Category: Theology

Gary Dorrien on the Occupiers

Christian Century magazine interviews social ethicist Gary Dorrien on the Occupy Wall Street movement. The interview is a promotional piece for an essay by Dorrien in the latest issue of Christian Century, but it’s worth reading on its own. Best bit from the interview:

As a social ethicist whose field was invented by the Social Gospel movement, I treasure the Social Gospel’s emphasis on just distribution and the common good, along with Reinhold Niebuhr’s realist emphasis on power politics and the faults of liberal idealism. But liberationist criticism adjudicates what I take from the Social Gospel and Niebuhrian traditions. Social justice must not be reduced to concerns about the fair distribution of things. It is also about giving voice to oppressed communities and being liberated from structures of oppression and dependency.

Read the interview.

Raised from being dead

Recently, I read a feminist interpretation of one of those stories in which Jesus goes and heals someone; alas, I can’t remember where I read it, so I’m going to have to reconstruct it on my own.

These healing stories tend to annoy me. I’m not friendly to supernatural explanations; I’m a religious naturalist; so I tend to dismiss those stories where a prophet brings someone back from the dead, because I know it’s just not possible. Obviously, however, I don’t have to think of these healing stories as literal truth; they can be considered as metaphorical.

So here’s the story: A man named Jairus, a ruler of the local synagogue, come up to Jesus, and says, “My twelve year old daughter lies at the point of death. Won’t you please come and lay hands on her that she may be healed?” Jesus goes to the man’s house, but when they get there, someone tells Jairus that his daughter is dead, so he should stop bugging Jesus. Jesus tells him not to be afraid, and goes into the house. He takes the girl’s hand, and says, “Talitha, cumi,” which means, “Girl, I tell you, arise.” And the girl gets up and walks around, and everyone is astonished.

Who knows what the original storytellers meant by this story? There are plenty of Christians today who will tell you that they are quite sure they know what the story means, and they will tell you that the story means that Jesus Christ can perform miracles and raise people from the dead. Well, this story comes from the book of Mark (5.25 ff.), and nowhere in the story is Jesus called “Jesus Christ,” and nowhere does the story say that the story has to be interpreted so literally as that.

Here’s another interpretation. Anyone who has hung out with twelve year old girls these days knows that it is a vulnerable age. Sometimes the alive, interesting, assertive girl of childhood seems to die at around age twelve. It’s like the girl that used to be so alive has died, or at least become this passive being that (metaphorically speaking) just seems to lie there; Mary Pipher wrote about this phenomenon in her book Reviving Ophelia.

Perhaps what those girls need is some adult who believes in them. That adult might say to the other adults in that girl’s life, “Be not afraid, only believe. The girl is not dead, only sleeping.” That adult might then say to the girl, “Girl, I say to thee, arise.” And perhaps it’s not a bad idea to have a respected male figure say this to the girl, someone who’s not her father, at least once in the girl’s life.

That interpretation makes this a story that’s not about physical healing, but instead about adults recognizing girl power when they see it.

Occupying the kingdom of God

We’re in Boston right now visiting family, and to day I read this on the front page of today’s Boston Globe:

When Occupy Boston protesters complain about greedy bankers, corporate jets, and the wealthiest Americans, Henry Hegelson feels as if he is one of the prime targets.

Hegelson, 37, said he is not only in the top 1 percent of American earners, but also founded a financial company and an airplane charter business. He said the protesters don’t seem to care that he built his wealth from scratch….

In that last sentence we see the chasm that lies between the understanding of the occupiers and the wealthy: Hegelson believes that he created all his wealth completely “from scratch,” while the occupiers believe that the financial system is basically rigged in such a way that the vast majority of people simply cannot build their wealth “from scratch.”

I come at it from a third perspective. Theologian Bernard Loomer pointed out the intellectual accomplishments of Jesus of Nazareth, and in particular Loomer’s intellectual conception of the “Kingdom of Heaven,” which Loomer himself prefers to call the “web of life.”

Based on this intellectual conception of the way the world works — that we are all inter-related in a web of life — Jesus pointed out the damaging effects of wealth. Too much wealth cuts you off from other persons, and indeed from all living and non-living things, in destructive ways. If you want to be fully supported by and participating in the Kingdom of Heaven, you must get rid of wealth. Too much wealth leads you to exploit other human beings, other living things, and non-living things — to live counter to the Web of Life.

Thus, when the rich young man comes to Jesus and says that he follows all the rules of religion, wand wants to know what else he must do to have access to the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus tells him (as translated in the King James Version): “Go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thous shat have treasure in heaven.” The rich young man is “sad at that saying,” and wanders off and out of the story.

We never learn if the rich young man in the story actually sold everything he had and gave the proceeds to the poor. But we can be pretty sure that Henry Hegelson has no intention of doing anything of the kind; and so Hegelson has shut himself out of the Kingdom of Heaven. Unlike the rich young man, Hegelson isn’t even “sad at that saying”; he’s just baffled why anyone doesn’t think he is a hero.

Moving away from the humanist-theist debate

Tonight Amy Zucker Morgenstern, the senior minister at the Palo Alto church, and I led a class on humanism, theism, and naturalism, part of a series of classes we’re doing on current issues in liberal religion. We each began with a presentation on the topic; the text of my presentation is below. Our presentations were followed by a lively and enjoyable conversation with the 14 people who came, a conversation that ranged from metaphysics to demographics.

When Amy and I started talking about this class, I knew right away what I wanted to talk about: I wanted to talk about religious naturalism. I wanted to talk about religious naturalism because at the moment it is the only theological “ism” that I have any interest in associating with.

The reason I wanted to talk about religious naturalism is because in my experience it is the only theological position within Unitarian Universalism that doesn’t by definition shut out one or more other theological positions. Humanists and theists each want to shut the other group out, even force the other group out. Humanists and christian theists want to keep those doggone pagans out, and pagans, given half a chance, would shut out the humanists and christian theists. The Buddhists sit there smiling smugly at everyone else as if they have the real answers, and they’re willing to tolerate us until such a time that the rest of us get with their program. And so on.

This is all very fine and good. I like a good knock-down, drag-out argument as much as anyone. (Though I will admit I prefer theological bar fights to what academic theologians do — that is, I prefer an out-and-out fight with shouting, throwing of bar stools, and fisticuffs, to the refined intellectual backstabbing that is too often characteristic of the academy.) In fact, I think arguments are a lot of fun, as long as those who are involved are all basically healthy, and all basically want to get involved in the fight. Continue reading “Moving away from the humanist-theist debate”

A parable told by robots, signifying…

A robot tells the parable of the Gospel of Thomas, ch. 97. Here’s the text of the video:

The kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of flour. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the flour spilled out behind her along the road. She did not know it. She had not noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.

A slightly different version of Thomas 97 will be the reading in the Sunday services tomorrow.

(Update, 11/22: video moved to Vimeo, audio improved a bit, and editing tightened up a bit.)

October 2 sermon topic: discuss….

My title for this Sunday’s sermon here in the Palo Alto church is “Liberal religion, Silicon Valley style.” I’m a big believer in the notion that any religious organization will be influenced by the immediately surrounding community. Therefore, Unitarian Universalism in Silicon Valley should have some distinctive features. So what are some of the most important of those distinctive features, and how do they affect the way we do religion here? Here are three possible answers:

(1) One distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life is the ethic of hard work: here in the Valley, people believe that the harder one works the better off one will be. By contrast, Thoreau’s famous book Walden, an important book for many Unitarian Universalists, extolls the virtue of spending less time working hard, and more time contemplating Nature. I’d say Silicon Valley liberal religion extolls the virtue of lots of hard work, and tends to ignore thinkers like Thoreau.

(2) Another distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life is that we live in a truly multicultural and multiracial place. Santa Clara County is a white-minority county with no dominant racial or ethnic group; this is what the rest of the United States will look like within a generation. And while our congregation is 85-90% white, that also means that we are 10-15% non-white, and we’re all so used to living in the multiracial, multicultural world of Silicon Valley that it seems to me we’re pretty relaxed about becoming an increasingly multicultural congregation.

(3) Now add another distinctive feature of Silicon Valley life: the engineering and entrepreneurial drive which lead us to believe we can fix anything if we put our minds to it. I think Silicon Valley is going to be the place where liberal religion figures out how to be truly multiracial and multicultural. Here in the Valley, multiracial doesn’t mean there are both black and white people in the congregation, it means there are whites, blacks, East Asians, and South Asians; and people who were born in several different countries (Russia, India, Taiwan, etc.).

So liberal religion in Silicon Valley is characterized by a strong work ethic; by multiculturalism; and by a can-do attitude. This raise the interesting question that I’m going to try to address in the sermon: Does this mean all we’re going to do in our congregation is work our asses off? Because if all we’re going to do is to work our asses off (or work our collective ass off, whatever), even if it’s for a good cause, I’m just not interested. There has to be a better way to do religion….

The news from CERN

The news from CERN is — very interesting. According to the BBC: “Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Colider, have confounded physicists because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.” CERN scientists are releasing their results to allow wider investigation and debate in the scientific community.

Whether or not this experimental result winds up being confirmed, what particularly interests me is the willingness to challenge one of the cornerstones of physics. Fallibilism is a powerful principle: even the special theory of relativity has to be up for grabs; everything has to be up for grabs.

Is there a Unitarian Universalist “preferential option for the poor”?

I’m wondering why people join Unitarian Universalist congregations. Do we join in order to find a posse to help us further our existing social justice commitments? Do we join in order to help us stay in our current jobs, and maybe get better jobs? In other words, do we join in order to meet our own needs?

I’m a fan of liberation theologies. Liberation theologies talk about a preferential option for persons who don’t have as much power as the rest of the world. So Latin American liberation theologies talked about a preferential option for the poor: the purpose of religious communities was to live out Jesus’s consistent teachings to help people who were poor. Feminist liberation theologies say that religion communities must recognize that women and girls are as fully human as men and should be treated as such. And so on through black liberation theologies, queer liberation theologies, etc., etc.

Why have a preferential option for the poor? In liberation theology’s terms, the preferential option of the poor is how a religious community can begin to establish the Kingdom of Heaven, whether you believe the Kingdom of Heaven is something that’s here on earth waiting to burst out into reality if we give it a chance, or whether it is a reward that awaits you after death.

We can contrast liberation theologies with prosperity spirituality, which is “characterized by the doctrine that God desires Christians to be prosperous.” (William Kay, “Prosperity Spirituality,” in New Religions: A Guide, ed. Christopher Partridge [Oxford University: 2004], p. 91). Prosperity spirituality is designed to appeal to those who find the prospects for the future to be bleak and who don’t want to wait until the afterlife to enjoy the rewards of religion. Oral Roberts was the first great purveyor of prosperity spirituality.

Unitarian Universalism, and liberal religion more generally, strike me as being much closer to prosperity spirituality than to liberation theology. Many Unitarian Universalists are skeptical about heaven, and the rest are probably more concerned with getting heaven into people now, than in getting people into heaven later (to paraphrase John Corrado). Either way, we’re more concerned with how we can make our lives better, than we are in how we can enjoy the rewards of the afterlife. To my mind, this has pushed us into a kind of prosperity spirituality: Join our congregation because your life will be better due to improved mental and emotional health — join our congregation and do social justice to others which will make you feel better about yourself.

Sure, I’m exaggerating and engaging in polemic (as usual). But I also think I’m right: we Unitarian Universalists are far more likely to engage in our form of prosperity spirituality than we are to believe in a preferential option for the poor.

“Domesticated eristic debate”

There’s an interesting post with a long comment thread at the blog Warp, Weft, and Way that touches on the differences between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. The opening paragraphs captured my attention, but then I found myself questioning whether Western philosophy is defined too narrowly:

A core feature of philosophical culture in the Western tradition is the supposition that debating about abstract matters is productive of insight, and that it encourages (or at least comports with) the attainment of appealing moral and religious goals. The canonical thinkers of classical Greece and China all deplore eristic debate, where the point of articulating and defending theses is simply to gain victory over the opponent. Plato and Aristotle, however, domesticate the procedures of eristic debate, yoking precise definition and dogged discussion of entailments and justification to ideals of friendship and inquiry.

I think this kind of domestication never took place in classical China: the moralists with lasting influence (Confucians and Daoists) were not inclined to think friendship and inquiry well-served by prolonged argumentative discussion….

From my perspective as a former student of philosophy who now does theology, the cases of Plato and Aristotle are interesting and foundational to Western thought — but these two philosophers do not adequately represent the full spectrum of Western thought.

Western theology, which has been understood as both a subset and a superset of Western philosophy, includes several mystical traditions that tend more towards enigmatical pronouncements than towards reasoned debate (or domesticated eristic debate). For example, in the American intellectual tradition, Emerson tends towards mysticism; and it can be very hard to try to engage in reasoned debate with Emerson, since he tends to transrational and aphoristic pronouncements that depend more on intuition than reason. Another example from ancient times might be Jesus of Nazareth’s parables, as reported by later followers.

The Western theological tradition draws not just on Greek philosophy, but also on the deep reservoir of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish intellectual tradition. This expands the Western theological repertoire well beyond reasoned debate. Neither Ecclesiastes nor the parables of Jesus can be characterized as reasoned debate, yet both have serious intellectual content. None of this is to deny that there is a distinct difference between Chinese and Western intellectual traditions, but whether theology is a subset or superset of Western philosophy, I’m not convinced Western philosophy can be reduced to domesticated eristic debate.

Reading notes

From the essay “It’s about Faith in Our Future: Star Trek Fandom as Cultural Religion” by Michael Jindra:

Most Americans think of “religion” as a system of private, conscious, and articulated beliefs, usually expressed in churches and formal creeds, and set off from the other “spheres” of life such as work, politics, or leisure. This view of religion, however, stems from the specifically Western process of societal “differentiation,” in which institutional religion was given a specific function. After the medieval era, when religious practice was intimately connected to everyday life, the practice of Christianity became “abstracted,” or disconnected from everyday life. As a result, we now tend to regard “religion” as something connected to institutions such as churches and denominations. Alternatively, we view it as something personal and private, a psychological aid that is only peripherally connected to a person’s life.

This view of religion severely limits our understanding of it….

Religion and Popular Culture in America, ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, rev. ed. 2005), p. 161.

Using a more expansive definition of religion, Jindra goes on to demonstrate how Star Trek fandom can be understood as a kind of humanist religion. He supports this in part by citing an interview with Rodenberry published in the March/April, 1991, issue of American Humanist, in which Rodenberry said he saw Star Trek as based on a humanist philosophy wherein human beings take control of their own destiny.