Part 3 of Hunting the Predators. Frightening beyond belief.
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Month: July 2011
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Hunting the Predators Part 2
Here’s Part 2 of the chilling “Hunting the Predators” documentary, which I’ll be using in my Cybersecurity Law class.
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Hunting the Predators
I found this video while prepping my Cybersecurity Law syllabus for next semester. Chilling.
On today’s Brian Lehrer Show there was a segment on a “Marriage Vow” being promoted by a religious right group called the The Family Leader. The original version of the Vow, as signed by Tea Party / Religious Right darling Michele Bachman (among others), stated the following:
“a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”
After some public outcry, this clause apparently was dropped from the Vow.
There are so many ways in which this clause is stupid and uninformed. Let me focus on one: the notion that a child born into slavery in 1860 was part of a “household.” African American slaves were not permitted to run their own “households.” In fact, in many states slaves were not legally permitted to marry. Even where marriages were permitted, slaves remained the property of their owners, who could separate families at will.
The truth is that no black child born into slavery in 1860 was raised in a “two-parent household.” All such children were were raised in multi-person work-camp-prison compounds headed dictatorially by a white male, who owned them as his property. (Rather ironically, but sadly not surprisingly, The Family Leader touts itself as a purveyor of Focus on the Family’s “Truth Project.”)
Does this suggest the authors of the original version of this Vow are racist? Well, yes. Here we get a glimpse behind the racial code-word curtain of American libertarian Tea Party politics. Why anyone claiming to be a follower of Jesus would align him or herself with this sort of thing is beyond me.
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The Evolution of a Worshipper
Yesterday I posted a response to N.D. Wilson’s treatment of Rob Bell in Books & Culture. In this post I’d like to take this conversation a bit deeper.
Wilson’s essay strikes me as a classic example of the “divine command theory” (“DCT”) of ethics. According to DCT, something is good or bad simply because God wills and commands it to be so. It is a popular theory with strong Calvinists because it emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty. This is the perspective, I think, from which Wilson writes.
DCT is vulnerable to the Euthyphro Dilemma. The Euthyphro Dilemma is based on one of Plato’s dialogues. It asks, “does God will the good because (a) it is good, or is it good (b) because God wills it?” If (a), this suggests there is something greater than God, to which God is subject. If (b), this suggests that morality is arbitrary and that statements such as “God is good” are empty tautologies. Neither (a) nor (b) reflect what Christian theists traditionally mean by “God” or “good.” DCT asserts (b), and thereby falls prey to claims of arbitrariness and emptiness.
Wilson seems to think the only other option is (a), which would reduce “God” to something less than the final, soverign being of Christian theism. But (a) is not the only other option. Indeed, neither (a) nor (b) reflect traditional Christian theism. As theologian Stephen Holmes notes in his chapter “The Attributes of God” from The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,“‘goodness is neither merely a name we apply to God’s actions nor a standard beyond God by which he may be judged. Rather, it is God’s own character to which he may indeed be held accountable. . . .”
Note that Holmes asserts that God may be “held accountable” to act in accordance with God’s own character. This is the meaning, Holmes notes, of Abraham’s plea in Genesis 18:25: “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham could not make an appeal to a standard of “right” if “right” meant simply whatever God commands. Why is Abraham confident that God will not “kill the righteous with the wicked” — confident enough to challenge God Himself? Because Abraham knows that God will always act in accordance with God’s own character. God is just, and therefore God will not act unjustly.
An epistemological problem, however, remains. How can we as mere humans know enough about what God is really like to expect that God will act in accordance with some standard we perceive as “good?” DCT here must posit a radical, complete inability to know anything about what God is like. All we can do, according to DCT, is hear and obey God’s commands. But this is untenable.
In order to know that we are in fact hearing God’s commands, we must have some knowledge of the content of God’s communication to us. In order to have such knowledge, we must believe God in fact has communicated in a reliable, intelligible fashion. But in order to believe that God’s presumed communication is reliable and intelligible, we must hold such communication (and by extension its putative speaker) to some standard of reliability and intelligibility. If God could tell a lie and command that such a lie is “good,” how could we know that God’s commands are in fact things He wants us to follow? Maybe God is a trickster and wants to lead us astray.
We can make such judgments because we do, in fact, have some creaturely knowledge of what is “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible.” Our creaturely knowledge necessarily is delivered through the cognitive and linguistic structures available to us as human creatures. But these structures are derived from God as our creator, in whose image we are made. Therefore, although we do not have direct knowledge of what “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible” are with respect to God in His essence, we do have analogical knowledge of these things. This analogical argument is found in Thomas Aquinas, and Holmes summarizes it as follows: “we first know derived goodness, and from that begin to understand what it means to call God good.”
Holmes notes a number of problems with Thomas’ argument and further highlights the problem of divine simplicity that underlies this discussion. But Holmes is correct, I think, in affirming the basic insight that God’s perfections are one and that we can know something about what God is like by creaturely analogy. To be sure, such knowledge is only analogical, never direct, and it is always mediated through and accommodated to the limits of human language. Indeed, we can never really grasp what God communicates to us without the presence of the Holy Spirit, who both authenticates to us God’s speech and enables us to perceive and understand it. But all of this means that, like Abraham, we are right to interrogate deeply when some passage of scripture, or some doctrinal claim, is stated in a way that makes God appear less than everything that He is, all at once, and all together: less than perfectly loving and good, less than perfectly merciful and just, less than perfectly sovereign and gracious.
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N.D. Wilson on Bell: Ugly
N.D. Wilson writes on Rob Bell in the current issue of Books & Culture. I don’t agree with some of Rob Bell’s conclusions in “Love Wins” (to the extent I can figure out what he concludes), but Wilson’s piece is just atrocious. Here’s something I sent in to B&C, but I don’t think they’ll have the space to print it. What bothers me most about Wilson’s piece (and about a similar blog post by Jamie Smith, much as I respect Jamie), is the notion that a sense of aesthetics, a gut-sense that God just can’t be how He is portrayed by some folks, is an invalid source of knowledge. I think that aesthetic sense, that pit you get in the stomach when something just sounds wrong, often serves as an important pointer towards truth. Here’s the text of my long letter to B&C:
Apparently, for N.D. Wilson (“Pensive Rabbits,” July / August 2011), God is free to act arbitrarily and call it “good.” There is no sense, it seems from Wilson’s review Rob Bell’s “Love Wins,” in which God’s inherent character might constrain the ways in which God acts. Nor is the any sense in which the imago Dei in humans, or the subtle presence of the Holy Spirit, might prove useful as a hermeneutical lens for discerning whether some particular account of how God supposedly acts really is True. Bizarrely, Wilson the novelist (does he write ugly stories?) decries Bell’s appeal to aesthetics as bizarre. Never mind the vital role aesthetics has played in the development of Christian conceptions of Truth down through the millennia of Christian thought.
Could it be that when something strikes us as terribly “ugly,” that thing is splattering against the Truth of God’s image deep within us? I felt this recently when I took a tour of the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland. I was in Krakow for a theology conference on the theme “What is Life.” I learned more during that tour of Auschwitz than I did from any of the papers given during the conference (many of which were excellent). I suppose that, for Wilson, the visceral ugliness of Auschwitz doesn’t convey any Truth at all. For my part, I think the bile I felt in my throat during my tour of Auschwitz was the image of God pressing against every cell in my body — literally, a “visceral” reaction, deep in my viscera — against the horror of the death camps.
This is why I think Bell is entirely right to raise the “hippidy-hipster’s” cynical “Really” in response to the stories of Heaven and Hell we so often like to tell. A young Hindu woman, forced into sexual slavery because of her family’s debts, dies forsaken in a brothel of AIDS, never having heard the name of Jesus. She is immediately escorted to the eternal conscious torment of Hell. All of this ultimately glorifies God. “Really?” Yet that is the story much of popular Evangelical soteriology would force us to swallow. Should we all shout “Sig, Heil!”? “Hail Victory” does sound like a catchy title for a Praise and Worship song. Or does the naked ugliness of this story hint that it isn’t really Truth?
Wilson’s response is a strange, quasi-modalistic fideism. If Jesus thinks “the earth is the center of the universe,” Wilson asserts in his concluding Credo, “[t]hen so do I.” Wilson’s disregard for the other two important persons one might want to consult — the Father and the Holy Spirit — is telling. For Wilson, God’s (or I suppose “Jesus'”) actions can be arbitrary. There is no relation between the economic and immanent Trinity. God does not act as God in His Triune being is — he acts as pure power. So why bother with the Trinity at all?
Wilson’s implied modalism leads to his baffling use of the present tense concerning what “Jesus thinks.” How can we know what “Jesus thinks” (present tense)? We of course know some things that Jesus “thought” as described in the Gospels. We have to employ all sorts of theological and herementuetical grids to begin to get at what those things mean for us, particularly when we try to construct doctrine. Should we, say, hate our parents (Luke 14:26)? What did Jesus mean by that? And we have no idea at all what Jesus “thought” about most things during his life on earth. The doctrines of the incarnation and the kenosis ensure that Jesus the man held many typical first-century Jewish ideas that educated people, including Wilson, don’t hold today. Maybe even things like geocentric cosmology. But all of this is the sort of stuff only smarmy skinny-jean clad seminarians talk about while they sip lattes in the div school cafe. A real man like Wilson can let all that pass.
So how do we know what Jesus — or better, the Triune God — “thinks” today? We do what believers in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ have always done. We exercise faith that seeks understanding. We search the scriptures. We use the minds and the experiences God has given us — including our innate, God-imaging sense of aesthetics — and we listen for the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. We look deep into the tradition of thought bequeathed by those who have gone before us in the faith. If what we come up with seems awfully ugly, if the Spirit within us wants to retch, we keep working on it. We don’t settle for Auschwitz when shalom is who God in His perichoretic being is. Some of Bell’s answers are wrong, but “Really” is the right question to ask of many of the hideous God-stories we tell.
In Al Mohler’s editorial on gay marriage in today’s Wall Street Journal, he states that “[s]ince we [Evangelicals] believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality.” He concludes that “it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.”
Here is a quiz. Did Mohler also say this:
it is a homage we owe to the Bible, from whose principles we have derived so much of social prosperity and blessing, to appeal to its Verdict on every subject upon which it has spoken. Indeed, when we remember how human reason and learning have blundered in their philosophizings; how great parties have held for ages the doctrine of the divine right of kings as a political axiom; how the whole civilized world held to the righteousness of persecuting errors in opinion, even for a century after the Reformation; we shall feel little confidence in mere human reasonings on political principles; we shall rejoice to follow a steadier light.
No, he didn’t. This was written in 1867 by Presbyterian preacher and Confederate Army Chaplain Robert Louis Dabney, in 
his treatise In Defense of Virginia. Dabney, like Mohler, was trying to stem the tide of a cultural revolution that Dabney believed had caught the Church flat-footed. Dabney continued,
The scriptural argument for the righteousness of slavery gives us, moreover, this great advantage: If we urge it successfully, we compel the Abolitionists either to submit, or else to declare their true infidel character. We thrust them fairly to the wall, by proving that the Bible is against them; and if they declare themselves against the Bible (as the most of them doubtless will) they lose the support of all honest believers in God’s Word.
The obvious resonance between Mohler’s and Dabney’s public theology ought to give careful readers pause. Certainly, Mohler is not in favor of Black slavery, nor do I suspect he’s a racist. However, Mohler employs precisely the same reasoning and rhetoric as did Dabney — right down to the claim that only folks who agree with him completely are part of the faithful remnant of the true church. It failed then, and it fails now. It was a misguided form of fundamentalism then, and it is a misguided form of fundamentalism now.
This is not to suggest that the question of African slavery in the 19th Century is morally equivalent to the question of gay marriage in the 21st Century. That sort of argument is anachronistic and fails to account at all for the theological anthropology and ecclesiology that inform both the rejection of slavery and the support of “marriage” as a life-long covenant between a man and a woman.
But Mohler utterly misses the fact that “marriage” is primarily a sacramental covenant inseparable from the life of the visible Church. His Biblicism fails because the Bible simply doesn’t function as a stand-alone rule book for public thought in a liberal democratic state. (This is also why Mohler, like Dabney, must deny the reality of modern scientific theories in favor of earlier mechanistic natural theology — though Dabney’s critique of materialism is relatively sophisticated in some ways.)
Though Mohler speaks in his WSJ editorial of the “believing church,” he doesn’t seem to have any notion of The Church as an institutional alternative to the secular city. But it is precisely and only in this alternative community that the true meaning of “marriage” can be disclosed. It is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in life-long union, in submission to each other and often accompanied by great sacrifice and difficulty; it is only in the Church that men and women who are so called by God can live out that calling in chaste singleness, submitting their sexuality each day before the cross; and it is only in the Church that gay men and women who are so called by God can live as faithful participants in the life of the Church and for the good of the world, bearing the self-denial that this may involve. The problem isn’t that people aren’t willing to read the Bible literally. The problem is that we have forgotten what it means to be the Church.
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Ministry in the 21st Century
There’s a nice interview in the current Christian Century with Josh Carney, Teaching Pastor at University Baptist Church, near Baylor University. Carney is a young pastor in a demographically diverse evangelical / free church congregation that attracts many well educated students — sounds familiar! A few excerpts:
What has the transition toward more age diversity been like? Any bumps?
It’s been exciting. My heartbeat is for families, and as this group grows it presents an opportunity to get to know and love more people. The major hurdle has to do with congregational identity. An increase in families means a need for more resources for them, and when we shift resources we make statements about mission and identity. We are trying to figure out who we are in a way that both affirms the historical and makes room for the new.
What other parts of being in ministry have been challenging?
Working out how specifically to pursue our mission as a church. It hasn’t been difficult for us to identify how God would have us be kingdom people in the world. What’s been harder is determining the best way to accomplish this. For example, we might all agree that the kingdom that Jesus proclaims compels us to work to alleviate suffering. But what is the best, most responsible way to do this?
Is the debate about prioritizing what kinds of suffering to address? Or about direct service versus systemic change?
Both. Because we’re close to a university, we’ve had to learn that on just about every issue—theological or otherwise—our community is full of opinions that are both extremely educated and extremely diverse. A lot of people have had experiences that shape the way they see the world—and what they think the solutions for the world’s ills are.
The challenge is to engage and serve the world in a distinctively kingdom way. Instead most of us quickly let our political ideology dictate how we do this. We need to continually pray that the Holy Spirit would illuminate the countercultural love option that Jesus offers—the third way that comes through gospel imagination.
What’s something important you’ve learned in ministry?
As the world changes, people don’t. Folks do lots of things they didn’t do ten years ago: carry iPhones, send Facebook messages, buy fuel-efficient cars. But people are hurt the same way and need the gospel the same way they did ten years, 100 years or even 2,000 years ago.
There is much within evangelical culture that is now seen as unhealthy and misguided. We at UBC have rejected much of our immediate past. In the constructive phase, the natural tendency seemed to be to look back further by exploring the liturgy of the church. Here we found much that was helpful—and we found that some of our objections had already been addressed.
Slowly, we’ve begun to reidentify what was useful about our immediate, painful pasts as well. It’s been refreshing to create new liturgy and find gifts from all of the church’s seasons.
Has this process of exploring the past been largely about worship and liturgy, or has it touched other areas of the church’s life as well?
I’d say that all the changes we’ve experienced have fallen under the umbrella of ecclesiology. A pastor friend says that everything comes down to ecclesiology, and the longer I do this ministry, the more I agree.
…
What developments would you like to see in your congregation’s mission? In the wider church’s?
I hope that the church—both our local expression and the larger one that we’re part of—learns to be more creative. I feel that a lot of our problems come from a lack of imagination.
When the pesky Pharisees try to trap Jesus by asking if he thinks they ought to pay the temple tax, he offers one of those answers that turns the question on its head. Caesar’s image is on the money, so it belongs to him. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. But what has God’s image on it? Well, we do. The creation testifies about God. In fact, the creation exists because God breathed it, and all of this creation belongs to God.
Jesus both critiqued the world and loved it. He was never satisfied to give a response that lived within the parameters of the question. He found a better way, a third way to respond—and the world stood in awe as it saw God move within history. Our lack of this kind of imagination is evident in our politics, in our wars and unfortunately even in the church. But this can change. My prayer is that Christians will be imaginative Jesus people.
Describe an experience that made you think, “This is what church is all about.”
A lot of what I’ve said so far is about the church’s immanent ministry, how it engages the world. But this has to be rooted in transcendent ministry, in the worshiping community.
One Sunday at UBC the last song the band played was the doxology. It was time to make the transition to the learning portion of worship, but something within me was profoundly content to sit in God’s presence. I found myself standing in the peace of God which transcends understanding, filled with an inexpressible joy and overwhelmed by love.
All the community gardens, mission trips, relationships with local school districts and low-income housing complexes—if all that work is not about this kind of moment, if it’s not about participating in the divine dance that has been going on for all eternity, then it misses the point. We are because God is.