Maybe I just hear about these things because I’m doing a PhD in religion, and my radar is already tuned into those kinds of issues and stories, though I suspect this one was really hard to miss. By way of recap:
Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and pastor of the fastest-growing church in the U.S., has been accused of soliciting a male prostitute and using meth. By way of further irony, his church in Colorado has been especially vocal about condemning gay marriage proposals.
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When the accusations first came out, the response was flat denial. Then, the response shifted, that he had called the prostitute, and bought the meth, but used neither. Frankly, this conjured up someone else’s 1992 response to the question if they’d ever smoked pot. I didn’t buy it then either; I’m much more cynical and less inclined to buy this explanation today, as soothing as it might be to accept this whole thing as an enormous misunderstanding.
There have been a run of prominent conservative leaders whose sexual foibles have come to light in the last month, beginning with the revelation that Mark Foley had inappropriate contact with pages, continuing when it came out that Don Sherwood was beating his mistress, followed by the undoing of Ted Haggard. I’m not going to draw any conclusions, aside from the obvious: they were human, male, and subject to the passions of all creation.
In the last year, I’ve known more than one person in these circumstances, living a secret life that came out to the public, and each time, it’s staggering to hear about. Looking back….yeah, looking back, sometimes you can’t even tell. Sometimes, it comes as a massive shock to the system, like throwing a hairdryer in ice water. And in the wake, everybody gets fried: friends, families, admirers, careers, hopes, futures. I daresay you won’t see Ted Haggard in the spotlight. Anyone seen Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker anytime lately?
It’s easy to damn him as a conservative or a hypocrite, except for the fact that I’ll go ahead and say that every man I know under the age of 40–hell, every man I know–struggles with lust in some form or fashion. What, you were surprised at this one, that somehow marriage or Jesus doesn’t keep us from wanting to stick our hands on the hot stove?
I’m reminded of the scene in Super Troopers when Rabbit takes the stolen car out, and Farva busts him, and while being cuffed, Rabbit yells out, “Same team, Farva! Same team!” Same team, Ted. We’re all in this together.
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Aquinas deals with these desires in an extremely potent way in the Summa, which I won’t delve into here. In a nutshell, we have intellect and passions, both of which are created by God as good. The passions, those things we share with animals, are, like the intellect, designed to serve and enjoy God, but are subject a lot more sway than the mind. In Luther, there’s a massive conflict, that we will to do one thing and desire to do another, and so, doing good is always a struggle. For Aquinas, the two are designed to go together: we never do other than we truly desire to do. Thus, when I give in to lust, it’s only because I wanted to–if the intellect is the higher part of us, and desire the lower, then it follows thus.
What’s important to recall here is that the passions–fear, anger, desire, and all the rest–are part of our God-given faculties, and when harnassed by a vision of the Good–God, fall into line, and start craving that which is good. You ever felt in your bones that if you didn’t get loved that you were going to collapse? That’s kinda what he’s talking about. When trained towards God, the passions become not an enemy, but one’s greatest ally. Instead of wanting to do one thing and choosing another, we choose that which we desire the most, and find our joy in it fully.
So, on this Sunday, here’s to following our desires, and praying that God makes our desires and the will to the good one and the same.
Same team.
You know that your reading list for the semester is rough when you look forward to reading Dante, not because he’s light literature, but because it’s the lightest thing on your plate for the semester. I spent close to three hours yesterday afternoon slogging through this book, and read maybe thirty pages. Seriously: it’s killing me. Of course, not knowing the history of German idealism isn’t helping my cause with understanding what Gadadmer’s putting forth. As my friend Dennis Tucker puts it, “it’s a chance to learn.”
Gadamer opens his magnum opus with a lengthy discussion of where the German philosophical history went wrong, in short. Somewhere along the line, after Kant, philosophers starting looking at the ideal as something which concentrated first in abstract principles, occasionally revealing itself through the bombastic statements of Hegel and Nietzsche. The point he’s trying to make is that this tradition tends to devalue what is in its particularity. In an example that C.S. Lewis will also use, he talks about the morality of trees, that a tree is not a bad tree because it doesn’t look like a tall, towering pine; some trees are meant to be shrubs. As such, it makes no sense to call that tree “bad” just because it doesn’t measure up to what you had concieved as “tree”.
This weekend, we’re having a mini-retreat at church to discuss a few little topics, and in the wake of reading Gadamer, my head was spinning. I walk into the retreat and see multiple friendly faces, give a lot of much-needed hugs, and am relieved to be out Gadamer’s shadow for a few minutes. We stand around, eat little pistachios and munchies, and eventually sing before breaking out into little groups. The first song contained the line “come build a house of flesh and bone.”
Flesh and bone? Suddenly, the fog bank in my mind rolled away and everything Gadamer was talking about took on human faces. The ghosts of his words spiraled out the front door and in slouched people with all kinds of eyes and toenails. Kant become an old woman with silver hair and a middle-aged pooch; Hegel grew a moustache and cowboy boots. When we deal with the “church”, it dawned on me, this is nothing more complicated than dealing with “people”.
Aristotle writes in his Ethics that he doesn’t see the need for a universal, because if there was one, it wouldn’t make much difference for this person or that person. In other words, if John has seven nails to put this board up, it does him no good to idealize about how to put it up with nine. Most days, I’m inclined to agree, that we are to work with what we have been given, and hope for completion. As Moltmann pointed out long ago, this is the point at which the idealists break down: they have no hope in what cannot be anticipated. God gives to us frail people that which we could not have expected, which is more than we could have wanted had we known what we wanted.
Dealing with church is no more than dealing with the vessels through whom God is working. The abstractions of “church” are meaningless apart from their concrete expressions, for only those visions given by God can provoke us, and only those gifts that hope anticipates can sustain us. And how else does these emerge but through flesh and bone? Miraculously, these things are not competitive: spirit and flesh, grace and need.
“You screened them, you examined their denominational loyalty, their faith, their church background and commitment, their affirmation of the ‘Baptist Faith and Message.’ And our [staff] regional leaders are in touch with them, monitoring them. If there were any problems of doctrinal aberrations, of charismatic influences or practices, or even tolerance, or anyone not [properly] practicing baptism, or contributing in any way to ecumenical-type practices, we would know about it and deal with it.”
–Jerry Rankin, head of the International Mission Board, SBC
One has to wonder if the propogation here is of the church, mysterious and God’s. This is not to lsingle out the SBC against other groups, by any means, but to say that when the internal organizing of a body supercedes the openness that is neccesary as a church, the end is near.
This openness is not the reception of any old thing as Christian, but the anticipation of every new thing at the hand of God. As Christians, we believe that what is present is not the sum total of existence, but the world in part. What is to come, comes as a gift of God, unpredictable and new. And thus, any attempt to hold the interior logic of a church as final and unchangeable ignores the world to come, which will make all things new, new beyond our wildest dream, a world which even now is breaking in.
Why is it when the media wants to get a soundbite from Christianity, they never turn to anyone other than Al Mohler or Jerry Fallwell?
I’ve learned that tonight, Mohler is facing off with gay advocates over the success of Brokeback Mountain. You can get the transcript here probably tomorrow. Ten bucks says Mohler’s going to have to confess he’s not even seen the film. Any takers? It happens every time: Christians talking about crap they’ve not listened to or seen.
God, help us. Our own voices are killing us.
As a native Louisianaian, I’ve been watching the events of the last week in near total disbelief. New Orleans, though light years from my native Shreveport, is the gem of the state: it’s the land of jazz and beignets and bourbon and all things that are indicative of Louisiana. When I think of what is the cultural homeland, I can look somewhere south and say, “I’m not sure what it is about this part of the state, except that whatever is right about being from Louisiana is here.” Frankly, I’ve never been prouder to be from there than I have this week, as the largest city in the state becomes the home of the largest exodus I’ve ever seen. My only fear is that now, they may never return, that the roots of cypress knees may now become roots of red oaks or east Texas pine.
Ten hours away, in Waco, Texas, hundreds of refugees come. In the government housing, 15 apartments are opened up for families fleeing the Astrodome. Our church is putting together one, sponsoring the family in its needs. The church around the corner from my house, one that I have criticized for its past opposition to the local homeless shelter, is housing 60 people in its gym. Another church in town that I’ve always suspected liked the idea of being a church more than actually being one is holding another large band on its floors.
And I feel more than a little embarrassed.
Where have I been this weekend, when people were staying up nights to man makeshift shelters, or clean floors so that displaced families would have a place to be? The library, my desk, deep in the 4th century and some inane period of time that has real relevance, but in terms of hurricanes, not much in the way of comfort.
I’m blown away by the throngs of generosity that have risen up from the country in taking in people who do not speak their language. New Orleans lives a life completely its own, unlike any other, and for them to relocate is like asking a cowboy to go vegan. I’m amazed by the waves of people that seem to keep coming, and how each wave of people is met with another wave of generosity and open arms–beds, canned food, rides, furniture. It’s making a lot out of more than we really needed to begin with.
This book expresses my feeling about this whole time, telling the story of three travellers who show up hungry, and in the process of making this really dumb stew, show the town how to pull out of their excess enough for everyone to share. It reminds me of another time, when another person pulled out enough for thousands to eat. Some scholars have tried to reduce the story down by saying that what happened was that Jesus’ example of sharing inspired others to pull a stone soup and share their excess with their neighbors, but this is one of the reasons that I study theology and not New Testament: frankly, that’s a load of crap.
To say that what we have is all around us, is to say that there is not a God that graciously slathers all we have on us to begin with. To say that what we have to give is ourselves is to say that we have no God to give, and that furthermore, God has nothing of us worth giving away either. There is no good example to give me that will inspire me to give what I have to the poor, or to spend my hours that others might benefit. There are only the gifts of God, poured out in plenty, waiting to be shared. As I watched in the foyer this morning, the stuff pile up for a family we have not met, I am reminded that this is the call of the church: to give to one we do not know, for no other reason that to keep it back is to kill a gift. Love is meant to pass through us, and not to rest.
Building on the first two parts of this series, having determined that it is difficult to say if there is anything ontologically different between believers and non-believers, we now turn to the question of whether or not the two are ontologically the same. Is there something that Christian tradition testifies to as being the same, regardless of allegiance to Christ?
If one looks to the New Testament, the evidence is scant. The emphasis is on difference–between disciple and crowd, church and world. Beginning with the Gospels, it is impossible to ignore the hard sayings of Christ that seem to place the followers of Christ in a different category, not simply of allegiance or practice, but of being, using language of “born again”, of “darkness/light”. But is it possible that this language relies upon an understanding beyond this of the Old Testament?
Throughout the Old Testament, the emphasis in terms of group relations is one of participation: people belong to the nation of Israel, not only on the basis of birth, but on the basis of belonging, as in the case of Rahab, Ruth, etc., a pattern that continues in the New Testament, as those who were outside become inside, and vice versa. But behind even this is the teaching of creation, that all people, male and female, were created, prior to their social allegiance, as one people.
Prior to the social allegiances created by church, state, or race, is the oneness spoken of in Genesis 1-2, that all people were created by God as a unified humanity, that there is something single about people prior to culture: created-ness. This activity by God gives an interesting understanding of this oneness, however: that the oneness of humanity is one given to us by God, and thus part of our makeup, but not one that is forever a given. The lesson for Christian/non-Christian relations begins here, that we remember that creation was given intitially as a unity, not a division.
As people who participate not only in the lives of one another, but the life of God, the lesson for Christians is thus: because it was a divine activity that created the fundamental created unity, it is there that we must begin with our relation to those who are not part of the visible church–the place of recognizing that whatever new creation Christ has brought to the church was first begun by God in the beginning.
Continuing with the first post, today we turn to the cliffhanger of Part 1: are people, i.e. Christians and non-Christians, essentially different or essentially the same? Again, I use that term “essentially” to refer to some part of the self that is beyond touching, the ‘essence’ of what it means to be Christian. It’s good to note that a lot of Christian theology rests on this concept of the essence, whether one is talking about the nature of the trinity, or simply the human nature. If we do away with the concept of essences altogether, we find ourselves at odds with centuries of Christian tradition that has posited that there is something of substance that is related to action, both in God and in ourselves.
Traditionally, essences have been understood in the following way in relation to God: God is one substance/essence, and three persons. That is to say, that God is essentially unified, though present in three distinct persons (Father, Son, Spirit). How this is understood by Christians varies, but the main point to take away here is that behind the persons of the Trinity, there is a unity that is at work. As such, God, having created humanity, created a unified creation: a single variety of humanity, differentiated into male and female, but of one kind.
It is in this that discrimination runs into a brick wall: if people are created, by a unified God, as in their core being, unified people, we are at a loss to explain how Christians are somehow, beyond the reaches of time, different. It could be explained that by sinning, we become less of who we are, that is, we reject our core being–that as a creation of God–and attempt to construct something from the ground up, and that in Christ, that core is once again reunited with God. But this doesn’t answer the problem that we run into in the New Testament when we find that, as the church relating to the world, we are to treat those that are not named Christian better than we would our own family.
Jesus is forever inviting and eating with those that are percieved to be on the outside; Paul admonishes the churches to deal peaceably with those that are not of the community and to live their lives in such a way that despite abuses, the surrounding world will see something different. In short, the call of the church is to see the surrounding world as having no different origin or no different core than themselves. Both church and world are in the position of needing a relation to God; the difference is that the church, in its practices, reflect that origin. Or should.
So what has changed about those called Christian? If the same Creator God has created those called Christian and not, is there human about being Christian? Is it a different state of being, or a different practice, with different origin and terminus? Can there be one without the other? And if there is something different in the core state of being of those called Christian, how does that alone make a difference? This is meant to be a jumping-off point for discussion, not a final note.
