(Ir)religiosity

Today was supposed to be for another Diana Butler Bass post.

But then the gays had to go and cause a tornado in Minnesota.

Like a lot of people yesterday I read John Piper’s outrageous post claiming that God caused a tornado in Minneapolis to send a message to the ELCA:  God doesn’t like gays and doesn’t want them in His (yes, His) church.  And like a lot of people I was angered.

I left this comment on Piper’s post:

It is deeply disappointing to see such a prominent Christian leader yet again contributing to the narrative of fear. You’re peddling a poisonous and toxic theology Mr. Piper. And you join the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in doing so. Yours is a Christianity that betrays the heart of the gospel. I highly doubt you will, but I pray that you retract your words.

I was in a hurry so here’s a few more thoughts.  (My hope is that more people (people who, unlike me, have voice and influence) will call Piper out on this because the last thing we need is another excuse for people to write off Christians has gay-bashing, fanatical, wing nuts.)

The theology is ridiculous. I’m hesitant to even call this theology because Piper’s cutting and pasting of scripture tells me that he is more interested in justifying his own ideology with religious authority than he is in serious reflection.¹  It is very destructive and obviously raises some disturbing issues when it comes to theodicy and the nature of God.  The burden of proof is on Piper to explain every other natural disaster.  Who is being punished in all the other tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes?  And what kind of God dishes out punishment of that magnitude?  What of grace?  If God is in the business of unleashing holy hell on those God pleases then why does God only seems to care about who is having consensual sex with whom and who is marrying whom?   Aren’t there other issues that might seem at least a bit more pressing, like say, war or starvation or economic exploitation or disease?  If this is God’s way of dealing with things the why hasn’t the United States been wiped off the map for failing to care for its own as the wealthiest nation in the world or for starting bogus wars abroad in order to secure its “interests?”  What kind of hierarchy of sins is this that sex is at the top and other problems that directly affect persons livelihood don’t even seem to register?  Why doesn’t God give a damn about those?

When you push the thought to its inevitable conclusion, Piper’s God begins to look more in more like the mean kid killing insects with a magnifying glass.  God is a sadist who enjoys inflicting cosmic pain on others.  If that is true then I have no interest in God.  And if religion consists of me running scared for the rest of my life hoping that God isn’t out to get me then I’m out on that too.

Christianity is not a religion of fear.  From beginning to end, it’s narrative is one full of hope for the redemption and restoration of all things.  Piper, in his post, is more interested in a narrative of fear that dehumanizes the other, casting God as a cosmic antagonist, the ultimate mob boss who will kill you on a whim if you look at him the wrong way.  This is not the gospel, indeed it betrays the very heart of the gospel by opting for fear and hate instead of hope and love.  “Perfect love casts out fear.” Jesus modeled that perfect love and brought the narrative of hope to its apex.  He had a ton of opportunities to go postal on someone who didn’t get it or deserved to be punished, but he didn’t.  In fact, in the third act of the story Jesus shows us just how absurd the whole system of punishment and fear really is.  Is that not the clearest and most unambiguous embodiment of the very nature of God?

God does not create tornadoes to “send messages.”

God sent the best message God could 2000 years ago and the message is this: love, not hate wins; hope, not fear, has the final say.

You, John Piper, are on the wrong side of history.  Homosexuals pose no threat to the church nor does God hate, despise, or want to punish them.  We should be welcoming them with open arms to join us in participating in the restoration and renewal of all things.  Justice demands it.

1. To be sure, we’re all guilty of this to some extent, but there are good interpretations and bad interpretations. [↩]

Tony Jones hits the nail on the head in this video.

If you follow his blog then you’re aware that Tony has been blogging about homosexuality lately and called for an open and honest discussion without reference to the six clobber verses that are all too often taken out of context.

The problem, of course, isn’t that Tony wants to abandon scripture and rigorous exegesis as he and others are accused of suggesting. The problem is that too many of us are limiting our hermeneutic to a handful of verses, the immediate context of which is either replete with other off the wall stipulations that we have long since abandoned, as in the Hebrew bible, or uses vocabulary which is ambiguous at best and more than likely refers to sexual behavior that is hardly analogous to those in long-term monogamous homosexual relationships in today’s context, as in the case of Paul’s letters. The problem is that we are guilty of a dangerous selective literalism that not only creates a highly myopic and repressive ‘canon-within-the-canon,’ (we are all guilty of our varying emphases) but that it blatantly ignores, as Tony points out, the overall trajectory of scripture — a trajectory of liberation, redemption, and restoration in which God’s interaction within humankind and all of creation is steeped with grace tempered with justice.

There is a meaningful, constructive debate to be had here. But until we find a way to mend this gap it seems that communication is at a standstill. We’ll just keep going around in circles rehashing the same old points and probably yelling louder and getting more emotional in the process. Most of the comments on Tony’s blog are a case point.

So, as far as I can tell (and I’ve read most of the comments) Tony’s question is still an open and unanswered one:

If you are one who thinks that homosexual sex is sinful, can you please explain to me WHY a gay or lesbian person who is in a long-term, monogamous relationship would not be able to wholeheartedly follow Christ?

My only stipulation is this: You may not quote one of the six verses in scripture that mentions homosexuality. Instead, you must use theological and/or philosophical arguments to attempt to convince me that when you have genital contact with someone of your own gender, it somehow inhibits your relationship with Christ.

We like to dichotomize things.  It makes our lives much easier when things can be easily compartmentalized and divided.  But the problem with that tendency is that it creates unneeded — and often blatantly false — polarities and bifurcations.  These type of constructions are endemic in the modern church and some of the more common and noticeable ones are the divisions between conservative and liberal, evangelical and progressive, traditional and contemporary, and so on.  Even within the latest renewal movement which aims to rethink and re-imagine “church” and Christianity we see a division between emerg-ing and emerg-ent.  This penchant to create fissures and fractures seems to be a natural one.

Nevertheless, I think something is missed in doing so because no group or category has a monopoly on Truth (capital “T”) but each one has a certain part, a certain important piece, of the truth (little “t”), a piece that is lost when its counterparts jettison it altogether.  So I like the tension and the dialectic.  To me, that’s the real sweet spot.  It can be painful and messy, yes, but I think that makes it all the more beautiful.

Of all these petty and unnecessary binaries the division between orthodoxy and orthopraxy is one of the most important, or at least one with greater implications.  It’s also one of the most divisive that will almost always incite inflammatory or emotional reaction from someone.  Really, when you think about it, where stand here has implications for just about everything.  It’s serious business.  And the usual arguments are so…tiresome.  Conservatives insist that orthodoxy trumps everything and that it must be vigorously defended against heresy.  Likewise, liberals, quoting Matthew 25 no doubt, rebut that praxis must be emphasized over (and sometimes against) belief.  But both poles have blind spots, blind spots that their counterparts love to point out.   And so goes the endless deadlock and debating round and round the circle.

I think both of these points are hopelessly unimaginative and helplessly beholden to a modern mindset that is very quickly becoming outmoded.

I want to suggest that it is not either/or and that placing doxis (belief) and praxis (action) against one another misses the larger movement.  I think it is and/both.  And rigid hegemony of either is dangerous if not destructive.  Belief is deeply important to me but only insofar as it transforms the very fabric of my being, rupturing my comfortable and conventional way of relating to the other, with something wholly Other, something I otherwise thought to be impossible, even absurd, but now made very possible via my response to God’s grace and Jesus’ to call to radical love.  Similarly, those tangible actions and that palpable praxis, because it is so radical and beyond predictable possibility, simply cannot be brought to full fruition without a grounding narrative or belief, a reliance on something beyond my own finite human capacities.

So both belief and action are inherently interdependent and mutually interactive.  And both are understood differently.  Belief is not simply something to which I submit my mental or cognitive assent, neither is action, like some sort of fetish, something I do in order to avoid guilt or shame.  Both of those usual conceptions avoid real transformation.  As much as we might argue otherwise, they just don’t alter our being, our person-hood, and our relations with God, self, and the other.    And for me that is the ultimate point.  That is what we are striving for:  individual and collective transformation so that we are realigned according to God’s purposes, restored of the Imago dei so we can responsibly participate in God’s alternate reality (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) and graciously increase the love of God and neighbor in our various contexts.

Belief and action, doxis and praxis.  Both are very important and both are contingent upon the other, but neither can be allowed to crust over into tired dogmatism because when they do we run the dangerous risk of slipping into idolatry. And when we do that, well, we’ve really missed the point.

Peter Rollins has an excellent post on why/how he denies the resurrection that has been bouncing around the blogosphere over the last week or so.  If you haven’t read it you should, he has some good food for thought.  Ultimately, insisting on rigid assent to the factuality and historicity of the resurrection misses the point.  Indeed, one could assent to such propositions and still unashamedly deny the very existence and power of the  resurrection. The point is not so much what may or may not have happened in the past, but what is happening now in the continued present and on into the im/possible future.

This strikes to the very root of belief.  Todd Littleton offers a great comment:

We cannot say what we believe. We only do what we believe.

Jonathan Brink has two excellent posts that address this very thing.  Our true, and often hidden belief, it seems to me at least, lies not in our creedal propositions or our elaborate systematic theologies (though those are not without some merit) but in our naked encounters with the other and our willingness to allow oursleves to be transformed by such a meeting.  It is in that moment and through that event that our true belief, birthed through vulnerability and empathy and with complete disregard for dignified formulation, is laid bare for all to see.

We simply cannot rightly speak of what we truly believe.  It evades the very extremities of our language and discourse.  For true, transformative belief — and in theology I cannot think of any legitimate belief except that which truly transforms — can only be made known within the realm of relationship and the sphere of praxis.

Social media is changing things.  You could even say social media is changing everything and it would probably be true.  I’m about halfway through Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat right now.  Though it was originally published only three years ago, it’s already becoming a little dated as far as the half-life of web 2.0 related things these days goes — which demonstrates perfectly exactly how things are changing.

Friedman’s overall thesis is that the world is becoming increasingly “flat” as we continue to explore what appears to be the endless limits of the information age.  Anyone who has access to a computer can search for and locate just about anything they want which undermines our traditional, hierarchical systems of transmitting information.  Things are becoming more and more open and less restricted.

I ran across this site yesterday (via Andrew Sullivan)  that illustrates this point perfectly.  It is basically a simple mash-up of Google Maps and the all the Prop 8 donors.  So you can actually see where in California, or the United States, individuals or groups that contributed to the pro-Prop 8 effort.  But that’s not all.  You can actually see their names and the exact amount they gave.

This presents all sorts of new possibilities (or problems depending on how you see it).  Now, to be fair, all this information can be accessed elsewhere and has been made public by the state of California; donors were presumably aware of this when then gave.  EightMaps simply makes it all more visual and accessible.

This is fascinating.  We normally think of “donating” to something as primarily a private action.  That isn’t really true, but that’s how we think about it.

This portrayal undermines that assumption.  It makes things very public.  I’m sure many people don’t like that.  But I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.

I wonder how, if at all,  our private actions might change if we assumed that everything was public. That’s not a false assumption by the way.  Our so-called private decision to “donate” to a certain cause may have very public consequences for someone else.

Just ask the gay population in California.

What would happen if we were actually walking advertisements for the causes/ballot measures/you-fill-in-the-blank that we fervently supported in private?

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