I am indeed alive.

Uggh. Between food poisoning and a hard rive crash, May has been a tough month around here. It looks like I will indeed be taking a sabbatical at church, but never fear! Undone will continue: coming next week; the beginning of a 6 (number of man) part series on Theology: Why theology is necessary. Here are the topics, in no particular order:
1. Theology and exegesis: not the same thing.
2. Subjectivity - how to be sure of everything.
3. What is our theology at Epic? -we'll hit this in our Partner's class, btw. :)
4. Consumerism in my soup: How Madison Ave. influences our faith.
5. Europe put theology in my head.
6. Holy Spirit - fess up, beyond tongues, nobody gets you :(
7. What is the Bible?
8. The limits of theology.

So there are 8, 8 posts forthcoming, subject to revision.... Any other questions about theology you guys would like? You can email 'em to me if you so desire, or post 'em in the comments!

a postmodern on postmodernism

Stanley Hauwerwaus is a firebrand for the church. Engaging and witty, he is primarily an ethicist with a knack for speaking in a way that gets under people's skin. Always worth a read. So here's something I like of his.

The essay from '95 is entitled Preaching As Though We Had Enemies, and is an academic rant - that's kind of what he does :)Beginning with "I am just postmodern enough not to trust 'postmodern' as a description of our times," Hauerwas writes an engaging and accessible essay about the church's captivity to the world. His aim in the essay is to pull apart the fabric of our modern Christianity thinking and reveal that "if postmodernism means anything, it means that the comforting illusion of modernity that conflict is, can be, and should be avoided is over." The great part about Hauerwas though is that he seems to relish his role as Devil's advocate. He goes for shock value with titles like, "Preaching as Though we Had Enemies" even though he is a pacifist. His concern is that the church has lost a sense of her opposition to the world, not just from materialism, but also because of our assumptions about how values and freedom work.

His essay is nice because it demonstrates briefly how our thinking got this way. He's not just saying, "You have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything" like so many Sunday sermons. He's trying to demonstrate that our impotence in the world comes from something. Early on he summarizes his thoughts about postmodernism:

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism. Modernity sought to secure knowledge in the structure of human rationality, and relegated God to the "gaps" or denied Him all together. Modernity said that God is a projection of the ideals and wants of what it means to be human so let us serve and worship the only God that matters-that is, the human. Postmodernists, in the quest to be thorough in their atheism, now deny that the human exists. Postmodernists are thus the atheists that only modernity could produce.

I love it! (he just called you an atheist, btw) You can understand the phrase "by denying that the human exists" as meaning postmodernism deconstructed and relativized everything we know, leaving us with an inability to say anything certain at all, including that we exist or what our nature is. So Hauerwas is writing to brace the church, to startle it into recognizing how different we should be than the world! I like how he describes the intellectual problem we have:

" Christians in modernity thought their task was to make the Gospel intelligible to the world rather than to help the world understand why it could not be intelligible without the Gospel. Desiring to become part of the modernist project, preachers and theologians accepted the presumption that Christianity is a set of beliefs, a "worldview," designed to give meaning to our lives."

So what is lacking in church is the actual voice of God, conviction and an active struggle against evil in the world. The church should be taking it to the streets. Well, at least that's what I think his point was. The great thing about Stanley, though, is that even if you miss the whole point, there are still a couple of good quotes to hang your hat on. My favorite line:

"Cosmic struggle" sounds like a video game middle-class children play.

I mean, how great is that!? Every theologian should be so lucky.

Goodbye, Christ

Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon-
But that day’s gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible-
But it’s dead now,
The popes and the preachers’ve
Made too much money from it.
They’ve sold you to too many

Kings, generals, robbers, and killers-
Even to the Tzar and the Cossacks,
Even to Rockefeller’s Church,
Even to THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.
You ain’t no good no more.
They’ve pawned you
Till you’ve done wore out.

Goodbye,
Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova,
Beat it on away from here now.
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all-
A real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME-
I said, ME!

Go ahead on now,
You’re getting in the way of things, Lord.
And please take Saint Gandhi with you when you go,
And Saint Pope Pius,
And Saint Aimee McPherson,
And big black Saint Becton
Of the Consecrated Dime.
And step on the gas, Christ!
Move!

Don’t be so slow about movin!
The world is mine from now on-
And nobody’s gonna sell ME
To a king, or a general,
Or a millionaire.

-Langston B. Hughes, 1932

Hughes was hounded by the media and establishment for this poem and kept on an FBI security-risk list until 1959. All for not liking the way Jesus was being sold. As a poem, it's a driving out of the money changers, and in that way preciously Biblical. A profound critique of the cozying up or religion and society, don't you think?

quote

"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." --George Orwell

Orwell is money. Every theologian should be forced to memorize his essay "Politics and the English Language" essay. He was critical of laborious speech. So I'll stop here.

what is a pastor?

I mean besides someone to vent all of the unfulfilled father and power issues on....
What do I do? What is my skill or profession? Most people break the position down as either orator or manager (the good ones are even CEO's !), but these aren't particularly biblical definitions and besides, whatever pastors are clearly, it's not enough....
So I like to take polls and surveys. I figure its the one place I get to give my opinion anonymously, as just one opinion among many without any negative repercussions. So I take every survey and opinion poll possible. I also hope to win a PS3, but that's just the flesh talkin'.

Most of these polls, like the one I filled out today for a museum, ask for your profession and offer several fields to choose from. Inevitably, there is no clergy category, so I am forced to choose between "Health Services" or "Other". Sometimes I get "health" or "mental health" or "service" or "caring professions"and I choose those. I figure if I write "pastor" they will just throw my submission out like jury duty.

It's funny to me that the options for pastor are so institutionalized. In particularly, most of the options that seem to cover it are largely physical sciences: psychology, mental health, etc. So mental health is really about as close to emotions and feelings and "care for the soul" as I can get. Until ministry, I always produced a product you could touch: construction. I'm not expecting that intercession or spiritual direction would be listed, let alone "influencing unto maturity," but it is striking to me that the primary categories of industry these pollsters see in the world are largely material and functional, not personal or connective. It just all seems so soulless.

Of course, it could just be that I am no longer functional at all

humility, again

God has been dealing with me about some things through this sermon on humility. Among other things, It got me wondering, is humility even possible in a capitalist society? What would it look like? If capitalism is just a giant competition for resources, then where will we learn about humility in a world that stresses success, -not to mention glamour and cool? The billions we spend on sports and apparel probably aren't going to teach us much about this aspect of Jesus. And perhaps churches aren't as well. I am staggered at the amount of Christian spam I receive; every program is the best, every conference the most Spirit-infused. But the commoditization of "virtue-experience" seems to negate the virtue of humility doesn't it? Don't believe the answer is simply a moral capitalism, either.

I wonder too, how much of the humility dichotomy we think of is actually a product of our consumer culture. We tend to see humility as the battle between the desire to be the superman ,successful and powerful and the silent, passive, even exploited humble one. But is this dichotomy a produced one? Both ends of that spectrum can be "full-of-self." True selflessness seems to bypass these manufactured desires and focus on a larger goal outside of the self, not necessarily in competition with the self. If you love God then doing what is needful for the Kingdom of God, helping out wherever you can, is both humble and filling. It just fills you with something besides self.

the good doctor on humility

Preparing for a message on humility, I ran across this wonderful quote on humility by Aquinas:

The virtue of humility consists in keeping oneself within one's own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one's superior. Thus humility cannot befit God, who has no superior, but is above all. Whenever any one subjects himself out of humility to an equal or any inferior, that is because he takes that equal or inferior to be his superior in some respect. Though then the virtue of humility cannot attach to Christ in His divine nature, yet it may attach to Him in his human nature. And His divinity renders His humility all the more praiseworthy: for the dignity of the person adds to the merit of humility; and there can be no greater dignity to a man than his being God. Hence the highest praise attaches to the humility of the Man God, who, to wean men's hearts from worldly glory to the love of divine glory, chose to endure a death of no ordinary sort, but a death of the deepest ignominy. -Summa Contra Gentiles, 4:55:15.

A powerful exposition of the nature of humility and the incarnation.