Pastor Scott's Thoughts

Why White Christians Should Read Easu McCaulley's "Reading While Black"

This morning I finished Esau McCaulley's rich and helpful book, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an
Exercise in Hope (InterVarsity Press). Dr. McCaulley is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and his book was recently selected by Christianity Today as "The Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year" (for 2021).

The book not only deals with reading the Scripture from a Black historical perspective, but it uses that hermeneutical lens to tackle a number of critical contemporary questions. There are chapters devoted to each of the following questions:

• Does the Bible have a word to say about the creation of a just society in which Black people can flourish free of oppression?
• Does the Bible speak to the issue of policing - that constant source of fear in the Black community?
• Does the Bible provide us with the warrant to protest injustice when we encounter it?
• Does the Bible value our ethnic identity? Does God love our blackness?
• What shall we do about the pain and rage that comes with being Black in this country?
• What about slavery? Did the God of the Bible sanction what happened to us?

Each of these chapters are really well done. They are rich and thoughtful, yet they are written at a level accessible to most readers and they invite healthy, constructive conversations to come out of them.

There are lots of reasons why every person of faith would be edified by reading this text. However, let me just mention two reasons why many of my white sisters and brothers might want to wrestle with a book on African American readings of the Scriptures.

First, in paying attention to Black readings of the Bible, it not only helps all of us to hear the texts in a new way, but it makes those of us from majority cultures aware of our own lenses of interpretation. As McCaulley writes, "...everybody has been reading the Bible from their locations, but we are honest about it" (p. 20). What gives the African American reading of Scripture such power is that it reads the Scripture from the same social location of hostility, marginalization, and oppression from which the texts emerged and to which the voices of the Bible speak. Social location matters in our interpretation, and if we are not careful, our social location can cloud the Truth the gospel reveals. In one of my favorite quotes from the book, McCaulley writes,

The question isn't always which account of Christianity uses the Bible. The question is which does justice to as much of the biblical witness as possible. There are uses of Scripture that utter a false testimony about God. This is what we see in Satan's use of Scripture in the wilderness. The problem isn't that the Scriptures that Satan quoted were untrue, but when made to do the work that he wanted them to do, they distorted the biblical witness. This is my claim about the slave master exegesis of the antebellum South. The slave master arrangement of biblical material bore false witness about God. This remains true of quotations of the Bible in our own day that challenge our commitment to the refugee, the poor, and the disinherited (p. 91).

It isn't that a Black reading of the Bible avoids having its own particular lens (nor is that reading monolithic). None of us can fully escape our lenses. However, the similarity of social locations between the African American community's history of enslavement and discrimination and the history of oppressed Israel offers a reading of Scripture - in particular an understanding of the liberating character of God - that resonates more truthfully to the transformative intent of God's Word than readings that are shaped from social locations of power (and the desire for that power to be retained).

Second, it helps us pay attention to the potentially transformative nature of the Bible both historically and in the present. One of the things that has happened, in part because the Bible has too often been used in the hands of authorities to fight for maintaining the status quo, is that the Scripture is often viewed in the culture as a continuing source of oppression. Tragically (and ironically), the same Bible that is and was the primary source leading to not only the abolition of slavery but the elevation of the dignity of all people, is also the source often used by others to justify slavery and it inhumane atrocities. That has led to a cultural moment where not only the Bible but Christianity is often viewed not as a source of life and liberation for people, but rather as part of the oppressive problem that needs to be overthrown.

As McCaulley acknowledges early in the book, this tension over the Bible itself often put him in an awkward and unfortunate position, as a young Black scholar, of having to choose between progressives working for justice while essentially setting aside the authority of the Bible, and those on the other side who held to the authority of the Bible but also used it as a way of maintaining forms of inequity. As he put it, "In my professor's attempt to take the Bible away from the fundamentalists, he also robbed the Black Christian of the rock on which they stood" (p. 8). What McCaulley and a Black hermeneutic rightly offers the church is a way of taking the authority of the Word (and the nature of the God we meet there) seriously, and allowing the Bible itself to be the source of the work of justice and liberation. This is a perspective the whole church desperately needs.

 

Reading the Imprecatory Psalms with Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad"

As a way of trying to attend to Black History Month, I read the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning novel The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. The story centers around Cora, a young slave woman who escapes from the brutal bonds of slavery in Georgia, via the underground railroad, to try and find a life of freedom in the north or west. Although fictional, Whitehead bases his novel on many of the historical events and narratives surrounding the victories and tragedies connected to those few brave men and women who tried to secretly usher people from slavery to freedom.

The book is haunting, disturbing, and difficult to put down. It is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, hopeful and tragic. Wrestling with the historical and brutal realities of slavery behind its narrative are deeply unsettling but hopefully transformative when honestly confronted.

Like many works that narrate the history of the African-American experience, beyond the obvious evil of slavery itself, what I find personally so disturbing is the role Christian faith too often played in validating the systemic wickedness of racial oppression and justifying the status quo. One of the reasons I believe Christians should read these kinds of works is to view the faith of the majority culture through the eyes of the oppressed.

This coming week I am launching a videocast and podcast called New Creation Conversations. The first conversation is with a good friend and great scholar, Dr. Brent Strawn. Brent is a professor of Old Testament Studies at Duke Divinity School. We talk about a number of important things related to the Old Testament. In part of our conversation Brent reflected on what are known as the imprecatory psalms. Imprecatory psalms are those prayers that ask God to bring judgment, wrath, and punishment upon the psalmist’s enemies. Two of the best-known imprecatory psalms are Psalm 69 and 109. There are nineteen other psalms that are usually counted as imprecatory also: 5, 6, 11, 12, 35, 37, 40, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 79, 83, 94, 137, 139, and 143. Here is an example of what those psalms sound like from Psalm 69:

You know full well the insults I’ve received; you know my shame and my disgrace.

All my adversaries are right there in front of you.

Insults have broken my heart. I’m sick about it.

I hoped for sympathy, but there wasn’t any;

I hoped for comforters, but couldn’t find any.

They gave me poison for food.

To quench my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.

…Pour out your anger on them – let your burning fury catch them.

Let their camp be devastated; let no one dwell in their tents…

Let them be wiped out of the scroll of life!

Let them not be recorded along with the righteous! (Psalm 69:19-21, 24-25, 28)

I couldn’t help but think about the imprecatory psalms in certain passages of Whitehead’s novel. Many of those held in slavery in the book try to live out of imaginations shaped by the gospel. One of the most hopeful passages in the book envisions a community of the oppressed who attempt to form a community of care that has reflections of the new creation. However, there are passages that also reflect the imprecatory psalms. As an example, at one point Cora hears that her former wicked and violent owner has died. She reacts with a kind of imprecatory biblical imagination:

[Cora] envisioned her former master tangled in linens, purple tongue poking from his lips. Calling for help that never arrived. Melting to a gory pulp in his casket, and then torments in a hell out of Revelation. Cora believed in that part of the holy book, at least. It described the slave plantation in code. (p. 271-272)

In several passages, Whitehead narrates those in slavery having to believe in divine justice and wrath, because if God does not bring judgment upon those who oppress them, then there is no ability to keep faith in the existence, let alone the goodness, of God.

Often when we think about the reason such violent and wrath-filled imprecatory psalms were included in the canon of Scripture, we think about the need for our frustrations and cries for help to be named to God, even if God may or may not answer such seemingly brutal prayers as, “A blessing on the one who seizes [the Babylonian’s] children and smashes them against the rock!” (Ps. 137:9).

As helpful as it may be to express those feelings to God, and as comforting as it is to know that God hears our cries against those we think of as enemies, I would argue that part of the role the imprecatory psalms play is to remind us that in this moment, there may be people at the margins praying those kinds of prayers against us. When we are hurt, misused, and in places of weakness, we rightly hear these psalms as identifying with our pain. However, when we find ourselves in positions of power, can we hear these prayers as the prayers of others, perhaps against us?

• Who are those who are looking to us for sympathy, but find none?
• Who are those who cry to us for comfort, but can’t find any?
• Who are those who shout for help in their hunger and thirst, only to receive from us contaminated food and vinegar to drink?

When they came to a place called Golgotha, which means Skull Place, they gave Jesus wine mixed with vinegar to drink. But after tasting it, he didn’t want to drink it (Matthew 27:33-34).

God and the Pandemic: What I Am Learning from N.T. Wright about Faith and the Coronavirus

Yesterday, I posted on what I was learning from Walter Brueggemann's book on the current pandemic. N.T. Wright came out with a book right around the same time. Besides focusing on the New Testament, which is his field of expertise, Wright's book also attempts to step back and take a broader theological view of the moment. Like everything Wright does, it was worth the time to read and reflect on.

Three Things I Learned from N.T. Wright in God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and Its Aftermath (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2020).

(1) The Summons to Repentance Comes Through Jesus not Events

Early on, after the virus had begun to have a global impact, I saw a number of Christian writers and pastors attempting to fit the pandemic into some kind of prophetic framework or end times strategy. It is not usual for people to try to find meaning or purpose (or even someone to blame) for the pain and upheaval the virus has caused by interpreting it through the lens of the plagues upon Pharaoh or the prophetic punishments connected to exile upon Israel. Although this might be a natural response, Wright is not sure this approach is theologically warranted or pastorally helpful.

As Wright correctly (I believe) and helpfully points out, for Christians, the ultimate and fullest revelation of God’s will and nature is the person of Jesus. For Wright, no further revelation is necessary to (a) reveal God’s self nor to (b) call us to repentance and transformation. Wright puts it this way, “Of course, again, God can do whatever God wants. If he wants to draw things to people’s attention in a special way, that is up to him… But this is not the norm. It is not what we should expect… From now on, the summons to repentance, and the announcement of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven, come not through wars, earthquakes, famines or plagues… They come through Jesus. Through the story of Jesus himself, told, preached, announced; through the people of Jesus, the people in whose lives Jesus himself lives by his Spirit; through the strange work of Jesus even in parts of the world where his name is not recognized. If God wants to alert us to things that are wrong in the way we have been running the world – and that seems to me highly likely – they will come to us Jesus-shaped” (p. 22-23).

(2) Lament and Suffering Includes a Call to Work

Wright, like Brueggemann, makes space for groaning as part of the coming of the new creation. Interestingly, Romans 8 is an important place of reflection for both of them. Wright, however, is concerned that Christians not interpret Romans 8:28 (“…in all things God works together for the good…”) as advocating Christians live into some form of Stoic resignation. He is fearful that if we over interpret the pandemic as from the hand of God or as part of a cosmic divine plan that is headed toward ultimate good, that although we may groan and suffer, we will not allow those labor pains to lead toward action. In other words, for Wright it is problematic to say or believe that God created the pandemic crisis in order that some good might occur. However, if we look to God and respond to the call to work toward his purposes, even out of this horrible and destructive pandemic, God might bring about things that are good and redemptive.

There is, therefore, something divine about those who have worked (and are still working) diligently to aid the sick, discover a cure, and bring aid to those in need. Romans 8:28 is not a promise that everything will simply work out in the end without us. It is, however, a promise that those who live into vocations or callings in line with God’s purposes are assured that God will be at work with them, and in them, bringing about his new creation purposes.

(3) Live Wisely and Participate (Humbly) with Those Who Mourn

As I have shared elsewhere, one of my favorite excerpts from Wright’s book is a quote he uses from a letter of Martin Luther’s when he too was faced with leading people through a plague or pandemic five centuries ago. This quote has been a great help for me as we have tried to weight all of the different decisions about gathering or not gathering in person as a church. Although Luther thinks God’s hand may be at work in the disease, he advocates for Christians to live practically and faithfully. Luther writes:

With God’s permission the enemy has sent poison and deadly dung among us, and so I will pray to God that he may be gracious and preserve us. Then I will fumigate to purify the air, give and take medicine, and avoid places and persons where I am not needed in order that I may not abuse myself and that through me others may not be infected and inflamed with the result that I become the cause of their death through my negligence. If God wishes to take me, he will be able to find me. At least I have done what he gave me to do and am responsible neither for my own death nor for the death of others. But if my neighbour needs me, I shall avoid neither person nor place but feel free to visit and help him (p. 63).

This moment has not exempted the church from the sufferings of our neighbors around us. If anything, it should have given us a moment to recognize our common human fragility. Unfortunately, the church has not always embodied that humility or that care for neighbor. Both Wright and Brueggemann reflect on Israel and Judah’s exile in the light of the current moment. For both, these months of exile-ish living have reminded us that the church building and the opportunity to gather is not unessential to our Christian journeys. When we are not able to gather there is a great deal that is lost and worth grieving in its absence. However, these months have also taught us that God’s people are much more than a building and that we are tied to Christ and to one another in ways that can endure times of separation.

Since both great scholars lean so heavily on Romans 8, perhaps it is important to note that Paul’s great chapter ends with the affirmation that nothing in all creation - not life, not death, and not pandemics - can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Like most, I am hopeful that in a few months the major burdens and pains of this pandemic will be behind us. However, I am also certain that this moment has not separated us from the love of God, nor hopefully from the love of one another. And I am prayerfully hopeful that these months have not just been moments of pain-filled groans but, as we seek God's purposes, they have also served as birth-pangs of the newness that God desires to bring about through his people.

Dispatching Us to Otherwise: What I Am Learning from Walter Brueggemann About Faithfulness in a Pandemic

I recently heard a church leadership expert describe pastoring during the last nine months of the pandemic this way: imagine you signed up to run in a race and just as you approached what you thought was the finish line you saw all the competitors jumping into a lake and swimming to the other side. In that shocking moment, you realized you had inadvertently signed up not for a standard 10K, but for a biathlon instead. You decide to take a risk and jump in the water and start swimming. Having barely made it to the other side, you now see everyone jumping on bicycles. In that moment you realize you signed up not for a biathlon, but a triathlon, and although you succeeded in not drowning during leg two, you don’t own a bike…

I think the point of the story is that, in any area of leadership, no one signed up for the challenges of the last several months. Most of what we have had to take on we were ill prepared for. We have faked our way through the first aspects of change, but as we look to the future, we not only feel ill prepared for what lays ahead, but we very well may also be desperately unequipped.

Early on, two of my favorite theological voices helped me begin to navigate these turbulent times. Leave it to Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright to not only have well-formed thoughts about Christian life during a pandemic, but to also be able to get them down on paper and out in book form quickly enough to be helpful in the moment. Both books have been encouraging for me in a number of ways. Today, I thought I’d reflect on three things I learned from Brueggemann’s book on the pandemic, and then add the three things I learned from N.T. Wright tomorrow.

Three Things I Learned from Walter Brueggemann, in Virus as a Summons to Faith Biblical: Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief, and Anxiety (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020).

(1) There is no Quid Pro Quo with God

As is typical of Brueggemann’s writing, even his book on facing a pandemic is really an analysis of Hebrew Scripture and its understanding of the nature of God. One area where Brueggemann has helped me to read the Old Testament well is to pay attention to the freedom of God narrated in its pages. The Jewish people understand their relationship to God to be very genuine and rooted in mutual freedom. There is never any sense – for Brueggemann – that humans are simply acting out a script pre-written by God. In fact, quite often the decisions humans make - both for good and for evil - seem to be surprising or even shocking to the divine. In the text, God must always respond to the free will and decisions of his human creatures. However, it is also the case that God is free. God’s actions or reactions cannot be determined by human words or deeds. There is no formula of petition, prayer, and/or behavior that can get God to give good gifts or to refrain from judgment. Even when people – like the Ninevites in the Jonah story – repent, they do so with a question, “Who knows what God will do?” Their repentance does not ensure that God must turn from his judgment and respond with mercy. God is not a cosmic vending machine of either blessings or curses. Yahweh cannot be controlled. Yahweh is mysterious and free.

There is, however, one constant with God. God is love. The people can trust in God’s compassion.

For Brueggemann, this means that there is no easy formula for equating the COVID pandemic with judgment for sin. (And we preacher-types should be very cautious before naming or proclaiming it as such). The outbreak of this deadly virus may have some relationship to divine justice, but it may not. Likewise, there is no formula for repentance, prayer, or justice that will cause the pandemic to go away. All of those questions are shrouded in a mystery that we should be careful to believe we know or can say too much about. We can, nevertheless, trust in God’s compassion.

(2) A Pandemic (Like All Crises) Opens the Possibility to Imagine New Relationships – Especially to Neighbors

In the early days of the pandemic, it was interesting to see how much the changes that were taking place revealed our deep connectedness. We realized quickly how dependent we are on farmers, teachers, nurses, grocers, delivery drivers, and toilet-paper makers. As the pandemic has gone on, it has also put a spotlight on our lingering social inequities. The exposing of those inequities has forced new – and difficult – conversations about justice reform, resources for the needy, inequity in health care, and the disproportionate needs of students and their families.

Brueggemann believes that this historical moment, like the moments of exile in Israel and Judah’s history, can awaken the prophetic imagination for God’s newness. As he writes, “Prophetic imagination is the anticipation of new social possibility that is available from the intention of the God of the prophets. What is now required of us is not simply fantasy but moral imagination to express historical possibility that is congruent with God’s hope for neighborliness. That moral imagination is rooted in promise; at the same time, it is grounded in the realities of dollars, laws, natural resources, and social conditions. The prophetic task is to submit our awareness of dollars, laws, natural resources, and social conditions to the hopes of the creator God” (p. 58).

My favorite part of the book is the way Brueggemann ends each chapter with one of his beautiful and thoughtful prayers. (His written prayers are works of theological art). In the last lines of a prayer entitled At the Ends of a New Normal, Brueggemann prays:

We want to return to the old normal that yield (for some) safety and happiness,

            But you dispatch us to otherwise.

Your new normal for us requires some adjustment by us.

            And adjust we will. We will live and trust and share differently.

“All things new” is a huge stretch for us.

But we know it is your good gift to us; with wistfulness, we receive it

            We embrace it, and

            We give thanks to you. Amen (p. 60).

(3) The Groans of Birth-Pangs are the Path to New Creation

For many reasons, I have become quite obsessed with the idea of the new creation in Scripture. I am in the midst of writing a paper for a theology conference on the significance of the biblical vision of the new creation. (It is particularly important to Paul’s understanding of the gospel). As Brueggemann reminds readers, Paul’s articulation of the new creation in Romans 8 does not think of its emergence as an easy, convenient gift, or as the natural end or assumed progress after the current time. Rather, the coming of the new creation is mysterious and it comes only through a painful process of disconnection from the old creation; a process similar to the groans and pains associated with childbirth.

Brueggemann writes, “From God’s side, I suppose, new creation will come as God chooses. But the coming of new creation is with an ethical passion that requires us to consider the groan of newness from a human side. The truth of newness from the human side is that God’s gift comes at huge cost, the cost of acknowledging that old creation has failed and is dysfunctional, the awareness that new creation requires disciplined, intentional reception" (p. 65).

Again, Brueggemann would never say the pandemic happened so that God could bring about something new. That would be to assume too much knowledge about God and God’s ways. It would also trivialize the genuine suffering that people are going through and likely do damage to the compassionate love at the center of God’s character. However, perhaps we can receive these months as a moment to lean on God’s compassion, imagine new ways of living in love toward our neighbors, and lean into the painful – but necessary – changes that must take place for the new creation to be birthed in our midst.

Good stuff. Tomorrow a word from Tom Wright.

Ash Wednesday, Lent, and the Counter-Formation We Need

In the Scripture 40 is a number that represents an extended period of time that is long enough and challenging enough that it brings transformation. The forty days of rain in the Noah story brought a renewal to the earth. The forty years in the wilderness did not just get Israel out of Egypt, but were also used by God to get the ways of Egypt out of them. Moses met with God for forty days on Mt Sinai and received the new life offered through the Torah. Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness not only reliving Israel's wanderings (now in faithfulness), but it was there that the Lord resisted the temptation to define the Kingdom through full stomachs, signs and wonders, or in conquest.

These forty days of Lent, beginning today on Ash Wednesday, are meant to be for Christians an annual time of concentrated counter-formation. In Lent we fast in order to break up the routines that are constantly shaping us. It is a time when we resist the ways we are being patterned, habited, and taught what to love (the ways we are fed) by various practices and "cultural liturgies," and intentionally give ourselves to the counter-formation of the cross and the purposes of God revealed in its shadow.

I always find Lent to be important, but for many reasons, this year seems especially personal and important to me. I don't know if it's my recent journey through loss and grief or the cultural tensions and practices that are so prevalent during an election season, but there are several "counter practices" we experience in Lent that seem especially timely this time around.

Lent (Ash Wednesday in particular) reminds us that we are going to die. One of the texts for this first Sunday of Lent is Genesis 2-3 where the serpent whispers to Eve, "You won't die!" (3:4). It is fascinating that in response to the serpentine lie, we will repeated remind the faithful today in words and in the symbol of ash, "Hey, don't listen to the serpent. You are dust and ash. You are going to die."

Being reminded of our mortality is an important counter-practice for people formed in a culture that idolizes youthfulness and that fights desperately against aging and maturing. But it is also an important counter-practice for people formed in a culture of rugged individualism. We need to be reminded of our dependence. Walking through the recent loss of my dad not only forced me to come to grips with his mortality, but with my own. One of the hardest - and also most beautiful - things to witness was my father becoming so dependent in the last few weeks of his life. He was resistant at first, but eventually he gave in to his need for the care of my mother, his family, his care-takers, and the breath of his Creator.

We live in a time of rugged individualism and the desire to be increasingly independent, self-made, and isolated from others. We need someone to remind us today, "You will die. You are dependent on the life and goodness of others. You do not control your days. Your breath is gift from God."

Lent invites us to confess our sin. Again, the Genesis text for this first week is about sin, rebellion, and turning away from God's purposes. However, it is also about blame. Adam blames Eve and God. Eve blames the serpent. No one confesses. Everyone points the finger.

We live in a time when confession and admitting our sins is not very popular. There is a famous line from the old novel and movie Love Story: "Love means never having to say you're sorry." I'm not sure about that. However, I am sure that much of our cultural liturgies today believe that, "Power means never having to say you're sorry." The counter-liturgy of Lent invites God's people to stand beneath the shadow of the cross again and again and confess our sins of commission and omission.

I am continually struck by an inversion that happens in the Old Testament prophets. The early sections of the OT seem to imagine that shalom will happen only when our enemies are defeated and "our" side is vindicated. In the Noah story, for example, the righteous float in safety while the wicked drown. By the time of the prophets there is a new imagination. For the prophets, the problem is not so much "those people" out there, but rather the lack of faithfulness "in here." The Jonah story, for example, inverts our imaginations. In Jonah, the wicked are redeemed when the righteous submit themselves to going into the depths.

In a time filled with the language and imagination of "us v. them" we need practices that invite us to see the shadows of sin in us.

Lent breaks the scapegoating cycle. The work of a sociologist/theologian named Rene Girard has helped us to see that the cross reveals our tendency to participate in practices of scapegoating. For Girard, when our rivalries, fears, tensions, and sense of dissatisfactions get intense enough, it helps to get rid of those feelings of helplessness and anger by taking it out on someone else. The most obvious examples from the last century are the Nazi's scapegoating of Jews, the Turks scapegoating of Armenians, the Hutu's scapegoating of Tutsis, etc. Again, for Girard, this scapegoating process goes on and on from culture to culture at various levels of violence and exclusion.

The healing and transformative mystery, for Girard, of the cross of Jesus is that, in this case, the one who is scapegoated - cast out, excluded, misused, and crucified - turns out to be the innocent one. The scapegoat is without sin, those doing the scapegoating are revealed as guilty. It is this revelation that turns the tables on the scapegoating process and should break the cycle of memetic violence.

Again, this is a time where tensions and fears seem to be running incredibly high. It is easy for us to turn and pour out those tensions on various scapegoats. "If we just got rid of ______," we think, tweet, post, and proclaim, "then everything would be okay." (You can fill in the blank).

Lent invites us to be very wary of our anger and our tendency to focus that seeming righteous indignation on particular persons, peoples, and groups. There are certainly things in the world worth getting upset about. However, Lent invites us to step back and be cautious of how our anger gets lived out in cycles of retribution. It also invites us to allow the cruciformed love of Jesus, that takes in all sin, wrath, and violence, help us find constructive and life-giving ways to deal with our hurts, frustrations, and anger.

There are certainly many other ways Lent is trying to counter-form us to be reflections of Christ and ambassadors of reconciliation. But these three feel especially important to me today on this Ash Wednesday.

The 3 Challenges (Besides Keeping Their Job) Every Pastor Faces in the Next 9 Months

With the event previously known as the Iowa Caucus having taken place this last week, the US presidential election season is officially upon us. I think this is my fifth such cycle to live through as a lead pastor, and each time I am just happy to still have my job - and the majority of the congregation still speaking to one another - at the end of it.

As we get started on this nine month gauntlet of congregational danger, I decided to reflect on three reasons this is such a potentially challenging time for pastors. Here they are:

First, the church is political. Some will survive the next few months by assuming that the church is "spiritual" and not political. In fact, many lay-people will encourage pastors to stick to the spiritual and ignore the political. This view, that the spiritual and the political can be bifurcated from one another, has many similarities to the Gnostic heresy that posed such problems for the early church. Gnosticism essentially taught that the spirit (or soul) and not the body mattered. The early church opposed this view passionately. It is part of the reason the birth and death of Christ, as well as the resurrection of the body, were included in the creeds. The gospel is not a set of instructions about how to transcend the physical, it is the proclamation that God became flesh in order to redeem every aspect of the material created world, including its systems and structures. Jesus was not crucified for being a misunderstood spirit guide, he was killed for offering a politic (a "kingdom" way of living with both the neighbor and the enemy) that ran counter to the principalities and powers.

The weekly proclamation of the church that "Christ is Lord" is profoundly political (subversively so). Therefore, the first challenge of the next nine months is that the church can't help being political in its preaching. It just happens to embody a politic that the world cannot comprehend, nor embody, on its own terms. Which leads to the second problem. 

Second, the church is prophetic. Because the church embodies a largely foreign politic, as it enters the world it finds that there are places it fits and places where it doesn't. Especially in America's two-party system, it finds things in both parties to celebrate and affirm and also things it must prophetically reject. The church cares for the life of the unborn, but it also cares for peacemaking and reconciliation with enemies. The church is called to protect the vulnerable, but also called to welcome the stranger.

I find this to be where much of the danger lies for pastors. Eventually, people must cast a vote one direction or another. And they will always do so imperfectly. Christians cast votes knowing that they have had to choose some core faith values and likely overlook other significant kingdom values in the process. For this reason, personally, I never fault a believer for choosing to vote one direction or the other.

However, the church must not shy away from being willing to speak prophetically to even those parties or candidates it supports. I think it is very dangerous when any critique of one side or any affirmation of another side is heard as some kind of betrayal and lashed out against. Nathan has to be willing to say, even to the divinely anointed David, "You are the man!" or God's people fail to be uniquely holy. Blindly justifying immoral behavior or overlooking unjust policies of any leader can become a kind of idolatry. The church can and should be gracious. Judgment begins with the house of God, but its prophetic voice does not stop at the boundaries of the church property.

Third, the church is transformational and contextual. Perhaps the biggest challenge is not the tensions that the next nine months of politics creates, but the way it shifts much of our energy and focus away from our immediate context and those in need within it. The political world today has become a form of "reality" television. Once news programs started selling advertising and having 24-hour broadcasts, the focus became less on informing the public and more on keeping our attention. Unfortunately, the best way to keep our attention is to scare us and keep us angry.

Personally, I have felt convicted this week at the amount of time and energy the national political drama has taken up in my mind and spirit. It is not that the decisions before the public are unimportant. Public policy and the symbolic representation of our collective leadership do have profound effects on our life together. However, the vast majority of the transformational work of the church in the Spirit will be done within the local context where God has planted it. I must confess I know more right now about the machinations of the Senate trial than I know about my neighbors. That is not healthy for me or for the church's mission.

Voting in November is very important and it has important repercussions. However, casting a vote for the right candidate is not even a fraction of the church's political and transformational mission in the world. And so we must constantly work to keep it within a divine perspective.

Blessings on my fellow sisters and brothers in Christian pulpits over the next nine months. Preach the kingdom, be graciously prophetic, and seek the welfare of the broken at your gates.

The Cold, Wet Nose of Grace - Reflections After Reading The Grace of Dogs: A Boy, A Black Lab, and a Father's Search for the Canine Soul by Andrew Root

Toto, our eleven-year-old black miniature schnauzer, greets me every afternoon or evening when I get home. When she hears the door to the garage open, she comes tearing through the house and cries and jumps up and down until I pick her up and let her lick my face repeatedly in a regular routine that is equal parts delightful and disgusting. She will then want to play for a few minutes. We either play a strange game of tag - which I find hysterical because she has this funny way of putting her head down and her rear-end up (with her tail wagging madly) waiting for me to run at her – or we play an even stranger game in which she thinks my hand has become a mouse that hides in the cracks of the sofa, moves underneath a blanket, or sneaks up on her from behind. The whole time we are playing I find myself laughing and muttering, “You are such a weird dog… But you’re cute.”

Toto loves four things (not counting food): comfort, people, taking long walks, and riding with me in the car. She is a bit of a diva and likes to sit on soft blankets and fluffy pillows. But she mainly likes to sit beside someone. She wants to touch and be touched. She sleeps at the foot of our bed and prefers it if at least one of our feet is touching her during the night.

I believe she is the eleventh dog I’ve had in my life. Because of her age, we are already making contingency plans for number twelve. I’ve deeply loved ten of the eleven (one was a bit of a scoundrel). Three of the eleven have been especially loved: Toto, Tinkerbell (a white schnauzer who for ten years was the salt to Toto’s pepper), and a big black lab/shepherd mix named Maddie (who was like having a big, furry, third parent in the house when the kids were little).

Andrew Root has quickly become one of my favorite authors on spiritual formation. (If you have not read Faith Formation in a Secular Age, stop reading right now, order the book, and then come back). Because I love his writing and dogs, his little book The Grace of Dogs: A Boy, a Black Lab, and a Father’s Search for the Canine Soul caught my attention. If you are a dog-person it is a delightful and fascinating exploration of the history and uniqueness of domestic dogs and our deep connection to them. But even if you are not a dog-lover, there is much to glean from Root’s search for what is the essence of spirituality and what we learn from dogs (and their connection to us) that might teach us how to connect more deeply with God and with one another.

When the Root family’s big black Labrador, Kirby, had to be put to sleep because of cancer, their young son Owen not only wept but, after many tears, he left the room, “walked out to the lobby and returned with a dog treat and a paper cup he’d filled with water. Silently and purposefully, he knelt before Kirby’s body, placed the tiny dog bone on Kirby’s back, and, dipping his finger in the water, reverently made the sign of the cross on Kirby’s forehead. Then he lifted his hands to heaven like a priest at the altar, looked up, and whispered, ‘I love you, Kirby. Good-bye’” (p. 11). What Andrew couldn’t shake from that moment was not just the grief Owen and the whole family felt, but the clear spiritual connection Owen and the family had made with Kirby. A connection that Owen instinctively responded to by administering the last rites on his friend.

It caused Andrew to wonder: “Could there be something unique, maybe even intentional and holy, about dogs and their place in our lives? And if so, what soulful gifts could be ours to receive in the relationship, and what can we give? Could our connection with a dog in some way endure even into eternity?” (p. 23).

At the center of the book is a theory about human spirituality articulated by the well-known sociologist Robert Bellah shortly before he passed away. Bellah argued that humans encounter our spiritual or relational awareness with others through face-to-face contact. We need to see the other and be seen by them. In these personal connections three things happen, says Bellah, that make them spiritual in nature: Empathy, Bonding, and Play.

• Empathyis the deep experience of feeling the other, such as tearing up when someone else cries or smiling when another person laughs. You actually feel, at some level, what he or she is feeling.
• This leads to bonding, in which we feel our lives actually tethered together. Our most basic experience of bonding concerns a parent to a child, and shared experiences such as rituals, trauma, and other circumstances that write our lives together bond us to others.
• Play is the energy that moves us near to one another. When we take a break from the demands of everyday life, we enter a space in which we can see each other anew. For a mother with her child, playing is both the way into, and the witness of, a shared bond(p. 60-61).

It is in the three ways, argues Root, that we experience such unique emotional and spiritual relationship to dogs.

Like no other animal, dogs seem to be uniquely wired to read human facial expressions. In multiple experiments on various animals – including apes and dolphins – only dogs had the ability to respond to facial expressions. So, when your dog seems to be able to know when you are happy or sad, it is likely because they are reading what your face is telling them. “Psychologist and dog theorist Alexandra Horowitz explains the difference this way: ‘Dogs look at our eyes. If this behavior is unsurprising, it is because it is so human: we look. Dogs look, too. Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance’” (p. 47). In a very unusual way, our dogs read our emotions and express empathy toward us.

Dogs also desire, in ways unique from other species, to bond with humans.  “Dogs, like many other mammals, become attached to one another, forming packs. Dogs are even known to make friends with cats, turtles, and birds. Yet what their hearts long for most is to connect with people. Scientist Vilmos Csanyi states, ‘With well-designed experiments we can even show that puppies are attracted more powerfully to humans than to their own species’” (p. 49). If a dog is placed in a kennel (like in a pound) with other dogs, it will take them several days to bond with the other dogs that are present. But it will only take a few hours for that dog, when adopted, to bond with their new owners.

But for Root, one of the best things about dogs is that they want to play. When we had Maddie, she loved to play tug-of-war games with me. She had a rope with knots on both ends and she would bring it to me and drop it on my lap. That was the cue we were to start playing. She was so big and strong that she could have won the game at any minute. But it was clear as we played that she did not want to win. She wanted the game to just go on and on. When she did win and get the rope away from me, she would immediately bring it back wanting more. The kids were little then. I would often tackle them and start tickling them. Maddie instinctively knew it was play time and she would join in the tickling by licking the kids’ faces wildly - which would only make them scream and laugh all the more.

Root argues that playing together is central for our spiritual nature as humans. “The play of kindness and bonding can take us out of ourselves and actually attune us to the transcendent… If you see the possibilities here, you’ll understand why the play of kindness and mutual cooperation – with each other and with our beloved dogs – can be seen as a kind of spiritual workshop. It excavates and shapes our soul to rise higher, to experience deeper, and to receive more from the God in whom, as Paul said, we live and move and have our being’’ (p. 95-96).

There are several fascinating experiments and studies that Root describes in the book. But my favorite story about the transformative and even transcendent nature of dogs is told by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In a three-page biographical essay on dogs, Levinas recounts an experience he had as a German prisoner-of war during World War II. While in captivity, Levinas’ German captors systematically stripped him and the other prisoners of their humanity. Each day the guards would march their captors from prison to a worksite at gunpoint, while the townspeople looked down on them and jeered as though they were simply disposable objects and not people. Root picks up the story…

One day, however, on their march back to prison, a dog ran out from the woods and bounded up to the prisoners. His tail wagging happily, the dog jumped up to lick their faces, bringing into their gray world a blur of energy, color, and affection. Though the dog had never seen the men before, it seemed to recognize them, Levinas said. Even better, the dog seemed convinced that these broken, forlorn captives were amazing people.

For two weeks, after their long hours of dehumanization, the same dog appeared in their midst with his happy greetings. To the prisoners, Levinas recalled, the experience felt like drops of rain on a dry, dusty land. “For him,” Levinas wrote of the dog, “there was no doubt that we were men.” The dog’s joy was a kind of defibrillator to their souls, reawakening them to their true worth.

In his essay, Levinas points out that the dog had no such reaction to a tree, and a very different response to a squirrel. Yet when it saw a human being, the dog knew just what to do. It celebrated what the guards and townspeople refused to acknowledge: the lowly prisoners were beautiful human beings. The men responded, Levinas recalled, by giving their visitor a name: Bobby. Reflecting on the events later, Levinas saw the naming as bearing witness to the shared bond between the dog and the prisoners.

After two weeks, Bobby disappeared, never to return, but Levinas said the dog’s sacred work and witness remained, and the prisoners spoke of it often. They knew they were persons of worth and beauty now, and no misery could take that truth away (p. 118-119).

As Root takes in the significance of this event, he writes, “In our day, a dog can speak loudly against a culture that defines our worth and value by what we produce and consume, and that differentiates between people as more or less valuable based on the color of their skin, or on their education or income. Dogs don’t. To a dog, there is no difference between a person gifted enough to create a Fortune 500 company and someone whose hair is gone from chemotherapy or who is confined to a wheelchair. Human beings, these righteous dogs proclaim, are beautiful. Period” (p. 120-121).

I’m headed home in a few minutes from the office. As I pull in the driveway, I know that a little black schnauzer will be laying on the back of the couch (where she’s not supposed to sit), looking out the window, waiting for my car to pull in. When she recognizes either the sight of sound of my car, she will sprint to the back door and welcome me as though I am the most important person in the world. For Root, in that unconditional welcome there is a reflection of God’s grace that we should acknowledge as good, beautiful, and righteous.

I will often tell church greeters that their job is to stand at the door of the church and lick on people as though they are Labrador retrievers. I used to think I was making a joke. But after reading Root’s book, it might not be a bad model to follow.

For Christmas, my daughter bought me a shirt that says, “Be the person your dog thinks you are.” Perhaps, if we could learn to look at each other face-to-face with the empathy, bonding, and playfulness of dog-like grace, we might become the people God thinks we are.

The Challenge of the Americanist Heresy - Reflections After Reading Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective by Peter Leithart

Twenty-five years ago, I heard Walter Brueggemann say that he believes the Scripture tells one story, it just repeats that story over
and over again. The singular biblical story is this: God is calling a people out from the world to live in relationship to him and be a reflection of his nature and character in the world (to be the imago Dei), the problem is that they also live in an “Empire” which is trying to form and mark them in its own image. According to Brueggemann, empires can go by a lot of different names (Egypt, Canaan, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Rome, etc...) but they always embody an idolatrous counter-story to the reign of God and the eternal kingdom he invites the faithful to enter.

I have shared this idea regarding the kingdom v. empire often in sermons and lectures. I think most Christians would agree that this is a very important theme in the bible. The question that is difficult to deal with in our context is the next logical one: is America an empire in the biblical sense? And if it is, what kind of empire is it? Is it a good one or a bad one? Is it the kind of empire that helps people live as reflections of the Lamb or is it a beast that wants to mark us in its image?

Peter Leithart is my new jam. I recently finished reading his book Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective. In it, Leithart does an amazing job of surveying the theme of empires in the Scripture and thinking about their purpose. Some empires in the bible are used by God and others are judged by the Lord (most are both). Some empires operate in ways that God honors and blesses, while others are beasts that are destined for destruction. God’s people encounter some empires (namely Babylon) that are not beastly and oppressive, but they are alluring and seductive “whores” slowly absorbing the faithful into their life and values. All empires are the children of Babel and operate in ways similar to the Genesis 11 city that caused the nations to fracture. All empires, like Babel, are tempted to make for themselves a great name by self-sufficiently building a tower to supposed transcendence. Every empire is bluffed into believing (and thus convincing their people to also believe) that they are eternal.

Again, the question is, where does America fit among these descriptions of empires? In this book, Leithart argues that, although the United States is one of history’s great nations, our unique history, success and global impact have seduced us into believing we are something more – God’s New Israel, the new order of the ages, the last best hope for humankind, a redeemer nation. The problem for Leithart is not patriotism or a love for America by its citizens, but a placing in the nation a hope reserved only for the kingdom of God. When the two (the nation and the kingdom) get confused or blended, as they often do, Leithart believes Christians have moved from faithfulness to the gospel to a form of heresy he calls “Americanism.” This is a problem the church must take seriously, and one it must call people to leave behind. As Leithart writes,

Against this American mythology, I contend that “American faith,” though unthinkable without the heritage of Christendom, represents a heretical departure from the political heritage of the church. American Christians need to assess our past accurately if we are going to act faithfully in the present. Until American churches actually function as outposts of Jesus’ heavenly empire rather than as cheerleaders for America – until the churches produce martyrs rather than patriots – the political witness of Christians will continue to be diluted and co-opted. xi

There is so much to wrestle with in Leithart’s book. But here are three reflections:

First, God has given an important role to authorities (like nations and empires) and has given important roles to his people living within those principalities and powers.

Authority is ordained by God. It is good that children have parents, churches have pastors, students have teachers, cities have mayors, states have governors, and nations have leaders. Order is a good thing. Chaos (tohuand bohu) is not the way things are supposed to be.

But I would argue that, although authority and order itself is ordained by God, not all authorities and keepers of order have been chosen by God or act in ways consistent with the way God intends those placed in such positions should act. (See my blog on how to read Romans 13 Blog). I believe that, from a biblical perspective, empires or nations (and those placed in any position of authority) are to act in ways that bring life, security, blessing, nurture, protection, and freedoms to those under their care. Principalities and powers act most like the God who has granted to them dominion when they lead in the servant-hearted way modeled by Jesus. God raises up empires and nations to serve, not to be served, and to orient their existence for the well-being of as many as possible.

In this sense there is much in American history and even in the American imagination worth honoring and venerating. I do think it is in this sense of proper acting authority that we can rightly think of America as a “Christian nation.” In its commitment to the rights, freedoms, and dignity of individuals it operates in ways that God wants authorities to act. And it is in these aspects of America that we rightly recognize (and honor) the fingerprints of the Christian faith in its founding.

And I agree with Leithart that Christian people should be encouraged to serve in all kinds of roles of leadership within and for the nation. He writes, “Yahweh scattered citizens of His empire among the nations for a reason, not just to teach Israel a lesson but to begin forming a martyr-people whose faithful resistance would remake Gentile empire” (p. 22). In the words of Jeremiah, God’s people should “work for the welfare of Babylon.”

Because I speak so often about the ways I am convinced the gospel – and the cross in particular – invite disciples of Jesus to live non-violently, I am frequently asked if I think Christians can or should serve in the military, in the police force, or in government roles that command both. My answer is always, “Yes… but prayerfully and carefully.” I have nothing but the utmost respect for those who willingly give their lives to protect the vulnerable and oppressed. As a professor of mine used to say, there was something godly happening when the fences of concentration camps were taken down and the allied forces released those suffering and dying from such evil oppression. There is something deeply divine when the onslaught of evil is checked and subdued by properly acting authority.

Just last week a military chaplain asked me what kind of prayer he could pray with troops as they prepared for battle. I suggested that he might pray something like the following prayer: “Almighty God, we lament our inability to make peace without making war. We pray today that you would guide us as we attempt to re-establish peace. We not only pray for our physical protection but also that you would protect us from abusing the incredible power you have placed in our hands. We pray that you would help us limit the destruction to what is necessary for the goal of peace and that whatever we are called to do today or in the future brings us closer to a permanent peace and does not continue the cycles of violence that have plagued the world for too long. Amen.”

The chaplain thanked me and thought that was a very Christian way to pray. However, he wasn’t sure he could use it, because he was very uncertain about how that prayer would be received. Which leads to my next reflection…

It is very difficult to break free from the “Americanist heresy.” It is woven deeply into fiber of who we are as a nation. (It is particularly woven deep into we evangelical types).

My sense is the reason my new chaplain friend really liked but wasn’t sure he could use my suggested prayer was because it makes peace and not triumph the goal. My suggested prayer also raises subtle questions about the redemptive nature of violence, and it raises the possibility that God’s purposes and our national purposes may not always be aligned. For Leithart, most of us aren’t heretics because we are bad people. We have come by our Americanist heresy quite naturally. Here’s how Leithart describes it,

[The phrase God’s American Israel] was a fundamental paradigm to help early American settlers understand their role in God’s history. The Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony believed that God had providentially guided them to the new land and that He had great intentions for them. The parallels with Israel’s history were too numerous and too precise to be accidental. They had faced persecution and oppression of various sorts in Europe, now characterized as an old Egypt. The Lord had led them across a dangerous and deadly sea… America was an uninhabited and uncivilized wasteland, the desert of Israel’s testing… Alternatively, the new world was new Canaan, not a land of cities and cultivated vineyards, but a raw natural world that lay before the colonists for their conquest and dominion. Of course, this placed the Indians in the unfortunate and unenviable position of latter-day Canaanites… The American colonists were a chosen people who had relived the history of God’s earlier chosen people. (p. 67)

This innate sense of American divine destiny also leads to a unique kind of Messianic complex in which American liberty is the hope for humankind. We believe that we are in some sense “saving” other nations if we are able to remake them in our image. “America is the already…the rest of the world is the not yet” (p. 75). In this way of thinking it is America (and not the church universal) that is the light to the nations.

With this belief woven deep within our bones it becomes very difficult to be objective (let alone prophetic) about how the nation sometimes operates. One of the most important but difficult chapters in the text is Leithart’s survey of many of the unjust actions America has committed in her history, and many of the ways we not only overlook but support some of the most beastly empires in the world (especially some who do commit atrocities against Christians) out of self-interest. The problem is not just that the nation has done and continues to do unjust things, it is that we have very little ability to name them as unjust and to repent of them. The Americanist heresy assures us that everything the nation does must be right because we are God’s nation. Through this lens, no matter how we act, we are always the global good guy. This is very problematic, and it keeps us from understanding why other nations often view us not as redeemers, but as oppressors. “Americanism distorts our self-image: If we see ourselves as God’s gift to the world, we will have a hard time acknowledging our blemishes” (p. 86).

The American church has to find practices that honor what is best about America when it acts in ways God desires authorities to act. But it must have practices that locate our primary identity and imagination within the kingdom of God.

Here is an especially troubling quote from Leithart, “…Americanism distorts even orthodox religious convictions because, in the absence of the metapolitics of Christendom, Americanism is the de facto political theology for most American Christians. American churches cannot critique and confront American power because promotion of Americanism is what American churches stand for. Individual Christians do not have the virtues necessary to function as citizens of God’s imperium because American churches have discipled them to function as citizens of the American imperium instead” (p. 111).

I find it hopeful these days that many in the Christian community are recognizing how deeply woven these two contrary forces are in many of our imaginations and in our practices of worship.

Again, as I speak and teach about these issues, I’m frequently asked about keeping the American flag in the sanctuary. My standard answer (especially to young pastors) is that having the flag in the sanctuary is not my favorite practice. But I would not remove it until the people know (a) how much you love them and (b) that you value many of the same virtues that flag represents for them. I saw a church recently that, rather than removing the American flag, displays prominently the flags of all the nationalities of the people who make up their church. I kind of like what that says. It proclaims that all of the nations are gathered today under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

But the practices go way beyond where to place flags or how the church celebrates and acknowledges various national holidays. It shows up in how we pray, the way we preach, the way we baptize, and the ways we gather around the Lord’s table. I often like to laugh about “we confusion.” The church has to constantly find ways to remember that the “we” that is gathered in Christian fellowship is not the nation but the holy, universal, and unified global church. However, remembering that takes lots of practice.

I had a church member ask me recently if I was trying to make people un-American. I responded with an emphatic "no." I love this nation. I pray that God will help it operate the way he desires nations to bring order in an often fragmented and violent world. I told him my goal was not to make him un-American but just a little less American and a lot more Christian.

Leithart says it a lot better than I can:

My main practical message is a simple one: Remember who you are, and to whom you belong. Remember that you belong to Jesus first and last; remember that the church, not America, is the body of Christ and the political hope of the future; remember that no matter how much it may have served the city of God, America is in itself part of the city of man; remember that the Eucharist is our sacrificial feast. It is good for Christians to be salted throughout our polity – in the White House and bureaucracies, in the military, in international institutions. But Christians in those positions are called to be salt. American churches have too long discipled Christians in Americanism, and that makes Christian involvement in the American polity far smoother than it ought to be. Churches must repent of our Americanism and begin to cultivate martyrs – believers who are martyrs in the original sense of “witness” and in the later sense of men and women ready to follow the Lamb all the way to an imperial cross. xiii

Amen.

The Tenuous Life of the Christian Scholar - Reflections After Reading Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism by David Gushee

Christian ethicist David Gushee has served this last year as the president of the American Academy of Religion. Although I have read several of his essays and articles over the years on a variety of social and ethical issues, I had not heard him speak before this year’s presidential address at the national meeting of the AAR. His address was a powerful lament on the issues of race related to the American evangelical tradition. The address can be found on YouTube at this link - AAR Gushee Address - and is well worth watching.

I recently finished his memoir Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism which narrates his journey from coming to Christ as a non-churched teenager through his current place in Christian academia. As the title implies, his journey has not been an easy one and it eventually led him out of the segment of the Christian faith that birthed him. The highlights of his journey are as follows:

• At fourteen he left the marginal Catholicism of his upbringing.
• In late high school he became a “born again” Christian at a conservative Baptist church in Virginia.
• In college at William and Mary he found his new faith colliding with the challenges of higher education.
• He entered Southern Baptist Seminary in the midst of a conservative take-over of the seminary that was purging it of what some saw as creeping liberalism.
• He then experienced the complete opposite side of the Christian tradition working on his PhD in Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.
• After working for a few years with Ron Sider at Evangelicals for Social Action he was offered a teaching position back at Southern Baptist Seminary. The conservative take-over within the SBC was still taking place. When faculty who believed and taught that women could and should be ordained for ministry were being removed from the seminary, David felt like he had no choice but to find a position elsewhere.
• He landed at Union University and had a successful decade or so of teaching there as the university grew under the leadership of David Dockery. However, during the George W. Bush presidency, when David started writing ethics pieces against the use of torture from a Christian perspective, the push back from politically conservative denominational leaders and university constituents turned a blessed tenure of teaching into a time of not just being held in suspicion but being attacked personally and professionally.
• In 2007 Gushee was offered a position at Mercer University where he still teaches, and where he has a great deal of academic freedom but where he has also found himself dismissed and exiled from the evangelical faith tradition that birthed and raised him.

Reading Gushee’s book made me thankful for being part of a Wesleyan tradition that avoids some of the challenges he has faced in his ministry and scholarship. However, there was a great deal in what he shares about the pain and tension faced by Christian scholars that resonated with some of the scars I’ve received in my own journey. At times I found myself in tears realizing that although I am still largely embraced by and encouraged by the tradition that birthed and raised me, not all of my wounds are fully healed. It also served as a reminder of the ever-present fear that security for most evangelical Christian scholars is tenuous at best and only one or two offenses or misunderstandings away from being taken away.

Here are a handful of reflections:

Many of my favorite Christian scholars had a very warm-hearted Christian conversion experience as a young person that – although they may now be critical of some of the methodologies they experienced – has shaped them permanently.

My mentor Richard Mouw loves to write about the “smell of sawdust” that still exists in his memory from the camp-meetings of his youth. Gushee’s conversion as a teenager reminds me a lot of my friend James K.A. Smith’s coming to faith in a conservative Pentecostal church through the influence of his girlfriend’s (now wife’s) family. Both Mouw and Smith are often critics of some of the theology and practices of the faith communities that led them to Christ, and both worship in ways now that are quite distant from those traditions, nevertheless, both also reflect graciously about the transformational personal experience with Jesus Christ that they have not been able to shake and continues to shape their scholarly work at a deep level.

Gushee writes about his own faith conversion this way… “Probably everybody has foundational, identity-forming experiences, moments that set the course of their life. This was the most pivotal of mine…There was a before. Then there was an after... When everything is reviewed, tested, and sifted, I still choose to believe that what I thought happened that night in the old Buick Skylark is what in fact happened: I came into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I was born again. If that is not what happened, I literally do not know who I am. That experience so shaped the “I” writing these words that “I” am impossible apart from it”(pp. 11-12).

Christian higher education is very, very difficult.

Gushee rightly observes, “Every evangelical Christian university faces an extraordinary challenge. It must create a campus culture, an intellectual life, and a faculty that can accomplish its religious goals while meeting all requirements of the contemporary higher education and governmental establishments. This means conducting college life in a way that simultaneously satisfies students, alumni, donors, churches, pastors, trustees, parents, faculty, accreditors, regulators, employers, and the local community in which the school is situated. The demands of these constituencies are so different that tensions and difficulties are inevitable”85-86.

For these reasons, I do not envy Christian university and seminary administrators. And it is also why, up to this point, I have resisted joining their ranks. God bless you all. I don’t know how you do it.

Being held in suspicion by the church (and by the people) you love is really, really painful.

Several years ago, I was talking with a very accomplished Methodist scholar who had been raised in the Church of the Nazarene. I asked them why, in the early days of their academic career they had chosen to leave and spend their life teaching in Methodist rather than Nazarene institutions. They answered, “I finally decided that it was easier to be perceived as a conservative in a liberal environment, than to be viewed as a liberal in a conservative one. Because, when people think you are a conservative in a liberal environment you only have to defend your mind – which is not all that difficult. But when people perceive that you may be a liberal in a conservative environment, you have to defend your heart – and that is nearly impossible to accomplish.”

I don’t like the labels “conservative” and “liberal” because they are so inaccurate, and because they are completely dependent upon where a person is standing at any given time. Nevertheless, that scholar’s point has resonated with me across the years. It is incredibly difficult to defend your heart with those who might hold you in suspicion.

It took me a while to understand this reality. There are many reasons why I have spent my ministry years in both the academy and the local church, but one positive by-product of being in local church ministry is that it regularly gives me the opportunity to reveal my heart. People know I am passionate about the church, about evangelism, and about spiritual formation. These days I get the benefit of very public ministry and a congregation that has my back. That is not the case for many of my colleagues in universities and seminaries. That was not always the case for me.

There was a moment early in my teaching career when I could see two things clearly. The first was that people who feel like they are defending, protecting, or conserving orthodoxy often become manipulative and destructive. When a person is afraid, principles often take priority over people. It is a deeply painful experience when people you love become the people you fear.

The second thing I discerned was it is very rare to find leaders who – when caught between those they love and agree with and those they fear and disagree with – will choose to stand with those they love. This made me angry when I was young. I am much more empathetic now to the challenges of those who are trying to lead any church related institution through the barrage of criticism and anger that often comes from multiple directions. I have much more empathy now for a Caiaphas who is willing to scapegoat one person for the sake of an institution. And I have much more compassion for a Peter who shrinks back in denial out of fear that they too might get crucified. I get it. And I have regretfully now been on both sides of it. This Gushee quote says it well, “There is hardly anything as disillusioning as being disillusioned by religious people, especially religious leaders, and being disillusioned by yourself as a faux religious leader, and wondering what any of this has to do with the God who created the universe and the Jesus to whom we all had supposedly pledged our lives”(p. 76).

Let me say, I have been with and worked alongside a handful of Christian scholars who, in my opinion, said or did foolish things, took too much delight in deconstructing the faith of students, deeply disliked the church they were supposedly preparing people to lead, or who (for all practical purposes) had lost the vital faith they could still write and lecture about. But I can count those people on one hand. The vast majority of the colleagues I have worked alongside do their work out of a passion for knowing God more deeply and making him known more fully. And I know very few of those faithful women and men who haven’t struggled deeply with the shock they feel when they discover that, the longer they stayed in school, the less they were trusted by their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Complete academic freedom isn’t all it’s cracked-up to be. Shared values and vision will always bring limitations and boundaries – and the challenges that come with them.

But wait! Here’s the “Catch-22.” Although it is clearly still painful for David Gushee that he felt that he had to leave the evangelical institutions where his academic freedom was limited and where his exploration of important social and political issues caused turmoil, he isn’t all that happy and fulfilled to now be in a place of complete academic freedom. As he writes, “There is a real trade-off here. Shared religious vision often seems possible only at the price of constrained academic freedom. Unfettered academic freedom, on the other hand, often seems possible only at the price of a loss of shared religious vision”(p. 110).

In other words, Gushee loves being able to say and write whatever he wants now, but he can only do that in a place with little or no faith at stake. The only intolerance in his new setting is toward intolerance. However, where everything is permissible, little or nothing is at stake. Here is one of my favorite statements from Gushee toward the end of his memoir – as he reflects on the kind of students he encounters now:

But twenty-five years later, much of the younger constituency really is liberal on most metrics one could dream up. I am not talking here about political liberalism, or taking progressive stands on social issues based on a serious reading of the Bible. I mean something more like this: They do not talk much about the positive meaning of biblical inspiration and authority, they tend to be underdeveloped theologically, they don’t embrace evangelism, their missions efforts tend to be service-oriented more than proclamation-oriented, and so on. Strikingly, many also are attracted to older mainline styles of worship, so that many a moderate Baptist worship service resembles what would go on at the Methodist or Presbyterian church down the road. In relation to them, I am relatively conservative. I might even be viewed as an evangelical. Go figure (p. 114).

In other words, he misses doing theology in a place where faith matters deeply because it forms convictions someone might actually give their life for. He admits that he feels a little bit homeless now, and that he’s looking for a “creative alternative” to rigid fundamentalism on the one hand and the freedom that comes with lack of conviction on the other.

I hope that “creative alternative” is what we Wesleyan/Nazarene types are trying to find and embody. If it is, it will mean that we will have to foster environments of “generous orthodoxy” where thoughtful theological and biblical conversations can take place free of political, economic, and cultural co-opting. But it will also mean that we acknowledge that there are significant convictions that hold our communal life together. And although we may try to keep focusing on how to make those convictions as centered-set (as opposed to bounded-set) as possible, there are edges and limits to even the biggest of tents. The challenge is (and has always been) how to navigate those edges faithfully, thoughtfully, and lovingly.

Lost Faith in Mayberry - Reflections After Reading Meghan O'Gieblyn's Interior States

I recently finished reading Interior States- a series of beautifully written and thought-provoking essays from Meghan O'Geiblyn. The title of the book is a reference to the two locations that unify her fifteen diverse essays. The first location is the Midwest. Meghan intentionally lives and writes from a social location that not only gets treated like "fly-over country" by those who live on one of the hipper and more progressive coasts, but from a place that is struggling to know how to re-narrate its existence in the midst of rapid cultural and economic changes that seem to be leaving its way of life behind. As Meghan writes, "What unites the states of the Midwest - both the ailing and the tenuously 'revived' - is a profound loss of telos, the realization that the industries and systems that built the region are no longer tenable."

The second "interior state" that Meghan writes from is the loss of faith. After growing up in a very evangelical family and attending Moody Bible Institute for a time, Meghan experienced a crisis of faith that led her to walk away from the Christian convictions of her upbringing. Yet in her writing she can’t help but return – both critically and affectionately – to the religion she spent her early adulthood “trying to escape.”

I found myself drawn to her book not just because I enjoy good writing, but because I think it is important for folk like me, who (although with great struggle) hang on to an evangelical Christian identity, to listen to the voices of those “we” raised who have walked away not out of rebellion but out of an inability to stay. Meghan’s voice is not the voice of an angry child of the Church, but of a heart-broken one. Those are an important set of voices the Church needs to have the ears to hear and take seriously.

Having made the move myself, from ministry in a coastal, urban, diverse, and politically liberal setting to a more interior, rural, agrarian, mono-cultural, and politically conservative locale, voices like Meghan’s are helpful for those of us discerning and still learning how to do faithful ministry in Mayberry. There is so much that is beautiful and good about life in a place like Nampa, Idaho. There are lots of good and noble reasons why “interior” places like Idaho’s Treasure Valley are growing so rapidly. However, one can also sense some of the fears that easily foment an ugly and anti-gospel spirit in the various hamlets that make up fly-over country. Ministry in Mayberry has never been as quaint and picturesque as the fictional town of Mitford in a Jan Karon novel, but it is especially difficult among the faithful who are shaped by – to borrow a phrase from Meghan - the “politics of nostalgia” that Mayberry is being lost (or worse, taken away).

Here are three random thoughts after finishing Interior States:

Bad theology is destructive.

It’s clear as you read Meghan’s essays that she loves her family and has deep affection for the Christian people who raised her. In fact, one senses in her essays a struggle to find the kind of community of care that can replace the church for her. But at some point, the anti-intellectualism of the faith she was raised in became too much for her to embrace. In particular, she names the usual suspects - young-earth creationism, premillennial dispensationalism, fundamentalist views of the Scripture, opposition to egalitarianism, blindness to racial justice, unthoughtful and judgmental views of other faith traditions, and the merging in America of nationalism and Christian faith - as reasons for her departure from church and faith. It is not unusual to find people critiquing these aspects of American evangelicalism. However, there is something painful when those critiques are made not by an “outsider” to Christian faith but from someone who used to be an “insider.”

I couldn’t help but hurt and wonder if things would be different for Meghan, and many of the young people like Meghan I have known, if they had encountered a more thoughtful and intellectually honest faith along the journey. I don’t sense that what Meghan wants is some kind of Kantian faith within the bounds of reason only or even some “faith of her own” that she self-selected from various options. She seems to recognize the emptyness of a religion of reason with no transcendent mystery worth dying for. But at the same time, she cannot remain at home among people who will not be honest about or come to terms with what she calls “inconvenient truths.”

The church’s attempts at “relevance” are often a double-edged sword.

Meghan was raised in the last couple of generations of the church during a time when “we” have desperately attempted to keep kids present and active in the church by attempting to be both aesthetically cool and culturally relevant. To use the language of Andy Crouch, the church in these generations largely abandoned the posture of “condemnation” toward culture for new postures of “critiquing” and especially “copying” of culture. My favorite essay in the book is a wonderful and affectionate take-down of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) industry. Here is my favorite quote from the book…

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that, because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition (p. 152-153).

It is hard to live without a story.

The most painful and poignant part of the book for me was Meghan’s honesty about what the loss of her Christian story has meant for her, and how difficult it has been to find a replacement story of equal meaning and signficance.

In a very interesting essay on the doctrine of hell, Meghan writes, “Like so many formerly oppositional institutions, the church is now becoming a symptom of the culture rather than an antidote to it, giving us one less place to turn for a sober counter-narrative to the simplistic story of moral progress that stretches from Silicon Valley to Madison Avenue” (p. 47).

In a very honest critique of the emptiness in the culture of sexuality, she lands on this quote from John Updike, “It’s about sex as the emergent religion, as the only thing left” (p. 53).

In another utterly profound essay on the “vacuity of niceness,” Meghan ruthlessly critiques “niceness” as the “article of faith among young Americans on the left.” She critiques it as a virtue that does not require the active engagement of kindness or the vulnerability of compassion. It is a surface virtue that lacks the conviction of a story or the convictions that lead to sacrifice.

But the consequences of not having a story are most apparent in a fascinating essay on transhumanism – the belief or theory that human consciousness could evolve or exist eternally through connection to technology. Meghan for a time felt drawn to the hope she saw in the technological speculation involved in the transhumanist movement. But she gave up on it and fell into a new form of despair. She writes this about her search for transcendence,

At the time, I would have insisted that my rituals of self-abuse – drinking, pills, the impulse to put my body in danger in ways I now know were deliberate – were merely efforts to escape; that I was contending, however clumsily, with the over-whelming despair at the absence of God. But at least one piece of that despair came from the knowledge that my body was no longer a sacred vessel; that it was not a temple of the Holy Spirit, formed in the image of God and intended to carry me into eternity; that my body was matter, and any harm I did to it was only aiding the unstoppable process of entropy for which it was destined. To confront this reality after believing otherwise is to experience perhaps the deepest sense of loss we are capable of as humans. It’s not just about coming to terms with the fact that you will die. It has something to do with suspecting there is no difference between your human flesh and the plastic seat of the train. It has to do with the inability to watch your reflection appear and vanish in a window without coming to believe you are identical with it... if anything had become clear to me, it was my own desperation, my willingness to spring at this largely speculative ideology that offered a vestige of that first religious promise. I had disavowed Christianity, and yet I’d spent the past ten years hopelessly trying to re-create its visions by dreaming about our postbiological future or fixating on the optimization of my own body – a modern pantomime of redemption (p. 186, 198).

It is painful to read her honest quest to find a story meaningful and purposeful enough to replace the significance of the Christian story she left behind. It is a potent reminder that people cannot live without a story, and it is very hard to find, among all the various idolatries in the world, a story worth living and dying for.

I hope for all the prodigal Meghan’s out there searching for a truth-full story worth living and dying for, that the church might learn to not only offer but to also embody a thoughtful, faithful, loving and authentic “home” worth coming back to; a home rooted in Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In the meantime, thanks for your honesty Meghan. We are trying to listen.