Northside Mission
Guns AND Butter
The Second World War banished the fantasy of isolation for the nation. The US had to commit and sacrifice to bring down Japan and Germany and that mobilization required that the walls of insular religious communities like the CRC must come down as well. Great existential threats have a way of leading us to live outside of our natural matrixes of basic desire. In that way they themselves are a cousin of religion.
Archie’s Big One gave way to another great struggle, the Cold War. The Cold War, unlike the hot one against Germany and Japan did not require the level of blood sacrifice that America offered in the sands of Normandy or small Pacific Islands we had never heard of before. The Cold War was surely an anxious war, fearing the nuclear threat to end civilization, but its two major blood lettings in Korea and Vietnam produced different results than the struggle of the 40s. In the Cold War America could afford BOTH guns and butter. We could afford the self righteousness of the great moral struggle against godless Communism AND the American dream made flesh in suburban living.
It was no accident that both mainline and evangelical versions of Christianity flourished during the Cold War period. The Cold War was a new crusade, not against Islam, and not lead by a church unified in Rome, but a church that while differing on details expressed in denominational fragmentation could shape a consensus around an American image of “the good” found in America’s own story of moral achievement and triumph. Churches, Fundamentalist, Mainline or Immigrant might not be able to agree on doctrines of Election, Infant Baptism or even the Virgin Birth but their consensus around a public morality could be maintained across religious sectarian lines. The same type of consensus that immigrant churches could find in the Bible that Mark Noll highlighted could be achieved and expressed in a broader vision backed by the virtue AND science and promoted by media and embodied in institutions like the Boy Scouts of America. This consensus of public morality would of course come unraveled in the 60s and 70s but that would get ahead of the story.
The CRC’s Distrust of Ease Continue reading
The Insufficiency of Incarnation
Looking for A Bigger Truth Do Justice Blog has been doing a #listenatthemargins series. I haven’t been a faithful daily reader, listener, watcher but I’ve caught a number of them.
Here is one that really stuck with me. A very creative telling of one person’s experience of depression.
Here’s another with a Native American talking about Thanksgiving.
I like a series like this because it forces me to see things from a perspective different from my own. This is the whole notion of “privilege” acknowledging that the shape of our lives and experience impacts how we see the world. We all approach the world with a full set of biases. Listening to the stories and perspectives of others helps reduce these biases so that we can better know a bigger truth in the world.
Looking for the Salvation Narrative One of my biases honed now by years of preaching is that whenever I read or listen I’m always paying close attention to some questions and answers.
In the depression piece this is where she goes
In the Thanksgiving piece here was where she placed her hope
Isn’t The Right Answer Always “Jesus”?
It would be easy in either case to simply jump on the nihilism and humanism of the two pieces. You don’t need me to point them out. It isn’t hard.
Creation is the canvas of God’s glory and it can be mediated in through many things and in many ways to us. The glory of Jesus power in feedling the multitude came through bread and fish. When we pray for the sick to be healed we don’t curse the science or the medicine it produces. God’s common grace is mediated in 10,000 ways.
We should rightly give thanks for these things. It is sometimes an off-putting Christian habit to denigrate mediated common grace where some have found solace and comfort in this brutal world. “I’m glad this helps you” can be a charitable thing to say. My judgments are always my own.
Watching Ferguson Continue reading →