An Amusing Story

Well, I didn't get to blog every day while in China like I had hoped. And since getting back there's been lots of catching up to do. Add to that my son coming coming down with a killer flu this week and things have been a wee-bit hectic.

That said, there is one really amusing story from my time in China. And it's relevant to the nature of this blog. The title of my series of lectures was "Dualism, Materialism and the Prospects of Postmortem Survival." My last lecture was titled simply "The Prospects of Postmortem Survival." It followed on the heels of one lecture on dualism and two lectures on physicalist accounts of human nature. I began the lecture by stating the problem. If we are physical creatures through-and-through (as I believe we are), how could we possibly exist in any sort of after life? After all, following an ordinary death it appears our bodies cease to exist, are laid in the ground, and over time, their constitutent parts scattered to the four winds. So, how can the physical objects we are turn up in a heavenly city? Now if you're a dualist but also a Christian, then you've got the very same problem insofar as you believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life of the world to come.

In any case, the lecture explored different ways to make sense out of such a belief as life after death on the assumption that such life is bodily life. Here I explored two or three differen ways things could go, assuming a certain account of the persistence conditions of human bodies, i.e., the sorts of changes things like bodies can undergo without ceasing to exist. At the very end of the lecture I concluded that we can make sense out of such a doctrine as life after death, but if there is to be life after death it is going to take a miracle.

Now the amusing part. As I concluded, one of the Chinese professors, who had attended several of the lectures, stood up and stared at me incredulously, and said: "Is THAT your conclusion? Where's the postmodernism?" Apparently, he had been patiently waiting for postmodern survival to show up in my lectures and, as it turned out, it never did. He had, apparently, mistaken "postmortem survival" for "postmodern survival." When I pointed out his mistake he recognized it at once, was somewhat embarassed, but the two of us had a good laugh nonetheless.

As for me, I had a wonderful time. I think the highlight may have been our final night in Beijing. I took Rowan downstairs to the Hotel Lounge for a celebratory drink (non-alcoholic for him, of course!). And I asked him, "what was your favorite part of the trip?" And he said, "Well, it's between the lectures and the bird's nest." The bird's nest, of course, is the Olympic track and field complex. But, hey, I tied with that!!!! In fact, during one lecture I saw my son writing on a piece of paper. I figured he was doodling. I later discovered that he was taking notes!!!! 11 years old. Warms a dad's heart.

Human Nature in China

Times have changed. Just last year I was in China lecturing on the metaphysics of human nature. Then I was unable to access my blog, inferring that the Chinese government blocked access. But here I am one year later, and for whatever reason, with full access!

So, if time permits I figured I blog a little about my experience and my lectures. Today I am scheduled to lecture on dualist views of human nature. I'll cover a couple of Descrartes' arguments for dualism and the compound dualism of St. Thomas Aquinas.

My son Rowan and I spent a few days in Hangzhou before settling in Beijing. We spent some time with our friend Jing and her husband Chenhui. The highlight was traveling the streets of Hangzhou on bicycle with six million of our closest Chinese friends. It was the most harrowing of experiences!!! The streets are jam-packed with bicycles, mopeds, cars and buses and there are no discernible traffic rules. Absoulte mayhem. The same holds for boarding and deborading buses and trains. It is a free for all. People push and shove and no one is phased by it. I was happy to see that the taking off and landing of aircrafts do not obey the same cultural norms!!!

My favorite experience was flying from Beijing to Hangzhou aboard China Eastern Airlines. As the plane was landing and was all of several hundred feet off the ground people in the back of the plane began getting out of their seats and reaching for their things in the overhead compartments. The flight staff yelled at the people, raced to the back of the plane, closed the over head compartments, yelled some more and then ran back to her seat before the plane touched down. It was amazing to behold!!!

And the food. Ahhhh, the food! Flavor abounds and we are in culinary heaven.

Reflections on my first lecture will follow.

They Still Haven't Found What They're Looking For: More U2 NLOTH

Over at U2 Sermons there has been lots of discussion of the new U2 album, NLOTH. Beth, whose site it is, has been offering up really interesting and provocative musings on the album. Here’s one line from a recent post:

“U2 don't want to show us the certainties we humans make of religious experience after the fact; they want to show us actual religious experience in all its imperious, weird, transformative power.”

I think she’s right about that. I think this album (especially) provides more of a phenomenology of religious experience than an interpretation of it. The lyrics are written from the on-the-ground perspective of lived experience. They are not written in what we might call the theoretic mode, which comes after the experience has been filtered through a particular hermeneutic grid.

Life, it is often said, is always lived forward but only understood backward. This U2 album is very much written in the forward direction, not the backward. But if that’s so, then I don’t think we can say that the face looking back at the guy at the ATM machine in Moment of Surender is the face of Jesus, as one commenter at U2 Sermons does. From inside the story I think it’s ambiguous just whose face is staring back at the character. I think even the identity of the unknown caller in the song by the same name is, from inside the story, also ambiguous. Is it God? Is it a wrong number? Who is it? The ambiguity of the identity of the caller is supported by Bono himself who says exactly that in the book that accompanies the deluxe editions. He himself asks, “Who is it that’s calling? Is it God? Who?”

I think we’ve got to be careful about saying what lyrics mean or to whom the characters in them mean to be referring. As a piece of art the lyrics are open to myriad interpretations which, though they may be radically different, can all be faithful to the lyrics. From within the narrative of the album or the songs themselves, however, I think the source of transformation in MoS and UKC is shrouded in mystery.

One more thought. Also over at U2 Sermons Beth has a beautiful post titled Dhikr in which she talks about the Sufi influences on NLOTH. One of the things she suggests in her discussion is that there’s not as much ache in NLOTH as there is in previous U2 albums. She says,

“U2 often used to give us quite a lot of lament alternating with dazzled foretastes, or the two married into a kind of ache. But there is not much aching on NLOTH. The album is more settled and assured on both ends; its quest is to dwell in reality, not drum up drama, and yet it seems more confident than ever that there is a realm of very palpable connection with God available now as well.”

Well, I dunno. I think the very title of the album, together with the future orientation of many of the album’s moments, suggests otherwise. I think this album no less than previous ones drips with what the Germans call sensucht, a perpetually unsatisfied longing and yearning, an ache, at the center of the human condition. Indeed, I was just talking with students last night about this in connection with C.S. Lewis. Lewis claims in Surprised by Joy that sensucht, more than anything, was the central story of his life. I believe this to be the central message of I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. The band members may have in fact been found by God, but they still hadn't found what they were looking for. That's sensucht. And it’s there in White as Snow. It’s there too in Cedars of Lebanon

This shitty world sometimes produces a rose
The scent of it lingers and then it just goes

That just about says it all, doesn’t it? That just about summarizes all U2 albums: it’s a shitty world. But sometimes it produces roses. Enjoy the roses, because soon enough their fragrance will be gone. And the longing will return. The ache, in fact, is never fully massaged away, ever; at least not on this side of the Silence.

So NLOTH, no less than U2’s other albums, is radically this-worldly. But insofar as it is I don’t think it’s any more settled or assured than previous albums. Life in the sound is intrinsically unsettled. It’s characterized by darkness and punctuated now and again by real but fleeting glimpses of the Divine. Love may have the last word and a few beautiful penultimate words. And joy no doubt gets in its two-cents worth, too, between the already and the not-yet. But the scent of them both lingers and then it just goes. And so we find ourselves always longing, always yearning, never settled.

U2: No Line on The Horizon

Conversation in the media and around the blogosphere surrounding U2’s 12th studio album, NLOTH, is both ubiquitous and animated, much like the front man of U2 himself, the ever present Bono. Some of the faithful love the album and tout it as their best yet. Others….not so much. Despite the fact that I, like ever so many, have been suffering from a severe case of “Bono Fatigue,” (as my friend Matt likes to call it), I was eager to get my hands on the new record. Indeed, I had been listening to it for weeks before I bought it from my local record store Vertigo Music the day it was released.

Some Christians are hailing the album as U2’s most explicitly Christian since October. Indeed, Christians have been finding everything from the album’s cover to the lyrics thick with Christian content and symbolism.

Music is art and just as good works of art help us to see new worlds or to sometimes see the same world with new eyes, so the work of art itself is open to a plurality of interpretations, depending on the hermeneutic of the viewer-listener-reader.

Let’s start with the album cover, pictured above. It features a black and white Hiroshi Sugimoto photograph of sky meeting sea. Some interpret the cover as a testament to U2’s eschatological vision of that day when God’s kingdom has come to earth in fullness. I like that interpretation and think the cover is certainly open to it. Viewed from the perspective of the Christian story, what I really like about the photograph is the bottom half. The top half is very light and the bottom half much darker. It’s easy to view the image as a bold contrast between light (heaven) and darkness (earth). And yet. And yet one can’t help but be struck by the circle of reflected light amidst the darkness in the bottom half, pushing the darkness outward; a beautiful image I think. The Christian sees in this God’s goodness pushing back the darkness, all that drags us down. That’s grace. Gravity (darkness and sin) pulls us downward, but grace (light and love) push back against gravity and lift us up.

How does Bono himself describe the album cover? Well, not with the language and imagery I just used. He describes it in terms that are woven throughout the lyrics of the album and which, though not at odds in any way with Christian thought, are certainly not explicitly Christian either. He sees the photograph as symbolizing infinity, an image of a future open to infinite possibility. His focus is neither on the light nor the darkness, but on the vanishing point in the infinite distance, the point beyond our vision. The upcoming tour, by the way, will be called Kiss the Future.

The notion of infinity is, as I say, woven throughout the album. From the title track, No Line On the Horizon, where Bono croons

I know a girl with a hole in her heart
She said infinity’s a great place to start
Oh….

to the hymn-like confession Magnificent

I was born
I was born to be with you
In this space and time
After that and ever after
I haven't had a clue

to the equally confessional Breathe, where Bono speaks of the “roar that lies on the other side of silence.” I hear in all these lines an openness to the future, a denial that things must be the way they in fact are, a kind of joy in infinite possibility, and a yearning for what lies beyond. Christian? Explicitly Christian? If one is a Christian one will no doubt resonate with the themes of uncertainty in the face of infinity and that things are not now as they should be and will be in the shalomic future.

While many moments of autobiography can be detected on this album—gotta stand up to rock stars; Napoleon is in high heels; Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas, many of the songs are written, Bono tells us in the book that accompanies the deluxe editions, from the perspectives of characters he has created. The last two U2 albums—ATYCLB and HTDAB were straightforward autobiography, personal accounts of Bono wrestling with his own demons. This one less so; at least less so in terms of being written from the first-person perspective. But, as Bono himself reminds us, the mask reveals the man. And that’s no doubt true on this album.

Though not written from the first-person perspective there’s still a lot of Bono that shines through the characters he concocts for this album. What manages to shine through is humility, uncertainty in the presence of transcendence, doubt in the presence of unvarnished evil, longing, rebirth, and sheer joy, gratitude and love. If you're a Christian, all of those ideas are bound to resonate, and resonate deeply. Are they Christian? Explicitly Christian? Whatever they are they are certainly not exclusively Christian.

While Bono can be a little too full of himself for his own good, somehow he manages, I think, to convey a laudable sort of humility. This comes through brilliantly on Magnificent.

I was born
I was born to sing for you

I didn’t have a choice
But to lift you up
And sing whatever song you wanted me to
I give you back my voice
From the womb my first cry
It was a joyful noise
Oh, oh…

This is not braggodocio. It’s Bono realizing that he’s been given a gift, a voice, something which, like unusually good looks, is not something one deserves credit for. It’s dumb luck or sheer blessing. And Bono, in full confessional mode, offers back to its Giver what he regards as a gift, and he does so with an obvious sense of gratitude. He even acknowledges that when he wrote the song he had in mind the Magnificat, the song that Mary sings upon her visitation to Elizabeth. Although the song as a whole is, he says, "about two lovers trying to hold on to each other and trying to turn their life into worship. Not of each other, but of being alive, of God...of spirit."

There’s another confession of humility in the full-on gaze of ego in Stand Up Comedy. There Bono sings,

I gotta stand up to ego but my ego’s not really the enemy
It’s like a small child crossing an eight lane highway
On a voyage of discovery

Bono knows his ego needs taming, but I think he’s here revealing a charming childlikeness, the smallness he feels in the face of it all and the glee we all used to take in the dare to “cross an eight-lane highway” just for the thrill of it. Bono has not lost that sense of childlike glee and adventure. The world, bent and broken though it may be, still presents itself to Bono as a vast playground or carnival, an adventure inviting him on its many rides and attractions. And he’s (sometimes) downright giddy about being in the midst of it all.

There are several places on the album that strike notes of yearning and rebirth. First, in Moment of Surrender, a song about a character Bono has manufactured, a war veteran who hasn’t been able to reinsert himself into civilian life or into his own skin or psyche for that matter. As Bono puts it, “he has dragged his wife into drugs and booze, [and] he can’t live with what he’s done to her and so he breaks down beside an ATM machine and begs God to deliver them.” The song is, I believe, the highpoint of the album. In any case, we get these chilling lyrics sung in Bono's brooding voice:

I’ve been in every black hole
At the altar of the dark star
My body’s now a begging bowl
That’s begging to get back
Begging to get back to my heart
To the rhythm of my soul
To the rhythm of my unconsciousness
To the rhythm that yearns
To be released from control

The way Bono envisions it, it’s this same troubled soul in Unknown Caller, who ends up in some motel trying to make a call on his cell phone. Who’s he calling? A drug dealer to score more drugs? Someone for help? We don’t know. But he doesn’t get a signal. Instead, someone (or is it Someone) is reaching out to him with a stunning and completely unexpected (text) message. The message tells him to,

Go, shout it out, rise up
Oh, oh
Escape yourself and gravity
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now….

Restart and re-boot yourself
You’re free to go
Oh, oh
Shout for joy if you get the chance…

I can’t help but be reminded in these lyrics of Jesus in the Gospels telling those he’s healed or forgiven, “Go; you’re free. You’re healed.” One can only imagine or perhaps not imagine at all, if you yourself take yourself to have been forgiven or healed, then you know perfectly well that feeling of unbridled joy that comes with forgiveness and healing. And there are times either in private or public you "shout it out!"

And then, these lyrics from Breathe,

Every day I die again, and again I’m reborn

The ideas of yearning and rebirth permeate the album and, I think, Bono’s way of being in the world. It’s just like Bob Dylan said “That he not busy being born is busy dying.” Anyone who is not open to being born again (and again and again and again) is already dying and is in danger of turning to stone. U2 have always been open to the new, to the unexpected, to the surprising and transcendent, open to being reborn, again and again and again. That’s what make them perpetually fresh, still attractive to fans young enough to be their teen children.

My favorite feature of the album, btw, and no doubt an element owing to the genius of Brian Eno, comes at the beginning of Fez-Being Born. If you’ve heard the chorus to the first single off the album, Get on Your Boots, you’ll recognize these lyrics

Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Let me in the sound, sound
Meet me in the sound

At the beginning of Fez-Being Born, just behind the music, a barely audible Bono can be heard to sing, begging and pleading-like,

let me in the sound let me in the sound
let me in the sound, sound
let me in the sound, sound
let me in the sound.

That is brilliant! This is what Bono has been born to do. It’s the place he meets us, his fans, the place he is no doubt most himself, and the place he finds grace,

I found grace inside of sound; I found grace it’s all that I found.

Those beautiful lyrics are from the song, Breathe.

Is this U2's most explicitly Christian album? I'm not sure I even understand the question. Some of the lyrics will no doubt send chills up the spines of those of us who fit our own stories into The (Christian) Story. And Bono may no doubt have penned them from within The Story. But the lyrics and the album as a whole have broader appeal. You don't have to be a Christian to resonate with the realities about which Bono sings. I guess I get a little annoyed when Christians say things like "this is U2's most explicitly Christian album." While I'm not sure what that actually means, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Reading some of the theologically oriented reviews around the blogosphere leads me to believe that some are trying too hard to mine these songs of explicitly Chrisitan content. Sometimes a telephone pole in a movie is just a telephoe pole, with no deeper meaning. So, for example, when Bono sings "the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard" in I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight, I've got a hunch he hasn't got Revelations 4 in mind, as someone has actually suggested. Just a hunch.

As to the question whether this is U2’s best album, I'm agnostic about that, too. It may be a best since album. Their best since Achtung Baby or their best since The Unforgettable Fire. Is it better than Joshua Tree? I think Joshua Tree is in a class by itself. And I think we have to wait to see how NLOTH ages before we can say where it should rank in the U2 canon.

NLOTH is a GREAT album; I LOVE it and can't stop listening to it. And I’m pretty doggone certain an awful lot of people are going to meet me in the sound when they kiss the future in Chicago on September 12. How about you? Meet me in the sound?

The Nature of Belief

I have a friend who is a friend of Stanley Hauerwas, the Duke theologian whose reputation for foul mouthed rabble rousing is legendary. Hauerwas has written a memoir, which he’s had my friend read through in manuscript form. Because there are relevant similarities in life experience between Hauerwas and myself, and because my friend thought it might do my soul good to read it, he asked Hauerwas if it would be okay to share the manuscript with me. Hauerwas agreed. So that manuscript has provided my night time reading over this past week.

I have never been much of a fan of Hauerwas. Though I must admit, I’ve only read two of his books. The first was Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (1986). I was motivated to read this as a student at Yale Divinity School because of my work with people with mental retardation. (As you may or may not know I have an undergraduate degree in social work and was a practicing social worker for about three years.) The book did not make much of an impression. That may say more about me than it does about the book, however, as I was all of 23 or 24 years old when I read it. The other book of his that I read and that resonated deeply was Resident Aliens (1989), a book he coauthored with William Willimon, former Dean of the Chapel at Duke. That book I highly recommend to readers of this blog.

Here in Grand Rapids I’m part of a group called In Vino Theologica or in wine there is theology. It’s a motley little group of men and women, young and old, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant, Confused and Skeptical who come together to read and think about what it means to be Christian. I try to find short(ish), thought-provoking articles for us to read beforehand and then discuss over a couple of bottles of wine and fine cheese. Since I’ve been reading Hauerwas’s memoir I thought I would see if he had anything online that might serve the purposes of our little group. And I came across an article he wrote in 1991 that is immediately relevant to the discussion I was having with Mike Wittmer last week on his blog. Mike and I were discussing the nature of Christian belief.

In that discussion I made the following claims:

I would just point out that practices, rituals, sacraments, feasts and fasts, etc. for 1500 years of Christian history served as the primary means for the redirection and reorientation of our desires, our loves and lives, for our spiritual formation as icons of God and followers of Jesus whose end is communion with God and others. It is only since the reformation that the pendulum has swung away from the embodied practices of concrete communities as central to spiritual formation and toward the atomistic, disembodied and cerebral-centered. I suggest it’s time for the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction once again.

And,

When it comes to faith I am, after all these years, still a beginner. I am always ever a beginner. I’m coming to see, I guess, that I am still learning to believe, still learning how to believe. For a long time I was preoccupied with what to believe. As I get older I’m coming to see that how I believe is of equal importance. I am coming to see that belief is something that takes practice and something one learns to do over time.

In the article of Hauerwas’s that I found for use in In Vino, Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community Hauerwas compares becoming a Christian to learning to lay brick. He says:

To learn to lay brick, it is not sufficient for you to be told how to do it; you must learn to mix the mortar, build scaffolds, joint, and so on. Moreover, it is not enough to be told how to hold a trowel, how to spread mortar, or how to frog the mortar. In order to lay brick you must hour after hour, day after day, lay brick.

Of course, learning to lay brick involves learning not only myriad skills, but also a language that forms, and is formed by those skills. Thus, for example, you have to become familiar with what a trowel is and how it is to be used, as well as mortar, which bricklayers usually call "mud." Thus "frogging mud" means creating a trench in the mortar so that when the brick is placed in the mortar, a vacuum is created that almost makes the brick lay itself. Such language is not just incidental to becoming a bricklayer but is intrinsic to the practice. You cannot learn to lay brick without learning to talk "right."

The language embodies the history of the craft of bricklaying. So when you learn to be a bricklayer you are not learning a craft de novo but rather being initiated into a history. For example, bricks have different names--klinkers, etc.---to denote different qualities that make a difference about how one lays them. These differences are often discovered by apprentices being confronted with new challenges, making mistakes, and then being taught how to do the work by the more experienced.

Now the comparison:

Christianity is not beliefs about God plus behavior. We are Christians not because of what we believe, but because we have been called to be disciples of Jesus. To become a disciple is not a matter of a new or changed self-understanding, but rather to become part of a different community with a different set of practices.

For example, I am sometimes confronted by people who are not Christians but who say they want to know about Christianity. This is a particular occupational hazard for theologians around a university, because it is assumed that we are smart or at least have a Ph.D., so we must really know something about Christianity. After many years of vain attempts to "explain" God as trinity, I now say, "Well, to begin with we Christians have been taught to pray, 'Our father, who art in heaven. . .’" I then suggest that a good place to begin to understand what we Christians are about is to join me in that prayer.

For to learn to pray is no easy matter but requires much training, not unlike learning to lay brick. It does no one any good to believe in God, at least the God we find in Jesus of Nazareth, if they have not learned to pray. To learn to pray means we must acquire humility not as something we try to do, but as commensurate with the practice of prayer. In short, we do not believe in God, become humble and then learn to pray, but in learning to pray we humbly discover we cannot do other than believe in God.

This expresses better than my feeble attempts one of the points I was attempting to make in my discussions with Mike concerning the nature of Christian belief; namely, that Christian belief takes practice. It's not that we first become Christians and then as evidence of that engage in certain sorts of behavior. Rather, it is in the very course of engaging in the practices and rituals peculiar to the Christian way of being in the world that we actually become Christian.

We Are Liars

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.

That’s what Shakespeare told us. I think he’s mostly right. But what can that mean for us? Stangely, I think it means that we’re all actors and actresses and that as such our task is to lie to the world. And to lie big and bold. Because the bigger and bolder we lie to the world the more honest with the world we will be. It’s just like Wilco says in their song Misunderstood. You’re honest when you’re telling a lie. So you and I owe it to the world to lie our fool heads off and to discharge the debt of honesty we owe to the world.

Just as our task—our godly task!—is to lie to the world, it is the task of the world to tell the truth, and in so doing dishonestly describe the world we inhabit. Our task is to lie—big and bold—and in so doing to honestly describe the world we inhabit. I know this all sounds crazy, and it is. It’s ridiculous. It’s lunacy. It’s foolishness. But, of course, the wisdom of God is foolishness to the likes of us.

If you listen to news reporters, politicians, and marketing executives they tell the truth: the world is a mess, and so are we. Greedy men bilk investors out of billions of dollars; selfish little countries consume disproportionately large amounts of the earth’s resources, while other parts of the world languish; middle eastern nations terrorize each other while we ordinary Western men and women amuse ourselves numb with entertainment and the acquisition of stuff, believing as we do that this is what it means to be human and to flourish. This is the truth. And yet this description of the world is less than honest even if it is true.

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.

You and I, as Christ-followers, are called to be liturgical actors on the stage of the world. We are called to theatrically enact and incarnate the big lie—The Eschaton—the lie that the world and we human beings are not as the newspeople, politicians and advertising executives truthfully describe. The lie is that there’s another world, a new reality, another way of doing business with each other, a way characterized by peace, love, collaboration and unselfishness. And we’re being honest when we’re telling this lie.

Just as we answer the Divine invitation and gather around a table one day a week to dramatically enact and anticipate the eschaton—the heavenly meal where differences don’t divide and where though many we are nevertheless one—so are we called as liturgical creatures to go out into the world and to theatrically incarnate and anticipate this absurdity in the warp and woof of our daily lives, and so honestly describe ourselves and the world, as we quite literally put the lie on display for all the world to see.

We’ll fail of course, at this calling of ours to lie. That's because the truth is we’re horrible liars. Still, even though failure is certain, lie we must. It’s our calling.

The Party's On

I've been saying for a long time that we Christians need to relearn how to celebrate. God, after all, is a party-throwing God. And apparently, if the Gospels are to be trusted, we're all invited to the party. Yep, all of us: Me, Mike Wittmer, Pete Rollins, what's the guy's name who delivered the inaugural prayer...um...him, Bishop Spong, Ted Haggard, James Dobson, The Farting Preacher, and even that old curmudgeon Dissidens over at remonstrans.net.

That God is as promiscuous with his love and grace and mercy as the Bible makes God out to be makes some of us a wee bit upset, I know. But look: this whole bloody, awful, beautiful, confusing, depressing, delightful life and world history is going to climax in a party of universal proportions. Well, that's what the bible teaches anyway. And that's worth getting excited about. Isn't it? That's worth practicing for. Isn't it?

Well, I found someone else who who has been captivated by the image of this party-throwing God on a universal mission of reconciliation, healing forgiveness and celebration. This is how he puts it, and he puts really well:

Religion #1:

God is mean, angry and easily provoked. From day 1, we’ve all been a disappointment, and God is–justly–planning to punish us forever. At the last minute, thanks to Jesus stepping in to calm him down, he decides to be gracious.

But don’t do anything to mess that up. Peace is fragile around here.

Religion #2

God is gracious, loving, kind, generous and open-hearted. He rejoices in us as his creations, and is grieved that our sins have made us his enemies and caused so much brokenness and pain. In Jesus, he shows us what kind of God he is and restores the joy that should belong to the children of such a Father. True to his promises, he will bless all people in Jesus, and restore the world by his resurrection victory.

You can’t do anything to mess this up. God’s got his heart set on a universe wide celebration...

...We have far too many people selling religion #1. Like the Pharisees, they are the authorized representatives of the grumpy, ticked off, hacked off, very, very angry God who MIGHT….maybe, MIGHT let you off the hook….MAYBE…..IF–and it’s a very big IF–you manage to believe enough, obey enough, get the theology questions right enough, find your way to the right church, follow the right script and get the details right, down to the last “amen.”

...We have far too few Christians who are overwhelmed at the news that God has fired the bookkeepers, sent home the bean counters, dismissed the religion cops and bought party hats for the grumpy old people. The big announcement is this: In Jesus, we discover that God is just sloppy with his amazing grace and completely beyond common sense when it comes to his love. Just to enhance his reputation as the God who know how to throw a party, he’s inviting all of us back home, no tickets necessary, no dress code, for a party that will last, literally, forever. With open bar, and all on him. (Oh calm down Baptists. You can go to another room.)...

...The Father will have his party. Even for the undeserving kid who doesn’t quite get it. Even for the Pharisee-wannabe who is horrified that dad’s not cooperating with the system.

God will be gracious. God will be good. God will be overflowing in love. God will be good to the world. God will bless the nations. God will put his lamb and his Spirit and his loving face at the center of a universe made over in the image of the greatest wedding bash/banquet you could ever imagine...

...Your ticket to this event will most certainly NOT have a denominational name on it. Nor will your seat at the table be determined by your church or your theological team. The grace and goodness of God is going to erase all the lines, boxes, definitions, fences, dictionaries, sermons, announcements and pronouncements ever made. Your Biblical interpretations won’t amount to a hill of beans. God himself, and his good grace, will be the star of the show...

...God’s gracious face makes our religion fall apart. It takes away all our soapboxes. It shuts our mouths, because none of us deserve it and all of us can have it. God’s love and grace are so far beyond our ideas of what they ought to be that none of our ideas about God can survive the good news that comes in Jesus. Jesus is a salvation, grace, goodness, God revolution...

...Let’s stop it. Let’s stop hiding the face of a gracious God. Let’s show it, sing it, worship in its light, live as if we know that gracious, glorious God as the one the Bible proclaims and who comes to us in Jesus.

Let’s enjoy the face of a gracious God. Now and forever.

Preach it, brother! Preach it again! And then preach it one more time! Let's all of us preach it, try to live it and then practice for it. Practice for it? Yes; practice for it. How? By throwing some parties of our own in anticipation of the one that's coming. (First, though, I've gotta kick this sore throat.....)

(You can read the original post, by imonk, in its entirety by clicking here.)

Which Came First: Chicken or Egg? Thoughts about Belief and Chrsitian Faith

It’s been a VERY long time since my last post. Since then I finished an academic semester, been to London and Belfast and participated on a panel at the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship’s Worship Symposium with Jason Clark and Pete Rollins on Emerging Christianity. And I’ve also been trying to explain on someone’s blog claims I made at the panel discussion concerning belief and Christianity.

First, a word about the panel. As I said, the panel was made up of myself, Jason Clark and Pete Rollins with Jamie Smith, Lori Wilson and Mike Wittmer acting as respondents. Nathan Bierma deftly played the role of moderator. We attracted somewhere between 120-130 to the four hour panel discussion and roughly another 100 over the course of the next two days at one-hour discussions for those who didn’t make it to the panel. The Worship Symposium as a whole drew some 1400 participants from 38 different countries.

The impetus for the panel is a book that Pete, Jason, myself and Scot McKnight are doing addressing various issues in emerging. We gathered (except for Scot) the day before the symposium to go over drafts of our chapters. It was for me an enormously beneficial experience; both the colloquium at which we went over chapter drafts and the panel discussion.

Okay, now to the meat and potatoes. At the panel discussion, Mike Wittmer, a theologian at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, asked the panel whether there are any beliefs that are necessary to be a Christian. He wanted to know if someone could be a follower of Christ and lack belief in the resurrection, for example. Each of the panel members was reluctant to answer the question. Speaking for myself, I said that I was reluctant only because belief admits of different grammars and that the question(er) suggested there was only one. I said there that belief must be thought of not synchronically (as happening at a specific point in time) but diachronically (as something that happens over time). I elaborated on this later on Mike Wittmer’s blog.

Let me state briefly how I am thinking of belief and you good folks (if there are any of you left out there) can tell me what you think. The preferred grammar of the questioner is the grammar of assent, the view that belief is belief that: belief that Jesus was both God and human; belief that Jesus rose from the dead, etc. Here the idea is that belief is belief that certain propositions are true, and he wanted to know if in order to be a follower of Christ one must assent to certain propositions and if so, which ones.

My response was to tell a story about Pascal, who upon being told by a friend that he wanted to become a Christian, doesn’t tell the guy what to believe; rather, Pascal tells him to “go to Mass and take the Eucharist.”

The idea here is that belief can be the result of engaging in certain practices and rituals. Now most 21st Century, Western, Protestant Christians probably think that engaging in Christian practices or rituals follows on the heels of belief. Pascal suggests that the causal chain runs in the opposite direction, from practices and rituals to belief. Indeed, most of us probably think that belief is what brings about salvation itself and not salvation that brings about belief.

God, I take it, is never satisfied with belief that. God is interested in the total reorientation and rearrangement of our lives, our loves, our desires our entire way of being in the world. The important question is whether being a Christian is fundamentally and primarily about belief that certain propositions are true.

At the most basic level it seems clear to me that God is most interested in the total reorganization and reconfiguration of human life, of reorienting the human will, heart, desires and loves. God is interested in our moral and existential transformation. This of course is in no way incompatible with belief that certain propositions of the relevant sort are true. But the goal is transformed lives, not belief in “Jesus facts.”

And this is why when asked whether followers of Christ must know and put their trust in him, I’m inclined to point out that “being a Christian” (like belief) is progressive, that I am even now, and after all these years still becoming a Christian. Followers of Christ must, of course, put their trust in him. I must put my trust in him: today I must; tomorrow I must, and the next day I must. My frustration with myself is that I often put my trust in Christ one moment and then take it back the next.

As to the resurrection and whether someone could become a follower of Jesus before they come to believe in the resurrection, this is what I said on MW’s blog:

“I think that someone could become a follower of Jesus BEFORE they come to believe in the resurrection. But let me preface this…by saying that I agree that the resurrection of Jesus is indeed an essential piece of the Jesus story.

“Suppose you’re a fledgling writer. And suppose you meet someone at a writer’s workshop in Ann Arbor, another author with whom you share coffee and conversation during the breaks. Suppose this author speaks with you throughout the three day conference about the ins and outs of constructing plot and characters and does so in a way that you’ve never experienced before. You find yourself drawn to this author and to his words, even more so than the author leading the workshop. Suppose he has the effect of revolutionizing your own writing and that after all that time you spent together at the workshop you never bothered to get his last name. You knew him simply as John, the name on his name tag.

“Now suppose you go home utterly changed as a writer. Your writing from that workshop on is of a different caliber and gravitas than what preceded it. And then suppose that a week, a month, a year later you read an article in a writer’s magazine about the weekend John Updike attended a workshop in Ann Arbor and about the many conversations he had with this fledgling writer from Grand Rapids. You’re stunned! You’re shocked! You spent three days conversing with John Updike, whose work you love, and you didn’t even know it was John Updike. Now you do.

“The point of this little story is obvious. It’s certainly possible for you to have an experience of someone, to have your life changed by this someone, without at that very moment knowing who or what that someone is or is about. I imagine the resurrected Jesus could draw people to himself without those people knowing at the time of meeting who he is or what he’s done. Knowledge of that sort, if things go well, will come.

I went on to make a point about the resurrection itself.

“I want to stress again that the resurrection of Jesus gets its meaning and weight from the story it’s embedded in. Apart from that story it’s no more than a historical curiosity. I’m not interested in getting people simply to believe that a guy named Jesus was resurrected from the grave, and I doubt you [MW] are either. The good news is that our sins have been forgiven, that God has reconciled us, that there’s a new way to be human and that everything has changed because of the incarnation, life, death AND resurrection of Jesus. The incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus are themselves embedded in a six thousand year old, unfolding story of a bent and broken world and a God working for its restoration and renewal. In other words, the resurrection as an isolated factoid is not what is of paramount importance. It’s the resurrection as part of God’s program of love and reconciliation that is the issue of supreme importance.”

Well, that was my last and final contribution to the discussion on Mike’s blog. Thoughts?