I mentioned to my pastor back at City of Refuge that I was interning at a homeless shelter for my field education component. "Are you up on your TB testing?" he asked, which is an inside joke for all of us who have worked at the Star of Hope, where your annual performance review included a TB skin test. City of Refuge: if you haven't worked at a shelter and tested positive for TB, we probably won't hire you.
Here's the thing: I miss my annual TB test. And that encapsulates the struggle I am facing.
In the last year of my M.Div program, I am working on a thesis that I really find fascinating. And it has all these little tentacles which I also find fascinating: how churches can redeem a racially corrupted theology; what our theological resources are for doing so; how churches interact with other civil society agents and with government in developing societies, particularly young democracies; whether some kinds of Christianity seem to promote democracy and justice better than others; what role their theologies play in this or if we are in a post-theological dispensation when it comes to this; the emerging role of reconciliation and forgiveness as tools of statecraft, particularly in places like Burundi and Congo where punitive justice would mean incarcerating half the society, and the notable absence of theologians from these discussions about what are fundamentally theological concepts.
So I am thinking about going on for a PhD. And I am thinking about doing it in Africa. The University of Cape Town has a great program in Christianity and civil society and a slate of scholars I really admire, and I'd be within striking distance of the theological faculties at Stellenbosch and University of the Western Cape. I've talked to some professors and advisors here and they are enthusiastic: they think it's a logical next step given my interests, that UCT would be a good fit academically, that it would open a lot of doors both in academia and nonprofits depending on the route I wanted to take.
It makes sense. I'm seriously considering it.
But here's the thing: I really miss that TB test.
I miss being in the midst of lively, messy community. I miss feeling like what I did every day mattered. I've started playing the Christmas music, and one of the songs on my iPod is the London Philharmonic's version of "O Come All Ye Faithful." In my Star of Hope days, this was the song that the wise men processed in to as the grand finale of our Christmas pageant. We started practicing in October; every day after school, most evenings, some weekends, up until our December performance. I'd practice with the boys who were the 3 kings--we had a Red King, a Blue King, and a Silver King, with costumes I made myself, because there is nothing that cannot be accomplished with double-sided tape, Velcro, and a stapler--to make sure they came in at exactly the right moment, that they walked the right way, held their heads the right way, that they were *regal*. I prepared them over and over to ignore the crowd that would be there the night of the performance, to remember that they were men of great stature and wisdom, men who quested after knowledge, who carried themselves with dignity. And my rowdy 8-year-old boys, boys who were rarely in their school programs because their behavior was bad and their teachers didn't want to take a chance on them, became those kings. The first time we did it, when the music swells before the last verse and the choir sings "Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning," my Silver King made his dramatic entrance and the place erupted--cheers, applause, tears. And he never wavered. He didn't ham it up, he didn't wave to his mom; he kept his precise, stately gait, he looked straight ahead, he made it up to the stage and bowed to the Christ Child right at the perfect moment, as the choir says "Christ the Lord."
It. Was. AWESOME.
That kid's in high school now. All those 1st- and 2nd-graders are middle schoolers and high schoolers now. But there isn't a Christmas season that goes by that I don't remember how regal my little kings were, or how the wild-haired little girl who played Mary could make you cry with her version of the Magnificat, or how everyone fell in love with the angel-cum-gospel choir's rendition of "Jesus What a Wonderful Child" while the shepherds danced.
The kids were part of the salvation story that night, and as I told them over and over during rehearsals, it was because of this story that they were part of the salvation story that was unfolding over time and space, where everyone had a role to play and, as C.S. Lewis said, "each chapter is better than the one before."
Star of Hope had its frustrations--two of my friends took bets on how long it would take me to break a major rule, and I think the outside bet was two weeks--but I felt like what I did mattered, that every day I did something of eternal value. It's the way I feel at City of Refuge too--when I walk in, it's like realizing I'd been having trouble breathing and hadn't realized it until I could breathe freely again. What they do in that little corner of Third Ward matters. They are a glimpse of the Kingdom for those among us who have lost the vision.
I know my giftings are academic. I am a reader and researcher and writer and analyst; that is what I am gifted to do. And while I dread the prospect of being an academic who just writes in academic journals that other academics read--a community far too incestuous for my liking--I think maybe there's a place for those of us with those talents to delve into the theology and history and study and come out with the nuggets of wisdom to give back to our churches and communities, to say "Hey! This is where it went wrong, and here's how we can fix it."
That's the kind of academic I'd want to be. But the truth is, I've never been happier than I was at Star of Hope, playing Twister and nurturing the image of God in children and getting my annual TB test. And while I write this in my house in Cambridge listening to Christmas carols, I really wish I was trying to teach an 8-year-old rowdy boy to see with the eyes of a king.
Because one day, that is exactly what he will be.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Come, Let Us Reason Together
We are an arguing family.
Growing up, I thought all families argued. In mine, we like to get the last word in. I remember realizing that perhaps this was not conventional when my little sister had a friend over in high school and he watched in horror as my dad and I yelled and shook our fists and stomped our feet about school prayer and carried the argument out of the house into the driveway until I ended it by slamming the car door. (After launching a particularly strong argument. Because I like to have the last word. And the first, and most of the ones in between.)
I was thinking of this recently because I think we, as a church, have gotten sloppy as arguers. We proof text. We throw around words like "liberal" and "conservative" as slurs without really knowing what they mean. And growing up in a family where vigorous debate and reasoning was valued and where you'd better be able to defend your position (as my dad has said, "Your mama may have raised a mean child, but she raised no fools") has made me realize that it's a rapidly disappearing art, and the church is suffering for it.
I have a friend recently who said the arguments against ordaining gay people or blessing gay unions were the same ones used by racists to justify apartheid. It's an argument I've heard before, and it's sloppy and inaccurate. Apartheid theology twisted Scripture to see something that isn't there: a vision of race before race existed. The Biblical writers had some concept of tribe, but not of race as defined by color; that was a European invention about 1500 years later. Even many evangelicals took issue with apartheid theology: apartheid apologists used the Tower of Babel and Pentecost as examples of God wanting people to remain separate, while evangelicals typically see Pentecost as setting right what went wrong at Babel--the sin that caused division was now being set right by the Spirit, speaking to all in their languages so they were brought together, not pushed apart, the beginning of this radical new venture in inclusion that was the early church. (Flawed and faulty, as we all are, but still radical. And an adventure. I do love adventure.)
The parallel doesn't quite work with homosexuality. You can say Scripture doesn't refer to homosexual relationships as we now understand them, but then that does one of two things: 1) you are inverting the race analogy and, rhetorically, putting those who support full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the same position as the apartheid apologists. In one case, we argue that the Bible is misused to justify an argument about race that didn't exist then; in the second, we turn around and use the Bible to justify an argument about homosexuality that we assert didn't exist then; ie in either case, we are alleging the construct of race or sexuality *as we understand them today* did not exist in Biblical times, but in one place we are using it as a critique and in another as a justification; or 2) you're wrong, and no less a Biblical scholar than N.T. Wright says it, who says that "there is nothing that we know now about either the condition or the behavior of homosexuality that was unknown in the first century." It was not just pederasty or sexual use of slaves, he asserts, but also "read Plato's Symposium: they have permanent, faithful, stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, all sorts of things--Paul, in Corinth, will not have been unaware, in a world in which private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic, everyone else does what they do pretty much in public--Paul will have known the full range of behavior." The dismissal of first century understanding of homosexuality is, he says, "Enlightenment arrogance."
Now. It seems to me if he is right, and I tend to trust him as probably the leading NT scholar alive and certainly one of the leading authorities on Paul and Romans, then the question is not so much what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, but what weight and authority we give it. And that is a valid discussion to have. But let's have that one and not the one in which we try to force Scripture to say what it doesn't.
As for me, I'd like to think I'm probably not so easy to pin down on this issue as some might think I am. Where I am unsure, I prefer to err on the side of grace; I think it unlikely that God will ever say to me "You took that grace thing too literally, you over-graced the world, it got out of hand." I am tasked with loving people; the Holy Spirit is tasked with transforming them. I am less concerned with whether homosexual behavior is or is not a sin and more concerned with how the church has isolated it as a sin beyond others while ignoring the sins in its midst. We have way bigger fish to fry, folks.
I am sorry that in our shouting at each other, we miss the opportunity to articulate what a Christian vision of human sexuality and sexual mores might look like. At least the evangelical tradition is still clear: it is covenantal, to be exercised within the sanctuary and safety of marriage, because letting someone quite literally inside your skin is not to be taken lightly and not something we do with just anyone. It's a very high view of marriage, of sexuality, and of the body. It is also, in a world where marriage now may occur 15 or 20 years after the onset of sexual maturity and may not occur at all, a very demanding view--which doesn't make it wrong, but it's worth exploring. And for those Christians (I hesitate to say liberal just because I think liberal and conservative are unhelpful terms in this context, they've become so polarizing and stereotyped) who have unloosed sex from marriage, what does a Christian vision of moral sexual behavior look like? What do Christian principles look like incarnated in our most intimate relations? That is also a conversation worth having and we're not having it.
When an activist friend and I have talked about it we get mutually frustrated because she frames the issue of gay inclusion in the church (in her case, the Anglican Communion) in terms of human rights and I say the church isn't about rights; rights is political language, Enlightenment language, but not Biblical language and not faith language. By that I don't mean I think the church should stand in opposition to human rights; it has just made me think that it isn't the question we are meant to ask. Scripture talks about laying rights down, not taking them up. And I think a better question is not "what are my rights" but "what is my responsibility to my neighbor"--which in the end is the more demanding and costly question, and hopefully one that leads us to the same place of protecting and celebrating human dignity and worth ("rights," in political language) in its fullness but gets us there together, each of us looking out for and protecting the other over ourselves.
We don't argue well anymore. I mean we as a church--perhaps it is the degradation of our political culture that has seeped into the churches, perhaps that we don't value reason ("Come, let us reason together") and the premise-evidence-logic strand anymore, perhaps that we haven't the discipline and attention for it anymore (remember Paul talks of discipline as a prelude to faith); but we are sloppy, lazy thinkers these days, and I am frustrated by it. And it wasn't always this way. The Anglican construct of the three-legged stool posits that Scripture, reason and tradition are the three legs that hold up the stool of faith, which becomes wobbly when any one of them is missing; the Methodists added experience but held on to reason. Because these things matter, they are worth reasoning through and reasoning through well; they are questions about who we are and what it is to be human and how to live well in this world. Our conversation is so impoverished and we do it so poorly.
I am postmodern enough to believe that these are not our only tools or the only legitimate way of arriving at a conclusion, that narrative and art and experience are also resources, but a well-disciplined mind is still so vital--I am just not willing to give that weapon up just yet.
"In the church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians."--Karl Barth
Growing up, I thought all families argued. In mine, we like to get the last word in. I remember realizing that perhaps this was not conventional when my little sister had a friend over in high school and he watched in horror as my dad and I yelled and shook our fists and stomped our feet about school prayer and carried the argument out of the house into the driveway until I ended it by slamming the car door. (After launching a particularly strong argument. Because I like to have the last word. And the first, and most of the ones in between.)
I was thinking of this recently because I think we, as a church, have gotten sloppy as arguers. We proof text. We throw around words like "liberal" and "conservative" as slurs without really knowing what they mean. And growing up in a family where vigorous debate and reasoning was valued and where you'd better be able to defend your position (as my dad has said, "Your mama may have raised a mean child, but she raised no fools") has made me realize that it's a rapidly disappearing art, and the church is suffering for it.
I have a friend recently who said the arguments against ordaining gay people or blessing gay unions were the same ones used by racists to justify apartheid. It's an argument I've heard before, and it's sloppy and inaccurate. Apartheid theology twisted Scripture to see something that isn't there: a vision of race before race existed. The Biblical writers had some concept of tribe, but not of race as defined by color; that was a European invention about 1500 years later. Even many evangelicals took issue with apartheid theology: apartheid apologists used the Tower of Babel and Pentecost as examples of God wanting people to remain separate, while evangelicals typically see Pentecost as setting right what went wrong at Babel--the sin that caused division was now being set right by the Spirit, speaking to all in their languages so they were brought together, not pushed apart, the beginning of this radical new venture in inclusion that was the early church. (Flawed and faulty, as we all are, but still radical. And an adventure. I do love adventure.)
The parallel doesn't quite work with homosexuality. You can say Scripture doesn't refer to homosexual relationships as we now understand them, but then that does one of two things: 1) you are inverting the race analogy and, rhetorically, putting those who support full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the same position as the apartheid apologists. In one case, we argue that the Bible is misused to justify an argument about race that didn't exist then; in the second, we turn around and use the Bible to justify an argument about homosexuality that we assert didn't exist then; ie in either case, we are alleging the construct of race or sexuality *as we understand them today* did not exist in Biblical times, but in one place we are using it as a critique and in another as a justification; or 2) you're wrong, and no less a Biblical scholar than N.T. Wright says it, who says that "there is nothing that we know now about either the condition or the behavior of homosexuality that was unknown in the first century." It was not just pederasty or sexual use of slaves, he asserts, but also "read Plato's Symposium: they have permanent, faithful, stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, all sorts of things--Paul, in Corinth, will not have been unaware, in a world in which private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic, everyone else does what they do pretty much in public--Paul will have known the full range of behavior." The dismissal of first century understanding of homosexuality is, he says, "Enlightenment arrogance."
Now. It seems to me if he is right, and I tend to trust him as probably the leading NT scholar alive and certainly one of the leading authorities on Paul and Romans, then the question is not so much what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, but what weight and authority we give it. And that is a valid discussion to have. But let's have that one and not the one in which we try to force Scripture to say what it doesn't.
As for me, I'd like to think I'm probably not so easy to pin down on this issue as some might think I am. Where I am unsure, I prefer to err on the side of grace; I think it unlikely that God will ever say to me "You took that grace thing too literally, you over-graced the world, it got out of hand." I am tasked with loving people; the Holy Spirit is tasked with transforming them. I am less concerned with whether homosexual behavior is or is not a sin and more concerned with how the church has isolated it as a sin beyond others while ignoring the sins in its midst. We have way bigger fish to fry, folks.
I am sorry that in our shouting at each other, we miss the opportunity to articulate what a Christian vision of human sexuality and sexual mores might look like. At least the evangelical tradition is still clear: it is covenantal, to be exercised within the sanctuary and safety of marriage, because letting someone quite literally inside your skin is not to be taken lightly and not something we do with just anyone. It's a very high view of marriage, of sexuality, and of the body. It is also, in a world where marriage now may occur 15 or 20 years after the onset of sexual maturity and may not occur at all, a very demanding view--which doesn't make it wrong, but it's worth exploring. And for those Christians (I hesitate to say liberal just because I think liberal and conservative are unhelpful terms in this context, they've become so polarizing and stereotyped) who have unloosed sex from marriage, what does a Christian vision of moral sexual behavior look like? What do Christian principles look like incarnated in our most intimate relations? That is also a conversation worth having and we're not having it.
When an activist friend and I have talked about it we get mutually frustrated because she frames the issue of gay inclusion in the church (in her case, the Anglican Communion) in terms of human rights and I say the church isn't about rights; rights is political language, Enlightenment language, but not Biblical language and not faith language. By that I don't mean I think the church should stand in opposition to human rights; it has just made me think that it isn't the question we are meant to ask. Scripture talks about laying rights down, not taking them up. And I think a better question is not "what are my rights" but "what is my responsibility to my neighbor"--which in the end is the more demanding and costly question, and hopefully one that leads us to the same place of protecting and celebrating human dignity and worth ("rights," in political language) in its fullness but gets us there together, each of us looking out for and protecting the other over ourselves.
We don't argue well anymore. I mean we as a church--perhaps it is the degradation of our political culture that has seeped into the churches, perhaps that we don't value reason ("Come, let us reason together") and the premise-evidence-logic strand anymore, perhaps that we haven't the discipline and attention for it anymore (remember Paul talks of discipline as a prelude to faith); but we are sloppy, lazy thinkers these days, and I am frustrated by it. And it wasn't always this way. The Anglican construct of the three-legged stool posits that Scripture, reason and tradition are the three legs that hold up the stool of faith, which becomes wobbly when any one of them is missing; the Methodists added experience but held on to reason. Because these things matter, they are worth reasoning through and reasoning through well; they are questions about who we are and what it is to be human and how to live well in this world. Our conversation is so impoverished and we do it so poorly.
I am postmodern enough to believe that these are not our only tools or the only legitimate way of arriving at a conclusion, that narrative and art and experience are also resources, but a well-disciplined mind is still so vital--I am just not willing to give that weapon up just yet.
"In the church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians."--Karl Barth
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Anglicans, Everyone Else Is Making You Look Bad
**OK, I know it's been forever since I've blogged, so the next few blogs are going to alternate between finishing up my thoughts on South Africa and ruminations on the last year at Harvard. By the way, my housemate doesn't believe in using the heater, so I'm wearing sweatpants over flannel pajamas with an electric blanket. And still the mornings are painful.
Anyway, this blog post reflects on a project I was working on in June and July, viewing a major anti-apartheid march from 1989 through a theological lens.
*******************************************************
I love Reformed theology and thought. And I am not one who is usually enthralled by theology. I have little interest in debating the finer points of TULIP or whether Jesus became Christ before or after His crucifixion and resurrection; they can be interesting intellectual challenges, but in general, they are things we will not know the full answers to while we are yet on this side of life. I have come to the point where if a certain precept doesn’t help me in my basic mission to follow Jesus and not hurt other people—a mission that keeps me fairly well occupied most of the time, because sometimes it feels like I look up and totally unintentionally I have left mass carnage in my wake and I think, hmmm; that did not work out as well as I’d hoped—then it’s going to have to take a back seat to those things that do.
But spend a little bit of time with Anglicans and you’ll come to have a whole new respect for a robust and vigorously articulated theology, because it’s so sorely lacking in some of their circles. (I don’t say all, because they still have N.T. Wright, and that counts for something.) Even if you disagree with it, at least it gives you something of substance to actually disagree with.
As part of a project I was working on, I interviewed two former Anglican priests, both of whom served in fairly high positions in Cape Town’s diocese. One of them, when asked about the theological themes that drove church resistance to apartheid, said dreamily, “Faith.” Errrr….what? What did that even mean? Is that seriously all he’s going to give me? Not even a verse of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which would be more profound than anything I’d hitherto heard from him?
Unfortunately, no.
Then he launched into an explanation of how we were all energy moving at different frequencies and when we come together all that energy…blah blah blah my ears are bleeding…something about E=mc^2…and he rambles on and I think, do I still remember the Nicene Creed? Or the lyrics to “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”? Because I think he is actually sucking the faith right out of my spirit. Along with my will to live.
Then I talked to another Anglican who freely said, “I don’t really do theology, it was never my thing. It used to worry Tutu, he was always asking me when my next retreat was.” But, he continued, he just really wasn’t into the whole spirituality and theology part of being a priest.
Huh. I'm thinking the spirituality-and-faith part of being a priest is, I don't know, A MAJOR PART OF THE JOB. Who was in charge of ordination during these years? Because someone seriously fell down on the job, and apparently poor Tutu was trying to hold it together with string and duct tape. Anglicans, you should be pissed. This doesn’t show well.
So you can only imagine how I felt when I interviewed Allan Boesak a couple of weeks later. Boesak is one of the anti-apartheid luminaries, a founder of the United Democratic Front, fiery speaker, and a pastor in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. He did his Ph.D in the Netherlands and has done some great research on Bonhoeffer.
What I am telling you is, Allan Boesak has some theology.
He immediately started talking about Calvin and Kuyper and Bonhoeffer and about how the Reformed understanding of Christ’s Lordship of all things is the paradigm under which he operated. There is no private zone for the church separate from society, because society is also under the Lordship of Christ, whether it recognizes it or not. And Christ is steering things to His desired end. (A little bit of Calvinist predestination kicks in here.) I wasn’t sure if I should clap or kiss his ring.
And we were mutually smug about the nebulousness of much of Anglican theology.
I'm reading his memoir now which reflects on a major public scandal in which he was involved, so I don't want to comment on that until I've read his defense. But Boesak-Part II is coming soon.
Anyway, this blog post reflects on a project I was working on in June and July, viewing a major anti-apartheid march from 1989 through a theological lens.
*******************************************************
I love Reformed theology and thought. And I am not one who is usually enthralled by theology. I have little interest in debating the finer points of TULIP or whether Jesus became Christ before or after His crucifixion and resurrection; they can be interesting intellectual challenges, but in general, they are things we will not know the full answers to while we are yet on this side of life. I have come to the point where if a certain precept doesn’t help me in my basic mission to follow Jesus and not hurt other people—a mission that keeps me fairly well occupied most of the time, because sometimes it feels like I look up and totally unintentionally I have left mass carnage in my wake and I think, hmmm; that did not work out as well as I’d hoped—then it’s going to have to take a back seat to those things that do.
But spend a little bit of time with Anglicans and you’ll come to have a whole new respect for a robust and vigorously articulated theology, because it’s so sorely lacking in some of their circles. (I don’t say all, because they still have N.T. Wright, and that counts for something.) Even if you disagree with it, at least it gives you something of substance to actually disagree with.
As part of a project I was working on, I interviewed two former Anglican priests, both of whom served in fairly high positions in Cape Town’s diocese. One of them, when asked about the theological themes that drove church resistance to apartheid, said dreamily, “Faith.” Errrr….what? What did that even mean? Is that seriously all he’s going to give me? Not even a verse of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which would be more profound than anything I’d hitherto heard from him?
Unfortunately, no.
Then he launched into an explanation of how we were all energy moving at different frequencies and when we come together all that energy…blah blah blah my ears are bleeding…something about E=mc^2…and he rambles on and I think, do I still remember the Nicene Creed? Or the lyrics to “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”? Because I think he is actually sucking the faith right out of my spirit. Along with my will to live.
Then I talked to another Anglican who freely said, “I don’t really do theology, it was never my thing. It used to worry Tutu, he was always asking me when my next retreat was.” But, he continued, he just really wasn’t into the whole spirituality and theology part of being a priest.
Huh. I'm thinking the spirituality-and-faith part of being a priest is, I don't know, A MAJOR PART OF THE JOB. Who was in charge of ordination during these years? Because someone seriously fell down on the job, and apparently poor Tutu was trying to hold it together with string and duct tape. Anglicans, you should be pissed. This doesn’t show well.
So you can only imagine how I felt when I interviewed Allan Boesak a couple of weeks later. Boesak is one of the anti-apartheid luminaries, a founder of the United Democratic Front, fiery speaker, and a pastor in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. He did his Ph.D in the Netherlands and has done some great research on Bonhoeffer.
What I am telling you is, Allan Boesak has some theology.
He immediately started talking about Calvin and Kuyper and Bonhoeffer and about how the Reformed understanding of Christ’s Lordship of all things is the paradigm under which he operated. There is no private zone for the church separate from society, because society is also under the Lordship of Christ, whether it recognizes it or not. And Christ is steering things to His desired end. (A little bit of Calvinist predestination kicks in here.) I wasn’t sure if I should clap or kiss his ring.
And we were mutually smug about the nebulousness of much of Anglican theology.
I'm reading his memoir now which reflects on a major public scandal in which he was involved, so I don't want to comment on that until I've read his defense. But Boesak-Part II is coming soon.
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