Dennis Kucinich

Kucinich is one of the few politicians that sticks to his views even if they are unpopular.

Christian Soldiers?

Will we ever stop using this horrible image?

In February, I posted a review of the movie Jesus Camp. I felt sick when I watched the movie because it used imagery of war and violence to cultivate faith in children. A friend of mine was kind enough to show me this video which uses the imagery of war to represent Christianity. This appears to be a militant cult-like movement which has a goal of spreading misogynistic thinking and creating soldiers that strike down heresy, immorality and "demonic opposition". He rejects a vision of Jesus as an advocate for peace and justice which he calls a "hippie-like Jesus in a dress". He devalues Pastors that offer love and counseling and prefers church leaders that are more like "soldiers". It is filmed in front of a military cemetery and speaks about a "body count" of dying churches to drive home the militant imagery.

I recently purchased a book by this man (Mark Driscoll) at the request of a friend but I'm not sure how to respond. Does this bother anyone else? How do we bridge the gap with these types of people?

"I like your Christ. I don't like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ" - Gandhi

The Worst Theological Invention

Ben Meyers at Faith and Theology has set up a new poll with seven theological ideas, which he calls the Worst Theological Invention. Here are the nominations:

• Biblical inerrancy
• Double predestination
• The rapture
• Papal infallibility
• Arianism
• Christendom (not to be confused with Chrisendom, which is alsoone of the worst theological inventions...)
• Just war theory

So, go and vote here. I voted for Biblical inerrancy which probably is the root cause for some of the others. Second on my list would be the rapture.

First Debate...

The first debate of Democratic Candidates for the 2008 Presidential election in South Carolina just finished. Overall, I have to admit this is the best line up of candidates for a primary that I can remember. The debate was too short to get to any level of depth considering that there were 8 candidates and I don't think anyone made a strong impression or had any major problems. The only winners were the lesser know candidates that gained some exposure and made a good showing. It seems Dennis Kucinich may have picked up a little ground by pushing his opposition to the war and he continues to be someone I would consider. Bill Richardson focused too much on the 2nd amendment to realistically get a Democratic nomination and he missed a great opportunity to mention his experience as secretary of Energy and his help in sending a big chunk of funding to South Carolina's nuclear facilities. I think Sen. Edwards made a mistake by taking too long to answer a direct question about his role model for moral values but he made several strong statements throughout the night. I'm not sure why he didn't have a prepared response for such an easy question. Clinton was the best at transitioning every question into her prepared stump speech. Obama was good but not exceptional considering he is the best speaker in the bunch.

My vote is not in the bag but here is what I'm thinking right now:

• Clinton is for sale and is too much of a typical politician
• Obama is holding back and I hope has more tricks in his bag
• Edwards is possibly the best candidate but this could be the first election where being a white male is a handicap
• I like Kucinich right now but he has too much ground to make up and unfortunately presidents are elected based on personal appearance and he doesn't have it (it is sad but true)
• The rest of the field is better than you would imagine but has a mountain to climb

I feel confident I could vote for any of the them over any republican although I think Clinton is my least favorite because of her inability to convey sincerity and my fear that she would just maintain the status quo in Washington.

An Emergent Manifesto of Hope

a This book has some good moments but not enough moments to make it a good read. The format of having 25 different author gloss the surface of 25 different topics really doesn’t provide the depth that I would have wanted. However, it could serve the purpose of showing the world that the emergent conversation is still in touch with its Evangelical roots. Emergent is a broad umbrella and this book showcases a broad spectrum of ideas including a few that have not emerged much at all. Many are more conservative than you might expect. The best thing to say about the book is that it introduced a couple of people I hadn’t read much about. I suspect that the real purpose of the book was to get a few of these authors out in the public and maybe get a few writing careers jump started.

The bright spots are:

Samir Selmanovic – “The Sweet Problem of Inclusiveness, Finding Our God in the Other”
Barry Taylor – “Converting Christianity, The end of and beginning of faith”
Rodolpho Carrasco – “A Pound of Social Justice, Beyond Fighting for a Just Cause”

I hope that the idea of Emergent doesn't devolve into a ploy to sell books to young Evangelicals about cultural relativity and small acts of charity. This book could be the first step in that direction but I still maintain hope that the conversation will emerge into something of much greater depth and the beginnings of a much more progressive faith.

Zen for Christians - Practice tip

I seem to suffer from a common problem which is feeling like I can't keep the clutter of thoughts in my mind from distracting my practice. Deadlines at work, schedules, anxieties, memories, responsibilities and random thoughts about anything and everything always bombard my mind when I begin to sit. At some point I learned to stop fighting..

In "Zen for Christians" Kim Boykin offers an analogy that has helped in my practice sessions.

"Here's a helpful image I learned from a meditation instructor. You're at a train station. Your train is leaving in two minutes. You're weaving through all the people and you run into a friend you haven't seen in a long time. You stop and smile and say a few words and maybe give your friend a hug. Maybe you encourage your friend to give you a call soon. And then you run off to get your train. You don't ignore your friend. But neither do you get into a long conversation and miss your train."

I finally realized that it isn't a battle or test of concentration powers and it isn't a game of trying to clear your mind. Noticing our thoughts is the whole point. We learn to notice thoughts and then let them pass without consuming our minds.

Is Chruch Really Worth It?

It has been difficult over the last 10 years to stay plugged into a faith community. I was a board member in a church plant for several years, I have been on several different worship teams, numerous small groups, and spent time in 2 other new churches for very short periods in lesser roles. I've read more about church growth, planning, and finance than I'd care to admit.

The last 3 years have been a time of transition to something different, learning and investigation faith on a more broad scope. Most of my religious life has been one of compromise as I’ve sought to practice progressive faith in one of the most conservative areas in the world. The reason for the difficult transition is because I finally put a stake in the ground and decided that I would no longer bottle up my thoughts and feelings. I decided to “come out” theologically and place a few more demands on my faith community rather than always accommodating myself to my community. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I should just shut up, sing the silly songs, say the awkward words, and not rock the boat. I’m not sure anymore. Maybe it isn't worth it. Football season will be here before you know it and Sunday will once again be a day filled with excitement and emotion.

I may have made my journey sound as if it was more painful than it really was. Actually, I had a blast along the way. My faith journey has enriched my life immensely. I learned so much about faith and collected a beautiful cast of very diverse friendships. It has been a strain at times and I lost some relationships that turned out to more shallow than I once thought, but I would hate to imagine life without these diverse people in my life. Going to new places and meeting new people has always been very hard for me, so a side benefit of this whole process has been I have become more open to these awkward social situations. I can't tell you how many times I have smiled and shook a person's hand while thinking to myself "Damn, that was the most painful hour of my life. I am getting the hell out of here right now!"

I never thought I would consider an Episcopal church, but we have visited two (they really freak me out, so I don't see that as permanent). I can't do the charasmatic thing again because it always makes me feel like any minute Benny Hinn is going to come out and start slapping people in the head. One of the most interesting experiences has been visiting a Unitarian Universalist church. My wife and I both now attend a UU Buddhist class (the first of its kind in our city) and have even been to a few of the UU services. It has its drawbacks just like all the other churches along with a few new problems. I could be comfortable there, but my wife can’t do it. She does connect with the progressive issues and has made most of the theological shifts necessary, but her problems are: (A) She isn’t ready to “come out” to her fundamentalists friends yet so she wants to tell them the name of her church ends with some well know denomination (B) She really likes to sing about God. I can’t blame her. She has friends that would literally try to cast demons out of her if she mentioned UU or Buddhism or maybe even Episcopal! Just like Pavlov’s dog, our Evangelical and Charismatic experiences have forever linked our experience of God with certain types of music and particular words. I understand her issue. I guess an ex-Catholic or ex-Episcopal would feel lost without a sip of wine at every service.

I’m not sure where that leaves us. Soon we will adopt our little girl from China and I want to make some decisions about our faith community in the next couple of years. I don’t want to let my selfish desire to have my cake and eat it too cause problems for my family. I may have to suck it up and take one for the team, but I also don’t want my little girl to learn a bunch of crap that she will have to unlearn when she becomes an adult as I did. Maybe I can sprinkle in enough multi-faith, tolerance, peace and justice based experiences that it won’t be a problem for her. Does anybody out there with kids have any advice for me? Is a consistent faith experience with good kids programs worth the cost of a heavy dose of bad theology and a lifetime of fake smiles? It looks more and more like I'm going to have to choose. Does picking a church have to be like voting for the least undesirable politician?

The Great Divine Cleanup

What happens when an ancient group of people:

• believe God is all powerful
• believe God is just
• believe God favors them above others
• Live under the oppression of an empire and have no power to change the situation themselves

The answer is easy. These people would have to develop a theology about the divine correction of the injustice by God in what John Dominic Crossan calls “The Great Divine Cleanup of the World”. In his book “God and Empire”, Crossan details a clear and articulate picture of how 1st century Israel (including John the Baptist and Jesus) would have imagined and hoped for God’s plan of justice. I can't imagine any other scenario for these people. They had to believe this or else they had to imagine a different God.

This was not a new idea formed by either John or Jesus. Using different techniques, they both taught an already common understanding of the needed solution. This is NOT what the fundamentalist talk about today when they create those crazy books and video games about the dramatic end of the world. The original meaning of the great divine cleanup was a political shift in power that would leave the world in a better status for those oppressed people. One example of this common outlook is this excerpt from the Sibylline Oracles which was a document dating back to around or just prior to the time of Jesus’ birth:

“The earth will belong equally to all, undivided by walls or fences. It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously. Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division. For there will be no poor man there, no rich, and no tyrant, no slave. Further, no one will be either great or small anymore. No kings, no leaders. All will be on a par together" (Sibylline Oracles 2:319-24).

This isn’t a departure from the origins of Judaism. In fact it echoes the formation of Judaism as a community without a king because kings always become tyrants, with a commitment to the forgiveness of debt, and also included the rejection of the dominance created through generational wealth (50th year Jubilee). Israel was formed as a society in contrast to Egypt and its oppressive pharaoh. Throughout the Torah, the Great Prophets, and the NT, Israel desired a return to those first principles of a community of peace and justice.

“Jesus' Kingdom program was not just about politics or economics as distinct from theology. It combined religion, politics, and economics; it was about divine distributive justice; it was about the ownership of this world; it was about a theology of creation.” God and Empire - Crossan.

The value of this story lies in its meaning of justice. This is a contrast to our common view of retributive justice that seeks retribution for wrongs. Justice in God’s kingdom is distributive justice which means distributing resources to all as needed in a just manner. The model for distributive justice in their minds was the Jewish patriarchal view of fathers providing justly (not necessarily evenly) for their wife (or wives) and children.

Too often people look at these stories as if they were magical predictions of the future, but I think that is dangerous and often clouds the real meaning. Instead, we should let the story's truth shape our own vision for how the world could work and become motivated to fulfill our responsibility. The Kingdom of God is a present experience because as Jesus said, it is "inside us" which means it exists as a vision in our minds already. Instead of trying to guess when and where it may magically happen, we should be cultivating the collective vision and developing a plan to make the vision a physical reality. This means that anyone interesting in the Kingdom of God must also be interested in politics. Politics is the process of making our values public realities.

Quotes...

On May 13, 1798, James Madison wrote an oft-quoted letter to his close friend and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, in which he warned prophetically that:

the management of foreign relations appears to be the most susceptible of abuse, of all the trusts committed to a Government, because they can be concealed or disclosed, or discosed in such parts and at such time as will best suit particular views; and because the body of the people are less capable of judging and are more under the influence of prejudices, on that branch of their affairs, than of any other. Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretend, from abroad.

On April 18, 1946, Reichsmarchal Herman Goring was interviewed in his jail cell at Nuremberg by Captain Gustave Gilbert, a U.S. Army intelligence psychologist, who later reported these words of Goring's in his 1947 book Nuremberg Diary:

Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a facist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship... The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Both quotes are taken from "God and Empire" by John Dominic Crossan.

God and Empire

John Dominic Crossan has created a wonderful new book "God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, then and now". I was fortunate enough to hear Crossan speak in person for the first time in January and he gave a lecture that turned out to be a synopsis of this book. Crossan points out that a major shift in the study of New Testament theology is well underway thanks to the our more developed understanding of the Roman Imperial theology common in the first century. Crossan goes into detail about the archeological findings supporting the Roman mythological claims that Caesar Augustus was the son of god, lord, savior of the world, god of gods and bringer of peace. To claim that Jesus was any of these things was high treason and explains the brutal persecution of early Christians throughout the Empire.

In addition to setting Christianity as an opposing force to the Roman Empire, Crossan makes the case that the bible from start to finish is a radical political statement against the normalcy of civilization. In his eyes, civilization is not art, music, literature, and cuisine. Instead, the normalcy of civilization is imperialism, which can be translated as the use of force to extort and oppress others. It is hard to argue against Crossan. Everything we know about history supports this view of civilization and everything we've learned about Jesus tells us that he didn't buy into this violent approach.

The basic premise of the book is not that Rome was against peace. Instead, Rome was in favor of peace but their roadmap to peace was through war and sustained through oppressive taxation and violence. Augustus was seen as the one that saved the empire from the throws of civil war (hence the term savior of the world) and brought an unprecedented peace to the nations. The premise of this book is that the Romans (and all Empires before and after) sought peace through the method of violence but the vision of God is to create lasting peace through justice. This contrasts human retributive justice (punishment) v. God's distributive justice (sharing). That is where we come in. We have a choice about how we will fight for peace. Will we use violence or justice as our tool? The difference is dramatic because history is filled with examples of how peace obtained through violence is a temporary illusion. Not until we accept Jesus’ principles for peace through justice can we ever hope to achieve the sustainable peace intended by God.

Crossan doesn’t leave the present day application of this lesson up in the air. He boldly makes the claim that America is the new Rome. I agree.

Resurrection

I missed the importance of resurrection most of my life because I was too focused on stories about a physical resuscitation of the historical Jesus. I was taught that the reason for Easter was the need to muster up faith that the legends were historically accurate. What I missed was the idea that resurrection means the world rejected the message of Jesus and killed him but we still have hope that his vision of peace and justice can live again. This is shift from faith as belief or confidence that certain events happened as they were reported in this beautiful narrative toward faith as hope that Jesus’ vision could become a reality through our active decision to take part in making that happen.

Why is this shift in understanding important? Because our actions are deeply effected by our theology. Changing how we understand the resurrection is key to recognizing the kingdom of God as something that is here and now not simply a higher status in afterlife (heaven v. hell). Maybe I’m a little biased and maybe people that keep a literalistic view of this story can also come to value Jesus’ vision. I know people that are able to pull this off and I don’t mean to seem overly critical, but I am constantly voicing my opinion on this issue because I think it is the number one reason why people leave the Christian faith. It is also the most prominent reason that the vast majority of Christians make social and political decisions that counter Jesus’ vision. I hear people say:

“Justice is God’s business not ours. We should keep our faith out of politics. God brings his kingdom, not us.”

That is why I force this issue so much and why I think moderate and progressive Christians should be more outspoken within churches to change this misconception. In the new book “God and Empire”, John Dominic Crossan has this to say about how Jesus changes John the Baptists' view of the kingdom of God from a vision of something yet to come into a vision of something that is already present:

“You can speak forever about a future-imminence of the kingdom… But to claim an already-present Kingdom demands some evidence, and the only such that Jesus could have offered is this: it is not that we are waiting for God, but that God is waiting for us. The present Kingdom is a collaborative eschaton between the human and divine worlds. The Great Divine Cleanup is an interactive process with a present beginning in time and a future (short or long?) consummation. Would it happen without God? No. Would it happen without believers? No. To see the presence of the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, come, see how we live, and then live likewise.”

The vision of a kingdom of peace and justice is still alive. Easter is the celebration of this vision resurrected in the lives of those who dare to live it.

Thoughts on the death of Jesus

As a response to my earlier post about Holy Week - Friday, Chris W. mentioned that one of the common definitions of the word "passion" includes a reference to the passion of Christ and the martyrs in general. I think this shows how bad theology has made its way into our language and how the values of empire have made their way into our theology. Chris didn't like my take on Mel Gibson's movie and I understand why, but I think my critique is valid. I've moved my response to this post because I think it is important and I want to get other comments on how the common understanding of Jesus' passion is either misplaced or accurately portrayed in that movie as well as other places.

Mel isn't the first to confuse the crucifixion of Jesus with his "passion". That was done long ago and Mel just continued the mistake. Most dictionaries (sorry Mr. Webster)include that interpretation because it has become so common. The purpose of a dictionary is not to come up with "truth" but to present common uses of words. That definition proves that this use of passion is common and well accepted but NOT GOOD THEOLOGY. I don't dispute the commonality of the term or its acceptance by the church and for that reason Webster is correct to add it as a common definition. But, I do dispute its accuracy as a theological statement. Using the title "the passion of Christ" for a film focused entirely on the death of Jesus implies (and misleads) that Jesus was passionate about dying. I feel that is wrong. Jesus was passionate about peace and justice (the kingdom of God) and to do that in the face of the Roman empire was a death sentence.

Would Jesus be somehow less valuable to us if he had not be able to endure the pain? What if he had broken down and cried or begged to be released like he had done the in the garden? Was his life somehow more valuable because he was macho and could endure pain? What if he had rejected his teaching momentarily to save his life? Would it change what he said and what he stood for?

I suspect this type of logic is more a result of a few too many John Wayne movies (or Greek myths) rather than good theology. I think it is a result of Christianity setting our Lord against the heroic gods of the Greeks and Romans. It is common in all societies to somehow value people who face death with courage, but I think it gives people the wrong impression and strengthens the worldly attitude that "tough" is good and "weak" is bad. It is built into the fabric of our war driven competitive society, but it doesn't fit into the message that Jesus taught which values meekness, humility, and the last becoming first.

I do believe that Jesus faced death with honor, but when I imagine the event I imagine Jesus crying. Not just because of the pain and suffering, but because he realized that once again the Empire was winning the battle and there would be many more losses like this before his vision might become reality.