Ideas v. People

The energy of faith, hope, and love is the unheroic Passion of Christ crucified, the energy of his death and resurrection binding us to him. Passion is not willpower. Passion is the surrender of meaning and power, the emptying that is incorporation into Christ. Passion is the soul’s life.

Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning

I don’t believe there is a Hell in the afterlife, and this is probably why I am not evangelically-minded. If I did believe in something like that, I would be obligated to spend every waking moment saving (or trying to save) anyone I could from that fate. In light of infinite, endless suffering, nothing else could be worth doing.

I understand the impulse, however, to share profound experiences, and the impulse to defend and explore what we hold dear. The Christian experience compels us to invite (as fishermen, if you can excuse that imperfect metaphor) others to share in it.

When asked which commandment is greatest (see Mathew 22:36-40), Jesus answers “Love the Lord your God with all your heart. Love him with all your soul, and love him with all your mind."

I believe this means to strive toward a connection to Ultimacy, to accept our relative smallness, and to cease rebellion against the laws of the physical universe (our rebellion against our own mortality, for example, as seen in the Transhumanist movement.)

Jesus adds a second commandment, one that is like the first: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Everything in the books of Law, everything from the prophets is about these two things.

Perhaps, then, all or most Christians can agree on these priorities:

1) God

2) Humanity

We may understand the finer points (like, what “God” refers to) differently, but let's use this as a starting point. The two commands are alike. There is no clear distinction between loving others and loving God. What we do to anyone we do to Christ. Christ. God. Meaning. This is why our selfishness and our callousness to the needs of others does not expose the truth that we are very-naughty-indeed, it exposes the truth that we are mired in an existential failure.

Notice that there is nothing on the list between God and people. Doctrine and dogma are not included. In fact, Jesus appears to be saying that doctrine and dogma exist only to promote these two priorities. (If we intend to include our doctrine in the category of “God” we are making a grave mistake.) The conclusion is that people are more valuable than ideas.

Christian churches talk about fundamentals, the things on which they will not budge. At the same time, they evangelize, inviting people to share in the experience while, at the same time, alienating those people with “fundamental” ideas about the role of women, homosexuality, marriage, economics, violence, and a host of other contentious issues. It seems wrong to bend one’s principles to appease potential “buyers” but a question lurks: Is this idea worth more than the people you will lose?

This is why I have so little patience for talk about politics in the US. People appear more concerned with the triumph of their ideology than they are with the needs of others. I can rant about this at length, but why bother?

Any person is more precious than any idea. Christ calls us away from the idols of ideology, away from our loyalty to Truth-claims, and into a wilderness of love.

Good Friday

Teaching Racial Optimism

When I was working on my teaching degree, I observed a classroom in an Ypsilanti high school once a week. The majority of the students were black, and the teacher was white. The class had been reading Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy and they were asked to write an impromptu essay based on the following prompt: “Write about a time when racism impacted your life.” The students grumbled, but pondered the prompt and began to busy themselves writing. One student raised his hand and politely asked the teacher “What if racism has never affected our life?” The teacher quickly responded “Well, how about a time when someone you know was affected by racism?” This student was drawing a blank. Other students began to ask questions like “Why do we always have to talk about racism?”

It’s hard not to be skeptical of the notion that this student has never been affected by racism, but it’s easy to understand why the topic didn’t arrest the class’ interest: They’re tired of talking about it.

Our classroom discourse on race has become exclusively a discourse on racism, and this negativity encourages social reproduction. Our students are being taught that racism is an inescapable reality of life, and that racial diversity necessarily causes racial tension. (When do we talk about tolerance? When someone has been intolerant.) Because our curriculum automatically links race and racism, positive aspects of racial diversity are rarely discussed, except as a contrast to the norm of (usually white-against-black) racism. I am not proposing that racism be ignored in the classroom. Rather, I am suggesting that a new approach to race be developed for our classrooms, one which doesn’t focus solely on the negative and which celebrates racial diversity through more than tokenism. Our teachers must avoid two traps; ignoring race altogether and discussing it only in a negative context.

According to Lee Anne Bell's "Sincere Fictions: The Pedagogical Challenges of Preparing White Teachers for Multicultural Classrooms", pretending to be unable to see race causes white teachers to shirk their responsibility to challenge racial stratification and teach racial issues. It is a way to proclaim one’s innocence. This “colorblindness” does students a great disservice. Students recognize their racial differences even if we refuse to. They aren’t given any positive platforms to discuss them, however, and that’s where a new, positive, discourse must begin.

Bell is right to discourage “colorblindness,” but attacks the problem from a standpoint that is too negative. She suggests that white teachers must learn to “understand themselves as racial beings” by acknowledging the privileges available to them and recognizing their assumptions. As a racial being, however, a person is more than just a figure trapped in a struggle between warring groups. Possessing racial identity is also about being connected to your heritage and understanding what your unique background has taught you. White teachers need to become racial beings in a way that doesn’t make them shameful, or else students, who will perceive that shame, will interpret it as an admission of guilt, one that confirms a suspicious and defensive worldview.

Shortly after the writing prompt on racism, the teacher in this class asked me to stand in the back of the room during a test to discourage cheating. My presence made one student defensive. “I can’t take the test with you standing there, that’s intimidating,” she said. Other students chimed in; agreeing. One boy stood up and said “I see what’s going on”. He pointed to the six or seven students closest to me. “Black kid, black kid, black kid. This is racism.” I told him that such an accusation was ridiculous, that I wasn’t a racist and the assumption that I was actually exposed prejudice on his part. He brushed it off and told me he had just been joking. The girl sitting next to him, however, looked me square in the eye and asked me, sincerely, “Are you a racist?” I assured her I wasn’t; I just wanted to diminish the temptation to cheat.

This incident gave me a lot to think about. Did this student really believe he was the target or racial profiling? Has he learned that playing the race card is a way to manipulate authority figures even when there has been no demonstration of racial prejudice? Perhaps many of his teachers, feeling insecure in their own tolerance, are so worried about being perceived as racists that they will cave in at the very suggestion that what they are doing could be seen as a racist act. In this way, attempts to acknowledge and discuss racial tensions and issues in the classroom, however well-intentioned, have backfired. Because the only meaning assigned to racial difference is that of a potential source of animosity, many students feel racially estranged from their teacher. They are acutely aware of a racial division, real or imagined, between their teacher and themselves. White students feel alienated and accused. Black students feel either patronized or subjugated. Teachers are often too uncomfortable with racial issues to discuss anything frankly, and revert to “colorblindness” as a defense mechanism.

Bell talks about racial consciousness and being aware of one’s “racial location in the social order.” Too often, however, a focus on our racial location can create a feeling of inevitability and a self-fulfilling prophecy. And while our racial location can’t be ignored, it is far more productive to emphasize the ideal of racial equality than the problem of racial stratification.

If equality seems too distant an ideal, there is always diversity. The positive components of diversity should be emphasized so students can see the advantages of living in a multi-ethnic society. I can’t emphasize enough that the tensions that have resulted from our racial climate can not be ignored, but they must be tempered with hope. High school students are in the process of developing their worldview, and this worldview will color their actions. Many of the subtler forms of institutionalized racism are perhaps better taught at a college level. At the high school level, students should develop an outlook that will equip them to use information in a positive manner. If taught to expect a racial climate bordering on warfare, students will become paranoid and defensive, and, like the student who accused me of profiling, more susceptible to stereotype-vulnerability.

Our students are very fortunate to live in a country where countless ethnicities coexist peacefully. While far from utopian, America's racial climate is the product of years of hard work. America has shown a tremendous willingness to recognize its own injustices and then change accordingly. The contrast between the rights and circumstances of African-Americans fifty years ago and the rights and circumstances of African-Americans today aptly demonstrates this. Too often, however, our history classes are tainted with a bleak worldview that emphasizes the injustices of the past and not the progress that was made in response.

I read something by James A. Banks (and I'm looking for that resource again, if anyone knows what it was...) in which he describes a democratic classroom as a place where all cultural perspectives are valued. He suggests that teachers not ignore their own personal/cultural knowledge. Just as Bell wants white teachers to see themselves as racial beings, Banks suggests that the often-ignored diversity within European Americans needs to be examined in the classroom. When teachers use their background and experiences to critically analyze knowledge, they are encouraging students to do the same with their own backgrounds. With this kind of discourse, students can simultaneously address inequalities and celebrate their diverse backgrounds by placing value on those backgrounds and emphasizing the importance of diverse backgrounds to the process of interpreting and understanding events and ideas. If students aren’t singled out in a tokenist manner, but encouraged to take the initiative to speak from their experiences, they can develop a sense of racial optimism which will curb social reproduction. Teaching our culture’s struggle to overcome racism must be tempered with this lesson that racial diversity is advantageous.

Our classroom discourse on race must emphasize how lucky we are to live in a multi-cultural country. Cynicism and hopelessness will serve only to preserve and reproduce racial tensions.

On First Things (Part Three - The Holy Ghost)

Read Part One here.
Read Part Two here.

Implicit in the Christian concept of a “new covenant” is the possibility that at a particular point in history the parameters of the relationship between God and humanity may be redefined. To put this in terms of the parent-child relationship favored by so many theists, we could think of the way a parent will offer more autonomy and expect more responsibility as a child develops the capacity to handle those things.

The belief that God has intervened in history (through the prophets and through Christ) in order to teach us implies that God never intended to hold our hand forever. If we are taught something it is because we are expected to learn something. We are expected to evolve and change intellectually. Perhaps God does not change, but humanity clearly does. This means our relationship to God will change.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer believed humanity was outgrowing our adolescence and he understood profoundly the experience of the inaction of God. Setting aside his pacifist beliefs to join a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, he was imprisoned by the Gestapo. While waiting for his execution he wrote, in a letter dated July 16, 1944:

So our coming of age leads us to a recognition of our true situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

Bonhoeffer was executed, no miracle saved him. The Third Reich was defeated, but not by a miracle, and not before unspeakable atrocities were committed. Our experience in the Second World War not only demonstrated that we cannot rely on divinity to prevent atrocity, but also that the apocalyptic power once ascribed to God was now in our hands. The atom was split and self-extinction became a real possibility. In the wake of this development the stakes would appear to be higher than ever.

Through the lens of a superstitious belief in God’s intervention these events demonstrate the callousness of a God who is disinterested, even cruel. Though a purely materialist lens, these horrible things have no larger meaning and are simply bad things that happened; there is no Truth that can prevent them on our behalf. Through Bonhoeffer’s lens, however, these events demonstrate to us that God trusts us and believes in our potential to solve our problems on our own. The onus is on us. On this point, a Bonhoeffer-theist and a humanist-atheist agree. It’s not easy for a parent to allow a child to make mistakes, but if we aren’t allowed to make mistakes we are eternally helpless.

"Pushed out of the world and on to the Cross"

(The Crucifixion, as depicted by St. John of the Cross)

Many Christians object to this view and call for us to put our trust In God, but to deny our ability to reason, to deny our ethical imaginations, and to deny our autonomy and freedom, is to insult God. To demand that God be our benefactor in worldly affairs, the solver of our problems and the fulfiller of our needs (when we are completely capable of doing these things for each other) is to trivialize God and to neglect our responsibility.

To trust God is to trust that God’s inaction confirms the value of our ability to reason and solve problems. The old chestnut about the Earth being the center of creation was a symptom of the belief that the purpose of creation is to give humanity a home. We were not made for it, it was made for us. As arrogant as this view is, if lifted out of its pre-modern cosmology, it charges humanity with a tremendous amount of responsibility. We have to take what we have learned from our respective God-experiences and leave the nest. We have to let go of things. We have to forsake and be forsaken, as Christ was forsaken. Christ points the way out of the Temple, away from the insulated world of cultic practice and sacred laws, and into the fullness and richness of the human experience.

On First Things (Part Two - The Son)

Read Part One here.

The tenants of Judaism are on the one hand confirmed and deepened by the teachings of Jesus, and on the other hand they are renounced as obsolete. Jesus approaches religion in a way that is remarkably complex and would be deeply offensive to the community around him (as well as to our community today).

In the second chapter of Mark’s gospel, Jesus and his followers pick wheat on the Sabbath, which is forbidden by religious law. When the Pharisees criticize him, he reminds them that when King David and his men were hungry, they ate bread that had been set aside as a sacrifice to God even though only priests were allowed to eat this bread. David had privileged the basic human needs of his companions over the dogmas of religious law. Jesus says “The Sabbath was made for the good of human beings; they (human beings) were not made for the Sabbath.” This is a humanist position, one that demands that the needs of human beings be put above religious precepts and that these precepts have value only insofar as they benefit human beings. Because that is not always the case, the value and purpose of these precepts must be reconsidered.

In the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says he has not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. To “fulfill the law” meant to interpret and follow it perfectly. A very pious, observant Jew “fulfilled the law” when he understood it comprehensively and adhered to it above all other things. Jesus claims that he is fulfilling the law even though he and his followers, on the surface, disobey the precepts of that law.

This is more than simply a challenge to religious fundamentalism. Jesus proclaims that he is the truly pious one, in no small part by virtue of the fact that he does NOT necessarily adhere to the rigid moral codes of his faith. It is as if there is something beyond the law, something to which the law points and that “something” is the real reason for the law. If we take him at his word, this means the law was always (and by necessity) doomed to fail, that this religion, and by extension ALL religion, serves its true function only when it fails. Jesus was pushing anyone who would listen to step beyond religion. This is not a step back from religion, or a step around it. It is a step beyond, using the lessons learned from humanity’s religious experience to transcend that experience, an experience which is rapidly losing relevance and meaning.

This is a step beyond the law as well as a step beyond morality. Jesus structures many of his teachings in a formula that says “You have heard it said… But I am telling you…” Each of these sayings builds on the moral rule even as that rule is rejected in favor of a more abstract principle. Not committing murder is adherence to a moral code, while loving your enemy is embracing an abstract principle. Abstract principles must be applied anew in every unique situation to account for the virtually infinite number of possible ethical dilemmas. Now the comparatively abstract theology of Judaism is merged with an equally abstract ethical dimension.

In his excellent book The Subversion of Christianity, Jacques Ellul argues concurrently on the basis of much more orthodox theology:

Not only is it honestly impossible to derive a moral system from the Gospels and Epistles, but further, the main keys in the gospel-the proclamation of grace, the declaration of pardon, and the opening up of life to freedom-are the direct opposite of morality… To elaborate a moral system is to be a sinner before God, not because the conduct is bad but because, even if it is good, another good is substituted for the will of God.

This is not exactly the same as my position, but the practical result is the same, and it illuminates the fact that the incompatibility of Christianity and morality is not unique to any one specific Christian theology. It is essential to the Truth of the Gospel: the truth that humanity is absolved. This absolution is not earned, it is given. A person’s good deeds or bad deeds are not tallied. They have no bearing on a person’s standing or eternal fate.

In light of this, behavior can no longer be based on rule and authority. Concepts of eternal reward and punishment (contrary to superstitions frequently used as fear-based recruiting tools) lose their meaning. Belief in this absolution can be (and often is) abused as a free pass to behave in selfish and destructive ways, but if correctly applied within the larger picture of the Christian ideal, it means that a person chooses to do the right thing because it is the right thing. This is motivation superior to a construct of reward and punishment. It is a sign of a maturing world-view, and that maturity is essential because the “right thing” will be situational, and principles must be uniquely applied by a developed ethical imagination.

This is wildly idealistic, and places a great deal of faith in humanity, and I am perfectly comfortable with that. Is it ethical anarchy? In a certain sense, yes, but it is not ethical nihilism. The apostle Paul said “Everything is permissible” but he immediately followed that statement with the statement that “not everything is beneficial” and an exhortation to seek well-being of others instead of one’s own well-being. What that will look like will depend on our own abilities and circumstances.

But what becomes of our relationship with God if this is the case? What role does God play if not the role of law-giver and judge?

Read Part Three here.

On First Things (Part One - The Father)

I have long struggled to put what I believe into a coherent written statement, and for the next few posts, I'll be relating portions of my most recent attempt to do this. My views shift and mutate, like anyone else's, but I want to let this writing stand as a reminder of a particular point in my journey.

Originally, I began writing this when asked to contribute a guest-post to a blog on Atheism, and I intended to appeal, first and foremost, to unbelievers, not to proselytize, but to explain myself as a part of a dialogue.

Like most Christians, I share with most atheists a firm belief in the importance of critical thinking and skepticism, and in most of the day-to-day arguments between atheists and Christians (school prayer, evolution and such) I side firmly (I am “excluding the middle” for the sake of brevity) with atheists. I am a secularist not in spite of my faith, but because of my faith. Not only do I wish to keep something that I understand to be a beautiful, complex truth out of the hands of those who would cynically exploit a version of it for political, social (and even moral) purposes, but I also believe that the leaders of institutionalized Christianity have domesticated a radical idea (an idea that should stand in complete opposition to our social, moral, political and economic norms) and turned it into another obsolete dogma alongside others. I believe that the message of Christ is not a religion at all. It is a transformative perception of a Truth (post-modernity, tremble at that capital “T”!) that carries serious implications for our lives.

Thus far my Christian friends and neighbors are likely to agree, but I wish to be absolutely clear that the issue is not semantic; it is not a matter of placing Christianity above “religion” in order to stress Christianity’s privileged place. Not only is the Christian message not a creedal, dogmatic religion, it is an absolute rejection of all creeds, dogmas, ideologies, rituals, and moral laws.

Everything that is a part of religion is renounced by Christ. Even, finally, the traditional relationship with an anthropomorphic supreme being is abandoned. The things gained from humanity’s experiences with these traditions are not abandoned however. If we are willing to rise to the challenge it sets before us, the Gospel (the message that the first Christians derived from their experiences) offers a tenable step forward in the process of which religion is a part; an exit from religion that accounts for the value and meaning of humanity’s religious experiences.

Because the Christian message can only be understood as a leap that follows the leap taken by ancient Judaism, I should say a brief word about the Bible: I believe that our spiritual predecessors, while often brilliant and insightful, were also imperfect people troubled and prejudiced by the mores, political situations and pre-scientific world-views of the times in which they lived. They communicated their ideas and questions through myth and folklore, and their writings should not be understood as inerrant or literal. These stories are not intended as historical stories; they are spiritual literature that uses symbols and tropes that had profound meaning for the text’s intended audience.

This is not a new or unique position. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, said as much in his attempts to “de-mythologize” the New Testament, to lift the meaning out of its mythological construct, and Paul Tillich, (more prone than Bultmann to preserve the symbols), stressed that the symbolic is not less true than the literal, it is more true. Bultmann and Tillich had all the advantages of a 20th Century understanding of the world, but their arguments were not unprecedented. Origen, the 3rd Century Biblical scholar wrote in De Principiis (First Principles) that we misunderstand Scripture when we “understand Scripture not according to the spiritual meaning but according to the sound of the letter” because the mysteries transmitted there are hidden “in ordinary Words under the pretext of a narrative.”

The Old Testament narrative is not simply the surface conflict between the followers of Yahweh and the other cultures they encounter; it is a conflict between a convent with the mysterious God who defies concrete depiction and a worldly need for tangible, graven images and the religious security they offer.

In the beginning, humanity occupies a place of total innocence, represented by Eden. This paradise is lost when human beings eat, not from the tree of “knowledge”, as critics are fond of saying (in order to accuse Judaic faiths of anti-intellectualism), but the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil.” Humanity discovers “good” and “evil”, precursors to the concept of “sin” and this is the beginning of humanity’s great problem. Adam and Eve, the archetypical human beings, become ashamed of their nakedness. This nakedness posed no problem before, but with the burden of morality, they irrationally clothe themselves, not simply in literal clothing, but in divisive social constructions. They are now estranged by sin, but their sins are not the problem. The concept of sin is the problem. “Good” and “Evil” become categories into which behavior and even people are divided. As a result, human beings are estranged not only from an original place of innocence, an authentic life that encompasses the fullness and complexity of human-ness, but also from each other: We are expelled from paradise into a harsh world where brother kills brother (the Cain and Abel story) and people are separated into nations by barriers of culture and language (the Tower of Babel story.)

The decision is made to become “moral” people. Moral codes are demanded by such a decision. Religion is a way to preserve and teach these moral codes. For Israel, the stewards of truth in this narrative, God is kept invisible to prevent a shallow, superstitious faith. However, Israel loses faith, someone erects an idol, this idol is worshipped and the worshippers are severely reprimanded. Clearly, the more nuanced faith now demanded is difficult. Their God is anthropomorphic, and he is understood through their eyes but his Ultimate Otherness is still preserved by the prohibition against turning him into a visible object. This will (to an extent) prevent them from totally obscuring God with a god-image based on their prejudices and ideas. It does not work perfectly, but it is a step in the Process. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, succinctly summarizes the significance of this:

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

This new kind of theology was, I believe, a major step away from obsolete religious formulations. Christianity, then, arises from this tradition in the figure of Jesus, who provides the next major step.

Read Part Two here.

Unity

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