The church is often its best counter-argument

Jesus called us to a life of such reckless obedience, but so often lately I feel that we Christians are just winking at each other as we go about our apathetic lives. "Love your new sports car, it's really sleek." "You went on a ski trip? How was it?" "Are you going to see any movies this weekend?" "Learning to ride horses, good for you!" "Ooh, you got a tattoo. So edgy!"

What I really want to say in each case is: Aren't we clever, wearing Christ's name on our sleeves while we shake a cheerful fist in his face with our materialism and self-indulgence? We're so progressive, so "grace-oriented" and "balanced." We know it's not how we should be; but as long as I wink at you and you wink at me, nobody has to be reminded of it.

We're so pointless as the church in America. So accommodating and polite, as long as we can have our Calgon moments. It's interesting that masturbation has become a topic of debate in Western Christian circles again (among both men and women), after being a practice non grata for hundreds of years. I don't believe that's a coincidence.

But someone will say, "Don't go making lists of what's acceptable! That's legalism!" I'm not going to make anybody any lists. It'd be too depressing anyway, because you're already doing all the stuff I'd rule out on it. And so am I. I breathe the water too (and I drown the same way). I'm no more eager than the next guy to be the moral pioneer who gets all the arrows in his back.

And, it seems, neither is anyone else.

So we continue as before. "White-water rafting? So adventurous!"

Crossan and N.T. Wright

two of the dominant voices in the jesus debate are John Dominic Crossan and N.T. Wright. Apparently these two men had a debate back in march, this article might help to clarify the debate a bit as well. You can also find a number of debates or helpful articles here. I am not a big fan of the overall perspective of beliefnet, but nevertheless they do have some fascinating articles.

Starbucks

today i sat at starbucks talking with a student from a local seminary. we had set up the time to get a better understanding of each other's respective views of jesus. jesus according to my friend is someone who welcomes us into god, moves us toward god, and provides us with an example of one who has encountered god. he becomes the means to an existential end.
what of the cross i asked? the cross? that was merely jesus being true to himself. he followed the path he had to because that's the way the path went. the cross was arbitrary. jesus could have been left alone, but he wasn't left alone. instead, for whatever reason jesus threatened the establishment proclaiming his radical message of egalitarianism and equality. And because of that they had to get rid of him.

Now this argument has been around. That really, the only thing that jesus was doing was instituting a radical social program based on equality and egalitarianism. John Dominic Crossan makes this argument quite eloquently, and sadly quite inaccurately, in his work The Historical Jesus. Crossan calls him a jewish peasant cynic. but i think that is a bit tame. really what we ought to call jesus is the first french existentialist. Let’s be honest. The man was a philosophical pioneer. A fronch-man before the baguette. Quite impressive on jesus’ part. Apparently, those first century folk were quite unfamiliar with the work of foucoult, sartre, and camus. but not jesus. No. that is why it took another 1900 years before existentialism and notions of encounter entered the theological and philosophical fray once more.

Okay. what of the resurrection i asked?
the resurrection? he supressed a giggle. do you really believe in the resurrection; do you find that you need it for your faith? he returned.
yes i do.
why, why do you feel like you need it? he asked.
first it seems to me that the early church took it quite seriously, they seem to think it really happened.
but it's not in paul. paul never mentions the resurrection. (i think what he meant here was Crossan's argument that paul never mentions an empty tomb - the prototypical reason why i think crossan is a bufoon. Paul spends nearly an entire chapter explaining the importance of a bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, so if you have a bodily resuurection that more than likely means the tomb is empty. I don’t see how not explicitly mentioning the “empty tomb” is an argument when it is stated implicitly with his discussion of a bodily resurrection. anyway.)
“yes he does”, I said. “1 corinthians 15.” paraphrasing i said “if christ has not risen bodily from the dead than our faith is in vain and we are to be pitied above all. Paul clearly speaks of the resurrection really happening. it seems to me that if your starting point is, dead people don't rise from the dead, and then you decide whether or not the resurrection happened, you have cooked the results and your investigation, far from being objective, isn't even honest with itself. regardless of what your conclusion on the resurrection is, the least one ought to do is suspend judgment on whether or not it could have happened.”
yeah i understand, but see paul, paul had his experience of god through jesus. and he was telling all those people, he was saying, see get rid of your paradigms and your social stratification and your roman citizenship. there is a new kingdom, and you can experience this jesus who is resurrected every time we remember him. he called us to meet god through him. all you need is that encounter that existential moment of experiencing god.

At this point I must digress from my retelling of our encounter and tell you that I really enjoyed my conversation with my friend, despite being utterly bewildered by how he has come to his decisions. At one point he told me that we all make decisions. In other words his decision and my decision on how to take a passage of scripture or on how we view god are equally valid because they are equally volitional. I had to disagree, gently. It is true that we are all engaged in interpretation. I am not so naïve as to think that I come to scripture without any preconceptions. But it is not even good logic to say because we both make decisions, both of our decisions must be valid. It is entirely reasonable and rational that one of our decisions is better than the other, or more accurate, especially since we are making decisions regarding the same material.

articles on Jesus

here a few articles culled from the infinite depths of the internet on what people think of Jesus. Here is a link for an article by John Dominic Crossan, a PBS series , and two Newsweek articles on Jesus.

ideas have consequences

there are a million things i could begin this blog with, but it seems to me that the central starting point for christianity is with christ. for most americans jesus is a punch line. a familiar name that reminds us of sunday school and people with bad haircuts. Jesus has become easy to ignore because he has become a caricature of what he really is.

so who is jesus, and why does it matter. there are many different ideas about who jesus is, holy man, prophet, sage, son of God. christianity has claimed for two millinnia that Jesus was the son of God become human, and it really mattered that this was true. they also claimed that the cross was a real event and that he really did rise from the dead.

recently a friend asked me if all that was really necessary. and my response is yes. it is necessary. you can say all manner of things about jesus, about who you think he was, and if it isn't real, if it really didn't happen the way christians have thought then it really doesn't matter. but...if it did happen then, to quote Richard John Neuhaus, "it is the truth about everything."

the gospel claims some very simple things, and they can be a starting off point for us. number one, we are sinners. this is quite a distasteful idea to the contemporary mind, yet Christianity has always maintained that we are, by nature, guilty people. yes, there is goodness in the world, and we humans perform wonderful acts of kindness every day. but there is also great evil, one doesn't have to look far to see that this is true. it is because of sin that we are in a state of seperation from God.

of course i am making a large assumption that people want to be in a relationship with God. for many that's not the case. people make all kinds of requirements for the kind of God they will choose to believe in. so they say something like this, "I won't believe in any God who lets innocent children die." There are many versions of statements like this and i don't want to ignore the force of such statements but it seems to me that declarations like that are really just a postponement of any type of serious consideration of God.

in light of humanity's separation from God, Jesus came.

christianity is so culturally weighted down it is often difficult to know what the real thing is. is christianity Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, is it The Passion, it is George W. Bush, is it priests molesting children? because of such things it might be easy to think that Christians believe a bunch of ridiculous things that have no basis in fact, on par with aliens at Roswell. or perhaps that in order to be a Christian you have to believe something that no ordinary person would believe in, or that even the manner of belief for a Christian is a fundamentally different thing than it is for someone else.

Quite simply i believe that the nature of christian belief is basically no different than ordinary everyday belief. the manner in which a un-believer comes to know things and to believe in them is no different from the way in which i come to know them and come to believe them. the difference is the content of our belief, not the method of it. and as the title of this post indicates, what you believe really matters.