Sexual Conquering is Rape

July 18, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 99 Comments

There’s been quite the brouhaha over the piece published last week by the Gospel Coalition. The post pines for the good ol’ days, when men were men and women were women (and therefore subject to all the whims of men’s desires) especially in the arena of sex.

It cites the following from Douglas Wilson:

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage.

I’m not kidding.

The Wilson quote then goes on to say that men fantasize about raping women because society won’t allow them to exercise the power that is rightfully theirs in the “egalitarian” bedroom.

I’m not kidding.

To cut to the chase, here’s what Wilson misses: when you sexually conquer someone, this is rape. The connection Wilson draws is too much on target: he has, in fact, described all sex as an act of rape. It is therefore not surprising that he sees such a connection between rape outside of marriage and not finding the sort of satisfaction that he suggests is coming to men in their exploits of power.

I am embarrassed for Christianity that such an advocacy of rape (marital or otherwise) could find itself onto a websites that boasts of being one of a “Gospel” coalition.

This is one reason why we narrative theology is so important: it reminds us that the story that makes us who we are must always be the story of the cross.

When Jesus came and showed us what Christian manhood was all about, he did not conquer, but allowed himself to be conquered; he did not pierce, but allowed himself to be pierced; he did not plant by scattering his seed forcibly, he planted by giving up his own life–the grain of wheat falling to the earth and dying that it might produce a crop 100-fold.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

You want to be a man in the bedroom? Learn what it means to give up your power rather than clinging to that primal desire to conquer.

You want to be a Christian man in the bedroom? Go and learn what this means: “The husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Cor 7).

Even the bedroom is to be part of the way of the cross. Play the part of the Roman centurion, and you’re not telling the Jesus story any longer.

Historical footnote: the comparison between the conquering, piercing Roman and the conquered, pierced Christ is not mere poetic license, as often as I do riff on such language when it comes to the cross. Wilson’s description of power, penetration, and conquest is a conjunction of themes that the ancient Greco-Roman world used to depict power and social hierarchy. Conquered peoples were displayed as ravaged women in Roman art. Homosexual sex was ok, so long as you were “penetrating” someone of a lower social standing than you and not “being penetrated by” someone of such lower status.

Standing with the Afflicted

July 17, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

Lament. Songs of mourning. Plaintive cries to God from a world-gone-wrong.

The biblical tradition of lament invites us to take hold of three things at the same time: (1) the world as we experience it is not, in fact, the world as God wants it to be; (2) that God’s commitment to the world is failing at this point of pain, suffering, and death; and (3) that we have a right to expect that our demands for a better world will be met by the God with the power to do something about it.

Riffing off of Walter Bruegemann here, lament means that we honor God by agreeing with what he’s told us about what a good world looks like: a world of justice, a world of abundance, a world of peace.

Lament means we honor God by coming to God as the one who actually has the power to do something about this world gone awry.

And, lament means we honor God’s choosing of us as his people by taking up our place, the people of God on behalf of the whole, to demand that God act for the good of the afflicted.

Lament confesses God’s goodness, God’s power, and God’s choice of a people to be God’s agents for the world’s blessing.

Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld

And that is why we need to never lose sight of the fact that Jesus cries out to God in heart-broken lamentation, calling on God to act God’s part as deliverer of God’s beloved children.

This is what it is for Jesus to enter into prayer in the garden, crying out, “Abba, Father.”

It is a cry of lament.

It is a cry made in anticipation of the later cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus was truly forsaken. The father was not delivering the son. The son prayed for God to act in accordance with God’s fatherly power and protection and deliverance.

A cry on behalf of himself. But also a cry on behalf of the world who was represented by him, the messiah. The representative king of God’s representative nation.

Crying out to a God who would not answer, yet, in the face of death.

We must remember that Jesus’ cry, “Abba, Father,” is a cry of lament, because here our words are said to echo his.

It is the Spirit of God by which we cry out, “Abba, Father,” showing that we are God’s children and heirs–”if, indeed, we suffer with him in order that we might also be glorified with him.”

This is a cry of suffering and lament.

It is a cry that wells up simply because of how the world is–a place where God’s power has been usurped. And usurped repeatedly.

We cry out, not only for our own suffering, but for suffering with Christ which is a suffering whose deliverance yields the age to come.

The whole creation awaits the revealing of these sons–no longer suffering, but glorified and redeemed.

The creation awaits the answer of God to the laments of God’s people.

God answered Jesus.

He raised him from the dead.

This newness of life spills over, such that it is ours. Now. Already. Even as we live into it by the way of the cross, and by taking up our own cry, “Abba, Father,” on behalf of the many, even as Jesus himself cried out on behalf of the many.

As long as the world is not as it should be.

As long as children are trafficked for sex.

As long as women are enslaved for their bodies.

As long as stomachs rumble with no bread to quiet them.

As long as tongues swell with no water to shrink them.

As long as money defines justice with no one to declare it bankrupt.

As long as bankruptcy overtakes people entrapped in cycles of injustice.

As long as our lives are taken from us by cancer and bullets and cars.

As long as there is a world that needs to be set to rights, there must be a people standing up for that world in the presence of God. There must be a people living out the world’s suffering in the presence of a father with the power to deliver.

There must be a people who cry out, “Abba, Father,” even to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Red Dog (and other stories)

July 16, 2012 in Culture, Media with 1 Comment

Saturday night, the annual film festival known as Windrider Bay Area hosted a showing of Red Dog.

At the screening we were told that Red Dog is the all-time #3 selling DVD in Australia behind Avatar and Finding Nemo. (We also got to see the canine star’s screen test, which is hilarious.) The showing was followed by a conversation with lead actor Josh Lucas and writer Daniel Taplitz.

This was one of those stories that rolls around every now and then–a story that is as much about telling stories, and having a story, as it is about the overall plotline itself.

Red Dog is based on a true story of a dog who adopted a community in the desolate mining regions of Australia’s northwest. The dog then adopted one of the miners in particular. And when that miner died, the dog went a-wanderin’, only to return (months? years?) later.

In the film, and apparently in real life, the dog touches everyone. It brings the community of rugged miners together.

The line in the film that most struck me as the glue that held everything together was when one of the miners confessed mused on the reality entailed in coming out to a place like this to work: You dig long enough, and you discover that everyone has a story.

Everyone did have a story, and in the course of the movie a number of those stories unfold. This dog becomes the catalyst for setting many of those stories in new directions, a catalyst for new life.

The Q&A got rather bogged down (in my opinion) in the quest for cutesy stories about working with the dog Koko. Not a bad topic of conversation, but I thought the film served up a lot more compelling lines to pursue:

  • What does it take to transform our stories?
  • How do we as people find life in the middle of desolation
  • Why is it that a dog (or sometimes a child) can enter into a setting and bring people together who had, until then, managed to create their own little worlds in the midst of each other?

The film is slated for an August theatrical release here in the U.S. It’s definitely worth catching then. But make sure you bring your tissues.

Does the Son Elect?

July 14, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 20 Comments

(And other pressing concerns generated by Church Dogmatics §33.2)

Question 1: Is it faithful to Scripture to say that the Son, Jesus Christ, elects, such that in the God-man the one who elects and the one who is elected are one?

Or, is it more faithful to scripture to say that the one who elects is, properly, God the Father, who makes known to the Son that the Son has been elected for a certain task?

Barth’s whole program, as he presents it, hangs on Christ being both the subject and object of predestination.

I like the idea, but I’m not sure it’s how the NT presents God’s election. It’s all well and good for us, in our more developed Trinitarian Theology, to think “Father, Son, and Spirit” when we think “God.” However, this is not what the NT writers were thinking. For them, when they say “God” they mean the one to whom we refer to as “Father.”

More specifically, when election is assigned to a person, it is most often the Father (e.g., 1 Peter 1:1-2) rather than the Son; unless, that is, the Son is seen as agent of electing those (not himself!) whom the Father has chosen.

Barth Elects to say Yes to God Via His Pipe

Indeed, Ephesians 1 itself, the great “in Christ” celebration that provides the clearest indication that Jesus Christ is the one through whom any others are seen when they are elect, places the whole in the provenance of the Father:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us… Just as he (i.e., the Father!) chose us in him (i.e., the Son), before the foundation of the cosmos… Having predestined us (i.e., the same Father predestines as chooses and blesses) to adoption through Jesus Christ…”

I don’t think that John 1:1, “the Word was God,” provides the kind of leverage Barth demands of it to assign to the son what is clearly assigned to the Father throughout scripture.

Or, to put a different spin on it, when KB says that the son’s suffering is something Jesus speaks of “not as a necessity laid upon Him from without, but as something which He Himself wills,” I wonder what Bible he’s reading. The Son wills it as the will of the Father placed upon him.

I do not think, however, that this is as fatal to Barth’s project as he would lead us to believe. Jesus Christ can still be the primary object of election, focusing the choosing of God on the Son who as Elected One responds faithfully in electing God as well, and much of what Barth wants to maintain is upheld.

Question 2: If Barth wants the election of Jesus Christ to be the sum substance of election, such that all of us can look to Christ and take confidence in our standing before God–has he not cut off any defense he might have had against a charge of universalism?

If not every single person can so look to Christ and be comforted, then election cannot serve this purpose, which Barth says it surely has. I know, I’m not saying anything new here. And I’m happy for KB to be a Universalist based on the capacious nature of Christ’s work on our behalf.

Question 3: is it really all potential loss for God and all potential gain for humanity that God would choose to become incarnate, to become a man who must elect God in order for humanity to be truly God’s people?

I get this idea: we suck, God is awesome, God takes care of our suckiness, but at the possible expense of some of his awesomeness.

However, what if God really loves people?

What if God, creating people in his own image and likeness loves us in the same way that, say, Adam loved Seth–one born in his own image and likeness.

In other words, what if being in the image of God means that we are God’s children and therefore beloved of him, and God has something magnificent to gain from this whole business–a beloved, faithful, loving family?

I love how Barth is moving away from double-predestination (although, again, I think a revisionist hermeneutic is involved here) and creating a doctrine that is radically christological in its focus. I think that much of this is a salutary corrective to predestinarian thinking.

But more work is going to have to be done if this is going to be a revision that stands up to biblical scrutiny.

Compelling

July 13, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 13 Comments

A story without the power to compel us against our will is a story not worth telling.

If the story of Jesus as God’s agent to rescue the world cannot compel us to think differently than we would on our own, to act differently than we would if left to our own devices, then it is not a story worth telling, much less claiming as our own.

This is a story that is not told to be claimed as our own so much as it is written to claim us as its own.

For all my concern that this story make sense in our context, for all my concern that we allow change over time, for all my concern that we allow the praxis of the church to develop in ways that are culturally sensitive, for all of these enculturating dynamics that I think are essential, if I do not find myself repeatedly confronted by a Jesus story that is still, at essence, profoundly Other, summoning me to a way of life that I would not have on my own, then I am not telling the Jesus story.

If I “like” everything in this story as I’m telling it, I’m not telling the Jesus story. I’m telling my story as though it were his.

Birth is Easier than Resurrection

July 11, 2012 in Church with 12 Comments

Given the choice, I’d rather plant a new church than attempt to revitalize an old one. Of course, no one’s giving me the choice, so what’s it matter?

But my thinking is this: it’s much easier to give birth to something new than to raise something old from the dead.

I know, I know–church planters are ready to kill me now, for saying that church planting is easy.

It’s not. I know that.

Giving birth isn’t easy. I’ve been in the L&D room twice. I’ve seen it.

But I’ve never seen anyone raised from the dead.

Ok, so old, declining churches aren’t actually dead.

Has this post run aground yet? Wait… don’t answer that.

But here’s what I’m getting at: the things that you need to place to create a growing, thriving church plant are insufficient for turning around a declining, dying church.

The hope that I’ve heard expressed on several occasions is that a young (associate) pastor will eventually come in, and being young, attract young families. With this new infusion of youth, the church is expected to gradually revitalize.

But, to steal a metaphor from Jesus, that’s an attempt to put new wine in old wineskins.

You can go down that road if you want, but it is going to mean that the old bursts apart.

In other words, it’s going to mean that the folks who have been around for decades are going to have to walk the way of the cross. They are going to have to agree that everything they think church just “is” is going to have to die for that new life to come ’round.

I’ve heard the anger in the voice of the long-time member recounting how the pews the people had given their lives for had been pulled out of the sanctuary.

I’ve received the blank stare when I’ve asked why adults have to be relegated to juice and cookies rather than wine and cheese.

I’ve endured the excruciating choir that one day will, no doubt, be filled with fine young voices! (Or not…)

A people with a history have a shared story that defines for them “what church is.” To rewrite that story for a new generation, to embrace a people who will so rethink things that “church” won’t even be the word that comes to mind for some–this is the challenge of revitalization.

Someone who wants to revitalize has to discover how to lead a people through a holistic process of reimagining what church is from the ground up, from the inside out.

“Can these bones live?”

“You know, o Lord.”

“Prophesy to the wind!”

Yes, indeed, prophesy. And raise these bones from the dead.

My Complements…

July 10, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 10 Comments

The good folks at Christians for Biblical Equality provided me with a copy of N. T. Wright’s 2004 talk, “Biblical Basis for Women’s Service in the Church.”

Wright introduces his talk by making some observations as an “outsider” to the American Evangelical way of framing the issue and holding the debate. In particular, Wright hesitates about the language we’ve adopted to demarcate our “sides.”

“Complement is too good a word to concede to the other side.”

That was the heart of his concern.

Women should be admitted to the ministry, not on the grounds that in all things they are the same as men, but on the grounds that in many ways we evidence tendencies toward difference.

The presence of both is what makes the church stronger.

No Longer a Slave, but a Son

July 9, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

The Prodigal Son story keeps circling back into my world.

Two of my blog posts last week were in conversation with things I had read or heard that used the story as a definitive picture of God.

And, I got roped into teaching the kids during the sermon at church last night, and the Prodigal Son was the topic for our lesson.

Here’s my hang-up with most tellings of the story (though not with those I’ve heard in the last week): in Luke 15 the set-up is grumpy Pharisees who are not happy–At. All.–with Jesus’ welcoming sinners and eating with them. So any interpretation of the parable that doesn’t leave the “insiders” wrestling with their posture toward others, the “wrong people” who have been embraced (any interpretation that does not end with the spotlight squarely on the Pharisees who are questioning Jesus’ choice of party people) won’t do it for me.

Jesus is partying with the wrong people.

This, of course, is just how the story of the Prodigal Son doesn’t end. While the stories of the lost coin and of the lost sheep each end with the party, the Prodigal story ends differently.

It ends with dad outside the party, attempting to cajole older brother to join in the celebration. The story ends not with the accepting father nor with the accepted son, but with the faithful, loyal, grumpy older brother who will not join the party for this fraud who has just come home.

Both brothers, in fact, come to the father with the same, wrong narrative about their life in relation to him. And the father attempts to rewrite their stories.

They tell, or offer, stories of servitude, but the father narrates their lives as those of beloved children.

“Father, I have sinned against heaven and earth and am no longer worthy to be called your son. Take me back as one of your servants.”

But no, the father doesn’t even let him get to the “let me be your servant” part. Family ring. Fine robe. New shoes. And this “son of mine” is back!

There is rejoicing in heaven over one lost sinner who repents. And a feast on earth, apparently.

But as beautiful as that story is, most of the people I hang out with need the second one a bit more.

It’s the “faithfully slaving away” story. The story of the faithful ones who just do everything we’re supposed to. And always have. And always will.

And in the doing have forgotten who we are.

“Look, I’ve served you all these years, and I never disobeyed your instruction” (Luke 15:29, CEB). Behold the good and faithful slave! Laboring away under the yoke of his master!

No, says the father, not slave.

“Son.”

This is family. This is not servitude.

“Son, you are always with me.”

So why are you apart from me now at this moment of celebration? You are always with me.

“Everything I have is yours.”

Including this family of mine–with its lost son back from the dead.

And there we’re left. Outside the party. With the Pharisees who will not join the heavenly party of the faithless who have repented.

For all the shame and embarrassment and guilt that the younger brother felt, he was willing to have his story retold as a story of life out of death, of sonship rather than slavery.

How much harder to have our narrative transformed when we’ve done everything right. How much harder to have our story retold when our go-to narrative is one in which we’ve earned the party by working our fingers to the bone.

How much harder, also, to celebrate the miscreant.

Empire and Cross

July 8, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

I’m playing catch up with my podcasts these days, so I just now came across “Nerd Out: Leaving Church, Packing Heat, and Metaphysical Violence” in my Homebrewed Christianity Queue.

The discussion of peace and metaphysics was rich and challenging. Right around the 51 minute mark, you get this stream from Tripp:

Caesar’s editors got a hold of the Jesus story and they rendered unto God the things that were Caesar’s; namely, omnipotence, empire by coercion, cross building, totalitarian ideologies. You see what I’m saying? And when you find yourself needing to defend the patterns of empire’s power on behalf of the cross-dead homeless Jew, that’s when you’ve just got to say, “How did we get here?”

This is the sort of challenge to our celebrations of power that I keep returning to–challenges that the cross of Christ itself should be continually setting before our eyes.

In the course of the discussion, Tripp even riffs on Barth for a few minutes. *shhhhh!!!* Don’t tell!!

The question he asks is this: Is Jesus, as we meet Jesus in the Gospels, truly the revelation of who God actually is? Or is this Jesus a strange parenthesis between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the coming judgment?

That question, too, has the power to transform our understanding of what faithful embodiment of the Christian story looks like in our world.

But it does leave me with some lingering questions. Namely, what about those passages that make Jesus himself look more “violent” than selections in the Sermon might? E.g., what about the Jesus of the narrow way and crashing house from the end of the Sermon?

But then there is also the question of what comes before and what comes after. There is judgment. In the OT there is war and destruction. In Revelation there is a lake of fire.

So, my lingering question for the metaphysics of the non-violent, non-coercive God is this: what do we make of the other parts of the story that make Jesus, and Jesus’ God, look like those forces of coercive power we otherwise see Jesus repudiating?

  • Are those simply bad readings of the passages in question?
  • Or, do we exercise a revisionist hermeneutic in light of [parts of] the Gospels?

I’d love some more discussion on this, because I think that Tripp is absolutely correct. We cannot paint a cross on the sword of Caesar and think we are standing in the presence of the Crucified.

But what does this metaphysical reframing of God tell us about the God who will judge the earth (and who, apparently, has already on more than one occasion)?

Election and the God-Man

July 7, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 10 Comments

Blogsphere confessional: I’m over the predestination debate.

Been there. Done that. Committed myself. Realized that the debates makes people jerks/reveals that we are jerks. Pulled out. Don’t care anymore.

In particular, I find discussions of predestination to be theologically thin because they spend so much time in the ether that the story as it actually unfolds fades from view.

Barth, though, invites a reconsideration of predestination with a relentless focus on Jesus Christ, focusing on Jesus Christ himself as the object of God’s election (Dogmatics §33.1) daring me to give it one more try.

The section begins with what appears to be an intentional echo of Ephesians 1, as Barth begins sentence after sentence with “In Him…” Ephesians 1 was Calvin’s go-to text for discussing predestination.

Barth is acutely aware of the charge of those who, like Roger Olson, assert that the Calvinist’s God is a moral monster. Barth is not only aware of this, he agrees with the critique. To him, the absolute decree of God is the demon produced in predestinarian thought that must be exorcised.

Thus, instead of some “absolute decree,” we are to focus on the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, the one whom God has ordained to bear God’s name. This, says Barth, is the essence of election: in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, and the word became flesh.

Election, in short, is God’s determination “that the goal and meaning of all His dealings with the as yet non-existent universe should be the fact that in His Son He wold be gracious towards man, united Himself with him” (101).

Barth divides his subsequent discussion in two: as God, Jesus Christ elects; as human, Jesus Christ is elected.

This gets to be a mess.

But before we get to the mess, here’s where it’s helpful: it takes the focus of election off of ourselves as responders, and onto Jesus as the Elect One who also faithfully followed God throughout his life.

Now to the mess: Barth has an insufficiently developed understanding of the significance of being human, especially within the story of Israel, and thus ends up placing too much of Jesus’ function as representative and Lord on his divinity.

Here’s a summation of Barth’s concern:

For where can Jesus Christ derive the authority and power to be Lord and Head of all others and how can these others be elected “in Him,” and how can they see their election in Him the first of the elect, and how can they find in His election the assurance of their own, if He is only the object of election and not Himself its Subject, if He is only an elect creature and not primarily and supremely the electing Creator. Obviously in a strict and serious sense we can never say of any creature that other creatures are elect “in it,” that it is their Lord and Head, and that in its election they can and should have assurance of their own.

How can Jesus Christ derive authority and power to be Lord? By being the obedient Davidic and Adamic son whom God appointed to rule over all things–the one who, because he was obedient, was given a name that was not his before!

How can his election be the assurance of our own? Only if his is truly the election of a human being such that other human beings might know that God can choose even those in the likeness of sinful flesh!

In what sense could we be elect in another? Only in the sense that this other is like unto us such that we might bear his image as the renewal of our own!

Even Barth’s desire to ground the story of election more in the story of the God who truly is remains too far removed from the biblical story.

This is so because in turning to election, Barth jumps immediately to the Trinity outside of time rather than the revelation of Jesus as one whose humanity speaks to us about the word of God in time. And this means, not primarily as witness to the God who is beyond time, but showing us in the here and now how God works within a particular earthly story.

Barth is pointing us in the right direction by demanding we focus on Christ, but I’m not sure he’s walked far enough down the road toward he gestures.

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