The Gateway Drug of Confessionalism

Posted on June 7, 2012 by PaulVK

Quite a post here on where the construct of Reformed confessions my lead. Is confessionalism a gateway drug to RC conversion? http://www.leithart.com/2012/06/04/whos-got-the-gateway-drug/

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Annie Dillard Quote on Crash Helmets needed for worship

Posted on June 7, 2012 by PaulVK

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”

—Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

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Notes and Links from June 6 2012

Posted on June 6, 2012 by PaulVK

Youtube on bounded set vs. center set. 

Another youtube telling of the Gospel in Chairs. 

From the New Yorker, Why I love Marilynne Robinson 

This is not the kind of voice I normally associate with religious people, and it makes me wonder whether we might not be listening to the wrong voices. (A resolution: instead of clicking links to stories about the Westboro Baptist Church condemning, say, the Foo Fighters to the eternal flames of perdition, I’ll read a paragraph or two of an essay by Robinson instead.) In her new non-fiction collection, “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” there’s an essay called “Imagination and Community” in which Robinson discusses her conviction that the capacity to make imaginative connections with other people, familiar and foreign, is the basis of community:

 

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

 

This is a common enough belief, and it’s one that is frequently expressed by writers of fiction. It’s not an argument I am normally much swayed by, but Robinson’s fiction is an eloquent form of proof. She makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind. I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these perspectives.

More Marilynne Robinson: Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred

 We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous. 

When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire—a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense. These things do happen simultaneously, after all. None of them is active by itself, and none of them is determinative, because there is that mysterious thing the cognitive scientists call self-awareness, the human ability to consider and appraise one’s own thoughts. I suspect this self-awareness is what people used to call the soul.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit. In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way, and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Perhaps I should pause here to clarify my meaning, since there are those who feel that the spiritual is diminished or denied when it is associated with the physical. I am not among them. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world [God’s] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy? At this point of dynamic convergence, call it self or call it soul, questions of right and wrong are weighed, love is felt, guilt and loss are suffered. And, over time, formation occurs, for weal or woe, governed in large part by that unaccountable capacity for self-awareness.

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

I think much religious thought has also been intimidated by this supposed discovery, which is odd, since it certainly was not news to Paul, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or Calvin. All of them quote the pagans with admiration. Perhaps only in Europe was one form of religion ever so dominant that the fact of other forms could constitute any sort of problem. There has been an influential modern tendency to make a sort of slurry of religious narratives, asserting the discovery of universals that don’t actually exist among them. Mircea Eliade is a prominent example. And there is Joseph Campbell. My primary criticism of this kind of scholarship is that it does not bear scrutiny. A secondary criticism I would offer is that it erases all evidence that religion has, anywhere and in any form, expressed or stimulated thought. In any case, the anthropological bias among these writers, which may make it seem free of all parochialism, is in fact absolutely Western, since it regards all religion as human beings acting out their nature and no more than that, though I admit there is a gauziness about this worldview to which I will not attempt to do justice here.

Yet in many instances ancient people seem to have obscured highly available real-world accounts of things. A sculptor would take an oath that the gods had made an idol, after he himself had made it. The gods were credited with walls and ziggurats, when cities themselves built them. Structures of enormous shaped stones went up in broad daylight in ancient cities, the walls built around the Temple by Herod in Roman-occupied Jerusalem being one example. The ancients knew, though we don’t know, how this was done, obviously. But they left no account of it. This very remarkable evasion of the law of gravity was seemingly not of great interest to them. It was the gods themselves who walled in Troy.

Science might note with great care and precision how a new pathology emerged through this wholly unforeseen impact of space on our biosphere, but it could not, scientifically, absorb the fact of it and the origin of it into any larger frame of meaning. Scientists might mention the law of unintended consequences—mention it softly, because that would sound a little flippant in the circumstances. But religion would recognize in it what religion has always known, that there is a mystery in human nature and in human assertions of brilliance and intention, a recoil the Greeks would have called irony and attributed to some angry whim of the gods, to be interpreted as a rebuke of human pride if it could be interpreted at all. Christian theology has spoken of human limitation, fallen-ness, an individually and collectively disastrous bias toward error. I think we all know that the earth might be reaching the end of its tolerance for our presumptions. We all know we might at any time feel the force of unintended consequences, many times compounded. Science has no language to account for the fact that it may well overwhelm itself, and more and more stand helpless before its own effects.

The Virtues of Day Dreaming from the New Yorker

Biologos on Polemic Theology, pt. 1

We are called upon by the Lord to contend earnestly for the faith (Jude 3). That does not necessarily involve being contentious; but it involves avoiding compromise, standing forth for what we believe, standing forth for the truth of God–without welching at any particular moment. 

There are three major questions that we must ask; and I would like to emphasize very strongly that, in my judgment, we need to ask them precisely in the right order:

  1. What do I owe the person who differs from me?
  2. What can I learn from the person who differs from me? Pt. 2
  3. How can I cope with the person who differs from me? Pt. 3
Failure and Rescue and risk. 

In commencement addresses like this, people admonish us: take risks; be willing to fail. But this has always puzzled me. Do you want a surgeon whose motto is “I like taking risks”? We do in fact want people to take risks, to strive for difficult goals even when the possibility of failure looms. Progress cannot happen otherwise. But how they do it is what seems to matter. The key to reducing death after surgery was the introduction of ways to reduce the risk of things going wrong—through specialization, better planning, and technology. They have produced a remarkable transformation in the field. Not that long ago, surgery was so inherently dangerous that you would only consider it as a last resort. Large numbers of patients developed serious infections afterward, bleeding, and other deadly problems we euphemistically called “complications.” Now surgery has become so safe and routine that most is day surgery—you go home right afterward.

But there continue to be huge differences between hospitals in the outcomes of their care. Some places still have far higher death rates than others. And an interesting line of research has opened up asking why.
Researchers at the University of Michigan discovered the answer recently, and it has a twist I didn’t expect. I thought that the best places simply did a better job at controlling and minimizing risks—that they did a better job of preventing things from going wrong. But, to my surprise, they didn’t. Their complication rates after surgery were almost the same as others. Instead, what they proved to be really great at was rescuing people when they had a complication, preventing failures from becoming a catastrophe.

When things go wrong, there seem to be three main pitfalls to avoid, three ways to fail to rescue. You could choose a wrong plan, an inadequate plan, or no plan at all. Say you’re cooking and you inadvertently set a grease pan on fire. Throwing gasoline on the fire would be a completely wrong plan. Trying to blow the fire out would be inadequate. And ignoring it—“Fire? What fire?”—would be no plan at all.

Washington DC’s Gay Mafia: Basically how groups assimilate and work together.

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Links and Notes for June 5

Posted on June 5, 2012 by PaulVK

On Atonement:

Really fine article by Andy Crouch on segmentation: how marketers encourage self-differentiation in order to sell soap. Here are some quotes from the end of the piece.

For surely one of the scandalous things about the gospel—indicated by Jesus’ own practices of welcoming sinners and eating with them, calling tax collectors along with fishermen to be his disciples, and praying for the forgiveness of his executioners—is that it does not fit the marketer’s (or the Pharisee’s) formula “for people like me.” It is in fact for people not like me—unless they are “a wretch like me,” and wretchedness was never the basis of a successful marketing campaign. Christianity is not a product that can be added seamlessly into the lives of consumers like one more lifestyle-enhancing appliance. It is instead a call to a completely different way of viewing the world, one in which the one who looks least like me is at a minimum my “neighbor” (Luke 10:29-37) and could well be Jesus himself (Matt. 25).

Meanwhile, as the experiences of countless energetic and entrepreneurial young adults can attest, the ease, and the thrill, of starting something new “for people like us” is mighty tempting when set next to the plodding rate of change in established, multi-generational organizations which seem unwilling to share power or reward initiative. Add in a world view which takes consumer culture’s generational segmentation for granted, and new churches (or, ahem, new magazines) can seem like the only way to go.

Yet what is needed is almost exactly the opposite: to form in every generation the will to love the stranger in every other generation. This is not a matter of creating ministries, be they worship services, small group Bible studies, or sermon series, that appeal to one or another age group—however useful a transitional step that might be. Rather, it is the task of forming young and old into hearts that welcome those who are different from themselves. This runs straight against the grain of our atomizing culture, but without it the multigenerational promise of Joel that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams” (quoted by Peter at Pentecost) becomes null and void.

Piece that I wrote for the CRC Network on Why God Enables Church Fights.  Used some ideas from my Holy Hypocrites sermon/ blog post. 

Tim Keller’s advice to take a country church.

Don Elium and the difference between Criticism and Blame, or what we are doing when we blame. John Gottman on youtube on repair conversation attempts. Also a youtube on how to complain without hurting your partner. 

Patrol blog on Dispositional vs. ideological religion, in terms of how religion and politics should relate. 

Alan Jacobs on time management for academics. A lot of it is to help people find time to write.

The real cost of steroids in baseball from SI. Naulty’s life in steroids, in baseball, and finally in the church.

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Links and Notes for June 4 2012

Posted on June 4, 2012 by PaulVK

TC on Heteros and their marriage problem. 

This is the premise behind ABC’s dating game shows “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.” The assumption that placing a random grouping of men and women in exotic locations to pursue romance can lead to the basis for a meaningful relationship is about as far-fetched as a group of chimpanzees launching a NASA rocket.

Whole bunch of blogs at “the12” on CRC/RCA Merger:

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Links and Notes from June 3 2012

Posted on June 3, 2012 by PaulVK

Micha Boyett on Hermeneutics (a wonderful blog, not just for the ladies you know…) on Ann Voskamp, Tim Challies and dinner. Beautifully done. 

The Rising number of singles. Are churches adjusting? 

I could quit making this list and just post RHE’s Sunday Superlatives. She does a nice job picking good stuff.

The ex-good-Christian-woman by Kathy Escobar

The Problem with Light: Reflections on the Life and Death of Thomas Kinkade

Sometimes, my own students’ writing tends toward warmly lit windows and picket fences. Twenty year olds can be terribly nostalgic. They feel old to themselves. Beginning, as some of them are, to touch the razored edges of loss, they, too, seek to build worlds that never quite were. They believe there is some kind of goodness tucked in this, an honoring of sorts, a preservation of some golden thread of feeling.

That’s why in nearly every creative writing class I teach I eventually offer this truism: in this world, every light that shines on something creates a shadow, and you have to write both, own both, or your work will be hollow. Learn to hold life’s tensions.

The problem with light is that we assume it always reveals, but light without its requisite shadow, which is a light of our own making, conceals. The true light of reality, of God, illumines what is genuinely there, unearthing our darknesses. The soft, fuzzy glow of sentimentality that distracts from the shadows we’ve edited out, exaggerating what never truly was, is a deceiving angel.

The Patheos piece on Kinkade

How Orthodoxy differs from Protestantism  Lots to think about in this one.

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The joy of small churches and blogs

Posted on June 2, 2012 by PaulVK

I pastor a small church. I write a small blog. These are good things.

I know I’m supposed to want my church to be huge, and sometimes I do, but often I don’t. Sure, I wish I didn’t have to water the grass, or take out the trash, or unlock the door, but it’s quiet, and lovely, and there is room for schizophrenics, donut men, tattooed diabetics, alcoholics, and folks that just need to retreat to a quiet space and a listening ear. God must want us small. I hope he keeps paying the bills.

This morning I read some blogs. Some blogs feel like large churches. There are dozens or hundreds of comments for postings and thousands of page views. Part of my heart gets envious until I realize that I’d be annoyed if I had to manage a blog like that.

A lot of my love of smallness is selfishness and laziness. People can wear me out sometimes. I like people, but sometimes I just like the quiet, arms-length interaction that a book, a good blog read, or a gentle cool breeze offers.

Tomorrow when there are only 60 or so people in church on an early summer Sunday I won’t fret about the empty seats. Bradley can ask me why I used different words for God’s greeting. John can look at me wearily as I ask him how he’s doing. Nancy will have her tale of woe for the week. Neal will look at me and ask with concern “but how are YOU doing?” Jack and Joe will have their warm, encouraging smiles for me. Nina will give me a hard time because she loves me. Doug will bring in the mail. Greg will stand in back with mirror glasses and 4 layers of clothing scaring the visitors. HJ will hand out bulletins with his infectious, down-south-moved-to-California drawl. Brittany will grab all the attention she can. Roger will faithfully man the AV booth as he has for the last 13 years. Pete will pick just the right song for reasons most won’t comprehend. These are just a few of the glorious few I will see and love.

There will be a visitor or three, but most won’t stick. The sermon was strange. The music wasn’t what they wanted. There weren’t enough young families or children’s programs or available singles. The emergency felt-need that sent them desperately to a random local church subsided. There are better places to go.

God will meet me at my small church. God will speak to me through a thousand little blogs that no one reads more than once. Jesus will be with us when only two or three are gathered. In these small places he will refresh my soul.

 

 

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Links and Notes for June 1 and 2 2012

Posted on June 2, 2012 by PaulVK

Why are so many celebrities adopting black babies? 

Why Pentecostal snake handlers use poisonous snakes? 

CT: Sigur Ros and the Art of Worship

Cerebral Palsy 400k race

David Brooks on Europe, Values and the Segmentation Century

Women in leadership and marital status

Religions leaders are rockstars on Twitter: NYT

Abortion and Sex-selection from XX Factor: Slate

Powerful blog on depression, this one with her little girl at Disneyland

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My Case for a Holy Hypocrisy

Posted on June 1, 2012 by PaulVK

“The church is full of hypocrites”

I regularly see Gandhi’s famous Christ quote on a bumper sticker at my child’s school.

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Fair enough. If you can’t find much of value in my tribe, I can appreciate that you find something powerful and beautiful in its leader. According to the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:1-16 what the Holy Spirit is doing is working a process to grow the church up, to mature her, into that head which is Christ.

Gandhi was of course not alone in his criticism. Lots of people, inside and outside the church profess to appreciate Jesus but have issues with his church.

I hear it from David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group and author or the book “Unchristian”. According to his survey these were words that people outside the church used to describe present day Christianity:
* antihomosexual 91%
* judgmental 87%
* hypocritical 85%
* old-fashioned 78%
* too political 75%
* out of touch with reality 72%
* insensitive to others 70%
* boring 68%

I read it in countless blogs on the Internet like Rachel Held Evan’s piece 15 Reasons I Left the Church.

There is of course Jefferson Bethke’s youtube on why he hates religion but loves Jesus with over 21 million hits by this point.

A refreshing counterpoint is the Amazing Atheist who hates religion and Jesus too. What’s helpful about a guy like this is that he’s at least honest and not skating on a religious veneer.

Jesus had the best definition of hypocrisy that I’ve ever heard. “You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

Whatever you think of Jesus, he had a way with words.

This is, as I understand it, the basis for a lot of criticism of the church. The church somehow gets its sense of proportion wrong on a whole lot of things. Churches put money into buildings and programs when there are people starving. Churches are filled with self-centered, self-righteous, egotistical people who are bad to their children, bad to their spouses, bad to their neighbors, but because they go to church somehow God will reward them with heaven while sending other good people to hell to fry forever.

Only Choosers can Judge

Behind every judgment is a chooser, someone who is seeing the world and evaluating it against their own idealized frame of reference. You can’t charge someone with hypocrisy without first asserting that you know what “the right” is and that “the right” should be available to those who are choosing poorly.

I know that part of our cultural matrix today is an allergy about judgment. We don’t like people who judge because we don’t like being judged. It isn’t hard to see that you can’t make that statement and not be self-referentially inconsistent. You can’t judge judgers without judging yourself of course.

We might as well simply enter the game and acknowledge that we judge and own up to our own status as choosers and our own behavior as judgers. You can’t live as a real human agent in this world and not judge. All we should ask is that we own our judgments.

When Jesus Ditches Zen

Jesus’ great definition of hypocrisy is found in Matthew 23 where Jesus is most un-zen-like. Jesus is denouncing the scribes and the Pharisees for what they have done to the religion based on Moses’ law.

Matthew 23:1–4 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The experts in the law and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat. Therefore pay attention to what they tell you and do it. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy loads, hard to carry, and put them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are not willing even to lift a finger to move them.

Jesus will then proceed to get into name calling, “hypocrites” “blind fools” “whitewashed tombs”.

I think the folks who like Jesus but don’t pay much attention to him like this part too. We like a guy who can get angry and call someone out.

The difficulty is, of course, that Jesus chooses too. Jesus does a lot of negative teaching. Don’t do this, don’t do that, avoid this, etc. He says dramatic, hyperbolic things like “pluck your eye out, cut off your hand, let the dead bury their dead…”

There really isn’t a lot of zen in Jesus, no matter how much you like zen. It’s just not in the book.

Choosers choose and if you are a public chooser and you choose some really high values you will likely be open to the charge of hypocrisy.

If you live next door to a guy who does nothing but drink all day. You may not think him a hypocrite, unless you visit him and he starts to talk. He’ll probably start telling you about how his ex wife did him wrong, his children don’t treat him right, the city isn’t running things well, and his family hasn’t given him a fair shake. Suddenly you realize that even a guy who does little else than drink himself into the grave holds all kinds of lofty notions about how the world should work and dares to attempt to hold everyone else accountable to his ideals. We are choosers by nature.

Bounded set vs. Center set

One way to deal with the idea of hypocrisy as failure to fulfil a high calling, or a failure to keep things rightly proportionate in life is to recognize the difference between a group that has a bounded set identity and a group that has a center set identity.

Every group that has an identity have things that define that identity. I recently saw a friend’s post on Facebook explaining what polyamory is. Now we might think that a polyamorous person or relationship is one where “anything goes”, but that’s not true. In this person’s definition what was clear was that consent was the key feature of the relationship. One person could not go out and do things with someone else without the consent of the current partner. Consent and disclosure create the identity of the relationship.

A group that has a bounded set identity usually has a list of rules, or boundary markers that define the group or the nature of the relationship. One perspective on the Mosaic law with its over 600 laws is that of a bounded set. Our legal system in the United States works in a similar way. These laws are boundary markers about what defines a good citizen of the community.

The strength of a bounded set is its clarity and specificity. If you wonder whether a behavior is inside or outside the identity of the group or relationship just check the list.

As in many things the strength is also the weakness. If you disagree with an item on the list your place in that community may be threatened or you may be subject to sanction. All group identities and relationships are subject to one form or sanction or another. In the polyamorous one the sanction is the severing of the relationship with the current partner.

The other theory of community identity is that of a center set. This idea is that there is one value, one person (a chooser), or a small list of items that define the community. Participation in the community is relative to one’s relationship with the center. The myriad of things that life throws at you are evaluated through the filter created by the center.

As with the bounded set identity the strength and the weakness of the system work together. The system can be strong with flexibility, but difficult and strained through lack of clarity.

What usually happens in a community like this is that there are evaluative moments within the organic community that further define the community. It is usually in those moments that the center set community flirts with bounded set behavior, and bounded set communities self-evaluate according to a center set type ethos.

In Matthew 23 and in other places in the Gospel of Matthew (the Sermon on the Mount is a great example) Jesus challenges the bounded set approach with some center set principles.

Acts 15 as a Defining Moment for the Church

Acts 15 records one of the most important moments in the history of the development of the church.

In the 20 or so years since Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection the community of Jesus followers has changed dramatically. No longer are there only 120 personal friends of Jesus who believe he rose from the dead, most of whom were Jewish and from the Galilee region, there are now groups of people who are meeting daily or weekly in the eastern Roman empire to share meals, give to the poor, and worship in Jesus’ name. Many of these people have Jewish ancestry and ingrained traditions but others do not. Many have had experience with miraculous events that they have understood as the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus had promised them. Some of those who have experienced this are not ethnically Jewish, nor had they become Jewish converts which for the men would have meant circumcision. Circumcision since the time of Abraham and Moses had been a critical boundary marker for identifying who was inside the group and who was not.

Two leaders from the diverse church in the important city of Antioch in the Roman province of Syria, Paul and Barnabas, had traveled through Cyprus and into the province of Galatia. Paul and Barnabas found in the cities of that province a dramatic response (positive and negative) to their message that Jesus rose from the dead and is the messiah of God sent to save not only Jews but also Gentiles from the age of decay.

This new found success raised a problem though. Upon what terms was this new community to be identified? Where the traditional Jewish boundary markers plus the additional understanding of the resurrection and Jesus’ messiahship sufficient for the new community? If so, what about the painful and key boundary marker of circumcision? If not, what would define this new community?

It seems by reading between the lines of the book of Acts and the book of Galatians Paul and Barnabas were not the only people undertaking missionaries journeys. A group of Jesus followers who were from the sect of the Pharisees traveled to not only Syrian Antioch, Barnabas and Paul’s home church, but also the cities on Galatia that Paul had visited. They asserted that followers of Jesus must also observe the Jewish boundary markers including diet and circumcision regulations. The book of Acts observes that there was “no small debate” between Barnabas, Paul and this group of Pharisees. This is likely an understatement. The book of Galatians is probably a pretty good summary of Paul’s arguments with this group. In that book Paul wishes these “judaizers” would take the knife and go all the way on themselves with their genital surgery.

How would this new community of Jesus followers be defined?

Community as Revelation

A reader of the book of Acts would by chapter 15 have been presented with many claims of divine revelations and miraculous interventions. People in this new Jesus community are known as prophets and they are predicting future events and giving messages attributed to be new direct revelations from God. Peter has been sprung from prison by an angel even though James the Apostle was allowed to be executed by Herod. Phillip, Paul and Barnabas, men who were not among the original 120 followers of Jesus have done public miracles in Jesus’ name.

Given all of this Holy Spirit intervention how might we expect this to be resolved? I’m sure everyone would have been able to agree on “well we want God to choose for us. Let God reveal the answer to this debate in an incontrovertible way and it will be resolved. If God would just say it, we would believe it, and that would settle it.

Nice idea, but God doesn’t go along. Why not? Isn’t it important? Sure, but God is still silent.

Let’s imagine God did cop to the sincere wishes of his conflicted church. In the Old Testament we find God giving various direct orders for a lot of things. David regularly consults the priest to hear from God what he is supposed to do. Gideon has his fleece and his drinking soldiers. Prophets get sent with specific messages like Jeremiah’s “seek the peace of your new city…”

It seems right, but where would it stop? In some ways it could become a never ending bounded set community with God continually having to tinker with the rules. “Pork and lobster are OK for this group, but that groups should avoid them…” We might find this attractive, but something critical would be lost.

It seems the Holy Spirit is given to a historical church within the stream of history and that church is to be the revelation of Jesus to this world. Jesus said “and you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes and you will be my witnesses.”

This revelation to the world is to come through hypocrites and failures. This revelation will often be a group that fails their center set evaluation, has a mess of misplaced bounded set markers, but in the process becomes a place where failures and hypocrites will find community and hope. By this fact alone, God is revealing something in his church and about his church.

Community Process is Established

To the degree that the avoidance of a bounded set revelation achieved, Luke seems to wish to reveal a process that will become normative throughout the life of the church.

The procedure followed in decision making as portrayed here involved: (1) a process of discernment and recognition of God’s activity; (2) the interpretation of Scripture in such a way as to make sense of what has happened; (3) a view that debate and dispute are a part, necessary part, of the process of discernment—“such disagreement serves to reveal the true bases for fellowship, and elicit the fundamental principles of community identity”; and (4) finally, the consent or agreement of the ekklesia to the ruling offered by the church leader, in this case James.

Witherington III, B. (1998). The Acts of the Apostles : A socio-rhetorical commentary (451). Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Such a process will be recognized in an amazing diversity of transcultural situations. There is enough flexibility in the process to afford different cultural applications, but enough cohesion in the process to be evident and identifiable. It is in fact one of the most crucial revelatory pieces in the book of Acts, something more practical, identifiable, duplicable and achievable than the signs and wonders we crave. It is also just as frustrating.

The Decision Itself

The decision that is reached by consensus (I wish that were always the case) is that the new Gentile believers need not be circumcised, but they are admonished to stay away from food sacrificed to idols, meat from strangled animals, meat with blood in it, and sexual immorality.

At first glance this admonition seems like a familiar set of bounded community markers. Religious boundary markers commonly revolve around food and sex. Ben Witherington in his commentary makes a cogent argument that what this list is really pointing to participation in common Roman empire pagan temple practice. In the empire these temples were regular parts of common civic life and what went on at these temples commonly involved veneration and worship of a variety of deities, feasting and “revelry” to put it nicely. Sacred prostitution was common not just in the Roman empire but also around the world and actually for a community to avoid involvement in this might involve economic, political and social sacrifice. The new Christians from the Gentile world would not be held to the Jewish boundary markers of separation from “the nations” but would in fact maintain a center set separation through different means. It could in fact be very much like the approach that Jesus seemed to take in the gospels regarding the bounded set regulations he was criticized for violating.

A Holy Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is all about violating one’s own standards. One of the best defense against the charge is to be very specific about your standards and comply with them consistently.

It’s ironic that this is precisely the situation in which Jesus attacks. His complaint is against the bounded set system that the scribes and Pharisees have rigged in order to violate the center set center-of-mass of the Mosaic law which is love of God and love of neighbor. The bounded set is critiqued by the center set.

The difficulty of the center set ironically is one’s openness to the charge of hypocrisy from all of the other choosers in the world. “How can you say you love these people when you treat them like that!”

One of the difficulties of Jesus’ center set value system of loving God and your neighbor (which includes everyone up to and including your enemies) is that it the debt to love never ends. Who of us won’t be found guilty of hypocrisy by embracing such a system?

To make matters worse, it seems the Holy Spirit prescribed adjudicator of the necessary boundary set applications of this system is a bunch of us talking, meeting, praying and working together. If watching legislation is like watching sausage making, then watching the church attempt to make real life application to Jesus’ center set mandate is bound to yield a feast of hypocritical sausage.

The CRC’s Synod, its binational governing body is about just getting underway and for some of us this kind of thing may invite anxiety, despair, cynicism and even unbelief. This is the Synod time of year and in the month of June lots of church assemblies will be talking, praying, decreeing, and the response to most of this will be anything but consensus. It will be easier for people to agree that on charges of hypocrisy than it will for them to agree on the decisions made. What was God thinking when he made a world full of choosers?!

It seems the only way through would in fact be to embrace our hypocrisy, to fess up that our sausage is filled with the kinds of things we fear butchers may hide in it. We know from the rest of the New Testament that there would be plenty more questions to resolve beyond the circumcision question. What about meat sacrificed to idols? What about sexual norms? How does Jesus change our idea of God? How does the resurrection change how we approach all of the minutiae of everyday life? It doesn’t end.

In a world of choosers the safest bet is really to not profess anything worth anything. To hold nothing sacred, to refuse to name a standard, to call the polyamorous legalists for requiring consent and disclosure. To hold judgment on no one and nothing, especially not ourselves. In this way we can avoid the terrible judgment of hypocrisy. In this way too, however, we will not be human.

I prefer the road of holy hypocrisy and to be subject to Jesus’ standard. According to my own tradition, it is only by acknowledging your obvious hypocrisy and owning it, that you can understand the value of the rest of what Jesus says and begin to love the rest of the hypocrites in the world too.

Posted in CRC, Culture commentary, Institutional Church, On the way to Sunday's sermon, Understanding the Bible | 4 Comments

Links and Notes from May 31 2012

Posted on May 31, 2012 by PaulVK

Scholarship as a way of life by James KA Smith. The value a bookish life brings to the world.

Rich and Poor, Poverty and Affluence, a series written by Glenn Sunshine.

Tim Stafford on Miracles in Mozambique from CT

Posted in Daily Links and Notes | Leave a comment