Complete truthfulness is only possible where sin has been uncovered, and forgiven by Jesus. Only those who are in a state of truthfulness through the confession of their sin to Jesus are not ashamed to tell the truth wherever it must be told.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I’ve been reading Merold Westphal’s Suspicion and Faith: Religious Uses of Modern Atheism lately. Westphal teaches philosophy at Fordham and comes to Fuller every few summers to teach a two-week course on Philosophical Hermeneutics. I audited that class two years ago and left with a desire to read both this book and Overcoming Onto-Theology, the companion texts for the class.
The premise of Suspicion and Faith is to highlight how Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche can be read for religious value. This seems counter-intuitive, as their critiques of religion, guided by a hermeneutics of suspicion, are among the strongest and most resonant of the past few centuries. However, Westphal believes that they can perform a prophetic function, unmasking impious deeds performed under the guise of religious piety, and forcing the believer to engage the living God.
The first section of the book introduces the premise and sets the terms of discussion, followed by expositions of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche in that order. I found the introduction helpful for distinguishing between different varieties of atheism and explaining where skepticism and suspicion differ. To oversimplify, skepticism focuses on the truthfulness of a truth claim, while suspicion deals with motive, intent, and function. I find this a helpful distinction; many Christians embroil themselves in apologetics and debates about the truthfulness of religion, only to find that winning the debate is at best a phyrric victory, with little gained in the process. To better understand the other (and ourselves), we need to look beyond the empirical, with Freud as our first guide.
One of the magazines I keep up with is Inc., an entrepreneurial business mag. When it arrives in the mail, I flip through it, then read the articles over the month which follows, as down time permits. Last month’s issue featured an article by Gendron, a former staff member now promoting a new Entrepreneurial program at Clark University. I know little about the school, and less about the school, but did find a common thread between business schools and the world of theological education, which I’ve come to know over the past few years. It also links to the legal world, as described by Scott Turow in his memoir covering his first year at Harvard Law.
As Gendron puts it,
If I coached my 13-year-old son’s basketball team the way most institutions teach entrepreneurship, I’d be teaching the kids lectures about how to choose an agent and practice safe sex on the road.
That rings really true for me, given the parts of my education that I found relevant for me and other academically-minded folks, yet irrelevant for many of the Christ-followers I know. Simply put, the existing systems of theological education prepare people to function within that system and engage the conversations that the scholars have been immersed in for the past few centuries. Those conversations aren’t ungodly, nor are they meaningless/irrelevant speculation, but they are removed from the day-to-day experience of most Christians, and aren’t translated to the broader community of faith. Many of the attempts to translate the scholarly conversation and bridge the cultural distance come off as condescending “I’m smarter than you” talk, and, as such, fall on deaf ears.
That to say, there’s a need for wisdom and discernment in translating what the academy sees to what the church experiences, particularly when it comes to resonant connection points. It’s certainly real, but it’s not real to everyone, and finding the points of connection, even if it means lowest-common-denominator-speak will be of great value to all involved.
In conversation with friends about a month or so back, we talked about what it means to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” and of sanctification, learning to live the god-life, and I got to thinking about one of my favorite movies, The Shawshank Redemption.
It speaks to me in many ways, and one that stuck out recently is the vivid illustration of the lives of Brooks Hadlin and Red (Freeman’s character) after Shawshank. Adjusting to the outside world proved impossible for Brooks, and that phenomenon extends beyond Hollywood. It’s an indictment of our criminal justice system that the recidivism rate is so high and that persons, when released from prison, soon return to crime; by and large, the US has failed to re-integrate former prisoners into society, in part due to our collective understanding of justice as retribution.
As the sequence that follows Red’s release points out, he could well have followed the same path, if not for the tangibility of his friend, a form of community in an isolating world. As a follower of Jesus, I can’t help but make connections to the life of the community of faith, and the collaborative efforts of God in us and those around us.
In short? We can’t do this on our own. Those around us play a huge part in the acquisition of new patterns and the learning of a new way of life.
I’m on vacation this week, travelling in the Pacific Northwest. While riding Greyhound from Seattle to Portland this afternoon, I had what I’d best describe as a soul-shaking revelation, and it all made sense. By the time I arrived at the hostel, I was brimming with ideas and a new sense of hope. Something was ignited, and I did my best to do it justice in print.
I’m painfully aware that my words did not capture the entirety of what happened. The more I wrote, the less I was able to summarize. Matches up with what I’ve been reading this week, Peter Rollins’ How (Not) to Speak of God, which brings home the point that theology is done in the wake of an encounter with God, or an experience of the holy, which occurs in the everyday and the outside-of-the-norm alike. Simply by virtue of the fact that we’re dealing with God, all utterances, all theologies, are incomplete. That doesn’t invalidate them; rather, it leaves space for the sacred otherness of God.
More online reflections when I’m not down to 20 cents of internet time; the details on ‘what clicked ‘ will be hashed out in-person.
I caught the new single from Sean Kingston this evening, and it’s catchy.
Around the third appearance of the lyrical hook, the familiar cadence had my attention. It sounded like this seventeen-year-old pop reggae singer was channeling Led Zeppelin, and I exclaimed, to nobody in particular, “Tell me he’s not doing Dy’er Maker!”
He wasn’t covering the song, but he was drawing from it. And that got me to listen more closely to what he was singing. That’s what a well-chosen sample does; it draws the hearer into the new stream. There’s an echo of a familiar tune, but the notes are all different. Yet it works.
The Bible is filled with this, particularly the New Testament. The authors of these texts practically bathed in the Old Testament, and it comes out in their writing. There’re plenty of direct citations, but even more allusions, which open up to us as we study the scriptures. When we read the Old Testament, we start to hear the tracks that they listened to, and the album, so to speak, makes sense as a coherent whole.
Jesus was a master of sampling, and it made his communication distinctive. He dropped the lines that people knew by heart, but he spun them in a different direction. He spoke familiar truths in a way that caused his hearers to listen more closely and respond to God, rather than just nodding along with the beat (as we tend to do when we’ve heard a song, but never really listened to it).
Between emails yesterday afternoon, I slipped away from my desk to get a bite to eat. On the table besides me was the most recent issue of one of Fuller’s publications, Theology, News, and Notes. The theme of the issue was “Perspectives on the Call to Fuller,” and key people in administration, including the president, provost, and deans, shared their journeys. Two that gave me pause were the essays entitled “The Blessings of Unexpected Service” and “Choosing the Deep Water instead of the Shallow End,” while Rich Mouw’s “Over Someone’s Objections” filled in some more of the school’s backstory for me.
If you’ve a few minutes, have a read. I found the magazine encouraging and inspiring, and commend those who worked on it for doing a good job.
I’m skimming Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s Or Ours? in search of a suitable quote to introduce a lesson on historical models of mission, and this line grabbed my attention. Don’t think we’ll use it in the class, but it’s too jarring not to share.
Note: “we” here represents (western) missionaries, while “they” refers to indigenous peoples/Christians.
We have been anxious to do something for them. And we have done much. We have done everything for them. We have taught them, baptized them, shepherded them. We have managed their funds, ordered their services, built their churches, provided their teachers. We have nursed them, fed them, doctored them. We have trained them and even ordained some of them. We have done everything for them except acknowledge any equality. We have done everything for them, but very little with them. We have done everything for them except give place to them. We have treated them as ‘dear children,’ but not as ‘brethren.’ (143)
Among the first bible verses I heard justifying apologetics was 1 Peter 3:15-16. I mentally connected it with evangelism. Coming off a campus ministry mission trip where the teaching sessions were geared around apologetics for the sake of evangelism, that was the context I knew for making sense of these words.
But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.
I probably read the passage with that frame of reference for five years. Today, another faithful application of the text clicked. That’s how we make sense of theology. Giving an answer for the hope that we (communities of faith) have and exhibit. What we speak and write of God is intended to make sense of the distinctive lifestyle of followers of the Christ, and theology at its best fills in those blanks, while inviting further questions.
Among the most formative books in my pilgrimage is Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, which I first read in late 2002. I’m on my second copy and have found ways to read it, or at least refer back to it, every year. In a chapter entitled “The Gospel and the Religions,” he changes the evangelistic question from “What happens to the non-Christian after death?” to “what is the end which gives the meaning to this person’s story as part of God’s whole story?” (note to self: unpack this later)
This opens a new set of possibilities, and in this world, both theology and interreligious conversation look very different. Newbigin’s four suggestions (pp. 181-184) are appealing.
- We shall expect, look for, and welcome all the signs of the grace of God at work in the lives who do not know Jesus as Lord.
- The Christian will be eager to cooperate with people of all faiths and ideologies in all projects which are in line with the Christian’s understanding of God’s purpose in history. (ie - missio dei)
- It is precisely in this kind of shared commitment to the business of the world that the context for true dialogue is provided.
- The essential contribution of the Christian to the dialogue will simply be the telling of the story, the story of Jesus, the story of the Bible.
When you work with someone on a project you both agree is worthwhile, but for different reasons, it’s hard not to be curious about why the other person/community is by your side. Why are you doing this? How do you put up with the stuff that’s getting in the way? What’s the endgame? Why would you throw your lot in with us on community development without an explicitly evangelistic motivation? Christians care about global warming and poverty? What is this?
That’s when 1 Peter 3:15 comes into play, as an exhortation to explain the backstory behind these hope-motivated actions. Makes sense to me.
I’ve been wracking my brain for the past hour, trying to think of something witty, profound, or catchy to write. Nothing’s coming, yet there’s an insatiable urge to pray, accompanied with two realizations.
