Community of the Risen

I recently wrote a post about an exercise I took some of the youth group kids through. They were being really squirmy as we were going through the lesson so I asked them why we study the Bible in the first place. You can read their answers here, but I want to focus now on my own thoughts on the matter.

There are so many religions in the world, but I think that Christians sometimes oversimplify the matter. I have often heard a pastor suggest, “All other religions are based on works, but our religion is based on grace and mercy.” Why do pastors say such ignorant things? For the Hindu, their religion is part of their everyday lives attempting to find communion with their gods who is only a shadow of the true Brahman. For the Muslim, there is not greater honor than serving Allah as the one true living God. They worship him because he is the all-powerful deity. They would not suggest they could somehow “earn” the love of Allah–the all powerful other who is changed by no man. So why do we oversimplify the matter?

We are so quick to categorize all the other religions, but should we be? Why are so we so afraid of other religions? Why are we so afraid of our students studying them? We really ought to consider them a little before we write them off.

“I don’t get it,” Chad said. “Everyone thinks their religion is right, so how are we supposed to know which one is right?”

“Chad asks a good question,” I responded.

I am teaching a lesson and the kids are squirmy so I switched topics to get their brains turning.

“How do we know that Christianity is right?” I ask them.

Silence. I like silence sometimes when the wood is burning.

“We know because it was first,” Jacob finally interjects.

“First?” I ask. “The first what?”

“The first religion.”

“No. There were other religions before Christianity.”

“Jesus said he is the only way to heaven,” Cynthia said.

“But how do we know Jesus was right?” I ask back.

“These are really hard questions!” Jeff said angrily.

“But they are important questions,” I respond. “We are about out of time.”

Time was running short.

“But you haven’t told us the right answer yet,” Tessa responded.

“I know,” I say. “Be good sheep.”

I have lately been reading “Wealth and Poverty” by George Gilder.  He makes a few interesting arguments in his book, but one that I want to focus on specifically.  Gilder is an economic and political conservative who helped shaped the Reaganomics of the 1980’s.  Specifically what I want to focus on is his view on “fair” housing for the urban poor.  Gilder argues that all housing, no matter how fair or equitable the housing, that is for the poor will be ultimately unfair and breed inequality.  Why?  Because middle-class and upper-class citizens know that the urban poor are often single-mother households will high rates of delinquency.  Because of the high rates of crime, the middle-class and upper-class move away from these areas to congregate in economically homogeneous areas in order to create better schools and areas where crime is not rampant.  Thus, argues Gilder, there is no way for us to “fix” such a problem.  In fact, Gilder does not see this as a problem, but as a type of sociological phenomenon that will happen no matter what the government tries to do.

What then is our job as Christians when we decide where we are going to live in the future?  Should we join the status-quo as middle-class Americans and move in to a “safe” neighborhood?  I don’t think so.  I think our job as Christians is to move into areas where there is a large amount of urban poor and live among them.  Learn about their struggles and their heartaches.  I’m not sure that Christians understand this, but I am going to be make a bold statement: Our job as Christians is not to get the poor better jobs, better housing, and better lives.  The fact is, there is little we can do to change the structure.  Just like you can’t force someone to love someone, you can’t force the rich to give up their wealth.  Gilder actually argues that such a prospect is futile because the rich have so many tax-shelters that you can never really take their money. In fact, when one tries to redistribute wealth, the richest are usually the least affected.  Our job is to suffer with the poor, to learn how they get things done, and give them ways to live a full and contented life within their context.  As we do this, perhaps we can help them more and more to be people who follow the way of the cross.

“History is not a science,” I tell Wes.  “It is a way of thinking about the past.  I am tired of listening to people talk about ‘the Jews’ or ‘the Romans’ as if they were one unified group who all thought the same.  There really is nothing reliable about the past.”

I speak in hyperbole and Wes indulges.

“What do you mean nothing is reliable?” he asks.

“I look back at history.  Just look at recent history.  Our founding fathers now all have a mythology of their own.  If we look at events from history, we have to recreate them from primary documents from the people who were actually there.  We have autobiographical works and letters from people who were living only 200 years ago, and scholars still cannot decide exactly how such events happened.”

“Yeah,” Wes said.  “But we do have an idea of some of the major events. We have sources and documents to create a semi-balanced picture of American history.”

“Yes,” I agreed.  “But that is only the tip of the iceberg.  As we go further and further back, we begin to realize that documented evidence of the past is less and less. We have to rely on pictographs and symbols for the earliest parts of history.  How can we ever expect to connect with the earliest people groups in history like the Jews who wrote the Bible?”

“We can’t,” Wes said.  “That’s the point.  We live in the present as a culmination of all the choices of all people in all places everywhere.  People made choices that have led to these events. We can attempt to reconstruct those events, but we can’t know those events as the people who experienced them did.  They know the truth of their perspective, but we have to read all the different perspectives from history and decide which is best.”

“We just have to be so careful,” I said.  “That we don’t treat history like science.”

I was thinking recently as I was reading my bible how easily I take words like “faith” and “love” in the Bible.   I tend to think that they have a certain meaning and were highly valued by those who read them, but how can we know this?  If you read the early primary sources of those who were attempting to define what it means to be a follower of Christ, they disagreed.  So how can we know what it really means to follow Christ in this modern context so far removed from Christ?

Check out this guys thoughts on Charlie Brown:

Over at Jesus Creed McKnight had this to say about the Cedarville Incident, and I think he is quite correct:

Colleges do not endorse everything anyone says when they invite someone to speak. I cannot comprehend why so many don’t get this: invitations of speakers to schools or even churches do not mean blanket endorsement. Invitation does not mean endorsement. In fact, if we think about this a bit it becomes clear: no one agrees with anyone completely. So, let’s spread the word that a school inviting someone does not mean the school will agree with everything that someone says. I know I didn’t think this: “Wow, Cedarville invited Shane; Cedarville might be considering becoming a social gospel school. Nor did I think they were suddenly transforming into a new monastic community.” I thought, “Good for Cedarville. Those students probably will like some of his ideas and not like others. They’ll all learn. He’ll challenge them to think about Christian involvement.” I’m sure that this is what I would say to an administrator who would do such a thing at our school.

I just finished reading Santley Hauerwas’ lecture given at a youth ministry conference.  His article mainly dealt with the problem of focusing Christian identity around love and the forgiveness of sin.  If this were the case, God could have sent a man to tell us to love one another and that are sins would be forgiven if we would repent of them and change our ways.  We did not need Jesus for these reasons alone.  He argued that we needed Jesus because he was Jesus.

We needed a man, fully human, to come down and meet us where we are at.  We needed a man to show us a lifestyle of alternative politics.  It is important to remember that, as Hauerwas noted, Jesus’ confession to Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world is not a message that his kingdom is in another place.  Jesus’ claim is that his kingdom is altogether different in character to the Roman Empire.  His was a kingdom built not by military conquest, but by the very people who spurn the military leaders by loving their enemies and upset the status quo by giving to the poor and the needy instead of taxing them.

Jesus’ message is sometimes bigger than we sometimes make it out to be.

Scot McKnight has done well to warn us about Shane Claiborne has not been allowed to speak at Cedarville University in Ohio because of a few angry bloggers in the area.

Here is a bit from another article that has covered this piece:

“There was a tension between my desire to use this event to challenge students to take a closer look at a very important social issue, and the need to protect Cedarville’s reputation as a conservative, Christ-centered university,” said Ruby. “There can’t be any confusion about our commitment to God’s Word and our historically conservative doctrinal position.

“Nearly all of the opposition to Claiborne’s visit came from off campus,” he said. “The reaction from both faculty and students has been along the lines of, ‘We are a university … We need to be having these kinds of conversations on campus if we are going to adequately equip the next generation of Christian leaders.’ “

I am so angry about this.  Universities should be the very places where people like Shane are born. But, because of people like Ingrid Schluete argue that “penal-substitionary atonement” should be the center of the Christian faith (an argument that did not really surface until Anselm in the 14th century).  Hopefully I will have a more reasonsed talk with others about this later, but as for now I just want the world to know how angry I am about this.

Wes came out of his theology and ethics class today.

“Theology was interesting today,” Wes said.

“How so?” I asked.

“We talked about moral absolutes and relativism today. I told my professor that we could not know right and wrong outside of our context.”

“What did she say to that?”

“Well, she talked about how our generation just never grew up with absolutes. We were never taught it in schools. I just can’t understand where she is coming from. How can we live outside of our context?”

“Couldn’t you make the same argument back to her?” I asked. “I mean, couldn’t you say that she didn’t grow up with contextualization?”

“She used the analogy of a tree falling in the forest. If no one is there, does it still make a sound? Do we have to be present for reality to take place?”

“How did you guys end the conversation?”

“The conversation meandered.  We ended up talking about drinking.  She asked if it was all right for us to drink in ministry settings.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yep,” Wes said. “I’m twenty-two, and I’m drinkin’ if I’m at a pub.”