Check here for the outline to see where this fits (and to read the prior sections start here and read sequential posts up to this one)
Realities Over Against Us
Let us assume you are in agreement that pastoral excellence centers on the ability to shape persons and communities for living faith as a way of life. Let us also assume that you find Volf’s vision of faith as a way of life centered in the practices of giving and forgiving compelling and attractive. Can we say with confidence that this vision is always and everywhere reality? Do Christians live it and do pastoral leaders foster it in communities they lead? There are two immediate problems in making this assumption. One has roots in changes in the social structure of our society while the other relates to powerful cultural traditions, yet both social structure and cultural tradition as factors “out there” also shape us and therefore impact our minds and hearts, our hopes and the actions based upon them. We highlight their basic shape here, although in various ways they shall be woven throughout the whole book. In turning to them, we turn from a God-give vision that ought to guide us to the all too human realities that actually shape us far more than we’d like to admit.
Living By Faith-Substitutes
The first problem is that the spheres of modern life have semi-independence, each operating according to its own logic and values. Because we each live in and through them all, we internalize the value-conflicts between them and too easily fall into a pattern of compartmentalization. Faith has its own tidy sphere on Sundays and in one’s soul; but work, family, politics, school, & the arts are disconnected from faith. While love of neighbor may rule the soul, love of a bargain rules in shopping, love of power to effect self-interest rules in politics, and so on.
Some people working on these questions call the problem of the disconnect between worship and daily life the “Sunday-Monday Gap.” Where did such a gap come from? I propose that the Sunday-Monday gap is really a symptom of the differentiation of society. We generally experience the differentiation of society in terms of compartmentalized lives. Let me give a fairly dramatic example from Vice President Dick Cheney, taken from a prominent speech on energy policy early in his tenure in office: “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue put it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Lest I be seen to pick on the Republicans, Bill Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeline Albright gave a lecture at Yale a few years ago titled “The Mighty and the Almighty: American Foreign Policy and God,” in which she suggested it would be “preposterous” to apply Jesus’ teaching about not resisting evil and turning the other cheek to contemporary challenges in foreign policy. Religion, the message seems to be, is for the sphere of the heart while other values rule in other spheres of life (fn about ‘Christian realism’ here).
The issue clearly goes deeper than simply compartmentalization. It goes deeper in terms exactly of core values and of ultimate concerns. Core values and ultimate concerns are terms that, for religious people, raise the issue of polytheism and idolatry. Recall the story of Moses’ trip up the mountain just after the Israelites escaped from Pharaoh’s Egypt (Exodus __). When the Israelites reached Mount Sinai, they made camp and Moses ascended to converse with the Lord. But Moses took so long negotiating with God that Aaron stepped into the leadership vacuum and made a golden calf for the people to worship.
The temptation to worship other gods has always been present. The great reformer Martin Luther said that he could easily show which god someone worshipped: “That to which your heart clings, that in which you trust, that is your god.” Luther lived at the cusp of the modern world, when the old medieval society was beginning to break apart. Even in 1529, he understood the growing power of money in a market economy, a power with which we content mightily. In his powerful description of the meaning of the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods,” Luther said this: "This I must explain a little more plainly, so that it may be understood and remembered, by citing some common examples of failure to observe this commandment. Many a person thinks he has God and everything he needs when he has money and property; in them he trusts and of them he boasts so stubbornly and securely that he cares for no one. Surely such a man also has a god—mammon by name, that is, money and possessions—on which he depends with his whole heart. It is the most common idol on earth." And it might be the most common idol on earth still today!
Four hundred years later, the great sociologist of religion Max Weber attempted to account for the remarkable rise in economic might in the nations of Western Europe. What could account for such a remarkable thing as the industrial revolution, an unprecedented period of productivity, innovation and wealth creation? He pinpointed the Protestant Ethic, an understanding that while one’s ultimate salvation could never be absolutely sure, material gain showed divine blessing and was evidence of God’s election.
The Protestant Ethic led to the rationalization of the economy, and as this ethic increasingly became disconnected from pious intentions, only the profit motive remained. The problem, argued Weber, is that science drove rationalization not only in the economy, but also in government, so that these two main spheres of life became gradually separated from religious passions that oriented their actions with the result that in these other spheres other ultimate values came to dominate. While vastly oversimplifying, let me do some shorthand here, naming various distinct spheres of life in modern society and their gods as Weber describes them.
Economy’s god is profit and efficiency.
Government’s god is power and self-interest.
In the so-called “intimate sphere,” the god is pleasure.
The sphere of education worships scientific knowledge.
In the sphere of the arts god is beauty.
And still active, though within a greatly reduced sphere of influence, is the God of the Jews and Christians whose main value is, in Weber’s rather technical term, acosmic, or neighborly, love. Weber found it quite easy to point out the problems with this situation of, as he called it, “modern polytheism.” When in the world of work profit is god, persons serve the end of profit. Such a system will think of people as exchangeable pieces of labor to be applied to material in the production process. You may have heard the famous quote from Henry Ford: “Why do I always get the whole person when all I really need is a pair of hands?” In such a rationalized system, Weber worried, we would become trapped in an economic system characterized by “specialists without spirit.” And so it goes with each sphere, so that we in fact each contain within us a moral pluralism that allows us to move through the spheres of our lives enacting the appropriate value-set demanded in that arena.
Through a long history that can’t be told here, eventually most churches and pastors accepted their demotion to one sphere of life—that of things “spiritual.” These spiritual things happen in the heart and through the church. Pastoral leaders therefore busy themselves with creating programs that will attract people to church—emotionally resonant music, compelling preaching, and programmatic offerings for youth and adults that fit with their age-graded concerns throughout the life course. In order to assure regular participation, they simply set up motivational systems for achieving attendance through initiatives such as “perfect attendance month” and shamelessly scolding the Easter-Christmas members who enjoy the fruits without contributing their labor.
What is lost in this vision of church? What is lost is the vision of gathering and scattering. The church ceases to be a busy intersection, a nexus where disciples are equipped to be seed and light, salt and yeast, for the sake of the world God loves. Instead of this, the church as one sphere among many implicitly bears the conviction that religious belief and values are for heart and heaven. While people might be sent out into the world, it is only for bringing others into the life of the church, putting claim on their hearts for heaven. In the rough and tumble of government or business, you play the rules of the game in that sphere or you get stepped on. The recent entrance of the religious right into American politics only proves the point: they have baldly used faith as a veneer for hard-ball politics. Such politicizing of the faith only reinforces for other church-goers that public life is morally suspect as a matter of course, the norm only proven by the exception.
more to come later today I hope . . .
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