onehandclapping
o I was out running errands today and drove past the local Baptist church that is our neighborhood crummy church sign contributor. They’ve been doing fairly well the last few months – nothing real offensive or overly cheezy. Then there is today’s (I recreated it with church sign generator) –
How do you read this?
Do I believe in progress? That question has been on my mind the last few days. I recently started reading N.T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God and was forced to ask myself that question before I finished the first chapter.
Wright claims that our conception of evil and inability to process it is due in part to our having bought into the Modern myth of progress. He writes –
The heady combination of technological achievement, medical advances, Romantic pantheism, Hegalian progressive Idealism and social Darwinism created a climate of thought in which, to this day, a great many people – not least in public life – have lived and moved. In this climate, the fact that we live “in this day and age” means that certain things are now to be expected; we envision a steady march toward freedom and justice, conceived often in terms of the slow but sure triumph of Western-style liberal democracy and soft soft versions of socialism. Not to put too fine a point on it, when people say that certain things are unacceptable “now that we’re living in the twenty-first century,” they are appealing to an assumed doctrine of progress – and of progress, what’s more, in a particular direction. We are taught, often by the tone of voice of the media and the politicians rather than by explicit argument, to bow down before this progress. It is unstoppable. Who wants to be left behind, to be behind the times, to be yesterday’s people? The colloquial phrase, “That’s so last-year” has become the ultimate putdown: “progress” (by which we often simply mean a variation in fashion) has become the single most important measuring rod in society and culture.
Wright is surprised that this belief in progress has survived Auschwitz and that some people still think the world is basically a good place. He welcome the postmodernism because it deconstructs the “dangerous ideology of ‘progress'” and “encourages a cynical approach: nothing will get better and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I’m having a hard time with this. I don’t buy into the fairy tale version of progress or think that science will solve all the ills of the world (which is why I was always amused by the gravity stones at Wheaton and other colleges). But cynical though I am, I don’t buy into Wright’s portrayal of postmodernism that preaches that the world will never get better either. Since I have barely started the book, I have no idea where Wright is going with this but I’m uneasy with his distinctions so far.
How can there be redemptive history without some sort of progress? I don’t place my trust in government systems or technology as the key to a Utopian dream. I’m not part the postmil camp that thinks things are getting better and better all the time. But I’m also not premil “we’re all going to hell in a handbasket” either. God seems to have a purpose in history, a story that is unfolding, a redemption that is taking place. Within the Judeo/Christian worldview we generally hold to a linear view of history. We are moving forward in history and there are eschatologies to be had. We have goals to achieve and a Kingdom to spread. If we are working at all towards such things I would say progress is occurring.
What good is there to work for the good or to fight injustice if things can never get better? I’m not interested in letting evil triumph or living in some world where the Force has achieved perfect balance. I want to see the Kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven. And I think that after 2000 years of practice, we should expect that some things should have changed by now. So if Christ and Paul were preaching it then, the church should be doing it by now. I have no problem in seeing redemptive trajectory at work in scripture and then applying that same concept to history. If the point is to bring Christ’s message to the world, I would hope that doing so not only is possible, but is actually happening.
Maybe I am misunderstanding terms here. Perhaps Wright is referring only to trust in political systems and science as an obstacle for our understanding evil. I need to read more and figure out where he is headed with this.
A few spiffy things I would direct your attention to while my brain is on complete weekend mush mode (as in I’m having fun catching up on Iron Chef America episodes)…
A really cool site that was mentioned in the comments of the Why Buy Fair Trade post below – Fair Trade Sports. Get shirts, hats, water bottles, and well made sports equipment that were fairly made and traded. Great idea – promoting fairness in sports beyond the playing field.
Then if you are interested in the good, bad and ugly ways in which Christianity makes the news – check out the new blog Christianity in the News. So far I have found it fascinating – although there are days when I’m not sure if my reading it is a good educational resource or a sick obsession. It’s worth checking out at any rate.
And in the utterly superficial category… If you are as obsessed with LOST as I am and are dying to know how this season will end, Spoilerfix has a handful of tantalizing tidbits to offer. But they also reveal that the next season won’t start until next January – so we will be forced to wait with whatever horrible cliffhanger they leave us with until then.
Of course this bill is being labeled as intolerant and anti-christian. Apparently hitting children is the only godly way to get them to do what you want. While the revised bill does allow open handed spanking, that’s not good enough for some groups that insist that harder objects must be used to break the child’s will.
Why is this a bad thing to some? One church whose advice pamphlet on spanking will be challenged by this new law, says that “guiltiness of sin can only be removed by God at salvation, but God has established a method by which children can have human justice satisfied and thus remove guilt. This method is spanking,” because “The reality about Biblical spanking is that it works in a child’s life to help bring him to the point of salvation.” This church advises parents that “children should be disciplined starting shortly after birth with spanking beginning at the manifestation of the rebellious will,” and that if after spanking “If the will has not been broken, spank again. Some of the ways the administrator of discipline can tell if the child is still being willful is if he turns around or puts his hands behind him during the spanking, or if he screams during or after the spanking.” Oh and the Bible is clear that you can only use a rod to spank. They also tell parents that “when parents know to spank for a disobedience but withhold the rod, they are sinning.”
I guess they’re going to have to revise their theology or finally be punished for abusing children.
I know most spanking advocates aren’t as extreme as this church, but I really have a hard time understanding it still. Just like I really can’t fathom how anyone could hold the mindset that women are inferior to men, I can’t understand how anyone can think it’s okay to hit a child. I see it happen all the time, but I still don’t get it. If it was a man hitting a woman or even a person hitting a dog – they would be prosecuted. But to hit a child is considered an inalienable right. I posted this quote before, but it is fitting today –
Why? To show that they are bigger and stronger and have power over the child? To teach that might makes right? To break the child’s will/personality? To control the child? To instill the fear of discipline (or God)?
I do not want my child to think that just because someone is bigger and more powerful than she is they can do whatever they want to her (no matter what our national war policy might imply). I do not want my child to be a good person because she fears physical harm if she isn’t. I do not want my child to love/serve me or God out of fear.
There’s something messed up about having to use laws to punishment parents who hurt children in order to punish them. One would hope common sense and love would dictate that, but other forms of rampant violence (spousal abuse, rape…) show that control and intimidation through physical violence is too often the norm. So if we need to add laws that protect babies and children to those that protect women, then so be it.
Over at the Justice and Compassion blog Benjamin gave a good perspective on why buying Fairly Traded food is a good thing. He recently placed an order for Fairly Traded sugar and wrote this –
I was feeling a little guilty, because this sugar costs 4 times “normal” sugar, and we are not exactly in brilliant financial straits at this time. My friend Karl (a Mennonite, interestingly), encouraged me in this. He said that I am simply assuming the full fair price of the sugar, instead of outsourcing that full cost to someone else who is actually a lot worse off than me financially.
When we sustain our lifestyle by hurting others we are not saving anything. It is hard sometimes to see that our purchases are not just isolated events – there is a whole chains of events, people, and environments that they affect as well. Its not just about us.
he latest Mark Driscoll shit to hit the fan (read about the controversy here).
Wow if I had only known sooner that to succeed at church planting I need to make fun of women, hippies, gays, gamers, and the mentally handicapped. Oh yeah and be at war. And instruct people in the way of Christ the American Dream. And give my husband sex at LEAST once a day.
I don’t know what is the saddest thing here – that people actually listen to and defend this guy or that he is indoctrinating men into planting churches like this.
From his video –
People walking in tend to think that a church planter is … a pastor. He’s not yet a pastor: he’s trying to build a church so that he can be a pastor. A church planter has a different skill set. He’s got a different mission that he has to be on – to gather men.
To gather the best men that he can find. To gather men who are willing to be trained, willing to repent, willing to learn. Willing to learn both doctrine and practice. That’s why Paul tells Timothy to watch his life and his doctrine closely.
The sad, hard, painful truth is that most churches are struggling, dying, and failing, and most church planters will just be part of the rising body count of failed church plants if they are unable to gather, to inspire, to correct, to discipline, to instruct MEN.
And this is particularly important for young men. The least likely person to go to church in the United States of America is a young man in his early 20’s. These are guys who have absolutely made a wreck of everything. They’re banging their girlfriends. They are guys who are blowing all their money, staying up all night playing World of Warcraft, finding free porn on the internet, and trying to figure out how to get a bigger subwoofer into their retarded car.
Those are the guys who must first be gathered, they must get a swift boot in the rear, they need a good run through boot camp, they need to be told that Jesus Christ is not a gay hippy in a dress, and that they’re dealing with the King of kings and Lord of lords, and there’s a mission that he has called them to.
60% of all Christians today are female. I’m glad that the ladies love Jesus. But if you wanna win a war, you’ve gotta get the men. And once you get the men, you must know what to do with them.
They wanna know how to get married. They wanna know how to have sex with their wife at least once a day. They wanna know how to make money, buy a home, how to have children, how to pay their bills, how to father their sons, how to encourage and love and instruct their daughters, and so in addition to being to being the right kind of man, he must clarify the mission that he is on. And he must understand that his first priority is to gather men, and to, by God’s grace, force them to become the kind of men that are needed for God’s work and God’s kingdom so that that church can actually be established, those women can actually be loved, those children can actually be raised, and that that city will have an example of the difference that Jesus makes.
I think I’ve become too used to the language of the missional church. The language that sees the Kingdom of God present in this world, that sees the good news as being about more than getting one’s butt into heaven when we die, and that takes seriously the call to bring freedom to the oppressed. So this past Sunday as I visited the church I grew up in, I wasn’t prepared to go back to the old perspective. That of a church doing missions as opposed to being missional.
My first clue should have been that it was the church’s missions conference. Missionaries from all around the world had been brought in to report on what they were doing. So the sermon that morning was from an Indian man who runs a Seminary in India. He was there to tell us about the “Divine Strategy for Missions.” As he put it – the way missions always has been and the way it always should be. The strategy is apparently composed of a mere four points.
1. Spreading the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ – which as he explain is a lot easier in India than America because they allow prayer in schools.
2. Raising support from the believers – this has to come from Americans because indigenous people can’t afford to support missions.
3. Engage in social outreach – This is done only to soften people’s hearts because “physical help that doesn’t result in spiritual help is no help at all.”
4. Reach the influential in the community – because finding and using power is the only way to spread Christianity.
During most of his sermon he kept talking about the tiny tiny amount of Christians in India. But then at one point he said something about how Pentecostalism is really popular and spreading fast in India because they focus on healing so much (but that we of course know that the only true healers are doctors who have been gifted by God and trained at medical schools). So besides sounding more like a high modernist atheist than a spiritual Christian, he was drawing lines at who really are Christians. Apparently only those who follow cessationist conservative Evangelicalism are true Christians.
I’m sure there are good things coming out of this mission, I was just saddened at how limited a perspective they have. Serving Christ in a missional way involves so much more than getting people intellectually convinced about the facts of the Gospel. It is so much more organic and contextual than this “divine strategy for missions.”
This is the concluding post in my series of responses to the questions I posted as part of last month’s book discussion on Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat over at the Emerging Women blog. (read my other responses – here).
Question #8 –
“We can argue until we are blue in the face that Colossians is good news for an oppressed and marginalized community at the heart of the Roman empire, but unless this good news is for those truly at the margins – slaves, children, and women- it is nothing but a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.” (p201). But the household codes in Colossians 3:18 -4:1 have more often been interpreted as justification for oppression of those groups instead of good news. The authors address this issue through a fantastic expanded account of Onesimus (the slave) and Nympha (who had a house church) – the whole book is worth just this story imho. The authors propose that the household codes can be interpreted as (1) Just an affirmation of the imperial view of the household, the Aristotelian hierarchy of man over women and all that (not likely if this letter is about subverting empire and not being captive to the philosophies of men). (2) A loving patriarchy when the wives and slaves choose to submit and husband (amazingly enough) love and not beat their wives (wow – that seems full of hope). or (3) Paul is challenging the status quo by promoting the freedom and full rights of women and slaves. He couldn’t of course say so directly because to commit that to writing would lead to serious persecution from the empire for such revolutionary practices. But the language he uses connotes the themes of inheritance and jubilee. Remember that Colossians was delivered and read with Philemon (about treating a slave as an equal), the subversion is evident. Are we willing to challenge systems that oppress others if it means questioning the philosophies and assumptions of empire (ending global slavery, grant equal rights to women, not treating children as commodities)?
This is of course one of the most controversial parts of the book (bring up equality for women and you’re bound to find controversy). The idea that Paul was intending a certain meaning through his use of allusions to inheritance and jubilee that he couldn’t say outright challenges the assumptions of many contemporary Bible readers. The average reader is so used to assuming that their 21st century cultural lenses and vague familiarity with English versions of the Bible is all they need to fully grasp the Biblical text. Try to suggest that there may be elements there that a 1st century reader would hear, but which require a tad more complex reading from the reader today and one is met with cries of “the Gospel is simple enough for a child to understand, how dare you assume the masses need education and intellect to understand God’s word!” (a claim that I have issues with, but which is believed as gospel truth by many).
But assuming that the household codes listed here and the language that surrounds them really does claim a revolutionary inclusion of all, then what does that mean for us now? Perhaps to forget these passages as confining the church to rules and philosophies that don’t even make sense in our culture today and instead see them as messages of hope that can alter our world for good. To recall the language of jubilee and shalom they connote and actually put that into practice. To live in this subversive and revolutionary way.
I always laugh when I hear Christians tell me that I’m just being influenced by the world when I stand up for women’s rights. In what universe do they live in where women actually have equal rights in the dominant culture? Where do women actually receive equal pay and benefits? Where do women not have to live in fear of being raped or trafficked into sexual slavery? Where are women appreciated as people instead of sex objects? Where do women get the same publishing and speaking opportunities as men? I’m not giving into the world – I’m trying to subvert the world by promoting women’s equality. It’s the church that has sold itself to the lies of hierarchy and inequality.
And it gets worse when slavery is brought up. The fact that our clothes, our food, our junk is made at best by underpaid workers in sweatshops and at worst by abused slaves doesn’t seem to bother most people. It keeps our stuff cheap and helps our economy. To care about those people would just be hurting ourselves and our country. Phrases like “you can’t change the laws of economics” or “those jobs are better than what they had before” get thrown around as poor excuses for not giving a damn. (and don’t even get me started on the people who say that if those poor people would just live morally, then they would have better options available to them). When it’s our greed that brought about most of the conditions for slavery worldwide and it is our greed that sustains it, it is up to us to fix the mess we created.
Guess what. This might take sacrifice. To live for Christ and the values of the Kingdom just might mean having to deal with some hardships. Maybe we can stop seeing “carrying the cross” as not getting to pray in school or not having our candidate win and start having to actually identify with Christ by caring for those he cared about. By being willing to pay workers a fair wage, to not support the (cheap readily available) products that were made by slave using companies, to stand against sexism even when the church openly supports it (and labels you a liberal feminist). These are lessons, I’m still learning. To get over my sense of entitlement and wanting to be liked by everyone in order to actually live for Christ.
So I was searching though some of my old junk and came across some of my college papers. It was quite an amusing journey to read the stuff I was thinking about a decade or so ago. I was kinda hoping I could have found the paper I wrote for my Theology of Culture class freshman year where I discussed postmodernism as the greatest current threat to Christianity. My how I’ve changed.
I did stumble upon an interesting paper I had written for one of my History of Christianity classes with Mark Noll. It was a brief overview of the history of the physical form of the Bible and how it affects our reading/interpretation thereof. I explored the transition from scroll to codex and speculated on the implications of electronic media on Biblical interpretation. I found it amusing that this was written about eight years ago and already my language describing the electronic medium sounds archaic (and it didn’t help that I had to download a special program just so I could open such an “old” file on my newer computer.)
Reading it now I see that my writing has issues and for as long as it is, it needs a lot more research to make it more than the briefest of introductions. But I remember Dr. Noll encouraging me to try to get it published and maybe if I hadn’t of been getting married two weeks after I wrote this I would have. So here’s to publishing it on good ol’ Google Docs and inviting anyone who’s as big of a history geek as I to take a look.
Enjoy – The Form of the Bible: The Transfer of the Biblical Text from Scroll to Codex Form
