What it comes down to for me – as a Velvets fan, a lover of rock and roll, a New Yorker, an aesthete, a punk, a sinner, a sometime seeker of enlightenment (and love) (and sex) – is this: I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal.
Ellen Willis in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island
The very first issue of Rolling Stone I ever bought had Peter Frampton on the cover. It was February 1977 and the year before his album “Frampton Comes Alive” was a huge success. Songs from the record played frequently on the radio – “Show Me the Way” and “Baby I Love Your Way.” Every two weeks for awhile thereafter, until I started to subscribe, I bought a copy of the magazine to see what was happening in the music world.
The pattern developed early for me, I think. My enjoyment of most anything is enhanced by reading about it. When I fell in love with baseball, I started to read about some of its history and best players. With my eighth grade experience of God’s love in Jesus, I began another journey of reading – mostly evangelical and charismatic writings. When some of that reading brought me to more questions, other journeys began – philosophy, psychology, and rock and roll.
In April of 1977, Rolling Stone, in an issue with Hall and Oates on the cover (remember them?), published a long article by Ellen Willis about her spiritual journey – which was also a journey with rock and roll. I don’t recall how much of it I actually remember, but I found it on-line and was moved in re-reading by its deep honesty. What I remember vividly, the first time I read the article was this quote from a song called “Rock n Roll” by a group I had never heard of, The Velvet Underground. The quoted line in the article read: “her life was saved by rock and roll.”
Life saved by rock and roll. What could that mean? Jesus saved, but I was doubting what that meant. In my first encounter with Jesus it meant that those who believed in him, believed that his death was a necessary requirement for God’s forgiveness of our sins, were saved from the eternal punishment of hell. If you did not so believe, well…. I had come to a difficult place with all that, though. How could I write off people of other religious traditions when I knew virtually nothing about them? Cartoonish condemnations of existentialism and pragmatism left me wondering what these philosophies might teach. I wondered if the full impact of Christian faith in Jesus was really meant to be focused on another life? I did not want to give up on Jesus, but I wanted a Christian faith that could help me think more deeply and that could take into account so much that I was learning and encountering.
Part of what I was encountering was rock and roll and writing about music that matched the music’s artistry. A writer like Ellen Willis could pen words that discussed music and spirituality. Her words were truthful. I too, think we struggle against nihilism of one kind or another. I too believe that body and spirit are not really separable. I believe that redemption is never impossible, and always equivocal – by that I mean our embodiment of God’s love and grace is real but momentary, and in the next moment we can lose our way a bit. I learned this from Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr and Ellen Willis.
In the end, I believe that Jesus saves – that is, through Jesus I experience the grace and love of God which lead to a greater degree of wholeness in my life, and lead me to work for the healing of the world. I also believe that the grace I know in Jesus comes to me in different, and sometimes surprising, ways – including rock and roll and the words written about it. This life was saved by rock and roll, at least, in part.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Saturday, June 11, 2011
Economy and Justice
We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity
Preamble, United States Constitution
But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
The prophet Amos (5:24)
There must be some way out of here
said the joker to the thief.
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine.
Plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line,
know what any of it is worth.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
This spring I read two books that indicate we may be in a time of economic confusion, a time to ask about what things are worth, about the meaning of justice and welfare.
Tyler Cowan, The Great Stagnation is an e-book that David Brooks has said may be “the most debated nonfiction book so far this year. “America is in disarray and our economy is failing us,” Cowan begins his book. He argues that we are in the midst of a multi-decade economic stagnation that began in the 1970s. Median wages have risen only slightly since then. Recent economic recoveries have been relatively jobless. Our economic success earlier this century, he contends, was based on picking “low-hanging fruit”: abundant land, rapid technological development, and a pool of bright, but uneducated children and youth. His words about technology are particularly interesting given many of the new developments we have experienced. Today… apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch (9). To make his argument, Cowan notes the rate of growth of median family income. It slows significantly in 1973. From 1947-1973, median family income doubled; from 1973-2007, it grew less than 22%. Cowan believes that until we find the next new low-hanging fruit, we might expect much the same – the great stagnation.
The other book, which I also read on an e-reader this spring, published in 2006 prior to the recent economic meltdown, is Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. It comes at our recent economic history from another angle. For decades, Americans and their government were committed to a powerful set of ideals – never wholly achieved, never without internal tension – that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity. Animating this vision was a conviction that a strong economy and society hinged on basic financial security, on the guarantee that those who worked hard and did right by their families had a true safety net when disaster struck…. Today, however, the social fabric that bound us together in good times and bad is unraveling. Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. (8-9, 15) Hacker acknowledges growing economic inequality in our economy. From 1979-2003 the average income of the richest Americans doubled, factoring for inflation, while the middle class saw their average income rise 15%. The incomes of middle-class families aren’t much higher today than they were in the 1970s – and they are much more at risk. (24) Hacker is less concerned about inequality than the great risk shift.
Weaving the arguments from these two works together we can say that at a time when economic opportunity seems more limited and difficult, average families are being asked to assume more economic risk. What might the meaning of justice be in such circumstances? How do we care for the general welfare? How do we balance sufficient government revenue for an adequate safety net with the encouragement of economic opportunity? These questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. My greatest frustration is that too few are even asking them.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Preamble, United States Constitution
But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.
The prophet Amos (5:24)
There must be some way out of here
said the joker to the thief.
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine.
Plowmen dig my earth.
None of them along the line,
know what any of it is worth.
Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”
This spring I read two books that indicate we may be in a time of economic confusion, a time to ask about what things are worth, about the meaning of justice and welfare.
Tyler Cowan, The Great Stagnation is an e-book that David Brooks has said may be “the most debated nonfiction book so far this year. “America is in disarray and our economy is failing us,” Cowan begins his book. He argues that we are in the midst of a multi-decade economic stagnation that began in the 1970s. Median wages have risen only slightly since then. Recent economic recoveries have been relatively jobless. Our economic success earlier this century, he contends, was based on picking “low-hanging fruit”: abundant land, rapid technological development, and a pool of bright, but uneducated children and youth. His words about technology are particularly interesting given many of the new developments we have experienced. Today… apart from the seemingly magical internet, life in broad material terms isn’t so different from what it was in 1953. We still drive cars, use refrigerators, and turn on the light switch (9). To make his argument, Cowan notes the rate of growth of median family income. It slows significantly in 1973. From 1947-1973, median family income doubled; from 1973-2007, it grew less than 22%. Cowan believes that until we find the next new low-hanging fruit, we might expect much the same – the great stagnation.
The other book, which I also read on an e-reader this spring, published in 2006 prior to the recent economic meltdown, is Jacob Hacker’s The Great Risk Shift. It comes at our recent economic history from another angle. For decades, Americans and their government were committed to a powerful set of ideals – never wholly achieved, never without internal tension – that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity. Animating this vision was a conviction that a strong economy and society hinged on basic financial security, on the guarantee that those who worked hard and did right by their families had a true safety net when disaster struck…. Today, however, the social fabric that bound us together in good times and bad is unraveling. Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. (8-9, 15) Hacker acknowledges growing economic inequality in our economy. From 1979-2003 the average income of the richest Americans doubled, factoring for inflation, while the middle class saw their average income rise 15%. The incomes of middle-class families aren’t much higher today than they were in the 1970s – and they are much more at risk. (24) Hacker is less concerned about inequality than the great risk shift.
Weaving the arguments from these two works together we can say that at a time when economic opportunity seems more limited and difficult, average families are being asked to assume more economic risk. What might the meaning of justice be in such circumstances? How do we care for the general welfare? How do we balance sufficient government revenue for an adequate safety net with the encouragement of economic opportunity? These questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. My greatest frustration is that too few are even asking them.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Friday, May 27, 2011
Bob at 70 - Together Through Life
Interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual
I Corinthians 2:13
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn.
Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”
My first memory of a Bob Dylan song came from a Young Life group meeting I attended in high school. There was this song book that included “secular” songs along with explicitly Christian songs. I remember singing, “I Shall Be Released.” I also recall a locally produced Christian newspaper, put out by the Jesus people group I was part of at the time. One article making a case for Christian faith cited Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” – No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke. There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk softly now. The hour is getting late.
When I began to ask questions about the Christian faith as I knew it then, one place I looked to expand my mind was to the music of Bob Dylan. Those song lyrics that I had heard or sung spoke to me. What more might I learn? I remember buying my first Dylan albums - Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits, Volume 2. There they were: All Along the Watchtower, I Shall Be Released - - - and a whole lot more: the biting lyrics of “Positively Fourth Street,” the tender lyrics of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” the ache of “Just Like a Woman” and “I Want You,” and the phenomenal “Like a Rolling Stone.” How does it feel? It felt pretty amazing. Remarkably, this guy was born in Duluth (like I was) and grew up in Hibbing, the north country. I wanted to know more, and hear more. My school library had a copy of Writings and Drawings of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s biography. As I could, I bought albums (vinyl then!). Street Legal was the first new Dylan album I bought when it came out and I have bought each new album in turn, even the Christmas album (I am glad proceeds went to charity).
Dylan’s music, with roots deep in a variety of American popular musical idioms, and his sometimes brilliant lyrics, were sparks igniting intellectual flames in my young mind. This was one cornerstone in the growth of the horizon of my self-understanding and my understanding of the world. There were others along the way – the psychology of Abraham Maslow, the thought of Alan Watts introducing me to non-Christian religious tradition, Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s Howl. I’ve not been quite the same since.
My journey brought me back to Christian faith, but it was a faith that could be more open to the world - that could listen to rock, jazz and Dylan, that could think with and about other religious traditions, that could be in dialogue with psychology and philosophy. Dylan’s music has been a part my journey for many years now. I am currently reading Robert Stolorow World, Affectivity and Trauma, subtitled “Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis”. I came to the chapter titled, “Our Kinship-In-Finitude” in which Stolorow argues the importance of persons connecting with each other in our common experience of finitude. We seek out “brothers and sisters in the dark night” and such connection (“deep emotional attunement’) is especially important if we are to be able to integrate our traumatic experiences into our lives. The essay begins with an epigraph from…. Bob Dylan. I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
This week Bob Dylan turned 70. This summer I turn 52. I am grateful that our days have overlapped and grateful for this music which is part of the soundtrack of my life, these words which are part of the poetry of my life.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
I Corinthians 2:13
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn.
Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”
My first memory of a Bob Dylan song came from a Young Life group meeting I attended in high school. There was this song book that included “secular” songs along with explicitly Christian songs. I remember singing, “I Shall Be Released.” I also recall a locally produced Christian newspaper, put out by the Jesus people group I was part of at the time. One article making a case for Christian faith cited Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” – No reason to get excited, the thief he kindly spoke. There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke. But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate. So let us not talk softly now. The hour is getting late.
When I began to ask questions about the Christian faith as I knew it then, one place I looked to expand my mind was to the music of Bob Dylan. Those song lyrics that I had heard or sung spoke to me. What more might I learn? I remember buying my first Dylan albums - Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits, Volume 2. There they were: All Along the Watchtower, I Shall Be Released - - - and a whole lot more: the biting lyrics of “Positively Fourth Street,” the tender lyrics of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” the ache of “Just Like a Woman” and “I Want You,” and the phenomenal “Like a Rolling Stone.” How does it feel? It felt pretty amazing. Remarkably, this guy was born in Duluth (like I was) and grew up in Hibbing, the north country. I wanted to know more, and hear more. My school library had a copy of Writings and Drawings of Bob Dylan and Anthony Scaduto’s biography. As I could, I bought albums (vinyl then!). Street Legal was the first new Dylan album I bought when it came out and I have bought each new album in turn, even the Christmas album (I am glad proceeds went to charity).
Dylan’s music, with roots deep in a variety of American popular musical idioms, and his sometimes brilliant lyrics, were sparks igniting intellectual flames in my young mind. This was one cornerstone in the growth of the horizon of my self-understanding and my understanding of the world. There were others along the way – the psychology of Abraham Maslow, the thought of Alan Watts introducing me to non-Christian religious tradition, Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s Howl. I’ve not been quite the same since.
My journey brought me back to Christian faith, but it was a faith that could be more open to the world - that could listen to rock, jazz and Dylan, that could think with and about other religious traditions, that could be in dialogue with psychology and philosophy. Dylan’s music has been a part my journey for many years now. I am currently reading Robert Stolorow World, Affectivity and Trauma, subtitled “Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis”. I came to the chapter titled, “Our Kinship-In-Finitude” in which Stolorow argues the importance of persons connecting with each other in our common experience of finitude. We seek out “brothers and sisters in the dark night” and such connection (“deep emotional attunement’) is especially important if we are to be able to integrate our traumatic experiences into our lives. The essay begins with an epigraph from…. Bob Dylan. I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
This week Bob Dylan turned 70. This summer I turn 52. I am grateful that our days have overlapped and grateful for this music which is part of the soundtrack of my life, these words which are part of the poetry of my life.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Friday, May 20, 2011
Kierkegaard parable
It has been more challenging in recent weeks to find time to blog. Since Easter I have traveled out of state twice, officiated at two (with tomorrow – three) funerals, and been busy with all kinds of May activities.
Bradlee Dean’s prayer before the Minnesota legislature today could give me something to write about, but I want more time to consider how one might best respond. I appreciated the Republican Speaker of the House’s response. Mother Jones on-line has a piece about the connection between Dean and Representative Michele Bachmann, but I don’t have time to develop all this right now.
I hope, in the near future to develop some thoughts about the hatred of taxes “theology” that is prominent right now in many places (phrase from Michael Tomasky in The New York Review of Books), in light of a book recently completed and one in which I am significantly immersed – Cowen, The Great Stagnation (available only as an e-book) and Hacker, The Great Risk Shift. Again, I need more time for this.
Next week, Bob Dylan turns 70. There has to be something there.
This past week, Harmon Killebrew died.
A lot of tiny threads, but little whole cloth.
So here for your reflection is a parable written by Soren Kierkegaard (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript and found in Parables of Kierkegaard)
When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon: then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Bradlee Dean’s prayer before the Minnesota legislature today could give me something to write about, but I want more time to consider how one might best respond. I appreciated the Republican Speaker of the House’s response. Mother Jones on-line has a piece about the connection between Dean and Representative Michele Bachmann, but I don’t have time to develop all this right now.
I hope, in the near future to develop some thoughts about the hatred of taxes “theology” that is prominent right now in many places (phrase from Michael Tomasky in The New York Review of Books), in light of a book recently completed and one in which I am significantly immersed – Cowen, The Great Stagnation (available only as an e-book) and Hacker, The Great Risk Shift. Again, I need more time for this.
Next week, Bob Dylan turns 70. There has to be something there.
This past week, Harmon Killebrew died.
A lot of tiny threads, but little whole cloth.
So here for your reflection is a parable written by Soren Kierkegaard (from Concluding Unscientific Postscript and found in Parables of Kierkegaard)
When in a written examination the youth are allotted four hours to develop a theme, then it is neither here nor there if an individual student happens to finish before the time is up, or uses the entire time. Here, therefore, the task is one thing, the time another. But when the time itself is the task, it becomes a fault to finish before the time has transpired. Suppose a man were assigned the task of entertaining himself for an entire day, and he finishes this task of self-entertainment as early as noon: then his celerity would not be meritorious. So also when life constitutes the task. To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Kristeva
In college I majored in philosophy and psychology, and thirty years later the question – “what are you going to do with that?” still echoes.
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Hell - No?
Moreover some… of those who remain within the faith of the Church, while believing that there is none greater the Creator God, in which they are right, yet believe such things about him as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of men.
Origen, On First Principles
Rob Bell is the pastor of a large congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and an author who writes intelligently and creatively about the Christian faith. I read one of his early books on Christian faith entitled Velvet Elvis. Recently Rob Bell published a book that is creating quite a stir. I have not yet had the chance to read Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived so I cannot comment knowledgably about its contents and arguments. All I can do is comment on the commentary, and look forward to reading the book when I can find a copy of it. My local bookstore is sold out.
Here’s what I have heard about the book. Bell began pondering what a Christian doctrine of hell might be about if it was a place that included someone like Mahatma Gandhi. He struggled with the idea that Gandhi could be in hell for eternity and so began to reconsider the meaning heaven, hell and eternal destiny. Bell has been considered an evangelical Christian, and these questions have created quite a stir in the evangelical community in particular. The Christian Century characterized Bell’s argument this way: Bell challenges the notion that hell is a place of eternal torment for people who aren’t Christians and argues that an emphasis on hell is misplaced, although he denies he is a universalist. Dr. Riley Case of the United Methodist Confessing Movement, an evangelical renewal movement within The United Methodist Church characterizes Bell’s book as follows: The book asks some important questions about eternal destiny, but in the end posits something close to universalism, the belief that in the end all persons are saved and there is no eternal hell.
It is Dr. Case’s further argument that I want to consider here. Case argues that there has been a distinct lack of conversation within United Methodism about this book and asserts that “a good discussion on hell… would be insightful and helpful.” From there he offers some observations on hell, including this: It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot. He concludes his essay, published on-line through the Confessing Movement’s “Happenings Around the Church” April 6, 2011 with a criticism of progressive Christianity, citing H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic 1937 statement about liberal Protestantism in America about “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
“It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot.” When Dr. Case makes his case for hell, I am assuming by the context that he considers hell a place of eternal punishment, to use a phrase from the Vineyard Church statement of faith – “eternal conscious punishment.” I want to ponder this, though in what follows I am not necessarily claiming that Dr. Case would hold some of the positions I am criticizing. I am going to use his statement as a springboard for theological discussion and reflection.
As a Christian, I take very seriously human sin and the need for forgiveness. I don’t have to look any further than my own heart and life to understand the ease with which people slip into hurtful behavior and how insidious and entrapping such behavior can be. I say something hurtful that I really wish I had not said. I am ashamed of this, but rather than admit it, I seek ways to deny my action, and the problem becomes worse. A similar dynamic is repeated widely in human experience. Of course, sometimes the stakes are much higher and the consequences much more destructive. The death of Jesus is a tragic example of the wages of sin – uncomfortable truth needing to be silenced, disquieting love needing to be extinguished.
As a Christian I also take seriously God as truthful, just and loving. In God’s presence the truth about our lives is made manifest. We cannot hide from God, and God’s truthful presence is also a truthful judgment about our lives. My Christian faith is not a faith about a God who simply ignores human sin, nor is it about sinless humans, nor does it lack a profound sense of God’s judgment, and in it Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are central.
Nevertheless, I think it is crucial to question an understanding of hell as eternal conscious punishment for those who do not believe certain Christian doctrines. I think we can ask if it really is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot, or we can ask what kind of case for Christianity is made when a cornerstone of that case is the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious punishment.
What do we say about God if we believe in hell as an eternal punishment for non-believers? We might rightly ask about God’s justice. Justice requires a punishment that fits the crime, so to speak. In at least some cases for Christianity based on the hot fires of hell, there is one punishment given to all, no matter the degree of their offense. A Gandhi who was Hindu is in hell for his unbelief, just as is a Hitler. One could say that it is the same punishment for the same infraction – refusal of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Is eternal conscious punishment a just response to unbelief? What about those whose contact with “believers” is quite mixed, or even cruel. Gandhi knew some of the cruelties of British rule in India. People experience abuse at the hands of clergy. Their ability to believe may be quite limited by such experiences. Do they deserve eternal conscious punishment in the hot fires of hell? How seriously can we take Jesus’ command to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength if the invitation to love is footnoted with a “by the way, failure to love is punishable by an eternity in a fiery hell”? I don’t want to claim that theologians cannot make a case for Christianity that includes God’s love, God’s judgment, and an eternal hell. I do want to claim that there are some prima facie problems here that need addressing and that alternative cases for Christian faith can and should be made. I want to claim that at least some of the cases made for Christianity with hell as a cornerstone enjoin belief in a God as savage and unjust as some of the worst of our human rulers.
If Origen was right all those many years ago, that some in the Church, while believing in God, yet believe such things about God as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of persons, and if one belief that poses such a problem is belief in a fiery hell as place of eternal conscious punishment for those who don’t believe, then not only should a case for Christianity not depend upon such a belief, but we need to positively make another kind of case. I don’t believe Christianity depends on hell as a place of eternal conscious punishment, though the topic is worthy of serious discussion. I think another case can be made. I think other understandings of the death of Jesus, beyond the notion that God required a blood sacrifice in order to forgive so that people would not be sent to hell, are possible, and are present in the tradition, even in the New Testament.
As early as the third century CE, Origen offered a different understanding of the ideas of hell from those wherein it was seen as a place of eternal fiery punishment. “But when the soul thus torn and rent asunder, has been tried by the application of fire, it is undoubtedly wrought into a condition of stronger inward connexion and renewal” (On First Principles). “There is a resurrection of the dead, and there is punishment, but not everlasting” (On First Principles). H. Richard Niebuhr, in the same book in which he criticizes liberal Protestant Christianity in America, also wrote this: Liberalism represented again a dynamic element in religious life; it was a revolt against the fatalism into which the faith in divine sovereignty had been congealed, against the Biblicism which made the Scriptures a book of laws for science and for moral, against the revivalism which reduced regeneration to a method for drumming up church members, and against the otherworldliness which had made heaven and hell a reward and a punishment. (The Kingdom of God in America, 185.)
I look forward to reading more from Dr. Case. I look forward to reading Rob Bell’s book. I will do both with some other words of H. Richard Niebuhr echoing in my mind. I call myself a Christian, though there are some who challenge my right to that name… because I also am a follower of Jesus Christ… because my way of thinking about life, myself, my human companions and our destiny has been so modified by his presence in our history that I cannot get away from it… because my relation to God, has been… deeply conditioned by this presence of Jesus Christ in my history and in our history…. I call myself a Christian… because I identify myself with what I understand to be the cause of Jesus Christ. (The Responsible Self,43)
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Origen, On First Principles
Rob Bell is the pastor of a large congregation in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and an author who writes intelligently and creatively about the Christian faith. I read one of his early books on Christian faith entitled Velvet Elvis. Recently Rob Bell published a book that is creating quite a stir. I have not yet had the chance to read Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived so I cannot comment knowledgably about its contents and arguments. All I can do is comment on the commentary, and look forward to reading the book when I can find a copy of it. My local bookstore is sold out.
Here’s what I have heard about the book. Bell began pondering what a Christian doctrine of hell might be about if it was a place that included someone like Mahatma Gandhi. He struggled with the idea that Gandhi could be in hell for eternity and so began to reconsider the meaning heaven, hell and eternal destiny. Bell has been considered an evangelical Christian, and these questions have created quite a stir in the evangelical community in particular. The Christian Century characterized Bell’s argument this way: Bell challenges the notion that hell is a place of eternal torment for people who aren’t Christians and argues that an emphasis on hell is misplaced, although he denies he is a universalist. Dr. Riley Case of the United Methodist Confessing Movement, an evangelical renewal movement within The United Methodist Church characterizes Bell’s book as follows: The book asks some important questions about eternal destiny, but in the end posits something close to universalism, the belief that in the end all persons are saved and there is no eternal hell.
It is Dr. Case’s further argument that I want to consider here. Case argues that there has been a distinct lack of conversation within United Methodism about this book and asserts that “a good discussion on hell… would be insightful and helpful.” From there he offers some observations on hell, including this: It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot. He concludes his essay, published on-line through the Confessing Movement’s “Happenings Around the Church” April 6, 2011 with a criticism of progressive Christianity, citing H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic 1937 statement about liberal Protestantism in America about “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
“It is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot.” When Dr. Case makes his case for hell, I am assuming by the context that he considers hell a place of eternal punishment, to use a phrase from the Vineyard Church statement of faith – “eternal conscious punishment.” I want to ponder this, though in what follows I am not necessarily claiming that Dr. Case would hold some of the positions I am criticizing. I am going to use his statement as a springboard for theological discussion and reflection.
As a Christian, I take very seriously human sin and the need for forgiveness. I don’t have to look any further than my own heart and life to understand the ease with which people slip into hurtful behavior and how insidious and entrapping such behavior can be. I say something hurtful that I really wish I had not said. I am ashamed of this, but rather than admit it, I seek ways to deny my action, and the problem becomes worse. A similar dynamic is repeated widely in human experience. Of course, sometimes the stakes are much higher and the consequences much more destructive. The death of Jesus is a tragic example of the wages of sin – uncomfortable truth needing to be silenced, disquieting love needing to be extinguished.
As a Christian I also take seriously God as truthful, just and loving. In God’s presence the truth about our lives is made manifest. We cannot hide from God, and God’s truthful presence is also a truthful judgment about our lives. My Christian faith is not a faith about a God who simply ignores human sin, nor is it about sinless humans, nor does it lack a profound sense of God’s judgment, and in it Jesus’ life, death and resurrection are central.
Nevertheless, I think it is crucial to question an understanding of hell as eternal conscious punishment for those who do not believe certain Christian doctrines. I think we can ask if it really is difficult to make a case for Christianity without assuming that hell exists and the fires are quite hot, or we can ask what kind of case for Christianity is made when a cornerstone of that case is the doctrine of hell as eternal conscious punishment.
What do we say about God if we believe in hell as an eternal punishment for non-believers? We might rightly ask about God’s justice. Justice requires a punishment that fits the crime, so to speak. In at least some cases for Christianity based on the hot fires of hell, there is one punishment given to all, no matter the degree of their offense. A Gandhi who was Hindu is in hell for his unbelief, just as is a Hitler. One could say that it is the same punishment for the same infraction – refusal of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. Is eternal conscious punishment a just response to unbelief? What about those whose contact with “believers” is quite mixed, or even cruel. Gandhi knew some of the cruelties of British rule in India. People experience abuse at the hands of clergy. Their ability to believe may be quite limited by such experiences. Do they deserve eternal conscious punishment in the hot fires of hell? How seriously can we take Jesus’ command to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength if the invitation to love is footnoted with a “by the way, failure to love is punishable by an eternity in a fiery hell”? I don’t want to claim that theologians cannot make a case for Christianity that includes God’s love, God’s judgment, and an eternal hell. I do want to claim that there are some prima facie problems here that need addressing and that alternative cases for Christian faith can and should be made. I want to claim that at least some of the cases made for Christianity with hell as a cornerstone enjoin belief in a God as savage and unjust as some of the worst of our human rulers.
If Origen was right all those many years ago, that some in the Church, while believing in God, yet believe such things about God as would not be believed of the most savage and unjust of persons, and if one belief that poses such a problem is belief in a fiery hell as place of eternal conscious punishment for those who don’t believe, then not only should a case for Christianity not depend upon such a belief, but we need to positively make another kind of case. I don’t believe Christianity depends on hell as a place of eternal conscious punishment, though the topic is worthy of serious discussion. I think another case can be made. I think other understandings of the death of Jesus, beyond the notion that God required a blood sacrifice in order to forgive so that people would not be sent to hell, are possible, and are present in the tradition, even in the New Testament.
As early as the third century CE, Origen offered a different understanding of the ideas of hell from those wherein it was seen as a place of eternal fiery punishment. “But when the soul thus torn and rent asunder, has been tried by the application of fire, it is undoubtedly wrought into a condition of stronger inward connexion and renewal” (On First Principles). “There is a resurrection of the dead, and there is punishment, but not everlasting” (On First Principles). H. Richard Niebuhr, in the same book in which he criticizes liberal Protestant Christianity in America, also wrote this: Liberalism represented again a dynamic element in religious life; it was a revolt against the fatalism into which the faith in divine sovereignty had been congealed, against the Biblicism which made the Scriptures a book of laws for science and for moral, against the revivalism which reduced regeneration to a method for drumming up church members, and against the otherworldliness which had made heaven and hell a reward and a punishment. (The Kingdom of God in America, 185.)
I look forward to reading more from Dr. Case. I look forward to reading Rob Bell’s book. I will do both with some other words of H. Richard Niebuhr echoing in my mind. I call myself a Christian, though there are some who challenge my right to that name… because I also am a follower of Jesus Christ… because my way of thinking about life, myself, my human companions and our destiny has been so modified by his presence in our history that I cannot get away from it… because my relation to God, has been… deeply conditioned by this presence of Jesus Christ in my history and in our history…. I call myself a Christian… because I identify myself with what I understand to be the cause of Jesus Christ. (The Responsible Self,43)
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Walt Whitman in an 1889 conversation about baseball: It’s our game: that’s the chief fact in connection with it: America’s game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere – belongs as much to our institutions, fits them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.
Thomas Wolfe in a 1938 letter thanking his host after attending the Baseball Writers Association of America: One reason I have always loved baseball so much is that it has been not merely “the great national game” but really a part of the whole weather of our lives, of the thing that is our own, of the whole fabric, the million memories of America. For example, in the memory of almost every one of us, is there anything that can evoke spring – the first fine days of April – better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mitt, the sound of the bat as it hits the horsehide: for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical – almost everything I know about spring is in it – the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the smell of grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, that smell of the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, the resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.
The 2011 baseball season began this week. Spring is here, or near, and almost every day in the coming months we will have scores to watch and games to mark our days as those days lengthen into mid-summer then slowly shorten as darkness encroaches with autumn.
For a few years when I was a boy almost everything I knew about spring was associated with baseball. Bubble gum cards hit the stores, and we wondered what the new year’s cards would look like. In sixth grade some of us received permission from the teacher to bring our transistor radios to school on opening day, so we could catch the Twins game, during recess or other breaks. These were the days of the radios with the single ear phone. Opening day 1970 was very special. Brant Alyea, a newly-acquired outfielder, had four hits, including two home runs, and drove in seven runs as the Twins defeated the Chicago White Sox on April 7. Truth be told, I had to do a little research to insure the correct numbers here, but I remember Alyea and I remember he had a phenomenal day. Later that same season (September 7), Alyea had another seven RBI game. The Twins won their division for the last time, until 1987.
There were years when my appreciation for baseball waned. I would follow the Twins some, and catch the World Series when I could, but some of the magic was gone. Perhaps that is the way with all childhood passions. Adult thoughts and responsibilities take up residence in the mind and heart, as they should. Recent years have seen a return to me of a love for the game. I am not sure why, except that in a world that is often complex, violent, disappointing, a world where progress towards peace and well-being is often glacial, there is a place for a game that reminds me of boyhood hope and enthusiasm, that comes with the lengthening days of spring, that is not on a clock, and that keeps score by bringing runners home. It is good to have this game as a part of the weather of my life.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Along with a return of interest in baseball has come a return to reading about the game. For me if it is interesting it is worth reading about. Logging in time at airports this past month I read two recently published baseball books, both worth checking out. Jimmy Breslin’s Branch Rickey, is a delightfully written book about Rickey and his determination to bring an African-American into major league baseball. I am kind of proud to say he was a Methodist. John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, tells the story of baseball’s earliest years in the United States. It is filled with fascinating detail and wonderfully rich characters. If you want to know what Helena Blavatsky has to do with early baseball, or the story behind the Spalding name on the baseball equipment you use, check this book out.
Thomas Wolfe in a 1938 letter thanking his host after attending the Baseball Writers Association of America: One reason I have always loved baseball so much is that it has been not merely “the great national game” but really a part of the whole weather of our lives, of the thing that is our own, of the whole fabric, the million memories of America. For example, in the memory of almost every one of us, is there anything that can evoke spring – the first fine days of April – better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mitt, the sound of the bat as it hits the horsehide: for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical – almost everything I know about spring is in it – the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the smell of grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell more about an American summer than, say, that smell of the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, the resinous, sultry, and exciting smell of old dry wood.
The 2011 baseball season began this week. Spring is here, or near, and almost every day in the coming months we will have scores to watch and games to mark our days as those days lengthen into mid-summer then slowly shorten as darkness encroaches with autumn.
For a few years when I was a boy almost everything I knew about spring was associated with baseball. Bubble gum cards hit the stores, and we wondered what the new year’s cards would look like. In sixth grade some of us received permission from the teacher to bring our transistor radios to school on opening day, so we could catch the Twins game, during recess or other breaks. These were the days of the radios with the single ear phone. Opening day 1970 was very special. Brant Alyea, a newly-acquired outfielder, had four hits, including two home runs, and drove in seven runs as the Twins defeated the Chicago White Sox on April 7. Truth be told, I had to do a little research to insure the correct numbers here, but I remember Alyea and I remember he had a phenomenal day. Later that same season (September 7), Alyea had another seven RBI game. The Twins won their division for the last time, until 1987.
There were years when my appreciation for baseball waned. I would follow the Twins some, and catch the World Series when I could, but some of the magic was gone. Perhaps that is the way with all childhood passions. Adult thoughts and responsibilities take up residence in the mind and heart, as they should. Recent years have seen a return to me of a love for the game. I am not sure why, except that in a world that is often complex, violent, disappointing, a world where progress towards peace and well-being is often glacial, there is a place for a game that reminds me of boyhood hope and enthusiasm, that comes with the lengthening days of spring, that is not on a clock, and that keeps score by bringing runners home. It is good to have this game as a part of the weather of my life.
With Faith and With Feathers,
David
Along with a return of interest in baseball has come a return to reading about the game. For me if it is interesting it is worth reading about. Logging in time at airports this past month I read two recently published baseball books, both worth checking out. Jimmy Breslin’s Branch Rickey, is a delightfully written book about Rickey and his determination to bring an African-American into major league baseball. I am kind of proud to say he was a Methodist. John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, tells the story of baseball’s earliest years in the United States. It is filled with fascinating detail and wonderfully rich characters. If you want to know what Helena Blavatsky has to do with early baseball, or the story behind the Spalding name on the baseball equipment you use, check this book out.
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