An Informative Balance as Our General Assembly Nears

First, a hat tip, to my friend Brandon for highlighting this piece by David Brooks in The New York Times.  I like reading Brooks, but I’ve fallen out of my reading pattern this summer.  Brooks calls this column, “The Secular Society,” a “book report” as he writes about Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age.  No doubt that there are some within my expression of Christian witness, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) that feel threatened by “secularism.”  I am not one of them.  I am old enough to remember “blue laws” that disallowed certain items to be bought at the grocery store on Sunday and I can remember when most stores were closed on Sunday.  I can remember that little league was a week day summer activity and extra curricular sports in school stayed away from weekend practice.  That was before soccer, youth sports traveling teams, and a generation of parents that use sports to keep their kids “out of trouble” or use sports as way to the economic easy life through their kids.  Yes, that was an oversimplified judgement.  My apologies.  You may be wondering what does Brook’s column have to do with my practice of Christianity or my expression of Christian witness?

Orthodox believers now live with a different tension: how to combine the masterpieces of humanism with the central mysteries of their own faiths. This pluralism can produce fragmentations and shallow options, and Taylor can eviscerate them, but, over all, this secular age beats the conformity and stultification of the age of fundamentalism, and it allows for magnificent spiritual achievement.(1)

As my denomination gathers in Orlando at the end of this week our family of faith continues to try to make sense of how we will share table with each other as our own orthodox believers fight “secularism” and what some might call “theological impurity.”  The liberals continue to wonder why our denomination is “blending in” to the Christian religious landscape of America rather than claim our historicity as “questioners,” our founders spirit of education, and an ecumenism that does not seek the lowest common denominator of faith.  I think we are a denomination trying to figure out, some might say “discern,” what hospitality means at the table in the 21st century, and “who” or what constituency group gets to define what a Disciples identity of hospitality will mean in our culture.   When you think through the ecumenical or Christian Unity movements I think one could argue that in our culture these have been a success.  In our American context, a church is a church.  Some meet in buildings and some store fronts.  Some have traditional hymns and some have either professional bands or garage bands playing.  Some have symbols that indicate something mysterious and important happens in that space and others look like concert venues or coffee bars.  Some have seminary trained preachers or ministers and some are suspicious of persons with degrees from accredited institutions of higher education.  Who speaks for generic Christianity in our culture?  Is it people like Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, Creflo Dollar, Cardinal Dolen, or Brian McLaren?  Is it institutions like ORU, Liberty, or Regent?  Often, these persons or institutions are the face of Christianity in America and they represent an orthodox to fundamentalists perspective that is consumed as “normal” Christianity.  It is a “rich” time to be a believer or a practitioner.  I am much more concerned with one’s practice than their beliefs about Jesus, and for me, that is what hospitality is based in and upon.

The Secular Society
David Brooks | The New York Times | July 8, 2013

Taylor’s investigation begins with this question: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?” That is, how did we move from the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a lot are in the middle?

This story is usually told as a subtraction story. Science came into the picture, exposed the world for the way it really is and people started shedding the illusions of faith. Religious spirit gave way to scientific fact.

Taylor rejects this story. He sees secularization as, by and large, a mottled accomplishment, for both science and faith.

______
Note

1. David Brooks, “The Secular Society,” The New York Times, July 8, 2013. (accessed July 9, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/opinion/brooks-the-secular-society.html?ref=opinion&_r=1&)

, 07/09/2013. Category: Culture, DOC Thoughts, Michael D.

Too Busy to Blog, but still . . .

Too busy to write.  Well, yes and no.  Writing, blogging, is a hobby that I’ve moved down the “do it” list for several months now.  I can feel the angst beginning to well up.  I’ve been away from it, but I’ve been doing my best to model “I want to, but I cannot right now.”  Super busy does not equal, nor translate to successful or meaningful living.  It just means busy.  Sometimes it is of one’s own making, as I have been, and often because there are too many things one cannot say ‘not now,” though it was you, me, that made those commitments.  Thus has been my pace of living.  I’m not trying to be indespenseb

There are items for reflection right now and will be items for reflection during and after my denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has our General Assembly, next month.  I will most likely reflect on some of the resolutions in this space.  One, in particular, has been battered about for 15 years now.  It has been the constant cuca burr as congregations, clergy, lay leaders, and denominational representatives try to determine how to remain at table with differing opinions about how persons are formed or created in God’s image.  When you peal back the layers of exegesis and eisegesis, cultural arguments, and world views I think that becomes the question.  Could God create a non-heterosexual being?  Said another way, are homosexuals or transgendered persons created in God’s image too?  Many base their answer to that question, and their image of God’s creativity, on ancient stories and understandings of the world not meant to provide such direction.  Many cannot determine how to hold the biblical witness in juxtaposition with the science that has cured diseases once caused by God.  Science and technology that has sent people to the moon orbiting our little slice of heaven.  Science that today provides humanity with the ability to end all life, as we know it, but not end creation.  Science and technology that can help us end hunger, poverty, and disease rather than be defined by ancient understandings of society and culture.

I don’t read the bible literally.  The creation stories in the Christian bible describe a deity, a power, with the capability of creating by simply speaking something into being.  How is it that a power beyond our understanding, a claim that all brands of Christendom affirm, can be limited in what it could create?  If one believes that the deity, God, created everything, what one calls good and evil, then even what humanity calls “evil” has the residue of the deity.  Are heterosexuals that discriminate against homosexuals claiming to have more of the imago dei, the residue of God, within them?  This would certainly follow the pattern of what humans do to one another.  This was certainly part of the argument when slaves, black people, were 2/3 rds a person.  This is why I am puzzled that persons who have experienced and continue to experience real discrimination in our culture, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, are the very persons with leaders in our denomination openly limiting the imago dei of God that was used, and still used to discriminate against their race in the human species.

The proof of diversity in creation and within the human species is powerful testimony, to use a religious word, about the creative power of the deity that I call God.  Yes, there will be items for reflection as similar branches of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism continue to parse the image of God to reign over community rather than live peaceably within community.  Does that analysis and commentary make me a humanists?

The Humanists Vocation
by David Brooks | The New York Times | June 20, 2013

Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative about private morality because they didn’t want to offend anybody.

, 06/21/2013. Category: Culture, DOC Thoughts.
Next page →
← Previous page