Treasure in Earthen Vessles?

I was a Lutheran Pastor for nearly twenty years. I have several years of advanced theological training. I feel competent in making a critique of what often passes as the Christian faith. I do not pretend to speak for any denomination. My thoughts are mine alone.

Personal Salvation?
I am disturbed by the idea that the event of the Christ was simply to effect personal salvation. It would be ignorant to dismiss the centrality of the incarnation in Christian theology; indeed, St. Paul speaks eloquently of God’s value of the individual as the object of grace. While much of the NT speaks about the establishment of a covenant viz a vie the sacraments as a participatory metaphor that symbolizes the salvific intention of God, it is not the end of the intention of this divine metaphor: salvation is the beginning, not the end, of the eschatological reality.

What is the eschatological imperative? It is to be Christ for the world. I am not speaking the double-talk of the new age self-justification. To my mind, this is spiritual masturbation: so much self-pleasure with no love or intention of sharing community. To be Christ for the world is to lose one’s self for the sake of the world. This is what the myth of the incarnation of the logos bespeaks: God comes into the world to be broken by the sin – becoming the curse – that even the deepest fractures of the human heart may be healed by the brokenness of the Christ. As Christ is raised, so to shall humanity be raised in the likeness of the Christ. It is significant that the risen Christ still bears the prints of the nails: the wounds did not heal; they remain as Christ returns to bear the brokenness of humanity to the perfection that is God. This act perfects God and gives birth to hope where once there was despair. Why, then, do we speak of personal salvation? Look at the myths of the fall. Our individual parents were cast out of the garden, out of a place of harmony and peace. Individuals must be welcomed back to the garden if they are to live lives that are not bound up in their lust for their own welfare.

Lust for Self-Preservation
Gandhi was a rather pointed critic of the Christian religion: “Oh, I don't reject your Christ. I love your Christ. It's just that so many of you Christians are so unlike your Christ." I do not believe that Gandhi is the ultimate arbitrator of the truth of Christianity. I do believe that it is a fair critique of the practice of the faith in Western Culture. The Christian religion is not a doctrinal system as much a covenant between God and humanity, a promise made between the lover and the beloved.

The crux of the faith is to be free from the need to be saved. If I am free from myself, I am free to be love for others, especially for the unloved.

This is the key article of the doctrine of the incarnation: God transcends God’s self to be for humanity. In this way, the individual is freed from self-preservation to be for the other. Sadly, this has not been the case for most of the history of the Christian faith. Much of the faith becomes an article of self-justification and thus a sullen caricature of itself.

God is Love
I have, for years, been haunted by a small – only five short chapters worth – epistle in the NT, First John. In this short letter the author, an anonymous writer influenced by St. John’s mysticism, writing about 90-120 C.E., writes the words: beloved, let us love one another… for God is love. The proof of faith is not intellectual ascent. The proof of faith is love for one another. And this love is not limited to those that share our faith, it is not a love that excludes, but seeks to love all as sons and daughters of the same parent. So this say? It tells me that there is none that can be outside of the love of a God that has become broken for the sake of love. That is a profound realization, one that changes the self with the beautiful and terrible knowledge of God.

The difficulty with truth is that once you have encountered it you are changed. You can no longer claim ignorance and are now held hostage by its demand to change.

I believe this is why most Christians have degraded the depth of their creed and have settled for a lesser eschatology; another word for this is original sin. We have made God over in our own image; we have made God into a source for my eternal life without considering the depth of love that drove the eternal to embrace the now. Consider that most Christian evangelism says nothing of a duty in love to care for the needs of all flesh. If God is love, and we are the disciples of the Christ, how, then, can we stand apart from this demand to love all? This terrible truth means death, not eternal life.

Justification by Grace through Faith
God justifies, that is God puts us right. We are free from the need to be for ourselves. Faith, then, is the act of living as if we are free. It is the strong word of God that says no to all that would imprison us, including wealth and self-satisfaction. That I would have criticized the so-called theologians of liberation for their confusion of ethics and eschatology. Now I am not so certain that this is a valid critique. I do not believe that we are the force that brings the Kingdom of God to the earth. I believe that we act as if God reigns and that God’s reign is defined by love. Dostoyevsky put it well when he wrote: “hell is the inability to love.” Augustine, as well, when he said, “Thou beholdst the Trinity when thou beholdest love: for the lover, the beloved, and the love are three.”

This is why I am not a Christian. I love the Christian myth, but feel that this is beyond me. I believe, help my unbelief. I think that too much dilution has taken place. We have lost ourselves in a sea of things and self-satisfaction, on both the materialistic and metaphysical levels. Perhaps Gandhi was right: there are precious few Christians. Prayer has to be transformed into action. Creed has to find articulation in life. Poetry has to become the muse that inspires life, like YHWH playing with the dust, forming it into a body and inbreathing life and then declaring love for the dirt that had infinitely greater potential than dirt could imagine. It became the dwelling place of the logos. Perhaps it is a treasure in an earthen vessel?

From It to Thou - Part 2

Beyond the First Person Singular
Forgive the awkward grammatical image: What has hurt us and has created us is the drive to assert “my” right to live over and against “your” right. Buber would have called this an “I/It” relationship. The other is a means to an end, an obstacle to overcome. Think about the epithets of warfare. The enemy is never thought of as human. The enemy is a “gook,” “heretic,” “nigger,” “fag,” and so on. The uglier the epithet, the greater the fear. Really, what have to fear in each other? Why do we need to be the greatest at the expense of the other? I would suggest it is our fear of extinction that drives the engine of hatred.

So Why Are We So Afraid?
I am amazed at the cost of warfare; finances aside – money has no value except that which we have assigned to it – the real cost of warfare is in lives lost. There is precious little that is worth anything: We have time and our life, nothing more. We use resources and leave a legacy of consumption in our wake. We cling to life with terrible tenacity, but will as quickly dispose of life. What has struck such fear in our hearts? Why are we so afraid?

I think that it is part of our evolutionary imprinting that has made us into creatures defined by competition. We are accustomed to the struggle. We long for the bitterness of victory and defeat. Life devolves into a win/lose dichotomy. Competition, from my limited perspective, bespeaks fear. We compete because we are afraid of loss. I do not accept the notion that competition drives progress. That makes for good capitalism, as it implies a profit and loss equation: somebody wins; somebody else loses. The cycle is not ascending: it is circular. Times and names have changed. The periphery has been altered, but the essential equation of hunter and hunted remains. We remain in fear of a perceived enemy that shares more in common with us than we dare to imagine. In a real sense, we are afraid of ourselves. The mirror frightens us.

Is Conflict the Only Impetus to Evolution?
Conflict has, without a doubt, created intelligence. Consider the predator: predatory animals must be intelligent. They have to rely not only on the weapons at their disposal, but an innate intelligence that allows them to hunt, capture, and consume their prey. The idea of a food-chain has driven evolution, especially human evolution. We developed from a simple ape that began to develop tools, later developing a brain that allowed the creation of theology, art, philosophy. But is this the only impetus?

I posit that the next evolutionary development is one that moves beyond confrontation with our fear. The ultimate fear is of our own finitude. We face the immensity of a universe that is both infinite and infinitesimal and find that we occupy a very small bit of space and time. We are momentary expressions of life that possess self-awareness. To overcome our fear of finitude is to accept the reality of our own extinction. This is not an issue of God. It is an issue of acceptance of a godless universe that is beyond our comprehension.

God, Religion, and the Spirit
It is almost an excurses that is necessitated: it is not that I do not believe in God, I do not believe in the God that is the necessary parent for lost and fearful children. There are moments when even the most courageous of us requires a moment of spiritual comfort. This having been said, I do not believe that a world come of age – to borrow a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer – requires a God that is there to hold humanity’s hand as it crosses the street. What God, then, do we worship in a godless universe? I believe in God as the ultimate source of all life and as the connection that holds us in a community that exists in space/time. I find great beauty in the myth of the incarnation: a God that transcends the eternal glory to experience the finitude of the creation (using that term advisedly). This is the God that seeks to lead by experience of the most deeply seeded human fears. This embrace of our fear allows God to be the God that both is and exists. A humanity that has come of age requires a myth that allows us to face the darkness as adults.

God becomes human. The eternal become finite. Our minds allow us to imagine an infinity and beyond (apologies to Georg Cantor) and in so doing suggests that we, at least in the realm of imagination – intuition? – move beyond what is merely sensed and can only be spoken of as metaphor. The human mind embraces the infinite and infinitesimal. In so doing it embraces that which can drive the next great cycle of evolution: an awareness of a common destiny with the whole of the cosmos, God and creation meeting in the arena of the mind.

I AM an Introvert… And Glad for It.

We introverts are a put-upon clan. We live in a world of noise, cluttered by the racket made by a world that confuses content with quantity: verbiage rather than substance. We are not shy, just reserved. We are not without social skills, indeed ours have to be more finely honed as we live in a world that is, by its nature, hostile toward our preferred way of being in the world. However, why would we care what the world thinks? Our impressions are born within and do not seek to be validated from without. It is good to be an introvert. Moreover, not only an introvert, but also an INTP. Damn, life is good.

Jung’s Typology of Personality
I am a proud INTP. Yes, we are the rarest of people. We are those whose motivation is drawn purely from within. We live in a world of intuition, able to think in terms of metaphor and to see shades of meanings. We live in a rich world of thought and we see endless possibilities. We are the dreamers, the creators, the philosophers and the architects. Ours is a world of potential that does not require us to be tied to any dogma or any tradition. I like the Webster definition of introvert: “the state or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one's own mental life.”

It seems that the artistic mediums to which I have been most attracted – photography and music – are the sine qua non of the INTP. It is not surprising that I prefer music that is harmonically iconoclastic (Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Gerry Mulligan) to music that is linear or predictable. I like Satie because his music just doesn’t care about expectations. It is for its own sake on its own terms. Very much as I am.

Socially Astute
I have always said that introverts live in two cultures; the larger extroverted American culture and, what is more important, the culture of our minds. I have learned to be very flexible, how to speak and survive in an extroverted world, all the time wondering if they have ever savored a moment of silence in their lives full of noise that they confuse for content. I wonder how they live in the din and how they can parse out what is valuable for the excess of verbiage. I know how to speak and how to live in the world, so much so that many people think that I am extroverted. But my energy is drawn from within. I love a moment alone, to listen to Bach on the cello or enjoy a beautiful poem. It is not that we are anti-social; I think that we are anti-intrusion.

I admit that I have a mighty need of time alone. This feeds my soul and allows me to find the energy to be in a world of sensory assault.

I am an introvert, and proud. I am self-sufficient without falling into the myth of the solipsism. I am able to be with others and content to be alone. I am the paradox. I am an introvert.