Panentheism and Theodicy: Creator's guilt

I strongly suspect that the panentheistic approach isn't a silver bullet for theodicy problems, but it does have some interesting implications. For example, Scoots asked...

Would we understand a panentheistic God as having created the cosmos, i.e., with some form of intention? Because if we don't, then we still need some explanation for why there's a universe, and if we do then that god would still bear culpability for making a world where horrors would take place.

I think a panentheist could go either way on this one, depending on how he understands the relationship between God and the universe. An epiphenominal panentheist* who says that the mind of God arises from out of the universe, would probably say that God did not create the universe, but instead the universe created God. Regarding the origin of the universe ... who knows? I guess he could ascribe to some scientific theory about the of the universe, or he could dip into some narrative that attempts to explain existence, or he could simply argue that the question of "why" doesn't make any sense with regard to brute existence.

A pattern panentheist* might argue that God is not personal, and is therefore both unable to willfully "create" and, by similar reasoning, exempt from guilt altogether.

But a Platonic panentheist* might say that God is personal and did in fact create the universe. Then, like Scoots says, he would need to justify God's decision to create. If God created the universe, and could have foreseen the horrors that would come to pass, then God should be held responsible for those horrors. I expect a Platonic panentheist would use one of the many arguments that traditional theists have already made attempting to extricate God from creator's guilt. Maybe he would take a line from Romans 9 and say that it's OK for God to create things with the intent of destroying them. I don't like that approach very much. Maybe he would argue this is this is indeed the best possible world, and that the goods of existence outweigh the horrors that seem to remove any possibility of meaning from that existence. I don't like that approach either.

But here's a possibility: what if the idea of "creator's guilt" makes sense when discussing, say, the atomic bomb, but is inherently contradictory when discussing the creation of worlds. Here's what I mean:

Suppose that God is puttering around in God's kitchen, making Mrs. God an egg sandwich and trying to decide whether or not to create a universe. And to simplify things, let's further suppose that God wants to create a deterministic universe, where all events in time can be known based on the universe's starting configuration.

Also, God is making the egg sandwich using eggs from free-range, grain-fed chickens, so there's no guilt to deal with there.

To decide whether a universe is worth creating, God can simply follow the implications of the universe's configuration, thinking it through, so to speak, and decide whether the horrors in this potential universe are justifiable. If they're not justifiable, God will refrain from creating the universe. If they are justifiable, then God can go right ahead and do whatever God wants.

So, settling down in an easy chair, God begins thinking through our universe. God begins with the big bang, or whatever came before that, and proceeds to the formation of earth, and the animal ferocity of life as it evolved. God's mind simulates the universe perfectly, so God knows your person in its entirety. God knows what Abraham will think about Isaac, and what Pharaoh will do about the Israelites, and what you will think about these words you are reading right now. God considers, in every detail, the suffering of starving children, the grief of mothers, lovers, friends, every single detail up to the point that God decides should be the end of the universe.

But wait.

In thinking so exactly about the world, and its people, and their thoughts and feelings, God has essentially created that world.

In information systems terms, the hardware of the universe is the mind of God. The program of the universe is composed of its its initial configuration and physical laws. And because, in our panentheistic model, the mind of God is the only reality we have to work with, the only way to know the outcome the universe is to run the program. Once the program has been run, the horrors have already occurred. God simply can't think through a potential universe without making it an actual universe.

And if that's not curious enough: what if this is the simulation? What if, right now, God is simultaneously considering all possible universes, and the salvation of the universe involves God's ultimately selecting the best possible universe, or - even better - merging all the possible universes into the Best Possible Universe?

Hunh. Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.


* I just kind of made up the terms "epiphenominal panentheist", "pattern panentheist" and "Platonic panentheist", so you might not want to use them in essays or on dates or anywhere important.

Panentheism and Theodicy: Why worship?

Next, Connor and Jennifer hand us this question regarding the God described in the previous posts.

What about him is compelling, or inspires you to worship or follow him?

I think I'm going to have to begin by unpacking some of this panentheism stuff. Briefly, panentheism is the belief that God both transcends and is radically present within the universe. It is distinct from pantheism, which teaches that God and the universe are identical. So in terms of set theory, pantheism teaches that Universe = God, while panentheism teaches that Universe ⊂ God.

Paul's speech to the Areopagus begins to move in this direction:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

There are lots of metaphorical approaches to this idea, each with slightly different implications. You might take the Platonic route and think of God as the Divine Nature or Form of Divinity, and all the things in the universe as being instances that reflect this form to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Pattern, with all things in the universe exhibiting this pattern to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Mind, a consciousness arising from the interactions of the physical universe in the same way that a creature's mind arises from the physical interactions in its brain.

Each of these metaphors provides a different way of describing God's relationship with the world, and each has slightly different implications for God's relationship to the good. If God is most accurately described as a Form that exists separately from the world, but is instantiated within the world, then good becomes the degree to which an instance reflects the divine form.

If God is most accurately described as a pattern that is replicated on small and grand scales throughout the universe (think fractals), then good becomes a part of this pattern, or perhaps is identical with the pattern itself.

If God is the mind that arises from the interactions of the universe, then the good is likely an idea that has some independence from God, but the mind of God would always affirm the good, and insofar as the mind of God could interact with other minds, the mind of God would always promote the good.

I think that these metaphors present sufficient reason for feeling worshipful awe and affection toward God: First, because God is immense, subsuming the universe we know and probably all the universes that we don't know; second, because God is present, immanent, intimately involved in every moment, suffering as we suffer, and rejoicing as we rejoice; third, because we can identify God with all the good we experience, either because God is the source of that goodness, or evident within that goodness, or personally affirming that goodness.

Panentheism and Theodicy: What do we do with the Bible?

In comments on my original theodicy post, Jennifer made several comments like this:

You could reject special providence, but I find it hard to reject the special providence if you're going to hold that the Scriptures contain anything that resembles truth regarding the nature of God

Sure enough, it is a royal mess. You have God dropping pillars of smoke and fire, smiting people hither, rescuing people thither, impregnating a virgin, sending angels here, sending angels there. You have Jesus walking on water, miraculously healing people, miraculously feeding people, and rising from the dead. You have tongues of fire, apostles freed by strategic earthquakes, casting out evil spirits, and raising the dead.

And then you have me sitting here, saying that this sort of behavior poses a logical dilemma that can best be resolved by saying that, in fact, God didn't do those things.

Now it's easy to see how I could maintain this belief and reject the validity of the Bible. And it's easy to see how I could abandon this belief and accept the validity of the Bible. The odd thing is that I'm saying that the Bible is valuable, but that God didn't do all these things that the Bible says God did. If the Bible contains all this misinformation about God, how can it be valuable?

I'm going to begin my answer by making an assertion about the Bible: The Bible was not written by God.

For some people, this statement will be terribly obvious, and for others it will be terribly offensive. For those who find it offensive, I'll just mention the internal contradictions in the text (variations in the number of Solomon's stalls and horses in 1 Kings 4 and 2 Chronicles 9; insects with four feet in Leviticus 11, how long Jesus spent in the tomb, yada yada). But if none of that makes *any* impression on you, please consider the following biblical story from Numbers 31:

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

And the LORD was displeased with Moses for his lecherous and genocidal counsel, and struck him dead on the spot.

Oh, wait, that's not how it ends, is it? It ends like this...

The LORD said to Moses, "You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. Divide the spoils between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community."
...
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.

I find that offensive. So now we can all be offended.

Really, though, my point is that it's difficult to read the Bible as a Perfect Book provided by a Perfect God. Either God's severely messed up, or the book is, and (based on the theological axioms I mentioned earlier) I have to prefer the latter.

Now if you're still with me, let's go on to another assertion: The Bible is, first and foremost, a collection of stories. It is not a divine rulebook. It is a story about how people - mostly, Israelite people - have experienced God in some unusual circumstances. Like all stories, it was written by a person (actually, many people) with differing goals, values, biases, priorities, perspectives and ethical blind spots. Like all stories, it was written for a particular audience, within a particular society at a particular point in history. This doesn't mean that other people can't read the story and learn things from it, but it does mean that there's probably a disconnect between what the text meant to its intended audience and what it should mean to us.

These two assertions encourage us to approach the text very cautiously and interpret it with an eye to the likely biases of the writers. When a writer says, "God said this," we should read that not as a divine claim that "God said this," but, "I think God said this," a statement that could be true even if God didn't really say such a thing.

This is the generous approach, by the way. The cynical approach would assume that the writer was intentionally putting words in God's mouth to get the God Trump for manipulating people.

So there's one way in which the Bible could be considered true: it's true insofar as when people say, "I heard God say this," we can assert that those people are telling the truth, although it's possible that they could have been mistaken about what God actually said.

But I don't think this goes far enough. The Bible has been revered for thousands of years by millions of people, and seems to capture some deep truths about the human experience of God.

I think this is the sense in which we should understand the Bible to be true. Somehow, it distills many human experiences of God into a single compilation. And so rather than trying to figure out whether we have to be baptized to be saved, or whether God created the world in 7 days, we should be looking for broad themes that are woven throughout the Bible. It's here that we can expect to see God's inspiration, threading hints about Divinity through its disparate stories, occasionally surprising us, continually nudging us toward goodness and love.

God Exists, God is Good, God is Love

Connor asked:

Could you say a little more about dropping special providence, but sticking with God is good. It seems to me that most people, at least at the gut level, claim God to be good because of special providence, i.e. Jesus (as God) dies for my sins so I'm saved, yanks me out of Egypt, whatever.

That is a bit of a conundrum, isn't it? The Israelites say, "we know God is good because God brought us up out of Egypt". But I'm saying, "if God brought you up out of Egypt, God is not good."

Let me cheat a little and rephrase Connor's question as, "If there is no special providence, how do you prove God is good?"

The short answer is, I can't.

My theology begins with a pair of unprovable statements: "God exists" and "God is good". My theological goal is not to prove these statements. If anything, my goal is to disprove them. I want to see if there is a way to understand the world given that these two axioms are true. While I can and can present arguments for each of them, and can relate my own experiences that reinforce these beliefs, and can relate the experiences of other people that have been elevated to the status of Church Tradition, I'm not really concerned with proving them true. These are things that I simply believe, in the same way I believe that the sky is blue. You could argue the heck out of the proposition "the sky is green", and I could try my hardest to believe it is green, but in the end I simply would be unable to affirm, from the depths of my being, that the sky is green.

Once upon a time, my theology probably operated under the influence of a third axiom, "God regularly intervenes in the world", but I've since decided that this one simply won't jive with the first two axioms and my experience of the world. However, this panentheism project is an attempt to see if it's possible to soften that axiom somewhat so that it still captures an important part of the Christian witness; in particular, I'm seeing what might happen if I changed "God regularly intervenes in the world" to, "God is intimately involved with the world," or "God loves people," or something like that.

So really, these three axioms underpin my assumption that theology is something worth doing. If God does not exist, theology is silly. If God is not good, theology is dark and futile. If God does not care about the world, then why care about God?

But if these three axioms are true, and can be brought into harmony with my experience of the world, then theology may actually be a worthy endeavor.

My theology is not for people who have happy, rosy relationships with God, and who believe things like "God made the world in 7 days" or "God got me a parking space." My theology is for people who are suffering, or who see the enormity of the suffering in the world and are - rightfully - furious with God. If I can present a theology that provides a way to understand God as good and loving within a world full of horrors, then I think I will have done something helpful.

Theodicy

Theodicy (thE-'ä-d&-sE): A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.

For those of you who haven't encountered theodicy before: it's generally depressing. In fact, it could be magnificently depressing. So if you haven't already been wondering about God, and evil, and all that, you may want to go read something more pleasant. Like cute overload or something.

Still with me? Great.

Let's start this mess with a few observations about how Christians answer Big Philosophical Questions.

1. When answering the question, "What is God like?", Christians generally make several claims about the attributes of God, among them that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. The Bible seems to support these claims.

2. When answering the question, "How does God interact with the creation?", Christians generally endorse an idea of a God who is intimately involved with the creation, particularly with human beings. Christians also usually endorse special providence, wherein God occasionally interrupts the natural order to do something helpful for people. The Bible seems to support these claims.

3. When answering the question, "Is there evil?", Christians generally say, "yes." Sometimes people say that evil is illusory, or that evil is merely an absence of good, or that all evil is constructive and eventually has positive results, but sane people generally acknowledge that the world is full of evil - sometimes perpetrated by people (murder, rape, genocide), and sometimes perpetrated at random by nature (disease, earthquake, tsunami). Most sane people also acknowledge that often, this evil is so egregious that it destroys people, and it seems patently ridiculous to insist that these sorts of evil (called "Horrors", in a recent related discussion) could ever be constructive.

From the perspective of Western philosophers, this slice of worldview is fraught with peril. More specifically, it is internally contradictory. The answers to the questions can't all be right ... one or more of them must be wrong. This is where theodicy starts to show up. People - both Christians and non-Christians - notice what appear to be contradictions in the standard Christian story about the world, and so someone has to resolve the contradictions.

In general, there seem to be three ways that people go about doing this.

1. People deny the question has any validity, whether because it is immoral to question God in this way, or because God's ways are mysterious and incomprehensible, or what have you. Really, no discussion can be had after this point.

2. People try to define terms in such a way to dissolve the contradiction. So, for example, someone might claim that all-good does not mean that God ought to rescue children trapped under the rubble of a building collapsed by an earthquake. Or they might claim that all-powerful does not mean that God can do things that are inherently contradictory, and then show that intervening on behalf of abused children would raise an inherent contradiction.

3. People try to find a leg of the argument that they can let go. So, for example, process theologians might claim that God does not really fit the traditional descriptions: that God's moral character is developing just like a person's does, so the claim that God is all-good is simply inaccurate. People who are unwilling to deviate from the traditional description of God might try to give up a different leg, perhaps claiming that evil does not really exist, or if it does, God is not responsible for creating it or intervening to fix it.

Now, a few final observations:

First, the "problem of evil", as it has often been called, raises for atheists no analogous "problem of good". The problem of evil arises specifically because theists claim that a certain kind of God exists, and that this God has a certain kind of relationship with the world, which seems incompatible with the existence of evil. On the other hand, people who claim that there is no God need not explain why God allows evil, and they also need not explain why, if God does not exist, there is good. The painfully simple atheistic answer to that question is that good is not contingent on a God.

Second, in my estimation, the problem of evil is the strongest single argument against worshiping God. If God does not exist at all, it's ridiculous to worship. If God does not provide for followers, why worship? If God is not good, why worship? In fact, if God is not good, we may have a moral obligation *not* to worship. To make matters worse, this is a visceral argument. People can brush off a claim like "the ontological argument for the existence of God is invalid", but it's harder, rhetorically, to brush off the suffering of millions of people over millions of years.

Some people manage to do it, but it's harder.

As a result, it is absolutely necessary that Christians do good theodicy, theodicy that not only can be accepted by those in the Christian community, but those outside as well. And as others have said before, people outside the community can't take you seriously if your answers won't stand up to Auschwitz.

I've recently decided that, for me, the moral contradictions in the problem of evil trump all the other problems. I absolutely accept the claim that special providence is incompatible with perfect divine goodness: A god who delivers money to American churches but fails to rescue children from Indonesian tsunamis cannot be a good god.

But I also am incapable of dropping the claim that God is all-good. I am simply incapable of releasing that belief. So I have to drop something else ... and to me, the thing that seems most droppable is the doctrine of special providence. So I have to claim that when money arrives in the mail, or when I get a good parking place, or when a friend's cancer disappears, God hasn't intervened or done anything out of the ordinary.

Obviously, this move puts a new burden on me, first to explain how I can understand the Bible to be true in light of this doctrine, and second to explain some other way that God might relate to the world. And it also doesn't solve the problem of how God could be morally justified in having created a world that allows for so much horror. I'll talk about those things in a later post.

I swear

I'm going to get around to posting a real post. Regardless of the hot water leak in the slab of my house, I really am going to have some free time this week.

But this is just too rich.

Question #6: Regarding Walter Reed Medical Center

Which would you rather give for your country, your legs or your life?

Question #5: Punctuation

Continuing our series of odd questions ... quick, is the following sentence correctly punctuated?

Come in and enjoy a home-style dinner with all the fixin's!

Definitive Answer from Casey:
"Though it looks wonky somehow, I think it is. "Home-style" is not in the dictionary, so it's hard to say if it should be a hyphenate, and though "fixin's" looking like an improperly placed possessive, it seems like a proper conjunction."

Equality Ride 2007

Looks like the Equality Riders won't be coming back to ACU this year. But they will be at Baylor...

Question #4: Zephyrs

Anyone remember the name of that church song with the line about the "gentle zephyrs"?

Definitive Answer: As expected, my mom and dad figured it out.

The song is Beulah Land. Interestingly enough, in our old songbook the first line was changed to "I've reached the land of love divine".


Beulah Land by Edgar P. Stites

I’ve reached the land of corn and wine,
And all its riches freely mine;
Here shines undimmed one blissful day,
For all my night has passed away.

    * Refrain:
    O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
    As on thy highest mount I stand,
    I look away across the sea,
    Where mansions are prepared for me,
    And view the shining glory shore,
    My heav’n, my home forevermore!

My Savior comes and walks with me,
And sweet communion here have we;
He gently leads me by His hand,
For this is Heaven’s borderland.

A sweet perfume upon the breeze,
Is borne from ever vernal trees,
And flow’rs that never fading grow
Where streams of life forever flow.

The zephyrs seem to float to me,
Sweet sounds of Heaven’s melody,
As angels with the white-robed throng
Join in the sweet redemption song.

My Son My Executioner

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a reading by the U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall.

The Poet Laureate is almost 80, and doesn't move too quickly. He sat behind a long, narrow table covered with a white tablecloth, and occasionally, when he got involved in a poem, his foot would poke, poke, poke at it.

I enjoyed his poetry. Listening to a thoughtful, eloquent lector made me feel like I was participating in something important and mysterious, and when he finished, I felt like I'd been to church. As far as feelings go, I haven't been to church in quite a while.

Here's one of his early poems, written about his first child.

My Son My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
  I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
  And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
  Of immortality
Your cries and hungers document
  Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
  Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
  And start to die together.

*piff*

Woah.

I think a fuse in my brain just blew. And nobody else is likely to understand why. But here's my attempt at an explanation.

Jack Whelan just said this:

The encounter with the Christ is an experience of insemination in the Matthew 13 sense (parable of sower, mustard seed, etc.). This seed has a subversive effect within the soul life of those who are inseminated, and they find that if they nurture its germination in the right way, a new regime grows within.

This was a marginal point within his post about postmodern Catholicism.

Now briefly: The idea of "seed" is an ancient idea, an archetype that goes way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back. It may be so old that it's actually genetic rather than just memetic. It's all tied up with life and death, with dying to live again, with harvest gods, with Jesus, with sex. And, as hinted at in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, the idea of seed is all tied up with modern things, too, particularly potentially world-changing technologies such as genetics and nanotech.

Another primary theme in The Diamond Age is subversiveness ... the idea that things change for the better primarily because of tiny changes that happen out of public view, and perhaps in opposition to public norms.

Those two ideas rattle around in my head fairly often. I know they're really important ideas, but I'm not sure why. So anything that talks about "seed" or "subversion" will light up my pattern-matcher.

Particularly things that also talk about "Matthew", and my lucky number, "13".

Hrm.

Question #3: Regarding Social Norms

Say you, personally, wanted to change a social norm. In light of the last 100 years of American history, what method would you use to make that change?

Question #2: Regarding Artificial Intelligence

Why is it so hard to design a machine that can make free, undetermined choices?

Question #1: Regarding the Shoah

In Jewish history, is the Holocaust effectively the opposite of the Exodus?

Heavens to betsy

I've written a little lately about books I've been reading, but what about the books I haven't been reading? Specifically, what about the book my wife is reading about Chinese Christians in the early 1980's, The Heavenly Man?

Because I'm not reading this book, I only know what my wife tells me. And basically, she tells me that it sounds kind of like the New Testament. Church leader gets put in prison, hears a voice, his hands are loosed, and he walks out of the prison, making a miraculous leap to the top of a wall and a miraculous leap across a sewage-filled moat to complete his escape. Back home, his wife has had a vision that he has been captured, and the church has been praying and fasting on his behalf.

Yeah, sounds like the New Testament. But the Book of Mormon sounds a lot like the Old Testament.

I say that, not because I have any good reason to believe these things didn't happen, but because I'm kind of afraid that they did.

Why am I afraid?

I'm afraid because thousands of African Christians didn't walk away from their murderers.

Because thousands of men, women and children didn't walk through tsunamis unharmed.

Because 6 million Jews didn't walk out of Nazi death camps.

In other words, I'm afraid that I'm going to believe that these things actually happened, which will force me into Dostoyevsky's corner, where I have to admit twin propositions like:

1. God exists and acts in the world

2. God only acts on the behalf of those who tickle God with prayers, or fasting, or whatever gets God off.

For me, this is the basic problem with special providence and supplicatory prayer. Can we call God "good" if God only rescues those who recite the proper incantations ... or are lucky enough to have wives back home, reciting the incantations on their behalf? And if this capricious, megalomaniacal God really were the God of the universe, could we morally justify worshipping it?

A few bucks for things she needed

So a few of us are up at the church building this morning, getting lunch ready. Woman walks in and tells me about how she got jumped at the bus station. Shows me her broken glasses. Tells me how the nice bus people reinstated her ticket, thank the Lord, but now she needs some help for the trip to Dallas.

Sorry, I tell her. I don't ever give anybody cash.

Which I don't.

Buying food instead of giving people cash may take a bit longer, but it's darn hard to trade Chicken Express for drugs or booze. And I was pretty sure that this woman wasn't headed to Dallas, but to the crack house down the street. Her story wasn't very good. Her heart wasn't in it. She didn't want to lie to me. Really, he just wanted a couple bucks to buy whatever it was she needed to make her feel better for a little while, to forget whatever she needed to forget.

So she turned down my offer of food to take with her, because food wasn't really what she needed. She left looking tired and sad, telling me, as she walked out the door, that she hoped I would have a nice day.

But I wouldn't have a nice day. I had called her bluff, and for some reason, I felt pretty bad about it.

I used to think giving people drug money was patently bad, but now I'm starting to wonder. Maybe some people legitmately need drugs. And rather than pretending that what they need is food, maybe I should think about offering them ... safer drugs. I mean, really: life looks pretty bleak sometimes, and we cope the best way we know how. Street kids in Central America sniff glue, because it makes their hunger go away. Maybe Texans do meth, crack, or whatever because it's the relief they have access to.

In other words, maybe people do meth because they can't get Prozac.

Troop Surge Address

Just so you don't miss it, the President is supposed to address the nation tonight at 8 p.m. Central (GMT -6) regarding his proposal for increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Democrats in congress have already started advancing legislation that would require authorization for any such surge.

(Oh, and I assume everyone knows we've been dropping bombs in Somalia? Just a heads-up.)

Jesus Fish

I walked past a massive black Suburban in a parking lot today, and noticed that it was sporting a school of Jesus Fish, looked something like this:


Obviously, the four fish represent four family members. My question for you is ... and I want your knee-jerk response ... which fish do you think represents dad?

Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk

My deepest apologies for being so off-topic ... but you've gotta see this.



(thx, laughing jack.)

Another blog for you

Jack @ After The Future:

Societies evolve, and with that evolution comes painful losses with the important gains. Every society, including ours, must learn the trick of what to hold onto and what to let go of. It's not easy. The extreme cultural right is the party of hanging on no matter what; the extreme cultural left is the party of letting go no matter what. Most people live mostly unconsciously in the conflict between the two tendencies, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other. Sane people in the middle have to find a way to consciously, artfully synthesize the two tendencies. That's what it means to me to be a centrist--the center is defined by this integrationist project, which is very different from just splitting the difference between the extremes. Integration in this sense is a spiritual activity, but that's a subject for another time.

Google Zeitgeist

Mark Elrod (I always want to type "Mark Aelrod") posted about Google Zeitgeist earlier today. He just looked at the top searches in 2006, but he seemed to miss some interesting things in the other ratings:

The "where is list":

1. where is togo
2. where is matt
3. where is torino
4. where is darfur
5. where is villanova
6. where is montenegro
7. where is angola
8. where is .com au
9. where is palestine
10. where dubai

Well you can all stop searching. I'm right here.

(BTW, this is probably what they were looking for.)

(Also interesting: For those of you who know my last name, you can search for "where is matt lastname" and find an amazon list that is NOT mine, but looks suspiciously me-ish. If you search for "matthew blog" you will find on page 2 a blog about Matthew at Harding. Also not me.)

Simplify

It's lunchtime, now. I traipsed through a rare Abilene drizzle to grab Subway's Two for Tuesday, and now I'm sitting at my desk, munching on one of the Two and drawing little boxes and arrows on a sheet of printer paper, three-holed to fit in one of my Very Important three-ring binders.

The boxes and arrows represent different areas of my life - the layout of my home is in one box, the schedule of my week in another - because I'm trying to get things straight. I have this emotionally pressing need to simplify my life. I'm not quite sure what this means, or what the benefits would be, but the feeling is there all the same. My life feels ... cluttered.

Maybe this drive to reduce clutter is one that has arisen from programming, and I'm trying to nest and encapsulate things neatly so that I can hold the entire idea of My Life in my head all at the same time.

Maybe it's about mastery, and I think that if I can reduce the number of entities I encounter on a daily basis - clothes, books, toothbrushes, vehicles, people - I can have more control over my environment.

Or maybe it's that I think that if I could clean up my life, it would be more efficient. I would get more benefit, or be more productive, or something more positive per unit time. Maybe I'm approaching 30 and developing an unsettling, subconscious feeling that I'm wasting my life.

Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom. The illusion of separation of subject from object is best removed by the elimination of physical activity, mental activity and emotional activity. There are many disciplines for this. One of the most important is the Sanskrit dhyana, mispronounced in Chinese as "Chan" and again mispronounced in Japanese as "Zen." Phaedrus never got involved in meditiation because it made no sense to him. In his entire time in India "sense" was always logical consistency and he couldn't find any honest way to abandon this belief. That, I think, was creditable on his part.

But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.

Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.

He returned to his Midwest, picked up a practical degree of journalism, married, lived in Nevada and Mexico, did odd jobs, worked as a journalist, a science writer and an industrial-advertising writer. He fathered two children, bought a farm and a riding horse and two cars and was starting to put on middle-aged weight. His pursuit of what had been called the ghost of reason had been given up. That's extremely important to understand. He had given up.

Because he'd given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an occasional glimpse of inner emptiness shown in some short stories he wrote at the time, his days passed quite usually.

What started him up here into these mountains isn't certain. His wife seems not to know, but I'd guess it was perhaps some of those inner feelings of failure and the hope that somehow this might take him back on the track again. He had become much more mature, as if the abandonment of his inner goals had caused him somehow to age more quickly.

Hm.

I hadn't intended for this post to be about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but there you go. This bit makes me a bit nervous, if you want to know the truth. Phaedrus goes into the mountains and pretty soon he ends up insane. And if it's all the same, I'd prefer to avoid insane.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.

Bah, humbug.

'Convert or die' game divides Christians

I expect you've heard about this game already, but here's some stuff I didn't know:

Left Behind Games' president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is pacifist because players lose "spirit points" every time they gun down nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by having their character pray.

...

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics.

...

The Rev. Tim Simpson, a Jacksonville, Fla., Presbyterian minister and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, added: "So, under the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?"

Thanks to Colby for the linkage.

I'm going to go hide under the bed now.

Zen and the Art: Changing the World

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I recently read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. A surprising number of people (two) seemed to want to know what I thought of the book. So being the accommodating fellow I am, I'm going to attempt to write about it.

Now this won't be a scholarly literary analysis, or a cliffs note summary, or really any kind of review that any self-respecting publication might be interested in. Instead, I'm simply going to try to describe, in a fairly disorganized way, the sorts of things that happen when the thoughts in my head get mushed together with the thoughts in Zen.

What the book is kind of about

For those of you who haven't read Zen, a brief summary might be in order. Zen really seems to be two books, the first being a narrative about the author taking a cross-country motorcycle trip with his son, with periodic flashbacks discussing the author's life and thinking, all the way up to the point where some mental health experts got ahold of him and solved his various problems by applying choice electrical currents to the appropriate areas of his brain.

The second book, interleaved with the first, is a philosophical investigation of separateness. It's a thoroughly Buddhist attempt to contradict our tendency to reduce, subdivide and compartmentalize the world. In my opinion, this is the meat of the book: the narrative is just a framework for moving the reader along and, at some points, for illustrating the author's philosophy.

An interesting thing

Here's something from Zen that I found interesting:

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important _end products_ of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values of[sic] right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

How should you go about trying to change the world, if you're turned on by that sort of thing?

Pirsig seems to suggest that you're going to get the best results if you focus on improving yourself. And this approach makes a lot of sense: if all the leaves on a tree are green, one's experience of the tree should be green. If all the people in a society are kind, one's experience of the society should be one of kindness.

Then why write a book?

I suppose that one answer would be: you improve yourself to the point where you have something worthwhile to say to other people, and *then* you write your book. Another answer is: "Rob, you're full of crap." If you want to change the world, then bottom-up methods are important, but top-down methods are also good. Writing a book, reforming a government, starting a charity - all of these methods are just as likely to be effective as "make myself a better person".

This poses some problems from a Buddhist point of view: it reinforces my tendency to distinguish between myself and the world. But another problem - a related problem - is that one has to decide what kinds of changes to try to make. And this, I think, is why Pirsig's emphasis on introspection has merit: because effective change does not necessarily equal positive change. If your values are screwed up, then your broad attempts to change the world are likely to screw the world up rather than make it better.

So how do you get good values?

"Good values." Heh.

OK, I'm stuck. Somebody come pull me out.

Get wet

Hunh. I guess today's a day for baptism.

From Pastor K at South Bay Christian Church:

Anne Lamott writes that "Christianity is about water. 'Everyone who thirsteth, come ye to the waters.' It's about baptism… It's about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rains and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving into all those things we can't control: it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched."

And, if you're the audio-visual sermon illustration type, here's yer fix, courtesy of Steve Allison:

Calling God "He"

So I'm having a conversation about using gender-neutral language in church, and an acquaintance - a woman - injects this comment:

God is a man. And if he's not a man, well he's sure not a woman.

Props to me: I didn't bite through my tongue.

I consoled myself with the thought that this isn't often an explicit theology: most conservative Christian churches probably hold that God is neither exclusively male nor exclusively female. The problem this presents is that the language most of these churches use to refer to God is exclusively male. And language matters. Because our language is currently at odds with our theology, we need to change one or the other.

One of the objections I hear for changing from masculine language is, "what are you going to use instead?" Specifically, the questioner usually wants to know what I am going to use as the singular pronoun when referring to God. So in a sentence like this:

God is good, and he wants us to be good.

they want to know, what am I going to use to replace "he?"

At first glance, this is a significant problem, because the English language has no gender-neutral singular personal pronoun.

"She" is not a good alternative, because it causes the same problems as "he". (Although one could argue for a sort of linguistic affirmative action, wherein we should call God "she" for the next several thousand years to make up for always having called God "he" before.)

Likewise, "it" is out of the question, because most of these people believe in a personal God, and calling a person "it" is degrading. (Although one could argue that calling a person "she" is also degrading.)

But the obvious answer, which sometimes gets overlooked, is: don't use a pronoun.

God is good, and God wants us to be good

Problem solved.

But won't this be cumbersome? Won't it sound really awkward?

Well, do the things said about God on this blog sound awkward? Because this is the language I already use, both in writing and speaking. It's what I've done for several years. And to my knowledge, nobody's noticed.

Sadly, this doesn't entirely solve our language problems, and here are two reasons:

1. Songs. It's hard to change them to be gender neutral, and not butcher them. (Gender-equal, maybe, but not gender neutral.) I'm sure you could come up with many more examples, but how would you reword these songs:

Dear Lord and Father of mankind
Forgive our foolish ways...

O worship the King
All glorious above
And gratefully sing
His wonderful love...

2. Gender-neutral language may not go far enough. Exploring God in the context of ideas that we have traditionally labeled "female" could be very powerful, but this is stymied somewhat by going to gender neutrality. In more conservative churches, though, going to even occasionally female language would be even harder than going to neutral language ... as you can see by the quote at the top of this post.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

One reason I haven't been posting: I've been reading, and it's hard for me to do both at the same time.

One of the books I finished recently: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. I may have more to say about the book later; for now, here's an excerpt.

The ugliness the Sutherlands were fleeing is not inherent in technology. It only seemed that way to them because it's so hard to isolate what it is within technology that's so ugly. But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also include the making of things. Actually a root word of technology, techne, originally meant "art." The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them.

Neither is the ugliness inherent in the materials of modern technology – a statement you sometimes hear. Mass-produced plastics and synthetics aren't in themselves bad. They've just acquired bad associations. A person who's lived inside stone walls of a prison most of his life is likely to see stone as an inherently ugly material, even though it's also the prime material of sculpture, and a person who's lived in a prison of ugly plastic technology that started with his childhood toys and continues through a lifetime of junky consumer products is likely to see this material as inherently ugly. But the real ugliness of modern technology isn't found in any material or shape or act or product. These are just the objects in which the low Quality appears to reside. It's our habit of assigning Quality to subjects or objects that gives this impression.

The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phaedrus' metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or its absence, doesn't reside in either the subject or the object. The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use ...

The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in the world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.

Out to Lunch

I'll be away for a week or two.

Don't do anything fun while I'm gone, 'k?

Update: I'm back.

(So among all those people who share my warped idea of fun, let there be much rejoicing.)

So... close...

Barring any legal hijinks by the Republicans, it looks like the Democrats are going to pick up both the House and the Senate.

w00t?

As far as I can tell, CNN has the best online coverage of the election results. They're also carrying some interesting exit poll data. For example, here's a snippet from their U.S. HOUSE SOUTH EXIT POLL:

VOTE BY RELIGION

	Democrat	Republican
Protestant (70%)	42%	57%

VOTE BY RELIGION AMONG WHITES

	Democrat	Republican
White Protestants (54%)	32%	66%

BORN-AGAIN OR EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (49%)	41%	58%

WHITE EVANGELICAL/BORN-AGAIN?

	Democrat	Republican
Yes (35%)	28%	71%

Well allrighty.

Vote.

Unless you're stupid. Then stay home.

Bonus election day link! Leonard Pitts Jr. sums up my opinion about the Democratic Party.

Richard Beck's Universalism posts

In Christian theology, Universalism is the idea that all people will be saved.

I had been considering a couple of posts about universalism, but lo and behold, Dr. Richard Beck has already done a brief series on why he's a universalist. I'll start by linking you there, and maybe later I'll have some things to add.

Why I am a Universalist

I think my favorite post in the bunch is this one, which juxtaposes Universalism, Calvinism and Arminianism. An excerpt:

Talbott in Universal Salvation? asks us to consider three theological propositions:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.

2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.

3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.

First, it should be noted that significant Biblical support could be cited for each proposition. All are supported by the biblical witness.

However, and here's the rub, Talbott points out that these propositions are logically inconsistent. That is, a Christian cannot, logically, endorse all three propositions. Look back over the propositions and mull them over. You'll see he has a point.

Confession 2

Background:
Sometimes, crafty church gnomes place blatantly partisan literature in our church foyer. The latest brochure was a glossy little voting guide, but the local, jingoistic, "christian" "newspaper" makes regular appearances as well.

Confession:
When nobody's looking, I extract the newspapers from the foyer, and add them to a neat little stack in the utility closet.

Underhanded, I know, but I figure this causes fewer problems than demanding equal space for a stack of Planned Parenthood brochures.

Engaging the Text

A series of posts on what the biblical text might have to say about the morality of homoerotic behavior.

(Note: This post is a trailhead. None of these posts are new, but a trailhead post makes it easy to add a link to the series in my sidebar.)

• Overview


• Sodom and Gomorrah


• An Interlude


• The Vice Lists


• Paul's Theology in Romans


• Stuff about God


• What Romans 1 Says about God


• Ethics and Romans 1

Hm. Now that I look at it, I skipped the holiness codes in Leviticus. Ok, give me a minute ... ah, here we go:

Also, remember that you're not allowed to wear the devil's own fabric, polyester. Maybe because it's fire-retardant? I dunno.

Hope

"Odd," I thought. "I wasn't expecting this feeling."

But there it was anyhow, in the middle of an otherwise uninspiring paragraph about feminisim, atonement, and Jesus.

I had been meandering through a book my sister gave me for my birthday, trying to nudge the scattered bits of my feminism into something coherent, toting my theological briefcase, very businesslike, and then this old friend recognized me, leapt on me, overwhelmed me with an embrace that was more than half wrestling hold.

"Wow," I thought. "I remember this feeling."

It feels like hope, but it's not quiet, or rosy.

Instead, it's a firework that hits me in the eyes and the gut at the same time, occupying my mind's eye so fully that, for a long ecstatic moment, I'm blind to everything but that one unavoidable future, largely featuring the triumph of laughter, full of mountains, of warm days smelling like watermelon and feeling like river water, chilly days feeling like friends and smelling like warm coffee, everything limned in golden joy.

And although the feeling quickly fades, for the moment I am convinced. There really is hope for the world, and there really is power in the cross of Christ. It is a power we can trust and admire: not the power to live perfectly, or the power to appease a transcendent, merciless, bloodthirsty God, but the deep affection that seems to be the only way to transform hatred without fostering hatred, to eradicate violence without using force, and to grant joyful life despite the power of death.

Happy birthday to me!

In keeping with my longstanding tradition of throwing birthday parties for myself: today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!


Here's a fun game: If you want to get me a gift, don't buy anything ... just copy the internet address from your browser and paste it into a comment. So, for example, you could put your favorite book from Amazon.com, or maybe your favorite video from YouTube. After you submit the comment, I'll put a picture of your gift at the bottom of this post.

Fun!

Happy birthday to me!

(from Crystal)


(from Colby)


(from Jeff)


(from The Cute One)


(from Connor)


(from Scoots)


(from Stu. NSFW!)


(from Sandy)


(from Jessica)


(from Casey)

Great Britain held hostage by ... Harding?

OK, I feel bad about all this off-site linking - it makes me feel like a lazy blogger - but you ACU and Harding folks shouldn't miss this one. It seems that Harding's new missions globe has ... um ... misplaced Great Britain by a few thousand miles.


No wonder those Brits are post-Christian! We obviously can't find them so that they can be re-evangelized!

Click the image to visit the Lame-O Weblog of Mark Elrod, who teaches at Harding.

And speaking of Mark Elrod, does anybody know an ACU professor who has a blog, much less a blog as interesting as Elrod's?

Update:

Mark reports that Great Britain has been returned to its rightful place. Whew. That was fixed rather quickly, though. I wonder ... how easy is it to move those continents around?

Also, Colby suggests reading the blog of (ACU Associate Professor) Richard Beck.

Two wars

As I was walking down the hall this morning, I suddenly realized: During the first four years of the Bush presidency, the United States invaded not one, but two sovereign nations and initiated two wars.

Two wars in four years.

And instead of ousting the people responsible, we voted to give them another four years. More than 40,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq alone.


I think I'll go be sick now.

Church of Christ vs Episcopal Church

Connor has attended both, and provides you with this deep and meaningful analysis.

Praying:
CoC - Kneel if you want to be stared at.
EC - Kneel or die.

Go, read, now!

Update: It would help if I actually put the link in...

Class update

OK, Connor requested a class update, so here it is.

We've spent the last three weeks talking about Genesis 1-3, and what it may or may not have to do with gender roles. I mean, we still haven't taken the five minutes we would need to define the terms "sex" and "gender", and consequently, people frequently say interesting things like, "Yes, I think Adam and Eve probably had sex ... um ... gender."

But moving on...

Like I said before, the class is tag-team-taught by Shane and another guy (Damon). After being in the class for several weeks, I can say that they've done a pretty good job of picking a direction and sticking with it. If I've understood their approach correctly, they're basically trying do apologetics for the creation narratives.

Shane has a sort of literary approach to the text, where you classify its genre and then you only listen to the messages you would expect to hear coming out of that genre. Damon has a sort of Rabbinical approach to the text, which means you try to tease out a lot of allegory and hidden meaning. But basically, both of them are doing a lot of work trying to get the students to interpret Genesis in a new way, and then, kind of parenthetically, following that up by arguing that Genesis talks about identity but not so much about gender roles.

I think this approach is pretty good. It makes the class of mostly college students stretch a little bit, and tweak their hermeneutic, and even reconsider their gender biases, but it doesn't require them to do anything terribly scary or off-putting. All in all, I think the students are going to come out of this class with a better way of reading the first 3 chapters of Genesis, and a little more play in their ideas about gender.

But I do think the teachers are a little reluctant to address certain issues, including

• What modern psychology says about gender


• What feminists say about gender


• The church's sins against women


• Why homosexuality is a gender issue

Maybe we'll get to these as we go along. At any rate, I'm hoping that before we get out of Genesis, we at least look at Jacob and Esau.

Gender and Creation Myths

OK, since a lot of you seem to be interested in gender and Genesis and all that, let's continue our discussion with a new post. There seem to be several questions that people are interested in answering, which I will summarize as follows:

• Are there biologically-determined traits that occur more frequently in either sex? And if there are, can we distinguish them from other traits? And if we can, what should we do with this information?


• Are there socially benefical roles for the sexes? That is, does a society gain significant benefits from encouraging women to behave a certain way and men a different way? And if so, are there also significant harms?


• Are there divinely ordained roles for the sexes? That is, are there ways that God says women should be, and other ways that God says men should be? And if so, what are they, and how did we find out about them?


• What should we expect to learn from the creation stories in Genesis?

OK, so the fourth one we haven't talked about much, and it really kind of folds into the third one, but hey, this is my post, so I can be as sloppy as I want!

My opinion:

When we read the creation stories in Genesis, we should not expect them to be literally true. Instead, we should expect them to provide a broad metaphor that will help us understand ourselves.

Missteps in Iraq

Well, this makes things a little clearer.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration's gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

Extemporaneous gender

Gosh, I suck at public speaking.

We're having a class at church on Wednesday nights: "Gender and the Kingdom of God". Sounds promising, right? Except that nobody really knows what they mean by "gender".

For maybe 30 years, the word "gender" has been used to denote the socially constructed part of a person's sexual identity. But most folks in the church aren't quite caught up on the latest thinking about gender. So our class starts its discussion of Genesis 1 and 2 by trying to divide the imago dei into "masculine" traits and "feminine" traits. This riles me up a bit, so I try to push people into defining their terms. I ask, "Who says?" Who says "nurturing" is feminine, while "powerful" is masculine?

The answer I want to hear has something to do with society or culture, but that answer is not forthcoming. So, nervous and agitated, I try to explain how sex and gender are different, and why the distinction is important. But what actually comes out sounds like five minutes of:

Bla bla bla nurturing bla gay men bla bla.

Did I mention I suck at public speaking?

Anyhow, I think my points are both important and simple, so I'm going to try again, and I'm going to limit myself to three sentences.

Here goes.

People like what they like, whether it's football or knitting, and attaching gender stereotypes to these preferences muddies our vision when we're trying to tackle the world's big problems: things like hunger, global warming, domestic abuse, and even terrorism.

But what's worse than gender stereotyping is looking to the Bible for support for our stereotypes, implying that we're not just failing our society when we refuse the roles of warrior male or submissive female, we're also rebelling against God's Will for all men and women.

If we fail to recognize that gender is socially constructed, and if we then fail to condemn the gender stereotypes in Genesis 2 as the rhetorical posturing of a patriarchal society, we will be bound to repeat the sinful patterns of bigotry, violence and self-hatred that have marred the church for generations.

There.

Does that make sense?

Blogger Beta

My blog is now part of the blogger beta. It looks a little different, and in the sidebar I've added a "News" section that contains interesting articles that are coming through my feed reader.

Let me know if anything's acting weird; I'll report it.

Response: Hart's Comments on Theodicy

(I'm pulling these comments up into posts because I think the articles and issues mentioned deserve posts of their own.)

Crystal links us to an article on theodicy by David B. Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian. It's an excellent article, and eloquently communicates the problems implicit in certain Christian responses to evil:

"these attempts can span almost the entire spectrum of religious sensibility: they can be cold with Stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, wanly roseate with sickly metaphysical optimism."

But Hart's understanding of how the world works is apparently quite different from mine. He talks about creation's fallen state, but this is a problem for me: how can we accept evolutionary theory and also accept the idea that creation was once perfect and then became corrupted?

Similarly, his discussion of Aquinas makes it clear that he thinks there are spiritual beings pushing and pulling on the visible world, and as I've said earlier, this doesn't work for me.

The theodicy i'm hoping to end up with will probably rest some of its weight on the panentheistic idea that God is present in all creation, and so fully rejoices in the good, and fully suffers in the evil, but for one reason or another, doesn't personally act on the world. (Instead, God's agency seems to be expressed through people, and most perfectly in Jesus.)

But coming from the tradition I come from, first I have to deal with the Bible. The modern/premodern move is mostly an attempt to salvage the Biblical text by translating it into terms that I (and maybe a few other materialists) can accept; to understand what seem to be blatant falsehoods as mere differences in language.

ABC = FOX?

Update: Here's a little more about the docudrama.
ThinkProgress
Media Matters
Congressional Quarterly

Update:
Letter from Clinton lawyer

Response: That Samaritan woman

The quote at the end of my previous post comes from a story in John, wherein Jesus talks with a Samaritan woman and teaches her a little about the nature of God's spirit. In the course of the discussion about this story, Scoots said that when the Samaritan woman brings up a religious argument, she is attempting to "distract Jesus from prying into her sketchy personal life".

While Scoots seems to come to excellent conclusions about the point of the story, I disagree with his characterization of the Samaritan woman, and think it is worth providing an alternative reading.

First, notice that the woman's long list of husbands actually shows her not to be a promiscuous woman, but a victim. As far as I know, a woman couldn't divorce a man, so either she had been divorced by all these men, or they had died, or some of both. And as a result, the Samaritan woman was probably living in the next best arrangement she could manage, given her culture and history of husbands. Sure, she might be changing the subject out of shame, but it's just as likely she's changing the subject because dead or deadbeat husbands aren't particularly pleasant to talk about.

Second, it's worthwhile to observe that the discussion Jesus has with the woman parallels the conversation he has with the highly educated Pharisee Nicodemus in John 3. As Thomas Robinson, minister for the Manhattan Church of Christ, writes in "A Community Without Barriers":

Here, Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman in exactly the same manner as he spoke with Nicodemus. He showed the same degree of seriousness, the same concern to lead both to deeper insights, and the same perception as to where they each were in their own spiritual development ... to this Samaritan woman, Jesus chose to begin to reveal the reality of the Spirit, which even Jesus’ closest disciples did not fully understand until years later.

And furthermore,

In the Gospel of John, it is to this Samaritan woman that Jesus chose first to affirm his identity as Messiah. He found in her an openness and a level of understanding that suggested that such a revelation to her could be fruitful. She in turn led others of her town to listen to Jesus and to come to believe in him as the Christ. Thus, remarkably, the Gospel of John suggests that the first real community of believers in Jesus was among the Samaritans, led to their own personal faith (though they were reluctant to admit it) by this Samaritan woman (John 4:39-42)

A bit of a quandary

Ok, now I've got my butt in a crack.

I still think it's useful to recognize that the Bible was written in premodern language by premodern people. In fact, I suspect that we're liable to get ourselves into lots of trouble if we don't make this distinction when we interpret. But I'm still a little bit dubious about how the premodern/modern lens will actually affect how we read the text.

Because Randy's mentioned Ephesians 6, let's use that as our first example. Maybe it will help if we start by pretending that we've just picked up some Ancient text and started reading it.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

OK, so the author starts talking about the devil and spiritual forces of evil, and immediately my brain starts sending up flares. "Danger!" it says. "Premodern language is being used here!" The author continues with his metaphor, recommending that his readers adopt defenses such as righteousness, truth, peace and faith against these supernatural attacks. Hugs, kisses, end of Ephesians, hooray.

Now how should I interpret this passage?

As a hair-splitting modern person, I think I should go about it by dividing the "truth" of the passage into two distinct parts. The first is the author's worldview, in which spiritual forces manipulate people and everyday events. The second is the author's statement, which is couched in the language of his worldview.

Now honestly, I'm very reluctant to try to evaluate the truth of a person's worldview. I can see some value to thinking of things in terms of spirits and spiritual realms, and it's not like empirical evidence can prove or disprove the existence of spirits. But the "spiritual realms" worldview is not my worldview. And so before I evaluate the point that the author is trying to make, I am obligated to translate it into language that is compatible with my worldview. In this case, I would be obligated to translate the author's supernatural language into something a little more helpful for my modern sensibilities; perhaps I would translate his "spiritual realms" language into a description of the shadowy regions of the human psyche.

As a result, I would then be able to get some benefit from the text: instead of trying to make myself believe that we are constantly manipulated by spirits, I can go ahead to what I think is the author's real point: that we should adopt virtues as means to produce goodness in ourselves, despite the ways in which we sometimes tend toward evil.

Put another way, I can treat the author's language about evil spirits as metaphor, and then try to apply or interpret the metaphor.

OK, great! So when I run into stuff about spirits manipulating the world, I'll just kind of gloss over that as a premodern metaphor, and try and translate the ideas into modern language.

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.

Wha?

Thanks a lot, Apostle John. Now what am I supposed to do with that?

A bit of an epiphany

Reading your comments on my "Evolution" post gave me a lot to think about: Connor's move toward panentheism, Shane's suggestion of a new creation myth, Jeff's version of intelligent design, and quite a few other things. As I drove home from the Texas hill country this weekend, I was rolling all these things around in my head, hoping to wear away the incidental ideas and pluck out a few smooth, polished insights.

First, I decided that my problem begins with my experience of the world. So far as I can tell, we live in a world full of meaningless destruction and suffering. People are buried alive in earthquakes. They die of various diseases They starve to death. Children are abused by parents who were also abused. Towers fall on people. The strong exploit the weak.

But there's also a lot of beauty and goodness in the world, and it's not restricted to rich people in western nations. The sun sets in spectacular style. Rain falls and makes the world green. Friends and family lighten our hearts. Our appetites are sated by good food and good sex.

The problem that I encounter is that joy and pain are apparently distributed at random. There does not seem to be a divine intentionality about any of it; all of the beauty and all of the suffering simply seem to be the ticking of a mechanistic universe. Tsunamis are triggered by a set of causes and effects that, on the small scale, are trivial to predict and understand. Birds evolve from reptiles, and there's no need for a guiding intelligence to complete the picture. The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous.

And so based on my experience, what can I say about how God acts in the world?

It seems that the only thing to say is that God does not act. That if God is present, God simply allows the world to continue ticking away, and doesn't interfere.

But there's a problem with this conclusion: faith traditions all over the world contradict it. The Bible paints a picture of a God who is intimately involved with the world, and who frequently acts on it. The good guys get rescued from fiery funaces and lion's dens ... the bad guys get zapped with plagues or swallowed up by the earth.

So how do we reconcile the Biblical narrative with our own experience?

I think the secret, for me, lies in how we interpret passages like these, which I have unabashedly yanked from their contexts in Matthew 5 and John 3.

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

The first passage says: the wind blows where it pleases. And if we stop to think too long, we may run into some real difficulties here. We know that the wind doesn't blow where it pleases. The wind blows based on variations in temperature and pressure on and above the surface of the earth. It has no preference as to whether it blows east or west.

Generally, though, we don't worry about this passage. "It's a figure of speech used by people with a premodern worldview," we say. "This passage, after all, was written by premodern people for premodern people."

We do the same thing with the second passage, although we have to be a bit more explicit. There's really no good reason to suppose God fiddles with gravitational fields and hauls the sun up over the horizon every day, or to think that God causes the rain to fall by pushing around some molecules. This is just the language used by people who didn't have any more functional explanation for what caused the rain and the sunrise.

But these aren't the only passages in the Bible that were written by premodern people. In fact, the entire Bible was written by people, and for people, who had no recourse but to explain natural phenomena using supernatural language. Consequently, the lens that we use to read "God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous" is the same lens we should use to read about God killing Aninias and Sapphira. The lens that we use to read "the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well" is the same lens we should use to read "the wind blows where it pleases".

Does this mean that we have to dismiss all the miracle stories in the Bible as fables written for a premodern audience? Not necessarily. Premodern people would be perfectly justified in using supernatural language to describe supernatural events, and any good empiricist will admit that it's notoriously hard to prove that something never happens.

But it does mean that we should be reluctant to accept at face value passages that attribute action to God. Although they may be theologically helpful for a premodern reader, they may be theologically destructive for a modern reader. Some of us are simply incapable of believing in a God who heals the illnesses of middle-class Americans, but fails to prevent earthquakes that slaughter thousands of Kashmiris.

I'm fairly excited about exploring the implications of this premodern/modern distinction, because I think it will allow me to affirm my experience of the world, affirm the theological value of the scriptures, accept my own modern (or post-modern) worldview, solve some really hairy theodicy problems, and take a step toward panentheism. But that should probably wait for another post.