Resurrection and Particularity

Abstraction is easier than earthiness. Religious principles command little, but a God become man is difficult indeed. A God who dies and comes back to life in real space-time human history might be the most difficult reality of all. Notice I didn't say "truth" for that word is so easily abstracted.

It's much safer to have religious values. It's much more demanding to deal with a God who passed through death and back to life again; and there's reasonable enough evidence to the fact.

In response to a world of theologians that neuter every Christian symbol and abstract every Christ-event into a vague principle for living, David Bentley Hart proclaims:

If then a theology of beauty stands with the concrete and the particular, in defiance of any species of thought that places its faith in abstractions or generalities, it militates of necessity against practices that simply sort narratives into discrete categories of story and metaphysics, myth and meaning, symbol and reality, and then rest content...If indeed Christianity embraces "the aesthetic principle" par excellence," then abstraction is the thing most contrary and deadening to the truth it offers...God's glory, though, is neither ethereal nor remote, but is beauty, quantity, abundance, kabod: it has weight, density, and presence...In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, 2003

I couldn't help but think, on a week we celebrate the Resurrection in Christendom (except for the Orthodox community which celebrates next week), how counter-cultural the truth of history really is. We live in an America that craves principles for life, that likes to abstract God to generic religious values, and the raw fact of Jesus coming back to life stands opposed to such abstractions.

A related idea is prominent in Time's cover story this week: Rethinking Heaven, by Jon Meachem. Meachem's basic thesis is that too many Christians view heaven as a bodyless existence in some pie-in-the-sky afterlife. Meachem challenges that notion, appealing to a new heavens and new earth and a bodily resurrection and afterlife.

Of course, if you know anything about Christianity, Meachem is absolutely correct, which makes his title rather presumptuous. Meachem, nor the theologians he cites, are rethinking anything. One need not go back to the Bible to point out that Christians, even since the second century, have believed in the resurrection of the body, as opposed to the mere immortality of the soul. Christians have been professing this truth by way of the Apostle's creed for 20 centuries.

But Meachem's still on to something. Far from challenging Christian stereotypes, he's really challenging the common American clinginess to abstraction and ease. Much easier to believe in a bodyless heavenly paradise, than for the fact that God the Father will redeem, through the risen Jesus Christ, this world and unite it to his new heavens.

In sum, Jesus' Resurrection shames our sense of existential viability, needing to feel certain things or perform certain religious tasks to have a fake or weak experience of the divine. No, in Christianity, as Hart notes, the particular beauty, the raw fact, of Christ's Resurrection is the deepest truth, my feelings be damned.

He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Religious Freedom Can Erode Slowly, But Not Yet

Last week, a monumental piece of news went mostly unnoticed. It regarded a U.S. Supreme Court decision (Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) that the Obama administration was contesting against a religious establishment. You can read the details of the case in many other places. Essentially what was at stake was a religious organization's freedom in hiring and firing whom they want without government interference.

Does the government have a stake in a religious organization hiring whom they want? Of course they do. In this particular case, it was about a person with a disability. This was a dicey situation, to be sure, but if the government can tell a religious organization whom they can hire and fire, even in this case, what's to stop the slow slide into greater breaches of the 1st Amendment (wherein religious persons and organizations are guaranteed the "free exercise" of their religion)? What's to stop the government from pressing ideological concerns into religious hiring and firing, particularly of pastors, priests, and ministers? For instance, how far are we from the government intervening in a church by demanding it hire someone as a pastor who disagrees with certain sexual mores of that church's beliefs?

It is precisely at this crossroads where the myth of an impassioned "secular" government must forever die. The government- and particularly the Obama administration and the Justice Department- wants to apply enforcement standards on religious organizations. They wish to force an ideological- not an impartial- agenda on religious organizations. There is no magical middle ground free from the influences of any worldview- religious or otherwise- and there will always exist the certitude that someone is going to influence the government on his or her view. It isn't just the church that tries to influence the state, but everyone is trying to influence the state. Secularists who decry the mixing of church and state misunderstand the inherently evangelistic nature of their position.

So what of the outcome of the Supreme Court decision then? Well, the Supreme Court unanimously (that's 9-0 for folks scoring at home) struck down the EEOC and the Obama administration's argument. Fortunately, this is a pretty simple reading of the 1st Amendment to the Bill of Rights, and that means that two of the Justices that Obama nominated disagreed with him.

The lesson in all this is that religious freedom is a tenuous venture. Even in a country with supposedly guaranteed religious freedoms, those freedoms can erode slowly, imperceptibly. The very imperceptibility lies in the fact that this news- news the Wall Street Journal called the most significant Supreme Court ruling on religion in over 50 years- was barely covered by mainstream media.

But, alas, we have Supreme Court Justices who can read, and so religious freedom is spared the slow decline into autocracy, at least for the foreseeable future.

Tim Tebow and the New Evangelical Witness

Image by Time MagazineThe original sin of the blogosphere is commenting on a popular piece of news without saying anything original. Such is the case with Tim Tebow, where plenty of cyber ink has been spilled. And yet, in the most unlikely place, I read something original on Tim Tebow yesterday. The highlight of the analysis (from Time writer Jon Meachem) is this:

"What is new and what makes Tebow an intriguing figure...is the scale and scope of his witness. With Billy Graham on the cool side of the mountain and George W. Bush living quietly in Dallas, Tebow is perhaps the most significant Evangelical Christian in the country."

The thought hadn't occurred to me before, but consider the history. The first and second Great Awakenings brought us high-profile pastors that spoke to large crowds. In many ways, Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield were both the first evangelicals and the first celebrity pastors. Charles Finney brought more hype, excitement, and innovation to what it meant to be evangelical a hundred years later. And then we get to the 20th century, where the newer evangelicals brought us Billy Graham and, apparently, Christian evangelical Presidents.

The interesting thing about Tebow, then, is not so much about what Tebow says but about what Tebow says about us. Consider how the leading evangelicals in each stage matched the era's style of communication. Whitefield and Edwards would preach for much longer than an hour, to large outdoor audiences, living in a verbal culture with the only major form of media being the newspaper. Billy Graham entered in the era of radio and television, and thus preached to massive audiences via those media while also utilizing the stadium "crusade." And now, we have an evangelical who actually plays in a stadium every week.

This isn't to ridicule Tebow at all, but to point out his method of influence. The Time writer Meachum called him "perhaps the most significant Evangelical Christian in America." Why not a pastor or evangelist or writer? Because we live in an entertainment culture, and Tebow by trade is an entertainer. That's what sports- for how much I admittedly love them- are. They are entertainment. In a culture where influence is touted by soundbytes, and less than 144 charaters in Twitter, and by a pristine image, Tebow has risen to the fore not necessarily because of his message but because of his charisma and his profession.

It's not that I think Tebow is an unfortunate advocate of evangelical Christianity. In fact, I think he does admirably in his role. It's just that Tebow might be the most significant evangelical because he plays by all the media rules of our culture. He speaks in soundbytes and he looks good. He does well by playing by the rules.

It's just that I wish these weren't the rules.

Thinking through Voting Priorities

Tis the season... for politics.

The Republican primary races are heating up as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries are next month. Though the entire country and not all Christians are Republican, I still thought it'd be an appropriate time to think through how we should vote.

Years ago, I treated readers to a systematic theology of political issues in their rank of importance. That's similarly related to how I think through political issues, and why I vote on certain politicians over others. You may not agree with this list, but I find having a rubric in place sets my mind at ease, and helps me not get caught up in the ephemeral beauty pageants that tend to be Presidential elections (or high-profile state elections).

1. To me, the most important defining characteristic of whom to vote for over another revolves around a person's view on major life and death issues. Particularly, what is a candidate's stance on just war and abortion? The most fundamental human right (found in the 1st and 9th amendments) is the right to exist and to exist justifiably. Babies in the womb have not done wrong so as to be killed, and neither have innocent civilians in war. Naturally, there are more complexities to the issue than this. But generally, if I agree with a candidate's views here over and against a different candidate, I won't go any farther. I will pull the trigger for the one I agree with.

2. But what if two (or more) candidates generally agree on the above issues? How might I further differentiate on them? Well, in this category, I will call it "quality of life" issues. Does the candidate really believe an unfettered market is an unqualified good? Does the candidate believe in any semblance of local, state, or federal solutions or cooperations with private industry or charity to accomplish ends which alleviate human suffering? Does the candidate believe in a statist proposition that government is the instrument of good? Do they believe the government is an instrument of good at all or can it merely set the right conditions for justice to occur? I'm trying not to give away all of my political opinions on various issues here, other than to say that how you answer these questions will likely determine your vote in a state or primary election.

3. But what if candidates agree, even still, on the issues in the second category? How will I then decide? This is what I call the character category. Does the individual exemplify strong moral character? Are they running unfair attack ads? Does the individual display an effective means of leadership? Are they intelligent or just an ideological puppet? These are important questions. I might agree with a candidate on all important issues, but they might be a horrible leader. Nevertheless, I don't want to stomach compromise on the first two issues just to get a good leader. I will vote for someone if they agree with my opinions on 1 and 2 but have moral character, as opposed to someone who has great moral character but I disagree with their views on 2. That's why these are prioritized in this fashion.

Now, I can never nor have I ever come upon a situation where my vote wasn't determined by these three steps. I can't think of any examples where candidates would have lined up well in all three categories.

You might have a different priority as you think of whom you might vote for? I'm curious as to what those might be. Feel free to comment below.

Pastors and Congressmen

This is not the start of the joke. The irony of the title is that it references the two things you aren't suppose to discuss in polite company: religion and politics. The other irony is that it's the only thing people ever really want to talk about. Even still, that's not what this post is about. This post is about the universal phenomenon of disliking something collectively, but loving it personally. I can explain.

It seems we are consistently told in this day and age that Congress is broken and the two parties can't work together. As such, the approval rating of Congress is at an all-time low (but it's always really low, somewhere near 10-30%). And yet there's an irony to this, because individual representatives to the House of Representatives often have very high approval ratings. Even in landslide election years such as last year, about 70% of Congress is still re-elected.

And I've been noticing that same kind of trend with pastors recently. A pastor friend of mine recently remarked that he never wanted to be known as "that pastor," and that it was one of his goals to be a different kind of pastor than others. I knew what he meant: the reputation of pastors collectively is not very good and he was always trying to confound this by being nice and congenial to church outsiders. Often, the manifestation of this impulse means that pastors tip well.

The irony behind this trend is that almost every pastor I have known- in the dozens and dozens and dozens- is like this pastor. They are all great people: warm, friendly, caring, and considerate of those who don't go to their church. And, seemingly contradictory to that, the view of pastors and priests across the U.S. is not good as a whole.

So when I experienced this sentiment this past weekend, I wasn't confused. I performed a wedding and after the ceremony I got quite a bit of attaboys from typically non-religious folks saying that I did a nice job, and that I wasn't like other pastors. And of all the pastors I've known- which, again, is many of all ages- regularly receive that same kind of feedback. "Your not like regular pastors," they opine.

And I begin to wonder how such a phenomenon appears in the zeitgeist. If everybody loves the pastor they know- whether they are Christians or not- how come nobody likes the idea of a pastor?

And despite how unspiritual or unreligious people tend to be, how come they still want pastors for weddings and funerals?

Something deeper must be afoot.