One time my Uncle gave me a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition that contained all sorts of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and the two explorers. In that correspondence, I found something that puzzled me: they seemed extremely educated and eloquent, they spoke of the advancement of humanity and the causes of justice and democracy, and yet they also spoke of Native Americans and people of African descent with what I can best describe as glib superiority. They seemed to think that higher level thinking and true scientific inquiry were the sole province of white males such as themselves.
I wondered, in discussing the book with my Uncle, how it was possible to be so enlightened in some regards and yet seem so benighted in others. He said, "everyone starts from where they are." In studying history it is important to remember that fact and allow it to shape how we judge certain characters. I have heard many people opine about the sore lack of intervention in the atrocities of Nazi Germany, yet if you read the information available to people in the late 1930's and early 1940's you will quickly realize that there was very little clear consensus as to what was actually happening. History is hard to see while it is happening.
Likewise, popular opinions of Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King Jr. were far from cognizant of the massive historical impact those two would have on race in this country.
In American Football the game plan is drawn up around two important schemes, sometimes called base offense and base defense. A "base" is the personnel group and their alignment on the field that is the default. Everything else: blitz packages, trick plays, alternate formations are variations on that base package. Most of the plays in any game are run from the base, because it's simply to complicated to always be running a different scheme, especially if you want to move fast to keep the opponent off balance. The Seahawks powerful defense was successful in large part to the fact that they were able to stay in their base defense most of the time. They didn't have to rely on tricky schemes or complicated coverage patterns, they just trusted that their guys were bigger, faster and stronger than yours. They played with swagger and confidence, because of that, and it won them a championship.
Base packages are great, when they work, but when someone finds the flaw, they start to break down. A few years back the "Tampa Two" base package was popular because the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won a Superbowl and the defense had that same ball-hawking, flesh-eating character as Seattle. "Tampa Two" is basically played with the two safeties deep, helping corners who play bump and run coverage on the wide receivers, which limits the long throws down the field and keeps the action in front of the defensive backfield. It relies on good pass rush from the front seven and physical play and sure tackling from everyone, but if it's done well it only has a few weaknesses. The weaknesses are short passes and plays up the middle of the field to tight ends or running backs, namely the things that the "West Coast offense" is based upon.
American football goes through these trends where things change and the competition adapts, which is largely the way our culture works as well. Right now, some of our base assumptions are changing with regard to sexual orientation.
The reason why I have been going on about football is because of Michael Sam, a defensive lineman for Missouri, who is most likely going to be playing in the NFL come next fall. Sam just came out. If, or rather when, Sam is drafted, he will be the first openly gay NFL player in history (there have been others who came out after their playing careers). The "base package" for professional football is super machismo. The notion that a homosexual man could thrive in that culture has seemed almost absurd, yet here we are.
It turns out that Sam told his Missou teammates before the season started, and they accepted him, and they put it behind them and played football. You hear interviews with them talking about how all they care about is what kind of football player he is, not who he loves. Apparently Sam is the kind of football player most guys want on their team, which means whatever NFL team he ends up playing for is probably going to react pretty much like Missouri.
This is all over Sportscenter, which I watch in the morning while I'm having coffee and getting the kids ready for school. Which means that my kids hear all this talk about Michael Sam being gay and what a big deal that is, which means that Caitlyn is going to have questions. Michele groans when she hears stuff like this on the TV when the kids are around, and I admit, I have a momentary thought as well. But on the other hand, this is a major issue being dealt with in our culture at the moment, and both our kids are going to be exposed to it sooner rather than later. They have an older cousin who came out a couple of years ago, this is not something we can or should shelter them from.
So the question was: "What is being gay?" That's pretty easy, without going into the gory details with an eight year old who thinks anybody kissing is pretty gross. My answer was pretty straightforward: "it's when a man likes other men instead of women, or a woman likes other women instead of men." Cate gave one of her patented looks, but I knew this wasn't the first she had ever heard of it. Then she quickly adapted and said, "Okay, but why does it matter if a football player is gay?"
That's a harder question to answer.
But, I gave it a shot. I explained that it matters because we shouldn't treat people who are gay any differently than people who are straight (yes I explained what straight was), and that they should be able to play football or do any job they're good at regardless of who they love. In hindsight, it was a lot easier to explain than erectile dysfunction ads, and she quickly seemed to accept it and move on to whatever it was that caught her eight-year-old mind.
The base is changing rapidly. It's no longer a question of right or wrong it's a question of why it even matters. I think we are seeing an attitude in younger generations that is going to make homophobia as irrelevant as the wishbone formation.
At no point in the conversation did I feel like I needed to talk about the bible, all I needed to consider is what I want to teach my daughter. Do I want to teach her to judge people who are different from her? Or do I want to teach her to love others, no matter what?
Jesus said, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Scribes and pharisees were good at following the law down to the last letter, but they were pretty terrible at really creating a just society where people were free to live to the glory of God. What I think "exceeding their righteousness" means for us is adapting well to the flaws that have been discovered in our base defense. Legalism falls flat in the face of love, isn't that largely what Jesus showed us? He said that what he taught and what he did, did not abolish the law but fulfilled it, which means he showed us what it was really good for. What it was really for was to establish justice, and make it so that we sinful people could somehow live together in peace and mutual respect. The fulfillment of the law is ethical injunction to love God and one another, so that stoning people is no longer a necessity, so that casting people out for whatever differences they might have is no longer a practice.
That's what I want to teach my kids. I want to teach them that the reason why we treat everyone with respect and radical love is because Jesus tells us that's the way. I don't want them to feel separated from the goodness of God's creation because of some human idea about abominations.
So thanks Sportscenter, for your obsessive overexposure of this whole thing, it has helped teach a lesson.
I think that might be grace at work.
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
One
The celebrations have been duly observed: we had an open house last week, the congregation wore bow ties last Sunday in honor of the first year of my pastorate at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church. Today is the actual one year anniversary of my first Sunday in the pulpit here. Between moving and adjusting, and adapting to a new place, it barely seems like I've blinked and a year has gone by.
Part of the speed is just the phase of life: we're in the midst of raising two school aged kids and things are just hectic. Older folks tell us, with a bit of warning: it goes by so fast, to which I say "I know," but I don't really know, because you never really understand things until they pass.
I'm going to turn 40 this year, which doesn't really mean much except for messing with my head. I remember a time when being 40 seemed about as likely as traveling to Jupiter, but here I am. What that teaches is me is that other ages that seem unlikely are going to be rolling my way, sooner than I expect them.
I have come to see my life in terms of decades, I spent nearly thirty years getting an education, I graduated from Seminary just shy of my 29th birthday, but I would say that I learned a lot more in the ten years that I spent as a pastor in a rural community in Western Pennsylvania than I did in the ten years that I spent in the systems of higher education. The past ten years have changed me quite a bit, I have learned to be a father and a pastor. I have learned what grief really is and I have learned to grieve in public; the first thing is inevitable, the second is a rather peculiar skill indeed.
On my thirtieth birthday I didn't want people to make a fuss, but they did anyway. On my fortieth, I don't think I'll resent the fuss so much, because I have a sense of how important marking the years actually is. I don't mean that we need a big hullabaloo (hear me Michele), but I understand that birthdays and anniversaries are moments to celebrate, because we are mortal.
Weird.
We celebrate the passage of time, which ultimately can only remind us that we're getting closer to it's end. It seems to me that those moments where we celebrate are the designated moments for looking back. The value in designating them as such is so that we can devote more time and energy to looking forward.
Emerson said, "The years teach us much which the days never know."
That is an elegant way of saying what I'm rambling on about. I think we have been sold the idea of knowledge, but perhaps not so much wisdom. Wisdom is not just knowing things, wisdom is being able to put those things into use, and understanding the context of what you know, and how one thing affects another.
There has been so much change in the past year, when I think about it too much I get a bit dizzy, but here I am, and here we go, year two.
Part of the speed is just the phase of life: we're in the midst of raising two school aged kids and things are just hectic. Older folks tell us, with a bit of warning: it goes by so fast, to which I say "I know," but I don't really know, because you never really understand things until they pass.
I'm going to turn 40 this year, which doesn't really mean much except for messing with my head. I remember a time when being 40 seemed about as likely as traveling to Jupiter, but here I am. What that teaches is me is that other ages that seem unlikely are going to be rolling my way, sooner than I expect them.
I have come to see my life in terms of decades, I spent nearly thirty years getting an education, I graduated from Seminary just shy of my 29th birthday, but I would say that I learned a lot more in the ten years that I spent as a pastor in a rural community in Western Pennsylvania than I did in the ten years that I spent in the systems of higher education. The past ten years have changed me quite a bit, I have learned to be a father and a pastor. I have learned what grief really is and I have learned to grieve in public; the first thing is inevitable, the second is a rather peculiar skill indeed.
On my thirtieth birthday I didn't want people to make a fuss, but they did anyway. On my fortieth, I don't think I'll resent the fuss so much, because I have a sense of how important marking the years actually is. I don't mean that we need a big hullabaloo (hear me Michele), but I understand that birthdays and anniversaries are moments to celebrate, because we are mortal.
Weird.
We celebrate the passage of time, which ultimately can only remind us that we're getting closer to it's end. It seems to me that those moments where we celebrate are the designated moments for looking back. The value in designating them as such is so that we can devote more time and energy to looking forward.
Emerson said, "The years teach us much which the days never know."
That is an elegant way of saying what I'm rambling on about. I think we have been sold the idea of knowledge, but perhaps not so much wisdom. Wisdom is not just knowing things, wisdom is being able to put those things into use, and understanding the context of what you know, and how one thing affects another.
There has been so much change in the past year, when I think about it too much I get a bit dizzy, but here I am, and here we go, year two.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Where to begin...
I really don't know where to start, but start here. It's a blog in response to a blog and a response and another blog and a bunch of comments on the first two blogs, or something like that, and it's more than a commentary on how convoluted interweb dialogue can get.
The subject of all of it, at the core, is the church: what it is, and why we go (or don't go).
I grew up as a pastor's kid, and I'm now a pastor myself, which means that I have spent more than my fair share of time in church. It also means that I am PAINFULLY familiar with how messed up church can be. I have been in on messy arguments and ugly debates since I was a kid. I have absolutely no illusions that the church is perfect...
And yet, it's still something.
When I read Miller's initial moment of realization that he doesn't like singing in church, and not because the music was bad, or old and dead, or new and shallow, but just because he doesn't feel connected to God that way, I was sympathetic. He is not as alone as he thinks. I know lots of people who love to sing, who love to sing in church, who will hinge their choice of church on the type and quality of the music more than anything else. But I also know that music can be a divisive factor that sets people against each other and it can be as off-putting to some as it is attractive to others. This is NOT a referendum on the music or the musicians, it is simply a fact of human nature, and as I read further into Miller's blog and the comments, and the incredibly defensive response, and some other blogs in response to the defensive response, I realized that there is a big problem here.
I like Donald Miller as a writer, I have read several of his books and they have moved me on some level. I think he generally gets talked about as a "voice" for modern American Christianity, as do Rachel Held Evans, Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, but in this case Miller is not a prophetic voice of modern American Christianity, he is a symptom of the flaws in modern American Christianity, perhaps the single biggest flaw: consumerism.
I find myself flopping that term around a lot, and I suppose I need to be intellectually accountable for defining what I mean by it. This is my personal perspective, not entirely original, but mine all the same. Consumerism, as it relates to religion, is the quest for a faith community that does what you want.
There is an innate religious impulse in the human soul, and there is no guarantee that that impulse will lead to God or Jesus, in fact, the biblical narrative seems to indicate that, left to our own devices, we will all eventually run headlong into idolatry of one form or another, which is why, even in the covenant of grace, we still need the law and the prophets to call us back from that entirely interior impulse.
We define right and wrong largely by what works for us, we define terms (as I just did) in a way that suits our perspective. Our perspective is made up of more assumptions than most of us care to count or even consider. If we were to carefully evaluate every last feeling and thought, we would be utterly paralyzed, so we take shortcuts, we make leaps of faith, and we build houses on the sand.
We are immensely skillful in justifying our assumptions, even after they have been washed away by the tide. We can rationalize our selfish desires with all sorts of spiritual and psychological talk: I just don't learn that way, I'm just not being fed, it just doesn't speak to me. We will completely convince ourselves that surely God wants us to be: happy, fulfilled, blessed, and satisfied, but we're essentially seeking after our own desires, with some language that tries to cover that sin in sanctimonious talk.
What would be better is to admit that they are essentially selfish desires and see where that takes you. It may not take you back to church, but at least you're not fooling yourself.
Churches in the west are deeply complicit in this aspect of selfishness and sin. We compete with each other to be the most attractive congregation, we tailor our programs and our liturgy to draw people who are not getting what they want somewhere else. The sad fact is that most churches grow by attracting people who have become displeased with other churches. And an even sadder fact is that people, who proclaim faith in Jesus Christ, are simply wandering out on their own.
My question about all this is really: what can we do?
It seems rather intractable. I think that Jesus' parable about the sheep hearing his voice is applicable, but it can lead to fatalism among church leaders, who basically have many of the same assumptions as the people who leave their communities. We basically think that we need to cater to religious consumers, honestly I'm not sure we have much of a choice.
I'm sure God has an answer for all this, I'm praying for ears to hear.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Observational Observations
I watched the whole thing. The whole debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham. Happily, Bill Nye is every bit the man I thought he was. Unfortunately, so is Ken Ham. If you read my post yesterday, you know I had hoped for a debate that would add to and enrich the dialogue between science and religion.
That did not really happen, and it's not Bill Nye's fault. In fact, @TheScienceGuy practically bent over backwards to be deferential to an obviously partisan audience at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. In my opinion, he was a little too nice to them. He allowed Ham to repeatedly get away with rhetorical monkey business and hide behind ridiculous cliches. I think he had decided ahead of time, just not to be the rabid, anti-god, anti-religion character that so many of the young earth creationists expected him to be, and for that I admire him even more now than I did yesterday.
Nye stuck to his guns, and kept hammering at a single premise: "Is Ken Ham's model of young earth creationism viable?" Meaning specifically can it make predictions about the world we live in, because after all that is the purpose of science in the first place. It's not just inventing useful things like the MRI, which Ham gleefully and repeatedly pointed out was invented by a young earth creationist. In fact, that was one place where Ham repeatedly tried to take refuge: the fact that a handful of actual scientists actually do subscribe to young earth creationism, as if that somehow validates the whole mess as a genuine statement of fact. Henry Ford was a rather outspoken anti-semite and before WWII broke out was known to admire Adolf Hitler, which doesn't mean he was somehow less of an innovator, but it does mean that he was a bit of a whack job. The argument, that because some people with a Ph.D agree with your craziness does not make it sanity. If that was the case Scientology would be true.
Ham has fairly clearly painted himself into a corner by insisting on the young earth aspect of creationism. Let me be clear, I believe that there is a Creator God, who is the Author of all that is, I am not, in any sense a pure scientist. I believe the Bible is the source of our knowledge of the Creator God, and a vehicle of divine revelation. But it is not a science textbook.
Every time Ham trotted out his rather obnoxious cliche: "there's a book," I wanted to "tag in" to the argument, because while I defer to my bow-tie-brother on the science stuff, I think Ham needs some straightening out about the Bible, and that's sort of my thing. Ham even went so far as to say that he understood that the Bible contained different kinds of literature, including poetry, and that obviously we interpret poetry (by which I gather he meant the Psalms) a little differently, than we do prose. He said he did that. At which point I was gripping the arms of my chair to keep from yelling at the computer screen: "Genesis 1 IS A FREAKING POEM!" Seriously, it is. Obviously, it is. In Hebrew, it has rhyme and meter and even a few puns. Even in English, where it has been largely changed to prose, it still has certain elements of verse. It was also composed, even by the most conservative estimates, sometime after the time of Moses, which means, if you're going to do all the addition of lives and generations that Ham is so fond of in dating the world, that it was actually written at least a THOUSAND YEARS after Adam and Eve, and that's a low estimate.
Which leads me to another annoying cliche that Ham kept tossing out there: we can't really know what happened in the past because "we weren't there." So I guess Moses or whoever wrote Genesis one, by virtue of not being an eyewitness, really should have just kept their mouth shut. Or maybe not, because actually we know a lot of stuff that we didn't actually observe. I wasn't there to watch the Declaration of Independence being signed, but I'm reasonably sure it happened.
Ham is so sure that the Bible should trump scientific observation that he willfully ignores a whole lot, yet as a student of the Scripture, I was painfully aware that he doesn't even understand the book that he's making his ultimate authority as well as a first year seminary student. He conflated the New and Old Testament, switched hermeneutic principles midstream, he even at one fairly embarrassing juncture, said that Christianity was the only religion that "has a book" that explains how the world was made. At which point, I gripped the arm of my chair again, because the part that does that, ISN'T EVEN OUR PART OF THE BIBLE! It was the Torah, a long time before we started calling it the Old Testament. Not only that, but besides the Jews who wrote it, a whole bunch of Muslims think it's pretty keen too. Besides all that, almost every culture on the face of the earth has some version of a creation story. The Aborigines in Ham's native Australia have this amazing story about the Dreamtime, Babylonians had Marduk slaying the giant world creature Tiamat and making everything out of her entrails, Native American Tribes have literally hundreds of origin stories involving different deities, and the stories are fascinating and powerful, and not at all meant to be perceived as scientific truth.
Neither was Genesis 1, it wasn't thought of as scientific truth by the fairly primitive people who first told the story around the fires at the base of Mount Sinai, it was simply a statement of faith and trust in a God who has made us in His image. I'm fairly certain that Jesus himself, standing in the Jewish tradition that had held Genesis as a sacred account of the covenant between the Creator and creation for thousands of years, didn't read Genesis 1 the way Ham would like us to. How do I know this? Because they wrote down what they thought of stuff, some of which made it into other parts of Scripture, some of which came to be called Mishnah, but all of which was painstakingly argued and debated at length.
But the most telling moment of the whole debate for me, came when Ham was asked to respond to an audience question that went something like this: "What if it was proven that the earth was older than 10000 years old? Would you still believe in God?"
Ham dodged the question, utterly dodged it, refused to even deal with the hypothetical. In that moment, I knew he had lost, and I felt a little bit bad for him. Nye had been ever so careful not to attack him, or call his beliefs absurd, he had steadfastly steered the course of scientific observation instead of ad-hominem attack, he had even said, in response to a question about where human consciousness came from: "I don't know." Nye was not responsible for Ham's biggest failure: his own unwillingness to admit that his perspective might be wrong.
I felt bad for Ken Ham at that moment, even as I was angry with him for being so pig-headed. I realized that he was literally trapped by his own stubborn insistence on taking the expansive truth about God's creative action and cramming it into his twisted little scheme. Nye was free, free to say, "I don't know," free to enjoy the majesty and the mystery of the universe and actually free to encounter a loving Creator in those things. Ham was stuck in a benighted state of understanding, which for all his science-ish evidence and concurring Ph.D's is essentially less enlightened than the attitude of the bronze age nomads who originally said the words "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth..." except, you know, in Hebrew, which went something like this:
Berashath bara elohim ath shemayim yath ha-eretz.
Beautiful? Yes!
True? Yes!
Scientific? Not so much.
That did not really happen, and it's not Bill Nye's fault. In fact, @TheScienceGuy practically bent over backwards to be deferential to an obviously partisan audience at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. In my opinion, he was a little too nice to them. He allowed Ham to repeatedly get away with rhetorical monkey business and hide behind ridiculous cliches. I think he had decided ahead of time, just not to be the rabid, anti-god, anti-religion character that so many of the young earth creationists expected him to be, and for that I admire him even more now than I did yesterday.
Nye stuck to his guns, and kept hammering at a single premise: "Is Ken Ham's model of young earth creationism viable?" Meaning specifically can it make predictions about the world we live in, because after all that is the purpose of science in the first place. It's not just inventing useful things like the MRI, which Ham gleefully and repeatedly pointed out was invented by a young earth creationist. In fact, that was one place where Ham repeatedly tried to take refuge: the fact that a handful of actual scientists actually do subscribe to young earth creationism, as if that somehow validates the whole mess as a genuine statement of fact. Henry Ford was a rather outspoken anti-semite and before WWII broke out was known to admire Adolf Hitler, which doesn't mean he was somehow less of an innovator, but it does mean that he was a bit of a whack job. The argument, that because some people with a Ph.D agree with your craziness does not make it sanity. If that was the case Scientology would be true.
Ham has fairly clearly painted himself into a corner by insisting on the young earth aspect of creationism. Let me be clear, I believe that there is a Creator God, who is the Author of all that is, I am not, in any sense a pure scientist. I believe the Bible is the source of our knowledge of the Creator God, and a vehicle of divine revelation. But it is not a science textbook.
Every time Ham trotted out his rather obnoxious cliche: "there's a book," I wanted to "tag in" to the argument, because while I defer to my bow-tie-brother on the science stuff, I think Ham needs some straightening out about the Bible, and that's sort of my thing. Ham even went so far as to say that he understood that the Bible contained different kinds of literature, including poetry, and that obviously we interpret poetry (by which I gather he meant the Psalms) a little differently, than we do prose. He said he did that. At which point I was gripping the arms of my chair to keep from yelling at the computer screen: "Genesis 1 IS A FREAKING POEM!" Seriously, it is. Obviously, it is. In Hebrew, it has rhyme and meter and even a few puns. Even in English, where it has been largely changed to prose, it still has certain elements of verse. It was also composed, even by the most conservative estimates, sometime after the time of Moses, which means, if you're going to do all the addition of lives and generations that Ham is so fond of in dating the world, that it was actually written at least a THOUSAND YEARS after Adam and Eve, and that's a low estimate.
Which leads me to another annoying cliche that Ham kept tossing out there: we can't really know what happened in the past because "we weren't there." So I guess Moses or whoever wrote Genesis one, by virtue of not being an eyewitness, really should have just kept their mouth shut. Or maybe not, because actually we know a lot of stuff that we didn't actually observe. I wasn't there to watch the Declaration of Independence being signed, but I'm reasonably sure it happened.
Ham is so sure that the Bible should trump scientific observation that he willfully ignores a whole lot, yet as a student of the Scripture, I was painfully aware that he doesn't even understand the book that he's making his ultimate authority as well as a first year seminary student. He conflated the New and Old Testament, switched hermeneutic principles midstream, he even at one fairly embarrassing juncture, said that Christianity was the only religion that "has a book" that explains how the world was made. At which point, I gripped the arm of my chair again, because the part that does that, ISN'T EVEN OUR PART OF THE BIBLE! It was the Torah, a long time before we started calling it the Old Testament. Not only that, but besides the Jews who wrote it, a whole bunch of Muslims think it's pretty keen too. Besides all that, almost every culture on the face of the earth has some version of a creation story. The Aborigines in Ham's native Australia have this amazing story about the Dreamtime, Babylonians had Marduk slaying the giant world creature Tiamat and making everything out of her entrails, Native American Tribes have literally hundreds of origin stories involving different deities, and the stories are fascinating and powerful, and not at all meant to be perceived as scientific truth.
Neither was Genesis 1, it wasn't thought of as scientific truth by the fairly primitive people who first told the story around the fires at the base of Mount Sinai, it was simply a statement of faith and trust in a God who has made us in His image. I'm fairly certain that Jesus himself, standing in the Jewish tradition that had held Genesis as a sacred account of the covenant between the Creator and creation for thousands of years, didn't read Genesis 1 the way Ham would like us to. How do I know this? Because they wrote down what they thought of stuff, some of which made it into other parts of Scripture, some of which came to be called Mishnah, but all of which was painstakingly argued and debated at length.
But the most telling moment of the whole debate for me, came when Ham was asked to respond to an audience question that went something like this: "What if it was proven that the earth was older than 10000 years old? Would you still believe in God?"
Ham dodged the question, utterly dodged it, refused to even deal with the hypothetical. In that moment, I knew he had lost, and I felt a little bit bad for him. Nye had been ever so careful not to attack him, or call his beliefs absurd, he had steadfastly steered the course of scientific observation instead of ad-hominem attack, he had even said, in response to a question about where human consciousness came from: "I don't know." Nye was not responsible for Ham's biggest failure: his own unwillingness to admit that his perspective might be wrong.
I felt bad for Ken Ham at that moment, even as I was angry with him for being so pig-headed. I realized that he was literally trapped by his own stubborn insistence on taking the expansive truth about God's creative action and cramming it into his twisted little scheme. Nye was free, free to say, "I don't know," free to enjoy the majesty and the mystery of the universe and actually free to encounter a loving Creator in those things. Ham was stuck in a benighted state of understanding, which for all his science-ish evidence and concurring Ph.D's is essentially less enlightened than the attitude of the bronze age nomads who originally said the words "In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth..." except, you know, in Hebrew, which went something like this:
Berashath bara elohim ath shemayim yath ha-eretz.
Beautiful? Yes!
True? Yes!
Scientific? Not so much.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Creation in the Balance
Tonight something really interesting is going to happen. Bill Nye, the Science Guy, fellow bowtie afficianado, is going to debate Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum about the origins of life on this planet.
You know that feeling that you used to get in grade school whenever there was a fight a brewin' between two kids in your class. It's a mixture of excitement and fear. I have that now.
Honestly, I'm rooting for the science guy, because I believe that the truth about God's creative power is much bigger than Creation Science wants to allow it to be. I want science to go on being science so that we, created in the image of God, can always grow in our awareness of the wonder of creation.
Most of all though, I want it to be a fully realized dialogue and debate, I want the two men to be honorable in their rhetoric and consistent in their arguments, but I'm afraid it will degenerate into a simple spouting of dogma. That's what gives me the fear.
When I say the phrase "spouting of dogma," I know you think I'm just talking about the religious guy, especially since I just basically endorsed Bill Nye as my personal rooting interest. But I'm not, I am aware that so-called "scientific" positions are rather often as dogmatic as their religious foils. Especially when it comes to evolution and other things where the body of knowledge that we have accumulated runs into the mystery of what we do not yet know. When that border is encountered we often have to step out in faith in order to cross it.
There's a poignant scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, there's this moment in a field in the Shire where Sam Gamgee pauses for a moment and reflects that with the next step he takes he will cross a line, a line that exists only in his heart. With his next step, he will be farther from home than he has ever been. Sam marks the moment with a bit of a pause for a moment of trepidation. It's an appropriate thing really, to have a bit of reluctance about blind progress. Science rarely takes those moments, which is why we need religion and ethics, because they do take those moments. It's important though that Sam takes the step, progress continues.
I believe that science and religion need each other to keep our society in balance. There must be something that pulls us forward and there must be something that gives us roots. Visions of society where one element is lacking are ultimately dystopian.
My hope is that Nye can be respectful of that balance, even as his zeal for science powers a rational presentation of facts. I also hope that Ham doesn't come across as too backwards and anti-intellectual, because he is representing the Body of Christ. I'm conscious, as a Presbyterian, that I stand in a particular part of the Body, part that values education, and scientific inquiry as well as the mystery of God. I am also conscious that many other parts of the body do not have the same perspective as I do, and as part of a connected whole, I should not despise them.
I don't so much want Ham to lose, as I want him to learn, to grow, to open his mind and his heart to a new thing. I also would like him to engage Nye in a way that will show "The Science Guy" that God is not his adversary. The worst thing that could happen for all of us is that the two of them would simple construct dogmatic fortresses and hurl insults over the wall.
I'm hoping it will be different, I'm hoping the debate itself may show some signs that the human species is not done evolving.
Here's to hope.
You know that feeling that you used to get in grade school whenever there was a fight a brewin' between two kids in your class. It's a mixture of excitement and fear. I have that now.
Honestly, I'm rooting for the science guy, because I believe that the truth about God's creative power is much bigger than Creation Science wants to allow it to be. I want science to go on being science so that we, created in the image of God, can always grow in our awareness of the wonder of creation.
Most of all though, I want it to be a fully realized dialogue and debate, I want the two men to be honorable in their rhetoric and consistent in their arguments, but I'm afraid it will degenerate into a simple spouting of dogma. That's what gives me the fear.
When I say the phrase "spouting of dogma," I know you think I'm just talking about the religious guy, especially since I just basically endorsed Bill Nye as my personal rooting interest. But I'm not, I am aware that so-called "scientific" positions are rather often as dogmatic as their religious foils. Especially when it comes to evolution and other things where the body of knowledge that we have accumulated runs into the mystery of what we do not yet know. When that border is encountered we often have to step out in faith in order to cross it.
There's a poignant scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, there's this moment in a field in the Shire where Sam Gamgee pauses for a moment and reflects that with the next step he takes he will cross a line, a line that exists only in his heart. With his next step, he will be farther from home than he has ever been. Sam marks the moment with a bit of a pause for a moment of trepidation. It's an appropriate thing really, to have a bit of reluctance about blind progress. Science rarely takes those moments, which is why we need religion and ethics, because they do take those moments. It's important though that Sam takes the step, progress continues.
I believe that science and religion need each other to keep our society in balance. There must be something that pulls us forward and there must be something that gives us roots. Visions of society where one element is lacking are ultimately dystopian.
My hope is that Nye can be respectful of that balance, even as his zeal for science powers a rational presentation of facts. I also hope that Ham doesn't come across as too backwards and anti-intellectual, because he is representing the Body of Christ. I'm conscious, as a Presbyterian, that I stand in a particular part of the Body, part that values education, and scientific inquiry as well as the mystery of God. I am also conscious that many other parts of the body do not have the same perspective as I do, and as part of a connected whole, I should not despise them.
I don't so much want Ham to lose, as I want him to learn, to grow, to open his mind and his heart to a new thing. I also would like him to engage Nye in a way that will show "The Science Guy" that God is not his adversary. The worst thing that could happen for all of us is that the two of them would simple construct dogmatic fortresses and hurl insults over the wall.
I'm hoping it will be different, I'm hoping the debate itself may show some signs that the human species is not done evolving.
Here's to hope.
Monday, February 3, 2014
And Furthermore...
Michele said my last post just kind of stopped mid rant. It never did really "drive home" I suppose, because I got to that part about certainty, because it was Sunday afternoon, my brain was just about toasted, and that seemed like a decent enough insight for one afternoon. But I also trailed off because I was about to get to something really rather painful that relates to that insight. Namely that it is an insight, not something I was born knowing; I have learned that in order to save your life you must lose it. In order to be humble before God you need to stop telling him all of the things you think you know.
At one point, I thought I knew a lot about God, I was flush with knowledge and theological insight, and I thought that being right with God was just being right about God. I had entirely compartmentalized my experience of God as the sort of character that comes and finds a strung out college student who had been determinedly anesthetizing themselves for months, from the God that I had learned about in Seminary. I was full of thoughts about covenant, and grace, and revelation, and doctrine, and the historical origins and development of doctrines, and I was trying to apply all those things to the rather peculiar vocation of being a pastor in a small town, and really, if I'm honest, I thought I had it all figured out.
Then my brother died.
And a whole bunch of stuff I thought I knew about God got picked up and put in the blender.
I had spent a lot of time and energy, thinking about and working through this cultural/countercultural dance that Christianity is waltzing through right now. I had ideas about "biblical" standards, and would engage, a bit too enthusiastically, in debates about homosexuality, or the nature and person of Jesus, or biblical interpretation, and have absolutely no reservations that I might actually be wrong, or not have thought things through, because I had thought them through, or I thought I had thought them through.
The dark night of the soul that was described by John of the Cross was a theory until that moment, then it became undeniably real. At least in one way: whenever I tried to access the nature of this pain through the lens of intellect, I got nothing, God was entirely absent. The Deity that had seemed so compelling during my theological education refused to make an appearance. But I can't say that God was absent, it's just that the God who kept showing up was the rather less impressive God who had sat on the edge of my dorm room bunk with me years ago, before seminary, before being a reverend, before I knew so damn much about everything. Some of you might know this God, the One who shows up and listens to all your questions and your anger and sits there while you rant and rave without really saying or doing a whole lot.
The dialogue goes something like this:
"Why don't you do something about this?" you ask, perhaps shouting.
"I am doing something," God replies.
"What are you doing?"
"Sitting here with you."
"Is that it?"
"What else do you want?"
It's rather infuriating... and also the only thing that helps even a little bit. There are no deep secrets of the universe bandied about. Doctrine and dogma have absolutely no meaning, the only thing that matters is presence.
I guess I'm kind of thick headed, because I always forget this about God, until something really bad goes down. I got another reminder when I had to deal with a man killing his wife and little girls. I had counseled the couple, I had emptied my therapeutic and spiritual toolbox into them, and yes I had prayed, we had prayed together, we were not just doing psychotherapy in a church. I thought I had done the best I could, but the problem was bigger than me. I had to come to the conclusion, as I had when Jon died, that sometimes evil wins.
I really expected to stand in front of the casket of those two little girls and utterly lose my faith... it was terrifying because I would then have to climb into a pulpit and be the reverend again. I shouldn't have worried. I should have known He would be there.
Not the god of good communication practices and therapeutic counseling.
Not the god of why bad things happen to good people.
Not the god of answers and certainty.
It was the God who will sit at the edge of the void with you and say absolutely nothing.
That is the God who is worth knowing.
That is the God who has saved me from dissolution and destruction.
That is the God who has saved me from being a self-righteous prick.
That is the God who has saved me from thinking I can do it on my own.
That is the God who has saved me from emptiness and futility.
That is the only God I ever want to talk about.
At one point, I thought I knew a lot about God, I was flush with knowledge and theological insight, and I thought that being right with God was just being right about God. I had entirely compartmentalized my experience of God as the sort of character that comes and finds a strung out college student who had been determinedly anesthetizing themselves for months, from the God that I had learned about in Seminary. I was full of thoughts about covenant, and grace, and revelation, and doctrine, and the historical origins and development of doctrines, and I was trying to apply all those things to the rather peculiar vocation of being a pastor in a small town, and really, if I'm honest, I thought I had it all figured out.
Then my brother died.
And a whole bunch of stuff I thought I knew about God got picked up and put in the blender.
I had spent a lot of time and energy, thinking about and working through this cultural/countercultural dance that Christianity is waltzing through right now. I had ideas about "biblical" standards, and would engage, a bit too enthusiastically, in debates about homosexuality, or the nature and person of Jesus, or biblical interpretation, and have absolutely no reservations that I might actually be wrong, or not have thought things through, because I had thought them through, or I thought I had thought them through.
The dark night of the soul that was described by John of the Cross was a theory until that moment, then it became undeniably real. At least in one way: whenever I tried to access the nature of this pain through the lens of intellect, I got nothing, God was entirely absent. The Deity that had seemed so compelling during my theological education refused to make an appearance. But I can't say that God was absent, it's just that the God who kept showing up was the rather less impressive God who had sat on the edge of my dorm room bunk with me years ago, before seminary, before being a reverend, before I knew so damn much about everything. Some of you might know this God, the One who shows up and listens to all your questions and your anger and sits there while you rant and rave without really saying or doing a whole lot.
The dialogue goes something like this:
"Why don't you do something about this?" you ask, perhaps shouting.
"I am doing something," God replies.
"What are you doing?"
"Sitting here with you."
"Is that it?"
"What else do you want?"
It's rather infuriating... and also the only thing that helps even a little bit. There are no deep secrets of the universe bandied about. Doctrine and dogma have absolutely no meaning, the only thing that matters is presence.
I guess I'm kind of thick headed, because I always forget this about God, until something really bad goes down. I got another reminder when I had to deal with a man killing his wife and little girls. I had counseled the couple, I had emptied my therapeutic and spiritual toolbox into them, and yes I had prayed, we had prayed together, we were not just doing psychotherapy in a church. I thought I had done the best I could, but the problem was bigger than me. I had to come to the conclusion, as I had when Jon died, that sometimes evil wins.
I really expected to stand in front of the casket of those two little girls and utterly lose my faith... it was terrifying because I would then have to climb into a pulpit and be the reverend again. I shouldn't have worried. I should have known He would be there.
Not the god of good communication practices and therapeutic counseling.
Not the god of why bad things happen to good people.
Not the god of answers and certainty.
It was the God who will sit at the edge of the void with you and say absolutely nothing.
That is the God who is worth knowing.
That is the God who has saved me from dissolution and destruction.
That is the God who has saved me from being a self-righteous prick.
That is the God who has saved me from thinking I can do it on my own.
That is the God who has saved me from emptiness and futility.
That is the only God I ever want to talk about.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Getting to the bottom, or the beginning, or the whatever
Having kids exposes you to all sorts of things, germs for one, but also the sort of virulent question that sets aside everything you think you know and forces you to actually think. I was actually thinking about the lines of questioning that kids can get you on when they start thinking about really big ideas. Questions like, "what was before the earth?" I can kind of answer that, because I've watched those shows on the discovery channel that talk about how planets are formed, or at least the theory attached to the process. But since I'm a pastor, I have exposed my children to all sorts of God stuff, and I am also a sort of authority on God stuff, meaning that I've done enough theological explorations that I have essentially stopped asking the really good questions, and contented myself with knowing what people like Karl Barth or John Calvin or Thomas Aquinas thought about things.
Kids mess with that.
"What was before God?" And you need to know that you can't start giving lectures about the Nicene Creed and the pre-existence of the Trinity. It's not going to answer their question. It doesn't really answer that question, it simply states something that we have come to accept as fact, but what if we don't just accept it?
In reading things written by Atheists, I have come to the conclusion that no one has really debunked the notion of God. Some have, rather compellingly, skewered religion. They have held up our anthropomorphic idea of God to a certain amount of ridicule, but then again, perhaps the vision that most of us have of God as some sort of cosmic grandfather, who hands out treats if you're good and whuppins if you're bad, is rather laughable.
God runs away from us when we investigate with our scientific tool kits. When we discover that the world is much older than Genesis would indicate, God can still say, "of course it is, that's just a story." When we plumb the mysteries of the creation of the universe and think we understand something like the big bang, God can still say, as Wendell Berry has so nicely put it: "What banged, and before it banged where was it?"
That is an inescapable barrier to our knowledge, because even without the ever expanding (and perhaps someday contracting) collection of matter and energy that we know as the universe, there had to be something. If time had a beginning (and maybe an end), there is still something that we still, rather imprecisely, call infinity, or even less precisely, eternity.
This is stuff you really can't think about too long without your brain telling you to knock it off. It's not something that can be investigated scientifically, because the only thing we have that qualifies as evidence exists in time and is made up of matter and energy, they are observable, measurable and they make up what we call our experience of the universe. To claim, as many religions do, there is something outside of that experience is heresy to scientific dogmatism in the same way that saying there is no God is to those who believe.
When we retreat into dogma, our questions go bye-bye, which is bad for religion, but it is fatal for science. Every time I hear Richard Dawkins or even Stephen Hawking, triumphantly proclaim that they have proven God does not exist, it makes me sad. Not because I want them to believe the way I believe, but because, in claiming such a thing they have failed as scientists. They have stopped asking questions, and asking questions is what they are always supposed to do.
We religious types need to ask more questions as well. Certainty is death to a living relationship with our Creator. There are questions that need to be asked, whether you believe in God or not. There is a reality to be dealt with, no matter what approach you choose to use. I like a universe with God in it, better than I like the alternative, therefore I find belief preferable to non-belief. I feel no tension between believing that we can learn things about reality from Genesis and from Darwin. Unless you are insisting t hat you absolutely know the answer, asking new question never hurt anyone.
Kids mess with that.
"What was before God?" And you need to know that you can't start giving lectures about the Nicene Creed and the pre-existence of the Trinity. It's not going to answer their question. It doesn't really answer that question, it simply states something that we have come to accept as fact, but what if we don't just accept it?
In reading things written by Atheists, I have come to the conclusion that no one has really debunked the notion of God. Some have, rather compellingly, skewered religion. They have held up our anthropomorphic idea of God to a certain amount of ridicule, but then again, perhaps the vision that most of us have of God as some sort of cosmic grandfather, who hands out treats if you're good and whuppins if you're bad, is rather laughable.
God runs away from us when we investigate with our scientific tool kits. When we discover that the world is much older than Genesis would indicate, God can still say, "of course it is, that's just a story." When we plumb the mysteries of the creation of the universe and think we understand something like the big bang, God can still say, as Wendell Berry has so nicely put it: "What banged, and before it banged where was it?"
That is an inescapable barrier to our knowledge, because even without the ever expanding (and perhaps someday contracting) collection of matter and energy that we know as the universe, there had to be something. If time had a beginning (and maybe an end), there is still something that we still, rather imprecisely, call infinity, or even less precisely, eternity.
This is stuff you really can't think about too long without your brain telling you to knock it off. It's not something that can be investigated scientifically, because the only thing we have that qualifies as evidence exists in time and is made up of matter and energy, they are observable, measurable and they make up what we call our experience of the universe. To claim, as many religions do, there is something outside of that experience is heresy to scientific dogmatism in the same way that saying there is no God is to those who believe.
When we retreat into dogma, our questions go bye-bye, which is bad for religion, but it is fatal for science. Every time I hear Richard Dawkins or even Stephen Hawking, triumphantly proclaim that they have proven God does not exist, it makes me sad. Not because I want them to believe the way I believe, but because, in claiming such a thing they have failed as scientists. They have stopped asking questions, and asking questions is what they are always supposed to do.
We religious types need to ask more questions as well. Certainty is death to a living relationship with our Creator. There are questions that need to be asked, whether you believe in God or not. There is a reality to be dealt with, no matter what approach you choose to use. I like a universe with God in it, better than I like the alternative, therefore I find belief preferable to non-belief. I feel no tension between believing that we can learn things about reality from Genesis and from Darwin. Unless you are insisting t hat you absolutely know the answer, asking new question never hurt anyone.
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