Category Archives: Theology

Friday

Ferry Beach Conference Center, Saco, Maine

I’m spending a couple of days at Ferry Beach Conference Center. I was supposed to attend a small church conference, but it was canceled at the last minute. I decided to come up here anyway and spend a couple of days doing a sort of study-retreat.

I left Concord at about 4 p.m., after having lunch and a long talk with a good friend. Traffic was heavy and slow on Interstate 495 headed north, and I didn’t arrive at Ferry Beach until 6:30 p.m. First stop was Huot’s, a seafood restaurant in the village of Camp Ellis. At their takeout window, I got fried clams, French fries, and cole slaw, and started the ten-minute walk back to the conference center. But I couldn’t wait to start in on the clams, and began eating them out of the bag as I walked.

“Is there going to be any left the time you get home?” said a man sitting on the wide front porch of one of the summer rentals. He had a good-natured grin on his face.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said. He just laughed.

Today, I’ve been working my way through Faith without Certainty: Liberal Theology for the 21st Century by Paul Rasor. I skimmed some of it back in June when I bought it, but now I’m sitting down and reading it straight through. I sat at the picnic table at my campsite on this perfect summer day, the sun glinting down through the trees, a chipmunk running back and forth between some trees, a few late summer birds calling idly every now and again.

And Paul writes clear prose that’s almost entirely free of the obfuscatory, precious academic jargon that’s endemic in theological circles. I have been particularly enjoying the way Paul clarifies the postmodern challenges to liberal theology.

It’s too bad the small church conference was canceled, but I have to say this is the perfect setting to catch up on my theology reading.

Should be a bestseller, but won’t be

This week, I’ve been reading Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker. Brock and Parker take on the subject of violence, and suggest that the Christian tradition provides a fertile breeding ground for acts of violence; they argue for example that if God was willing to kill off God’s son Jesus, what does that say to a child who’s being abused by her/his parents? –it says, do what Jesus did, accept the suffering, and all will be well.

But do not imagine that this is a Christian-bashing book. Both Parker and Brock have stayed within the Christian tradition. Rather, they are trying to retell the Christian story so that it becomes less destructive. In that respect, they remind me a little of the great Universalist Hosea Ballou. 200 years ago this year, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, in which he pointed out that a God of love would not kill his son in order to atone for something. It strikes me that what Brock and Parker are really doing is updating Universalism, finding anew that God is love.

And if you have no interest in discussions of God or Christianity, the book is still worth reading. The personal stories in the book are absolutely riveting — this is one book of theology that truly is a page-turner. And even if you’re not Christian, the stories give you a sense of how violence has become endemic in our culture. Highly recommended.

Remembering Maria Harris

In the past fifty years, which North American has had the most radical ideas on church life? My vote is for Maria Harris, feminist scholar and teacher. She’s best known as a religious education sholar, but I think of her as the expert on practical ecclesiology.

Harris is best known for her radical ideas about what churches really teach, as opposed to what classes they offer. Throw out that old notion that religious education is confined to Sunday school classrooms. Harris told us that we start learning about religion the moment we walk into a church building — or as she put it, the whole church is curriculum.

Think about going to a worship service at a congregation you haven’t visited yet. If someone welcomes you at the door, however shyly and awkwardly, you learn that this congregation welcomes the stranger, those who aren’t yet a part of the community. If people give money freely and gladly during the offertory, you learn that this is a generous people. And so on. It works the other way, too. If you want to teach people about generosity, it’s not enough to teach a stewardship class, which Harris would call “explicit curriculum.” We also teach each other about generosity through our actions, which Harris terms “implicit curriculum.” Andf the implicit and explicit curriculums teach different things, everyone’s just going to get confused.

She also talked about the “null curriculum,” what we teach by its absence — a very useful concept to anyone who’s trying to do anti-racism work in a local congregation.

That’s just the beginning of what this quietly radical scholar said. Over the past ten years, her books have been changing my entire approach to religion. Sadly, I just learned she died in February, 2005, after a long illness. You can read a wonderful tribute to her life and work by her former colleagues at Andover Newton Theological School [update: Feb, 2006, tribute removed from Andover Newton Web site], where she began her teaching career.

If you want to get radicalized, try reading these books of hers:

  • Fashion Me a People: Curriculum and the Church, Presbyterian Publishing, 1989;
  • Jubilee Time: Celebrating Women, Spirit, and the Advent of Age, Bantam, 1996
  • Reshaping Religious Education: Conversations on Contemporary Practice, with Gabriel Moran, Presbyterian Publishing, 1998.

Go on. Read one of her books. Radicalize your congregation. I dare you….

Moltman?!?

Mr. Crankypants is baaa-ack. Today, he will be ranting about theology. No fluffy lightweight stuff today, campers — theology.

Other UU bloggers have been taking a quiz that purports to tell you which theologian you most resemble. You can find it at http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=44116 — but really, don’t waste your time, the quiz simply ignores all of Mr. Crankypants’s favorite cranky theologians.

First of all, you know a theology quiz is suspect when they use the term “man” instead of “humanity” — that automatically means that they are not considering cranky feminist theologians like Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Reuther, or Rebecca Parker. (Actually, Rebecca Parker is too nice to be called cranky, but she is righteous.)

But it gets worse. The quiz has lots of talk about “Christ,” but very little about “Jesus” — so you can be pretty sure that you’re not going to be compared to Howard Thurman, who tended to use Jesus’ name, not the title later applied to him. The quiz goes on and on about retribution, with nothing about universal salvation, so you know cranky ol’ Hosea Ballou wasn’t considered. No mention of racism or oppression, so you can forget the cranky theolgians who fight oppression like James Cone, Anthony Pinn, or Gustavo Guttierrez.

Not even anything about the struggle between the secular and the religious, so rule out Harvey Cox (who’s not cranky), or Stanley Hauerwas (who has described himself as “the turd in the punchbowl,” and is definitely cranky).

Before Mr. Crankypants was even done with the quiz, he knew the quizmakers hadn’t even considered any of his favorite theolgians — that they were going to try to say Mr. Crankypants was like some dead male German. Sure enough — they said Mr. Crankypants was a 33% match for Jurgen Moltmann. John Calvin was a close second, and Jonathan Edwards was in there somewhere.

Mr. Crankypants can tolerate Edwards (who, although wrong, was plenty cranky, and could write reasonably well besides). But this was one online quiz that was so badly designed.

Now that you know you can skip the quiz, take that time to go and read some good, cranky, paradigm-shattering theology. But not Moltmann….for gosh’s sakes….

((Moltmann. Moltmann?! Grrr. Bet those idots haven’t even read A Black Theology of Liberation.))

More than you wanted to know about covenants

New Bedford, Mass.

In preparation for the sermon I’m giving here on Sunday, just before this congregation votes whether to call me or not, I’ve been researching covenant. I think of covenants as the promises as religious group makes to one another, and to the wider world. Thus covenants have practical theological implications. So I’ve been searching the Web for examples of covenants used by Unitarian Universalist congregations in North America. Here are some that I particularly liked:

Covenant of the Unitarian Universalist church in Saco/Biddeford, Maine:

In the freedom of truth and in the spirit of Love, we unite for the worship of God and the service of all.

Commentary: A hold-over from a classic late 19th C. Unitarian covenant. Simple, straightforward, and easy to remember, it includes a few key words: “freedom,” “love,” and “service.” Nice that this covenant recognizes that worship services are at the center of congregational life, though these days some Unitarian Universalists might prefer to find another word besides “God.”

Covenant of Second Unitarian in Chicago, Illinois:

We covenant to build a community that challenges us to grow and empowers us to hold faithful to the truth within ourselves. — We will be generous with our gifts and honest in our communication, holding faithful to a love that embraces both diversity and conflict. — Called by our living tradition, we will nurture spirituality within a vision of the eternal, living out our inner convictions through struggles for justice and acts of compassion.

Commentary: The language is a little trendy and middle class (“empowers,” “communication”), but overall reasonably memorable and suitable for reading out loud. For an article on the process used to develop this covenant, see http://www.uua.org/archive/promise/stories3.html

Covenant of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Ill.

Being desirous of promoting practical goodness in the world, and of aiding each other in our moral and religious improvement, we have associated ourselves together — not as agreeing in opinion, not as having attained universal truth in belief or perfection in character — but as seekers after truth and goodness.

Commentary: In spite of the 19th C. language (this was written in 1842), this is simple, direct, and to the point. The phrase “not as agreeing in opinion, not as having attained universal truth in belief or perfection in character” serves as an excellent reminder that we are all fallible as individuals. Would be better if it mentioned love, but aside for that an excellent covenant.

The Web site of the Unitarian Universalist Association has a small collection of historic and contemporary covenants at http://www.uua.org/archive/promise/covenants.html

What is theology, anyway?

Harvey Cox’s book on pentecostalism, Fire From Heaven, is his usual mix of scholarship, journalism, and diary. But partway through, he comes up with an interesting definition of theology.

You see, from the point of view of professional theologians, pentecostals don’t have any real theology, because they don’t have any professors of theology writing treatises on pentecostal theology. So many people say that there is no such thing as pentecostal theology. Cox writes:

There are, of course, theologians who take exception to the phrase ‘pentecostal theology’ as a kind of oxymoron. But I disagree. By its ‘theology,’ I mean the symbolic cosmos of the pentecostal movement, which is articulated not through formal treatises but in the songs and prayers, the sermons and testimonies. This is where the most fundamental revolution is going on … [p. 201]

Hmmm… The same thing might be said about Unitarian Universalism. The few professional theologians we have these days hold little interest for me — to be honest, I have no interest in doing systematic theology, nor am I interested in reading dead German theologians who write badly, nor do I want to base theology on psychotherapy.

But there are theologians whom I believe are doing really interesting work. Anthony Pinn, an African American humanist who has sometimes aligned himself with Unitarian Universalism, has done a number of books where he goes out into the African American community and simply describes the theologies he finds. Pinn contends that most other African American theologians claim that African American theology is entirely Christian — but Pinn finds a wide range of theologies out in the African American community (see his book Varieties of African American Religious Experience). I think of this as doing “descriptive theology,” whereas most academic theologians do systematic theology [yawn] or “prescriptive theology,” where they tell us what we should believe.

If we started doing descriptive theology of Unitarian Universalism, it might get pretty interesting. It might be fun looking at UU sermons, UU pamphlets, UU songs, and so on. Yes, this means the current hymnal should be studied as a theological work — as should the songs Susan C. is writing for our children’s choir — as should….

In any case, Harvey Cox has gotten me thinking that maybe there’s a better way to do theology. Maybe theology should consist of a mixture of scholarship, diary, and journalism. Maybe we’d be surprised if we started doing Unitarian Universalist theology that way — maybe we’d find out that we really do have a theology that has little to do with the “seven principles” and more to do with the way we lead our lives.

What a book

Notes from my week of study leave

Made my bimonthly pilgrimage to the Seminary Coop Bookstore, down in the basement of Chicago Theological School in the South Side of Chicago. (I still say it is the best academic bookstore I have visited on this side of the Atlantic.)

As usual, I walked out with ten or twenty pounds of books, including a copy of The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic, by R. K. Narayan, a prominent 20th C. Indian novelist.

I remember reading a review of this book a few years ago, probably when the University of Chicago Press edition came out in 2000. The reviewer said it was the best short version (179 pages of the massive 100,000 stanza original poem) of the Mahabharata in English. I’ve been meaning to read it ever since.

Having never read the full Mahabharata, I am in no position to judge how good an abridgement it is. But Narayna’s book is well-written, gripping, entertaining, and even manages to retain something of an epic feel to it in spite of its short length. Best of all, I now have a better sense of the context of the Bhagavad Gita, one of my favorite religious texts, which is but one small part of the entire Mahabharata.

Highly recommended.

B. F. Skinner and the inherent worth and dignity…

Notes from my week of study leave

The April 1, 2005, edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good essay on the work of B. F. Skinner by David Barash, professor of psychology at the University of Washington. Barash reflects, among other things, on how it is that we can see ourselves as we truly are:

The problem is not simply one of seeing ourselves as others see us, but as we really are. Thus for a long time the best view in the city of Warsaw has been from the top of the Ministry of Culture. Why? Because this is practically the only place in that otherwise appealing city from which it is impossible to see the Ministry of Culture (a thoroughly regrettable example of Stalinist architecture at its worst). By the same token, we all see the world from the ministry of our own perceptions, having only this very limited viewpoint from which to see ourselves.

It was Skinner who identified, more clearly than anyone before — or after — the key stumbling block for those of us trying to see ourselves accurately; namely, a reluctance to countenance that human actions are caused, because the more causation, the less credit. ‘We recognize a person’s dignity or worth,’ writes Skinner, ‘when we give him credit for what he has done. The amount we give is inversely proportional to the conspicuousness of the causes of his behavior. If we do not know why a person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him. We try to gain additional credit for ourselves by concealing the reasons why we behave in given ways or by claiming to have acted for less powerful reasons.’ Ironically, there is something flattering and legitimizing in actions or thoughts that spring unbidden from our ‘self’ — whatever that may be — and that aren’t otherwise explicable. By the same token, the more our actions are caused, the less are we credited for them.

Skinner, again: ‘Any evidence that a person’s behavior may be attributed to external circumstances seems to threaten his dignity or worth. We are not inclined to give a person credit for achievements which are in fact due to forces over which he has no control. We tolerate a certain amount of such evidence, as we accept without alarm some evidence that a man is not free. No one is greatly disturbed when important details of works of art and literature, political careers, and scientific discoveries are attributed to ‘influences’ in the lives of artists, writers, statesmen, and scientists respectively. But as an analysis of behavior adds further evidence, the achievements for which a person himself is to be given credit seem to approach zero, and both the evidence and the science which produces it are then challenged.’ And not only achievements: The quotidian events of normal living also qualify.”

Isn’t that an interesting reflection on our much-used phrase “inherent worth and dignity”? That phrase — “inherent worth and dignity” — is one we Unitarian Universalists toss around without really thinking about it. I strongly believe that the real task of congregations is to do theology — which means to reflect carefully on our religious faith, to reflect carefully on words and phrases and texts we use regularly.

David Barash shows us that the phrase “inherent worth and dignity” must lead us to reflections on free will, consciousness and subjectivity, and the mind/body “split.” But read it for yourself, and then start really thinking about what Unitarian Unviersalists mean when they off-handedly mention “the inherent worth and dignity of all individuals — what does that actually mean?!

To read the article, point your browser to:
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=rus8zx389vmlru6y5azc2lehaybc71

Ethics and Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo died yesterday, and our thoughts must be with all her family members as they grieve. But as someone who is not personally affected by her death, I find myself mulling over the ethical questions tha arose during this case, and I have been trying to separate out the ethical issues from the media hype and legal frenzy. The ethical questions prove to be difficult to address, and worthy of serious reflection.

The obvious ethical question is: Under what conditions is it OK to cease medical care for a person? But there are other, related, questions. Ignoring the legal requirements, after someone becomes incapacitated, what ethical standards allow us to say we know a person’s wishes? If someone does not agree with current legislation and/or judicial rulings in this area, is civil disobedience justified? — especially if, as Thoreau mentions in his famous essay on civil disobedience, we can point to higher principles as justification for such civil disobedience? Final question in this area: is this an ethical issue we can safely delegate to the legal realm?

One or two knotty ethical questions get raised by the struggle between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her parents. Most people would agree that when we are children, our parents have primary responsiblity for us, but when does that primary responsibility end? Can that primary responsibility end, but then return later at some level, e.g. when an adult child becomes incapacitated, terminally ill, disabled, etc.?

Similarly, we are confronted with ethical questions regarding marriage. (I am limiting my definition of “marriage” as two people joined in a religious or social ceremony of marriage or union, i.e., I’m not including legal definitions of marriage.) Did Terri Schiavo’s husband give up his ethical rights as a husband when he began building another family? What are the ethical rights of a spouse, anyway? In what areas and in what circumstances can spouses speak for each other? All of this raises difficult questions, including some ontological questions, e.g., do spouses lose something of their individuality when they become partners?

Another set of ethical questions concerns how public persons should get involved with the personal and/or family concerns of a single individual or small group of individuals. We might ask a question like this: Given the reality of the impact of mass media on our lives, at what point does the personal become public? — and therefore, what is the ethical responsibility of the public regarding the personal lives of individuals? A related question: If I am a public figure, how do I make the determination that a personal matter has become public, to the point that I can now ethically get involved as a public figure (e.g., elected official, appointed public official, judge, well-known minister, etc.)?

It is unlikely these ethical questions will have simple answers. (Nor will these questions have answers that neatly follow partisan politics!) Unfortunately, I suspect the public debate around the Terri Schiavo case will move away from the ethical issues, in two directions — into the realm of constitutional politics on the one hand, and on the other hand into overly simplistic debate between extreme views at both ends of the spectrum. But the ethical questions are there, and they won’t go away.