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April 26, 2006

The church at the end of the universe

Filed under: Books,Personal stuff — Camassia @ 11:15 am

Hey. If you’re wondering where I’ve been, I’ve mostly been dealing with medical stuff. I had an attempt at a radiofrequency ablation which was not successful, but entailed a rather long recovery anyway. Also had some dental work. But anyway, while I was sitting around getting over this stuff, I was reading about cults. The discussion in the last post, especially the comment from Paul (who belongs to a church that, at least back in the day, qualified as a doomsday cult) reminded me of how powerful new religious movements have been in American life.

There are a few sites on the web that round up these movements, both in friendly and hostile ways. In the friendly camp, the University of Virginia has a list of short profiles here, and the website Religious Tolerance also has some info. Anti-cult guy Rick Ross has a database of news items relating to various NRMs.

I take the descriptions with a grain of salt, because when the sites discuss movements I am familiar with I find things to disagree with. But one thing is obvious: the end of the world is big. There are a whole lot of people out there who believe that believing the correct scenario about the Apocalypse will separate the saved from the unsaved. Given the popularity of the Left Behind books, it’s not even that fringey an idea.

Reading all this helped clarify part of why I felt let down by the end of Newbigin’s book, though it’s not entirely his fault. As you might expect from a European, he talks about the Second Coming like he’s the only guy in the room even thinking about it. Lecturing a college in Glasgow, he’s probably right. But the whole discussion about what divides churches, and the apocalyptic reasons for uniting them, runs into a problem when you consider all the competing narratives in which the Apocalypse is the time when the true believers are exalted over the poseurs. I don’t know why these elaborate eschatologies are so important to people, but it strikes me as not being a coincidence that this has been so big in the last two centuries, when fascination with progress and the future have been so strong. The main doomsday predictions are counter-narratives of a sort to the Progressive one: long ago things started to go horribly wrong, and only now are people discovering the long-hidden secret that, like Godzilla sleeping under the ocean, is now being waked up to wreak havoc on human arrogance.

Newbigin also did lectures on the idea of historical progress, which Telford reviewed here. Going by his description, Newbigin still preached to an Old World audience where the only competing eschatologies were either Social Gospel-type ideas or totally non-Christian ones.

All this inspired me to get going again on that book that Troy gave me last summer. (Reading books in widely spaced chunks is pretty normal for me, as those who were around for The Politics of Jesus blogging probably remember. I’m sort of the anti-Rilina that way.) So far I haven’t gotten to the 19th century yet — I’m in the section on colonial America at the moment — but it does make an interesting companion piece to The Household of God. I hope to blog about it at some point in the near future.

April 18, 2006

In the household of God, I’m the one crashing on the couch

Filed under: Books,Ecclesiology — Camassia @ 8:21 pm

I picked up Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God as I was pondering the question of what is the true church. Newbigin is a favorite of Telford’s, who wrote about the book here, as an articulate advocate of ecumenicism. Telford’s advocacy never convinced me much, but to be fair I decided to take a look at Newbigin myself.

Newbigin was a Presbyterian missionary who wound up becoming a bishop in the Church of South India, a Reformed denomination. He played an active role in forming the World Council of Churches. This particular book consists of a series of lectures on Christian unity he delivered in Glasgow in 1952. He starts off, somewhat to my surprise, with a lengthy explication of the whole “justification by grace” concept as seen in Paul. I must admit, I’ve gotten lost in virtually every attempt that has been made to explain this to me, but Newbigin makes it more comprehensible than usual. Often the whole faith/works argument depends on setting off what you believe against what you do, which never made sense to me since the two are so interrelated. Newbigin, however, describes it more in terms of a sense of entitlement. The Judaicizers that Paul criticized, he says, believed that because they were Jews and kept the law they were entitled to God’s favor, so anyone who wanted God’s favor had to become Jewish. Paul, however, uses the example of Abraham to point out that God pours out his favor on whomever he wants; the circumcision and the other Jewish laws were the seal of that favor, but they did not create a quid pro quo arrangement whereby you get circumcized and therefore God must favor you. If the tree of Israel bears bad fruit, to use Paul’s metaphor, God feels free to cut off some branches and graft on “wild slips” — that is, Gentiles.

Many churches today, Newbigin says, make the same error. But for him it’s not really about “works,” it’s about anything that you think entitles you to be God’s people. Protestants, he says, tend to do that with doctrine: they believe if they have the right doctrine that entitles them to be church, and those with different doctrine are not entitled. But, Newbigin points out, Jesus did not really make that the defining feature of his own church. If he had, he would have made like Allah to Muhammad and written a detailed instruction book. (“A vast amount of scholarly labor,” Newbigin remarks drily, “has been been spent in trying to discover precisely that thing which the Lord Himself did not choose to provide.”) Instead, Jesus created a fellowship, which he invested with an almost frightening amount of authority: to preach the Word, heal the sick, forgive or retain sins, and indeed, write the New Testament. The importance of this fellowship is also why Newbigin rejects the idea of an “invisible church” in place of an actual body of people.

He has a problem, however, with Catholics taking this fact to the other extreme, and making apostolic succession the sine qua non of church. (I presume he could say the same of the Orthodox, whom he never mentions; he admits in the preface that this is a huge omission, but says he wasn’t familiar enough with the eastern churches to comment on them.) Newbigin agrees that apostolicity is an essential characteristic of the Church of Christ; but then, so is sinlessness, and obviously the RCC hasn’t exactly pulled off that one. Catholics generally say that by God’s grace the church itself is somehow sinless in essence, even though it’s full of sinful people. Newbigin doesn’t buy this distinction between the church and the people in it, but more than that, he wonders why God’s grace would cover so many sins and yet not cover a break in apostolic succession. So long as any church fails to be the perfect, spotless Bride of Christ, he says, it continues to exist by God’s grace alone. As Paul says about the Law, once you have failed one part of it you have failed at all of it.

Finally, Newbigin turns to the third defining feature of church: the Holy Spirit. This is to a great extent the authority behind the authorities, as he quotes Quaker luminary George Fox: “What had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth?” The Spirit is of paramount importance in the accounts of the ancient church, and Newbigin believes that mainline churches like his own have historically failed to recognize this. The action of the Spirit alone brought the Gentiles and Jews together, grafted the “wild slips” onto the tree. But he warns against conceiving of Spirit actions in too individualistic or showy a fashion, and thereby failing to see its quieter manifestations. The most exciting thing about the Holy Spirit now, he says, is how mundane it is. While in the Old Testament it only turned up occasionally to get someone to do something, in the Christian Church it has becoming a constant indwelling presence.

So if all churches have failed to be what they ought to be, why does God continue to extend his grace to them? Here we get to Newbigin’s somewhat eccentric version of the doctrine of election, which Telford has also written about here. God’s purpose through both Israel and the Church, in Newbigin’s view, has been the redemption of the whole creation, and “mercy to all.” Those whom he has chosen, from Abraham onward, he has chosen not because of their own merits but in order to serve this great purpose. The mistake that people keep making is (to use an analogy that Newbigin doesn’t) to think too much like Noah and not enough like Jonah. They believe that they’re the few chosen to survive the coming judgment, and so are greatly interested in the earthly markers that distinguish them, be it circumcision, doctrine, apostolic succession, or what have you. But in fact, Newbigin believes that God chooses people in order to serve, to bring the words of truth so that all might be saved. Like Jonah, they don’t have to be the most qualified people for the job; they are simply chosen. Therefore we have no right to judge each other, to decide who is saved and who is not, but have only to love one another.

When I’ve talked about this with Telford, one of my big complaints is that I don’t understand how he can talk in a way that sounds so pluralist and yet be such an anti-pluralist about other religions. And reading Newbigin hasn’t really cleared up the problem. I mean, I know I have some Quaker readers, and I can imagine they’ve been nodding along with a lot of this: the problems with setting boundaries between us and them, the unpredictability of the Spirit, the relative unimportance of doctrine, the idea of the church as servant rather than elite club. But Newbigin is not only not a Quaker, he spent his life turning Hindus and Muslims into Christians. What gives?

In fact, Newbigin’s passion for mission is the whole reason he’s an ecumenicist. He believes that mission is an essential, if not primary, mission of church, and not doing mission “involves a radical contradiction of the Church’s being.” His reason for this is apocalyptic: he believes that Jesus waiting this long to come back solely to give the church time to bring all nations to faith, and not coincidentally, for the church to reunite. “It belongs to the very heart of salvation,” he writes, “that we cannot have it in fullness until all for whom it is intended have it together.” Furthermore, his experience out in the field is that, as with soldiers in a war, missionaries find that the old ecclesial issues back home just don’t seem as important.

It seems to me that, in the end, he is simply trying to rearrange churches’ dogmas. Mission becomes the main non-negotiable thing, in place of all the other non-negotiable things on which churches base their identities. In that sense, he’s just doing the old Protestant thing and building the church around doctrine. Mission is the new circumcision.

Near the end, he admits that church shouldn’t be all about mission. The church should also be a “foretaste of heaven,” including such features as “worship and fellowship, offering up praise and adoration of God, receiving His grace, rejoicing in Him, sharing with one another the fruits of the Spirit, and building up one another in love.” Having established that, however, he quickly moves back to thumping the table for mission.

Now, I have no objection to mission if it’s done properly, but something about this leaves me cold. I kept thinking, so you’re going out and preaching, but preaching what? By questioning the necessity of doctrine and apostolicity, but making mission absolute, Newbigin reminds me of the old joke about what you get when you cross a Unitarian and a Jehovah’s Witness: someone who knocks on your door and doesn’t know why. Newbigin himself knows why he does it, but he seems to not hugely care what churches preach so long as they do it loudly.

But for me, coming to the church as an object of mission, I must say all those features of the church that Newbigin glosses over so quickly — fellowship, doctrine, ethics and so on — to a great extent are the mission. It is because that is where I must look to answer the big questions I have: Who is God? and Where is God? Newbigin’s discussion of entitlement to God’s favor sounded similar to the arguments against pacifism I was hearing in this thread: that tying salvation to any sort of “ethical program”, as Maurice put it, can only be driven by a desire to justify oneself before God. It vexes me no end that people apparently read this post and thought that was my main attraction to pacifism, and I am not sure how I could disabuse them. But that particular issue aside, Christian ethics are to me only partly about the quality of the people holding them — they are also about the quality of God. So long as the church’s ethics are God’s ethics, they reveal God’s good character.

One criticism Newbigin lodges at Catholicism, which he would probably have lodged against Anabaptism also, is that it identifies itself too closely as an “extension of the Incarnation”, with too much “now” and not enough “not yet.” He would, I imagine, say to me that God revealed his character on the Cross, and I should have faith in that. But I guess the whole problem with my faith, such as it is, is that I always need more. Such a distant event, attested by somewhat sketchy sources, doesn’t quite offer the assurance I can stake my life on.

This also makes me regret that he dealt somewhat hastily with the Holy Spirit. He emphasized its importance, and described the odd way in which everyone in the NT instantly and concretely recognized it, as if it were as straightforward as a visit from your cousin Fred. And Newbigin seems to see it in the same way; for instance:

No one who is not spiritually blind or worse can fail to acknowledge that God has signally and abundantly blessed the preaching, sacraments, and ministry of great bodies which can claim no uninterrupted ministerial succession from the apostles, but who have contributed at least as much as those who have remained within it to the preaching of the Gospel, the conversion of sinners, and the building up of the saints in holiness.

Sorry, but “Any idiot can see…” is not really an argument, although God knows it gets invoked enough in the blogosphere. I keep hearing stuff like that though, where Christians seem to expect me to see the Spirit as plainly as I can see the San Gabriels from Pasadena. I remember a while ago I was discussing some of my qualms about PMC with John, and he asked, in a that-settles-it tone, “But do you see the Holy Spirit there?” I was so sick of this question I shot back, “How do I know?”

This was so unlike the answer that he expected that he responded with just an exasperated noise. But it was an honest answer. And when Newbigin, at various points in the book, refers to things that “every Christian sees,” and “every Christian has felt,” that leave me totally confused, I do, despite his efforts, feel like I’m looking at a club for which I have not been elected.

April 17, 2006

Where it’s at

Filed under: Personal stuff — Camassia @ 10:58 am

In case anyone’s wondering, the baptism didn’t happen on Easter. To add to my own perpetual indecision, one of the cancer sufferers in the congregation died on Maundy Thursday, which has given the church leadership bigger things to worry about right now. The pastor and I are set to meet again next week.

I have, however, nearly finished Newbigin’s The Household of God, which I will post on at some point in the near future.

April 13, 2006

“One more know-it-all with a nimbus”

Filed under: Books — Camassia @ 12:56 pm

As you can tell, I’ve had other things to worry about besides the Gospel of Judas. But I kind of enjoyed this short review by Adam Gopnik, who as I recall is a mostly-not-practicing Jew. Although he doesn’t really have a dog in this fight, he decides he still likes the canonical Jesus better than the Gnostic one. It’s worth linking to for this line alone:

One of the unnerving things about the new Gospel is that Jesus, who never laughs in the canonic Gospels, is constantly laughing in this one, and it’s obviously one of those sardonic, significant, how-little-you-know laughs, like the laugh of the ruler of a dubious planet on “Star Trek.”

April 11, 2006

Gender, war, and the dictatorship of the dead

Filed under: Personal stuff,Religion and sex — Camassia @ 1:30 pm

I am due for some further discussion of this post, but before I get to that it occurred to me after the discussion of tradition in this post that all these subjects are interrelated. (Whoa, somebody call Dirk Gently!) The decision that women could not be ordained was made in one of those early church councils, and apparently without explanation. The current line from the Vatican is that it is simply impossible to ever ordain women, since the rule was made at such a high level and has been followed for so long. The extreme arbitrariness and finality of this creeps me out. Somebody (Chesterton?) said that tradition is the democracy of the dead, but this is more like the dictatorship of the dead. And not really of all dead, but of a particular group at one time. After all, you and I and my female pastor will be dead one day, but we don’t get a vote.

I realize, of course, that mystery is part of the Christian deal. There are lots of things that one has to take from tradition without completely understanding: the nature of the Trinity, the problem of evil, the mechanics of bodily resurrection, etc. But this one feels a lot more, I don’t know, personal. It’s not really a statement about the nature of God or matters beyond human understanding. It is, at least in part, a statement about me. It’s essentially saying, there’s something defective about you that cannot be fixed, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. (And yeah, I know people say that not being in church leadership is not a statement of inferiority, but I never found this very convincing. Especially since this unexplained ancient decision was made when that was pretty widely assumed.)

The reversibility of tradition is at the heart of church schisms. Martin Luther wanted the church to reverse some decisions that it considered irreversible; Mennonites wanted it to reverse even more of them. In the modern era this has become especially polarized, since the Enlightenment attitude takes the opposite position to the Catholic one — traditions are automatically suspect, and have to prove their worth. I keep wondering if there’s any middle ground on this, if there’s some way to place the burden of proof on change without necessarily making it impossible.

Anyway, getting back to the post, Jim McCollough writes:

Paul does sound narrow on women there, but note, it is an organizational and disciplinary ruling like “don’t let them teach men” that the Catholic Church has not felt bound to keep. When Paul does serious theological thinking, well then,in Romans it’s Adam’s sin; in Ephesians he subsumes marriage gender roles under the topic sentence about mutual submission to each other under Christ.

I noticed that contradiction too: in Timothy it’s Eve’s fault, in Romans it’s Adam’s fault! I suppose that’s one reason some people think Timothy had a different author. Although I suppose you can reconcile those by saying that since Adam was not deceived, he committed the worse sin because he knew what he was doing. (Though why that would make his descendants more suited to teaching, I don’t know.)

Jim goes on:

On the other topic, just a suggestion of something to add to the discussion. Even in Eden there was one opponent. And Adam’s really original sin was not defending Eve from its lies.

Well, this opens up the question of what exactly the serpent represents, on which I have heard different opinions. However, I still think it’s a stretch to put God’s intent behind that, and say that therefore man was essentially created a defender. Also, apart from the question of where we came from there is also the issue of where we are going. What will the nature of man be in heaven?

Jendi comments:

One question: if war and patriarchal gender roles are necessities of a fallen world, is it possible/realistic to deem them completely unacceptable (as pacifists do)? Or is the best we can do to navigate a balance between the temptations you describe, and the opposite temptation of utopian projects to reshape human nature in a godlike way? After all, we are commanded not only to “resist not evil” but to “overcome evil with good”. If the use of force is the only way to prevent all the law-abiding citizens from being slaughtered, can we say that it is never “good”? How can we “overcome” evil if we’re all wiped out and only the thugs are left? For me, Christian realism means recognizing there are some situations where all the choices are morally compromised. Otherwise we would be able to be our own savior by acting perfectly, and not need Christ’s forgiveness.

This brings up several points. First, let’s look at the context of “overcome evil with good“:

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord. On the contrary:
“If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It is extremely difficult for me to read that as a justification for violence. In fact, it really says the opposite: “good” does not mean defending others from the enemy, but feeding the enemy and letting God punish him if he so chooses.

That also addresses Jendi’s question about what you do if violence is the only alternative to all good people being wiped out. Paul says, in essence, let God take care of that. I think he would quibble with Jendi’s assumption that God would stand by and do nothing while everybody got killed. People were getting killed in Paul’s church (including Paul himself, eventually), but still the believed in God’s assurances that the gates of hell would not prevail. So in fact, far from saying they’re too perfect to need God, pacifists rely on God a lot more than people who believe they have to ensure their own survival.

Her last two sentences trouble me, because I hear it in one form or another a fair amount: there are some situations that are just bad, where you have to sin to some degree. Tom has eviscerated this argument in the past for various reasons, but for me the main problem is that it violates the Incarnation. Hebrews says that Jesus was human in all respects except for sin, and Christian anthropology has generally taken this to mean that sinfulness is not an essential part of being human; it is possible never to sin, though granted no one else has managed it yet. To say that some situations mandate sin suggests that Jesus’ sinlessness was to some extent a matter of luck: he just never got into those no-win binds.

Jendi’s last line also reminds me of the fallacy that Paul addresses in Romans 6: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” To say that God puts us in morally compromised situations so that we’ll need his forgiveness not only makes him sound like a manipulative creep, it also denies the whole theme of liberation from sin that Paul preached over and over.

Finally, Annie pointed me to her post on one of here favorite themes, James Hillman’s body-soul-spirit theory of gender. I haven’t studied him but I must admit that Annie’s descriptions of him never do anything for me. I’m with him in the opposition to Cartesian dualism, but it seems like he deals with it by creating yet another division, between “spirit” and “soul.” And both of them still seem too ethereal and disembodied to me. To call things like courage, reason, striving and justice “spirit” qualities that transcend body is to ignore how contextual they are. Courage, for instance, is a virtue if you are facing down an evil; in other contexts it can just be stupid risk-taking. The fact that courage is considered a male virtue is, I think, inextricably bound up with the notion that women have more to reasonably be afraid of, and so male courage would not be a virtue for them to display even if they happen to possess it. In the last post I took issue with the permanence of that situation, but that doesn’t mean I think courage is a disembodied “spirit” quality and therefore sexless. All ethics have meaning only in the embodied reality of living with other people.

Annie brings up one point that I didn’t address though, which is the notion that reason and logic are essentially masculine. I think the differences in our biographies are showing here: that just hasn’t been a big part of my experience of being female. In the world I grew up in, the warrior/nurturer distinction was a much more prominent gender division, and so the problem of female vulnerability has preoccupied me a lot more than the reason/emotion thing. (It might also help that the hippie environment I grew up in didn’t exalt “spirit” qualities over “soul” qualities nearly as much as Annie’s apparently did.) However, it is true that in my generation the hard sciences, like physics and computer wonkery, are still largely male domains. The interesting thing when I think about it though, is that I always experienced this as a difference of enthusiasm rather than ability. I could always do math and theoretical science, and learned some of it to a quite advanced level, but it didn’t interest me that much. (I’ve long been a hobbyist in astronomy and zoology, but I get bored when it gets too arcane.) At Wellesley, that seemed to be a common experience. From my viewpoint, I think I always assumed it was because men could tolerate the absence of the human element, and to exist in a world of things and concepts. I’m tempted to think of this as a warrior quality also, since in a battle situation you don’t really want to be in touch with your feelings, or anyone else’s for that matter.

But anyway, I’m not sure how much that assumption has factored into Christian history. I think of the exaltation of logic as an Enlightenment-era quality, but it’s true that there’s always been a strong tradition of Christian reason, at least in the West. There has also been a strong tradition of Christian mysticism, but the too-charismatic-for-comfort factions have often featured a strong female presence, such as Gnosticism, Montanism, and for that matter, Pentecostalism. There has been some speculation that such movements are one reason female clergy were banned to begin with. But that remains speculation, since like I said, the dead have not seen fit to explain it to us.

Edited to add: I note that Galatians describes the “fruit of the spirit” as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” Not a word about courage, reason, transcendence, striving or justice, interestingly enough.

April 6, 2006

Tradition revisited

Filed under: Personal stuff — Camassia @ 8:17 pm

I’m way overdue to address some of the responses to this post. First of all, Tom may not believe in Myers-Briggs types but he keeps demonstrating his INTP-ness with stuff like this, followed by this and this. I must admit, I’m not totally sure what he’s saying, probably because my own mind doesn’t run to the degree of abstraction that turns such subjects into boxes and lines. But I think what he’s getting at is that everybody in every culture integrates a personal pattern through the combination of factors that he lays out there.

When I thought it over, I was probably overstating matters by saying that “tradition is impossible” in our society. Or at least, by the broad dictionary definition that Tom uses. For myself, I was more following James Ault’s lead in thinking of tradition as a pattern of thought that draws from a sense of collective permanence. The collectivity is probably the most important thing — it’s essentially a “folk” culture, where things are done a certain way with little memory of precisely who started them or why, and individuals are encouraged to conform themselves to the communal archetypes rather than get in touch with their unique selves. I get the feeling this is the sort of thing Rusty Reno was longing for in that article I linked — to find God by just sort of letting go and falling back into “tradition’s eternal yesterday.” That type of attitude is common among Christians I know who are critics of modernism, which includes a lot of evangelical catholics. They have a problem with the Enlightenment-era attitude that all traditions and assumptions should be hauled out and dissected under a floodlight with the approach of a scientist who is seeing it for the first time with no preconceptions.

The problem I was pointing out is that like it or not, we blue-state Americans are all heir to that Enlightenment attitude. And here lies my second clarification: it’s not really that we lack tradition, but that that anti-tradition is our tradition. I and others who grew up with me also unconsciously absorbed certain “eternal” truths that framed the way we look at things, such as that teenagers always rebel against their parents, that childbearing is something of a side issue when it comes to sex, that group happiness is achieved through the aggregate happiness of individuals, along with a great deference toward science (everyone knew that Darwin was right, though few could tell you why), and a generally schizophrenic attitude toward the past — a mixture of nostalgia and terror at “turning back the clock.” I’ve been questioning a lot of those assumptions in the last few years, but in doing so I’ve been faithfully upholding one of my tradition’s great bumper-sticker slogans: “Question authority.” Following the anti-tradition tradition has somehow led me back to plain old tradition, yet I can’t really join it because I’ve already broken with tradition. If this has you confused, then you have some idea of how I’ve been feeling.

Also Andi wrote a long and thoughtful response to my somewhat flippant remark about her here. I should say, I did not mean to imply that “checking out of Western culture” meant that she somehow rid herself of her inner Westerner. I assumed she can do that no more readily than I can. I just meant that she moved somewhere else and has turned to another culture’s source of spiritual authority. Christians in the West do that too, in a sense — Jesus was hardly a European — but seeing how much Christianity formed the whole “European” identity to begin with, the two have become inseparable. Anyway, Andi has a long and interesting explanation of how she relates her journey to her home culture, which I’d probably screw up if I tried to paraphrase, so I recommend reading the original.

Finally, Lutheran blogger-on-sabbatical Maurice Frontz left a comment basically arguing for the “election” idea: God chose me, and grace is irresistible. I understand the theory, but my subjective experience is more ambiguous. To some extent I have felt drawn in, but these days it’s less a feeling of something pulling me than that I can’t leave. Last weekend when John asked me about my reasons for thinking of baptism now, I said that it feels like an acknowledgement of what I’m already doing. After three and a half years and a lot of whinging and doubting, I’m still going to church. I blog like a Christian. I talk like a Christian. I even think like a Christian, a lot of the time. But I have to admit, it feels more like habit than love. I think that’s why the idea of testimony makes me nervous: “Well, I guess I’m not leaving” isn’t exactly witness on par with “Amazing Grace.” And I also know that fixation is kind of a pattern with me — there have also been men I couldn’t seem to leave, much as it would have been a good idea. So the “irresistible” nature of it might be the Spirit, or it might not.

Of course, I realize not everyone has a rapturous “born again” experience. But I’ve spent an awfully long time in limbo, and the baptism may be more an attempt to get out of limbo than a signal that it has already ended. Whether that’s a good reason to do it, I’m not sure.

April 4, 2006

Mapping religion in America

Filed under: Politics and society — Camassia @ 4:31 pm

Geitner Simmons offers a fascinating set of maps.

April 3, 2006

The Bible and immigration

Filed under: Politics and society — Camassia @ 11:00 am

Before I move on with the catechumen series, I wanted to write a quick note on the illegal-immigrant controversy. There’s been a lot of discussion in the Christian blogosphere about it lately, most of it pitting the biblical commandments about loving one’s neighbor and welcoming the stranger against the Romans 13 commandment to obey the laws.

One other biblical analogy occurred to me, though, which I haven’t seen anyone else bring up: Paul’s letter to Philemon. The note is accompanying a slave, Onesimus, whom Paul is sending back to his master, Philemon. Exactly why Onesimus has been staying with Paul isn’t clear; he might have run away from Philemon, or Philemon might have sent him to Paul to serve Paul in his place (Paul says something to this effect).

What’s striking about this is how Paul obeys the letter of the law, but subverts the spirit of the law. Onesimus is Philemon’s property, so Paul sends him back to his owner. But the letter makes it clear that Onesimus is anything but property — Paul calls him “my child” and “my heart” and urges Philemon to accept him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” Paul says that he could order Philemon to do the right thing, but he would rather “appeal to you on the basis of love” and let Philemon choose to do the right thing. He adds that “If he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.”

The analogy I see with immigration is this. Most illegal immigrants come from a bad situation. You don’t take those sorts of risks just for the hell of it. But the American mentality that the best way to deal with a bad situation is to pick up stakes and move is not really biblical. (Yes, there was Exodus, but that was because God had a specific plan for the Hebrews.) Also, I have the same worry here that I expressed in my post on Appalachia, that American Christians sometimes take the commandment to help the poor as encouraging the poor to scramble up the ladder by hook or by crook.

Paul, I think, recognizes that Philemon’s house is Onesimus’ home, and that things are not really going to be set right until the two of them are reconciled. However we feel about the immigrants being here, we shouldn’t forget that they left a home behind them, and that, all things being equal, they’d probably rather be there. We Americans like to romanticize the aspiring immigrant looking for a new life, but in reality immigration is often simply the lesser evil in a fallen world.

Since the “master” here is usually a whole society rather than an individual, our task isn’t as simple as Paul’s gently admonishing letter to Philemon. There’s a limit to how much we can affect conditions in another country, and such changes as we can make are politically difficult. (If you want to scare a senator, sneak up and yell, “Kill farm subsidies!”) However, it seems to me that the Philemon epistle at least provides an attitude to approach ministry to illegal aliens with. So far the talk I’ve seen seems to be polarized between, “You’re welcome here, to hell with the unjust law,” and “You lawbreaker, get back to your own country.” But a better long-term goal would be to equip immigrants to create alternatives back in their homes. Bert likes to tell stories about Latin Americans who have created nonviolent Christian communities even under hostile conditions, like civil war and economic exploitation. Such models may provide a better solution in the long run than mass migration to a foreign land.

April 2, 2006

Questions of a catechumen: the true church, again

Filed under: Ecclesiology,Personal stuff — Camassia @ 7:40 pm

As promised, I am getting back to some things people have written in response to my catechumen series. Thanks for the words of support, and prayers. I will revisit one post at a time.

On the post about the nature of the true church, David Hamstra brought up the line from Matthew 18:20: “…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” It’s a popular line with people who are not into big overarching church structures, since it sounds like church is any time you and your buddies get together for prayer or theological bull sessions. David says he sees “the role of the larger church structures as being that of supporting the gathering of twos and threes.”

It’s worth noting the context of that line: it comes at the end of an unusually detailed instruction about how to deal with disputes within church. In short, Jesus says, try to deal with things quietly, but if that fails bring it before the whole church; and if anybody doesn’t submit to the church’s judgment, “let such a one be as a Gentile or a tax collector.” On the other hand, if you agree on things you will have great power, because wherever two or three are gathered etc.

So the overall passage is not as reassuring to low-church Protestants as it might sound like in isolation. Two or three may form a congregation, but they still have to submit to the larger body when they fail to agree on something. The fact that the church has fractured because of innumerable failures to do just that complicates the initial image that any small group can declare itself to be gathering in the name of Jesus and invoke his spirit.

Jose Solano defines church even more simply as “wherever repentant sinners gather.” Again, that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot it leaves out. Lots of people repent of their sins outside of a Christian context. Buddhists do it as a general habit. Surrounding the act of repentance are the definitions of what should be repented of, and how, and to whom. Jesus made it clear, as I said above, that failing to submit to church authority is a sin, which winds us back to the question of who has that legitimate authority. So that is sort of an answer that presumes a conclusion.

I am reading Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God now, which is all about this subject, so I think I’ll hold off further comment until I’m finished.

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