Not The Religious Type

Why GK Chesterton Rules

Let me start by putting out a CALL FOR GUEST POSTS.  I'm always eager for you to submit posts, but on my weeks away, I'm even more interested.  And next week I'll largely be away.  And then two weeks later I'll largely be away.  So here's your chance to set our agenda and display your rhetorical dazzling-ness.  You know that you’ve had something brewing within you.  Now's your time to shine!  Send them off to Dan at dan@notreligious.org.  Standard disclaimer: I don't promise to run your post.  (As a reader, I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that.)  But I'd very much like to see it, and it very well might see the light of the internet.

You may--if you read the comments--have noticed a little exchange last week with BMH, who mentioned that, while he'd read GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy a dozen times, he now regarded Chesterton as using his flamboyant rhetoric to camouflage his fundamental hollowness.  To quote Gertrude Stein, he could wonder if, with Chesterton, there was a there there. 

He brought that up because I'd quoted Chesterton twice within the week, once to kick off our series of posts about sex.  I'm sympathetic to BMH's point, as I'll expound upon in a moment.  But, in a breather from our posts on sex, I wondered if some of you might enjoy hearing just a bit more about this one-of-a-kind writer.

He was one-of-a-kind for just the reasons BMH mentions.  Many have tried to imitate Chesterton's style, but he pretty much patented it himself: a blend of self-conscious humor and paradox, a love of whimsical metaphor, and a kind of forceful bluster.

So, a few "for instances."  Here's one of his most famous lines from his greatest book, the afore-mentioned Orthodoxy:

Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.  …Satan fell by the force of gravity. 

And, a personal favorite from my tending-towards-perfectionist wife:

If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly.

He was one of the authors solicited by The London Times to contribute to their series of essays on the subject "What's Wrong with The World."  Here's the essay he submitted.

Dear Sirs:

I am.

Sincerely yours,
G.K. Chesterton 

I think it was a statement about sin.

By the time he wrote his late-in-life autobiography (he died at 63), he'd been in endless debates with his secular opponents and was getting a little cranky at their constant sneering at the unthinking, unquestioning credulity of religious people.  Here’s the first sentence of his Autobiography.

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29^th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington.

But I’ll stop.  The fun with writing about Chesterton is the chance to quote him endlessly.

A word on who he was.  He was a journalist and writer on religion who was entering his prime at the turn of the 20^th century, in London.  CS Lewis credited Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man with playing a key role in his conversion and Lewis shows some marks of being a Chesterton devotee.  Chesterton, like Lewis, was famously obese.

(I can’t resist a few of his own lines about his obesity.  During the First World War, a disapproving old lady said to him, “Young man, why aren’t you at the front?”  His reply: “Madam, if you walk around to the front of me, you’ll see that I am.”  And—I’m quoting this from memory—he had a give and take with his friend, the great playwright and atheist writer, George Bernard Shaw.  Shaw was a vocal (what we could call today) vegan and was rail-thin.  [Shaw lived to, I believe, 94 and once said it would take an accident to kill him, because his body would never give out.  He died from a fall from a ladder.]  In one of their public debates, Chesterton looked at Shaw and said, “Sir, if a foreign visitor were to see you, he’d think that all England was in famine.”  Shaw’s reply: “Sir, if the same visitor were to see you, he’d think that you caused it.”)

BMH isn’t the first person by a long shot to suggest that Chesterton’s flashy prose conceals an emptiness.  Many of his opponents in his own era doubted that he was even a person of faith.  For one, they thought he was too smart to believe what he was writing (did I mention they were prone to sneering?).  But, secondly, his rhetoric was so flashy and deft that he could feel hard to pin down.  Was it all a big put-on?

I don’t want to put words in BMH’s mouth, but one of you, responding to BMH, wondered how he could read Orthodoxy a dozen times if he regarded it as so “hollow.”  I could be wrong, but I feel like I know exactly how he could do that.

The first time I read Orthodoxy, I was astounded at its boldness and its humor, but I always felt I was on the very edge of understanding what Chesterton was saying.  I knew that great minds like Lewis had regarded it as being a very great book.  I knew that Chesterton, along with Thomas Merton (another tough kettle of fish) was regarded as one of the two great non-pope Western Catholic writers of the last century.  So I went back to it a couple years later.  Again, I was even more taken with his deft, bold prose and understood it about 20% more.  By this time, I’d started to read a little more Chesterton, so I had some context.  A couple years ago, I read Orthodoxy for probably the fifth time.  And I had a crashing crisis of confidence.  By this time I’d been around—let me be delicate with this—a few blowhards who, it seemed to me, loved the sounds of their own voice.  Was Chesterton just one of these?  He was so bombastic and he wrote so much (I have his collected works on my Kindle—we’re talking about 200 books) and not everything was so worth reading.

But I went back to Orthodoxy one more time this fall (I’m working on a book in which he might play some small part) and I repented.  This time—maybe I needed six passes at it—every word struck me as genius.  Mysticism? ( As we were talking about last week.)  Chesterton may be the world’s first and only slovenly hard-smoking and drinking mystic.  But, very much on Richard Rohr’s terms and beyond, it seems to me the man is a mystic.  A man of faith firmly ensconced in the larger culture?  He’s perhaps the greatest of these of the last couple hundred years.  A spiritual director?  Orthodoxy, to my mind, has a ton to recommend it on those terms.  A defense of faith from more than a few very unexpected directions?  Check.

I’ve read, multiple times, just about everything CS Lewis ever wrote.  (Okay, I haven’t taken on some of his academic material—A Study in Words, and so on.)  I’m assuming many of you love Lewis.  I defy you to have given more time to Lewis than I have.  And yet, from my current vantage point, I feel like (gulp) I’ve mastered Lewis.  I can’t imagine going back to that well anytime soon. Chesterton?  It’s hard to imagine hitting that point anytime soon.

I’m not sure how to solicit your thoughts here, but, of course, I’d love them if you have any. Clearly if you’ve read Chesterton and have opinions, fire away.  Or if this meditation stirs anything in your of any sort, let’s hear it.

Sex is Very Important. And It's Not So Important.

Thanks for the further clarification from many of you about what you were asking for when you asked for "a Stage 4 take on sex."  If I'm understanding you, your fear is that historic Christian teaching on sex is definitionally stage 2, in that it draws lines; it has a fundamental rule.  (Namely: only have sex with the person you're married to.)  But, some of you expressed, the only other viable option was to drop the conversation entirely, which you characterized as stage 3, because the only reason to drop the conversation would be because you don't want to appear stage 2 (or perhaps don't believe what you understand to be the stage 2 perspective). 

What, you asked, should one say from a stage 4 perspective to people who are in fact spiritually-interested and want to know your opinion?  (This last part was a very helpful clarification, because I couldn't imagine what one would say to a disinterested skeptic, or why one would bring up the subject at all.)

We do talk about sex in the last session of Seek, our ten-week class for spiritually-interested people.  We've had an interesting journey with this particular session.  For awhile, it took over all the other content of that last session (and there's plenty).  It started casually being referred to as "the sex talk."  We've spent many a year trying to hone that message, which we give three times a year in Seek.

Here's what we've learned, such as it is.  One, it doesn't strike me as stage 2 to do one's best to represent the Bible's teaching on something.  We folks who are at least aspiring to stage 4 also read the Bible and, in my case at least, are trying as best we can to obey everything in the Bible.  The key difference, it seems to me, is that in stage 4 we take a lot of interest in why certain things are commanded, not just in what is commanded.

So in our no-longer-regarded-as "the sex talk," what we've mainly found is great interest in the subject.  The pushback we've gotten has never come from doing our best to tackle the subject (we do encourage sex exclusively in marriage), it's only come from subtleties of tone.  As I've mentioned here, Seek is experience-based, not argument-based, so we talk about peoples' experience of sex, both with many partners and with one.  We mention that the Bible, while not being prudish in any way about sex--as the torrid Song of Songs should persuade us--does seem to say that sex is best-designed for one partner.  Why might this be?  We talk about sex as not just a physical and emotional exchange, but perhaps also as a spiritual exchange. The Bible's take seems to be that this exchange, this "becoming one" works just great in a lasting marriage relationship--it continuously reinforces the bond.  Outside of that bond, it seems less helpful and perhaps destructive, as if bonding and separating and bonding and separating and so on actually does have a tearing effect on many people, perhaps all people.  We have stories--largely that we've gleaned from past Seek participants--that validate that.

Then we acknowledge how difficult and perhaps unrealistic that is for many people.  The culture of the Bible assumes arranged marriage at a very young age--mid-teens.  In the modern world of no arranged marriage, as many people move into their thirties and forties and beyond with no marriage partner in sight, that's a very different story. I talk about my own issues on that front, as I married at the ripe old age of 29. We offer some very slim counsel (but counsel nonetheless) for folks in that situation.   We talk about how, if this hasn't been our story, it's by no means the biggest deal in the world, that God is big on working in our lives in just these sorts of places.  And we put this pitch right in the middle of a much larger context of seeing God at work in our lives for a lifetime, so that this--in my experience--no longer gets tagged "the sex talk." 

Sex, indeed, is very important.  It's definitely worth talking about--as the feedback I get from lots of spiritually-seeking people tells me.  But it's just one part of a much bigger picture. 

To my mind, this is plenty stage 4.  It's not a rule.  It is a perspective or, maybe better said, a prescription.

But what do you think?

A Crash Course in Catholic Mysticism

So I’m reading Richard Rohr’s new book, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See.  Many of you have experienced a taste of Rohr by participating in our “book” club (in quotes, because the book in this case was a two-part lecture) a few months back.  (And can I remind you that our current book club will focus on the easy-reading abridgment of Thomas a’Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ that you can find in a book called Christian Classics in Modern English.  We’ll discuss it in about a month, so you still have time to get in on the conversation—and you owe it to yourself to consider what a’Kempis is trying to tell you that no one else will ever tell you, at least this forcefully.)  I like Rohr a lot and have been helped by him just a ton, even though he often seems a little elusive to me.

Also, best as I can figure out, he doesn’t much believe in an active, relational God.  Prayer for him—while central—doesn’t involve either hearing from God or experiencing answered prayer.  So that’s a drawback.

But, for me, Rohr most certainly does capture a part of the conversation we engage in on this blog about as eloquently as anyone.  What we call “Stage 4,” you’ll remember, is characterized as “mystical.”  (For a primer on these stages for those of you following this conversation on Facebook, please visit the buttons at the top of the notreligious.org blog.)  But that forces us to think a bit more deeply about historic mysticism, which Rohr very much does.  He talks about things in ways that Otto, on our blog, has often championed (Rohr, for instance, talks about the problems of the ego—which he asserts equates to what Paul calls “the flesh”).

So, all to say, I’d love to give you a taste of his take on mysticism in The Naked Now.  It might not work.  Maybe you’d have to have read his whole book to understand the snippets I’ll throw your way (these quotes start at page 99).  But the book has made an impression on me.  A good chunk of one of my recent dates with Grace was taken up by processing his arguments (showing what a fun and romantic date I can be—in my defense the evening ended with us seeing the outstanding touring Broadway musical In the Heights).

A little context.  A good part of Rohr’s argument is against classic Enlightenment thinking, which he’d lump into what we’ve called “Stage 2” here.  This is the way of thought that boils down to marshaling arguments.  Liberals demonize conservatives this way, and conservatives return the favor.  This is at the heart of what he regards as a dead end in life and in faith, and it the opposite of the kind of “contemplation” that can lead to what he calls “mysticism.”  (His word for this either/or thinking is “dualism.”)  The opening paragraph below is an eloquent summary of why very educated people who took our version of the Alpha Course rejected its emphasis on argumentation and forced us to reframe the whole thing around experience, which led to creating Seek.  Anyway, lest this become book-length, here’s some Rohr.

As we said before, the human mind prefers to think by comparison and differentiation-from.  It starts as a binary system, something like a computer.  Polarity thinking is unfortunately a self-canceling system, a form of argumentation that merely lets both sides more deeply invest in and identify with their position.  Words can always be fashioned to make our point, and even we know that it is not necessarily objectively or totally true.  Ask any lawyer or judge, or honest husband or wife, if that is not the case.

…Thus most groups divide into liberals and conservatives of some sort, thinking that by defeating the other, they will win.  This appeals to our competitive nature.  The truth, however, is always something other than what one side says about the other.

The creating of false alternatives to force a person into an either-or choice, which can occur even with well-intentioned people, is even more characteristic of hostile or insincere opponents, as we see the enemies of Jesus exemplify.  “Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”  Polarity thinking avoids all subtlety and discrimination and creates false dichotomies.  If you fight dualistic thinkers directly, you are forced to become dualistic yourself.  This is why, classically, Jesus sidesteps the two alternatives by telling a story, keeping silent, or sometimes presenting a third alternative that utterly reframes the false dilemma.

Rohr goes on to talk about how the alternative to dualistic thinking is prayer (of a certain sort), and prayer as a way of life.  What prayer—as he defines it (and, as I’ve said, he and I wouldn’t see eye to eye on this definition, but it doesn’t take away from his upshot)—does for us is it frees us to receive whatever God is giving us in the present moment, in our actual circumstances right now, which is what he calls “the naked now.”  The way we dodge whatever God is trying to teach is in this moment is by living in our heads and fighting our imagined enemies.

I call contemplation the tree of life, as compared to… “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (the latter of which) represents “either-or” dualism, which we are strictly warned against and warned not to eat.  The tree of life promises access to eternal things, grows “crops twelve times a year,” and sprouts “leaves that are for the healing of the nations.”

But living in the full experience of this present moment, as God interprets it (Rohr’s take on contemplation) will leave us in a welter of paradox and inconsistencies in a way that we can dodge by rushing to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The tree of life, like actual life, calls us to hold tensions, which people hate to do.

It is agreeing to live without resolution, at least for awhile.  This is very difficult… largely because we have not been taught how to do this mentally or emotionally.  …I think this… is the very definition of faith.  But faith in Christianity largely became believing things to be true or false (faith as intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another source (Iove).  …We must move from a belief-based religion to a practice-based religion, or little will change.  We will merely continue to argue about what we are supposed to believe and who the unbelievers are.  …When you are concerned with either attacking or defending, manipulating or resisting, pushing or pulling, you cannot be contemplative.  When you are preoccupied with enemies, you are always dualistic.  …In most cases, you become a mirror image of both what you oppose and what you love (see Ephesians 5:14).

So.  This may be abstract.  But for those of you who’ve made it this far, I’m very interested in your reactions to what you pick up from these thoughts from Rohr.  At the risk of suppressing discussion, one pushback I’d like to forestall is a pushback that he’s anti-intellectual (because we can’t imagine a thinking person that doesn’t spend their whole life marshaling arguments).  He’s not.  He’s the very picture of an intellectual, in many ways, for better or worse.

That said, how do you respond to this?  Is this appealing?  Is this unappealing?  How so?

A Centered-Set Approach to Talking about Sex with Our Secular Friends?

In our two discussions last week of monogamy, there was a lot of traction in talking about how useful or not the approaches we were throwing out would be as we talked about sex with our secular friends--all, presumably, who were having unmarried sex or wanted to.  Were the terms of the conversation we were proposing--which took a whimsical approach to a traditional take on monogamy--pretty darn bounded-set, despite our professed ideals?  If so, maybe this was necessary, some hazarded.  Switching to the other central metaphor we often discuss here: if our secular friends are Stage 1 in this area, maybe we have to take a Stage 2 approach.  But, perhaps dissonantly, I'd pitched the approach under discussion as Stage 4.  Seriously?  Seemed pretty line-drawing to some of us.

I found myself mildly baffled in some of our exchanges, realizing that I must be having very different conversations with my secular friends than many of you are.  (Being 47 with five kids might explain some of those differences, to be sure.)  But my assumption is that I'd have no comment whatsoever about my secular friends' sex life.  It truly would never cross my mind to hazard an opinion.  Unless, I suppose, they were openly unhappy about their relationships and brought up a vulnerable conversation with me.  Then I cuold imagine using exactly Chesterton's approach, which talks not about right or wrong, but about consequences--of finding a life with more wonder or less wonder.

But it sounds like many of you are in very different conversatins that I'm in.  Can you tell me a bit more about those conversations?

Sex as Fairy Tale?

Okay, so we're hop-scotching a bit here.  Let's talk how a good God could allow suffering!  Let's talk monogamy!  Let's return to the former!  And now let's return to the latter.  There's a crazy logic here which, since it's crazy, I'm not sure I actually understand.  But, back to "A Stage 4 Take on Monogamy?" from Wednesday.

As always, great conversation from you all about monogamy.  The consensus seemed to be, if I can make a blunt generalization, yes, monogamy is the way to go.  But how to convincingly make that case to callow young secular people is no easy task.  Is married sex "better" in any demonstrable way?  I was especially struck by the power and vulnerability of Chip's comment:

Monogamy (usually by way of marriage) can bring two families together in a meaningful way. I remember as a child of a single mom it was tough for me to connect with her boyfriends because I always assumed they'd be out the door sooner or later. A good man who committed to her, I might have been able to have a real relationship with a man like that.

I'm tempted to punt back to the Chesterton quote we started with for a moment.  To revisit it, he said (in Orthodoxy):

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.  …Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.  It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.  …A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.

 
This comment came as a part of a larger (and delightful) argument about why fairy tales are the bottom-line truths of the universe.  In fairy tales, there's always one strange, seemingly arbitrary prohibition, says Chesterton--you'll inherit the kingdom if you don't see a cow before morning, or some such thing.  That arbitrary prohibition matches well with our experience of the universe, says Chesterton.  The world isn't strictly logical, but there's a wonder to it that's easy to miss, a wonder which fairy tales reawaken in us.  And that speaks to the fundamental truths of these stories.  The strange prohibition (you'll have perfect happiness and rule over the whole earth unless you eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, say) has something to say to the sense of strangeness and danger that the world holds.

So, to I'm sure oversimplify Chesterton, this is what he's pitching about sex.  There's a wonderment and strangeness about sex.  And there's one prohibition--it's made for one partner.  Violate the prohibition and, as in a good fairy story, the kingdom is lost.

 
Now we can certainly push back, and please feel free to.  Is married sex in fact, by definition, full of wonderment and strangeness?  For decades?  When we read about Warren Beatty's alleged 12,500 sex partners (as a recent bio of him alleges), is there any sense in which we could envy such a life?  Heck, evidently the man is irresistible!  That in itself would be fun to experience even for a day.  Maybe there was a kind of wonder and delight in his sexual experience that we one-sex-partner people could know not of.  Who are we to say?

But Chesterton would categorically deny this as even possible.  To him, the strange and wild adventure in life is in what he casts as "Orthodoxy."  Everything else is a pale and desperate copy.
 
So that would argue for finding the wonder and strangeness in married sex as a lifelong, thrilling quest. 

It would not, I don't believe, have anything to say to those of us for whom such a quest is now not possible.  In his world, I think he'd say that we have great promise in healing and new life via Jesus.  But he would pitch that we'd be fools not to shoot for this particular fairy tale.

Thoughts?  Does that frame of reference work for you?

No, Seriously, Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Thanks for all your comments over the last two days, and I could well imagine we'll get back to the monogamy subject shortly.  Very thoughtful comments!

A couple of you pushed back on my Haiti post that merely saying that "why" God allows suffering is the wrong question doesn't get us far enough.  Wrong question or no, it is a question that begs an answer, you said.  And it's a question that Greg Boyd, whom I championed in the previous post, does in fact try to answer.  So perhaps we can hazard a few more words there.

A couple of thoughts.  For reasons I'll detail below, I'm still sold that the best thing to be said is that it's the wrong question, that comfort and God are not to be found in the question.  And I remain sold that that's by and large the position the scriptures I mentioned (Job and Jesus on the Tower of Siloam) take.  But, as you point out, this is not the only thing that can be said.

Why is there suffering in the world?  If you'll forgive the small-scale crudity, in my world the most-compelling answer is "because shit happens."  That is clearly a reality of our world, and an important one.  Every time something hard happens to us or someone we love, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that we were well aware for most of our lives that truly hideous things were happening in the world to other people, and we still seemed to be able to function.  Now that that bad stuff has happened to us, perhaps it's not time to reopen the question, but to move forward with God as helpfully as possible.

Now is saying that shit happens the same thing as, in theological terms, saying that (a) the Fall pretty much spoiled things forever by letting sin and suffering into the world and that, until the new heaven and new earth, those things are realities that aren't going anywhere? or (b) that, as Jesus says, the devil is "the god of this world?"  Yes and yes, it seems to me.  Yes.  Absolutely.  That does describe the world we live in.  Now, for some people, this is no comfort on any number of levels.  Isn't God more powerful than the devil?  And how then can we praise God in all circumstances, when we've now established that pain, suffering, sin, evil and brokenness don't come from God, but from the devil? 

To my mind, the way we get around those things is by recognizing that understanding the deepest realities in the universe is very helpful, but not the bottom line in faith.  "Doubting" Thomas is a hero to our modern sensibilities, but Jesus assesses him by saying, "Blessed are those who believe without seeing."  I think there's profound wisdom here.  We praise God, in this world-view, because whatever is happening to us, God is alive, present to us, and loves us.  And maybe he'll offer us some concrete help.

I've been reading some more on mysticism and contemplation (thanks to our old friend Richard Rohr and his new book The Naked Now) and one of the big pitches there is that mysticism embraces paradox and mystery while our either/or selves lean towards a sort of cut-and-dried approach to life that limits our ability to connect with God or even truly enjoy our day as a gift from God.  I'm sold, but I recognize that not everyone will happily go there with me.

Here's more from our friend GK Chesterton on this perspective:

Imagination does not breed insanity.  Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.  Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.  …To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything is a strain.  The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in.  The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens.  It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head.  And it is his head that splits. 

I'm with Chesterton on that perspective, but, again, maybe it's an acquired taste.

(Boyd, by the way, continues his argument by pitching a position that's gotten him a whole lot of pushback, called "open theism."  His take, if I can represent it from memory, is, first, that the world is characterized by spiritual battle, hence his call for us to fight evil and suffering rather than work especially hard to understand it.  So, for him, yes, it's the devil who's to blame for these things.  He goes on to argue (again, if memory serves) that God has self-limited so that he's watching events unfold as are we all, that God has to adapt to changing circumstances every bit as much as we do.  It's that part that's gotten him the pushback, but I find it very easy to read his books, accepting that premise and seeing where Boyd wants to take us.)

How helpful do you find the "why is there suffering?" answers? 

 

A Stage 4 Take on Monogamy?

A common question from people I talk to who are exploring faith is why the Bible has restrictions on sex.  I, of course, like each of you, do have things to say in reply to this.  But, while I'm in a "quote great dead writers" space, as per last week's post on fame, here's a take from GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy (a book I'd recommend reading and re-reading), who often has a memorable turn of phrase that might nudge us a Stage-4-ish direction.

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself.  …Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman.  To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.  It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking.  …A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. 

How does that sit with you?

Why Did God Allow Haiti's Earthquake?

There's an impressive amount of theologizing about Haiti's earthquake happening in the larger culture.  Last week the New York Times published an editorial called "Haiti's Angry God" in which an American aid worker took the Haitians she works with to task for praying during the post-quake fallout.  To her mind, they should ask harder questions about a God that would have allowed such suffering to their country.

The estimable Lisa Miller, who writes Newsweek's "On Belief" blog dealt with similar theological questions, giving the final word to Bart Ehrmann, a theologian who once believed in God until abandoning faith when he couldn't answer why God would allow suffering.

We see many Haitians praying, despite all.  I heard a National Public Radio piece last week from Haiti in which the professional man being interviewed was asked by the interviewer what he wanted their listeners to do.  Pray for Haiti, was his answer, and I was impressed that they didn't edit that out.

And one famous American preacher has weighed in on why the quake happened, suggesting that Haiti's voodoo and devil-worshiping past is reaping its reward.

For what it's worth, I think the Bible is clear that, at least, the last perspective is off-track.  The heart of the great biblical book on suffering--Job--critiques Job's false friends who are determined to figure out why Job is suffering.  It's as if they can't live in the tension of seeing someone else suffer without establishing that somehow the sufferer deserved their suffering, so we, the onlookers, are safe.  It won't happen to us.

There's a direct parallel in Luke.  Jesus is told about a tower (the Tower of Siloam) that has fallen on and killed eighteen people, and he's asked who sinned that such a thing happen.  His point?  That's the wrong question.  In John 9, we're told about a man born blind, and, again, Jesus is asked whose sin caused this disability.  And, again, he says that's the wrong question.

The best thing I've read on this subject is Gregory Boyd's God at War.  Boyd says that it's our Greek influence that makes us need answers to suffering and evil.  The issue, he says, isn't intellectually figuring out evil.  That will lead to two bad outcomes: torment (as Bart Ehrmann discovered) and complacency.  To Boyd, the world is a thick spiritual battle.  When we confront suffering and evil, our task is not to analyze the suffering and evil, it's to fight it.  To fight it spiritually.  To work for justice and compassion. 

Some years back, one of our daughters was near-death for some months.  Many, many people prayed for her and her condition improved to the point that she was healed.  A doctor on her ward was so impressed that she contacted the science and faith reporter for a major national magazine, who interviewed us.  He asked us why we thought our daughter had gotten sick, given that we were pastors and presumably godly people.  Now it's not that we hadn't entertained that question.  Had we been spiritually targeted because we were trying to work for God in a spiritually-dark place?  But, in the end, our answer was that we didn't ask why, that we had enough problems without asking for that kind of torment.  Why us?  Well, why all those other families on the NICU at Children's Hospital?  Maybe they weren't pastors, but had they done something to "deserve" having a horribly sick child? 

The question, it seems to me, is--as the Bible reiterates and Gregory Boyd talks about so powerfully--the wrong one.  "Why" never offered anyone any comfort, any power or any answers.  What offers comfort and power is God.

So let's not over-analyze "why God allowed" Haiti's earthquake.  Let's not demonize the Haitians as having somehow caused their unimaginable suffering.  Let's, instead, do exactly what so many Haitians are asking for.  Let's pray for Haiti, offer aid to Haiti, maybe offer ourselves to Haiti.

What do you think?

Let's Talk a Bit More about Fame

Thanks for any prayers you've offered for Haiti.  If you're one of our locals, we'll be taking an offering for Haiti this Sunday.

I'd like to revisit our fame conversation just a bit, and it suggests another reading project for our friendly blog.  I don't believe we'll be reading the Religionless Christianity book together.  I did read it and was challenged by it, but it still struck me as being perhaps not entirely on topic for us.  I've asked Caleb Maskell, who'd mentioned it, to review it for us, and he says he'll get to that in February. 

But the start of our conversation about the a'Kempis and Pascal quotes on fame does suggest a very worthy book club selection to me.  One of the most valuable books I've ever read on faith in Jesus is a contemporary abridgment of Thomas a'Kempis' The Imitation of Christ.  It's one of three abridgments in a collection called Christian Classics in Modern English.  (The other two that come with it are The Practice of the Presence of God and The Confessions of St. Augustine.)  While the other two have much to recommend them, this book's take on a'Kempis is, to my mind, revolutionary in its impact on a modern person of faith.  NO ONE (have I given that enough emphasis?) talks today like a'Kempis does and, to my mind, these are words that we need to hear.  This abridgment was out of print for many years (when our church was growing at a dizzying rate a few years back, we briefly considered trying to buy the rights to the a'Kempis section of the book from the publisher and publishing it ourselves, which should tell you something about the regard many of us have for this), but it's back--and only $9.99 new at Amazon, with used copies starting at $0.06.  If I can add one more incentive: as of a few years ago I was told that The Imitation of Christ was the bestselling book in history apart from the Bible.  So here's your chance (a) to feel like a literate person while reading a (very good) Cliff Notes version of a great but difficult book, (b) to feel a part of our larger blog conversation and (c) if I'm right, to receive the sort of spiritual feeding that's flat biblical but which no one else will teach you.  Who's with me?!  (Seriously, use the comments section to say if you're planning to do this.)  I'd think we'd talk about it here in about a month.

In terms of the comments on fame, I do have a favorite, if I can choose between comments each of which I love like children.  It was DJ Sybear's:

Wouldn't the desire for fame be worse than fame itself? Isn't that the point of the quotes above?

In different terms, one could say that the desire for fame is the desire to be at the center of a set: a set of people, a set of ideas, a set of values. To be famous is to be the object of others' desires; to desire to be famous is the vain, foolish seeking of power, of the world as one's own stage, to be desired above others, and at worst, to be desired above all others.

I mean, isn't this essentially the cautionary tale we tell about Lucifer?

Yes, that is a strongly-stated version of the biblical point of view, as I understand it.  Fame in the Bible gets reduced to living "for the praise of men," a bad thing to do.  Check out Jesus's words in the Sermon on the Plain: "Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets." (Luke 6:26)  He says that the Pharisees fast not for the spritual benefits of fasting, but for fame, so everyone will regard them as awesome religious people.

This struck me as an interesting post to run, because fame, one could argue, is the modern equivalent to eternal life, though it certainly has roots in ancient cultures where warriors hoped to die in the kind of brave deed in which their fame would be forever sung by bards.  Those, just to note, were pagan cultures.

And yet most Westerners, myself included, have to wrestle with their desire for fame.  We all have the lack of ego strength that wants that kind of validation.  I have a vivid memory of a Christian high school friend of mine (I was an atheist at the time) musing, "I want to be famous, because what else is the point of life?"  While I could empathize with the sentiment, I found myself wondering if he was listening to himself.  The CHRISTIAN was saying that to me, the atheist? 

So, if not fame, what then IS the point of life?  Why is "lust for fame" commonly regarded as abandonment of the faith in historic Christendom? 

Again, I empathize.  I spent about a decade in the low-level professional theatre world, where everybody wants fame--that's why you're there.  I've published a book with a real, no-kidding publisher who has, in fact, published the occasional mega-seller.  Do I want to have my praises sung as their biggest star?  Who wouldn't? 

And yet I go back to DJ's pointed comments.  Lucifer wanted to be sung of.  Jesus has many an encouragement towards impact, towards huge faith, towards big risk.  Many of his followers have, in fact, achieved immortal worldly fame--albeit after they were crucified upside-down, as we're told Peter was.  On the road to that crucifixion, I can't picture Peter preoccupied with the local equivalent of Q-scores. 

As alluring as being loved and celebrated by all is, if you'll forgive the strength of my sentiment, you want a hell of a lot more than fame.  You want the kind of impact that comes through persistent obedience to Jesus and the dreams he's brought your way--through pain and rejection and setback AND through success and encouragement and answered prayer. 

But do let's read a'Kempis together.  If he doesn't give you food for thought, I'll be very, very surprised.

Thoughts?

Pray for Haiti

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Hey gang. I've been in San Antonio this week, talking with some great folks here about many of the things this blog community talks about, and it's been great. I return to Boston tonight and I'll look forward to picking up the thread of our "fame" post the next time I get a moment. Thanks for your provocative comments. But, if I may, I'd love to enlist your prayers for Haiti. I'm sure you've heard about yesterday's catastrophic earthquake there, in a country without the infrastructure to handle such a thing--if any country could. I feel a particular sorrow about this, because our church is in a Haitian neighborhood (the previous small Catholic church that met in our building was Haitian), so many fiends are contacting me and others in our community asking for prayers, alerting us to the impending major relief needs, and asking for help in locating relatives. I'm confident that any prayers you'd like to offer would be regarded as a strong showing of friendship indeed. And we'll continue our previous conversation soon.

Discontented Contentment?

I've been in many conversations the last few days with some very motivated people of faith who, in their motivation, struggle with day to day happiness.  Some of them have seen really encouraging things happen through them, yet still can't quite rest in that, because they have faith for a lot more.

A week or so ago, I talked with some folks about two seemingly-disconnected things: (1) "dying daily" in the sense that Jesus talks about, which seems to tie into putting to death things that make us miserable in hopes that something much better might be resurrected, and then (2) living in great faith for the things we feel God has put on our heart.  Those two things both seem very important and yet at odds--do we "die" to things we care about in hopes of their resurrection, or do we pray for them with as much faith as we can until they're ripped from our dead, lifeless fingers?

Some of these friends have made it clear that they wouldn't want a certain sort of contentment that would make them fat, happy and unmotivated.  But I've met far too many passionate, miserable people in life to wish that on anyone.

One theologian, some years back, talked about the power of "discontented contentment," as if that's what we all should be shooting for.  What's your thought?  How do you navigate these things that can seem so crucial and yet hard to experience simultaneously?

Do You Want to Be Famous?

I've been collecting quotes of interest for a novel I'm very slowly working on, and one of the fun things has been finding relevant quotes for my characters from thinkers like Thomas a' Kempis and Blaise Pascal. 

One of the stakes of my book concerns becoming famous, and I find these two quotes from the authors mentioned to be pretty punchy and provocative.

The praise of the world is short-lived and always accompanied by sorrow.  …Anyone who goes looking for stardom and does not count fame unimportant reveals little fondness for heavenly things.  …You are not a better person because you are praised; neither are you any worse if somebody denigrates you.  You are what you are.  Words can’t change that.  Thomas a’ Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek [worldly] greatness; that is most remarkable.  Blaise Pascal, Pensee 16.

How do you respond to these quotes?  Do you hope to be famous? 

Can Being "Godless" Strangely Bring Us Closer to God? / Steven Hamilton

I'd like to ask this brilliant blog community for a little help, or at least your thoughts on something I have been pondering.  You see, I heard it again last Sunday in a church service, and it made me feel kind of guilty again...kind of blamed for something I have no real control over. In most churches I have attended, they have proclaimed that it is a shame that I was raised in such a secular culture and have no grid for the "supernatural" like tribal people from other places...and yet I have been struck by this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Prison letters, from 18 July 1944:

 

"When we speak of God in a 'non-religious' way, we must speak of him in such a way that the godlessness of this world is not in some way concealed, but rather revealed, and thus exposed to an unexpected light.  The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age."

 

I have been contemplating this quote from Bonhoeffer for a few weeks, after beginning my way through Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times by Jeffrey Pugh (which was recommended in the comments in a recent post here at Not the Religious Type).  The prison setting for this quote was one where, near the end of his life, Bonhoeffer is writing to a friend about his thoughts for writing a book - or series of books - on something he referred to as 'religionless christianity' in a secular world that has 'come of age'.  But it's this last sentence that has been haunting me lately: "The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age." 

 

What could this possibly mean, considering the fact that we westerners - or at least me, myself and I - have been shamed by 'the religious' for being overly 'secular-ized' by a non-supernatural cultural paradigm, where our truths are based in science and not 'the supernatural' [this is just fact even in American Christianity - have you noticed that your typical 'Christian' bookstore has a whole section about 'God and Science' or proving God via scientific exploration?  It seems to be a growth industry in 'Christian literature and apologetics'].  Is this some sort of Kierkegaard-esque statement that the more godless we are, the less encumbered we are by religious culture - a kind of clearing of the religious haze - so as to see and know God more freely?  Or perhaps even being more secular helps to get the 'knowing about God' out of the way in order to actually relate to and 'know God'?  What is it about a godless, secular world 'come of age' that Bonhoeffer thinks brings people closer to God?  I would appreciate all of your thoughts on this....thanks!

A Tragic Lesson in Thinking Before We Speak?

I'm not sure what moral I'd like to draw from this story in Monday's New York Times.  It details the consequences of three American evangelical preachers visiting Uganda and leading fiery meetings with the theme that gays have a evil plan to destroy families.  Their message took.  As a result, legislation was introduced in Uganda, which apparently has some chance of passing, that homosexuality be punishable by hanging.  All three evangelists, when contacted by the Times, said something to the effect of, "Well, that's taking our message too far."  Rick Warren had preached some years back in Uganda something to a similar effect, but with less fireworks.  He too has disavowed the Ugandan response.

Perhaps my question is to ask whether those of us pursuing faith can be too quick to identify the enemies of all that is good, to, as it were, draw lines.  Maybe this story just seems like, to go back to my rhetoric roots, reductio ad absurdum on this point.

And maybe I'm pointing out straw men.  Clearly this is as extreme a case as you'll find.  And good things could be said for drawing lines--most thought requires one to say, "I'm talking about x, I'm not talking about y."  But this does seem like a morality tale playing itself out before us.

How does it strike you?

Do We Undervalue Unanswered Prayer?

Dan Littauer let me know that the blog Daylight Atheism ran a post on the "napkin stories" in Not the Religious Type, taking them to task because people of faith count the "hits" in prayer while ignoring the "misses."  So there's an illusion of regularly answered prayer that's not backed up by the facts. 

What do you think about that?  I guess a couple of things stand out to me.  One, I'm well aware of unanswered prayer (had they kept reading in the book, there was a chapter on that along with a number of passing comments).  So I have theories of how to think about that.  But maybe more impressive to me is the existence of answered prayer at all.  Any person of faith will indeed need to figure this one out or no one would ever pray.  But that such encouraging stories do in fact happen with some--to the person involved--meaningful connection to their prayers strikes me as wonderful.  If the person in question regards something as an answered prayer, from my position, who are we to quibble with them?

But that leads me to my second thought, which is that I have no hope of persuading a hostile observer that any prayer is ever answered, because perspective plays a big role in that interpretation.  If one is not inclined to concede the possibility of an answer to prayer, I'm not sold that even God would have the ability to arm-twist a concession.

So I think of stories like one from awhile back.  A young man, exploring faith, comes to a small group I'm leading.  He complains that he's had persistent gut pain for several days and will be seeing a doctor that next morning.  With no warning, I go Oral Roberts on him, putting my hand on his stomach and saying, "Be healed in Jesus' name."  He looks up and says, "The pain is gone!"  It remains gone.  He decides to follow Jesus.  Now was that an answer to prayer?  On the surface, one could make a case for it.  Maybe his days-long pain cured itself in the split-second that I prayed.  Or maybe some powerful psychosomatic effect kicked in.  (Though I'd still regard the "it's psychosomatic" explanation as a powerful argument for praying for people.  If your or my prayer can produce a powerful psychosomatic effect that will heal diseases, we should be praying all the time.)  Clearly the experience persuaded him--he decided to follow Jesus in the aftermath.  But could I (or he) persuade the most-skeptical observer?  ...The most skeptical observer?  I'd think not.  But could we persuade someone with no axe to grind in the question?  That might be a different story (if such a mythical person could be found).

Now I've prayed for lots more people who haven't had such a salutary result, which goes to the blogger's point.  But I think that's another question.  It doesn't--to my mind--say that when we do feel we experience an answer to prayer we should deny our own inclinations.

Your thoughts?