Community of the Risen

You should read Wes’ Paper here:

You Were Aliens

There are many theological systems.  Some are built on grace, others on hope, others on atonement, and many terms are interconnected to form a coherent whole.  Perhaps it would be helpful to think of theology in the contemporary framework of the world wide web.  On a website, there is an interconnected set of sub-sites that all find their root on a home page.  From the home page, if one can navigate through the maze of sub-sites, a person will find a locus of knowledge that centers around whatever the creator wishes.   The problem is, however, that a web-site is, by nature, limited in its scope of any subject.  The nice thing about them is that information can be deleted and added rather seamlessly (thus the rise of wikipedia and other open source software).  In the same way, any system of theology centers around a series of ideas and cannot, in and of itself, be an end.  Theology is only the study of God, not God himself.

When we read about the “peace of Christ,” the Pauline text also reminds us that it “transcends understanding.”  In other words, the peace of Christ cannot be understood in the way we understand facts and conceptions of reality. The peace of Christ ultimately transcends and eclipses all reality.  There can be ways in which we begin to understand this peace, but it is primarily experienced rather than understood.

Recently I taught my first lesson on the crusades in my intro to teaching class.  This is not a student teaching position.  I just show up once a week to help out with the classroom.  It is a social studies junior high world history class, and I have to teach two lessons.  I did the first one last week.  I was very surprised by the results.

I went through a brief history of Israel with the students, then we read one document from Pope Urban II and one document from the Arab perspective.  After this, we talked about bias in documents.  After the lesson my host teacher told me that the information had gone totally over the students heads.  I was stunned.  I had gone through the documents slowly because I wanted to make sure they understood the documents.  I had explained all the difficult vocabulary words.  What was the problem?

She suggested that I had made the crusades too religious.

“They don’t all have a religious background, you know,” she said.

I really didn’t know what to say.  I am living in a generation where it is a stretch for students to understand the religious aspects of the crusades.  The study flabbergasted me so much that I went to Barnes and Noble today to look at information on religion and education.  I picked up a book by Stephen Prothero called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to know.  He believes along with others that these problems of religious illiteracy can be traced to “John Dewey and other progressive-era education reformers, who gave up in the early twentieth century on content-based learning in favor of a skills-based strategy that scorned the piling up of information” (4).  Prothero began to find that he could have “challenging conversations” at the college level without “common knowledge” (4-5).

We have to find ways to bring this “common knowledge” at the junior high level.  If we don’t inculcate students with proper vocabulary at the junior high level, I don’t think we will ever be able to reach students.

Reading this week in my California history book has been disheartening.  Once again, there was a time in US History when a minority race was set against the majority because of people’s fear.  Japanese were interned simply for the fact that they were Japanese.  The most interesting person, however, was Earl Warren who originally allowed for the injustices to go on as a governor of California, but later said it was the greatest mistake of his life.  He went on to become chief justice of the United States and fought for civil rights for all people.  It is interesting the way that people can change and grow to become better people.  In some sense we are all Saul on our own road to Damascus.  We have to be careful how quickly we write people off.  I think it is also important to remember, however, that the reason Warren gave into the internment was societal pressure.  We also have to remember that we are going to be motivated often by a “the will of the people” which can also be the “democratic tyranny.”  As Christians, we need to be able to stand for our rights.

When I asked a student in class the other day not to say “shut up” to another student, I was given a blank stare.

“That’s just the way we talk,” she said.

I was floored.  I didn’t really know how to respond.  I am thinking today about the difficulty of language and what place it has in the classroom.  After having thought about it, I have decided that when I become a full time teacher, I will spend an entire class period early in the semester analyzing with the students the relationship between language and social division throughout history.  Since the middle ages, language has been used as a weapon to divide society.  If we dislike someone, we have words with which to express that anger.  If we want to show that we’re smarter than someone else, we will use words they cannot understand.  We have created classes based on the way we talk.  For instance, historically certain words have been considered “taboo” in Christian circles as a seperation marker.  If you say certain words, you receive less respect within your particular Christian faith community.  It is not about what you mean when you say it, but merely the fact that you say it.

Thus we have quite a difficult mess on our hands.  How do we begin to bring students together in the classroom through language when it is precisely language that has seperated sub-cultures for so long?

I just got another article published at Jesus Manifesto, check it out.

Michael Cline is asking some hard questions at Jesus Manifesto.

Mark Montgomery has written some very good thoughts on how we are invited into God’s Kingdom.

Wes has written another wonderful thought provoking piece on Torture and Jesus at Kingdom Conversations.

“We had to run monsters,” Phoebe said.

“Monsters?” I asked confused.

“Suicides,” Rollie corrected. “They call them monsters now. She means suicides.”

“It’s not politically correct to call them suicides,” my Uncle Phil says.

“That makes sense,” I said.

Rollie and Phoebe are two of my cousins, and we had dinner at grandma’s house tonight to celebrate their birthday. The youngest great grandchild was also there—Emma.

“What do you want?” her mother Kristen asked in a high voice. “You want to play with the dog?”

“Be careful that dog is retarded,” Rollie said.

“Rollie,” uncle Phil said again. “You are sitting between two people who work with mentally disabled people.”

“Yeah,” I chime in. “It’s politically incorrect.”

Last semester I wrote a paper on how religion, truth, and education should be interrelated.  I am not a proponent of forcing students to follow my particular religion, but I am of a strong belief that beliefs should be more central in classroom discussion.  Let me explain, in probably oversimplified terms, how I think that religion should effect the following subjects:

• Math: Most people have divorced the idea that math and morality are related.  This is a most unfortunate circumstance.  Math, in the modern institutions, have largely been reduced to the theory in which it is rooted.  Growing up in the 1990s and graduating in 2004, I grew up in math programs that used very few word problems.  Math teachers at the high school level must, as much as possible, help students make moral decisions in their everyday life.  For instance, we should not divorce theory altogether, but we must implement that theory into real life situations.  The majority of problems on a homework assignment should be something that students can relate to.  Students should be discussing the immoral ways that math is being used by the media, and how algebra and other concepts show the way that government works.  Math should be rewed to morality.
• Science: No one is science should try to divorce the ideas from science with the moral situations that those scientific theories give rise to.  For instance, a discussion on how social darwinism sprung from Darwin’s Origin of Species should not be left by the teachers to an ethics class sometime in the future.  Students should be encouraged to analyze the bias behind scientists, and students should always be encouraged to think critically about the moral issues that face scientists.
• Literature: I do not have to spend much time here, for literature has always been linked to emotion and morality.  Most English teachers do not have difficulty discussing the religious and philosophical views of the authors student read, looking at and examining religious allusions, and other such things.
• History: It is also not hard to see how history and religion are related.  Some would argue that it is the history of religion that explains the history of the world.

It is not hard to examine such things and think about the ways religion should be tied into education.

Earlier this week, I spent a significant amount of time dedicated to Ayn Rand and her thoughts on capitalism. I hope as I continue my way through her book that I can continue to post on some of her thoughts as they apply to this blog. Her major flaw that she seemed to see within capitalism was its unholy matrimony with politics and the state. Just as socialistic communism is a good idea in pure theory, the idea of capitalism seems good until the state begins mandating and regulating the economy so that some “win” and others “lose.” Any government that attempts to interfere with capitalism, argues Rand, will get in the way of the pure market structure that is supposed to keep the well oiled machine running smoothly. What are we as Christians supposed to do with such a statement? Are we to distrust the state or distrust the capitalistic system, or both?

One thing that we have not yet look at is the market anomalies within the “perfect” system of capitalism. Why do people consume at rates higher than they need to? Why do people sometimes go for the more lavish option when another option is just as good? Thorstein Veblen began noticing what he referred to as “conspicuous consumption” beginning to arise in nineteenth century Europe where middle to upper class citizens were buying things simply to show class and status. Because they had more money than they needed to simply subsist, they began to buy things they really didn’t need because certain items began a symbol of socioeconomic status. This begin to offset the “balance” of capitalism because people start doing things like building bigger houses simply because they can.

A good fictional example of this is found in The Great Gatsby. The main character Nick is living earlier in the 1920s and is living out in a rich area of New York City. Nick is introduced to a man who throws lavish parties named Gatsby. The long and short of it is, Gatsby simply has a lot of money and likes to throw huge extravagant parties, and it is, to an extent, a social symbol. There is a certain amount of mysterious surrounding him, but Nick, how is also the narrator says this about Gatsby:

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a kind of “self-created” identity, Gatsby has “invented” the person whom he wants to be. Because he has money he is able to sell this identity to those who share in this identity. What does this say about Gatsby’s business skills or his ability to make more money? It says nothing at all. The ideas behind the book are that this “conspicuous consumption” that takes place in the West Egg where Gatsby lives is a self-constructed “platonic conception.” None of these people really needed the things they had, but they still had them nonetheless. They could have lived in smaller houses, but they chose to live in bigger houses simply because they could. This is, in a nutshell, the idea behind conspicuous consumption—buying more than what you need simply because you can.

I have also written at length about the economic decisions that face Christians. How can we prophetically deal with conspicious consumption in a prophetic way with the people in our churches? In the American church, we sometimes forget to realize that economics and spirituality are always tied up in the same dimension. We should not try to seperate the two.

This leaves me with some major questions that I want to pursue in future posts. Perhaps my readers can give some feedback to help formulate my thoughts:

1. Should Christians care about conspicious consumption?
2. Is the church spending too much money on luxuries? If so, what in your mind constitutes a luxury?
3. If Christianity is a viable option in America, should it endorse the capitalism of its nation? Why or why not? Make sure you understand the nature of capitalism before answering that question.