Month: January 2009

The Past and the Future Along a Texas Highway

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I have a new post up at the Deep Green Conversation blog – Seeing the Past and the Future Along a Texas Highway. It’s inspired by this West Texas sight –

Over the holidays we loaded the kids in the car and made our way from Texas to a family gathering in New Mexico. It’s been decades since I last made that drive, so I wasn’t expecting the site that greeted us in West Texas. Expecting miles and miles of rugged and mindnumbingly boring terrain, we encountered instead the juxtaposition of the past and the future.

Across the expanses of cotton fields, there rose, side by side, oil wells and wind turbines. Little did I know that Texas is the country’s leading producer of wind energy and that I was driving through the second largest wind farm in the country. What I saw simply were hundreds of turbines spinning steadily while towering over still oil pumpjacks  In short, a spectacular sight to give one pause.

Texas was once synonymous with oil.  My own grandfather made and lost his fortune as a supplier to oil companies. But that world is changing. Another family member who has oil wells on his property (a result of the “drill here, drill now, pay less” push), is seeing them run dry. The oil is running out. Some are drilling deeper at enormous expense, only to deplete the oil in a few months. The oil tycoons realize this—the petroleum-dependent way of life that made them rich is ending. The average person might not see it yet, but those with a serious stake in it sure do.

So while the environmentalists and hippies have pleaded for clean energy for years, it is finally being actualize as the rich and powerful big oil people seek out alternatives. These wind farms in Texas are mostly the creation of businessmen who know that the world’s brief dalliance with oil is almost over.  Clean, sustainable alternatives are where they are placing their bets. Hence the scene in West Texas—still oil jacks, representing relics of the past, being dwarfed by the sleek gleaming wind turbines ushering in the future.

Of course I considered this and rejoiced in a future of clean energy as I drove past in my gas-guzzling car.  The irony there is almost too palpable. I’m grateful though that some people, whatever their reason, are pushing forward in developing clean technologies and making them accessible. Those of us who admire that possibility, but who have yet to escape conventional options, need the help of others to create the infrastructure for clean energy. I can’t exactly stick a turbine in my backyard, and don’t have the cash at the moment to install solar panels or buy an eco-car. But I can support projects that are paving the way to making such options available to all.

Needless to say, finding a hopeful vision of the future made the drive through West Texas much more intriguing than I expected it to be.

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Choosing Between Truths

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I care about truth. Twist the epistemological argument every which way and slander postmoderns as you will, but pursuing truth does matter to me. But in the myriad of options for interpreting the Bible, sometimes it is hard to claim one truth over another. It is difficult to know which truth I want to cling to – which holds the most meaning for me.

Before you get too weirded out let me explain why this is currently bugging me. I was considering the story of Josiah rediscovering the book of the law as recorded in 2 Kings 22. Not exactly a story I grew up hearing often (no animals so therefore not an appropriate children’s Bible story apparently). But one that resonates with powerful meaning – depending on how you choose to interpret it.

The few times I heard this story mentioned in the literalist/inerrantist churches I attended, the truth in the story rested on it being historically factual. As in everything in it actually happened exactly as written in scripture. The King miraculously found the lost books of the law, was convicted by the nation’s lack of regard for God, and turned Judah back to worship of the one God. The moral of the story being to always immerse oneself in scriptures lest one fall away from true worship. Josiah was a great hero of the faith, and we too should be sure to never forget our daily quiet time of reading the Bible.

Then there’s the source criticism interpretation. Scholars suggest that Shaphan and Hilkiah, representatives of two powerful families in Judah at the time, actually forged the supposed long lost document. Their agenda was to reform the religious practices of Judah, centralize the worship in Jerusalem as a way of unifying the Judean and Israelite people in the wake of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom by the Assyrians a century prior, and also to limit the power of the king by making him subject to the Deuteronomic Law. The truth lies in the representation of the communal religious story, as well as in a historical accounting that meshes with other historical knowledge of that period. It makes sense – helping to explain the difference between the Levitical and Deuteronmic law as well as the strong emphasis on social justice in Deuteronomy. There is not so much a moral of the story here as a solving a puzzle feeling.

Finally (for my purposes at least) there is the feminist interpretation. Instead of dwelling on the power plays of influential families in Judah, or on the heroic acts of a King, this interpretation focuses on Huldah. A lost gem of scripture she was the prophetess who interpreted the books of law to Josiah and delivered the word of the Lord to him. Amongst all in Judah, she was the only one faithful enough to the mandates of God to continue in the study of and devotion to scripture. And she’s a woman. Take that all you complementarians – here’s the prime example of women in the Bible not only preaching and teaching men (the King and high Priest at that!), but doing so in a major way. She’s more than a hero, she’s a symbol of hope for all us women seeking to break free of the church’s silencing and oppression of our sex. Historically true because it has to be in order for the precedent setting to work. But also true in the message of hope it conveys to women.

This is where gets messy. I see the truth in all three interpretations (and I am sure more exist as well). I don’t automatically assume that the Bible just couldn’t be actually representing historical facts. But neither do I dogmatically insist that such is always the case. The story is true whether that truth rests in its historicity or in its power as a cultural narrative. I wouldn’t really care except that I want to claim Huldah’s story and point to her as an historical precedent for women’s leadership in the church. I don’t want her to just be a manipulated (or manipulative) pawn in some ancient power play – I want her to be genuine. I want this interpretation to work.

And so I wrestle with truths. Amongst equally valid options do I simply choose the story that makes the most sense in my worldview? Or do I sacrifice resonating meaning for scholarship or theological camps?

Truth in the end is all about choice.

But more importantly – faith.

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Love and Sin

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I grew up having the doctrine of original sin hammered into me.  People are sinful – rotten to the core from conception.  As a result, I always assumed the worst of people.  Sin was a person’s defining character trait.  And above all else they needed redemption – at whatever cost.  So in interacting with people one focused on their depravity – seeing how they were sinful and even making sure they knew that as well.

The problem with that stance is that it makes it really hard to love one’s neighbor.  And I mean really love them – not some silly “tough love” line about loving them too much to allow them to continue in sin.  But loving them even amidst the mess.  So in this mindset, when it was brought up that we should care for the poor who lost their homes in Katrina we were told that some of them are poor because of their sin.  Or when its suggested that illegal immigrants should be treated with dignity and respect, some horrendous anecdote about a criminal act committed by an immigrant is mentioned.  Or when its suggested that the homeless get fed, they are written off as undeserving addicts and alcoholics.  The idea seems to be that if some sort of sin can be pinned on a person that gets us off the hook for having to love them.

But it can be dangerous to fall out of the habit to love.  When we chose not to “in humility consider others better than ourselves” but instead dwell wholly on their faults we end up resorting to doing most things out of “selfish ambition and vain conceit.”  Our needs reign supreme when we readily find excuses not to love others.  Loving our neighbor then becomes a foreign concept.

Perhaps I’ve been too long in the emerging church world where loving others is just a given.  Or perhaps spending the holidays with my family who thinks I’m an idealistic freak was a wake-up call.  But it still shocks me when I encounter people who are genuinely confused as to why caring for the needs of others would be a motivating factor for doing anything.  I want to believe love wins, but then I encounter so many people who can’t even fathom the concept.  It’s just difficult when even the basic aspects of the faith can’t even be agreed upon.

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