It has been a slog get writing done this spring in the midst of teaching, family and now regular preaching and congregational leadership. But bit by bit I've chipped away at these last chapters and today (or by Saturday at the latest) I'm going to be done, sending the draft off for comment to my editor at Brazos, and moving on to other things for the time being. After I get his feedback, I'll do a revision of the whole thing (likely in June after school's out) and then it'll disappear into the publishing pipeline to emerge in a year with marketing and distribution behind it. I really like Brazos, and I am glad that they are publishing the book. It is a great home for the work. They market well, distribute widely, and show up at academic conferences to promote their line.
Still, inspired by others who've done this, I sort of wish I could just publish the book and make it available via download as an e-book or mail order as a real book. I've been thinking a lot about a post from Andrew Sullivan on creative types and the internet. He reflects on the kinds of distribution for musicians and how much artists make in those different modes of distribution. I think that is pretty interesting, and the link to Kevin Kelly's post on 1000 true fans makes me wonder why go with a traditional publisher at all if what we writers want is to inspire people, to help shape ideas about how we live life, and to make a living? But would I get tenure in a traditional academic institution if I did a Radiohead-style website download of my new book with a 'pay what you think it is worth' deal? I get only a buck a book at most from the mainstream publishing process, so even if people only paid $2 I'd double my income and potentially increase sales because of the low cost. Of course I couldn't sell a print version for $2 because the production does cost something, but at any rate these questions are haunting me as we think about creative new ways to reach and interact with an audience around ideas that matter to us (hint: it is not the books, albums, etc. but the events that allow for personal interaction that are the bread and butter for most creative types).
Here's a teaser from the conclusion to chapter 5, "Karma and Grace"
The Trouble with Church-Culture Divides
Focus
on the Family and its affiliated entertainment arm, Plugged In, share some
basic concerns I want to applaud.
Knowing the God we see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
Christ would indeed focus our attention on the cry of the child whose home is
broken by domestic violence, or the cry of the parent whose child has been
caught up in addiction. Because
such an impulse is so central to the animating core of Focus, and of Dr. Dobson’s
life and ministry, beginning with affirmation on that point seems
essential. Dobson is, after all, a
man who was trained and has worked his whole life in ministry with a goal of
Godly healing for individuals, families and society. Over the years, Dobson has learned not to do radio shows on
difficult issues like child sexual abuse too close together because the flood
of terribly difficult calls becomes overwhelming spiritually and emotionally
for his staff of correspondents.
He knows that lives are broken, and his God-inspired motivation has been
to reach out with help.
The
basic impulse to listen to the cries of suffering and brokenness in society and
to respond shapes Plugged In, as well.
While they focus particularly on an area of society—culture and
entertainment media—Dobson has singled out as very troublesome, they seek to
find within it examples of faith and the good life to encourage and support
family well-being. In an old
tagline no longer used by Plugged In, they aim to offer “Christian perspective
on what to see at the box office, which TV shows are worth your time, and what
music comes up clean.” Anyone who
has had a child of their own or has cared for children of another knows the
basic impulse to protect the child from harm, and to reach out in an embrace
once harm has been done. Plugged
In do not intend to short-cut family conversations about how to engage media
but to serve them, so that the light they shine on popular entertainment can
also illumine the conversations about faithfulness around the table in
Christian homes.
Yet! A more robust theology of grace breaks
apart the bounds of such constricted imagination about God and the world. In order to set up the next chapter’s
engagement with C. S. Lewis as part of spelling out in detail the expansive
imagination such a theology of grace implies, I can here note specific issues
with the understanding of God and culture, and the God’s action in Jesus for
our sake. It is true that
strains of purity and holiness run back through Christianity and Judaism,
exhibiting tensions between the sacred and the profane common to many religious
traditions beyond these two. The polemical starkness of choosing between two
ways seems endemic in Christian faith, and its history in the United States is
particularly strong given our Puritan founding as a “City on a Hill” charged by
the Rev. John Winthrop, echoing Deuteronomy 30, to “chose life.” Such arguments
have a certain power, to be sure, but taken to be the decisive framing of life
before God they can lead, as they have all too often in U.S. history, to
divides between a pure “us” and an evil “them”.
The
term ‘constricted imagination’ comes in when one asks about God in relation to
such church/world divides.
Imagining whole swaths of life abandoned by God, set ‘over against us’
or at the very least, as Focus President Jim Daly puts it, ‘not helping’, gives
the distinct impression that God is small. Working from the assumption that the darkness of the world
needs ‘our’ light shone upon it might conjure up nice images of the Sunday
school children singing “This Little Light of Mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” We should be chastened, however, by the
conviction through out scripture that, as the Psalmist puts it, “God is the
creator of the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them” (Psalm
146:6).
Rowan
Williams, in his lovely book of meditations on the Creed, Tokens of Trust, likens the line “the almighty, maker of heaven and
earth” to a person flicking a light switch. Like the electrical current illuminating the room, Williams
argues, God’s creative power is constant and present, holding all things in
their being, rather than in some way either present long ago or only present to
that ‘sacred’ portion of creation with whom God deigns to dwell. Such a
sensibility is surely close at hand when, in breaking open notions of love for
neighbor to include “enemies and those who persecute you,” Jesus said:
Matthew 5:45-47: When someone gives you a hard time, respond with
the energies of prayer, for then you are working out of your true selves, your
God-created selves. This is what God does. He gives his best—the sun to warm
and the rain to nourish—to everyone, regardless: the good and bad, the nice and
nasty. If all you do is love the lovable, do you expect a bonus? Anybody can do
that. If you simply say hello to those who greet you, do you expect a medal?
Any run-of-the-mill sinner does that.
From this and other similar
passages the God we meet in Jesus Christ might be described as a prodigal God.
Jesus suggests that if we live lives formed by relationship with that sort of
God, we too become prodigal: we give our best to all, regardless.
As our
prodigal God, so we are to be prodigal with the mercy and love we have
received. We don’t reserve our “rain”
for the deserving anymore than God does.
If this is true, the challenge, as C. S. Lewis helped us to see, lies in
seeking relentlessly for those signs of God’s presence and work under the
surface of things. In his
delightfully brusque manner, he says this: “We
may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded
with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.
And the incognito is not always hard
to penetrate.
The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come
awake. Still more, to remain awake.” A world so full of God’s presence and
purpose as to be “crowded” with God hardly gives us the ability to set church
against culture, and to then take a step further to paint culture as ‘lost’, ‘dark’
or ‘against us’. The absurd
conclusion would be to say those same terms ‘lost’, ‘dark’ or ‘against us’ are
true about God whose only experience of such abandonment was on the cross. And
exactly because of that reconciling abandonment on the cross we can be sure
that God’s reconciling work is in the midst of abandonment and darkness of all
sorts, suffering with us and lovingly opening up possibilities for new
creation.
To
argue that God rules only over the spiritual, and therefore calls us to engage
only the pure and holy, then, could be understood as an unfaithful stance for a
disciple of Jesus. In fact, such a
constricted view of God totters on the edge of a variety of early Christian
views usually lumped under the label Gnostic, and that Christians have long set
aside as heretical. On key aspect
of such views declares matter evil.
The idea was that our divine spark finds itself trapped in the material
body. This very materiality, this
fleshly body with its emotions and temptations, distracts us from seeing our
true spiritual nature. Docetism was one key version of such belief, a term
derived from the Greek dokeo, “to seem” and used to argue for an understanding
of Jesus who was actually pure spirit, not really physically human, one who
suffered, died and was buried, and on the third day raised.
To allow
for a less-than-fully-human Jesus is to not be deeply moved by his own
compassion and the actions it inspired.
Jesus, the gospel writes tell us, again and again ‘had compassion’
(splagchnizomai), a term that literally evokes ‘gut-wrenching’ emotion (Mark
1:41; Matt 14:14; Luke 7:13).
Again and again, Jesus was moved physically by the plight of the poor,
the outcast, the stranger, and those make ritually impure by the letter of the
law. In his life, and particularly in his death, he moved with his own body as
a bridge across those divides to reconcile and heal the chasm between humanity
and God.
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