Tag: Christianity

Islamic Violence

ImageAmericans are finally waking up to the fact that Islam is a worldwide phenomenon, and not just “over there,” although we seem to believe we are the first to have discovered this and are going at it like Marco Polo.  American media commentary about Islam would make you think that you were listening to the first broadcast from the moon.  “What’s it like?” America asks.  “We will tell you,” says the news.

For my part, I’ve read the Koran twice cover to cover, which is far less than many Muslims, and far more than most Christians.

The million dollar question today is whether or not Islam is inherently violent.  “Is it?” you are asking.  “I will tell you,” says I.

There are two popular lines.  One is the ranting and insistent “Yes!” which has on its side a vast array of very obvious evidence, namely, that some of the most terrorist-producing countries are Muslim.  Muslim countries are not good to women.  Honor killings are still practiced in some Muslim countries.  The people who point this out usually do so without much nuance.

The second popular voice is a more calm but less sensible, “No.” It’s the claim that Muslims are just people like everyone else who have a peaceful religion like Christianity or Buddhism.  They’re misrepresented by extremists the way sophomoric cynics try to group all Christians with Westboro Baptist Church.  This view is based on hope.

The Koran came to be when Muhammed entrenched the ethical code of the 7th century Arabian desert in an eternal religious being whom he claimed was speaking to him.  Thus Muslim ethics will always be tied to the nature of daily life in that cultural context.  In that context, if a tribe attacked your tribe, and you did not retaliate, you signaled weakness.  Thus the rival tribe would feel empowered to attack again, to take your women as property, to drive your people away.  “An eye for an eye” is the teaching of the Koran.  Forgiveness is encouraged only insofar as it causes a person to reform.  But territorial defense is essential.

Is that violent?  Sort of.  It’s also sort of basic, common-sense justice that you would expect of a culture that isn’t governed by a bureaucratic legal system.  It’s not the same as the Christian ethic of turning the other cheek and repaying evil with good.  It’s not the same as Christianity, and the two are not just different paths to the same God.  But it also isn’t crazy.

The problem is that masses of Muslims throughout the world are told that the West has already taken eyes and teeth from them in wars of incursion.  The sexual morality we dispense through our movies and our scandalous celebrities is fairly convincing proof that we’re not reforming.  So in a cross-section of the Muslim world, there is a wholesale belief that the West has attacked.  If they don’t respond in kind in some way, it will signify weakness and allow for further offense.  That’s just the way of the desert.  So rather than demonizing Islam, take its ethic for what it is: pre-Enlightenment myopia.  Combine that with abject poverty and you have something that is potentially volatile.  However, it isn’t of necessity violent.

They

ImageThere’s a trend I’ve noticed, one that I’m sure psychologists have categorized and codified, but I don’t know what they call it.

When people see something horrible, or wicked, or deviant, we come up with a grouping for those responsible for said malfeasance.  We call people “crazy” in order to create a safe, fenced in group from which we have just separated ourselves.  In childhood there are “bad guys,” which is an awfully neat line for an incredibly undefined population.  More than one commentator pointed out that the American media used “insurgents” for what we called, during the American Revolution, “patriots.” Categorizing gives power to the one who makes the categories.  It gives us the power to protect ourselves.

In the wake of the terrorist act at the Boston marathon, there is now a desperate longing for explanation.  What degree of mad ideologizing could lead to such an act of hatred?  People are already eagerly anticipating a category into which that person can be put.  We will most likely brand this person with some variation on “zealous” or “disturbed.”

But what’s strange to me with this particular event is the urgency I’ve seen from a number of voices to say “Humanity isn’t like this.” There seems to be an express desire to make sure than humanism itself is defended.  Comedian Patton Oswalt tweeted a commentary on this which got widely circulated, and he uses language like “a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population” and “a tiny sliver” versus “a vast majority.” The culprit is a lack of tolerance, and the guilty party is not most of us, because humanity is not “inherently evil.”

At some point each of us will need to wake up to the fact that we can’t create enough categories of brokenness to make ourselves a safe exception.  We are in the broken category, the untrustworthy category, the hateful category, and the evil category.  Some degree of socialization and behavior modification may keep us out of the Lord of the Flies, but it’s not our inherent capacity to choose to be good.

There’s only one category that we ought to strive for, and that category is “forgiven.” It will keep us from the kind of hubris that we use to take power over others, write them off, and separate ourselves from them.  Forgiven is a fundamentally evangelical category – it always makes room for someone else.

In The Mix

ImageI’m digging through drawers at my parents’ house, looking for stole-me-downs [(n.) stuff you take home from your parents’ house], and I’ve come across a pile of old papers and photographs.  They are valuable the way a foreign currency is valuable – only to the person who comes from the same place.  The place is my childhood, a country of one.  I’m the only traveler who would look at these and think I had found something worth keeping.

There are letters I wrote to my mom from camp, newspaper clippings of a diatribe I wrote to the Editor in high school, yellowed pictures of a school play.  I found things I drew when I was daydreaming.  It’s all wrapped in a dust sarcophagus that makes me sneeze.

So much goes into the making of an adult.  In this country, typically tens of thousands of dollars of expense, schooling, training, coaching, discipline.  If the ingredients of a recipe cost this much and the cooking took this long, you would expect an extraordinary meal.  You kind of think most adults should be marvelous instead of mundane.  Maybe we are.  Maybe we are simply so surrounded by one another that we take each other for granted.

I’m mixing a couple of recipes of my own.  We take pictures of them with Gramma and Grampa, which will in this generation will never yellow.  They will go in a digital file somewhere, numbered, and be forgotten for a generation.  They will not make anyone sneeze when they’re discovered.

There are certain key ingredients.  Today I took them to church.  At the lunch table, we talk about the faith.  We talk about what Jesus thinks and what the Bible says.  We talk about what it means to be good.  In my room, I’ve found notes from the first Bible study I joined in college.  Someone made sure that was part of my recipe along the way.  I’m making it the most important part of theirs.

To me, the recipe is worth every penny.  If I accomplish nothing else, I hope that my children are my masterpiece.  Somewhere deep in my soul I find a longing to make sure that they have everything they need and become everything they want to be.  I am crafting a work that will last forever.

Oh Well, Rob Bell

ImageI always liked Rob Bell’s call narrative.  He says that when he was young, he felt like God told him, “Just teach this book.” Forever after, that was to be his call.  Now he has the chance to do it on a wider scale than ever before.  His latest book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About God” was the best chance yet, because the controversy surrounding his last book, “Love Wins,” made him virtually a household name.

What Bell Could Have Done

Bell is now poised in exactly the place every evangelist should want to be: hated by religious teachers, loved by the masses, and enjoying a wide (and lucrative) voice in the public sphere, from which he can preach the gospel without hindrance.  And he honestly starts to do that.  He talks about a God who loves us, a God who took on flesh as Jesus, a God who gives us hope.  He acts like he might intend to entice a modern Millennial audience to follow the God whom they’ve always heretofore been told is an oppressor. 

What Bell Did

He starts to but doesn’t follow through.  Because when it comes to an obligation to respond to God, he can’t say anything more that lots of people are kind of spiritual (chapter 1).  When it comes to miracles, he can’t say anything more specific than that everything is wonderfully miraculous (chapter 2).  When it comes to God revealing himself, he can’t say anything more than that the biblical writers were coming up with flawed analogies (chapter 3).  When it comes to the Holy Spirit, he here wanders around quite a bit (chapter 4), establishing little more than that life is mysterious and “we” have a sense that history is progressing somewhere.  He finally comes to Jesus, whom he dives into without any explanation of why I should be interested in Jesus more than Buddha or Muhammed, and why I should believe the Bible is at all reliable (chapter 5).  Chapter 6 doesn’t fall within the realm of traditional Christian theological doctrines.  The chapter simply asserts that God is “progressive.”  Finally, in the last chapter, Bell is supposed to tell us what to do with this progressive, hope-inspiring God who never does anything to make us unhappy, but instead is in the business of blowing our minds.  This final, punchline chapter just doesn’t hold together.  He tells the story of the sheep and the goats, but strangely leaves out the goats.  Then he tells the story of a comedic friend who pretends to be a priest and take confession, which shows how much we need to confess.  Then he tells a story about a yoga class in which women weep because they are integrating their bodies with their “being.” Then he talks about how our brains react when we watch each other.  Then he talks about communion, the purpose of which is to open our eyes to the fact that God is everywhere bringing everything together.

This isn’t even liberalism.  This is pantheistic mush.  This is Spinoza and Hegel reheated and dumbed down.

The enemy throughout the book is a group of wildly construed straw men.  They are Christians who protest against peace and hate questions and are out of date and oppose progress.  Who are these people?  Well, they’re not Rob Bell, that’s for sure.  He’s way too cool for them.

What Bell Didn’t Do

What Bell doesn’t do is tell us why on earth anyone should trust the biblical revelation of Jesus once the cultural ship sails towards secularism.  Bell thinks he’s an evolutionary step above the biblical writers.  He credits the explicit self-revelation of God to the writers’ personal impressions.  When they make moral judgments on issues like homosexuality, Bell knows they’re wrong and that God’s revelation has progressed.  Yet it’s not clear why the gospel writers’ impressions of Jesus aren’t also projections.  After all, miracles may just be their antiquated means of describing what they saw.  Bell’s use of Scripture generally is not deferential.  He riffs off of it but doesn’t submit to it.  He’s moved from exegesis to allusion.

Let me use a surfing metaphor, since Bell’s new book is rife with images of water skiing, surfing, and sunbathing from the beaches of southern California, where he now spends most of his time.  Let’s say someone drifts out on a surfboard to enjoy the sun.  Then they keep drifting.  Then they take a nap.  When they wake up, still on the board, land is nowhere in sight.  Now that person is still alive and still floating, but prospects aren’t all that good.

Bell has cut himself loose from a local church, from the accountability of community, from the necessity of responding to critics, and from the canon of Scripture.  Now he’s drifting.  His still alive.  Hey, maybe he’s enjoying the sun.  But he’s getting further away.  And prospects aren’t good.  And sadly, he has a little fleet of floating followers.

In Bell’s mind, all of this is progress.  He’s moved from the hard work of pastoring in the harsh climate of Grand Rapids to the relaxing life of writing books in Laguna Beach.  In fact, Bell is now charging 50 people at a time $500 to spend 2 days with him, which includes casual conversation and a few hours of surfing.  He’s about to do this for the fourth time.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is $100,000 in 8 days to be covered in the dust of your rabbi.  To which land is he anchored?  Not to his original call narrative.

Rather than joining the Bell critics who use the clicheic promise not to drink his Kool-Aid, I’d recommend a metaphor a bit more in keeping with the substance of Bell’s theological work.  Don’t eat the cotton candy.

My Hope for the Pope

ImageThe new Pope may not be any different than the old pope, or the pope before that one.  But if you want to consider the signs, there are some fascinating and promising potentials here.  Two things of note, both firsts.

He’s a Jesuit.  Jesuits are known for three things: founding universities, evangelizing non-Chrisitians, and fighting with corrupt authorities that need to be reformed (specifically, with Rome).  There has never been a Jesuit Pope before.

Secondly, he chose the name Francis.  This is a touch ironic, because he’s not Franciscan.  And no pope in the over 800 years since Francis lived has chosen that name.  Maybe because it’s hard to sit on the Vatican’s estimated over $10 billion and bear the name of the guy who chose poverty.  But it’s a promising choice.  It’s a second sign of the possibility of reform.  He may mean to signal that he’s going in with the intention of cleaning up some long-standing messes, and maybe particularly the church’s ambiguous relationship with Jesus’ awfully clear teachings about money.  And if the RCC has a chance of impacting the next generation, it will be through those who value truth and evangelism more than money.

We’ll see.

Cultural Scripts

The reason this debate is at the center of culture is because Christians have not acted like Jesus.  Don’t try to demonize gays and lesbians on this.  If Christians had shown a shred of decency (or even of humanity) over this issue over two thousand years, they might not be suffering the backlash that they are just beginning to suffer.  That’s because Christians have addressed this issue with pronouncements and position papers rather than love.  It never crossed the minds of the bulk of Christians to identify with the woman caught in adultery and facing death by bludgeoning.  We just stood back and said, “The law says no.”

Picture a fifteen year old boy.  He’s lost in a world of confusion as he tries to establish his identity, find friends, individuate from his parents, dream of the future, and fall in love.  He is a mess of ego and hormones.  No one who has been fifteen would ever do it again.

Now imagine that he finds himself attracted to other boys, with whom he identifies.  Girls just don’t hold the same interest.  But between the things he hears from the bullies on the playground and the things he hears from the bullies in Sunday School, he kind of knows that this is off script.  So he keeps it to himself.  It starts to make him nervous, because he wants to be normal.  He wants to be accepted.  He starts to pray that his desires would change or go away.  But they don’t.  He dabbles in gay pornography and then feels ashamed of himself.  He still doesn’t tell anyone.  He doubts himself.  He doubts prayer.  He doubts God.  He doubts life.

Now he is presented with two cultural scripts.  A cultural script is sort of a storyline for your life.  They’re all around us.  It tells us how you are to generally behave if you want to fit into any one particular group, culture, or relationship.  There’s a brutish, truck-driving, military man script.  There’s a demure, responsible housewife script.  There’s a driven, type-A, businessman script.  This fifteen year old is offered two scripts.

One is a growing culture of love and acceptance.  It teaches that he should be free to develop into his full potential as a responsible, thoughtful adult.  It teaches that he should be able to express his opinions without persecution, silence, and shame.  It allows him to fall in love and to seek companionship.

The second script tells him that he is broken.  It says so with a sense of sympathy.  The solution to the brokenness is suppress his desires and manage his behavior.  This can be done with a lot of work, prayer, and support.  However, by and large, there are not people around who know how to support him.  He’s referred to a specialized group that has quiet meetings in the back room of a church.  There’s not a sense that he is supposed to talk about it.  He’s ok, but questionable.  To be fair, his closest friends know his deepest secrets and love him.  They walk with him.  It’s only because of them that he doesn’t feel completely alone.

The first script is being offered by the gay community.  The second script is being offered by the Christian Church.  One is confident, growing, and seems to be arising out of persecution with force and popular appeal.  The other still seems to be limping along without a clear message.  Which one is this fifteen year old likely to take?  Which one would you take?  Which one sounds more like Jesus?

Dear Christian Church – as you suffer the consequences of the mess you’ve made, pray that the secular culture around you does a better job following Jesus’ teaching to love your neighbor than you have.

In my next post on the subject, I’d like to talk about what the Bible does and doesn’t say.