May 29, 2006
May 21, 2006
May 5, 2006
Apr 28, 2006
Hope, Faith and Love
I thought of a parallel in church a couple weeks ago. A teenager loves recklessly because she is inexperienced in not having love returned. As she grows older, she becomes more cautious with her love. A young Christian hopes recklessly in the promises of God because she is inexperienced in non-fulfillment. But as she grows older, she learns God's plans are bigger than her hopes and thereby don't always include her hopes. The same pattern is true for faith. The new Christian can have reckless faith, yet as she matures she may begin to question her interpretation of some things and what she is putting her faith in.
Our culture has a simple way of addressing the first, i.e. love. We say, "It is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all." We don't, however, have that view of hope and faith. Perhaps we understand this about love because we know that humans are flawed and that finding love is really a bit of a crap shoot. We know we must take big chances in order to have any possibility of true love. Perhaps we figure that God, on the other hand, is perfect and should fulfill all our hopes and all our faith, so we think that hope and faith are somehow more eternal than love. But what we don't take into account often enough is that we are flawed - our hopes, our love, and our faith are all flawed. Hope and faith are therefore also a bit of a crap shoot, particualarly when we place our hope in other flawed humans. But why do we not hold the same positive view of them? Is it that love has more physical forms? Should we amend the statement to “It is better to have loved physically and lost than not to have loved at all?” But that doesn’t sound right, so why can’t we say it is better to have hoped and lost than not to have hoped at all?
I thought of a parallel in church a couple weeks ago. A teenager loves recklessly because she is inexperienced in not having love returned. As she grows older, she becomes more cautious with her love. A young Christian hopes recklessly in the promises of God because she is inexperienced in non-fulfillment. But as she grows older, she learns God's plans are bigger than her hopes and thereby don't always include her hopes. The same pattern is true for faith. The new Christian can have reckless faith, yet as she matures she may begin to question her interpretation of some things and what she is putting her faith in.
Our culture has a simple way of addressing the first, i.e. love. We say, "It is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all." We don't, however, have that view of hope and faith. Perhaps we understand this about love because we know that humans are flawed and that finding love is really a bit of a crap shoot. We know we must take big chances in order to have any possibility of true love. Perhaps we figure that God, on the other hand, is perfect and should fulfill all our hopes and all our faith, so we think that hope and faith are somehow more eternal than love. But what we don't take into account often enough is that we are flawed - our hopes, our love, and our faith are all flawed. Hope and faith are therefore also a bit of a crap shoot, particualarly when we place our hope in other flawed humans. But why do we not hold the same positive view of them? Is it that love has more physical forms? Should we amend the statement to “It is better to have loved physically and lost than not to have loved at all?” But that doesn’t sound right, so why can’t we say it is better to have hoped and lost than not to have hoped at all?
Apr 26, 2006
Mar 17, 2006
My head is filled with their faces most nights, when I first lay down and my day rushes through my mind in process form. Their faces are always the first images, mostly her face. She's looking away, eyes down. Then her eyes are fixed on mine, unable to look away, eyelids caught open. Then her head is fallen forward and her eyes are the only thing holding her head up, and she whispers, "I'm sorry." Fear-full. Shame-full.
And I wonder if my guilt is well founded, or if this must be how they learn to follow rules. I attempt to comb through that day's frustrations, that day's angers. Maybe I should yell less. Maybe she should never feel shamed.
I comfort myself with promises of reduction of yelling and shame-inducing looks. And I reach for the echoes of laughter, the seconds pregnant with grace and innocence and abandon. And I usually fall asleep.
Perhaps this is a good definition of original sin - knowing the evil so well that it turns to habit then using the good to deaden the pain.
And I wonder if my guilt is well founded, or if this must be how they learn to follow rules. I attempt to comb through that day's frustrations, that day's angers. Maybe I should yell less. Maybe she should never feel shamed.
I comfort myself with promises of reduction of yelling and shame-inducing looks. And I reach for the echoes of laughter, the seconds pregnant with grace and innocence and abandon. And I usually fall asleep.
Perhaps this is a good definition of original sin - knowing the evil so well that it turns to habit then using the good to deaden the pain.
Mar 9, 2006
Transcendence
Christian tradition has generally understood transcendence as a movement beyond human borders, either as God coming into the everyday and our somehow experiencing that or as humans reaching beyond themselves to God or as the crossing over into new life after death. This traditional understanding of transcendence, as being “above and independent of the universe,” is epitomized in Pascal’s challenge. He concludes that if there is a God then everything that occurs here on earth occurs according to a logic outside of our knowable reality. If one chooses to believe and trust this God’s non-human logic, one loses nothing. But if one rejects this transcendent God, then one might lose everything. As a youth evangelizing in shopping malls I was taught to unwittingly use Pascal’s challenge.
This understanding of transcendence, however, has been in question for a long time. In Martha Nussbaum’s challenge to traditional transcendence in her book Love’s Knowledge she examines Odysseus’ encounter with Calypso in The Odyssey. When offered a beautiful, goddess companion, the lack of any need, and eternal life, Odysseus refuses and continues his journey home. Nussbaum asks, Why? and why do we identify with that choice? We all say that we want eternal life, without trouble, and we do, but when faced with the problem of what that really means, do we want that life? Nussbaum’s conclusion is that we get “the feeling that the other life would just not be comprehensible as a life for a human being with human virtues and human heroism.” The reason for this is that “[h]uman limits structure the human excellences, and give excellent action its significance.” For example, a great deal of what we consider to be good morals has to do with our response to suffering. In a transcendent world free of suffering, what need would there be for such morals? Ultimately, Nussbaum agrees with Nietzsche’s analysis that humanity’s (particularly religions’) desire for a “true” world different from our own ultimately leads to our non-concern and inaction in the world we have. In answer to Pascal’s challenge, Nussbaum would claim that something very significant is lost if one gives assent to traditional transcendence. Her answer is “a transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result.”
The ultimate denial of traditional understandings of transcendence came in 1882 when Nietzsche pronounced that God was dead. The nihilism that resulted from this pronouncement reached its literary zenith in the writings of Kafka and Camus. In Camus’ The Stranger, for example, the main character, Meursault, mirrors the choice made by Odysseus. Meursault is convicted of murder and facing a hanging in a couple of days. The priest is sent and gives Meursault Pascal’s challenge, asking him what good it will do him to not accept God. Meursault refuses the priest’s offer, saying that it was of more comfort to him to be sure of his couple of days and of his death than to have the priest’s false security. The priest asks him what he would want heaven to be like, and Meursault responds that it would be a place where he could sit and remember this life. Admitting these things gives him great peace, and he lies on his prison cot more full of life than he has ever been. His transcendence comes through a refusal of the traditional understanding of transcendence. Meursault is the fictional embodiment of Nussbaum’s questioning of the significance of an afterlife.
In Camus’ The Plague, the plague that strikes the city is a metaphor for the absurdity of the human condition. The only hope of transcending the ill effects of the plague comes through choosing solidarity with other humans over and against any benign explanation from another world that is not really our own, such as is offered by the town’s priest. Concerning why the plague exists and why it must be fought, the main character says, “a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.” This is again a fictional representation of transcendence through descent into humanity, not a reaching beyond humanity. Camus suggests, in the line of Nussbaum and Nietzsche, that to ask why or to focus at all on any transcendent reasoning necessarily takes away from the work at hand. The world is full of more trouble than we can deal with; all we can do is cure as quickly as we can. Wallace Stegner also portrays this understanding of transcendence in his works where relationships pull people through difficult times, not any transcendent understanding of God’s purposes.
Secular philosophers and writers are not the only people who have found transcendence through descent interesting, or necessary. As early as 1975 Sallie McFague began to apply these concepts to her understanding of theology and literature. In her book Speaking in Parables she takes as her model of transcendence something very basic to our human understanding – language, and more specifically metaphor. She writes,
Metaphor is, for human beings, what instinctual groping is for the rest of the universe – the power of getting form here to there. We use what we have, who we are, where we are to grope toward what we dimly feel, think, and envision we might have, who we might be, where we might be. We do this through a process in which imagination is the chief mover, setting the familiar in an unfamiliar context so that new possibilities can be glimpsed.
“The meaning of the gospel is generated through metaphor, through words which we ‘know’ but which are now put into a new context so that we see ‘what is’ in the light of ‘what might be,’ the ordinary emerges shaped by a new context. Thus we move, through metaphor, to meaning; metaphor is a motion from here to there.” Jesus is par excellence the metaphor of God, and so his story is the way to God.
Each of these authors demand to one degree or another a transcendence through descent. They claim that paying attention to the hereafter takes away from what we could be doing in the now. These authors make excellent points and each of them greatly affected my view of what transcendence can be. I grew up in a Pentecostal, fundamentalist sub-culture that concentrated greatly on transcending to the next world, which I believe at times contributed to the detriment of this world. I thus found myself agreeing with much of what Nussbaum wrote and found parabolic theology to be a healing corrective for my personal understanding of God. However, I also see tremendous limitations. For example, my Pentecostal roots were born in social struggle. Pentecostalism flourished in the poor south only a short time after being beaten in the Civil War. It particularly flourished among African-Americans who had learned under the heavy yoke of slavery to long for the world beyond this one, to which the great spirituals are testimony. Today Pentecostalism especially flourishes in third-world countries that know only suffering and have little or no hope in anything they find in this world. What shifting context within this world would give them hope? If you told a mother in Africa whose husband, brothers and half her children have died from aids that she must descend into herself to find the answers to her struggle, or that understanding herself in a new context here and now would save her, from where would she find hope or salvation? The Pentecostal focus on the soon-to-return Christ in power and glory to wipe away God’s enemies and bring about his Kingdom of peace would much more likely be useful to her, especially if physical healing were offered to rid herself and her remaining children of HIV.
McFague’s theory does work well on most of Jesus’ parables, and I appreciate her resistance to over-spiritualization. However, the theory only works when Jesus’ parables are separated from the rest of his life. Christ’s healings were not mere metaphors. His raising of Lazarus from the dead was not a mere metaphor, much less so was God’s raising of Jesus from the dead. Christ’s ascension was not a metaphor, nor was his promise to return, nor his giving of the Spirit to empower his followers. Most of Nussbaum’s critique of religion is very strong, except in one place – when she considers the doctrine of the Incarnation in Christianity. She writes, “Christianity seems to grant that in order to imagine a god who is truly superior, truly worthy of worship, truly and fully just, we must imagine a god who is human as well as divine, a god who has actually lived out the nontranscendent life and understands it in the only way it can be understood, by suffering and death.” She goes on to note, “the universal compassion for human suffering that one associates with Christianity is difficult to imagine apart from the paradigm of human suffering and sacrifice exemplified in Christ.” It is God’s transcendence through descent, the incarnation, that most appeals to her.
I think we need a dual understanding of transcendence. Transcendence by descent is by no means sufficient for our understanding of who God is; however, it is helpful in reminding us to focus on this life, in reminding us that God is concerned with this life.
Christian tradition has generally understood transcendence as a movement beyond human borders, either as God coming into the everyday and our somehow experiencing that or as humans reaching beyond themselves to God or as the crossing over into new life after death. This traditional understanding of transcendence, as being “above and independent of the universe,” is epitomized in Pascal’s challenge. He concludes that if there is a God then everything that occurs here on earth occurs according to a logic outside of our knowable reality. If one chooses to believe and trust this God’s non-human logic, one loses nothing. But if one rejects this transcendent God, then one might lose everything. As a youth evangelizing in shopping malls I was taught to unwittingly use Pascal’s challenge.
This understanding of transcendence, however, has been in question for a long time. In Martha Nussbaum’s challenge to traditional transcendence in her book Love’s Knowledge she examines Odysseus’ encounter with Calypso in The Odyssey. When offered a beautiful, goddess companion, the lack of any need, and eternal life, Odysseus refuses and continues his journey home. Nussbaum asks, Why? and why do we identify with that choice? We all say that we want eternal life, without trouble, and we do, but when faced with the problem of what that really means, do we want that life? Nussbaum’s conclusion is that we get “the feeling that the other life would just not be comprehensible as a life for a human being with human virtues and human heroism.” The reason for this is that “[h]uman limits structure the human excellences, and give excellent action its significance.” For example, a great deal of what we consider to be good morals has to do with our response to suffering. In a transcendent world free of suffering, what need would there be for such morals? Ultimately, Nussbaum agrees with Nietzsche’s analysis that humanity’s (particularly religions’) desire for a “true” world different from our own ultimately leads to our non-concern and inaction in the world we have. In answer to Pascal’s challenge, Nussbaum would claim that something very significant is lost if one gives assent to traditional transcendence. Her answer is “a transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result.”
The ultimate denial of traditional understandings of transcendence came in 1882 when Nietzsche pronounced that God was dead. The nihilism that resulted from this pronouncement reached its literary zenith in the writings of Kafka and Camus. In Camus’ The Stranger, for example, the main character, Meursault, mirrors the choice made by Odysseus. Meursault is convicted of murder and facing a hanging in a couple of days. The priest is sent and gives Meursault Pascal’s challenge, asking him what good it will do him to not accept God. Meursault refuses the priest’s offer, saying that it was of more comfort to him to be sure of his couple of days and of his death than to have the priest’s false security. The priest asks him what he would want heaven to be like, and Meursault responds that it would be a place where he could sit and remember this life. Admitting these things gives him great peace, and he lies on his prison cot more full of life than he has ever been. His transcendence comes through a refusal of the traditional understanding of transcendence. Meursault is the fictional embodiment of Nussbaum’s questioning of the significance of an afterlife.
In Camus’ The Plague, the plague that strikes the city is a metaphor for the absurdity of the human condition. The only hope of transcending the ill effects of the plague comes through choosing solidarity with other humans over and against any benign explanation from another world that is not really our own, such as is offered by the town’s priest. Concerning why the plague exists and why it must be fought, the main character says, “a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.” This is again a fictional representation of transcendence through descent into humanity, not a reaching beyond humanity. Camus suggests, in the line of Nussbaum and Nietzsche, that to ask why or to focus at all on any transcendent reasoning necessarily takes away from the work at hand. The world is full of more trouble than we can deal with; all we can do is cure as quickly as we can. Wallace Stegner also portrays this understanding of transcendence in his works where relationships pull people through difficult times, not any transcendent understanding of God’s purposes.
Secular philosophers and writers are not the only people who have found transcendence through descent interesting, or necessary. As early as 1975 Sallie McFague began to apply these concepts to her understanding of theology and literature. In her book Speaking in Parables she takes as her model of transcendence something very basic to our human understanding – language, and more specifically metaphor. She writes,
Metaphor is, for human beings, what instinctual groping is for the rest of the universe – the power of getting form here to there. We use what we have, who we are, where we are to grope toward what we dimly feel, think, and envision we might have, who we might be, where we might be. We do this through a process in which imagination is the chief mover, setting the familiar in an unfamiliar context so that new possibilities can be glimpsed.
“The meaning of the gospel is generated through metaphor, through words which we ‘know’ but which are now put into a new context so that we see ‘what is’ in the light of ‘what might be,’ the ordinary emerges shaped by a new context. Thus we move, through metaphor, to meaning; metaphor is a motion from here to there.” Jesus is par excellence the metaphor of God, and so his story is the way to God.
Each of these authors demand to one degree or another a transcendence through descent. They claim that paying attention to the hereafter takes away from what we could be doing in the now. These authors make excellent points and each of them greatly affected my view of what transcendence can be. I grew up in a Pentecostal, fundamentalist sub-culture that concentrated greatly on transcending to the next world, which I believe at times contributed to the detriment of this world. I thus found myself agreeing with much of what Nussbaum wrote and found parabolic theology to be a healing corrective for my personal understanding of God. However, I also see tremendous limitations. For example, my Pentecostal roots were born in social struggle. Pentecostalism flourished in the poor south only a short time after being beaten in the Civil War. It particularly flourished among African-Americans who had learned under the heavy yoke of slavery to long for the world beyond this one, to which the great spirituals are testimony. Today Pentecostalism especially flourishes in third-world countries that know only suffering and have little or no hope in anything they find in this world. What shifting context within this world would give them hope? If you told a mother in Africa whose husband, brothers and half her children have died from aids that she must descend into herself to find the answers to her struggle, or that understanding herself in a new context here and now would save her, from where would she find hope or salvation? The Pentecostal focus on the soon-to-return Christ in power and glory to wipe away God’s enemies and bring about his Kingdom of peace would much more likely be useful to her, especially if physical healing were offered to rid herself and her remaining children of HIV.
McFague’s theory does work well on most of Jesus’ parables, and I appreciate her resistance to over-spiritualization. However, the theory only works when Jesus’ parables are separated from the rest of his life. Christ’s healings were not mere metaphors. His raising of Lazarus from the dead was not a mere metaphor, much less so was God’s raising of Jesus from the dead. Christ’s ascension was not a metaphor, nor was his promise to return, nor his giving of the Spirit to empower his followers. Most of Nussbaum’s critique of religion is very strong, except in one place – when she considers the doctrine of the Incarnation in Christianity. She writes, “Christianity seems to grant that in order to imagine a god who is truly superior, truly worthy of worship, truly and fully just, we must imagine a god who is human as well as divine, a god who has actually lived out the nontranscendent life and understands it in the only way it can be understood, by suffering and death.” She goes on to note, “the universal compassion for human suffering that one associates with Christianity is difficult to imagine apart from the paradigm of human suffering and sacrifice exemplified in Christ.” It is God’s transcendence through descent, the incarnation, that most appeals to her.
I think we need a dual understanding of transcendence. Transcendence by descent is by no means sufficient for our understanding of who God is; however, it is helpful in reminding us to focus on this life, in reminding us that God is concerned with this life.
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