Does Jim Dobson "Make Stuff Up?"

In the mid to late 1980's I was going through a spiritual journey that would take me from the insular world of hyper-fundamentalist Christianity with its certainties, quick and easy answers, and lack of ambiguity to a place where I had to walk by faith and not by the myth of certainty. I traveled the back roads of Florida, where I was a sales rep and kept my radio tuned to AM Christian stations. One of the programs I listened to regularly was Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Dr. Dobson offered me plenty of advice on rearing my young children, and caring for my family relationships. It was important advice: my wife was an addict and her addiction was destroying our marriage and affecting the ability of our children to succeed in school. Try as I might, the downward spiral was too much for us to bear, and we ended up divorced. My (ex-)wife later died, a tragic victim of the disease that destroys many other families like ours.

Years later, I was serving at a United Way in Florida. I had been ordained in the Episcopal Church and viewed my sojourn through fundamentalism and out the other side as a necessary part of my spiritual formation. I now longer considered myself an "evangelical" but I still had a special place in my heart for Jim Dobson. Those lonely, tear-filled afternoons were part of who I am, and Jim Dobson helped to form me. So I was distressed to learn that Dr. Dobson seemed to have some very wrong information about United Way. And that he was encouraging his listeners to stop supporting their local United Ways, since he said, they were driven by a pro-abortion and pro-gay-rights agenda. One afternoon, a co-worker (an evangelical) buzzed me on the intercom. "Turn on the radio. Dobson's back on us." I did, and he was. I figured that if I called in, identified myself as both a Christian minister and a United Way official, I could surely correct him. After all, he said he was only interested in the truth.

I dialed the toll-free number and heard a friendly voice on the other end. "Focus on the Family. How may I help you?"

I identified myself. "I believe that Dr. Dobson has some incorrect information about United Way, and I'd like to speak with him to set the record straight."

The voice on the other end was suddenly cold. "You are off topic."

And the line went dead.

Jim Dobson went on for the rest of the program lying through his teeth about the organization I worked for. I never again tuned into his program.

So, when Barack Obama said yesterday that Dr. Dobson was "making stuff up," I can testify that Obama is telling the truth. Jim Dobson makes stuff up about people who disagree with him. "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology," Dobson said, adding ominously, Obama is "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

Why? Because Obama suggested that some Biblical laws were time and culture-bound, and that taking Jesus' Sermon on the Mount seriously would mean an understanding so radical "that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application."

That's not "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," that's having the guts to say that real Christianity is not some American, middle-class, white-bread civil religion, but the claim that Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar (or the United States of America) is not. I don't know if Obama really is serious about trying to take Jesus seriously or not.

But I do know that Jim Dobson makes stuff up.

For Good Friday: A Rare Perfume

I saw my father’s green Mercury Cougar pull into the parking lot a block or so ahead of me. I had been out of town at a conference and hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks, so I slid across three lanes of traffic and whipped into the space next to him. He got out of the car and looked at me as if to say “Where have you been? You’re late.” The afternoon sun angled through the trees giving everything that hint of summer gold. The golden light caught his face and for the very first time, I looked into the eyes of my father and saw an old man looking back.

We hugged and he stepped back for a moment. I noticed that he had missed a large patch of whiskers under his chin. His eyes dropped. “I went to the doctor today.”

I had forgotten his appointment, but I never let on. “How did it go?”

Suddenly, the air was sucked out of the universe and we stood, face to face, grasping for the words that neither of us wanted to speak or to hear. “It’s bad, real bad.”

I had already lost one parent to cancer, and I knew the road ahead. A cancer death happens a little at a time. First there is the hope that there is somehow a cure, that some medical miracle can be summoned to wash it all away. Then, there is the gradual realization that all of our scientific knowledge counts for very little when this disease begins to devour a life one cell at a time. For people of faith, there are the daily prayers for healing, for acceptance, for endurance.
Finally, the air around us is filled with the scent of sweet perfume, as we anoint our lovers, our parents, our children with our tears, and wipe them dry with our hair. Like Mary of Bethany.

It had only been days before that she and Martha had summoned Jesus to come to pray for her brother. Yet he had not come, at least not in time, and Lazarus was lost to the fever. Then, when there was no more hope, when there was only the pain of accepted death, he came and Lazarus rose. It was life out of death.

Now Mary finds Jesus, his face set towards Jerusalem, where the smell of death fills the air, an anti-perfume, hanging over a city occupied with the daily tasks of life. So she breaks open an alabaster case, and lovingly massages the ointment into his feet. She that knows she is losing him, she that knows this quest for the Kingdom they have been on for three years is about to end. She feels her prayers for his protection swirling downward into the blackness, and her tears fall like spring rain. It is the time of the festival of new life, Passover, when her heart should be soaring, but all she feels is dread. Her brother lives; his friend—her mentor, her teacher—is about to die. It is death out of life.

Right in the midst of the new life of Spring, death crushes us still. Even for those whose lives are filled with the perfume of Jesus’ love, those who believe in healing, in resurrection, in hoping against all hope, the enemy finds its prey. We believe in life, yet we die. We pray for healing and sometimes, the healing comes, the stone is rolled away and we live. But we live in this world filled still with pain, with tears, with sickness, with death. To live is Christ; to die, gain.

It's the great paradox of faith. What is it we are about? Life or death? In Holy Week, walking through Jerusalem, death wrapped around us like a mantle, can we possibly live? And how do we stay faithful? How do we care for the poor, the sick, the dying, when we can hardly see them through our tears? We break open the perfume, we cry, and we listen for the reassurance in his gentle voice.

Romney and Kennedy: Losing Their Religion

The former liberal Governor of Massachusetts, who before being born again to the theo-conservative movement, was a pro-gay-rights-pro-choice-pro-socialized-medicine Country Club Republican, finally gave The Speech. The Speech is being compared to JFK's "I am a Catholic" speech. Indeed, the similarity of the Speeches is not in what they declare, but in what they deny. That most commentators on the Speeches have missed the great difference between them shows how little we really pay attention to what the candidates say.

JFK said he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute." Romney believes in an America where "freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone." Kennedy wanted us to ask not what a President's religion would do for our country but Romney asked what a President's country can do for religion. The private Catholicism of JFK has given way to Romney's public civil religion: syncretized and sanitized, devoid of conflict and devoid of distinction.

Romney said that "the founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square." And it here that Romney's speech does depart from Kennedy's: its explicit contention that "freedom requires religion." Romney has advocated the establishment of a state religion, where the only beliefs that are not worthy are those of people without faith.

It's an ironic evolution in theo-conservativism. Ronald Reagan used to speak of an America founded on "traditional Judeo-Christian values." Romney, claiming his mantle, describes an America that has faith in faith itself. Romney's pantheon of "God(s) in whom we trust" is actually a denial of the faith he so publicly declares . The Mormon church claims to be the only true church, much as JFK's Vatican does. When Romney said that being true to his beliefs means "that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God," he is denying his religion, just like Kennedy did. Kennedy said he wouldn't let the Pope tell him what to believe and how to act. Romney said that the Apostles of Salt Lake City will not tell him what to believe either, whether about the Pope or the Prophet. And in so doing, each ultimately denied their religion.

The United States of America is not a Judeo-Christian nation, but the product of a Enlightenment, where all religious expression is a pitiable attempt to describe the ineffable; the cave drawings of a primitive and puny creation faced with the wonder that is the cosmos. In that vision, even those who choose not to explain the cosmos through a declaration of faith are free to do so. However, Romney's theo-conservatism creates a nation where the religious test prohibited by the Founders is now a nation where "freedom requires religion." It's only a step away from saying that if one does not believe that way, one is not worthy of freedom. Romney has denied his religion, but unlike Kennedy, he has denied the American heritage of religious freedom as well.

That's reason enough to deny him the White House.

An Apostasy Full of Grace and Truth: Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God

He was once the fair-haired boy wonder of evangelicalism, there at the creation of the American Religious Right. He helped define the culture war, especially over abortion. He helped create the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republican majority, the conservative Supreme Court and the New Evangelicals. Now, he's an apostate, a unborn-again seeker, a member of an Eastern Orthodox church, and a a self-acknowledged failure. Which means that, strangely, he's a finally a success.

Frank Schaeffer, the son of evangelical theologians Francis and Edith Schaeffer has, in his memoir Crazy for God, provided a beautiful, touching, and painfully honest story of growing up in the evangelical sub-culture in the age before it emerged as the culture. His portrait of his famous (at least in some circles) parents, and their Swiss Christian community, L'Abri, will anger those evangelicals who regard the Schaeffers (especially Francis) as saints. But, if you're looking for a Daddy Dearest, you'll be mightly disappointed. There is no scandal here, other than the scandal of evangelical Christianity in America once it got itself fitted into Constantine's vestments.

Frank paints his father as an art-loving historian, a free-thinker more at home in the Florentine Accademia than on the radio with Dr. Dobson. The elder Schaeffer apparently detested the power-hungry theo-politicians like Dobson, Falwell and Robertson, and was far more concerned with reaching young people in search of life's big questions than in reaching the halls of power. Still he allowed himself to be manipulated by the theo-politicians, to become the most sought after evangelical teacher of the 1980's. Francis Schaeffer is revered in evangelical circles, where his books and film series (produced by Frank) are still best-sellers two decades after his death. He created the intellectual underpinnings of the Religious Right (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing) and did more than any other theologian to gain evangelicalism its entry onto the political stage.

Edith is considerably more God-crazy than her husband, but her son clearly adores her. Beautiful, stylish, and fiercely intelligent, she is the fire in L'Abri's stove, warming everything with her presence, all the while irritating the living hell out of her family with twenty minute sermons masquerading as prayers, and her passion to "save" every living being in earshot.

Frank Schaeffer is honest about the dysfunction of his family, his sister's mental illness, his own sexual coming of age (sometimes uncomfortably so--the man apparently was a world-class wanker as a teen), the family fights over theology (which nearly wrecked L'Abri), and his parents' love affair with art, music and literature. He's also painfully honest about his failed career as a secular film maker, and genuinely regretful at giving up his early and promising career as an artist to chase the big evangelical donors who were underwriting the Schaeffer phenomenon.

Where he's at his best is also where's at his angriest: about the destructive role he played in American political life and the unleashing of the monster that ate the Republican Party. These days, he's a post-evangelical who rejects "what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidty, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture." He also considerably more nuanced about abortion, though calling him "pro-choice" would be a stretch.

In this he taps into that ironic vein that has created most of us evangelical apostates: the very success of evangelicalism, its emergence as the dominant religious influence in America, and its naked lust for power have driven us far from our home. One of Francis Schaeffer's most famous works is a film series about abortion and euthaniasia entitled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? His son wants to know: whatever happened to the Evangelical Church?

Frank Schaeffer's apostasy is full of grace and truth. But what else would you expect from Francis and Edith Schaeffer's boy?

Kansas Sam and the Temple of Doom

• God is an exalted, perfected man.
• Jesus of Nazareth is the biological child of God the Father who had sexual relations with the Virgin Mary.
• After his resurrection, Jesus came to a lost tribe of Israelites called the Nephites, who lived in what is now the U.S. He appointed twelve apostles from the Nephites and they were sent out to spread the Gospel among the people who lived there.
  
• God has a human body and is not "eternal." There was a time when God did not exist.

Those are among the chief doctrines of the Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. They are in direct contradiction of the chief doctrines of the "orthodox" Christian churches, Catholic, Protestant and Eastern. Can someone be a Christian and not believe what "orthodox" Christianity teaches? Of course. Even "orthodox" believers (me, for instance) have been known to have their share of doubts, heresies and unbeliefs.

But you cannot logically say that those who accept the beliefs of Mormonism believe in Jesus the same way those who believe in the traditional doctrines of orthodox Christianity do.

Then why is Sam Brownback apologizing for a campaign staffer's e-mail asking for help in fact-checking the doctrines of the LDS church, and asserting that "the LDS Jesus is not the same Jesus of the Christian faith?"

This is something that every orthodox Christian and every Latter Day Saint knows: the two faiths are similar and have much in common, but differ on who God is, who Jesus is, and whether or not the Bible has a missing "Third Testament." They are as similar as Shia and Sunni Islam are. And as different.

The only reason I can think that Kansas Sam has to apologize is that in America, it's not supposed to matter whether or not a President believes that Jesus used to live in Missouri or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will return to rapture the Chosen Ones. Its' supposed to matter that he or she is competent, has a vision and convinces the American public to support that vision.

Sam got caught slyly trying to slip into the mantle of the evangelical Elijah. It might work among the more moderate religious conservatives. But will the Bob Jones Office of the Inquisition be any more likely to vote for an apostate Methodist who converted to Papism than they would for Mormon Mitt Romney? I rather doubt it. Kansas Sam is headed for the Temple of Doom.

He should apologize for making religion and religious beliefs a central point of his campaign. But he shouldn't have to apologize for saying that religions believe different things. Maybe now, he'll shut up.

The 2.5% Doctrine

My good friend, Not Very Bright, (whose bloghandle is ironically self-deprecating, since he's one the smartest bloggers around) has a great post about the beliefs of some of our South Carolina legislators regarding evolutionary biology. No surprises here: most of those who responded claim that they believe that the Genesis story is to be understood literally and that humans were made in a single, special act of creation in a Middle Eastern garden, on a Friday afternoon 6,000 years ago. Thank the God of Abraham for Bill Cotty and Mick Mulvaney who express their belief that God is indeed quite capable of designing a universe and populating it with billions of life forms in a graduated process that science calls "evolution." (Rep. Mulvaney is a bit confused about the difference between "deism" and "theistic evolution" but at least the man can think. I promise to spend some time in his office giving him a brief on theological schools of thought...)

The more we discover about the grand design of the universe, the more we see the hand of a Creator in it. (At least I do, you're entitled to be an agnostic or an atheist if you like. At least until such beliefs are listed as threats to national security and we ship you off to Gitmo.) But belief in a Creator in no way presupposes that the Genesis stories (there are two creation stories there, one in chapter 1 and another in 2 and 3) are to be taken as a scientific inquiry into the origin of life. In fact, genetic research has established the basic outlines of Darwin's theory as fact.

The April 13, 2007 issue of Science magazine reveals that the tiny spider macaque, chimpanzees and humans share at least 97.5% of their DNA. This means that only very tiny variations in the genetic code produced the vast diversity of primates and humans. It's wonderful, heady, exciting news. It also strengthens the faith of those who refuse to check their brains at the bright red door of their parish church.

Instead of viewing this news as another scientific validation of theistic biological origins, most creationists either ignore it or deny it. Why? Because it does not fit neatly into their "literal" reading of Genesis. If the events of the Genesis stories are to be understood literally, goes the creationist line, then there was no "fall" and no need for redemption, thus no atonement brought by Jesus' death. No resurrection. No Pentecost. No Second Advent.

In this, the creationists make themselves the unwitting accomplices of the Richard Dawkins band of reactionary atheists who belive that knocking over the straw man of a literal Adam and Eve knocks over the whole basis for Christianity. Unfortunately for both of them, Christianity is dependent, not on a literal reading of Genesis, but on Jesus of Nazareth, the radical Jewish rabbi who came to free people from their enslavement to the traditions of human superstition, including those based on a flawed reading of Genesis or other ancient texts.

And it only takes 2.5% of our DNA to help us figure out that the entire 100% got here in an entirely miraculous process of slow motion creation over 15 billion years. It's the little things that count.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?—Isaiah 43:19.

Whatever you may think of the Episcopal House of Bishops’ “Mind of the House” resolutions passed today at Camp Allen Texas, they have spoken clearly and forcefully.

When the Anglican Primates met last month in Tanzania, they issued an extraordinary communiqué to the American Episcopal Church: comply with our directives by the end of 2007 or face expulsion from the Anglican Communion. The Bishops said, “well, thanks for the advice; here we stand: we can do no other.” They rejected the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué for five reasons:

• “First, it violates our church law in that it would call for a delegation of primatial authority not permissible under our Canons and a compromise of our autonomy as a Church not permissible under our Constitution.
• “Second, it fundamentally changes the character of the Windsor process and the covenant design process in which we thought all the Anglican Churches were participating together.
• “Third, it violates our founding principles as The Episcopal Church following our own liberation from colonialism and the beginning of a life independent of the Church of England.
• “Fourth, it is a very serious departure from our English Reformation heritage. It abandons the generous orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition. It sacrifices the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking Bishops. And, for the first time since our separation from the papacy in the 16th century, it replaces the local governance of the Church by its own people with the decisions of a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.
• “Most important of all it is spiritually unsound. The pastoral scheme encourages one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them and be instruments of reconciliation. The real cultural phenomenon that threatens the spiritual life of our people, including marriage and family life, is the ease with which we choose to break our relationships and the vows that established them rather than seek the transformative power of the Gospel in them. We cannot accept what would be injurious to this Church and could well lead to its permanent division.” Read it all here.

The American branch of Anglicanism is governed by a polity that is similar to that of the United States, with a bi-cameral legislative and governing body that has served well for more than two centuries. Accepting the Communiqué would have meant that only one of those Houses has any real meaning, the House of Bishops. That’s like the U.S. Senate declaring itself the only legitimate law-making body in the U.S. Congress. There’s a Constitution which prevents that. The same is true in the Episcopal Church. Without the laity, the whole people of God, the House of Bishops is just a magesterium comprising “a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.” That may be the way the Roman Church functions, but it’s not the way the Episcopal Church works.

The Bishops are right to take such an extraordinary stand in response to the crisis. The violations of diocesan boundaries, the imposition of a magisterial order, the desire to create an “Anglican Covenant” which supersedes the ecumenical Creeds are all actions that could not be accepted in good conscience of the House of Bishops.

So what happens next? The Bishops asked for a face-to-face meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams and members of the Primates' Standing Committee to explain their point of view. It may or may not be granted, but it will not change things. The American Church, for better or worse, and to no one’s actual surprise, has decided that to bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed, and proclamation the year of the Lord's favor are more important than trying to pacify those in Anglicanism who consider them heretics.

There’s a new thing coming to be here on the broken foundation of the old, if only we can perceive it.

Mitt Romney, Evangelicals and the End of Religious Tests

Once upon a time, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had principles. And one of those principles was: theology matters. They would rail against the slightest deviation from the evangelical creed: the inerrant Bible, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection and dual nature of Christ, and his imminent second advent.

No faithful conservative evangelical would ever think of casting a vote for a member of a fringe Christian sect like Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unification Church (the "Moonies") or the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). Of course, that was before they got drunk with Constantine's chalice. Power corrupts even the ostensibly incorruptible.

Because suddenly somebody who believes that God used to be a man on another planet, that the Bible is not only errant, but superceded by "another testament," that salvation is earned through a combination of faith and works, and that the ultimate destiny of faithful humans is to become a God is a contender for the Republican nomination in 2008 among conservative evangelicals.

Today's Spartanburg Herald-Journal notes: "Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who still hasn't officially committed to a presidential run, is shaping up to be a strong contender for the crucial GOP nomination in the Palmetto State." Even among South Carolina's notoriously sectarian Baptists like Jared Young of Romney's Commonwealth Political Action Committee. Young told the Herald-Journal:

"Gov. Romney has always stood on the side of life, he's been a fierce defender of the sanctity of marriage, and will continue to fight for those conservative principles. Gov. Romney is a person of faith, and that's important to most Americans. He leads by example with character and integrity, and has been married to the same woman for more than 30 years."

Young, observes the newspaper, is a Southern Baptist and graduate of Bob Jones University, whose president has called Mormonism a "cult."

If John Kerry or Barak Obama said that Jesus was not born of a virgin, and that God used to be a man, you can bet that the right-wing South Carolina blogs would be all a-twitter. I can imagine that Crunchy and Gross would rail against "wolves in sheep's clothing" trying to fool the voters into thinking that they were orthodox Christians. But of course, what really matters to evangelicals now is power, not theology. So they're lining up behind the Governor of Massachusetts, because he's "electable" and could help bring Congress and the federal courts back into their orbit. (Or do Congress and the courts orbit around evangelicals on their pre-Copernican flat earth?)

Frankly, it matters not a whit whether a president believes God used to be a man or a yellow squash or whether he believes in God at all. What matters is whether or not he believes in the Constitution of the United States, and whether or not he's prepared to preserve, protect and defend it. That Constitution bars any "religious test" for elected office. Which is why we've had Deists, Unitarians and Catholics alongside good Baptists and Methodists and Episcopalians in the White House. (We've undoubtedly had practicing atheists, as well, though none openly. Nixon comes to mind...)

But evangelicals and fundamentalists have made religious testing a precursor to elected office. Now, their power suddenly shaky, they are willing to say that religion is unimportant as long as someone is committed to conservative political positions.

In a strange sort of way, this is actually good news. Maybe our next President won't believe that he (or she) has been anointed by God to save America and the world from infidels. Maybe a Mormon President would actually be a religous liberal, committed to freedom for all beliefs and non-beliefs. Especially if that Mormon President were incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Whoops. Sorry. He's a Democrat.

Besides, did you know that Harry Reid believes that God used to be a man?

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Endnote: As to whether or not Romney is even a "conservative," (as if that term means anything in the reign of George Bush) check out this from the Boston Globe. But he's been married to the same woman for 30 years, so that must count for something.

Let Us Now Praise (In)Famous Men: Saddam Hussein and Ted Haggard

We celebrated the festival of All Saints today at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, complete with incense, Russian Orthodox chant (with real Russians!), baptisms and hymns that shook the rafters. And of course we read old Ben Sirach's hagiographa on the righteousness of fame and power, "Let us now praise famous men..." (Ecclesiasticus 44:1).

In the midst of all the liturgical seism, I couldn't help but think of two famous men that were not being praised: Saddam Hussein and Ted Haggard. Each was on the receiving end of guilty verdicts today: Saddam's for murder and Ted's for "sexual immorality." Each had it all, by the standards of those who set those standards: riches, power and influence. Each proved a traitor to the gifts he had been given.

Saddam, once a young reformer, set out to bring his oppressed people into the modern world, but ended as a deposed tyrant, wearing filthy rags, hiding in a hole in the ground. Ted, once a young and idealistic pastor, built a 14,000 member mega-church, and influenced the beliefs of millions of American Christians including the President of the United States. He ended as a defrocked and broken man, bemoaning his own sojourn in "the dirt."

Saddam gets an appeal, but unless the balance of power shifts in Iraq, he will eventually hang, his body twisting in the Chaldean desert wind. Ted will be shuffled off to counseling to try to make him an ex-gay-ex-pastor (and maybe to get him off crank).

What Saddam and Ted have most in common is not the guilty verdicts, it's the debilitating denial that brought them to their end. Saddam just couldn't believe that he wouldn't be the Caliph of Pan-Arabia. Ted just couldn't believe he was gay. They each fought wars to try to maintain their fantastic lies. Saddam killed 300,000 of his own people and maybe another half a million Iranians and Kuwaitis. Ted killed his ministry, his family life, his integrity. He may have helped kill the evangelical ascendancy in American politics as well.

There's another part of old Sirach's work that doesn't make it into the Church lectionary. and it's too bad, because it's a lot closer to the truth of the human condition than the All Saints lection: "Be not a hypocrite in the sight of men, and let not thy lips be a stumbling block to thee. Watch over them, lest thou fall, and bring dishonour upon thy soul, and God discover thy secrets, and cast thee down in the midst of the congregation." (Sirach 1:37-39)

The tragedy of infamy is no less painful to watch when it is self-inflicted.

Ken Lay is dead. Ann Coulter is a plagiarist. What's new with you?

Ken Lay is dead. Ann Coulter is a plagiarist. Rush Limbaugh is still able to have chemically-induced right-wing sex, but won’t say with whom. Kim Jong Il is mad. Soldiers kill innocent people, sometimes after raping them. The space shuttle still flies, though those pesky foam tiles still keep falling off. Joe Biden will not be the Democratic nominee in 2008, just like in the past six elections. The lunatics still rule the asylum that is South Carolina politics and their Bull Street haunts will soon be expensive condominiums. (Unlike mine.)

I go on vacation and nothing changes.

Sorry for the lack of posts around here. I was gone. I’m back. My readers (both of them) have probably gone on to blogs that are actually interesting and whose authors actually write on a somewhat predictable schedule. Let’s start again.

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The past month or so, I gave up politics and got religion. Of course, while this blog has always been about religion, it seemed to me that the battles that were being fought in my church were bigger than a single denomination and were part of a greater struggle to bring religious faith into the post-modern age. That’s why I spent so much time on the General Convention and its absurd attempt to legislate theological purity. I know I bored you. Hell, I bored me. That’s why, after it was over, I sat at the beach, sans internet, and read, without writing. I needed filling. And, evidently, copious amounts of the distilled juices of various plants.

Theology happens in the space between holy writ and the editorial page, between the diner and the altar. It crosses the gulf between the human condition and the divine mind. It shows us the path towards authentic humanity and authentic divinity. It’s hard work and too often left to people who are more interested in clever aphorisms or bedside “devotionals” that yank little pieces of scripture out of context and build publishing empires out of them. (Prayed the “Prayer of Jabez” lately?)

But theology is important, too important to be left to the Kendall Harmons and Peter Akinolas of world, or of the Church, for that matter. It’s too important to be left to people who have it all figured out, or believe that they are President or Pope or Archbishop because they are spokesmen (they are nearly always men) of God.

One thing the conservatives have right: we are in a theological crisis, a crisis which threatens the very meaning of what it is to be a person of faith. Is faith the sum total of the accumulated thought of the “fathers”? Is it simply a catechetical response to questions which can have only one correct answer? Is it some doctrinal system, revealed to wiser, holier, Godlier people than us? Or is faith something more, something less analytical, something less sure of itself?

The theological crisis of the early 21st century is a political crisis as well, for politics, says the Wikipedia, “is the process and method of making decisions for groups. Although it is generally applied to governments, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious.” Political orthodoxy is as rigorous as any religious one. If you want justice for the poor, you have to be a liberal Democrat. If you want relief from ever increasing taxes, you have to be a conservative Republican. The deep thought required to navigate the uncharted waters of reality is too hard. Better let smarter people do it. People who know better. People who have read the book. Be it Left Behind or The World is Flat.

Because it’s too hard to think. Because when you think, it occurs to you “that you just may wind up being wrong.” (Penned by the great theologian and fallen away Catholic, Jimmy Buffett.) Because thinking means giving up on sureness, on certainty, on always knowing. Because thinking requires faith.

And nobody needs faith who already knows the answers.

A Cyclone of God: Episcopalians and Presbyterians Blowing in the Wind

I have just finished reading Bruce Chilton’s remarkable “intellectual biography” of Paul of Tarsus, Rabbi Paul. Chilton’s wonderful book lays out the evolution of Paul’s thought, in both his letters and the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles. He shows how Paul, convinced that Jesus was not just a Jewish Messiah, but was the Cosmic Christ who redeemed all humanity, became ever more radical in his views, in spite of the cost in lost friendships and ostracism from the leaders of the fledgling Jesus movement.

Paul decided, based on his vision of the Risen Jesus, and his experience with Gentile believers that he had come to know, that the Bible’s clear prohibition against accepting non-Jews as religious equals, was simply wrong and that Jesus was “Lord of all.” (Acts 10:36) That phrase was coined, not by Paul, but by Peter, but as the New Testament illustrates, Peter didn’t quite believe it. Paul, however, did.

And that belief, radical and “unscriptural” as it was, caused Paul untold problems: “Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned. Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:24-28)

Now the spiritual heirs of Pauline “salvation by grace alone” have made another theological leap: homosexual people, in loving, faithful, committed relationships are as much a part of the divine purpose to create a redeemed humanity as are heterosexual people who are married to each other. It’s unscriptural. It challenges every notion of traditional morality. It’s utterly inconceivable to anyone who believes that the Bible’s sexual ethics are the norm for Christians (I dare say, even Paul). It’s going to cause those who accept it untold problems. But like Paul struggling against those he called “false apostles,” (2 Corinthians 11:13) the Episcopal and the Presbyterian Church in the USA have decided to be true to the Gospel and not the traditions of men.

In Columbus, today, the Episcopal House of Deputies (made up of lay and clergy delegates) voted not to impose a moratorium on the election of gay or lesbian people to the office of Bishop. At nearly the same moment in Birmingham, the Presbyterians voted to allow clergy to be ordained who are gay and otherwise qualified.

Each of these decisions will get lots of attention by those who would impose Levitical law upon a system of grace. Each of them, like Paul’s decision to welcome uncircumcised Gentiles into the full fellowship of the Church, will hasten the looming schism in each of these denominations. We may as well get it over with.

The Episcopal Church is now led by a woman, even though traditionalists point out that Jesus and his 12 apostles were all men. The traditionalists want to set limits on grace. The radical reformers want grace to abound. It’s going to hurt. Families and congregations will be broken up. Great and historic denominations may well founder on the shoals of legal machinations. The Anglican Communion, that great relic of the British Empire, will emerge as something entirely different than it is today. The Presbyterians will create yet another Reformed body.

But the Church will eventually accept this, as surely as it accepted the notion of unclean pagans in its midst. As Eugene Peterson puts in The Message:

"We, of course, have plenty of wisdom to pass on to you once you get your feet on firm spiritual ground, but it's not popular wisdom, the fashionable wisdom of high-priced experts that will be out-of-date in a year or so. God's wisdom is something mysterious that goes deep into the interior of his purposes. You don't find it lying around on the surface. It's not the latest message, but more like the oldest—what God determined as the way to bring out his best in us, long before we ever arrived on the scene. The experts of our day haven't a clue about what this eternal plan is. If they had, they wouldn't have killed the Master of the God-designed life on a cross. That's why we have this Scripture text:
No one's ever seen or heard anything like this,
Never so much as imagined anything quite like it—
What God has arranged for those who love him.
But you've seen and heard it because God by his Spirit has brought it all out into the open before you.” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

And the Spirit of God, said Jesus, blows where it will. Creating, renewing, and life-giving, still it blows like a cyclone. That’s not the latest message, but more like the oldest.

Big Brother, Jesus is Watching You

It’s in the South Carolina Low Country, amid abandoned plantations and cotton gins overrun with kudzu and the detritus of Reconstruction. Greeleyville has a population of 452 souls, not counting chickens, dogs, mules and mosquitoes. Passing through there today, I spied on a church marquee a sign meant for the folks way up in Washington, D.C. who will certainly never come to the terminus point of the American dream. It reads: “Big Brother, Jesus is watching you.”

Indeed.

Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee rolled over and approved the nomination of the most visible symbol of the new Big Brotherhood, the ultimate Nanny State Bureaucrat, General Michael Hayden. Of course, the loyal opposition sniffed its “disapproval.” Said Democrat Barbara Mikulski: “My confidence in Gen. Hayden should not be interpreted as confidence in this administration, I have flashing yellow lights about the Bush administration's willingness to politicize this important intelligence agency.”

Indeed. That’s why she voted to approve the nomination.

A "yes," you see, means "no." And the War on Terror is Peace with Strength. Ah, Orwell again: “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

Indeed.