Worth Reading

I came across two pieces of writing today well worth taking the time to have a look at. First, there’s an excellent article by Tom Ryan recently posted at The Other Journal. Here’s a little excerpt from what is an excellent challenge to the church to be honest about both the the inherent limitations (epistemological and otherwise) of being human, and of the uniquely human capacity for spiritual transformation in and through doubt:

So what are we to make of this reactionary and defensive posture of the church? If this sort of apologetic defense against anything resembling doubt or atheism is the reality of our current ecclesial climate, then it is critical for us to wonder about what sort of spirituality this fosters. In other words, how does an implicit posture of defensiveness influence the very ways we seek to gather and practice our faith? And can the church, so preoccupied with cultivating a people who believe biblical absolutes passionately and confidently, find space and a language to warmly welcome those with doubts into their communities? The failure to do so—and the tendency to entrench ourselves within our certainty—will only serve to objectify and demonize those who don’t share what we perceive to be “God’s way.” It will artificially pit believers against non-believers, faith against doubt, sacred versus secular, and will miss the point of our Christian faith entirely…. What if, rather than adhering to a spirituality staked on the clarity and defense of one’s beliefs, we discovered a spirituality which held both belief and doubt as critical to our journey? What if we could see the process of doubting not as something to lightly entertain while we quietly and confidently “know” underneath it all, but as one of the hallmarks of a sincere and wise spirituality?

Second, Eric Meyer (a fellow Regent sojourner) has written a really thought-provoking piece examining the historicity of truth, the “reasonableness” of religion and whether a demonstration of this is (or ought to be) a goal worth pursuing. Another excerpt to pique your curiosity:

[T]here is no way out of history and into the universal—at least not without making some very “religious” sounding claims about the capabilities of human reason. Likewise, any notion of the steady progress of humankind under the tutelage of Reason (now unshackled from superstition) is telling a story about the origin, goal, and meaning of human life, and as such is making religious claims. Finally, secular ethics is, at its best parasitic on the values inculcated by religious traditions. At its worst, it is unaccountable to religious traditions altogether and falls prey to the temptation to objectify and instumentalize human beings and the rest of creation for the sake of whatever appears “rational” at the time. The “universal truths” of secular ethics are a harvest planted by someone else.

Two different pieces addressing different concerns, but both containing much to think about, I think, as we head into the Easter season.

 

Religion as “Playing Kingdom”

A large part of my thesis work involves exploring the historical impact of religion. Does it really “poison everything” or might its influence upon history be a little more nuanced than that? Religion has, obviously, had a massive impact on the development of western culture, some of it - imagine! - even positive in nature, but it’s also proven to be a gift that is easily abused and distorted. For a whole host of reasons, “religion” is a world that seems more likely to invoke negative reactions than positive ones today.

In today’s entry from Listening to Your Life, Buechner has a bit of a different take on the “what’s so good about religion?” question. Here’s his response to the query, posed by one of his students:

I found myself speechless. I felt surely that there must be something good about it. Why else was I there? But for the moment I couldn’t for the life of me think of what it was. Maybe the truth of it is that religion the way he meant it - a system of belief, a technique of worship, an institution - doesn’t really have all that much about it that is good when you come right down to it, and perhaps my speechlessness in a way acknowledged as much.

Unless you become like a child, Jesus said, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and maybe part of what that means is that in the long run what is good about religion is playing the way a child plays at being grown up until he finds that being grown up is just another way of playing and thereby starts to grow up himself. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until - in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignance and mystery of it - you start to see that the playing is itself the first-fruits of the Kingdom’s coming and of God’s presence within us and among us.

 

(Grateful?) Cognitive Minorities

I count it a good Sunday morning at church when I leave the building empowered with good ideas for living well. Among other things, I think, the Sunday morning service ought to provide people with tools for interpreting their experience (at an individual or collective level) through the lens of the biblical narrative. Church ought to be a place where people can go to have both the world, and their beliefs about it (religious or otherwise) rendered in intelligible terms, and in a manner that both challenges and encourages the way in which they participate in it. No small task, to be sure, but this morning’s service managed to accomplish all of these things, benefiting greatly from a little “outside help.”

Today we were joined by two Mennonite Brethren leaders from Québec, Éric Wingender of École de théologie évangélique de Montréal and Charles Martin, the moderator of the Québec MB Conference. Together, they provided us with a window into the religious culture of Québec , as well as a timely challenge regarding the nature of the church’s influence in the broader culture. The province of Québec, much like the Greater Vancouver area, is an overwhelmingly secular environment - one in which a public profession of Christianity is likely to be met either by bemused apathy or open hostility. Québec’s situation differs from other parts of Canada due to the historical influence of the Catholic Church - an influence which, according to Martin and Wingender, is widely perceived to be a negative one. The Quiet Revolution in the 1960’s - a period of accelerated secularization in Québec culture - figures prominently in the collective cultural mindset. Christianity is perceived largely as a thing of the past, a relic from a period of Québec’s history that is best forgotten.

So how is one who continues to believe that Jesus Christ really does represent the clue to history to respond in a cultural context such as this? Peter Berger used the term “cognitive minority” to describe those in the modern West who believe in the supernatural despite powerful social and psychological pressures toward secularization, and while Wingender did not use this term, Christians in Canada - whether in Montréal or Vancouver - will likely resonate with Berger’s explanation of it:

Whatever the situation may have been in the past, today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably of the majority, or people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well. This means that those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority… By a cognitive minority I mean a group of people whose view of the world differs significantly from the one generally taken for granted in their society.

In a context where the absence of belief in God is assumed, confidently self-identifying as “religious” isn’t always easy. Yet the fact that Christians no longer enjoy the status of “cognitive majority” is not necessarily something to be bemoaned. The message of Martin and Wingender in today’s service was that the overwhelmingly secular context in which many Canadians find themselves might just give us the chance to take a fresh look at how the nature of the gospel message ought to affect how Christians engage with the broader culture.

Both men strongly advocated a re-imagining of Christian influence within culture, moving away from the top-down approach those in Québec are so familiar with, and toward a “bottom-up” mentality, where Christians exercise influence through love of neighbour, compassion, building community, and seeking not only to present Christianity as a plausible “cognitive option,” but to demonstrate its truth in everyday life. On this view, the main issue is not “how do we take back what we’ve lost?” (especially when what we “had” might have been acquired illegitimately or immorally in the first place), but “what unique opportunities to reflect God’s redemptive gospel are made possible by our position as ‘cognitive minorities?’”

The text Wingender preached from this morning was Matthew 8:18-27. In these verses, Jesus displays two apparently contradictory ways in which God has worked and continues to work in the world. In 8:18-22 Jesus responds to a teacher of the law’s declaration to follow Jesus wherever he goes with an enigmatic description of the nomadic and uncertain nature of his ministry on earth. Wingender interpreted the “foxes have holes” statement as an expression of God’s peculiar and less-than-obvious way of working in the world. God “hides” himself from us in that he comes to us in unexpected ways that we find confusing and unsettling. Then, in the calming of the sea in 8:23-27, Jesus displays his power over nature, working in ways we are more accustomed to expect from a deity. This, Wingender referred to as God’s “revelatory” nature. Thus, God simultaneously hides and reveals himself from us. And the appropriate human response to God’s paradoxical manner of working in the world is trust.

So what does this have to do with how Christians, as “cognitive minorities” ought to think about and respond to culture? Simply put, God’s way of working in the world will sometimes seem strange to us. The loss of cultural influence by a once-dominant Christianity may not seem like a good thing - it may even seem to be something that God might have some interest in preventing. It certainly doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to “make disciples of all nations” (Mat 28:19).

But perhaps here in Canada we are entering or in the midst of a season of “hiddenness” as opposed to “revelation” with respect to how institutional Christianity relates to the broader culture. Perhaps the church’s mode of being in the world at times reflects the God they are called to image, operating in different ways - now advancing, now receding from view - in different historical contexts. For roughly 1500 years, God’s name was proclaimed or “revealed” by a culturally dominant church, which had both positive and negative consequences. Now, with the rapid secularization of the West, maybe the time has come for the “hidden” face of God to be proclaimed by a church who is humble, penitent, open to dialogue, and committed to loving our neighbours as ourselves.

I’m probably guilty of any number of exegetical errors in the preceding, but I am, at any rate, grateful for the message communicated by my French-Canadian brothers this morning. Both seemed deeply committed both to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and to embracing the challenge of representing him to a culture that seems, on the surface to have had enough of God. I’m grateful for their reminder that wherever we find ourselves - Québec, Vancouver, or anywhere in between - we must realize that God does not work according to the straightforward linear models of “progress” by which we evaluate “success.” He reveals. He hides. And we trust.

 

Telling our Story Well

My parents came down for a visit last weekend and left me with some listening material for the frequent drives out to Abbotsford that I am making these days. The Massey Lectures are an annual Canadian event in which a noted scholar gives a series of addresses on some topic of current interest. Among the many notable past Massey lecturers are Noam Chomsky, Jean Vanier, Margaret Visser, John Ralston Saul, and Stephen Lewis. In 2003 the guest of honour was the Canadian novelist and current professor of English at the University of Guelph, Thomas King. The title of his lecture series was “The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative,” and I spent today’s commute listening to his first lecture - “‘You’ll Never Believe What Happened’ is Always a Good Way to Start.” It was an absorbing and thought-provoking talk which left me wondering about the nature of stories and how our story-telling affects who we are and the influence we have on the world around us.

In the opening lecture, a wonderful example of King’s skill in storytelling, we are taken on a whirlwind tour through a Native creation myth. King skillfully weaves in everything from comedy to metaphysics, painting a picture of a world brought into being by the collaboration of animals and semi-divine human figures which is characterized by balance, harmony, and respect for non-human creation. It is a wonderful story, and a story well-told at that. King then contrasts this with the creation story which gave rise to, and continues to nourish “the West” - that cultural entity which traces its origins to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This creation story gets much less time than the Native one - in part because it is likely a familiar one to King’s audience, but also because King sees this story as giving rise to many of the evils which have plagued our world, not the least of which were perpetrated against the Native North American population of which King is a part. “How would the world be different,” King wonders, “if a Native creation myth had shaped Western culture? ” What if we’ve started out with the wrong story?

I’ve been picking away at the November issue of The Walrus for the last month or so. It’s a special issue devoted to Canada’s Arctic, and I have to admit that I was less than enthusiastic to see show up on my doorstep. “The Arctic” is just not an area of the world that grabs my interest, and it took me a long time to get into this issue. Gradually, however, I began to be drawn in by the stories of struggle and beauty which characterize life in this most extreme and unforgiving of environments. I was especially moved by the suffering and loss experienced by the Inuit people - the manner in which their culture has been steadily eroded by the encroachment of Western mass media, technology, and cultural values. The Arctic issue contains stories of courage, beauty, and hope, certainly, but just as many which are characterized by substance abuse, suicide, and hopelessness. Much of this is pinned, rightly or wrongly, on “the West” and, indirectly, on the Christian story which undergirds it, if only in an unacknowledged or indirect manner. As I read these stories of suffering and misery and continue to process King’s lecture, the question persists: what if we’ve started out with the wrong story?

“Once we tell a story, it is loose in the world,” says Thomas King, and it seems rather obvious that the Christian story - with all of its intentional and unintentional negative consequences - is here to stay. While I am inclined to question King’s characterization of Western religions as inherently “martial and hierarchical” and while I disagree with his characterization of “crime and punishment” being the “basis of Christian doctrine,” it is hard for me to disagree that the Christian story has been used by some to justify the gross mistreatment of others. It’s even harder for me to speak against an interpretation of the world that comes from a member of a group of people that have suffered at the hands of those committed to the story I adhere to. It is simply a fact that the Christian story has historically led to the privilege of some and the marginalization of others. This is not to suggest that those who built the world we live in were using this story correctly, but the fact remains: our story has not historically been kind to Native people. It’s not obvious that the story that gave rise to the West was or is or could be seen as “good news” by the Native peoples of North America.

In the question period following King’s inaugural lecture, one person asked the obvious “now what?” question. What do we do now? The Christian story is “loose in the world” and the effects - negative and positive, intentional and unintentional - brought forth by those who have historically subscribed to it cannot be undone. King responded by saying that we have to privilege the right kinds of stories, and we have to tell our stories well. He is careful to remind us that “the same story can be used to help or to hurt.” For me, this was the ray of hope for all of us who occupy positions of historical, cultural, racial, religious, or any other kind of privilege that has come at the expense of others. We can tell our story better. We can tell the Christian story - a story associated by so many, rightly or wrongly, with the many evils of our world - in ways that help rather than hurt. Even though we cannot undo the pain caused to, for example, the Native peoples of North America by those who have understood and told our story badly, we can resolve to tell it better. We can tell it in ways that bring life, healing, harmony, justice, and peace rather than the ways that our world is already, tragically, far too familiar with.

God has given us a story worth telling, but he has also given us the freedom to choose how we will tell it. I am grateful for Thomas King’s reminder that a well-told story can (and does) make all the difference in the world.

 

Who’s Afraid to Face Reality?

Over the course of the last half a year or so I’ve slogged through pretty much the entire catalogue of atheist writings that have come out in the last four years. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t been the most edifying experience I’ve ever gone through, but at the very least it does force one to think carefully about the claims these authors make about religious folks. One of the consistent refrains found in Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Onfray, Stenger and, before them, Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx is that religion is for people who are afraid to face reality as it is. The inability of religious people to deal with the harsh realities of life is claimed to lead them to wild flights of fantasy and delusion in order to provide comfort and security in a universe that, at rock bottom, is characterized by nothing but “blind pitiless indifference.”

I thought about this yesterday as I was sitting in church. Our congregation has had to deal with a number of difficult times in the last couple of years - one member murdered, others dealing with potentially serious complications in an unborn baby, one young man faced with the task of being the primary caregiver for his mother after a stroke, and many more dealing with loved ones suffering long-term physical and mental illnesses, and all of the pain that goes along with these things. Yesterday morning, in particular, our corporate prayer time seemed to simply be an endless litany of tragedy and suffering. At one point, I looked around and saw a host of heads bowed, in sadness and in prayer, silently bearing corporate witness to the simple truth that our faith does not immunize us from the difficulties of the world. I saw no flight from reality here, only a determination to grieve and hope together in a world where God can, at times, seem inexplicably silent. I saw no exulting in death as the portal into a spiritual utopia; rather I saw a people who felt the full weight of the pain of the world, but who nonetheless resolved to face it together, and to put their faith in a God who we believe will one day redeem the evils of our individual and collective histories.

I couldn’t help but contrast this with what the average North American is fed on a daily basis through the various media of irreligious popular culture. Here the message seems to be: extract whatever pleasure you can from the moment, enjoy your youth while it lasts and anesthetize yourself with mindless entertainment or buy another product to dull the pain (or the boredom) of reality. Our highest paid citizens are those who entertain us. Youth, strength, and beauty are exalted and clung to desperately through various “anti-aging” techniques, surgeries, and products. A quick scan of the average newsstand or a glance at the options in a typical evening of prime time television highlights our cultural obsession with the minutiae of the lives of celebrities (and their children, it turns out - I recently saw a magazine headline proudly declaring that their current issue had four pages devoted to what Tom Cruise’s kid is wearing these days). Twenty years after Neil Postman complained that we were in danger of fatally compromising public discourse with our obsession with entertainment, little has changed - we remain in danger of “amusing ourselves to death.” All of this could lead one to the conclusion that there are many ways of avoiding the harshness of reality, and not all of them are religious.

At the conclusion of yesterday morning’s service we celebrated the Eucharist together. It had been a fairly long and heavy morning. The text our pastor had preached from was Jeremiah 23 where the prophet chastises the religious leaders of Israel for declaring “peace” when peace was nowhere in sight. It was an indictment on the prophets of Israel for falsely representing reality - for being afraid or unwilling to face reality as it was. Jeremiah wanted his people to see what lay ahead - a time of great difficulty and hardship. While he believed that their time of exile would ultimately come to an end, this did not minimize or detract from his understanding of the suffering that lay ahead. Jeremiah wanted his people to look reality squarely in the eye.

I wonder if the Eucharist might be symbolic of a determination to look at the world in a “realistic” fashion. Through it, we acknowledge both that the world is not yet as it ought to be and that the manner in which it has been and is being redeemed is through the suffering self-sacrifice of the God who created it. The symbol of Christian hope is the broken body and blood of a crucified Redeemer - a reminder that God himself did not attempt to avoid the pain of reality and that we ought not to expect to either. At the same time, the Eucharist is, obviously, a symbol of profound hope - that our intuitions about the nature of the world will one day be validated and that the Christ event really is the key to history. We remember what redemption has cost, but we look forward to its ultimate consummation. And we do all of this, I would suggest, realistically - we acknowledge reality for what it is, but we also acknowledge ourselves for who we are - creatures designed to expect more from ourselves and from the world we inhabit.

 

Gospel, Culture, and Church (and Gnosticism)

This past weekend was spent at a study conference entitled “Culture, Gospel, and Church” held in Abbotsford which was put on by the Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren churches. Among the highlights of the conference, from my perspective, was Bruce Guenther’s lecture on how Anabaptists in general, and Mennonite Brethren (MB) in particular have historically engaged or, more often, failed to engage the broader culture. The experience of MB’s in revolutionary Russia, combined with the suffering and hardship they experienced upon immigrating to Canada produced a people who clung to their ethnic heritage and viewed the broader culture in which they found themselves with suspicion and fear. “Culture” was a word used to describe those on the “outside.” “Insiders” were to remain pure by isolating themselves (sometimes physically, more often culturally) and avoid contamination by the broader society.

It was interesting for me to learn about some of the historical roots of the MB ambivalence toward “culture.” I don’t recall ever being explicitly taught that culture was something to be feared or resisted, but I do remember having this nagging suspicion growing up that many of the things that others found enjoyable or stimulating was probably somehow “immoral” or “off limits” to me because I was a Christian. “The world” was not an arena of discourse and activity that was to be confidently and curiously engaged or challenged, but something to probably be feared and avoided. I was simultaneously intrigued to see how deeply rooted this sentiment has historically been in MB consciousness and curious to know how best to contribute to promoting a different and, I believe, healthier view regarding how Christians ought to engage the broader culture.

Today I was reading a bit more from Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God and I came across his discussion of gnosticism and the constant temptation this has presented to Christians (among others) down through the ages. If any way of looking at the world could be viewed as antagonistic to the cultivation of human culture it would be gnosticism which posits a radical dualism between the physical world and the putatively more real and important spiritual world. The Mennonite Brethren historical rejection of “worldly” values in order to focus on eternal salvation seems to represent a form of gnosticism; this world was deemed to be beyond hope and focus ought to be on securing one’s status in the one to come. Lilla does a good job of describing both the problem with this view and why the broader Christian community has historically resisted the various gnosticisms that have popped up:

If Christ’s sacrifice only justified us, however, gnosticism would still remain a temptation. We would be at one with God but still alienated from the world around us, especially from our fellow men. The justified Christian believer would t hen disturbingly resemble the gnostic heretic, cultivating his private faith, shunning the world, and awaiting an apocalypse that would destroy the evil cosmos. That is why the theologians have always maintained that Christianity, properly interpreted, is destined to transform the world, not flee it. The world as created by God was and is good. Sin caused a rupture within creation, but Christ’s coming offered the promise of reconciliation - of man with his God, and of men with one another.

I think that MB’s could fairly be accused of tending toward a gnostic approach to culture in the past, minimizing the Christian mandate to be a part of the transformation of the world and fleeing it instead. At the same time, it’s hard to summarily condemn an approach to culture that was forged during a period of immense suffering and profound social and cultural dislocation. Suffering tends to render one’s options in stark and binary terms. The gnostic impulse may be theologically inappropriate, but there are times when it is entirely understandable.

As I read Lilla and continue to reflect on the past weekend’s conference I find myself wondering if the current move by MB’s toward a more positive approach to culture is at least partly a function of increased prosperity and material comfort. Culture will always seem more valuable and worthy of embrace when our experience of it is a positive one, and MB’s ascent of the social ladder over the past half-century or so combined with the peace and security of Canadian society in general has made it increasingly difficult to construe our relationship to culture in “us/them” terms.

Theologically, I think that there are good reasons to adopt a view of gospel, culture, and church that emphasizes integration and transformation rather than wholesale rejection. There’s simply no way to avoid the fact that gospel, culture, are closely connected, regardless of whether we acknowledge this or not. The gospel should indeed play a role in the transformation of any human culture, but every understanding of the gospel and attempt to live that out in the church is at the same time profoundly culturally conditioned.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering the causes of a view of culture that we now seek to repudiate. MB theology of culture may have lagged behind others at times - indeed, it may continue to do so - but a view of the world that is forged by suffering and hardship is always one that I will be inclined to be sympathetic toward even as I actively attempt to contribute to its correction.