From my inbox...

This paragraph is from an email sent by the folks at BattleCry on July 24;

SUBJECT: "Imagine an America with only 4% Christians..."

Christianity in America will not survive another decade. How is that possible? At the current rate of evangelism, it is estimated that only 4% of this generation of teenagers will be Bible-believing Christians by the time they reach adulthood. 34% of adults today are Evangelical believers. Imagine an America at 4%. This is an unthinkable crisis. We cannot let this trend run its course. It is time for the Church to respond. We must take action!

Wow. There's quite a bit to unpack here.

Like naming a Christian organization "BattleCry" - did Jesus start even one battle? Was war even Jesus' favorite metaphor for so-called "spiritual battles"? Other Jewish sects before and after Jesus' ministry rallied around "messiahs" who did start battles, and failed (like Simon bar Kochba) - at what point do are we led to read Jesus' story as an intentional rejection of the idea of a warrior-messiah?

How about the implication that Christians who are not "Bible-believing" inerrantists are not really Christians. Has anyone at BattleCry read Mark 12:28-34* lately? Which part of the story says that the doctrine of inerrancy is a litmus test for those who claim to follow Jesus? (if this question is theological nonsense to you, good! You're probably busy loving your neighbor.)

I admit, when I read this email my initial, unfiltered reaction was "Great!" The world could use more God-, neighbor-, and self-loving Christians and fewer Bible-believers. You may be tempted to think I'm saying something negative about the Bible or "believing" it (whatever that means to you) - please re-read carefully.

I'm sure that the language of war helps drive decent church people to BattleCry's leadership conferences (that's what this email was about... selling tickets) and they have every interest in painting their statistics (34% / 4%) in the extreme. Still, this was my boost of hope for the day, that our Great American Enlightenment Expiriment may roll on and that fundamentalisms of ALL TYPES - Christian, Islamic, Jewish, etc. (thanks Karen Armstrong!) - are on the ropes here. According to its own publicity, fundamentalism is in an "unthinkable crisis." May Christ-like compassion reign!

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*Jesus quotes Deuteronomy, part of the Jewish Shema prayer;

One of the scribes, when he came forward and heard them disputing and saw how well he had answered them, asked him, "Which is the first of all the commandments?" Jesus replied, "The first is this: 'Hear O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

The scribe said to him, "Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, 'He is One and there is no other than he.' And 'to love him with your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." And when Jesus saw that [he] answered with understanding, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." And no one had the courage to ask him any more questions. (Mark 12:28-34)

Heresy's Cost, Honesty's Peace

The rise, fall, and return of Carlton Pearson illustrates one of the many ways "God has yet more light and truth to break forth out of his holy word" (from pastor John Robinson's commission to the pilgrims leaving England). His story was the subject of NPR's "This American Life" in December, available online at http://audio.wbez.org/tal/304.m3u .

Born into a family of Pentecostal ministers, raised in an evangelical church where he "cast out devils" as a high school student, and all but adopted by Oral Roberts at his university, Pearson says the intellectual climate during his formative years was "smothering." Of the spiritual reality he percieved, he says "the devil was as present and as large as God. He had most of the people... everything was a devil. So, if you believe it, you experience it." Pearson started Higher Dimensions church in Tulsa OK in 1981, creating the most racially integrated church in town. His rising profile included guest preaching with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, working in televison, introducing T.D. Jakes, and visiting the White House during the Bush, Clinton, and Bush II administrations. Naturally, Bishop Pearson preached a conventional evangelical theology on hell; that God would send non-born-again-Christians to an afterlife of eternal punishment and torture.

Seeds of doubt about the doctrine of hell sown in private Bible study flowered one night. Watching video taken in Somalia on the evening news, Carlton Pearson experienced a revelation; "I saw how we create hell for each other on this planet. And for the first time in my life, I did not see God as the inventor of hell."

I remember hearing my dad reflect on the relationship of rural Chinese farmers to the Christian God. He would say he couldn't imagine how God's love could condemn the billions of good and faithful people who followed paths marked by Confucius, or Buddha, or Muhammad, or great philosophers like Kant. He thought, and read, and prayed; today he thinks that God provides for universal salvation, and it's an understanding that is still growing and changing for him.

Dad has some of the same questions as Pearson. "If you don't need Jesus to avoid hell, then do you need Jesus at all? If you might not need Jesus, then what difference does it make being Christian? What does being Christain mean, anyway?" The questions led Pearson to confront the evangelical doctrine of the scripture's inerrancy, and the historical process of canonization (in which ancient writings were considered and chosen to create the Bible). He turned towards an understanding he calls the "Gospel of inclusion," that all people are saved into heaven and God's presence after death.

As he began to preach the "Gospel of inclusion," his congregation shrunk from over 5,000 members to just a few hundred and four pastors left to start a rival church. Magazine articles in "Charisma" and others were relentlessly critical; Pearson endured personal attacks from his colleagues and an especially rough annual Azusa conference in 2002. "I miss my people. It's like I died, and they mourned my death, and they're pretty much over it." Pearson heard the "whole charismatic church" saying "Who do you think you are? Don't you know you're wrong? They're right - I'm saying what we've taught is wrong. The God we've presented is a monster." He was officially branded a heretic by the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops Congress in March of 2004.

Googling "Pearson +heretic" returns hundreds of pages, headed by a sober story from the Religion News Service ( www.beliefnet.com/story/143/story_14370_1.html is one place to read it) and including a surprising number of thoughtful, reasonable, and positive responses to Pearson and the "Gospel of inclusion." One thing I noticed was that most critics of Pearson's message immediately appeal to fear; that teaching universal salvation will lead to rampant immorality. It seems in the Pentecostal church community, there is much to be afraid of.

"That's how most of us got saved; we turned because the alternative was... scary!" says youth pastor Steve Palmer at Pearson's New Dimensions church. I heard this same message in my high school Fellowship of Christian Atheletes (FCA) group. God would torture people who were not practicing, born-again Christians when they died. In the NPR piece, one woman from Pearson's congregation talks about her neighbors' appeals to fear as they proselytize, and the surprise she feels at her own sense of compassion for them. Members of Higher Dimensions in Tulsa are often ostracized from the community, and in some cases from their own families.

"The threat of Judgement Day and a good fried chicken dinner; you will sure pack the church!" says Steve. Pentecostal churches in Tulsa may be filled, but Carlson Pearson says there is no way he would step back from the gospel of inclusion. For now, New Dimensions church moved in with WASP-y, 400-seat Trinity Episcopal Church in Tulsa... but will soon have to start looking for a bigger building.

"God is not angry with humanity! He sees us all through the blood! That is the gospel of Jesus Christ!" Pearson may have lost the hellfire, but he's kept the passion, verve, and imagery of Pentecostalism.

-h

Thanks to the CrossWalk blog - http://blog.crosswalkamerica.org - for pointing me to this story.

A Destiny Fitting of the Children of God

Below is a lengthy quote from David Brin's comments to this post on his own blog. Regular readers know I love Brin's work - fiction, science, philosophy, politics - but in order to appreciate his train of thought here, I need to explain a few things.

The "Enlightenment Project" is described pretty well at Wikipedia - broadly, it's our attempt to organize society according to reason and aimed toward progress (in opposition to 99% of history, in which societies were controlled by economic/religious/power elites).

"The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for or contact with such civilizations" - from Wikipedia.

Brin's concepts of the "Social Pyramid / Diamond" describe two ways societies can be organized economically. In the social pyramid, there's a small wealthy elite (the peak) supported by a great mass of poor serfs (i.e., 99% of human societies throughout history). The social diamond corresponds to the rise of the middle class, most especially in the US between the New Deal and the 1980's (our diamond has been shrinking since then).

So here's the comment in full; a beautiful, real, hopeful dash through our nature, our place in the universe, and a dream worthy of our wildest love. -h

BigC you are right to remind me of earlier statements about the surprisingly positive parts of human nature. Indeed, those parts were essential in order for the Enlightenment Project to happen at all... even as a fluke and unlikely, lucky-chance emergent property, rather than a first order effect of human nature.

Indeed, I will go farther. I believe that one of the higher candidates for a "Fermi Paradox explanation" is that intelligent life does emerge many times across the galaxy... but that it destroys itself through lack of foresight and self-control. Either in self-imolation spasms or through whimpering decline and degradation into "intelligent" but grinding poverty on ruined worlds.

Yes, this is an old explanation, but I give it a twist. Because I think it possible that - despite our self-criticism (in fact, BECAUSE of it) - we may be among the few destined to cross this crisis quickly and arrive at a civilization that is truly worthy of the name.

Think of a sapient life form descended from bears, or tigers, or paranoid zebras. Could they, no matter how smart, show the complex MIX of gregarious and individualistic ... competitive AND cooperative... traits that give us our intellectual breadth and variability, out of which self-criticism and mutual accountability/creativity can arise?

Moreover, now posit that even WE fell into oversimplifying social patterns that quashed creativity and criticism, 99% of the time across our history! Nearly all human cultures, dominated by feudal elites, suppressed the ferment of reciprocal criticism that lets a culture find its mistakes in time.

Read Jared Diamond's COLLAPSE in order to see how frail we are to ecological error. Alas, Diamond's few "success stories" were also towering failures. For although they avoided eco-error, they did so by enforcing brutally conservative regimes, devoid of any ambition to grow and learn and improve. A wretched prescrtiption and if that is our only path to survival, I choose glorious collapse.

Hence, am I more pessimistic than Jared Diamond???? Perish the thought. And yet, in the context of the Fermi Paradox, it seems that I must be.

This fluke of ours, this project that arose out of the genius of Pericles and Locke and Franklin and million proud craftsmen, is very clearly an anomaly. Under the traditional and deeply human-nature driven social DIAMOND [Brin means "social PYRAMID" here - in his excitement, he got his own images confused - see his own usage below -howie], the very best you could hope for was the genteel meritocratic imperium of Old China, in which Confucian noblesse oblige and civil service testing still allow a smidge of social mobility. That, certainly, is the vision updated by Lee Quan Yew in Singapore, and pursued by China today. It is the finest "pyramid" of them all, and they see it as the best "natural" human society. And they think we are quite mad. And they may be right.

But that path of theirs only slows down the grinding failure mode of genteel decline. I know this, because the stars tell me so. Because, blatantly and obviously, the Confucian pyramid is a social pattern that must have been tried many times among other life forms. It is a simple extrapolation of self-interest among rulers and ruled, after all. A little smarter than most feudal patterns. One can easily imagine it happening out there...

... because it happened (in various ways) so many times here! And here's the point.

The Fermi Paradox. The sky appears so empty. A Great Silence. Something is "wrong". There are many explanations. I am the one who has catalogued them, after all. But if this one is THE explanation ("Intelligence destroys itself") then the traditional pyramid - even the superior Confucian version CANNOT BE WORKING. It is obvious, pervasive, and the stars tell us that it must be wrong.

What might work is a gamble on something different. So different, so demanding, so "emergent" and contrary to FIRST ORDER animal nature that it was extremely rare on Earth, as it may have been rare across the galaxy.

Our new Experiment may be just that sort of thing. It is vibrant. It finds errors. It yells and spews noise, mixing individualism and community in chaotic ways, stirring cooperatin and competition in a vast brew. Oh it may be all wrong. It may be as awful, self-indulgent and immature as the Confucians - and the President of Iran - say it is...

...or it may be our hope. It may be THE hope of every race that is suffering and languishing out there in a desert of their own wastes... all of them in need of rescue, awaiting the first race to rise up enough to attain Star Trek levels of success, joy and generosity. What a fate for our descendants.

To go forth and rescue and teach them. What a destiny. Better than any portrayed in religion OR science fiction.



But...

...as I sit in this heat wave, I am left to wonder. ARE we smart enough? The Experiment is failing. Now, boys and girls. Right now, on the brink of our success. The neo-feudalists and their terrified-of-tomorrow allies are making their move. And the heat, the heat, this damned heat may be telling us that it is already too late.

I don't really believe that. I can't.

But oh, the irony. To have the tools in our hands. To ALMOST rise up and become the rescuers. The heroes that the suffering Milky Way eagerly yearns and waits for.

What a destiny that would be. So vastly more grand and fitting than anything told in Revelations! A destiny fitting of the Children of God. Apprentices, picking up His tools and setting forth to do high and noble work, both merciful and grand, making Him proud.

Oh, to have a destiny like that in our grasp... and to JUST miss!

That would be too painful. So very much worse than death.

david brin

A Statement of Faith on Salvation in Mark's Gospel, v 1.0

The motivation for creating this statement came from discussion at Bill Tammeus' blog. Conversation there prompted me to attend to Mark with fresh ears, especially for passages relating to salvation. The idea of "salvation" begs the question, "saved from what to what?" and Scripture provides a variety of images and metaphors, including from blindness into sight, from slavery into freedom, from death into life, and from aimlessness into purpose. "Salvation" in our cultural context is often linked to an afterlife or a supernatural realm, but these associations are notably absent from Mark; there is simply nothing said aside from Jesus' exchange with the rich man in chapter 10.17-31. Our culture, especially evangelical and fundamentalist sub-culture, also tends to place a premium on human "belief," "acceptance" or "reception" of salvation in order for it to be effective; in Mark, Jesus does not set this condition.

I will use the term "tribe" frequently, to describe our predisposition to band together into groups with a line between "insider/member" and "outsider/other." I find this instinct in itself to be morally neutral, though how it is used (i.e. how wide tribal horizons are set) certainly has a moral dimension that Jesus was interested in.

The gospel of Mark unfolds as a drama in three acts. Jesus asks at the end of Act I, "Do you not yet understand?" (8.21). First acts make introductions; Jesus' character has been on display from the beginning, yet his followers don't get it. Jesus' frustration at this point seems to say "What you need is already in front of your eyes! I'm all here!" In the first act he has taught, healed, fed, turned lives around (from the definition of "repent"), demonstrated acts of practical compassion, frustrated religious authorities, and announced the good news that sin has been forgiven by God's authority (2.3-7). Jesus has pushed the horizons of one's "tribe" - from family, "clean" people, religion, and nation - out to infinity (2.13-17, 3.31-35, 5.1-20, 7.24-30). Reminding ourselves that Jesus was Jewish, his ministry and good news in Mark's gospel is emphatically for Jew and non-Jew equally (8.14-21).

In Act II the conflict between Jesus and the Temple religious authorities deepens. The commandment of God was contrasted with religious law earlier (7.1-23) and when asked about it Jesus finds God's essential commandment in the Shema prayer (12.28-34, quoting Deut. 6.4 and Lev. 19.18); love of God, neighbor, and self. The first occurance of "save" is in the context of the cost of following Jesus (8.34-50), where he calls the people to transcend selfishness and follow the path of earthly compassion marked out in Act I. "Ghenna" is first used in 9.46, where Jesus says that no sacrifice (even "hell") is too great in order to avoid placing roadblocks in front of innocent "little ones" of lowest status who believe and are trying to follow this path. A rich man introduces the phrase "eternal life" (10.17), asking how he may inherit it, and Jesus responds by calling him to follow the hard path he is on. The disciples ask, "Then who can be saved?" Jesus answers, "For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible" (10:26-27). To Peter's plea that they have left everything to follow the path, Jesus replies seriously about the results to expect in this world (increased family ("Who is my mother?" Matthew 12.46-50) and persecution!) and mocks the rich man's concern (New Oxford Annotated Bible commentary).

With the stage set, Jesus enters Jerusalem to cries of "Hosanna!" (literally "Save us!") (11.1-11) from peasant people concerned with this-world salvation; more egalitarian social, political, and economic arrangements (though not in the mold of a new Davidic regime). A group of Sadducees introduces the concept of ressurection/afterlife, about which Jesus only says it will be markedly different from this life (no marriage) and reminds them that God is God of the living (12.18-27). In the midst of political chaos, Jesus offers reassurance to the "elect" without saying what the group is elected to or how inclusive it might be (13.20-27). As Jesus the martyr-messiah dies, the revered religious boundary between God and humanity (a true "final curtain!") is completely torn (15.37-38), loosing God in the world. It is then, with an empty tomb and no more, that Mark's original narrative concludes (16.8).
- C. Howie Howard

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I believe salvation is first and foremost a this-world state of being, found by following Jesus' path. This way of living is marked by more egalitarian economic, social, and political relationships, transcendence of selfishness and tribalism, a radical inclusion of all people within God's household, acts of practical compassion, and proclomation of the good news that God is at peace with humanity and all creation.

I believe Mark's scant use of the concepts afterlife, eternal life, the "elect," and bodily ressurection shows these to be of secondary importance on Jesus' path and reflects neutrality towards specific propositions about their existence, nature, and characteristics. Common cultural associations about these concepts made by western Christianity today are neither supported or denied by Mark's gospel.

Given the existence of an afterlife;

By Jesus' unconditional proclomation of the good news that sin has been forgiven,
By Jesus' ministry for Jews and non-Jews alike (members and non-members of his religion) without preference, crossing boundaries and expanding horizons of self-interest and tribe, subverting expectations and correcting for the human tendency to justify interests of self and tribe over God's universal concern,
By Jesus' execution and ressurection in the midst of sin, ignorance, and unbelief,

By Martin Luther's fundamental insight; that God's grace cannot be conditioned on any human action,
By my experience of Christ's boundless, no-last-chances love, and
By my reasoning, in a diverse community of church members, scholars, and philosophers,

I believe that all of creation - all people, all creatures, all matter - has an eternal place in God's presence, toward which we may struggle and progress willfully through the dross-burning process of coming to know God and truth.

A Few Pieces Before

Among my favorite posts in Andy's archiveat EnterTheRainbow is Oh, and One Last Thing Before I Go - Lectionary Thoughts for the Ascension. Check it out.

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Also, the InternetMonk has a good one on the evangelical "Culture War." I've long favored ending this silly, manufactured "war" from the progressive side; iMonk argues the same point from the evangelical angle. Thanks to Jeff for the link.

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My statement of faith on salvation in Mark's gospel is in version 1.1 form; look for it maybe Wednesday.

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Lastly, lyrics from Elbow's album Cast of Thousands have been important for me today.

Ribcage

We blew the doors off, didn't we?
P****d in their champagne
And did a real thing, didn't we?
Gave ourselves a name
And peeled away the shame
I wanted to explode
To pull my ribs apart
And let the sun inside

Red stain blossoms
And all you have is kisses

And when the sunshine
Throwin' me a lifeline
Finds its way into my room
All I need is you

Grace Under Pressure

Grace under pressure
Cooling palm across my brow
Eyes of an angel
Lay me down
We still believe in love...

Bill blog

I've been part of a rambunctious but ultimately (I hope) caring and even transforming (?) conversation in the comments to this post at Bill Tammeus' blog.

Read if you dare. Respond if you like. Love. -howie