Tony Jones on Orthodoxy

Tony Jones recently blogged about a paper he wrote and its response at Wheaton. I would highly recommend clicking this link and going to the bottom, where you can download the paper. It is short and thought-provoking. Please read it!

Orwell, in 1984, says "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." Now obviously this is in the context of the book, but it remains a thought provoking statement. I guess the other quote I could share comes from Heidegger, who said (I'm paraphrasing from my memory, but hopefully will be somewhat close), "The most thought provoking thing in this, the most thought provoking age, is that we are still not thinking." No wonder he seems to stand at the starting-point of postmodernity and the end (hopefully) of orthodoxy as we have known it.

Sorry for the random, off-beat quotes, but they were on my mind and I hoped they might add something to your enjoyment of Jones' article.

Peace,
Matt

Current Book Wish List

My book-love has gotten out of control lately. Unfortunately for me I buy 90% of my books at the thrift store and none of these ever seems to make it there. So in no particular order, here are some books that I am currently desiring in a covetous manner:

1. Propaganda by Jacques Ellul.
2. The Maytrees by Annie Dillard.
3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseni.
4. The Presence of the Kingdom by Jacques Ellul.
5. Everyday Theology by Kevin J. Vanhoozer (and others).

So why am I telling you this? Just in case you feel like buying something for me, I guess. There ya' go!

Peace,

Matt

Eastern Washington

Read this article I wrote...

I just posted a new blog article on the Silhouette page about Franz Kafka, and you should read it! I'd love comments, thoughts, questions, etc. I'm thinking of trying to write a few extended essays based on this shorter one, so feedback is especially nice this time around. And I think you might just find it fascinating.

Peace,
Matt

Church Irony

The Free Dictionary defines irony as follows: "Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs." Today I want to share a few ironic incidents I have been a part of in the past few weeks. I hope you find these entertaining. I really hope you can see what makes them ironic in the first place.

• I went to a church service recently where the pastor stood before us and said he was going to begin a new series on The Kingdom of God. I was a bit excited about this, especially because I did not expect it at all from this pastor. He taught how the Kingdom of God is different than the kingdoms of this world. Then, because it was Memorial Day, we closed by with a patriotic song and a time of remembrance for fallen American soldiers. I am definitely not against honoring people who sacrifice themselves for my country, but found it more than a bit ironic to do so after a sermon on the Kingdom of God. I tried to imagine Jesus taking a moment to thank the Father for the Roman soldiers and their hard work. It just seemed a bit strange...
• I have witnessed on more than one occassion this week the giving of a certain test at my church. It was a test to see if the test-takers knew their Ten Commandments. The test literally said that the 10 are just as important now as they were when they were given. Is it just me, or did Jesus teach something deeper? Isn't it ironic that we stick with the Old Testament when Jesus gave us something new that was supposed to move us past the Law? I wonder why we want people to memorize the Ten Commandments, but never quiz each other about the Sermon on the Mount... I'd blog on that one, but I'm sure you already know what I'd say.

How about you? Have you seen any classic church irony lately?

Peace,

Matt

Hans Kung and the Role of the Bible

After a discussion with a friend where he mentioned the book, I recently started back into Hans Kung' Theology for the Third Millennium, which I had somehow put down a few pages in and never picked back up until now. It's a great read and I thought I'd share some out-of-context quotes this morning so you could catch a small glimpse for yourself. You'll notice these are about the Bible and it's authority, which is something I'm currently re-working through:

"A Yes to the Bible, then, but - along with many Protestant theologians - an equally decisive No to the sort of biblicism that makes an idol of the literal text and rejects all criticism of the Bible as unevangelical, for the sake of a supposedly Protestant orthodoxy. The Protestant theologian too has not only the right but the duty to distinguish between testimonies that are clear and less clear, stronger and weaker, original and derivative, central and peripheral, lucid and obscure, testimonies that for all they have in common can diverge, contrast, and partially contradict one another.
Protestant theologians too - but others as well - thus have the right and the duty to do conscientious biblical criticism: textual and literary criticism, historical and theological criticism. This will not weaken the authority of the Bible, but make its light shine out anew."
(page 61)

"The writings collected in the New Testament canon do not form any sort of 'doctrinal unit.' It was not the Reformers but only the Lutheran and Reformed denominational churches, that taught the doctrinal unity of Scripture, a doctrinal system of statements from Scripture; plucked, that is, from the whole Scripture, whether in a more biblicist or more dogmatic fashion."
(page 69)

"He [Jesus] in person is the 'canon before the canon,' the 'center of Scripture,' the 'Gospel' itself... Every new age can tell the good news about this Christ in an irreducibly new way, so that in principle no one may deny the Christian character of an epoch in church history - neither of the Middle Ages, nor of the present. In these complete processes of life in the church and of the history of theology, hard and fast positions have been broken open from His side, corections have managed to become necessary and possible, now once more in the upheaval of an epoch the origins of faith can speak to us in new immediacy, the challenging primal shape of Christian faith unexpectedly becomes more lucid to us today than the ways by which it was mediated over its long history. All of these things surely belong to the healthy and happy surprises of our time."
(page 99)

"In first-and-final human questions...the special Christian experiences or, rather, the Christian message, the Gospel, Jesus Christ himself, acquires a normative meaning... The center of Scripture, the Christian message, the Gospel is he himself in person, the one who was experienced by the first Christian community as the Christ and was originally attested to in the New Testament - the living Jesus as he stands for God and man. And that is why for Christians the original testimony of this Christ, the New Testament in other words, is and remains the norma normans for all postbiblical tradition."
(page 122)

A Better Mix of Jesus and Politics

Last night Sojourners had a candidates forum in which they grilled the Democratic presidential hopefuls about areas that matter to people of faith; specifically poverty and poverty-related issues. I don't have CNN, but watched the highlights on Jim Wallis' blog. What I love about this is, 1. it spreads the debate beyond the Iraq war and fear of otherness (terrorism, immigrants, etc), 2. it is the church attempting to care for the least of these rather than the status quo, and 3. it seems less like the church going partisan and more like the church saying it cares about the Kingdom of God and it will vote accordingly.*

*Yes, there are problems when you talk about the Kingdom of God and politics in the same sentence. But some days I'll take what I can get. And in case you are wondering and don't follow Sojourners, they desire to do a similar event with the Republican candidates, which is why I feel like this is not a partisan deal.

Peace,
Matt

Abercrombie Priests and Hollister Gods

Last night I read Prof. John Pahl's article The Desire to Acquire: Or, Why Shopping Malls are Sites of Religious Violence. It's a great read, full of great photos and citations, encapsulated by a great quote from Slavoj Zizek that basically makes the claim that as the gap between beauty and trash diminishes, what we view as holy or good will ultimately be revealed "to be nothing but a piece of shit" (Gotta love that line). Pahl goes on to convincingly argue how shopping malls have become modern day religious sites, making shoppers into postmodern pilgrims. The problem, of course, is that their god is not only an idol (my words), but is worthless garbage.

So what's the problem?

• "Matter is evacuated of its materiality and desire displaced onto and condensed within an object contained within the confines of the mall."
• "The mall thus becomes a parody or exaggeration of real presence, a hyper-real compression of the spontaneity and contingency that any real presence suggests, in what is in fact a micro-managed and carefully controlled utopian project.
• "Malls disorient visitors to trigger desire, using natural and religious symbols to effect the function of a labyrinth, and then reorient pilgrims toward the fulfillment of desire through the acquisition of an enchanted commodity or experience."

In other words, the mall is a utopia just like the utopias you read about in books likeThe Giver, Animal Farm, 1984, or see in our own world history constantly. Something temporary, that will soon break or become obsolete, is given spiritual status. Clothes, video games, etc become gods, while mall employees and models become our priests. The only problem, of course, is that none of this provides any real fulfillment.

If truth is now nothing but a commodity, we as the church have a lot to figure out. And if we have commodified Jesus to make him into just another product, we have even more to figure out! I'm not just talking about cheap products that are sold to make a buck off of the living Christ, but about those of us who try to get others to buy into the happy-Jesus who does lots of neat stuff for you (fixes your problems, gets you into heaven) but never calls anybody to die to themselves. Jesus has become for us just one more god among the gods. No wonder, then, we see so many people in our country who say the prayer and get excited about their faith, only to fade in the coming days, weeks, or months. Like any product, we get bored with our commodified Jesus when he is surpassed by new, shinier products.

The typical answer that the Western church has provided up to this point has been to advertise harder, to prove that this product is worth keeping around by constantly repackaging it. We get the rebel Jesus, the cool Jesus, the Republican Jesus, etc. We advertise him on billboards, put his face on toys, talk about him on TV. All of this work has, of course, done nothing but devalue Jesus. He is now, in America, another commodity, thrown into the garbage pile of everything else worshipped in our McChurches.

So what's to be done? Here's some ideas I had while reading and writing and they are purely practical rather than theoretical. They are things I would like to do with my youth ministry students, or even just any American who I could get to come along:

1. I would love to have my students walk a labyrinth that was full of verses, prayers and questions based on what Jesus and the rest of the Bible said about money and possessions. Then I would have them follow a mapped-out course through the mall that was very labryinth-like, and have to think through those same prayers, verses and questions.
2. Have all of my students write a list (like a birthday/Christmas list) of things they want. Then I give them a second piece of paper and they spend one hour walking the mall and writing down everything they want. Afterwards, we meet and debrief the differences between the two lists.
3. Walk with a homeless man through the mall and get his feedback on what he thinks when he sees the people, the stores, the advertising, etc. Also, they would get to see how quickly the man gets kicked-out of the mall, hopefully alerting them to the fact that there are no homeless people in malls because malls are private property and they do discriminate.
4. Take students through the mall and interview them in front of different posters with models on them and ask them how they feel about themselves at that moment.

May the Abercrombie priests be exposed as the idolatrous liars they are, and may the Hollister gods be cast down from on high.

Peace,

Matt