Tag Archive - Ethics

Violence, Sports, & Gospel Redux

February 8, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Last week’s conversation about Ultimate Fighting and the gospel came as an interesting prelude to a few other things that went down this weekend: (1) I got to Christianity Today’s February cover story, “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture–and what might be done about it“; (2) this was, of course, Super Bowl weekend; and (3) we just finished season 7 of 24 on DVD.

The article, by Shirl James Hoffman, raises all the right questions. In short: have Christians been baptized into the narrative of sports culture rather than critically assessing where it might stand in need of redemption?

Aside: last week I talked about “baptizing” something that I perceived as sub-Christian [Constantinain "Christian" rule] and someone asked, perceptively, whether we aren’t, in fact, called to baptize things that are outside so as to bring them in. I think there’s something to that. But as commonly used, “baptizing” something means “embracing” it rather than “redeeming” it. When we say that something has been “baptized”, I think that what we’re really saying, often, is that it has baptized us. Baptism is to be about being written into the story of God’s work in Christ, but we use the phrase when Christ’s name is written on the byeline of someone else’s story.

So, yes, we should be “baptizing” sports culture, business culture, art culture but that would mean redeeming it, rereading it, transforming it in light of the narrative that we know to be ultimately true of the world [God's self-giving love in Christ] rather than simply inserting “For God’s glory” into the extant narratives of each.

Ok, so the aside took up a whole post. Sorry about that. Next time: what sorts of questions does Hoffman raise about sports that we might need to think more seriously about if we’re to baptize sports culture rather than be baptized by it?

Fruit of the Spirit: the Fruit of Death

February 4, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

I’m spending a little time in the “fruit of the Spirit” this morning, that great list of Christian virtues Paul lays out in Galatians 5: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” I love that self-control is part of the fruit of the Spirit, but that’s another thought for another day.

What I’m working on right now is that this fruit is the fruit of death–the results of being joined together with Christ in his crucifixion.

The starting point is to recognize that this fruit is set in contrast with the works of the flesh in the previous verses: sexual immorality, idolatry, witchcraft, disputing and factions, drunkenness and the like. The Spirit and the flesh represent the powers of the “present evil age” and “the age to come”–the latter having broken in with Jesus’ death and resurrection.

And so when Paul gets through with his description of the fruit, he insists: “those who are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Co-crucifixion with Christ means that we have put to death the old humanity, died to the age gone by, and are thereby given new life by the Spirit of Christ’s resurrection. The fruit of our death to the old self? The fruit of the Spirit.

Co-crucifixion, dying with Christ, is the transformative means by which we become capable not only of faith but “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6).

That Violence Thing Isn’t Important Now, Is It? Er….

February 2, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 20 Comments

Thanks to my good friends on Twitter, I was alerted to an article in today’s New York Times about churches putting on their own mixed martial arts as an outreach tool. Sketchy, but I get it.

Then comes the problem. The big problem. These aren’t being treated as gateway events to get people to hear a fundamentally different message, they’re being used to connect people to a “Jesus” whose “gospel” is embodied in the fighting of the mixed marshal arts.

The article quotes a pastor as saying: “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”

Yes, that’s what led the disciples to follow him too–all the way to Jerusalem. And what they, at the end, had to discover was not what Jesus came for. The battle and warfare imagery is transmogrified as violence and fighting are shunned (Peter, put away that sword!) and salvation is brought not by beating the crap out of the oppressors, but by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.

Why is narrative theology so important? Because the story tells us that the way of our salvation (self-giving love so that others might live) is the story we’re called not only to assent to but also to embody. “Take up your cross and follow me,” says Jesus. “Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires,” says Paul. Oh, and we might elaborate that these desires include the rage, factionalism and the rest that go into being an ultimate fighter.

The story of the cross suggests to me that the collision of “Feet, Fist, and Faith” is no gospel at all. These ultimate fighting feet are not the feet that don’t kick, but find themselves washed. These fighting  fists are not Messianic, but Roman: the fists in Jesus’ story strike the Messiah without retaliation. This faith is not the faith of Jesus Christ that is obedience in death so that others might live.

Yeah, the Story is that important. And yeah, they’re getting the gospel that wrong.

Which Cross?

February 1, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

Building a little on yesterday’s post about non-violence and the story of the cross, here’s a bit from Jürgen Moltmann that embodies a similar theology of the cross:

“Like the kingdom of Christ, the kingdom of Constantine began with a cross; but it was not the cross of Golgotha. It was the dream cross that promised him ‘In hoc signo vinces’-‘in this cross you will conquer’. With Constantine’s victory over Maxentius in 312, the martyr cross of Christ became a sign of imperial victory.”[1]

The question I’m wrestling with today is whether or not there is a Christian hermeneutic sufficient to keep us from giving such gospel-undermining interpretations of even the very images of the gospel that we’re invoking. Is there a way to tell and interpret the story of what makes us Christians that can keep us from baptizing a Constantinian settlement, from sending people on crusades, from biblically undergirding institutions such as slavery?

Does Paul’s narrative soteriology offer us a way forward? I think it does.

[1] Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (trans. Margaret Kohl, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 162.

Inhabiting the Curicform God (Part 1: Justification)

January 29, 2010 in Book Reviews with 11 Comments

If you don’t know who Michael Gorman is, you better find out in a hurry.

I use his Apostle of the Crucified Lord in my Acts- Revelation course because (a) students devour it; and (b) once they have, they speak of Paul differently, they read Paul differently, their understanding of the gospel is articulated in terms of the narrative of the cross.

I use his Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross in my Cross in the New Testament course because (a) I want my students to understand that biblical “ethics” is about living into a story, not about lists of right and wrong; and (b) because I want to subvert the idea that when we study the cross in the New Testament the most important thing is “theories about the atonement.” No, discipleship and “spirituality” are the more prominent interpretations of Jesus’ death on the cross.

If you want a quicker in to Gorman’s reading of Paul, you can check out his Reading Paul for a great orientation.

But in this and one subsequent post I want to say a few words about Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (for my gratis copy of which I pass on my thanks to the goodly folks at Eerdmans). Today I mostly want to talk about justification, next time we’ll deal with nonviolence.

Gorman begins with a reading of the Christ-hymn in Philippians 2, which he calls Paul’s “master story.” “Although/because Christ existed in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be exploited for gain, but emptied himself…” Although [x] not [y] but rather [z]. That’s Paul’s narrative.

The surprise of this story is that Christ reveals what it means both to be truly God and what it means to be truly human by not exploiting the power and position he had, but by self-emptying (=kenosis). For Paul as an apostle, his own life story must manifest the same: although he’s an apostle, he doesn’t exploit his position for gain, but labors and gives himself for the salvation of the churches (see 1 Thess 1, 2 Cor throughout).

We come now to chapter 2, whose subtitle begins, “justification by co-crucifixion.”

Gorman argues for a vision of participation in Christ in which justification happens by co-crucifixion. This means, among other things, that we must never imagine that there is a rift between justification and transformation (= sanctification) or between justification and justice. For my part, I would suggest that Gorman is here part of a growing chorus of voices that is helping get Paul scholarship back to one of the most important aspects of Reformed theology, one that had been set aside by several generations of Paul scholarship (perhaps culminating with E. P. Sanders): justification is a facet, and function, of Paul’s union with Christ soteriology.

For Gorman’s proposal concerning justification, two elements are indispensable: (1) the faithfulness of Jesus, expressed in going to the cross, is the reason that the cross effects our justification; and (2) this faithfulness is covenant faithfulness–fulfilling a covenant that demands both love of God and love of neighbor.

In short, what this means is that being united to the story of the self-giving son, Christians find themselves reconciled to both God and other people–and living into the narrative of God- and neighbor-love as the Spirit who joins them to Christ works out his cruciform image in them as individuals and as communities.

The means by which justification is accomplished (Christ’s faithful death) demonstrates the mode by which it comes to us (our own faithful response to God) and the manner in which we are called to live in the present (59).

In working out this theology, Gorman stresses that it is by grace: it is not self-generated; it is corporate: we are not saved on our own, but in Christ and as part of a body; it is an introduction into a new life that includes participation now in Jesus’ resurrection (69-70).

How does transformation happen in the Christian life? “Paradoxically, this death experience called faith results in life, both present and future” (80).

Two crucial take-home points for Pauline soteriology emerge from this chapter: (1) justification and union with Christ are not two separate theological models, but one model in which the former is a component part of the latter; and therefore (2) justification can never come without personal and corporate transformation into the image of the crucified and risen messiah.

Next up: co-crucifixion and non-violence.

Hermeneutics, Identity, and Ethics

January 27, 2010 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

For the past several days we’ve been in the weeds of a particular issue: the helpfulness (or lack thereof) of “authenticity” as a criterion for assessing our actions. I want to put such reflection within the larger project which is this blog / my life.

Increasingly I realize that for “people of the book” hermeneutics (i.e., how we interpret the scriptures as relevant for our own lives), our identities as people located in particular faith communities, and our ethics are inseparable. In my theoretical world of biblical scholarship, this means that identity and ethics follow self-conscious biblical interpretation, but in the real world all three of these influence each other, and any one can be the driving force for the other two.

“Storied Theology” is a phrase coined as both an indicative and an imperative. (1) It is descriptive of the kind of theology we find in scripture. God has tied himself to a particular people’s story and history, and revealed himself as a character within its drama. The consummate revelation of this God is in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. (Of course, what “consummate revelation” means will vary by biblical author, but that’s another topic for another day.)

(2) The biblical storying of God is not merely what we see, but what we’re called to do and what we’re called to live into.

Put these things together and you get any number of ramifications. One of them is what we have seen over the past week: our lives must be read as part of a narrative that is defined by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Together, this network of events tells us: (1) that God must exercise transformative power in order for this world to be a place that honors and glorifies him; (2) that sin exercises real power and produces real guilt that must be dealt with as God makes all things new; and (3) that the world is heading for a time of fulfillment and restoration.

This means, in turn, (1) that our lives must seek out and participate in the transformation God is seeking to bring about if we (Christians) are to faithfully bear the name of God’s king (Christ) into the world but also that the world we encounter is so beautiful and good as to merit restoration;  (2) that we must not set ourselves up as the measure of our own activities but rather we must anticipate that we will often feel the pull of doing what is evil and that we’ll do many things requiring forgiveness; and (3) that we must have hope as we look for the world (including ourselves) to become what we are not yet, and that we must use the glorious future (not the broken present) as our canon.

Life. Death. Resurrection. Those give shape to the narrative God has written his people into.

About a year ago I was having dinner with someone who expressed astonishment about a conversation he’d had with a Christian. The person rapidly insisted that the crucial things were to believe in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus. “But religion,” my friend said, “is about making you a better person, not all that other stuff.” Well, yes. To both. Religion is to transform us into something better, to open up communion with something higher. But we only know what that “something” is, what the shape of being a “better person” might be when we know what our story is.

Because Christian theology is storied theology, it’s imperative that we get our story straight. Looks like I got a bit distracted here. How does all this story stuff impact hermeneutics as a former of our identities as well as our ethics? Stay tuned.

Authenticity Part 3c: Sexuality

January 26, 2010 in Uncategorized with 9 Comments

Ok, you knew this was coming, right?

One of the things that drove me to start reflecting a bit more critically on the issue of sexuality was watching a short video from some homosexual Christians who were reflecting on their experiences growing up in the church. Homosexuals growing up in the church frequently testify to not only the guilt that comes from the preaching against their sexual drives but also to the imprisoning feeling of not being able to authentically express who they are as they strive to live their lives before God. Not acknowledging and living into their homosexual orientation creates an inauthentic experience of not only faith but also life itself.

I think about the issue of homosexuality a good deal (I live in San Francisco, for crying out loud), and I think that some Christian arguments in its favor are stronger than others. The authenticity argument I find to be one of the least compelling.

The reason for this is that in sexuality as much as any other, and more than most other, areas of our lives, the Christian call to live into the righteous life that God desires is a call to set aside what we would otherwise feel like doing.

I recognize that the church as a whole has given up its moral authority to speak on sexual issues. Unlike the church of the prior 1925 years, the church at the middle of the twentieth century became more of a baptizer of the culture’s sexual and marital mores than a missional outpost calling for a counter-cultural way of life. Once we no longer even call people to higher fidelity to their marriage covenant (stay married!) or to confining all sexual expression to marriage, then we’ve lost the moral standing to speak in God’s name about the sorts of sexual relationships God may or may not approve. I can hear one of my readers asking, “Who’s we?” and to this I say: the North American church in general, and the mainline churches in particular.

But having said that, I would say that every call to abstinence or self-control in the area of sexuality, every call to be faithful within a marriage covenant, is at some level a recognition that godly sexuality will at times be an “inauthentic” sexuality. Fully authentic self-expression will often entail sex with a person with whom one is developing an intimate relationship–where there is love. But a married person might develop a strong relationship with someone other than her spouse. Unmarried people will genuinely love the people they are dating.

Authenticity is an insufficient criterion to determine an appropriate expression of sexuality.

If someone is unconvinced that waiting for marriage, or confining sexual expression to marriage (or something like it) is biblical and godly, I suppose I could always bring out more extreme examples such as pedophilia. Is authenticity a sufficient judge to determine godly sexual expression in that case? I don’t want to build my whole case here, because I don’t want my dear readers to think that I can’t tell the difference between consenting, committed adults and the abuse of power, etc. that are entailed in pedophilia. But when we make authenticity our canon, there are ramifications that almost all of us will want to deny.

As I indicated in the first post in this series, I think authenticity is important, even indispensable in Christian communities. But it is not a sufficient rule of practice to tell us either how to act (because we’re being authentic) or how we shouldn’t (because doing a particular action wouldn’t be authentic).

Our rule of life is not who we are, but who we are being made to be in Christ, and the road he has led us on by which to get there: the way of the cross, which is the way of death, which is the formative narrative that determines what our life in community looks like.

Authenticity Part 3b: Forgiveness and Anger

January 25, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

A second issue about authenticity swirls around the nexus of anger and forgiveness.

(As an aside, and in the interest of transparency and authenticity, these first two issues are close to home for me. I tend to use more than my fair share of colorful (*ahem*) language and have been known to rage from time to time. The are neither the observations of a neutral observer nor a call to be just like me nor theological justifications for me to be just who I am. Now back to our story…)

I take these two together because… well… Jesus does. I’m such a fundamentalist. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about murder. He slides into a discussion about anger by telling us that when someone is angry it is as though the have killed the other person: they are liable to the judgment.

Here we have another indication that being “true to ourselves” isn’t always an indication that we’re living into the righteous life that God desires. In fact, the point of so much of this portion of the sermon is that who we really are can show us how bad our problem really is.

But this isn’t just about showing us we suck, Jesus wants to form us into a community that lives into the narrative of a Father who has brought forth children by the self-giving life of Jesus. And this, I think, is the turn that Jesus’ instruction takes.

After warning people not to be angry or call names, Jesus talks about life in the family of God. The family language is not accidental: “If you’re offer your gift on the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave it before the altar and go–first be reconciled to your sister or brother.”

Two things here: First, did you notice that our worship of God is given back-seat to our relationships with God’s children? Against our individualistic tendencies that see worship as a matter between me and God, or my heart alone before God, this passage says no, the quality of your community as a place that is living into the reconciled relationships that God himself establishes with us is our first priority.

But surely this attending to the other needs to be done because otherwise our hearts won’t be right in our own worship?

Nope. Here’s the second point. We don’t go and be reconciled because we remember that we’ve got to forgive someone else. We go and reconcile because we realize that they have to forgive us. Our identity as a people of forgiveness is so vital to our life before God that God demands we leave aside all pretense of piety until that issue is worked out.

Sometimes, the importance of authenticity has one redemptive function: to show us and the people around us where we need to live into the narrative that we are otherwise denying in our hearts and lives. To not forgive, or to not pursue forgiveness, is to live in denial of the story that makes us who we are. About anger in particular, James later warns us that this does not bring about (much less evince!) the righteous life that God desires.

Authenticity is not enough.

Indeed, continuing to live into the foundational moment of our story, not merely receiving forgiveness but extending it to others, is the sine qua non of continuing to participate in the story of God’s family: “If you forgive people their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but it you do not forgive people, neither will your father forgive your transgressions.”

Our call is not merely to be authentic, but to become authentically Christian, authentically children of our forgiving and loving heavenly Father.

Authenticity part 3a: The Shortcoming in Speech

January 22, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 0 Comments

I’ve tried to get us started thinking about authenticity by affirming how it’s good and then highlighting some if its limitations.

Now I want to suggest a few specific places where authenticity either does or might leave us short as a measure for the Christian life. Three areas illustrate the (possible) shortcoming: speech, forgiveness, and sex.

In response to some of my initial thoughts about authenticity, two different people shared with me some thoughts they were starting to work out about the relationship between “authentic speech” and the lives we’re called to live in Christ. One of these reflections had to do with use of “foul language,” the other had to do with what I’ll call acerbic speech or, more mildly, ungraciousness.

Part of the challenge with language is that it is culturally conditioned. Not only what a word “means” but how it communicates and its place in the shared lexicon of a society are all culturally determined. This means that in certain circles, words will not be offensive that will be in other circles, language appropriate to one context may not be appropriate in another. Moreover, there is up-side to using what is sometimes called “foul language”: sometimes, a strong word reserved for the right instance can communicate with power.

But just as often, use of such language can be an illustration of immaturity or bad judgment. The fact that all words are socially conditioned does not mean that we have carte blanche to use them however we see fit, it means that we have to read the culture we are in and choose words that function within that world in a way that matches who we desire to be.

When I speak of who we “desire to be,” I’m back to the question of eschatology: what “self” are we being authentic to? It may be that in using borderline language we are intentionally attempting to show that, for example, a legalistic expression of Christianity is inauthentic to the new person God is making us into in Christ. But it may just as well be the case that my insistence on using proverbial four letter words is illustrative of the old self with its strong, unwholesome, impure speech that refuses to leave behind what is familiar and habit in favor of the cruciform-road along which purity is pursued.

Curse words are the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of things that come out of our mouths, many of which are no less poisonous for all their flowery garb. In fact, it is perhaps with speech that the question of authenticity is so important to put into its appropriate context, because the assumption at several points in scripture seems to be that the mouth is as indicative of the condition of our hearts as anything else: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34).

My concern is that the high value we place on authenticity might make such demonstrative mouths into an inherent good: so long as we’re speaking what we feel, we’re being authentic, and that’s what Jesus says we should expect.

But Jesus’ words point in a different direction. The first part of the verse quoted above reads, “You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil?” It then goes on to say that the mouth speaks the overflow of the heart. What this means is that the congruity between mouth and heart can often be presumed, but it therefore becomes our job to assess the quality of those words by means other than authenticity to determine whether we speak as ones who are being transformed into the image of God in Christ or, instead, as those who are part of the viperous brood of the Serpent himself.

Jesus’ other words of correlation between heart and mouth are much to the same effect. What makes a person “unclean”? Not what goes in through the mouth and into the stomach. No, “but the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a person unclean.” Authentic words have the very real potential of reinforcing our need to be saved by the work of Jesus rather than demonstrating our participation in it.

This is, perhaps, where my second friend’s concerns came in. She was pushed to devalue authenticity as such when she saw it used as a cloak for ungracious, destructive speech. In some of the circles we both run in, this is often directed against the church and traditional ways of doing church in particular.

It is these uses of the tongue–the “I’m not gossiping, but…” conversations that are rife with gossip, the “no offense, but…” statements that introduce deeply offensive comments; the criticism, bickering, expressions of anger–that put on full display James’ warning that the tongue is a fire setting the world ablaze.

Authentic speech should be a goal–but authentically life-giving speech that refuses to use light as a masquerade for darkness, “truth” to suffocate love.

Authenticity, Part 2: Redemption

January 21, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 9 Comments

As I stated in my earlier post, authenticity is good. It’s much better than being “inauthentic” or “dishonest” or lying or keep up appearances.

But to suggest that authenticity is a sufficient criterion for determining what is right is to over-empower it. Or, to put it in a way that gets at the heart of what follows: arguing for action based on “authenticity” represents an over-realized eschatology. For now we are not  yet what we shall one day be. Until that happens, “who we are” is no clear indicator of what we should be doing.

There are several important angles for approaching the question of authenticity. One of these is what we discussed last time: being authentic about our struggles, shortcomings, sins, and other messy moments conduces to a healthy community of faith (and healthy witness to those who don’t have any faith). It stems the pretension that can lead to charges of hypocrisy and sets us on firmer footing with one another.

Another important angle for approaching the question of authenticity is the poly-cultural embodiment of the gospel. When we see the good news of Jesus crossing from Jewish into Gentile worlds, the church determines quickly that the religious, and cultural trappings of Judaism cannot be imposed on the Gentiles as a requirement to be received into the people of God. Parallels might be brought into the discussion from our modern context: each culture is permitted to create worship forms that are authentic expressions of honor and thankfulness to God.

But at the narrative dynamic of the Christian message is not simply that God wants us to be honest, or that God wants to create a multi-cultural people glorifying him with one voice. More fundamental than either of these is that we are redeemed from an old way of life, by the death of Jesus, and into a new way of life, empowered by Jesus’ resurrection.

The truth-telling to which we are called is an expression of our new identity “in Christ,” where God is our father. The new multi-cultural community is one in which Christ has accepted us to the glory of God–precisely by redeeming us from our sinful ways that left us short of the glory of God.

In other words, Christianity is about redemption, not mere affirmation. This means it is about transformation.

And if our story is about transformation, then we will always have to weigh what we want to do, what feels right for us to do against the very real possibility that our desire is an expression of the old humanity rather than the new.

We live between the times. This means that the new identity which is ours in Christ is something we are living into. We must still actively pursue a life which is “walking by the Spirit,” because the “flesh sets its desire against the Spirit.” As a people in the process of being transformed from our conformity to the patterns of one way of life into the new way of life made available to those who have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires,” there is always the distinct possibility that we will want what we are being redeemed from rather than that into which we are being transformed and to which we are being called.

One day we will simply be living full new life in Christ, such that all we authentically are and desire will be pleasing in the sight of God.

But until then, we are called to “put to death the deeds of the flesh” which are the integral and therefore authentic ways of being outside of Christ.

What on earth does this have to do with anything? As any good biblical scholar would, I put off specific point of application. But only until tomorrow or so. Stay tuned!

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