In the world, but not of it, but for it

During the rampage of theological gushing I went on this week, I passed through Slacktivist's "NRA: Not of this world," a kvetch about the author's interpretation of "worldliness."

It wasn't the best post in the series. I've followed Fred Clark's vivisection of L&J since its Typepad days, in fact since the first book. Where it shines brightest, to me, is where it's not just a takedown but a witness: where Fred, pointing to the darkness of the World's Worst Books, makes a statement about what it is to be Christian well. (There have been several, in the past. The last one I remember clearly was an aside in which he observed that Rapture theology leaves the church with no purpose, nothing to do.) And there wasn't really any observation like that today.

So when I found that I was gonna be a first-page commenter, I decided to add one in:

I'm not gonna knock the language of  "worldliness." Call me a Johannine fanboy, but I love that rhetoric of "the world," enough that I want to live it. I grok that we aren't to be of the world, even as we're in it over our heads. And I get why, too. It's right there in the unread followup to John 3:16. God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 

That's the beauty of the Johannine NT. We're called from the world so we can live in-and-out the story of its salvation. In the world, but not of it, but for it, in Christ's name and for Christ's sake.

And that's the horror of the World's Worst Books. That every Friday we witness anew L&J forsaking that. Believing, and assuming, and proclaiming that to be Christian is to be in the world, but not of it - but against it. Not to save, but to condemn.

That first-page comment I blockquoted up there? Got 20 likes and a response from a total stranger. I was stunned. The only post I've ever written that got that much response was a one-liner about Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes in the same thread. That got 24 likes.

On confession

Originally posted here:
 
Each prayer of the Daily Office has a prayer of confession at the start; in theory you could say five a single day (plus litanies.) None of these are sacramental in the sense that James was talking about; and while we *do* have a rubric for Reconciliation, the refrain about it is that "Any can, some should, none must."

When their time comes, I'm sure that I'm not a murderer or a heresiarch. I'm sure that my sins are small stuff. I say the prayer of confession anyways. To confess is to humble ourselves, to own that we can be wrong. To confess is to word our weakness, to learn words to confront it as we must.

To confess is to create a time and space when we can learn to sorrow, to regret, to come before a God of mercy needing mercy. And that's ultimately why we do it: confession is the hard work of learning to appreciate grace. Pardon the cliché, but as long as I can confess my sins I can celebrate that Jesus died for them; that He is mine, and I am His.

In which I talk about a papyrus fragment

The stores sell caramel apples and fresh cider, and there are racks of pumpkins outside the doors. The nights are colder now, and the blue hour comes too early. Autumn is upon us.

And instead of honoring that, I'm going to talk about a papyrus fragment, the details of which are found over here.

My first response was the one I posted on Slacktivist:

There's a strong tendency on the part of many scholars to err uncritically on the side of the exotic and non-traditional: the same person who takes the standard gospels as unreliable in their depiction of Jesus will then treat a text written centuries later, which makes outlandish claims attested to nowhere else, certainly no text written when there were still living witnesses to Jesus's life, as if it were very good evidence!

YES. THIS THIS THIS. Thank you so much for saying that. 

On a broader scale, my biggest issue with this whole topic is the horrible looming sense that there isn't going to be ANY intelligent, rational discussion about if and how this papyrus fragment means or matters: that people will, for personal psychological reasons, arbitrarily and dogmatically declare "Jesus was/wasn't married!"

Because as a relatively studied Christian (and usually the one who has to represent Christianity in my completely unchurched social circles), I waste enough time as it is dealing with the Rapture and Dan Brown. And maybe it's because I'm short of sleep, but I have no hope that popular culture won't make a mess with this, and I am tired of endless remedial cleanup.

 My expanded thoughts are as follows, below the cut.

Slacktivist says it like it is

It occurs to me that I've been essentially neglecting any writing about the Discourse of Decline recently - and just on time, Fred Clark (a smarter man than I) delivers:

Everybody knows that evangelical churches are more theologically conservative and orthodox. And everybody knows that mainline Protestant denominations are liberal and heterodox....

It goes something like this:

1: Find the most liberal theologians you can from mainline Protestant denominations — Tillich! Spong! — and then sketch caricatures of them that make them seem as outrageously liberal as possible.

2. Make these caricatures the avatars for mainline Protestant churches, always suggesting that they are typical, hugely popular and influential.

3. Cite this outrageous theological liberalism as the cause of mainline “decline.”

4. Contrast this mainline liberalism with the orthodoxy of evangelical churches.

5. Cite evangelical orthodoxy as the cause of the rapid growth of evangelicalism.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. For years and years and years.

This is propaganda. It’s the shell-game that we evangelicals have been playing for decades now. And it’s a shifty, dishonest trick.

Fred, you nailed it.

A non-owner's taste in gun porn

weapons.

I haven't been there for awhile, though, and last night saw me glutting through its archives. Six or seven pages back, I stumbled across this:

I also have a real interest in guns with interesting histories. Guns with a long series of modifications, or pieces that were used by 2 or 3 or 4 or more different countries before finally finding their way to the US....

I could go on – K98k Mausers and MG42s taken from Nazi stockpiles and used by the fledgling Israeli state, Gewehr 88s used in WWI by Germany and then given to Turkey, updated to use spitzer ammo, and then reworked to look like Mausers... Vetterli rifles updated every time a European war looked imminent... They may not appeal to a lot of people, but to me those are the really interesting pieces. “If this rifle could talk…I’d need to learn three new languages to understand its story.”

What do you think? What do you find appealing in a prospective gun purchase?

And so, having neglected blogging for a few days, I thought I'd write about it here.

In praise of John

First, an irrelevant update to the rest of this post: the Andalusada Scrapbook is currently hovering at 1999 posts right now. My little blog is growing up, and catching it at a moment like that feels like seeing your child take their first step, or getting the first printed copy of your own book.

And now, for the serious one: on today's "Smart people saying smart things," walden posted this:

It's interesting.  This part of the gospel of John is widely regarded as an interpolation and is not in the oldest of the versions to have come down to us.  So in all the scholarly editions, it's in fine print or is footnoted.

But it seems to me to be way more authentic and in keeping with the gospel than most of the rest of John -- which is filled with a lot of neo-platonism and philosophical claptrap.  Which seems more like Jesus of the synoptics -- the woman taken in adultery? or the long self-referential preaching prayer that takes up pretty much of three chapters of the last supper sequence?

I think that John mostly doesn't belong in the N.T., but that this story (based probably on an older oral tradition) does belong.

What exactly do you say to something like that? In my case, I said this:

Serious question here, walden: If we're setting the Synoptics as the litmus test of Jesus's biography, the Pericope's doubly problematic. It not only "isn't" in John (until it was), but it isn't in ANY Synoptic Gospel, and while there were several versions of the Jesus-forgives-a-sinning-woman story circulating that's no guarantee of accuracy.

So on what grounds could we now declare that the Pericope should be in the NT canon and John SHOULDN'T be? Because I don't see any good-faith way to argue that position without making glaringly bad assumptions, the first and worst being "There's nothing wrong with editing NT canon to make it sound more like what we think it should."

(I'd also argue that the Johannine tradition's theology is a really important feature and not a bug, but that's for later.)

 And since it is later, I may as well take the opportunity to get my thoughts down.

A year-long constellation of moments

This was me, on The Anarchist Reverend:

[I]n my mainline experience, no, I’ve never been Born Again™ because I’ve never had any single moment that was like that.

What I have had is a year-long constellation of moments. From memory I can identify all of them, date most of them, and time one of them to within a few minutes. No single point was decisive (not even the timed one, which involved a decision) – but the gestalt is. It hasn’t ended yet (I was saved; I am being saved; too soon to go on), but I can definitely single out a moment before which it hadn’t begun.

Thinking about it now, it's sort of astonishing that the moments of this constellation haven't been written about already. I may just do so.

Starting tomorrow, that is, because I'm getting kicked from the library tonight.

In which I am Cassandra

This was me, on August 9, 2012, on Slacktivist:

That's one of the big glaring things I'm not getting about Tony Jones's challenge: what exactly is it accomplishing? The problem with God-talk isn't that we don't do it, it's that it's easily and often dismissed as not Christian enough. Defining the parameters the way he does, it feels like his Storify stream is gonna wind up VALIDATING any future claims that "liberals are weak Christians and suck at God-talk." Because as much as I wish I was, I'm no mystic, neither apophatic or cataphatic. Without that kind of experience, I need to refer to Jesus and Scripture to say much that's substantive. And even if I did have mystical experience, without reference to the Word, in print or incarnate, it still wouldn't make the cut as being Christian enough.

(For the record, I'm gonna answer the challenge anyways.)

Today, Googling, I discovered that not even a week later it's already starting to happen. And to add insult to injury, the first comment was eaten by the Internet and didn't post.

I fucking hate being right.

A Bible As It Might Be

GAS is the clinical term for a psychological issue first recognized in the guitarist community. It's an acronym for "Gear Acquisition Syndrome." I got it early on in life, and I've had it ever since.

It comes in a few forms. One of them - most prevalent with books, for me - is completism. Series of books are self-reinforcing, cookbooks especially. There are two series of cookbooks that I will buy less because I'm interested (or able) to make any of their recipes than for the simple satisfaction of a rainbow row of books lined up together, all the same size and series. The other - especially with guitar paraphernalia - is utopianism: drawing up the exact utopian specifications for every last detail, in ways that would honor Fourier himself. This year, my GAS has been for Bibles.

Starting in January, when I first found religion, it was driven by dissatisfaction with the one that I had, which (as I've testified before) I had no idea how to read or even approach. Starting in the late spring, it was linked to the discovery of new favorite authors and new versions. As of the last month, it's been enabled and furthered by the GAS-inducing Bible Design and Binding Blog, which finally confirmed what I'd realized without knowing: that the Bibles I like are both marginal and poorly-supported. (The marginality and support are directly tied into the Discourse of Decline, and while it's going to take a lot of research to get the details it will be touched upon.)

I'd tried outlining point-by-point things about my dream Bible before. I fell asleep last night on  another specific list from Christian Matters of Taste. And in the morning, I awoke to the ever brilliant Slacktivist's article, "When 'evangelism' intends to alienate and exclude," which just about brings me to the matter at hand.

Fred started with an Orwell-grade lead: "The Truth For Youth culture-war Bible we discussed yesterday is destined to be poorly received. I think that's by design." Invisible Neutrino followed up:

One attraction I could see is that for teenagers questioning their place in the universe - what their purpose is - one possible answer is given in the Bible and its associated faith. But it has to be a process of self-discovery. You can't just patly supply the answer and expect someone to uncritically accept it; that's not the bedrock of a proper foundation of a faith-based existence.

It's linked because I'm still responding to it, and will write more on that in the future. But the first words out of my mouth on reading that were "I've been mulling over something like that myself..."

Evangelicals have tons of teen Bibles, with very specific culture-war topical notes and horrid garish finishes that instantly doom them to a fate no Bible should ever have: being outgrown. (I can't speak for the mainline, but I was given more or less a bonded-leather pew Bible; I have sentimental bonds to it but it's been totally unapproachable my whole life.)

Teenagers are questioning and establishing their place in the cosmos, and the Bibles they're given either give them pat answers or walls of text that are clearly meant to be filled in by an outside source (which teens are challenging.) From a product-side view (inspired by lurking on the Better Bibles Blog), somebody needs to design a Bible that lends itself to being both critically engaged and kept.

I'd mulled over specifics in the past, but right there was a half-sentence embodiment of what my dream Bible is meant to be. And now I'm going to spell out why it would look like itself - and what that self would look like.

This is my story

The single most visited page in the history of this blog was "Testifying." My list of 15 reasons why I spent ten years out of the church, written in response to Rachel Held Evans's post of the same name. (I've retroactively tagged it "responsive writing," because it totally was that before the tag existed for it to be.)

Rachel also wrote a follow-up piece to it, "15 Reasons I Returned to Church." It doesn't have nearly as many responses, and while I may yet itemize a 15-point list of my own, this isn't going to be that list. It's tangentially related, though, because once again I'm writing a confession of faith.

No rest for the non-rightist Christian, I guess. Last week it was Tony Jones. This week it's the Anarchist Reverend:

But in our attempt to not be the screaming of the religious right we’ve become a kind of watered down left filled with platitudes and vague warm feelings. That doesn’t cut it for me anymore. And I have a feeling that it doesn’t cut it for a lot of other people either.

I want to know why you’re in this faith. I want to know why you remain a Christian? Why does it matter?

It was a good question, and although I didn't answer before the 24-hour deadline was up, it got me thinking.

Attempting "something substantive about God"

Back on Tuesday, Tony Jones wrote "A Challenge to Liberal Bloggers to Write One Post About God":

I challenge all progressive theo-bloggers to write one post about God between now and August 15.

I mean, all of you: Fred, Scot, Rachel, MPT, John Shore, everyone at the Patheos Progressive Portal, and all of you I haven’t mentioned or even ever read. Write something substantive about God. Not about Jesus, not about the Bible, but about God.

Now that I'm done, as Tony Jones would put it, "clearing my throat," I'm gonna (pardon the metaphor) spit it out.

God is sacred, and near at hand and difficult to grasp, and love in an eldritch non-Euclidean way, and kinda self-explanatory but not so much, and above my pay grade.

So there you go: a substantive sentence. And having said that, let's unpack this thing.

Critical, apocalyptic optimism

Kathy Escobar is back from a month-long vacation. I didn't usually get around to responding much before she left, but after a month of silence, I'm not gonna lie: I was waiting for her.

On the merits of liturgy

This was me, six weeks ago, "in which religion is a relationship too":

But ever since I came back, I've discovered that I can find God in that "religion." That I was moved to share the Eucharist, Elevation and Fraction and queueing up and all. That those creeds and sacraments move me. That they are sacraments; in them everything is brought together and I... relate.

On Miss Rumphius, and my backyard

Sarah Bessey is a smarter person than I, and if I don't comment there it's because I regularly find nothing that feels worth adding. On impulse today, though, I clicked over there from Slacktivist, and stumbled upon "In which I share 10 books for tinies," to which I nodded through the list until I got to the honorable mentions:

Honourable Mentions: The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier, Sleepy Bears by Mem Fox, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and of course, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.

And I stopped nodding there, because that last title took me back.

Ethics as engineering

I am not an organized thinker. I love me my disorganized, non-systemic minds, my Ellul (still) and all. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not, but it is how I am; discussing that would be useful to write about someday.

So when, on Slacktivist yesterday, one of the old-timers said that "[A unified ethical] framework has the advantage of being more robust, able to answer new questions, like having calculus instead of a book full of logarithms," I responded:

"Unifying theoretical framework" is balls, because ethics is not science: it's engineering.

We do not have the luxury of isolating every variable, controlling the circumstances of the work, and submitting the results to peer review afterward to see if we got it completely right. We have to work with budgets, deadlines, and all kinds of other arbitrary factors, and "getting it wrong" has horrible human consequences. "Explanatory robustness" is a nonissue when you're missing lots of information, when you have to rely on heuristics and best practices, when "good enough" is a valid category.

Pure science, like pure philosophy, may benefit from structure; engineering and ethics need to be load-bearing. Some base in theory is useful, but the superstructure is real and needs to stand on its own merits.

And historically, a lot of great systematizing is used not so much to better build things up in the future, but to tear stuff down now, like Ursula L said.

The problem with the problem with homosexuality

On Friday, Kathy Escobar posted the first controversial post I've ever read on her blog: "unless we're all free, none of us are free." (One of the things that keeps me coming back is that she's reinventing a very old style of rhetoric that I love to bits.)

So of course I thanked her, admiring her prophetic voice. (I actually do like the challenging power of faith; but I take that damn hymn deadly seriously, then as now. And until I get my own soul in order, I'm in no shape to use the prophetic voice; I'd just be prooftexting badly to say what I could say, more effectively and comfortably, with the radical-critical voice instead.)

And I decided to respond to one comment, because it gave me a springboard to redirect what looked like it was a hard line into a prompt for dialogue.

This is what I wrote, edited only slightly for formatting.

I used to... but now... (1 of x+1)

This entire thing was set in motion by a blog I've been lurking on, because I've never gotten around to posting very much this last week.The question was what are some of yours?

And I answered. These are my extended answers, because I feel like they merit some unpacking, and because there are just enough that I can make this a multi-night habit and get back into the routine of paying attention to both my functional blogs.

I used to define myself in oppositions; now I'm defining myself in relations.