Resolved, Not To Wear a Bikini

(My apologies for being late on my posts. There is no wifi access at the convention center and the connection here at the hotel is spotty, at best.)

In many ways Resolved is Grace’s version of a young adult conference – and it shows. The burgeoning crowd is overwhelmingly twenty-somethings peppered with boomer-age stalwarts ready to pass the torch. As I mixed with the crowd I met people from southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the deep south, and even a few folks from overseas: The U.K., New Zealand, and Canada (Canada feels like it’s overseas doesn’t it?).

Friday night Rick Holland was the featured speaker and he introduced this year’s conference theme: “Jesus.” I liked how Rick spoke of the “problem of God” in terms of the tension between transcendence and immanence. He effectively gave voice to the frustration experienced by those trying desperately to connect with God, and he did so by first visiting the book of Job and then introduced Christ as the concrete “confluence” of the abstract streams of transcendence and immanence.

Nicely done. I think directing our theological imaginations toward the incarnation is the right direction to go and Rick did a nice job of pointing us toward the inherent vistas of possibility birthed with Jesus as the eternal God-man. I mean this sincerely: I think overall Rick preached a fine message about the unique role of the incarnation and I appreciated it.

However, there were a few bewildering moments for me. For example, Rick took one small passage in Job and used it to pronounce that the book wasn’t an indictment of God concerning unjust suffering at all, but rather the account of one sinful man’s inability to connect with a transcendent Holy God. In other words, Job simply demonstrates the need for atonement (ahem…someone’s penal substitution is showing). Rick also made the curious statement, “Most of what Job’s friends tell him is theologically true – just insensitively applied,” summarizing Job’s freind’s as saying, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

This is what happens when you’re a slave to systematics. When everything in the bible, according to your theological prejudice, by necessity must harmonize perfectly as a factual representation of God’s revealed perfect will, you lose the ability to see the trees for the forest and the biblical narrative becomes a limitation on humanity rather than a liberating story of possibility. The problem with this summary of Job is that there is no harmonizing Job with, say, Proverbs because these writings are at odds with each other – and its best to leave them that way. We’re not just at odds with the consequences of our foolish sin (Proverbs in a nutshell), we are also at odds with a world and a God that frequently makes no sense to our sensibilities (Job in a nutshell). The fact is, the unjust do often suffer and the unrighteous do often prosper. That’s exactly why we have alternative wisdom like Job and Ecclesiastes – to give cathartic lament to the reality of an unjust world and, yes, to indict God for it.

To ignore this is to ignore not only the obvious content of these writings, but to ignore the historical and cultural context of them as well. Job is a semitic version of a well-known Babylonian writing: “The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” the point of both is clearly to question the conventional wisdom of divine blessings and curses. Even more tragically, whitewashing the indictment of God in Job effectively silences the voice of those who cry out to God in lament.

Which brings me to my biggest objection from Friday night.

The most egregious thing I heard Friday wasn’t in Rick’s message, it was in his opening welcome tot he conference attendees. After giving a rundown of what to expect from the weekend, Rick made a plea to “watch your witness.” Palm Springs would be watching, Rick said, and we are to be ambassadors for Christ. Then Rick chose one specific thing to hammer home:

“Ladies, when you’re swimming at your hotel pool, please show modesty.”

This nicely demonstrates my problem with fundamentalist-leaning evangelicalism: it is a system of fear, shame, and control. When given the opportunity to put flesh and blood on what it means to be a Christian before a watching world to 3000 young adults, Rick chose to focus on the inherent sin of being a woman and the resulting need for women to be under the control of parochial sensibilities. The more distant implication (and I don’t think this is unfair given his comments about Job) is that when women are the victims of inappropriate sexual attention they aren’t really victims at all, because, as he later said in his message, “God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked – a truism!”

So, never mind being ambassadors of Christ by serving the people of Palm Springs. Never mind brining a message of reconciliation or meeting the needs of the poor in town. Never mind prophetically indicting the powers of conspicuous wealth so grotesquely displayed all around town. After all, it’s hard to find displays of wealth unjust when your theology has fundamentally baptized wealth as an indication of God’s approval. It’s even harder to have compassion for the poor – and there are poor here – when your theology has fundamentally vilified them as a demonstration of God’s just judgment.

No. Being an ambassador for Christ means that women musn’t show too much skin.

Technorati Tags: Fundamentalism, Job, justice, Resolved Conference, Rick Holland, Sexuality

Pat Robertson Falls From the Ladder of Being (And So Do We)

Poor uncle Pat. He just prefers his answers to be easy. The “main and plain” not only for the Bible but world as well – and who can blame him? Most of us want the Bible – or science, or politics, or television – to explain the schematic of life, not scribble all over it indelibly.

We prefer divine judgment to disaster. We prefer all homosexuals to be perverts and all feminists to be frigid. We cherish our villainous CEO’s as much as our historical fascist dictators and romantically pit them in battle against our crusading forces. We prefer WWII to Vietnam or Iraq.

We like all our Christians to be saintly (or sadistic) and our artists avante-garde (or addicted). We like our blacks and whites, our gender-roles, our partisanships, our winners and our losers. Oh how we love our losers. As Americans we prefer our sports with easy acronyms and decisively-bloody endings – NFL, NASCAR, MMA. The rest of the world can keep Soccer with its low scores, slow pace, and ambiguous endings.

It’s easy to read the Bible this way – and most of us do – until you get to Job, and Ecclesiastes…and Jesus. I recently heard John Goldingay summarize Writings:

“Proverbs says: ‘These are the rules of life: follow them. They work.’ Job and Ecclesiastes says: ‘We tried them. They don’t work!’”

Pat Robertson is echoing Proverbs when he condemns the Haitians for their tragedy, and so are we when we condemn him back. Earthquakes are more complicated than ancient Hebrew Proverbs. As is God, Haitian history and (believe it or not) Pat Robertson as well. It’s a Proverbs world that tries to make sense of tragedies with God or science, and it’s a Proverbs world that vilifies uncle Pat, too. Of course he’s wrong, and it’s important to say so, but slipping into his black-and-white shoes won’t change a thing.

What the world needs in an age of easy Bible answers and pretentious scientific posturing is more of Job, more of Qoheleth, more of the wounded-realist who has tested the prevailing ideology and found a few holes alongside the hope. Wounded realists are compassionate radicals, pushing relentlessly for understanding and justice (like Job) but wisely recognizing the imperfections in all of us (like Qoheleth). This requires a humility almost totally absent in the world of liberal/conservative, saved/lost, science/faith, gay/straight.

Psychologist J.P. Guilford called this oversimplified paradigm, “convergent thinking.” Robert Inchausti, commenting on the career of economic-thinker E.F. Schumacher in his excellent book, Subversive Orthodoxy, explains:

“[With convergent thinking] the paradigm is natural science, with its stipulative definitions and its verifiable hypotheses. Problems that come from the “real world,” Schumacher argues, do not yield to such reductionism. They usually demand a synthesis of irresolvable antinomies of some sort or another – such as freedom and order or security and risk – and this requires divergent thinking, that is to say, rule breaking, re-categorizing, and renaming kinds of processes so that we may rise to a more inclusive vision that synthesizes apparently irreconcilable oppositions into a higher conceptual unity.”

Alongside Schumacher, Inchausti places this progression of thought on a “ladder of Being,” reckoning it to be a more inclusive and creative approach to problem solving, saying,

“To the degree modern thought has [reduced] all things to their materiality, it has turned convergent thinking into an absolute, thus making ethical and philosophical problems increasingly difficult to solve – postponing them inevitably until some new science can be developed that will reduce every variable to controllable, atomistic, material elements.”

In this way, even though Modernity claims to liberate us from superstitions, life’s problems are tackled in remarkably similar ways by the scientist and fundamentalist alike: take a pill or memorize a Bible verse. That will solve all your problems. Reduce all complexities to their simplest encapsulated form and don’t question the experts.

Here is why we struggle to solve the problems of religious and ethnic pluralism, political and ethical dilemmas like abortion and stem-cell research, social ills like poverty or the disaster in Haiti. Convergent thinking always favors the simplistic, the decisive, the bloody. Convergent thinking turns Haiti into a divine object-lesson or a pragmatic political opportunity (just you wait and see). At its worst we find a willful ignorance that can only be described as arrogance or laziness (is there a difference?).

Not surprisingly then, Schumacher’s prescription outlined in A Guide For the Perplexed is a radically humble spiritual journey that begins with learning from both “society and tradition” and ends with “dying to oneself,” that ultimate act of faith best articulated by Jesus, by far the most perplexing figure in human history. It’s the presence of metaphor, paradox, and irony in scripture – especially in the incarnation of Christ – that most closely resembles real life and forces us into a posture of God-directed, unified humility. What we need most is the divergent Spirit of Christ.

In the days to come unified humility is what we’ll see in diverse partnerships of relief. Those who see themselves in the ravaged Haitians will bring the most mercy. That’s divergent thinking. That’s humility, and God is in it. It’s also what we’ll see in those who forgive Pat Robertson, not because they’re better than him but precisely because they recognize themselves in him. That’s the only way to make a difference and it’s the only way to climb back on the ladder of Being.

Technorati Tags: David Allen Hubbard, E.F. Schumacher, Earthquake, Ecclesiastes, Haiti, Humilty, J.P. Guilford, Jesus, Job, John Goldingay, Pat Robertson, Proverbs, Robert Inchausti

The not-God of I35, Job, and John Piper

My online friend Bill Kinnon has gotten himself into a bit of a row over the subject of God’s sovereignty with this post at his blog Kinnon.tv. In it, he not-so-gently mocks John Piper’s comments about God’s supposed role in the I35 bridge collapse a couple years ago in Minneapolis. Here’s the shot he fired across every neo-Calvinist’s bow:

I do not believe in a God who foreordains every action, but in a God who is not surprised by anything. As an example, the collapse of the I35 bridge in Minneapolis/St. Paul was not part of God’s sovereign plan – no matter what Piper told his young daughter.

Daryl Dash got into the action by announcing a subsequent, yet still impending, blog series on the topic and Bill seems to enjoy jousting with others in the comments section resulting in this rebuke by another reader:

God has foreordained everything to happen. The Scriptures are blatant about this side of the truth revealed about God’s sovereignty. Just because you can’t logically conceive of this as compatible with suffering in this present fallen world doesn’t mean you have to denigrate God’s pre-determination of all things.

Here’s my question: Doesn’t Jesus’ gospel – that is, the pronouncement of God’s inaugurated kingdom (i.e. Matt 4:23) – fundamentally presume the existence of a realm in which God is not king, where his rule and reign are not?

Continue reading…

Technorati Tags: Bill Kinnon, Darryl Dash, Evil, God, Job, John Piper, sovereignty