Today I took little dude to a 5-year-old birthday party. Most of the kids in his pre-K class were there. About twelve to fifteen adults were native Spanish speakers; three of us were white; two were African American.
At the same time, Laura was on birthday party duty with CM, attending the festivities for a classmate. The 7-year-olds were supervised by a room full of about 50% white, and 50% Middle Eastern, Latino/a, and African American.
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In our San Francisco world, “normal” means racially mixed company.
Perhaps this feeds my dissatisfaction with CM coming home from first grade on Friday all prepped for MLKJ day with a new vocabulary word: “racism.”
It’s not that the topic isn’t important. It’s not that MLKJ Day isn’t a crucial time to talk about issues of race and the struggles our country has had and continues to have. But I wonder if MLKJ’s memory might not be better honored by my first-grader celebrating the diversity that she lives in every day (her class is, at most, 1/3 white) rather than giving her a category for people whose destructive prejudice have marred, and continue to mar, the social fabric of our country?
So that’s my honest question for debate as we honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. today: is his memory best honored by teaching our young children about the full darkness of racism upon which King shone his light? or is it better honored by celebrating with our young children the reality that he saw and that they are, in many ways, living into?
I am aware that questions of race strike deeply at the heart of many people’s identity. So please be aware of that and, as you my awesome readers often do so well here, let’s make sure we keep the conversation civil and constructive even if/as we disagree.
Jesus came with more than his fair share of surprises. Among these was his power to reverse contagion.
“Contagion” is a fancy way of talking about something being contagious. In particular, we talk about contagion as how things become “unclean.”
If an unclean object comes into contact with a clean object, the clean becomes unclean. Uncleanness is more powerful than the cleanness an object might carry around.
Priests are holy and eminently clean. But they can’t go into the same room with a dead person: the unclean dead defiles the living clean.
Jesus messed all this up.
Jesus came and touched the unclean, declaring to them, “You are cleansed.”
The unclean leprosy did not defile Jesus. The purifying touch of Jesus cleansed the leper.
How relevant is any of this to us? After all, we don’t live in a world whose boundaries are marked by laws of purity and impurity. We don’t come to a temple for cleansing.
But, in general, Christians still struggle with the fear that we will be defiled by the unclean.
A few years ago I was gently ribbing a friend on Facebook who was describing their “quiet evening at home,” on October 31. They had gotten some candy, bobbed for apples, sipped some hot cider, made a bonfire.
Two things were equally clear: (1) they were celebrating Halloween. (2) They weren’t calling it Halloween because it’s a pagan holiday.
See also: every church that allegedly has a “Harvest Festival” even though nobody in our post-industrial age even knows what difference an ingathering of food would make compared to any other day of the year.
Christmas presents similar problems for us. We get all bent about Christmas celebrations that are less than what we would idealize as “Christian.” Many of us get worked about taking Christ out of Christmas and the like.
And so we’ve resorted to believing that the power of the world’s contagion, the power of the world’s uncleanness, is an overwhelming power to be feared, rather than being willing to embrace, participate with, and (either literally or figuratively) rubbing shoulders with the non-believing world around us.
Jesus is more powerful than the forces of the world that would defile us.
There is no power in non-Christian music or movies or celebrations that the cleansing power of the resurrected Christ (who is Lord over all) cannot overcome and purify.
So lighten up. Proclaim Christ. Worship Jesus in that old tavern or Masonic lodge or Druid temple if you’re fortunate enough to get the space.
Warning: this post is rated PG-13 for language. If you find strong language deeply offensive, please come back tomorrow.
But really, the offense of strong language is the point. Sometimes life needs to be rated PG-13 for language. Because the reality of life rarely lives up to its Rated-G billing (better: the Rated G fascade we Christians sometimes want to erect over it).
I’ve been poring over A Serious Man in anticipation of my world-changing SBL paper, “New Country for Old Men: Biblical Wisdom Traditions in Coen Brothers Filmography.” This movie echoes Job at many points. It wrestles with the reality of a world where life comes apart at the seams–and yet where God is believed to be active to give and to take away.
Often, the experience of the world’s privations is worse when we believe that the hand of God is sovereign and active. It wraps up God within the causality of our disappointments and pains.
The agony of this assumption of divine intervention is captured in all its rawness in the scene of Larry and his brother Arthur by the pool (warning: strong language begins here):
LARRY
(HISSING)
Arthur!
You’ve got to pull yourself together!
ARTHUR
It’s all shit, LARRY! It’s all shit!
LARRY
Arthur. Don’t use that word.
ARTHUR
It’s all fucking shit!
LARRY
Arthur! Come on!
ARTHUR
Look at everything Hashem has given you! And what do I
get! I get fucking shit!
LARRY
Arthur. What do I have. I live at the Jolly Roger.
ARTHUR
You’ve got a family. You’ve got a job. Hashem hasn’t
given me bupkes.
LARRY
It’s not fair to blame Hashem, Arthur. Please. Sometimes
-please calm down-sometimes you have to help your-
self.
ARTHUR
Don’t blame me! You fucker!
LARRY
Arthur. Please.
ARTHUR
Hashem hasn’t given me shit. Now I can’t even play cards.
LARRY
Arthur. This isn’t the right forum. Please. Not by the
pool.
Arthur weeps.
Arthur… It’s okay… It’s okay…
“Don’t use that word.”
Despite his circumstances, Larry is trying to cling to a world where people get what they deserve–even as he sees that it’s not true in his own case. And despite his circumstances, Larry (somewhat Job-like) will not curse in his wrestling with God.
But Arthur will.
Why is this scene so important? For the movie, for reality, there is a place to cry out in vitriolic protest against the injustice of the world. There is a place for raising our voices to God and telling God that the world where “God’s favor shines upon the righteous” and “the traps of the wicked spring upon themselves” is not the world in which we find ourselves from day to day.
So at the risk of justifying what is often frivolous behavior, I want to say that dropping s-bombs and f-bombs is sometimes an important response of Christian faithfulness to the God who has power over all things, and yet has not made all things just and good in the world as we experience it.
This is the biblical practice of lament: to look at what is wrong with the world, stand by it, and call out to God for a transformation of the cosmos such that it reflects the goodness of God. We will not let go of the reality of a sovereign Lord enthroned at God’s right hand. We cannot deny the failure of the world to embody the grace and righteousness by which this Lord and his God would be known.
And so, we lament.
And sometimes, this means crying out with all the boldness we can muster.
Please bear with me in a little gender stereotyping. And forgive and extend grace as necessary. Or rant in the comments–as you wish.
Last weekend we were camping with a bunch of other family’s from our daughter’s school. As the boys exercised their wills on the environment around them, I had Jesus’ words echoing through my mind: “…comes to steal, kill, and destroy.”
Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Are there tadpoles in the river? Those, clearly, are for fishing out and giving to the cats.
Are there cats? Those, clearly, are for carrying around, forcing affection from, and being compelled to eat and drink on demand.
And let’s not even talk about the baby birds.
Destruction and misery were in their wakes as the boys took charge of the world around them by exercising their superior size and force in myriad situations.
My daughter isn’t like that. My son shares some of those traits.
Shift gears with me to the church.
As Mark Driscoll promotes his own particular brand of macho church leadership, one of his deepest concerns pertains to the feminization of the church, and of our culture more generally. What we clearly need is more macho, more bravado, more “manly men” who can keep our world running… well…
… running like it’s in the hands of boys who never grew up.
When Obama was running for president, one of the greatest hopes of the people on the political center to left was that his gift of oratory might bode well for a new era of international relations. Perhaps the ability to speak clearly would translate into speaking as a means for peace-making rather than the killing and destruction that had been the choice of his predecessor.
In politics, it seems, at least in the presidency, a different way to lead and seek for peace is still some time off.
Back to Driscoll’s concern, I hope he’s right. I hope we are experiencing a feminization of our culture. Now, there are, of course, ways in which women control their environments as well. Stereotypical ploys of manipulation and social ostracism have their own insidious character.
But there seems to be a boy’s way of dealing with the world–wrestling, grabbing, fighting, killing, that has, in fact, been the way that grown up boys have controlled the world over most of the history of our human race. And we need a better way forward.
The church, of course, has had its own share of mishaps as its boys have led their crusades both literal and figurative: gaining control and exercising often destructive power, heedless of relationships, heedless of the wisdom of cooperation, heedless, of course, of the way of the cross.
If the feminization that Driscoll fears brings with it less of the stereotypical power gaming, more cooperation, and more concern for real people, it can only be seen as a welcome transformation.
As for the boys at school? Well, to be honest, my daughter caught some tadpoles and was permitted by one of her parents to bring them home in a bottle.
Fair enough.
But she wasn’t the one who intentionally dumped them out in the middle of the playground.
When we first started reading the Dogmatics, I got a good bit of advice for starting points other than 1.1. It seems that there is some really great stuff to jump into in book 4, in particular. But I like to go through things from start to finish, and I am increasingly glad that we’ve gone this way.
The questions Barth wrestles with in 1.1 always seem to be dancing around the bread-and-butter questions of my vocation to biblical scholarship: what is the word of God? what does the Bible have to do with the word of God? how does the Bible function in the church as the word of God? and what does this Bible as word of God have to do with what the church has said and must say in confessing its faith?
As Barth comes in §1.7 to situate all that he has said about the Word of God within the enterprise of Dogmatics, he makes it clear how a Protestant Dogmatics must differ from both a modernist dogmatics and a Roman Catholic dogmatics–and in both counts it has to do with the place of the Bible as a word that can always stand as a witness over against the words of people.
The summary of the whole might be found on p 255:
In fact Church proclamation is not an undertaking which can come under other criteria than God’s Word in respect of its content.
Other criteria cede ground, building the identity of the church on something other than that which truly defines it.
One target of Barths’ polemics in this section is the Roman Catholic Church. And here he reminded me of why I am Protestant.
As Barth articulates the difference between dogmatics as he practices it and RC dogmatics, the distinction comes to whether the church has been entrusted with dogmas that must be believed. And Barth insists that to place our belief in church dogmas is to place our belief in the words of men rather than the Word of God. In fact, their very character as dogmas that can be studied differentiates them from the dogmatics that affirms church proclamation: a dogmatics that demands an obedience to God, a response to the divine word, and not the learning of a theological system.
As much as my largely Protestant readership might agree with this in theory, it is a word of caution about what makes our theology truly Protestant that needs broader application in our context. I see two places where Protestants are acting, or are hedging more toward, a Roman Catholic manner of constructing theology, and I find each, in its own way, alarming.
First, there is the conservative expression of Reformed Theology that is spreading like wildfire these days. Conservative Calvinism has had a perennial challenge of honoring its traditions while maintaining its truly Protestant spirit of allowing the Bible, rather than traditions of men, to be the authoritative voice. In all, it is failing on this regard. To be Reformed in this world means, by and large, not to do what the Reformers did in going to the sources of both the Bible and those who have spoken about it, but instead saying what the Reformers said in their theological confessions.
In short, the Reformed Traditions has replaced the Roman Catholic Church as the magisterium in a system that defers to words of people, the word of the church, rather than the word of God.
The other place this tendency toward prioritizing the words of people over the Bible as word of God is, somewhat surprisingly, the Biblical studies academy, in that arm of it striving to do theological interpretation for the church.
In this world, a number of interpreters are advocating a return to “the rule of faith” as our guide for reading scripture. There are exercises at SBL sessions in which parts of the NT are read through the lens of a part of the creed, for example.
And in these exercises, Biblical scholars (of all people!) are practicing what happens when the word of God is subjected to and constrained by the words of men. While the results are sometimes “interesting,” I cannot bring myself to think that this is either what we should be doing as biblical scholars nor what we should be doing as the church. It is not the creeds that regulate our Bibles, but our Bibles which should be unleashed to speak afresh–even if that means challenging the creeds.
Barth’s other interlocutor is modernism: theologies that begin with what we already know about people or the world based on outside factors such as psychology or philosophy.
And while, on a popular level, this sort of theology is perhaps not so sophisticated, it is nonetheless rampant. The question is often posed these days, “What is God doing in the world.” This is a crucial question, to be sure! But it is also easily confused with, “What is happening in the world?” and our world can become the measure of what we must say when we speak of God, rather than allowing the Word of God to stand against us and speak a word of judgment upon what is going on in the world.
If not. If we don’t allow the word of God to challenge us as the church or as people embedded in particular cultures, we might find ourselves, strangely, guilty of nothing worthy of a conviction:
One of the common components to the story of American religious history as told among Evangelicals is that Christian influence is waning and that modern culture is more hostile to Christianity than ever before.
Are we so sure?
Historical demographers and sociologists have shown that in 1776 only 17 percent of the national population belonged to a church. It appears that an official religion governed an indifferent population for much of the colonial period. Then, in the nineteenth century, under the influence of evangelical expansion, church membership began to increase sharply. By 1850, 35 percent of Americans were church members. By 1906 the number was 51 percent. Sixty-two percent of the American populace belonged to religious institutions by 2000, though not specifically Christian churches. Evangelicals led the expansion. (David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 5-6)
I know it’s a bit hard to see the picture, but see what you can make of this sign:
(“CAPS WORN WITH BILL FORWARD ONLY! NO DO RAGS!”)
The sign adorns a new high school football stadium.
I’m curious how it strikes you. My gut reaction was that there was a racist tinge to it, at very least. “Propriety” seems to be delineated by what’s normal and/or appropriate to (an older generation of) white people.
But then I thought that there could be a more complex answer, such as certain styles of dress being associated with gang membership.
My gut, though, says that this is white people enforcing white cultural mores, and I’m curious to hear how it strikes you.
