traditionally has been the case.
Evolution is open, predictable by the past but not dependent upon it. Evolution can ‘fail’ as species encounter the ends of their genetic lines without sufficiently mutating to match a dynamic world. Evolution is open to extinction, to accidental death. The most surprising metaphor in this new book of evolution, then, is the destabilization of both God and creation. The God implied by the analogy of evolution is a God open to debacle, to failure, to death and the suffocation of extinction and the abandonment of the laws of the originating order.
In other words, the God implied by the analogy of evolution must be radically open to the calamity of the cross.
All such events are fairly sudden, absolutely irreversible, and involve the broader environment in which the species becomes extinct. Once done, extinction, like crucifixion, is for all time. Extinction, like crucifixion, is the dross of a generative process, even as it signals that a horror has occurred. Extinction, like crucifixion, is jarringly abrupt – one can see it coming only in retrospect, the great eloi eloi lama sabachtani for which, by definition, no one can prepare. Extinction, like crucifixion, is environmental; it involves not simply the persecution of any one organism but also the tearing of all kinds of temple curtains in two.
This calamity, of course, is not the ‘purpose’ of the process but is in this universe a likely and perhaps even necessary corollary. The purpose of the process, at least the one self-described by the unrolling of the book of evolution itself, is to continue and perhaps to increase the life of the evolving. Through evolution, life as a whole becomes richer. Through crucifixion, God’s involution increases, and the life of all creation progresses toward its eschatological confirmation. After crucifixion life abounds and death, of course, has no sting. God, for the continuing world, increases. The mutations of evolution and involution continue.
That all of this did not have to happen, naturally, is the ‘miracle’ of evolution and creation alike. It has all been in essence only a probability, however great or small. But at the advent of an event, the probability of its occurrence becomes one, and, for the theist, God’s continuing involvement in evolution implies that the probability of life and life renewed always becomes certain.
Thus, one Christian wager might be that evolutionary creation is the venue of God’s constant apprehension.
An evolutionary creation, after all, requires more of the involvement of God than a deistic order governed solely by its own self-evident rules. Evolutionary creation is anything but self-evident, influenced by genetic history but exposed to the internal chances of mutation and the external accidents of dynamically hostile environments. But it is precisely by being so open that an evolutionary creation allows in its nature the involution of God.
Evolution, then, is not the denial of creation as such but rather the fulfilling of creation itself as the dynamic and expensive process of life’s grandeur increases toward the eschaton. If creation is evolutionary in its essence, then the culmination that is its divined purpose will not be the cessation of life but will be its exclamation and graduation into still more complex, rich, and dynamic forms.
The Christian, to reconcile the creational and evolutionary accounts of the genesis of life, must simply assume that the book of evolution was not published in 1859 by Darwin but rather, simply, on the very first day by God, and that its run will not stop until the last day that historical humanity can know. Because the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex-nihilo implies that creation and all its subsequent order depends on God, evolution, for the Christian theist, becomes the affirmation of God’s providence in this the best of all possible worlds.
So it follows that to contemplate a lively and evolving creation is to consider (but not to determine) a living, dynamic and involving God. For creational theists, evolution, the unrolling of a book, must necessarily entail the involvement, the rolling up, of God into creation. Evolution implies incarnation, albeit incarnation more broadly understood than traditionally has been the case.
Evolution is open, predictable by the past but not dependent upon it. Evolution can ‘fail’ as species encounter the ends of their genetic lines without sufficiently mutating to match a dynamic world. Evolution is open to extinction, to accidental death. The most surprising metaphor in this new book of evolution, then, is the destabilization of both God and creation. The God implied by the analogy of evolution is a God open to debacle, to failure, to death and the suffocation of extinction and the abandonment of the laws of the originating order.
In other words, the God implied by the analogy of evolution must be radically open to the calamity of the cross.
All such events are fairly sudden, absolutely irreversible, and involve the broader environment in which the species becomes extinct. Once done, extinction, like crucifixion, is for all time. Extinction, like crucifixion, is the dross of a generative process, even as it signals that a horror has occurred. Extinction, like crucifixion, is jarringly abrupt – one can see it coming only in retrospect, the great eloi eloi lama sabachtani for which, by definition, no one can prepare. Extinction, like crucifixion, is environmental; it involves not simply the persecution of any one organism but also the tearing of all kinds of temple curtains in two.
This calamity, of course, is not the ‘purpose’ of the process but is in this universe a likely and perhaps even necessary corollary. The purpose of the process, at least the one self-described by the unrolling of the book of evolution itself, is to continue and perhaps to increase the life of the evolving. Through evolution, life as a whole becomes richer. Through crucifixion, God’s involution increases, and the life of all creation progresses toward its eschatological confirmation. After crucifixion life abounds and death, of course, has no sting. God, for the continuing world, increases. The mutations of evolution and involution continue.
That all of this did not have to happen, naturally, is the ‘miracle’ of evolution and creation alike. It has all been in essence only a probability, however great or small. But at the advent of an event, the probability of its occurrence becomes one, and, for the theist, God’s continuing involvement in evolution implies that the probability of life and life renewed always becomes certain.
Thus, one Christian wager might be that evolutionary creation is the venue of God’s constant apprehension.
An evolutionary creation, after all, requires more of the involvement of God than a deistic order governed solely by its own self-evident rules. Evolutionary creation is anything but self-evident, influenced by genetic history but exposed to the internal chances of mutation and the external accidents of dynamically hostile environments. But it is precisely by being so open that an evolutionary creation allows in its nature the involution of God.
Evolution, then, is not the denial of creation as such but rather the fulfilling of creation itself as the dynamic and expensive process of life’s grandeur increases toward the eschaton. If creation is evolutionary in its essence, then the culmination that is its divined purpose will not be the cessation of life but will be its exclamation and graduation into still more complex, rich, and dynamic forms.
The Christian, to reconcile the creational and evolutionary accounts of the genesis of life, must simply assume that the book of evolution was not published in 1859 by Darwin but rather, simply, on the very first day by God, and that its run will not stop until the last day that historical humanity can know. Because the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex-nihilo implies that creation and all its subsequent order depends on God, evolution, for the Christian theist, becomes the affirmation of God’s providence in this the best of all possible worlds.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Editorial: How Should Christians Think About Science?
One challenge of contemporary science, particularly quantum mechanics, to classical Christian theology is to describe reality in terms of probability rather than materiality. So, to know the rules that ‘govern’ the cosmos is not to know the nature of the cosmos itself but is only to know the predictability of the cosmos behaving in certain ways.
This is a considerable epistemological limitation, and it does indeed concern the ‘book of nature’ Augustine and later theologians claim as one means of revelation. The probabilistic nature of scientifically described reality may not necessarily spell the much looked-for end of metaphysics, but it certainly does comprise its thoroughgoing weird-ing.
No longer can the metaphysics of demonstrable reality claim to have captured the essence of the cosmos, because the nature of material reality itself is not certain, but only likely. Truth, then, is ultimately probable, contingent, and far from certain.
Here, one can sense the phenomenological tremors of an approaching theological tyrannosaurus: if the truth of the cosmos has any similarity to the truth of the creator, God would then exist, just as we do, not as the majesty of absolute being, but with the wiggling probability of existence itself. God would vacillate between being and non-being, presence and absence, momentary revelation and the vanishing secrecy of un-decidability. God would step inside Schrödinger’s box, displacing the famous cat as an object subject to and in some degree constituted by human apprehension.
One would hardly be alone in finding this approach disconcerting. Who could ever derive certainty from such a radically uncertain God? Who could possibly remain faithful to the God Who May Be? But, of course, such a theology only becomes necessary if one believe that the business of theology is, like the business of science, making descriptive truth claims which purport to correspond to the fundamental nature of reality.
By positing a theology-as-prayer, I have proposed an alternative approach. The theological task of such prayer would simply be to recall God to God’s disclosed promises of loving fidelity, to summon the Hebraic God Who Will Be, and who will be for us as God has promised to be. The essence of God’s being as metaphysical certainty or quantum un-decidability would ostensibly not matter, so long as God consequently comes.
The purpose of theology-as-liturgy would simply be to speak into the transcendent, silent roar of God. Like all the rest of creation, it would irretrievably remain analogy and would never equate itself with a metaphysical formula as something to be grasped. Thus emptied, theology-as-prayer might be able to listen to the language of probability coursing through existence. After all, if all language is metaphor, the most resounding claims of science cannot shake the tremor-producing numen of the Lord our God.
Theology-as-prayer, then, would construe scientific claims as what they ultimately must be: simply more poetry limning the created cosmos and, by corollary, suggesting the shape of the face of God-for-us. After all, what is the weight of a promise anyway, if not the likelihood, based on past experience, that it will be fulfilled? If the Trinity is the wager that God-for-us is the same as God-for-God, isn’t the language of Christian theism ultimately the grammar of probability anyway?
And if faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen, isn’t God for us always already in poor Schrödinger’s cubicle – hasn’t his always been the case?
And both the book of science and the book of faith would agree that God is not alone in there. Part of the wonder of the perichoresis, ultimately, is that God remains open to us, and, by extension, the possibility that we will not, that we will not love God. We are God’s quantum surprise. Our only hope is that God looks constantly inside the box of the universe, that God’s loving gaze will call us into being out of the depths of probability. Dare we assert that our gaze would perform something of the same for the advent of our God? “Wherever two or more are gathered…” but, of course, such a position lingers outside the scope of this essay.
But with the ongoing developments of extraordinary science, I do propose that theology should do that at which Christianity has long excelled and that which I have clumsily attempted here: using constant, creative, and subversive re-appropriation of the world’s own claims about itself to speak to the holiness of God.
This is a considerable epistemological limitation, and it does indeed concern the ‘book of nature’ Augustine and later theologians claim as one means of revelation. The probabilistic nature of scientifically described reality may not necessarily spell the much looked-for end of metaphysics, but it certainly does comprise its thoroughgoing weird-ing.
No longer can the metaphysics of demonstrable reality claim to have captured the essence of the cosmos, because the nature of material reality itself is not certain, but only likely. Truth, then, is ultimately probable, contingent, and far from certain.
Here, one can sense the phenomenological tremors of an approaching theological tyrannosaurus: if the truth of the cosmos has any similarity to the truth of the creator, God would then exist, just as we do, not as the majesty of absolute being, but with the wiggling probability of existence itself. God would vacillate between being and non-being, presence and absence, momentary revelation and the vanishing secrecy of un-decidability. God would step inside Schrödinger’s box, displacing the famous cat as an object subject to and in some degree constituted by human apprehension.
One would hardly be alone in finding this approach disconcerting. Who could ever derive certainty from such a radically uncertain God? Who could possibly remain faithful to the God Who May Be? But, of course, such a theology only becomes necessary if one believe that the business of theology is, like the business of science, making descriptive truth claims which purport to correspond to the fundamental nature of reality.
By positing a theology-as-prayer, I have proposed an alternative approach. The theological task of such prayer would simply be to recall God to God’s disclosed promises of loving fidelity, to summon the Hebraic God Who Will Be, and who will be for us as God has promised to be. The essence of God’s being as metaphysical certainty or quantum un-decidability would ostensibly not matter, so long as God consequently comes.
The purpose of theology-as-liturgy would simply be to speak into the transcendent, silent roar of God. Like all the rest of creation, it would irretrievably remain analogy and would never equate itself with a metaphysical formula as something to be grasped. Thus emptied, theology-as-prayer might be able to listen to the language of probability coursing through existence. After all, if all language is metaphor, the most resounding claims of science cannot shake the tremor-producing numen of the Lord our God.
Theology-as-prayer, then, would construe scientific claims as what they ultimately must be: simply more poetry limning the created cosmos and, by corollary, suggesting the shape of the face of God-for-us. After all, what is the weight of a promise anyway, if not the likelihood, based on past experience, that it will be fulfilled? If the Trinity is the wager that God-for-us is the same as God-for-God, isn’t the language of Christian theism ultimately the grammar of probability anyway?
And if faith is the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen, isn’t God for us always already in poor Schrödinger’s cubicle – hasn’t his always been the case?
And both the book of science and the book of faith would agree that God is not alone in there. Part of the wonder of the perichoresis, ultimately, is that God remains open to us, and, by extension, the possibility that we will not, that we will not love God. We are God’s quantum surprise. Our only hope is that God looks constantly inside the box of the universe, that God’s loving gaze will call us into being out of the depths of probability. Dare we assert that our gaze would perform something of the same for the advent of our God? “Wherever two or more are gathered…” but, of course, such a position lingers outside the scope of this essay.
But with the ongoing developments of extraordinary science, I do propose that theology should do that at which Christianity has long excelled and that which I have clumsily attempted here: using constant, creative, and subversive re-appropriation of the world’s own claims about itself to speak to the holiness of God.
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