Category Archives: Theology

Neither moral nor managerial

Mr. Crankypants here, and as usual he has something on his mind, which is this: Why is it that people in the United States assume that everything a minister says has to do with morality? — actually, morality and guilt. As if ministers are predominantly supreme moral and ethical arbiters. Speaking as someone whose alter ego happens to be a minister, Mr. Crankypants is uniquely placed to assure you that, on average, ministers are not that much better at moral and ethical distinctions than are non-ministers. It is true that ones would like a minister who is not going to molest one’s children nor rob one blind, but having an honest minister does not mean one should feel guilty every time one sees one’s minister.

Nor, despite what the acolytes of John Carver will try to tell you, are ministers essentially supermanagers and/or superadministrators. Trust Mr. Crankypants, most ministers have little formal training in management and administration, and even less skill. The effort to equate ministers with Chief Executive Officers is a lost cause, unless your congregation plans to pay your minister a salary equivalent to a CEO salary (we’re talking six figures for a chump CEO, and seven figures for a competent CEO for a nonprofit organization, just so you have no illusions about this). It is true that there are a few ministers with MBAs, but if your minister gave up a well-compensated position in the business world, you would be wise to be a little bit suspicious about why he or she decided to drop that seven-figure salary in favor of the pittance your congregation pays.

No,– in Mr. Crankypants’s experience, it is unwise to expect a minister to be either particularly moral or ethical (thus no need to feel guilty when you see your minister), nor to expect your minister to be particularly adept as a manager. At best, we can hope for minister who approximates to a holy person. But we’ll probably have to settle for someone who actually does maintain a daily spiritual practice, and who might be occasionally inspired (a word which literally means, O best beloved, infused with spirit, or Spirit). Ha! –too bad my stupid alter ego, Dan, is none of the above; except that he does maintain a daily spiritual practice.

Now that that is settled, Mr. Crankypants will head off to bed.

How to do emergent theology

while there are still those people who want to do systematic theology, those people typically live in the world of academia, or wish they were living in the world of academia. Systematic theology has become theology for other theologians and scholars. From where I stand, it is theology that has lost its connection with the reality of my world.

So where do I stand?

  • In the Buzzard’s Bay watershed in southeastern Massachusetts. (Systematic theology ignores watersheds and bioregions because it grows out of assumptions that theology applies in the same way to every watershed.) We are a postindustrial landscape where parts of the landscape contain intense concentrations of toxic wastes. We are in a postagricultural landscape where sprawl eats up farms and cranberry bogs. All this shapes the theological tasks of healing and redemption.
  • In a diverse community of human beings who don’t always fit neatly into the binary American categories of race. (American systematic theology, when it recognizes race at all, has a tendency to divide human beings into black and white binaries.) The Native and African American communities blend together. The Cape Verdean community may be Black, or it may be Portuguese, depending on who’s doing the looking and the talking. A White person could be an Anglophone or a Lusophone or a “Hispanophone.” All this shapes practical theological anthropology in ways seemingly foreign to the academic theologians.
  • In a place where religious discourse is divided between by conservative Catholic rhetoric on the one hand, and conservative atheist rhetoric on the other hand. (Systematic theology never seems to touch on the realities of the religious discourse in which we engage in the workplace and the wider community.) Our few liberal religious groups have silenced themselves by morphing into social groups who do not talk about religion. All this shapes theological discourse — talking openly about liberal religion is a radical act because doing so is a refusal to accept the generally accepted rules of religious discourse.

So how do you do theology when you’re so far away from systematic theology? A few academic theologians give us ways to do theology that matters. I have found Anthony Pinn particularly useful. Pinn writes as an African American humanist theologian who sees through the usual stereotype that “all African American religion is Christian.” In his essay “Rethinking the nature and tasks of African American theology: A pragmatic perspective ” (American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, May, 1998) Pinn writes:

…[M]y effort [is] to move beyond a strictly polemical discussion of Black Theology toward a more constructive and pragmatic posture that is based on three pragmatic moves. The first movement entails my rethinking conceptions of religious experience in ways that recognize the multiplicity of religious experiences. Thus, theology is done with a knowledge of and acquaintance with the variety of religious expressions. In this regard, the reader will recognize the intellectual shadow of both William James and Charles Long within this first move. The second move seeks to think through theology as empirical and historical discipline. Understood in this way, theology becomes a way of seeing, interpreting, and taking hold of African American experience. This thesis is expressed through an examination of theology’s objective and goals, using in large part Victor Anderson’s notion of “cultural fulfillment.” The third move entails reflections on methodology within African American theology. I argue for a critical, pragmatic commitment that gives priority to experience (and the objective of fulfillment) over “tradition.” William R. Jones and Gordon Kaufman provide the framework for this third movement in my pragmatic critique of African American theology.

Recognize multiplicity of religious experience: know how religion is actually done in the world around you. Understand theology as empirical and historical: observe, then interpret, before you theorize. Give priority to experience: leave the academy behind and get out into the world.

I think all this feeds into “UU Emergence,” that is, getting religious communities to deal directly with postmodern realities. There is no grand narrative any more. Instead of timeless systematic theology, tell stories about who and where you are now. There is no one religious movement that will take over the whole world. Instead of universal religious forms, let locality shape liturgy. There is no single genius who can speak for all humanity. Instead of trying to find a top-down authority that knows all and sees all, observe and feel and describe and build networks of mutuality with others. There is no one book of theology that will solve everyone’s theological problems. Instead of trying to write universal systematic theology, write ephemeral blogs.

Maybe it all comes down to getting out and walking around the place you live (I do mean walk, and not drive). I think I’ll do just that, right now.

Christmas, commercialization, and ecotheology

The December 11, 2007, issue of Christian Century magazine, has an interview with theologian Nicholas Lash. Noting that Lash has written sympathetically about Marxism, the interviewer asks if Marxism is “still a philosophy that Christians need to engage.” Lash responds that there is no doubt that Christians still must engage Marxism:

Those who doubt that Christians still need to engage with Marx are as foolish as those who doubt that we still need to engage with Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel. At the heart of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production was his insight that it led, with almost mechanical inevitability, to what he called “the universalization of the commodity form,” the transmutation not only of things, but also of all relations, into commodities….”

Lash is British. Here in the United States, as we drift farther and farther to the right, most people simply dismiss Marx without seriously engaging his thought. Thus we have Christians and other religious persons in the United States decrying, say, the commercialization of Christmas (which is simply a specific instance of commodification), but refusing to engage in a serious critique of the capitalist system that has commercialized Christmas — understandably so, because after all it is not a good idea to be branded as a “communist” or a “socialist” here in the United States. Lash addresses the refusal of many U.S. Christians to take Marx seriously:

May I risk being a little polemical here, out of friendly exasperation? I can understand why, in a culture as driven and absorbed by messianic capitalism as is the United States, versions of socialism of any kind are hard to comprehend with sympathy. But please do not drag us [British Christians] in with you. There were, as any historian can tell you, the very closest links between 20th-century socialism in Britain and Christianity, especially Nonconformity…. We do not find Christian socialism in any way difficult to understand, because we remember it.

In my own Unitarian Universalist denomination, which is essentially a post-Christian denomination at this point, I see pretty much the same refusal to engage with Marx. Lots of Unitarian Universalists are worried about the commercialization of our lives, the breakdown in human community, the degradation of the environment, etc. But it seems we are culturally unable to draw on the analytical tools that Marx develops in Capital — tools which provide deep insights into things like the breakdown of community and the devastation of the planet.

Indeed, one of the weaknesses of current Unitarian Universalist theology, as it is practiced in our congregations, is that we pretty much ignore philosophers after Kant. The end result is that our theology, like our social justice programs, tend to be fairly irrelevant to the late capitalist situation. As someone who is concerned with developing a relevant Unitarian Universalist eco-theology, I’d have to say that it’s probably time for us to start reading Marx.

Unprovability of Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law is as follows: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. But a corollary to Murphy’s Law states that it is impossible to prove Murphy’s Law.

Proof: If anything can go wrong it will go wrong; when you are trying to prove that things go wrong, your proof will go wrong; thus during the proof everything will go right, thus disproving (rather than proving) Murphy’s Law. Q.E.D.

It should therefore also be obvious that any attempt to apply either Murphy’s Law, or this corollary of Murphy’s Law, to religion will result in failure; which in itself has some profound religious implications. (And you thought Kurt Godel’s Unprovability Theorem was mind-blowing when applied to religion….)

Friday video: The empty jar

Story time, Unitarian Universalist style! In this week’s video, I read Jesus’s parable of the empty jar, from the Gospel of Thomas (one of the books that didn’t make it into the official Christian scriptures). Then I talk about a few possible interpretations of the parable, but since I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister I refuse to come up with one final correct interpretation. (5:05)

Note to nitpickers: Yeah, I know I’m posting the “Friday Video” on Saturday. Before you start picking nits, remember that I do this as a hobby, and sometimes life makes it difficult to keep to schedules.

Note: video host blip.tv is defunct, so this video no longer exists.

Notes on our theological boundaries

These notes are addressed to my fellow Unitarian Universalists, although they may be of some interest to other liberal religious persons. I’ve been thinking about this question: Where do we draw our theological boundaries? Having some sense of where our boundaries are will help us to answer another questions: whom do we keep out, and whom should we be seeking out to welcome in? Mind you, these are just notes — which means your thoughts, reactions, and comments will be most welcome. Continue reading →

Local theology

Let’s see if I can make some loose connections between a few things — just sort of thinking out loud….

In the past forty years, the main stream of conversation for academics and intellectuals interested in the humanities has meandered away from the narrow confines of the established Western canon, and gone off on multiple tangents. Those of us who are willing to admit to being intellectuals are no longer satisfied with reading books by DWMs (Dead White Men) — we’ve gotten fascinated by books written by women and persons of color, we’re reading books that were once only of local interest, and we’re looking in to folk literature and oral history and other, less fixed, media.

We’re meandering through a tremendously exciting intellectual landscape. Instead of just reading Walden, Nature, and The Scarlet Letter, we can read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and discover that it is just as good a book as those old standbys from the old American Renaissance canon. Instead of just reading Henry James, we find out that Sarah Orne Jewett was pretty darn good in her own right, and less ponderous than James. We still keep an eye on the great classics — Shakespeare and the King James Bible still tower above the rest of the literary landscape as the tallest mountains — but we’ve discovered that we don’t need to spend all our time climbing Mount Everest when there are many other equally interesting mountains and hills right in our own backyards (as it were) to explore.

And somehow this all connects with what I’ve been feeling about Western theology. I know I should be interested in reading Thomas Aquinas and Kant and (because I’m a religious liberal) Schleiermacher. But I’m far more interested in learning about Mary Rotch, a New Light Quaker who was read out of New Bedford Friends Meeting in the 1820’s for her liberal views, who joined the New Bedford Unitarian church, and who apparently had a profound influence of Emerson. As a Quaker, she didn’t prepare written sermons, but some of her vocal ministry apparently was recorded, and now I’m trying to track that down. She was no Thomas Aquinas, she wasn’t even a George Fox, but what she had to say deeply influenced many people here in New Bedford, and through her influence on Emerson her ideas spread even farther afield.

It’s a truism in certain circles to say that all theology is local theology. Local theology is the intersection of a religious tradition in on elocality, its local history, its place in a wider religious community or network, and the lives of the people in that religious community along with the lives of others in that region. Schleiermacher natters away to the cultured despisers of religion (read: upper middle class) about how religion is just symbolic; Aquinas and Kant spin their ontological fantasies about the nature of God and the ground of morals; and all the while, other people are actually living out religion and creating theology through the way they live their lives. I’m much more interested in local theology than the theology of academics and DWMs.

So when someone says to me, “Do you believe in God?” I want to respond flippantly, “Depends on where I am,” or more seriously, “Do you mean the God of the academics, or the God which may or may not manifest in the lives of people living in New Bedford?” Because when people talk about God in New Bedford, they tend to mean something different than the God I heard talked about in Geneva, Illinois (in Geneva, God does not bless the fishing fleet each year) — to say nothing of the fact that those who disbelieve in God in New Bedford disbelieve in a different God than those who disbelieve in God in Geneva, Illinois. And we can distinguish an even finer grain than that, for Unitarian Universalists in New Bedford believe or disbelieve in God in different ways than Unitarian Universalists in Geneva, Illinois.

As I said, I’m just thinking out loud here. Maybe some day I’ll make some sense out of what I’m trying to say.

Avarice and inhumanity

While researching today’s sermon, I found excerpts from a 1774 sermon by Elhanan Winchester, who was preaching Universalism in the 1770’s here in New England. This 1774 sermon was on the evils of the slave trade, and I would have expected that a Universalist preacher would emphasize the radical egalitarian aspects of Universalism, i.e., that God loves all persons equally, that all persons share in the same final destiny, and therefore allowing slavery goes against God’s intentions for humankind.

Perhaps Winchester makes that argument elsewhere in his sermon, but in the excerpt I read, he condemns slavery because it is founded on the “base and ignoble” principle of avarice. And, says Winchester, “avarice tends to harden the heart, to render the mind callous to the feelings of humanity, indisposes the soul to every virtue, and renders it prey to every vice.” Since Winchester did believe in some future punishment for sin, perhaps he is warning us that falling prey to avarice could result in punishment after death (up to fifty thousand year’s worth, in his theological system).

I’m an Ultra-Universalist myself (that is, I reject the idea of any punishment for sin after death), but I can draw a somewhat more subtle theological point from this. Any action that causes us to do evil, any action that “hardens the heart, renders the mind callous to the feelings of humanity,” makes us less human — it drives us further from God, if you prefer traditional theological language; or if you don’t like traditional theological language, it drives us away from love and loving relationships and so makes us less than human.

And if Winchester is correct, that avarice is one of the most base and ignoble of human sins — or to put it another way, that avarice quickly makes us less than human — this would imply that a free-market economic system based on self-centered interest could slip easily into avarice, which does not bode well for the morals or humanity of a people living under such an economic system.

(I’ve included more of Winchester’s words below….) Continue reading →

There’s a peculiar thing about racism in the United States. Racism is obviously real, and there’s plenty of research that documents its effects on individuals and groups of people. At the same time, the concept of race itself isn’t real; that is to say, race does not have a biological basis. Looking more closely at the legitimate research on racism, it seems obvious that the study of racism properly belongs in the domains of political science, sociology, perhaps psychology; but not in the domains of physiology and biology. That leads me to the unsurprising conclusion that race exists as a social phenomenon which is a result of racism;– it’s not that racism emerges from biological differences between races; instead, racism is existentially prior, and the concept of race is a social or political product or result of racism.

In theology, we could make a parallel argument. Race does not exist at the level of theological anthropology; when we ask, “Who and what are persons?” we do not find that race is an essential attribute of persons. Instead, we find that all persons are of infinite value (to use an old Universalist formulation); persons are not valued differently based on alleged racial attributes. Racism, however, clearly exists as damaged or perverted relationships between persons; racism, then, should be addressed as a problem of ethics and morals. Indeed, racism is so damaging to persons and to society that it can only be classed as an evil existent within the social order. Here the insights of the social gospelers becomes useful, as we attempt to gain an adequate understanding of “the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it”, and further as we attempt to “redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion.” [Theology for the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch, p. 5.]

I find making such a theological argument to be quite useful (although obviously as it stands, it needs to be refined quite a bit). By showing racism to be a species of sin or evil, we make clear that religious persons are in some sense required to put an end to racism. From the point of view of my Universalist theology, racism is a particularly egregious evil, because of the multifarious ways in which it denies the infinite worth of each person. Not that this theological understanding gives us any practical means for putting an end to racism; but it shows anti-racism work to be a strong moral imperative.