faithasawayoflife

body and soul

i've finally nurtured back to life a long lapsed habit that i love--biking to work. this was not very often practical when i was a parish pastor, although my colleague fr. chris tiano regularly seemed to manage. oh well. i began biking to school and back when i was a kid in bozeman montana (we're going to bozeman to visit my parents july 2-10 and i'm looking foward to climbing in the mountians). i love the solitude, the focus and movement of my body moving on the bike, and the way everything is so present unlike when in a car behind glass. the smells (sweet and sour), the greetings from porches and honks of cars, and here, in new haven, the chance to ride through the downtown yale campus. it is, for me, a means of keeping body and soul together. one of the things that currently has me thinking about living faith as a way of life is exactly this question of how to practically keep body and soul together. how, in other words, to be in my life fully, but with the difference made by following jesus . miroslav volf wrote an excellent piece on this idea a few years ago titled 'soft difference' partly as an exegesis of 1 peter but also partly as a friendly response to stan hauerwas and will willimon who take the 'resident alien' metaphor to rhetorical excess. in comparison, given miroslav's terms, hauerwas and willimon would be advocating a 'hard difference.'

biking is a way for me to think about care of the body and care of the earth. it is a way to make a personal counterpart to my writing of letters to the president on behalf of energy policy that takes seriously the stewardship of the life of all creation and not simply the parochial interests of the united states or, more to the point, businesses in the united states. i'm thinking of those business for whom environmental stewardship requires huge investments of cash to meet tougher pollution standards. but ultimately god counts the costs and benefits of our lives, and if faith is not just a meaningful motivation for personal virtue but also a serious basis for debate about public policy then we are called to a more expansive view for accounting of costs and benefits, especially beyond current quarter profit margins. in morning prayer today, the psalmist declared, "the wicked crush your people; they murder the widow and the stranger and put the orphans to death" (94). harsh. but when we separate body and soul, we cooperate in opening the door to evil. so, the moral of this tale is: everyone, ride your bike! no, not really. but find ways to practice keeping body and soul together. it matters.

anon, and +peace

spong: right or wrong?

i've had a wild week since i last posted. why, you ask? how kind of you to ask! i helped teach a course at hartford seminary with john shelby spong, former episcopal bishop of newark, n.j. and theological provocateur. i accepted the job in part out of friendship with ian markham and kelton cobb, who serve hartford seminary respectively as dean and professor of theology and ethics. i know spong is controversial and considered by some as a heretic at best and an atheist, more likely. i am not a 'spongian' but i agreed as a way to do what you might call 'fieldwork in theology.' why has this man sold so many books? why does he seemingly appeal to so many on the margins of the church? what does he offer, either in style or substance, that creates such strong reactions?

well! i now have some answers. i won't go into depth here, but will offer a summary response. email me if you want more.

1. he is a contemporary nicodemus (john 3). he seeks after jesus by asking the question, how can these things be? example: given what we know from science about the earth, our galaxy, and the universe beyond, how can we simply confess that jesus came down from heaven, lived, died, rose again, and ascended to heaven where he sits at the right hand of god? simply put, he takes quite seriously that one cannot both be a 21st century educated western person and at the same time straightforwardly confess the faith in pre-modern terms that embody profoundly different understandings of the world. i have great respect for this honesty. my father is a plant pathologist and my mother-in-law a botanist, and their reflections on faith and science sharped my perspective on the importance of pastoral seriousness regarding the integrity of religious speech. and one of my theological mentors, james gustafson, has struggled to speak of faith in ways that his colleagues in the sciences find approachable. his perspective is summed up in his most recent book an examined faith: the grace of self-doubt (fortress, 2004). while one might not accept all of spong's answers, he's more interested in pushing the church to ask the questions. in avoiding these tough questions, he says, the church pushes thinking people away. it is here that he self-consciously follows in the footsteps of another famous and controversial anglican bishop, john a. t. robinson, whose 1963 book honest to god created a big splash.

2. he is by his own admission a translator of scholarship to the broader public. much of what he says that is 'controversial' is either 1) readily available in the academic literature and taught in seminaries or 2) his playful suggestions based on his life experience and reflection. and his translation has a particular ax to grind against what he terms fundamentalism. as a product of the south during the jim crow era, he knows first hand what a fundamentalist world view looks like. he freely admits that his mother died a fundamentalist and could never grow beyond that. he has, however, and wishes for there to be a public voice for another christianity, one that take seriously the insights of biblical scholarship, historical research, and the findings of the sciences. because our knowledge changes over time, and therefore our language and meaning, how, spong asks, can our understanding of god stay the same? to mature, our understanding of god and our ways of speaking of what god is doing in the world through the life, death, and resurrection of jesus christ must grow and mature as well. again, one might argue with some of his particular conclusions but the basic impulse of his work here is commendable. and it ought to be said that many of his fellow former fundamentalists, in the jesus seminar and elsewhere, have long since left the church and offer it no help in 'thinking what it is doing' (hannah arendt).

3. he has a flare for the dramatic. well. i wish more theologians had the ability and desire to produce such wide public readership and debate as have bishop spong's many books. a little flare for the dramatic and the ability to speak to a broad audience about living faith daily and with integrity seems to me what pastors ought to strive to do every week.

okay, you're thinking, have i no critique? yes, of course. but much is to be learned from employing a hermeneutic of gratitude rather than suspicion. i'm thinking of writing a popular book titled 'the gift of heresy' to make the point about how very much we are shaped by those with whom we disagree.

monologue

a recent new york times article about blogging raised questions about the obsessive nature of this new medium for some. i don't have an obsessive bent towards the medium, but i do confess to finding it very rewarding to see that of the hundreds of readers of this blog, someone has finally joined the fray and turned the monologue into a dialog. thanks, joshua.

my hope, mind you, is not to show how brilliant i am (which would surely fail in any case) but rather to model and provoke reflection on that most difficult and important of arts: living our faith. clearly one of the ideals of the academy is the scholar who goes away to a small room with a pile of books and comes up with brilliant books. this endeavor is different. it looks more like open source theology, driven by my leading to be sure, but increasingly as others join in with posts, multiply driven. together, we will surely be wiser in following our Lord. take joshua's post, for instance. he offered a very fascinating suggestion in response to the cup holders versus creation post i did a week or so ago. he said:

" Actually just yesterday I spoke with a friend of mine who is an Associate Pastor at a large wealthy Presbyterian Church in Silicon Valley. He was walking through the parking lot on Sunday and noticing all the cars, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, etc. He also was aware of this survey and was wrestling with how to even begin to think about this subject in his own life and in the life of his congregation. In addition to preaching, study, etc. he wanted to try and find a tangible way to get people involved in both care for creation and for the poor. He had an idea on how to encourage people to at least think more about what they drive. He has titled it Kingdom Cars and the idea is to strike a deal with a car dealership that would allow people to trade in their new or slightly used expensive fuel sucking cars for two of equal size (say a BMW x5 for a Honda CRV). The extra car would be then donated to a poor family in a neighboring community or sold and the money used for the same thing."

kingdom cars. faith as a way of driving. hmm. this conversation could be getting good.

anon, and +peace