Do We Need to Tell Other Churchgoers that They're Wrong?
Ten minutes to write a post! Can it be done? A new record? Only if I swipe previously-existing material and don't digress!
But we all know that will be impossible, so just a word about this famous Globe article I mentioned in the previous post. I mentioned in the comments section that I'd been extremely disappointed with my segment of the article when it actually came out. It's a cliche to say "I was misquoted!", but man alive... The reporter, desperate to stir controversy when I resolutely refused to give any, fabricated a fictitious, hostile atheist ad campaign and asked me what I thought about it. I said the non-controversial, "Well, I guess I'd regard that as uncharitable." He then took that quote and appended it as a comment on the innocuous "good without God" campaign that's actually running, which makes me sound like a lunatic (as there's no way this campaign could be regarded as uncharitable in the slightest). He then added the phrase which I never said in any context, "and hopeless." One local atheist emailed me after reading the article, not so much angry (he said some nice things about my other quotes), but just quizzical. "Uncharitable? How the hell could this be uncharitable? And 'hopeless'? What on earth could that mean related to this actual ad campaign?" When the local atheist community is trying to think the best of me and help me rephrase, I know I've hit a rough patch. I emailed the atheist author mentioned in the article to apologize and explain.
So, I got that off my chest and now have four minutes left. So.
Here's an exchange from the thread two days ago. (And thanks so much, Otto, for a fun and thoughtful article yesterday.)
BMH said in reply to Jeff...
Good question, Jeff. It gets to part of what I was getting at when this whole defining love and religion thing started.
I am not sure you can do recontextualization well without also saying (or at least implying) that the vast majority of (at least American) Christians are just plain wrong about what they think it means to be a Christian. At some point, I think, you end up drawing those lines, even if you avoid talking about those lines explicitly.
I have very little problem with that, but that is perhaps why I am an academic and you and Dave are pastors :)
Ooh, I feel a post coming on, and I think we've got Otto set up for tomorrow with a guest post. But I'm still not sold. It seems to me the message to other church people is not "You're wrong," but "You're culturally-conditioned when you've just regarded yourself as 'right.'". That strikes me, yes, as a profoundly threatening message, but not quite the same, if I'm understanding you, as what you're saying.
I love Jeff (and, from what I can tell, Brent [BMH]) robustly in a man-love sort of way. They rock. But I differ here, I think.
I'm not sold we need to draw lines in a fundamental institutional critique. I think, rather, the contribution we're making is to pitch that many takes on "Christianity" (not least the use of that word) are cultural rather than "true." Contextualization, in the sense we were talking about, means that you present yourself in a particular context. You'd do things differently in a different context.
So I have no beef with any form of faith in Jesus that's working anywhere. Jeff later critiqued the emergent church movement. I'd say I have no beef with the emergent church movement...so long as I don't have to be it. If it's working, great. House churches may be making a fundamental critique of institutional churches--more power to them. I have no critique to make of either house churches or other institutional churches. If it's working for them, great.
But what i think we are saying is that, in the world of the secular west, we've lost the ability to actually engage the world around us on the terms we've been using. We've agreed to become marginalized, set into a subculture that exists, to a great extent, to throw rocks at the larger secular culture from behind our barricade. I'm pitching that that's due both, yes, to a misreading of the biblical narrative that we've somehow made the standard reading in the last hundred years (a line-drawing, to be sure, but not one I have to "win" with anyone who likes the state of things as they are) and to treating cultural truths as absolute truths.
Okay, a little heady, but I'm THREE MINUTES OVERDUE. (Still, pretty good. Thirteen minutes! You've gotta give it up for that.)
Thoughts? (You can even feel free to take a whole thirteen minutes to compose your comment. Knock yourself out.)
As usual, Dave, I agree with 99% of what you've been saying. So I have a sense that I have a disagreement, probably not a disagreement, maybe a reframing, in one area. It's something I've been thinking a lot.
On one hand, I'm with you and Brent that in a sense, Christianity is not a religion, it is a rejection of religion in favor of Jesus. Sort of. But there are some problems in this direction
First off, that strikes me as somewhat arrogant in an interreligious dialogue. As if we start the whole thing off by redefining the terms. Like- "I suppose that I wil deign to speak to you about matters of faith, so far as you know that MY faith is so superior to yours that it doesn't even DESERVE that title 'religion'".
Second, it strikes me that it would also be important for us to consider that, since we are obviously and unavoidably religious people running religious organizations, how can we do this WELL?
For example, the question "how do we deal with the bad press we get from the loonies who use our faith?" is certainly not unique to Christianity. Or, how do we speak the message of our faith and encourage people toward experience in ways that are relevant to the culture around us?
I don't think you disagree with any of this. I think I'm agreeing with you, and putting some weight on the reality that this recontextualization will necessarily have an insitutional cast, and be subject to the same mistakes that all religious organizations are prone to.