The Future of Christianity – Kind Of
Between all the conversations and other events that have been happening this weekend, I’ve been trying to reflect on the conversations I shared on Saturday. I was invited a few weeks ago to participate in a small gathering and discussion within walking distance of my home (gotta love Portland) that was called “The Future of Christianity”. In reality the title didn’t seem to fit the discussion but I believe the title was taken from a short video we watched to spawn discussion points. The video is a discussion primarily between two philosopher/theologians who I’m actually somewhat familiar with, though have had little more time in the past than to skim a book or two. The men in the video were Ken Wilbur and Thomas Keating, both very brilliant in their individual, yet complimentary ways.
The video talked much about Wilbur’s integral theory of consciousness, which is basically a way of describing paradigms in relation to spirituality and culture. There’s a certain incremental spectrum he uses for illustration which is rather inconsequential to my thoughts here other than to say the idea raises eyebrows (among the company in attendance) over its linear nature. In other words, it suggest a linear progression of what we commonly might think of as enlightenment, and doesn’t seem to offer room for the particular values in the categorizations it places at its lower levels. Some of these devalued categories include things like mysticism and ethnocentrism. Its true that these exhibit negative qualities in many contexts but to place them linearly as inferior values seems arrogant and rash.
Anyway, my point is not to explain the theories. (Which by the way really are rather interesting and aptly named by Wilbur in one of his books, A Theory Of Everything. Quite the title huh?) What struck me most about the day was the connections shared between participants, which in a community like this, seems to be as intentional as the discussion itself. Not only was I able to attend with two close friends, but upon arrival, I discovered that the event was something much different from the emergent church exercise I had the impression it would be. Not only did the age range have a great span but so did the particular positions held within the faiths. Not only were there representatives from many Christian denominations but there were also present (intentionally included) people from the Jewish and Islamic faiths.
Bringing together people of many faiths offers differing perspectives which is invaluable in itself and turns the imagined world of different people into a real one. At its core, the purpose of the discussion was simply discussion and to find familiarity and common ground between a diversity of cultures. At the discussion it often carried the name, the commonality of virtue. There was no problem to fix or solution to compromise on. It was simply to understand and share mutual existence. That is something most of us are good at talking about but not so good at finding in reality. In reflecting on the experience with my friend Joel, we realized that really, this was a unique moment in time, and a surreal and blessed one at that.
I’m still processing the experience even now, even beyond the great conversations we shared among beautiful souls during the day. I posted a series of quotables to my twitter throughout the event, which spawned a bit of conversation on my facebook in particular. I’d like to expand some more on some of those thoughts, particularly ones by Thomas Keating as well as the event organizer, Chuck Cooper, but will save those for a later post.
More Like Pharisees
..how is it that Jesus was a magnet for prostitutes and tax collectors – the two most despised classes of sinners in Jesus’ day – while the Church repels these types of people, just as the Pharisees did? The answer, I submit, is as inescapable as it is challenging. The Church, as a whole, is simply more like the Pharisees than it is like Jesus.
- Greg Boyd (via)
Also, this and this and this is a great rundown of Greg Boyd’s philosophy and book, The Myth Of A Christian Nation, if you’re interested. I’m a fan. The essay is a long read, but quite good.
I’ve conversed quite a bit recently, mostly internally, on the idea of church in general. Much of it references the distinction between the church and the Church, between the general idea of those who follow Christ’s teaching and the Pharisaic institution that the organized religion became long ago. I’m appreciative of all those who’ve offered their insight and stories on the matter, and have been willing to examine the issue with me.
Greg Boyd’s essay, The Religionless Church Of The Future, from which the quote above comes, offers an accurate illustration of the same religiosity that frustrates me. In much of my sorting out the pieces and remembering that Love applies as much to religiously ignorant people as it does to anyone, the only peace I continue to find is not the divorce of a system included in “the world” but willing marginalization.
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More:
- Posts about the Church as an institution (1, 2)
- More on this blog about Greg Boyd
- A quote by Wendell Berry
- More on the Journey To Love
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More On The Church
I feel my last article about the Church, which began with a lengthy (and dense) quote from Tolstoy, ended on a bad note. Or perhaps not completely bad, just incomplete. I’ve been holding a small discussion with some of my closest conversationalists on the issue, and attempting to iron out more precisely for myself where I believe the proper place is for a non-church-attender to stand on the issue. Or more precisely, what form my tone should take on the issue. I hope to be posting some of the highlights of that discussion in the near future, particularly after I’ve allowed my own thoughts on the matter to become more clear.
All this to say that it is incomplete, though my friend Stephen posted this link on Twitter earlier today, and I found it quite honest, calm, and relatable, more or less what the shape of my tone should, perhaps, be in love.
The article isn’t dead-on with how I feel, but I believe we share many honest sentiments.
Here’s a few lines I pulled from the article:
Periodically on this journey we may go through times when we can’t seem to find any other believers who share our hunger. That’s especially true for those who find that conforming to the expectations of the religious institutions around them diminishes their relationship with Jesus.
Scripture does encourage us to be devoted to one another not committed to an institution.
I make no secret of the fact that I am deeply troubled by the state of organized Christianity. Most of what we call ‘church’ today are nothing more than well-planned performances with little actual connection between believers. Believers are encouraged toward a growing dependency on the system or its leadership rather than on Jesus himself.
Most of us on the journey are accused of being divisive because freedom can be threatening to those who find their security in a religious system.
On Poverty And Prosperity
I dislike the term “rethink” because it is so in tune with the fashionable Emergent movement which claims as its mission to “rethink the way we do church”. Not unlike the hundreds of Christian sectarian movements that came before it.
Last month I posted a short article asking if we should reconsider how we define poverty, as it seems contradictory for Christ to have defined it as a state of material possession. I am now more resolute in the opinion that we should define poverty not by material possessions or income bracket, but by oppression, disrespect, pain, and fear. Is it not obvious that those who embrace low income willingly often find more contentment? Does the classic cliche of “money doesn’t buy happiness” not apply?
Despite my distaste for it, the term “rethink” does seem to fit this circumstance because it suggests that we take a closer look at how we normally perceive poverty and prosperity.
On Religious Foundations and Non-Conformity
The following is an abbreviated exchange between myself and Mike from subversivechurch. It followed my brief comments regarding Contradiction and Surrender. I love conversing with both Mike and Chris from subversivechurch, and would urge you, if you appreciate the more in-depth subject matter of my blog, to also frequent their blog at subversivechurch.wordpress.com.
Mike:
When we think something is proven or truth, then we start to build upon it, start to form our worldview around it as a foundation. Obviously if this truth turns out to be not truth, then we either tear down what we have built on said truth or we defend what we have built on said truth.
I think we can safely say that many people try to defend their religion, especially if it is being questioned. But it is exactly such a defense that starts things like the crusades, the moral majority and all sorts of other manmade atrocities carried out in the name of God.
Amos:
Very true. Would you say it is instincts of defense that lead us to transform defensive action into oppressive action when power is grasped and our accustomed comfort or authority is challenged?
Actually that was a rhetorical question, I think I know what you would answer.
Mike:
Actually, for those who see opposition as a threat to power, yes. I would say that many, rather hope that many, of the early church leaders were trying to consolidate Christianity. After years and centuries of oppression and martyrdom, it is very understandable to see why the acceptance of Christianty into the political arena would have been welcome and even seen as the product of all the suffering of past generations.
But it doesn’t make it right. So like our leaders in the mainstream church today, they defend their system, but are doing so based on good intentions. I have several friends who are pastors and do not see any deviousness in their plans for their church. It has to be the same with the leaders of old. But it is unfortunate they can’t be more flexible and organic. And really, it is ok to stick with a certain way of doing things, as long as one has an understanding that things may change, and it is ok if they change. But when people start to defend their way as the only way, then they are no better than those using power for more sinister means.
Why? Because it stifles the Holy Spirit.
Amos:
Right, good intentions doesn’t equate to good systems. What is most unfortunate is when defenders of the consolidated, expansionist pseudo-faith cannot even consider their direction. Its one thing to not realize what Mother Culture is always whispering in our ear- the many types of mass behavior that she whispers. But it is another when ideas are suggested and far from being even considered. Do accepters of the subtle lies of Mother Culture think non-conformists are only trying to get personal attention? As though they all have un-pure intentions? What is it about conformity and mass behavior that intoxicates us? Or is it little more than a symptom of a greater lust, or a greater brokenness?
We all have at least somewhat good intentions, or at least all of those relevant ( hate that word ) to the circumstances I’m describing. I’m trying to understand why its so much easier to not understand, dismiss, and sometimes even demonize another’s ideas when it only takes a little honesty to realize that we’re all looking for the same thing. One of my favorite lyricists puts it well: “Brother have you found, the great peace we all seek?”
We’re scared of whats different. I suppose thats describing again the circumstance in the previous paragraph. These are all symptoms, I guess, or ways to describe the symptoms of something larger. Something I’m trying to find a word for. I would say “fallenness”, but that is to vague for my satisfaction.
Mike:
You are right about non-conformity being a scary place. It is also at times a lonely place, which is why you see non-conformists talking about community as well. If it were not for my wife and kids, Chris would be my only community. There are a few, but thankfully growing number of people I have met online who, if I had no one here, I would pick up and move to be closer to for the sake of sanity and community. Yet, my faith in God has taken me this far and I can not go back to my starting point. Following Christ is an almost immediate step past the point of no return. Because we live in a society that considers itself christian, this point is not something readily visible or understood or taught. Bonhoeffer quotes Luther about taking community for granted. I find much solace in their words.
Also, the idea of being wrong is another big deterrence from stepping out in non-conformity. Looking like, or even worse, being proven a fool is too much for most people. It was something I struggled with for many years. When you see so many heading the opposite way of your non-conformist thoughts, those thoughts are chalked up as wrong or from the devil.
This is exactly why Chris and I blog. We hope that those who have those nagging thoughts that something should be, must be different, but are scared to follow them to fruition read of our journey, our thoughts and see that we are both confident and a little unsure and there is hope.
Ripening Like The Tree
Several days a week during my lunch break, and several days a week after work, I find myself on the couches or at the bar at Ground Coffee Shop across from my office reading a book and spending time with my friends there. (The same coffee shop I hung my photography in last month) I do this in order to be around people I know, and because going home after work makes it easy to get distracted doing something else.
This is where I found myself this evening and my friend, Moriah, who works at Ground, asked me a question who’s answer I’m not sure I’ve ever put into words before. She asked why I read so much. Sometimes I forget that I suppose it is, relatively speaking, more than most.
My answer consisted of something likely more vague than I would have liked and resembled a reason surrounding the knowledge of my miniscule perspective and a desire to consume my mind with a world bigger than myself. I was reading Rilke at the moment, and lo and behold, five minutes later read a section of his Letters to a Young Poet that I could not help but attach to my own otherwise inarticulate answer. Rilke said:
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the un-conscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.
And less than a paragraph later, he also added:
Being an artist means, not reckoning and not counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.
What more could I say to add to this? Were Rilke still alive today, I think we would be pals. He was, after all, born in Prague, which is the general vicinity of where the Lanka family immigrated from. He probably knew my family.
Cheers to Mo’ and her ironic question.
Neutral Presentation Of Christianity
Bradley R. E. Wright had a great small article on his blog about the tendency in academia to remain biased against Christianity as a religion, even in situations where objectivity is blatantly being destroyed. I of course had no problem noticing the trend back when I was in college, but had no clear way to articulate or address the issue then.
My comment in reply to Bradley’s blog was to mention that “Academia’s best course is objectivity, allowing listeners/viewers to decide for themselves. The sort of psuedo-academic issues (I say psuedo because it seems that academic would rely on objectivity) have for so long been mixed up with personal opinions that it seems much of academia has forgotten what objectivity is.”
I’m rather of the opinion that this is among the many indicators of the individualization of our culture.
I thought it a good idea to bring this conversation here to my blog, but please check out Bradley’s blog, its littered with excellent observations and true objectivity.
Contradiction And Surrender
There are times when I am ridiculously idealistic, and others when I refuse anything but pragmatism. It seems so contradictory in observance, but no less when compared to the standard perspective I recognize myself as having, one that in many ways doesn’t make it an absolute priority to remove supposedly contradictory ideas or feelings from my belief system. Speaking of feelings, I suppose it is most often that its our feelings that make us feel contradictory. Just today, this guy left a comment on a previous post saying “all i want in life is to agree with myself”. I think thats how we feel a lot of times- as though everything within us contradicts what we thought we knew. Our journeys through life give us new perspectives that may or may not be congruent with our prior vision of the world.
I feel as though I have discovered release from at least some of that frustration. This comes not from a tightening of the demands I place on my own understandings, but rather a remembering how foggy this world is. This world is like looking through a lens that is scratched, fogged, unfocused, and sometimes even pointed in the wrong direction. But I can find peace in that, because I can find peace in Grace. I can find peace in the small pieces of the puzzle I find daily or the glimpses of truth that remind me of the beauty and the depravity to which I cling.
Maybe our purpose in life isn’t to have it all figured out.
Maybe our purpose in life isn’t suppose to be free of contradiction.
What is poetry without irony?
What is beauty without contrast?
What is life without death?
What if the full culmination of this surrender comes naturally when the right circumstances are at hand, when all the while we’ve been trying to force it into a broken humanity and a misled culture?
Where Mass Behavior Leads, But Then Again, The Masses Can’t Help It
With a great cheer, I type out this quote:
Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy.
- Wendell Berry, Christianity and the Survival of Creation
I would personally go so far as to revise this statement by saying that modern Christianity has not become this condition, but rather, inherited the condition from whatever modern Christianity was before it became “modern”. It has been the majority of its existence, and certainly its entirety as a religion of the masses, that this trend could be traceable. For it is not only a tendency of Christianity, but a characteristic derived of human mass behavior carrying out an ideology that by nature is subversive and contradictory to mass behavior.
I describe this as lemming behavior, but due to the moment I write this post, must leave most of the explaining details out. (besides, I’m only cheering) Lemming behavior accurately describes the patterns of the actions of culture, not leaving out the likelihood of an upcoming cliff or even the dive from a cliff without understanding what it is about the wind in our face that just seems so confusing and wrong.
The Journey To Love
I’m increasingly resolving to post more on the topic of concrete love. I wrote an introduction to the problem I see us facing in the abstractness of Christian language several months ago, and am feeling guilty for not keeping up with my intended posting on the subject.
Parker has in our recent conversations expresses disagreement with my hypotheses (for lack of a better word) on the state of Christian culture and the causes and explanations I attempt to offer. I think he is resolved to assume we disagree ever since I supposedly “moved to Portland to become a hippie liberal” and often disagrees on a basis of the abstractness of the solutions I offer.
But I say “Nay! How could it be that Love is not the answer? ”
On Saturday Parker and Jessie Moore and I sat on the library lawn in Hood River after getting french toast for breakfast downtown. I find it often difficult not to bring up debatable conversation, especially more recently when hanging out with Parker. On this particular occasion I mentioned a line from the book Jesus for President that I was glad to have found because it seemed at that point in the book that Claiborne was finally arriving at the conclusion I was hoping he might arrive at. The end of the ensuing conversation was an attempt (I believe) on my part to explain the philosophy of life as a journey toward a realistically unreachable destination. That destination is unreachable because it is the ideals we live by but cannot achieve, the absolute truths, if you will. Love in its purest form, is an absolute truth. It is an idea we have, but in practice, fall far from its achievement.
I hope Parker doesn’t begin to perceive himself as my nemesis, as he is known for his ninja-ness and may smite me with a sneak attack from the bushes. As Parker and I often arrive at the same conclusions by way of different abstract reasoning, we often don’t realize the similarities in our arguments. I am well known for starting sentences with “In Jesus for President, …” while Parker is increasingly finding it hard to resist the introduction of “C.S. Lewis says…”
We may also endorse differing approaches to the conclusions we share but this is exactly my point, and I cannot help but exclaim this in our friendly, yet heated, conversations. “Thats exactly the point!” I remember saying on at least one occasion.
Love as Jesus described it and offered as an example for is an ideal. Its perfection is an achievement that humanity cannot and will not achieve in this world. Yet it is what drives us and what connects us both to each other and to God. If that ideal is not achievable, as the journey/destination theory suggests, the destination itself is not the purpose in this existence we currently find ourselves in. It is the journey that matters most. It is our investment of talents for something good and better and pleasing to the master.
To get away from the abstract idea, we must explore it. We must find roadmaps in our lives that give substance to the journey to finding perfect Love. In roundabout ways, this is the what my mind is consumed by and the reason I blog is to share my findings in this journey with those who care to listen.
This is the journey of discovering Love.
So I continue to inwardly express dissatisfaction with my efforts to share more concrete findings of Love instead of offering little more than instances of dis-love. With this renewal of effort I hope to offer more often the positive definitions I’ve explored, or at least more directly refer to this conversation (with myself and whoever would like to listen in) about Love.
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