The Internet Monk Archives

Mercy not Sacrifice (2): How do we view the “unclean”?

the human condition. Photo by renu parki at Flickr. Creative Commons License

We are thinking through Richard Beck’s illuminating book, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. In our first post, we introduced his suggestion that disgust psychology can help explain the ways we view and treat other people. Beck’s focus in this study will be on the church, and answers to questions like:

Why do churches, ostensibly following a Messiah who broke bread with “tax collectors and sinners,” so often retreat into practices of exclusion and the quarantine of gated communities?
Why is it so difficult to create missional churches? (p. 1)

Beck, referencing studies on disgust psychology, argues that the “logic” of contamination thinking is akin to the fanciful reasoning of more primitive magic, which “tends to override reason.” Of course, such thinking grows out of some legitimate purposes, but when applied to situations where it doesn’t belong, it finds people making causal connections where there are none in reality.

The following, citing excerpts from Unclean, looks at a few of the ways contamination logic views that which it deems “unclean.”

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I’d like to focus on four principles of contagion as have been described by Paul Rozin and his colleagues:

Contact: Contamination is caused by contact or physical proximity.

Dose Insensitivity: Minimal, even micro, amounts of the
pollutant confer harm.

Permanence: Once deemed contaminated nothing can be done to rehabilitate or purify the object.

Negativity Dominance: When a pollutant and a pure object come into contact the pollutant is “stronger” and ruins the pure object. The pure object doesn’t render the pollutant acceptable or palatable.

Contact.

Imagine I take out of my closet an old cardboard box. I want to show you something inside the box. I open the box and pull out a sweater. The sweater is old and somewhat ratty. It hasn’t been washed. I tell you that I was given this sweater by my grandfather who had an interest in World War II memorabilia. My grandfather acquired this sweater as a part of his collection. This sweater was owned and worn by Hitler. It’s from his actual wardrobe. After Hitler’s death many former Nazis took mementos from Hitler’s life. Apparently, there is a thriving black market trade for authentic artifacts or articles once owned, used, or worn by Hitler. The sweater I’m showing you was worn by Hitler the week before his suicide. It hasn’t been washed since. You can still see his sweat stains.

Would you, I ask, like to put the sweater on?

Research has shown that many people refuse to try the sweater on. More, people report discomfort being near or in the same room with the sweater. A wicked fog surrounds the object and we want to avoid contact with it.

What studies like this reveal is that people tend to think about evil as if it were a virus, a disease, or a contagion. Evil is an object that can seep out of Hitler, into the sweater, and, by implication, into you if you try the sweater on. Evil is sticky and contagious. So we stay away.

Dose Insensitivity.

[We] don’t think of something as being “a little” contaminated. “Dosage” is irrelevant. A small amount of contamination doesn’t compute. Something either is contaminated or it’s not. Consider the examples. In my church tradition small changes to worship practices, seemingly irrelevant, became huge sources of conflict. Like a drop of urine in a bottle of wine the small change—the polluting influence—ruined the acceptability of the worship. Changes to worship were dose insensitive.

Consider also how dose insensitivity drives the logic of ethnic cleansing. If, as the Nazis believed, Jews were polluting influences then dose insensitivity demanded complete elimination and extermination. The existence of a single Jew was too much to stand.

Permanence.

The judgment of permanence is characterized by the attribution that once an object becomes contaminated, nothing can be done to rehabilitate the object….Once polluted, always polluted.

…The judgment of permanence [is] important when we consider sins that are uniquely structured by purity metaphors. As we will see, when moral infractions are governed by a contamination logic the attribution of permanence — once polluted, always polluted — is imported into the sin experience. Such sins become emotionally traumatic due to the judgment that permanent, non-rehabilitative ruin has occurred. As a consequence, these “contamination sins” carry an enormous load of guilt, shame, and self-loathing within the church. After these sins people may “give up,” morally speaking, as some “pure” moral state or status has been irrevocably lost or ruined.

Negativity dominance.

The judgment of negativity dominance places all the power on the side of the pollutant. If I touch (apologies for the example I’m about to use) some feces to your cheeseburger the cheeseburger gets ruined, permanently (see above). Importantly, the cheeseburger doesn’t make the feces suddenly scrumptious. When the pure and the polluted come into contact the pollutant is the more powerful force. The negative dominates over the positive.

Negativity dominance has important missional implications for the church. For example, notice how negativity dominance is at work in Matthew 9. The Pharisees never once consider the fact that the contact between Jesus and the sinners might have a purifying, redemptive, and cleansing effect upon the sinners. Why not? The logic of contamination simply doesn’t work that way. The logic of contamination has the power of the negative dominating over the positive. Jesus doesn’t purify the sinners. The sinners make Jesus unclean.

Negativity dominance is problematic in the life of the church because, in the missional moment, when the church makes contact with the world, the power sits firmly with the world as the location of impurity. According to the logic of negativity dominance, contact with the world defiles the church. Given this logic the only move open to the church is withdrawal and quarantine, separation from the world. In short, many missional failures are simply the product of the church following the intuitive logic of disgust psychology.

• Richard Beck. Unclean (pp. 25-30)

Using God for Political Purposes

I am in the process of writing a post entitled “~~Five~~ ~~Six~~ Seven Views Of God and the Corona Virus”. The Post keeps changing the more I read and think about it. In considering all the different ways that I have heard people express their view of God and the Corona Virus, there was one particular viewpoint that stood out to me. That is, the viewpoint that God can be used or invoked to further a political agenda. For the record, this is a viewpoint that I find particularly offensive.

This viewpoint was reinforced for me this week from events having to do with the Black Lives Matter movement. Dan, a friend from High School posted the following on Facebook [emphasis mine]:

I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Trump anymore, but this is such a perfect example of the “Straw Man” fallacy I talked about last week that I couldn’t let it go. (Mike’s note: Dan had posted on Facebook last week about different types of logical fallacies. The “Straw Man” fallacy is one where someone “deliberately misrepresents another person’s argument, re-frames it as something extreme and ridiculous, and then attacks that “Straw Man” instead.”)

First of all, let’s make one thing clear. Trump lies. He lies with such frequency and consistency that if you take any statement he makes, either in person or on Twitter, and believe that the EXACT OPPOSITE is true, you will be right 90% of the time. And the 10% of the time when he does say something that is true, he is taking it out of context to twist the meaning.

So let’s get back to today’s “Straw Man” example.

You’ve probably heard about the controversy surrounding the removal of monuments. For the most part, it’s about whether statues should be erected (or remain erected) to honor people who were fighting to keep slavery legal. I don’t want to get into a lot of detail about this particular aspect of the story.

Then, the protests expanded to include other statues; notably, the one shown above, called the “Emancipation Memorial.” It was erected in 1876 to commemorate Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves. Looking at the picture, it’s not hard to see why many are objecting to the imagery there. (Defenders say, “But it was paid for by the freed slaves themselves!” Well, they had just been freed, so I doubt that they had much say in the design, and the intent was clearly to show Lincoln as a benevolent father figure.) But even if the merits of taking down the statue or leaving it alone are up for debate…

Let’s have a look at Trump’s comments, made at a recent press conference:

“I think many of the people that are knocking down these statues don’t even have any idea what the statue is, what it means, who it is. Now they’re looking at Jesus Christ. They’re looking at George Washington. They’re looking at Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson. Not gonna happen.”

Now, there is no evidence that anyone has suggested tearing down monuments to Washington or Jefferson, but you can see that he threw that little shred of truth in there about Lincoln, taken out of context.
The more important thing here is the comment about “Jesus Christ.” The claim was repeated at a church rally in Arizona; that “we’re seeing a call for statues of Jesus Christ to be torn down.”

This is far worse than just the “Straw Man” I talked about last week. It’s not just that Trump is lying to make his opponents seem “extreme and ridiculous.” He is using this blatant and bizarre lie for the specific and sole purpose of stirring up fear and anger among his Evangelical base toward the Black Lives Matter movement and anyone who would support them. This is incredibly dangerous, not least because many of his followers are just stupid enough to believe him.

Here are some of my initial thoughts about Dan’s post.

1. I find it incredibly offensive to use God for Political purposes. In the words of Bruce Cockburn (singing about Indigenous issues)

Went to a pow wow, red brother
Felt the people’s love/joy flow around
It left me crying just thinking about it
How they used my saviour’s name to keep you down

– Bruce Cockburn, Red Brother, Circles in the Stream 1977

In Canada, indigenous issues are very much at the forefront, and the church played a significant, you might even say leading role in supporting the political agenda against First Nations people.

2. No doubt you have heard or read about Trump using a Church and a Bible as a prop, and squelching constitutionally protected protest along the way. That previous occurrence, along with how he has co-opted a large swath of the evangelical movement, demonstrates the pattern of using God for political purposes. This latest event is just another example of how he does this.

3. In every lie there is a grain of truth. It is what makes the lie believable. In this particular case, one particular activist, Shaun King, stated:

Yes, I think the statues of the white European they claim is Jesus should also come down.

They are a form of white supremacy.

Always have been.

In the Bible, when the family of Jesus wanted to hide, and blend in, guess where they went?

EGYPT!

Not Denmark.

Tear them down.

After receiving much backlash, along with numerous death threats, King defended his position. “If your religion requires Jesus to be a blonde haired, blue eyed Jesus, then your religion is not Christianity, but white supremacy.” “I am a practicing Christian. I am an ordained minister and was a Senior Pastor for many years. If my critiques of the white supremacy within the Christian world bother you to the point of wanting to kill me, you are the problem.” (Secondary quotes from Newsweek).

So why call Trump’s comments a lie? This is where the Straw Man fallacy comes in. He is taking the comments of one person, and using those comments to characterize the entire movement. “Now they’re looking at Jesus Christ.” He is using it to inflame his supporters. And I agree with Dan, what Trump is doing is wrong.

4. Dan has no axe to grind with Evangelical Christianity. He wrote to me that:

My father is a Christian with a very strong faith. My mother attends church regularly, and always taught us to be respectful of all faiths, whether we hold that faith ourselves or not… I mentioned Evangelicals specifically because they are the most vocal supporters of trump, but I find it distressing that more Christians don’t speak out more forcefully about what Trump is doing… any Christian who believes, or worse yet repeats, the lie about “tearing down statues of Jesus,” … is either a moron or a racist; possibly “both,” but not “neither.”

5. To use God for political purposes is immoral. I will leave you with the words of our own Chaplain Mike:

My fundamental problem with Donald Trump is not his “policies.” My problem is that he is the singularly most inappropriate, untruthful, incompetent, corrupt, and self-aggrandizing person ever to be considered for such high office. He and those who are using him to advance their agendas are destroying the foundational ideals and institutions of this nation.

As usual, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Mercy not Sacrifice (part 1)

Uncleaned Sidewalk. Photo by Venture Vancouver. Creative Commons License

One of the most important and influential books I have read in the last decade is Richard Beck’s Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

Along with Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Beck’s book pulls back the curtain on some fundamental reasons why we think and act as we do. Beck focuses on religious communities and the impulses that motivate them with regard to protecting the purity of the group and/or welcoming the “other” (the “unclean” stranger) into their midst, whereas Haidt concentrates on our political tribes and the impulses that drive them.

The key scripture text to which Beck refers is the following story about Jesus from Matthew 9:10-13.

And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax-collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’ But when he heard this, he said, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’ [emphasis mine]

Mercy is the impulse to welcome: to cross boundaries, to set aside our natural “disgust” for that which is outside our bounds of “acceptable” and to invite the other to participate in relationship with us. In this case, Jesus showed mercy to “tax collectors and sinners,” welcoming them and eating with them, whereas the Pharisees did not. They did not understand how Jesus could violate the boundary between what they saw as “clean” and “unclean.” They lacked the bold imagination to see that mercy itself can be transformative.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, is the impulse to purify by excluding that which is “unclean” or by somehow “cleansing” it through a purification process. The Pharisees could not accept the “sinners” because their behavior violated the standards of the Pharisaic community (which they saw as God’s standards). They would not be accepted into Pharisaic circles unless and until they got their act together. Until then, no contact was allowed for fear that the Pharisees themselves would become “contaminated” and find themselves unclean. Jesus, however, had no such scruples. He had the imagination to believe that welcoming sinners might have the opposite effect — the unclean would become clean! This is the very point of incarnation, a point the Pharisees and multitudes of other religious communities have missed.

I want to work through Beck’s book again and, along the way, to share some of its powerful insights with you. Today, here is an overview of what “disgust” is — that impulse we all have to separate ourselves from the unclean and to expel it from our midst.

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First, disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust monitors the borders of the body, particularly the openings of the body, with the aim of preventing something dangerous from entering. This is why, as seen in Matthew 9, disgust (the psychology beneath notions of purity and defilement) often regulates how we think about social borders and barriers. Disgust is ideally suited, from a psychological stance, to mark and monitor interpersonal boundaries. Similar to core disgust, social disgust is triggered when the “unclean,” sociologically speaking, crosses a boundary and comes into contact with a group identified as “clean.” Further, as we will see in Part 2 of this book, the boundary-monitoring function of disgust is also ideally suited to guard the border between the holy and the profane. Following the grooves of core disgust, we experience feelings of revulsion and degradation when the profane crosses a boundary and comes into contact with the holy.

Beyond functioning as a boundary psychology we have also noted that disgust is an expulsive psychology. Not only does disgust create and monitor boundaries, disgust also motivates physical and behavioral responses aimed at pushing away, avoiding, or forcefully expelling an offensive object. We avoid the object. Shove the object away. Spit it out. Vomit.

This expulsive aspect of disgust is also worrisome. Whenever disgust regulates our experience of holiness or purity we will find this expulsive element. The clearest biblical example of this is the scapegoating ritual in the Hebrew observance of the Day of Atonement (cf. Leviticus 16), where a goat carrying the sins of the tribe is expelled into the desert. The scapegoat is, to use the language of disgust, spit or vomited out, forcefully expelling the sins of the people. In this, the Day of Atonement, as a purification ritual, precisely follows the logic of disgust. The scapegoating ritual “makes sense” as it is built atop an innate and shared psychology. The expulsive aspect of the ritual would be nonsensical, to either ancient or modern cultures, if disgust were not regulating how we reason about purity and “cleansing.”

The worry, obviously, comes when people are the objects of expulsion, when social groups (religious or political) seek “purity” by purging themselves through social scapegoating. This dynamic—purity via expulsion—goes to the heart of the problem in Matthew 9. The Pharisees attain their purity through an expulsive mechanism: expelling “tax collectors and sinners” from the life of Israel. Jesus rejects this form of “holiness.” Jesus, citing mercy as his rule, refuses to “sacrifice” these people to become clean.

• Richard Beck. Unclean (pp. 15-16)

The IM Saturday Monks Brunch: June 27, 2018

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The IM Saturday Monks Brunch: June 27, 2018

Welcome to Brunch. Each week just seems to get crazier and scarier. I’m running out of things to say and feeling the futility of the words I do find. Colt Clark and his Quarantine Kids put their finger on the source of my weariness, the fatigue so many of us are dealing with these days.

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I think John Mulvaney has had the best take on our leadership for awhile now.

[Note: Language warning]

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Mike Luckovich © 2020 Creators Syndicate

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Definitely “Darwin Awards” material…

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And here is a sober assessment of where we are and where we might be going…

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What do you think of what David Brooks says here?

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks is photographed in his office at the New York Times bureau in Washington, D.C. on Friday, January 27, 2012. (Melissa Golden/Redux)

…a quasi-religion is seeking control of America’s cultural institutions. The acolytes of this quasi-religion, Social Justice, hew to a simplifying ideology: History is essentially a power struggle between groups, some of which are oppressors and others of which are oppressed. Viewpoints are not explorations of truth; they are weapons that dominant groups use to maintain their place in the power structure. Words can thus be a form of violence that has to be regulated.

…The loudest theory of change is coming from the Social Justice movement. This movement emerged from elite universities, and its basic premise is that if you can change the cultural structures you can change society.

Members of this movement pay intense attention to cultural symbols — to language, statues, the names of buildings. They pay enormous attention to repeating certain slogans, such as “defund the police,” which may or may not have anything to do with policy, and to lifting up symbolic gestures, like kneeling before a football game. It’s a very apt method for change in an age of social media because it’s very performative.

…The core problem is that the Social Justice theory of change doesn’t produce much actual change. Corporations are happy to adopt some woke symbols and hold a few consciousness-raising seminars and go on their merry way. Worse, this method has no theory of politics.

How exactly is all this cultural agitation going to lead to legislation that will decrease income disparities, create better housing policies or tackle the big challenges that I listed above? That part is never spelled out. In fact, the Sturm und Drang makes political work harder. You can’t purify your way to a governing majority.

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Apparently, there will be a (sort of) Major League Baseball season. 60 games. Training camp starts this week, on July 1. First games will be July 23 or 24. The schedule will include 10 games for each team against its four divisional opponents, along with 20 games against the opposite league’s corresponding geographical division (for example, the AL East will play the NL East, and so on). Team personnel and players not likely to participate in the game (for example, the next day’s starting pitcher) will be sitting in the stands or another area designated by the club, at least six feet apart; non-playing personnel will wear masks in dugout and bullpen at all times; no spitting or chewing tobacco (gum is permitted); no celebratory contact (high-fives, fist bumps, hugs, etc.). Will fans be allowed to attend games? It appears uncertain at this point.

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This year has brought a remarkable convergence of strange and seemingly portentous events…

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I can’t think of a better time for a new Dylan album.

You don’t know me darlin’
You never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest
I ain’t no false prophet
I just said what I said
I’m just here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

“I just wanted to add a measure of grace to the world.”

In the play The Man of La Mancha Don Quixote said on his deathbed, “I just wanted to add a measure of grace to the world.”

I can’t think of a better goal in life — or a better goal for today.

Just to add a bit more grace to the world.

We add grace to the world when we approach each day as a day of possibility, a day when good things can happen, when we can plant a few more seeds of kindness, a day when we can do a little something to mend a torn or broken place in someone’s life.

We add grace to the world when we approach each day as learners, looking for lessons that can help us grow and mature and become deeper, more thoughtful, with more capacity to give and to benefit others.

We add grace to the world when we watch our words carefully.

We add grace to the world when we are patient with those who irritate us.

We add grace to the world when we laugh, when we find the humor in our silliness, the incongruity of so much of life, the crazy coincidences that surprise and delight us.

We add grace to the world when we cry, when we feel the pain that courses through the world and try to do something to slow its flow.

We add grace to the world when we just determine to be ourselves, to use the gifts we’ve been given, to take off the masks we use to hide our true selves and let the world see us and know us as we are.

In the play The Man of La Mancha Don Quixote said on his deathbed, “I just wanted to add a measure of grace to the world.”

May each one of us be a channel of grace today.

Yes, Free Will Exists

Yes, Free Will Exists

Here is an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate of whether free will exists or not from Scientific American. The article notes that debate began in earnest during the Enlightenment, but was seemingly settled by 20^th century neuroscience headlined by the famous Libet Experiment:

Libet found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision by the subject to flick their wrist began approximately half a second before the subject consciously felt that they had decided to move. Libet’s findings suggest that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a “conscious decision”, and that the subject’s belief that it occurred at the behest of their will was only due to their retrospective perspective on the event.

As the Wikipedia article goes on to list; criticisms of Libet’s experiment showed it wasn’t as cut and dried as some (but not Libet himself) tried to make it.

So the SA article draws the contrast between choices that are either determined or not; stating pre-determined is, in fact, tautologous. Then they say that the only undetermined choice is one that must be random:

In this context, a free-willed choice would be an undetermined one. But what is an undetermined choice? It can only be a random one, for anything that isn’t fundamentally random reflects some underlying disposition or necessity that determines it. There is no semantic space between determinism and randomness that could accommodate choices that are neither. This is a simple but important point, for we often think—incoherently—of free-willed choices as neither determined nor random.

But of course, most people’s idea of randomness is ambiguous at best. Most would say something is random if no pattern can be discerned. But as the article says:

However, a truly random process can, in principle, produce any pattern by mere chance. The probability of this happening may be small, but it isn’t zero. So, when we say that a process is random, we are merely acknowledging our ignorance of its potential underlying causal basis. As such, an appeal to randomness doesn’t suffice to define free will.

Then they make the observation that our free choices aren’t erratic, but are the determined choices of our preferences. “A free choice is one determined by my preferences, likes, dislikes, character, etc., as opposed to someone else’s or other external forces.” This becomes their working definition. And here is the money quote:

But if our choices are always determined anyway, what does it mean to talk of free will in the first place? If you think about it carefully, the answer is self-evident: we have free will if our choices are determined by that which we experientially identify with. I identify with my tastes and preferences—as consciously felt by me—in the sense that I regard them as expressions of myself. My choices are thus free insofar as they are determined by these felt tastes and preferences.

They then make the point that I have often tried to make in these discussions: the inadequacy of materialism to account for our consciousness. Materialism must be reductive, and therefore reduces our consciousness to mere neurological activity; the firing of neuron networks in our brain. But the neurological activity, although necessary (if your brain ain’t working you’re dead), is not the be-all and end-all alleged by materialism because an emergent property, something greater than the sum of the parts, has manifested – our consciousness. The article states the key issue:

The key issue here is one that permeates the entire metaphysics of materialism: all we ever truly have are the contents of consciousness, which philosophers call “phenomenality.”’ Our entire life is a stream of felt and perceived phenomenality. That this phenomenality somehow arises from something material, outside consciousness—such as networks of firing neurons—is a theoretical inference, not a lived reality; it’s a narrative we create and buy into on the basis of conceptual reasoning, not something felt. That’s why, for the life of us, we can’t truly identify with it.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Feb 22, 1788 – Sep 21, 1860

The author of the SA article then discusses the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, and his own recent book, “Decoding Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics” He sums up Schopenhauer’s argument as:

Kant considered the world-in-itself unknowable. Schopenhauer, however, argued that we can learn something about it not only through the sense organs, but also through introspection. His argument goes as follows: even in the absence of all self-perception mediated by the sense organs, we would still experience our own endogenous, felt volition…

In Schopenhauer’s illuminating view of reality, the will is indeed free because it is all there ultimately is. Yet, its image is nature’s seemingly deterministic laws, which reflect the instinctual inner consistency of the will. Today, over 200 years after he first published his groundbreaking ideas, Schopenhauer’s work can reconcile our innate intuition of free will with modern scientific determinism.

Well, I certainly hope Pastor Dan Jepsen has time to read this post and chime in. His background in philosophy is far superior to mine. I really don’t know much about Schopenhauer or his works, and to be honest, am not going to take the time to slog through dense Germanic prose. The author of the SA article, Bernardo Kastrup, has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, he has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the ‘Casimir Effect’ of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Supposedly, his work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental.

The notion that reality is essentially mental appeals to the nascent panentheist in me. I much prefer it to its opponent; that consciousness is a fiction written by our brains. I still assert the cosmos resembles nothing so much as “Mind” itself. Now I’m a Christian panentheist, so that Mind is God who is a person most completely represented by Jesus himself. Jesus, who said of the Pharisees that they “do not will to come unto me, that you may have life” (John 5:40 YLT). So our wills are a gift to us of God who wishes we come to him but does not coerce it. The traditional definition of free will.

What think you? Does Kastrup make a convincing argument?

“Your relationship with God grows uniquely in the soil that is your journey through life”

My friend Dory recently wrote:

This year has been transitional for me, and I hope I’m not nearly done yet. I have deliberately stepped back from everything I thought I knew about traditional Christianity, racial divide, politics, racial bias, the meaning of freedom, and the response of the church to government oppression. I have asked God to let His light be the only light shining on these issues for me. It’s been eye-opening, and has called for the dismantling of some ideals I’ve held most of my life. It’s confusing. It’s unpleasant. It’s not easy.

Lastly, if shining God’s light in an unbiased way into the deepest parts of your heart scares you, as it did me, it’s probably a good sign that it’s time to do it.

Blessings.

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I appreciate Dory’s honest expression of faith and discovery here. And I can’t help but think that, if we were all just a bit more self-aware, and if we would all just shut up instead of scattering our opinions around on social media and elsewhere about what’s happening in the world and acting like we’re experts about it, then maybe this pandemic year could be a year of true revival and transformation in our lives.

Dory’s courage to look in the mirror, to “step back” and recognize that she only “thought she knew” the “truths” she had received, and to go further — to “dismantle ideals she held for most of her life” — well, what can I say? How I wish more of us could grasp that this is the path of faith rather than the way of certainty most of us imagine! Embracing doubt rather than doubling down — imagine that!

In Mere Churchianity, Michael Spencer wrote:

Jesus wanted the life of his disciples to grow out of Kingdom-of-God soil. That Kingdom takes root in the lives of disciples who were changed by the gospel. While signing up to take a discipleship class can give believers a plan for reading the Bible and many helpful ideas on prayer, your relationship with God grows uniquely in the soil that is your journey through life. Jesus meets you at places that are meaningful to you; he speaks to you as an individual, and he grows his influence in you in unique ways. You aren’t defined by anyone else’s map of the Christian life, even if those maps might be helpful in some ways. (p. 158)

Thanks, Dory, for sharing how Jesus met you at places that are meaningful to you.

It reminded me to take a look at my own “map” once again.

JMJ: The South Shall (not) Rise Again!

Ramblings: The South Shall (not) Rise Again!
By J. Michael Jones

Mike writes at his blog J. Michael Jones

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I am a product of the south. There are many things that a true southerner should be proud about…our Confederate history, not one of them. The code name that we southerner’s like to use for the support of the Confederacy is “our heritage.” Putting it within that narrative makes it sound like it is our birthright, our inheritance, our family name or crest or coat of arms, and the essence of our history as a sub-culture.

I grew up in northeast Tennessee. The odd thing about this issue for us, was the fact that our part of the state sided with the north. One of the first and most vocal abolitionist newspapers in the nineteenth century was in nearby Jonesboro. Fighting from that war was local, where skirmishes left a cannon ball in the front of a church in another local town. They left the ball there for the historical context (although I’ve heard rumors that they had to take that Yankee ball out and re-cement it back in so it wouldn’t fall out and hit a parishioner in the head).

Yet, for most part, we had our identity closely connected with the Confederacy. If the Civil War, and slavery seems like a long time ago, I must mention, when I was born in 1955, there were still several Confederate solders still living and many emancipated slaves still alive. The last Confederate solder died when I was four and the last slave died when I was a junior in high school. So, in some ways, that war was yesterday and I was a product of the post-Civil War period.

In my small town, the Confederate flag was flown as much as the American flag or maybe more. The logo, “The South Shall Rise Again!” was a common graffiti, painting on the sides of barns and bridges. It was something of pride for a subculture that, needlessly, suffered from a inferiority complex.

The reason that our part of Tennessee did not side with the south during the war, was our terrain. It was hilly and mountainous, not conducive to large plantations. Since slavery was basically free labor, the larger the plantation the more it would benefit, from slavery.

This is not to say that we did not have our share of slaves. I remember several antebellum houses or farms that still had slave quarters. I almost rented such a home in Jonesborough while I was in college. It was built in 1815 and had two (horrible) slave quarters under the porch, dirt floor and a stone bench where the family of five would sleep.

I remember one beautiful old plantation house sitting on a bluff above the Holston river. That land was first cultivated in the eighteenth century and grew into a large plantation with many slave cabins. It has been passed down in the family up to the time I was a child. I do remember my father, a good and decent man but with the same racism that generation carried, said as we drove past that house one day, “That whole family has been cursed with accidents, suicides, cancer and the like. They think it is a curse from God for owning slaves.” So, there was the notion, even then, that slavery was a work of the devil.

The Re-writing of History

I am a great fan of history now, but wasn’t then. I do remember clearly how the Civil War was taught from middle school into high school. I will put it in bullet points:

Blacks were an ignorant and inferior people that the noble colonialist brought to America, educated them, Christianized them, took the bones out of their lips, gave them Bibles, gave them shoes, and gave them the opportunity to advance in society.
The Civil War was not about Slavery but about hard working, God-fearing (white) farmers in the south, who were being taken advantage of by the north and the “states’ rights” to protect those farmer’s livelihood. The slaves, according to that history, didn’t want things to change for them because it was going pretty well under slavery.
The south could have won the Civil War, but quit because the north was causing so much destruction by their ruthless (e.g. Sherman) behavior.

The Myth of the Confederate Christian Champion

As I’m writing this piece, there is great controversy stirring once again about Confederate monuments. I could write pages and pages about this but I will summarize. Statutes of Confederate leaders are being brought down because many blacks (rightly so) see these as images of oppression and suffering. At the same time, people in my childhood culture (southern, white) are very angry they are coming down, saying it is killing their culture. It would be like (to them) banning beer and Oktoberfest in Germany’s Bavaria.

During this time, I’ve seen several things posted by my Tennessee friends and family with revisionist history about these figures (these histories usually have roots with conspiracy theorists and on politically far right web sites) that declare that these men were noble people who didn’t like slavery and those tearing them down don’t know history. The truth is, those who know history best are those who like the statues the least. The reason is, they understand who these men really were (not a revisionist, white-centric history) and they also understand why these statues were erected in the first place. It was not to celebrate the rich history of the south (mostly white history) but as a direct statement during the Jim Crow hyper-racism period and during the civil rights moment of the 1950s and 60s.

Robert E Lee

The revisionist histories that are circulating cherry-pick only a few points without giving the rest of the story. It is true that Robert E. Lee was a great US general before the war and did not like the idea of secession. It is also true that he decided to honor his state of Virginia and join their cause as part of the Confederacy. The revisionist try to paint him as a friend of the slaves. That part is far from historical reality as he was a man of his times.

Lee inherited hundreds of slave an they were under his direct control. He could have set them free, but he did not. It is a complicated story (as it was for many whites during this period) where Lee spoke of the evil of slavery, but at the same time, directly supervised the whipping of his slaves, believed the myth (see above what I was taught) that blacks were better off as slaves in America than freemen in Africa. He believed that some day slaves could be set free but to never obtain the social status of whites, who were superior to blacks. I recommend reading real histories by real historians rather than things written by political pundits. You can start here.

In summary of this complicated view of Lee, he wrote the following to his wife:

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.

The language that Lee uses is both offensive to any black person but is also the language of the modern “white supremacy” movement.

Jefferson Davis

For the sake of time, I will just mention that while it was true that Davis was a statesman and military leader of the US, he was also a slave owner and supported slavery. You can read more about that here.

The False Narrative of the Pseudo-patriot

My southern friends often wrap themselves in America patriotism as a badge of honor, at the same time they are promoting the Confederacy as a keystone in their own culture, but the two are mutually exclusive. The succession of the south from the United States, was the greatest act of treason this country has ever known. It is also the greatest act of terrorism against this United States by far. Those same people reject the recent lawlessness and destruction that, unfortunately, accompanied (in a very small part) of the Black Lives Matter protests, yet, the Civil War was a million times worse in the destruction of property, lawlessness, and violence. Yet, they want to champion the Civil War’s cause.

The Sin of the Southern Church

One of the reasons that I’m not a big fan of organized religion is that they so often climb into bed with pure evil causes, for the sake of power and money. The southern church did the same for the same of the lucrative slavery trade and function. While members of the Christian society were eventually some of the loudest anti-slavery voices (and should have been) the compromise and promotion of slavery by the Church was more common.

I grew up as Southern Baptist. That denomination’s very existence was over their support of slavery and the denial of human rights to blacks. It is plain and simple. It was a great sin on that denomination and they still have not shaken it. When I grew up Southern Baptist, racism was massaged deeply within that Christian religion. I heard the “N-word” used by Southern Baptist preachers from the pulpit. I also heard statements such has “God never intended for blacks and whites to mingle, certainly not to marry.” I also heard whispers of white supremacy doctrines within that culture, such as “God gave the blacks muscles because God wanted them to be the working class and whites, the leaders and thinkers.”

The church I went to (in college) after I left the Southern Baptist church of my upbringing, was a Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). It too separated from the mainline Presbyterian church over the issue of slavery, as the PCA supported slavery and the stratification of whites above blacks in society. Now, to give them credit, both the Southern Baptists and the Presbyterian Church in America have (if I remember correctly) made statements of confession and repentance over their churches’ sins. But a true cultural repentance is more difficult. It is like trying to get the purple out of your white tee shirts and underwear, after they have been washed with a new purple beach towel. Getting the towel out of the wash machine is the easy part. Getting the color out of your clothes is the difficult and insidious part.

I remember in 1978 meeting with a PCA pastor who was a Civil War enthusiast. He was working on book about finding godliness in the lives of Confederate generals and emulating that godliness. I know pastors now who are fighting to keep Confederate statues up.

I’m sure someone will prove me wrong, but I searched and the only statistics I could find for the PCA says that the percentage of the members who are black are “0%” and <1% immigrants. I’ve seen a black person, although rarely, in a PCA church so it can not be 0%, or can it? For the Southern Baptist, it is a little better, at 6%.

The Difficulty of Cultural Repentance

It is hard enough to go through a personal “repentance” or change of course. An example is an alcoholic who commits to sobriety. It is painful and hard. It is even more difficult to turn from the subtle errors of our character such as bitterness, anger, lying or manipulation. But the most difficult repentance is the cultural change. The reason is that it is external to our hearts. The society around us agrees with this error. If we buck the system our friends and family will loathe us and abandon us. We find our identity in the subcultures and to turn from them, feels like a part of us is dying.

For me speaking out against racism (and this is not the first time) and even this article against embracing the Confederacy, comes at a great cost. I alienated my entire birth family when I wrote an article here about my own racist upbringing. Some were very pissed off, as were people who grew up with me. Everything I said was factual, but painful.

I’m sure that this article will piss off Southern Baptists, Presbyterians of the PCA and virtually 100% of my childhood friends.

When you are facing something like cancer, friends and family are a premium. I’ve lost many who are either upset that I speak out against racism, or damaging our planet, or lying. I’ve lost many more friends from me being candid about my own emotional struggles. I know that if I were a conformist and only wrote what people wanted to hear, my quiver would be full of supporting friends and family. But I can’t help myself. I detest lying and injustice and will stand on my principles, even if I am the last person standing on them. Now, if I speak against racism I am accused of “virtue signaling.” So, then, are we to remain quiet on every point of virtue? I think not.

Before I close this article, I also want to add that just being white and raised in the south does not automatically make you a racist. But those who escaped this racism, at least during the age of my upbringing, were rare. I knew a guy who was raised by two intellectual (and atheist) parents, and he was very outspoken about civil rights and against racism and he lived in the same area as me. And being raised racist doesn’t make one guilty… remaining one does.

Finally, if the people of the south gave up their love for the Confederacy, what do they have? Will they give up their entire culture? Hell no! Look what they have that’s decent and worthy to build a culture on. The have the greatest music on the planet (look how many great musical artists trace their roots to southern music). They have the best food in America (not better than Italy, but America). They have the southern charm, southern hospitality to be proud of. I could go on and on.

But the Confederacy is an ugly chapter in our country’s history and certainly the racism that goes with it. Give it up! Let it go. But don’t forget it. Study it in school. Learn from it. But don’t celebrate it.

Musick for the King – An Internet Monk Review

Few pieces of music can touch the soul like Handel’s Messiah. Making this composition into the centerpiece of a historical of historical novel is a task that only a masterful hand dare try. Barrie Doyle delivers a masterpiece of his own in “Musick for the King – A Historical Novel“. In it, we are transported into the life and times of George Frederik Handel, and are privy to his innermost thoughts, as he struggles against the opposition facing him in mid 18th century London.

Handel has become a pawn in the struggle between King George II and the King’s son Frederick, and it has brought Handel to near ruin. We enter into the parallel story of Susannah Cibber, a soprano whose reputation is in ruin because of a messy divorce from a cruel husband. But a libretto written by Handel’s friend Jennens, quite unlike anything written before, provides a chance at redemption, both financially and spiritually for both George and Susannah.

That actual writing of the entire of the oratorio took Handel only twenty four days. Quite fittingly then, “Musick for the King” covers the event in only six of its 207 pages. But what an incredible six pages! We enter Handel’s mind when the book, like the Messiah itself, reaches a crescendo during the writing of the Hallelujah chorus.

Awakened by the noise and fearing the worst, John hurried down the narrow dark back stairs from his loft room. He burst into the composing room just as Handel, laughing with excitement, with tears still streaming down his face, appeared in the entrance to the music room. He stopped when he saw his butler’s frightened expression.

“Nothing, my dear John. It is nothing.” A huge grin spread across his face. “Yes, it is everything.”

He was laughing, crying, and talking at such a pace that his Germanic accent broke through.

“Mein Gott, John. I did think that I saw all heaven in all its glory before me. And the great God himself!” He collapsed to his knees, shaking with ecstasy, hands and arms spread wide. “It was magnificent. The music is magnificent. I am a mere tool. I did not compose such music in all my left, yet my hands were driven by the music in my head. Ach, mein Gott! It is glorious!”

At the end of the chapter, I said to myself. “Mike, you have just experienced greatness. You have to read that chapter again to drink it all in a second time.”

Barrie Doyle is a masterful story teller. His three fictional novels, The Excaliber Parchment, The Lucifer Scroll, and the Prince Madoc Secret all fall into the category of “can’t put down”. Indeed, I read each of them in a single sitting. With “Musick for the King”, Doyle expertly weaves in a story that is as mesmerizing as his novels. Mystery and suspense run like a thread through the entire book. That the book is based on actual events makes it all the more powerful. The time and effort that he puts into researching the times and places of all his novels is self-evident.

Like the Messiah itself, Barrie Doyle has produced a work of art that gets my highest recommendation. I did not receive a promotional copy, but have purchased two copies to give to my music loving family. (I read my wife’s copy for the review!)

All of Barrie’s books are available at BarrieDoyle.com and can be signed on request.

Racism: One Tragic Outcome of Misunderstanding Grace

Inclusion. Photo by Bradley Huchteman at Flickr. Creative Commons License

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Traditional Western Christian theology has not always served us or our world well.

As a particular example of this, I would refer to our accepted understandings of “grace” and its implications. The debates between medieval Roman Catholics and the Protestant reformers focused on the nature of grace as it applied to individuals and their standing before God. “How can I be saved?” was the question; “How can I go to heaven and avoid hell?” Given the historical situation as it was, it was a necessary debate. However, the overwhelming dogmatic shadow this constrained definition of grace cast over Western civilization and its history is criminally unfortunate. Catholic and Protestant battles over the nature of individual salvation coincided with the onset of European colonial expansion, and became part of the fire feeding its twin engines of religious conversion and economic exploitation of indigenous populations around the world.

I would contend that a radical misunderstanding of God’s grace in Christ lies at the very root of our struggles with evils like racism.

Some theologians saw problems early on in the era of discovery and conquest. The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was an early moral and theological debate in Spain about the conquest of the Americas, whether or not it was justified to convert natives to Catholicism, and what relations should be between the European settlers and the natives of the New World.

On the one side was Juan Ginés de Sepülveda, a prominent humanist and Greek scholar who justified conquest and evangelization by war and forcible conversion. His opponent, friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, in contrast, was a staunch advocate of peaceful and persuasive conversion. These two sides were dealing with a question that had been argued back and forth in Spain — were the indigenous peoples of the New World full, rational human beings, or were they complete “barbarians” who could not make rational decisions for themselves?

Though the Valladolid Debate signaled commendable ethical reflections on conquest and colonialism, the result did little to actually help Europeans see the people of the New World as anything more than “barbarians” (rational or not) to be conquered, converted, and ruled over. According to Bonar Ludwig Hernandez, “although the Spaniards actually sat down to discuss the fate of the Native Americans, the Indians did not benefit in any tangible way from the debate.” Nor did it do anything to stop the tide of colonialism and imperialism by Spain or other European nations. By 1914, a large majority of the world’s nations had been colonized by Europeans at some point.

This subject, of course, is as complex as history itself, and I’m not suggesting that all the blame for the attitudes and actions of Europeans toward the other peoples of the world should be laid at the feet of poor theology. However, I can’t help but think that the world and its history might have taken a much different course if Paul’s theology of grace had been understood more fully and applied more faithfully by the church. As Klasie pointed out in his excellent posts recently, the “racism” we know today in the West is not innate but deeply rooted in the colonialism and imperialism of our past, which fostered our own particular tribal “in-group” and “out-group” perspectives on people of various ethnicities and skin tones. The church often played a key role in this history.

But all this is directly contrary to Paul’s theology of grace in the New Testament. Paul’s conviction was that Jesus came to be Lord of all and to reconcile all people to God and one another. This is God’s good news, his gift of grace to the world.

Hear what John Barclay, author of the essential study, Paul and the Gift, says about the subject:

Paul’s theology of grace is not just about an individual’s self-understanding and status before God. It’s also about communities that crossed ethnic, social, and cultural boundaries. This is what made Paul so controversial in his day. His mission to the Gentiles involved telling them that they didn’t have to fit within the cultural boundaries of the Jewish tradition. In his letter to the Galatians, for instance, he strongly criticizes other Jewish Christians who say you have to fit in the Jewish cultural box in order to be Christian. Paul says no—God has not paid regard to that cultural box.

…What we take for granted as having worth—our place in a hierarchy, our class, our wealth, our education, you name it—does not count for anything when we are encountered by Christ. In Paul’s day, the main forms of hierarchy were built around gender, ethnicity, and legal status. Men were considered more important than women, Jews were considered more valuable than non-Jews, and a free person was considered more valuable than a slave. Paul says that in God’s eyes, none of these social boundaries matter. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Gal. 3:28).

What I find so profound is the capacity of grace to dissolve our inherent and inherited systems—what we might call social capital. What counts before God is not what we pride ourselves on—or what we doubt ourselves on. What counts is simply that we are loved in Christ. This is massively liberating, not only to us as individuals but also to communities, because it gives them the capacity to reform and to be countercultural.

• John Barclay, What’s So Dangerous about Grace? (interview at CT)

Barclay says that Paul’s distinctive contribution to our understanding of grace is its incongruous nature. In the ancient world, patrons who gave gifts to beneficiaries were encouraged to find worthy recipients. But Paul learned that God’s favor was not bestowed in that manner. Paul observed that God had showered the gift of Christ upon Gentiles as well as Jews, those he formerly deemed unworthy. And Paul’s own experience confirmed this as well. He knew that it wasn’t because of his Jewish privileges or zeal that Jesus laid hold of him by grace. Barclay writes, “Paul thus identifies a divine initiative in the Christ-event that disregards taken-for-granted criteria of ethnicity, status, knowledge, virtue, or gender.”

In other words, Paul’s teaching about grace brings “into question every pre-existent classification of worth.” The gift of Christ comes to all, without regard for any of the categories we have established to determine our worthiness or unworthiness.

That’s why Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:16, “Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh.” “According to the flesh” means according to the categories humans have set up. He is not saying that all these distinctions have disappeared, or shouldn’t ever be taken into account, only that grace renders them insignificant as “markers of worth.” The Galatians need not submit to Torah-observance to make themselves worthy recipients of God’s favor. Peter need not fear that eating with Gentiles will offend God’s standards. Grace teaches us that, whether Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, Roman citizen or barbarian — the distinctions we erect in order to divide and organize our world into “worthy” and “unworthy” are no longer the categories by which we are to judge and relate to others.

Furthermore, as Paul emphasizes in Galatians, social practice is the necessary realization of Christ’s gift. In that epistle, he argues that the good news of grace in Christ is actually lost if not enacted in social relationships that challenge common cultural conceptions of worth and standing.

Social practice is not, for Paul, an addition to belief, a sequel to a status realizable in other terms: it is the expression of belief in Christ, the enactment of a “life” that can otherwise make no claim to be “alive.” (Barclay)

The Church’s long history of cooperation with Empire in reinforcing human standards and divisions rather than contradicting them in word and deed has nurtured the growth and spread of such evils as racism. Paul taught and demonstrated that God’s incongruous gift of grace in Christ is meant to form dissident communities which follow the Spirit whose fruit is love, welcoming the “other” rather than judging them by “fleshly” categories.

Imagine that.