New Blog: religiouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com

I’ve decided that 2012 is a year of re-alignment. Missouri has ditched the Big 12 for the SEC, and I have moved my membership to the Episcopal Church. My last time in the United Methodist church as a United Methodist was on the last Sunday of Lent this year. I was visiting some friends in another city, and went to their church with them. It felt a lot like the church where I grew up. It was a downtown church. It had a sort of pleasant, familiar smell that I’ve got come to associate with sanctuaries. The hymnal was there, the bulletin was very much like what I’d grown up with, even the pews were uncomfortable in a comforting and familiar way. And the service, which did all the things that annoy me about Methodist services, was a fine and familiar specimen of the breed. It was what it was, to the glory of God. But it’s not who I am anymore. Two weeks later, I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church at the Great Vigil of Easter.

I think it’s sort of fitting that my last entry on this blog was that Methodist Fight Song. “They pray the most, they preach the best, they labor most for endless rest.” That will always be part of me. “A Methodist, it is my name, I hope to live and die the same!” Well, I don’t bear the name anymore, but the songs, the sermons, and the doctrines are in my bones. So maybe I’m not leaving the UMC so much as infiltrating the Episcopal Church.

I like to think of it has having dual-citizenship in the two traditions, but moving my primary residence. As such, I’m retiring this blog. But being newly resolved to blog regularly (it has to work one of these times), I’ve started up a new blog: religiouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com. Hope to see you over there.

“And when the happy day shall come,
And all the Christians are brought home,
My soul will feast in endless rest
With all the shouting Methodist.”

Keep shoutin’, Methodists. Be nicer to your ordination candidates and young clergy, but keep shouting.

 

Methodist Fight Song

I came across this years ago, but lost it. I thought of it again the other day, and was able to track it down with the help of Google Books and Regenstein Library. This was once published in an actual hymnal. It’s awful. And also kind of awesome.

I am a soldier of the cross,
I count all earthly things but dross;
My soul is bound for endless rest,
I’ll never leave the Methodist.

For a better church cannot be found,
Their doctrine is so pure and sound;
One reason that I’ll give for this,
The Devil hates the Methodist.

They pray the most, they preach the best,
They labor most for endless rest;
I hope my Lord will them increase
And fill the world with Methodist.

The world, the Devil and Tom Pain
Have try’d their best, but all in vain;
They can’t prevail; the reason’s this:
The Lord defends the Methodist.

And when the happy day shall come,
And all the Christians are brought home,
My soul will feast in endless rest
With all the shouting Methodist.

We shout so much for sinners here,
But when in heaven we do appear,
Our shouts will make the heavens ring,
When all the Methodist shall sing.

A Methodist, it is my name,
I hope to live and die the same,
I then with Jesus shall be blest
With his dear loving Methodist.

The Devil, Calvin and Voltaire
May hate the Methodist in vain;
Their doctrine shall be downward hurl’d,
The Methodist will take the world.

(Lifted from George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals. New York: J. J. Augustin, 1944. p. 56)

Dress Codes

Near the beginning of my first unit of CPE, I showed up one day in jeans. It was a part-time extended unit doing the school year, and I was just going in for group. I wasn’t going to see any residents that day (it was a residential retirement community, not a hospital). My supervisor disapproved and asked me to explain my choice. I told him I was coming from school, I was not going to see residents, that I dislike wearing what I call dress up clothes and everybody else calls business casual when it’s not necessary, and that it didn’t seem necessary when I was just going to be talking to four seminary students and priest behind a closed door.

He found that reasonable enough, but asked what I would do if I were called to a resident’s bedside for an emergency (which never happens, but that’s neither here nor there). I told him that given the unexpected nature of the situation, I wouldn’t hesitate to go in wearing what I happened to have on. Surely someone in need of emergency pastoral care had more important things on their mind than whether the pastor was wearing jeans or slacks. He didn’t buy it. Since he was the supervisor and I was the student, so he got to have the final say. And it wasn’t a battle I felt like picking.

I never deliberately pick this battle. I pretty much accept it as a fact of life that I have to dress “business casual” whenever I’m acting in a pastoral role. I’m willing to put up with it, for the most part. There was one other time when what I took to be a low-key check in with the committee that keeps track of me was in their mind a professional interview. It’s not a problem; I’ll wear slacks next year.

But let’s be clear: this is a concession I make, not something I embrace. I grew up in an informal atmosphere, and gravitate toward such places. Some people put a great deal of thought into planning what they will wear. They schedule their laundry accordingly, make ironing part of their daily routine, and the like. Some even enjoy this. For some, there’s a spirituality to it. I have nothing against them. But I don’t enjoy it. It’s not a spiritual exercise for me. It’s a chore. And given that I have enough trouble getting anywhere on time in the morning, it’s an unwelcome one.

One of my best friends is the exact opposite of me on this count. I wear a sweatshirt in the winter and a t-shirt in the summer if I can possibly get away with it. He’s been known to wear a three-piece suit in July even though he’s not going anywhere in particular. For him, it’s a way of showing respect to everyone he meets, of being reminded of the importance of every moment (his word was sacramentality). I get that. And hey, it looks great.

But that’s not how I show respect. I wouldn’t wear jeans if I were invited to the White House to meet the president, but that has nothing to do with respect for me. It would be to avoid causing embarrassment for myself or others. My friend shows respect through clothes. I show it primarily through language.

But in my mind, the language I would use meeting a head of state is more about respect for the office. I would be showing more respect for a person if I were speaking in a slight drawl and peppering my discourse with pedantic references to church history, sci-fi allusions, and cuss words. For me, that shows respect because it’s unaffected. It’s how I talk to people I consider worth talking to. And it’s how I talk to God. I only speak to God in earnest. But I talk to God while dressed up at church, in my pajamas when I wake up in the morning, and naked in the shower.

It’s not that I don’t think one’s outward actions have a bearing on one’s spiritual dispositions. I do. It’s just that the same actions don’t have the same effect on everyone. My friend finds a sacramentality in wearing a suit and calling people sir and ma’am. I find a sacramentality wearing jeans and swearing at God in Klingon. He and I probably make an odd looking pair when we go to a pub, he in his suit, me in whatever t-shirt happened to be clean. It’s a given that we’re being respectful. And if you can be respectful too, and enjoy talking about patristics over a beer, we’d love to have you join us. You can wear a tie like him or a t-shirt like me. Either way, pour yourself a glass. Qapla!

Works Righteousness

I have never believed in works righteousness. But it is only through the process of studying for my qualifying exams that I have come to truly hate it, and to sympathize with Luther’s vehement loathing of anything that smacked of it.

Allow me to explain.

At my university, we do qualifying exams as part of our Ph.D. program, like everybody else. My division has four written exams over set bibliographies and an oral examination where you retract defend your written essays. It is a fairly infrequent occurrence for someone to fail. Only students who’ve been around for some time can remember anyone by name, and most of my contemporaries know of only one story. Still, if you do fail, there’s no second chance. Your enrollment in the program is terminated. So you can imagine that even though one’s odds of failing are very slight, it’s hard not to be pretty nervous. And by nervous, I mean terrified.

For much of the last six months or so, as I’ve been preparing, I’ve had occasion to reflect on what the prospect of failure (however unlikely) means for me. Most of that has been on what it means for me as a person, how the possibility has to be embraced in order to ever do anything, how one’s sense of worth can’t be contingent on one’s success in one’s various endeavors, etc. And I’m pretty good on that count. But the other night, I woke up and it suddenly occurred to me that however okay I was with it psychologically, it would mean suddenly finding myself unemployed in the Great Economic Downturn of 2008-200920102011. My livelihood at the moment is my stipend from my school, and if my enrollment in the school came to an abrupt end, so would my income.

Like I said, it’s highly improbable that I would fail. But even after praying myself down off that very figurative ledge, I was quite resolved to do absolutely everything in my power to be sufficiently prepared. So I’ve gone back and re-checked out couple books that I’d just skimmed, figured out when I’ll read a few that I was planning to just skim, realized that there aren’t enough hours in the day or days left in the week (that’s a literal week; the exams start a week from tomorrow) to read and process everything I’d like. So I find myself asking how much is enough. I want to have mastered as many of these texts as possible. I don’t want to do the bare minimum. But when push comes to shove, and with my present livelihood on the line (not to mention my career in this field), how much is enough to not get kicked out?

So if you know Luther or any other strain of Protestant theology, you can probably see where this is going. I am reminded of Luther’s anxieties over his salvation prior to his eureka moment with Romans 1:17. He believed, like any good late medieval Catholic, that one must be holy to see the Lord (that much is scriptural, see Heb. 12:14). And for him, that meant not only being in a state of grace through baptism and penance, but dying in a state of grace, and then being purged of one’s sins in purgatory. So how do you get into and stay in a state of grace? How much penance did you have to do? How many works of piety and mercy were required to make God disposed to give you the gift of perseverance, so you could get into at least purgatory when you died?

Luther’s breakthrough came when he realized that there was no humanly possible way to bridge the gap between God and humanity. One can do nothing to merit grace. It’s called grace because it’s entirely unmerited. God has done absolutely everything involved in salvation. God imputes Christ’s righteousness to the sinner based on faith, and even this faith is a gift of God. Humans always want to be able to contribute something, to think they had something to do with it. But it the scandal of it is that there is nothing about salvation that is not a gift (this has a slightly different nuance in Wesleyan theology. We’ll talk about that some other time. I’m pretty Lutheran today).

I fear (at certain moments) rejection by my school, which is also my community, and being deprived of a paycheck and a certain career. Luther feared being rejected by God and being deprived of eternal blessedness (and subjected to eternal torment). As I agonize over how much is enough to prove my merit as a scholar (a cruel irony that I study the grace of God, but have to prove my merit), I am thankful that I do not have to live my life wondering if I’ve done enough not to be rejected by God. My admission to candidacy and continuance in this program depends on me showing that I am good enough. My salvation does not.

And given how agonizing this test is, even though I will almost certainly pass it, I find that I don’t just think that any theology is wrong that makes my salvation almost but not entirely certain (and therefore dependent in some some small measure on my ability to prove my worth). I find it utterly abhorrent, and censure it not as an unfortunate misunderstanding, but a damnable error, a snare of the devil. But thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

Seeing as I managed to post all of four times in 2010 (two of them in January), it’s safe to say I haven’t been very good about this. WordPress has a post-a-week challenge they’re trying to promote. I will no doubt fail in this endeavor, but it’s a nice idea, and I will be more at leisure to do so once I take my exams (which start two weeks from tomorrow). So why not? Cause let’s face it, it’s embarrassing when you only have to scroll down a bit to get to posts from two years ago.

Against Truisms, Platitudes and (Unless You’re Careful) Tweets

I was just looking at a twitter feed, @EssentialChurch, which is apparently promoting a book on reaching out to church “dropouts” (not a bad way to phrase the problem of attracting/retaining young adults). Many of the tweets are about a missional or outward focus. For instance:

The most outwardly focused churches are many times the healthiest on the inside.

A missional church thinking outwardly usually is a healthy church inwardly.

Fair enough. I bring your attention to this because they are the sorts of things one hears a lot these days in many churches, and there is an obvious truth to them. You hear this, and even though it’s quite vague, you can’t help but nod. The church exists for the sake of its mission, they seem to be saying. We need to spend less time on inward focused things like denominational polity and the color of paint in the sanctuary and more time on reaching out and connecting with the things people actually care about. And who could dispute this? My guess is that even the people who make every church meeting so miserable by turning each trivial decision into an epic battle agree with it in principle.

But what I noticed was that both of these aphorisms could be inverted, and they would also express a truth. For example, we might say that churches that are focused on prayer and searching the scripture tend to have the most effective mission. Churches that listen to the word God speaks within might have the most powerful outreach. Doesn’t quite have the ring to it, but you get the idea. Christians of some eras have been most moved by interiority. I assume I’m not saying anything radical when I note that it’s not really a question of outreach or formation. One generation may get more excited about the one than the other, but you can’t have one without the other.

My point is only to say that we have to be careful about thinking in shorthand. Slogans have their place, and some churches have made very effective use of tweets and Facebook statuses. But we have to be sure that we don’t mistake a good one-liner for the whole story, or one generation’s truism for the truth. I fear that in our laudable efforts to employ current marketing techniques for evangelistic ends, we create echo chambers.

The Bible actually has something like a Twitter feed in the book of Proverbs. But it doesn’t just keep driving home a single message over and over. The individual proverbs supplement each other, nuance each other, sometimes contradict each other. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit” (Prov. 26:4-5). You see how you would be missing something essential if you only read one or the other of those verses? A good aphorism is more than a truism, good preaching is more than platitudes, and good exhortation more than cheer leading.

Tweet 140 characters at at time if you must, but don’t think that way!

New Religion Discovered in United States

As you may know, my primary endeavor these last few months has been preparing for my doctoral exams. I had originally hoped to take them in October, but as the process has been slower than I hoped, I now anticipate taking them in February. But my summer has not been unproductive.

One reason my studies have been so slow is because I have been investigating reports of a new and growing religion, which may have several million practitioners, most of them in the United States. My findings are nowhere near ready for publication, but I am at least prepared to share the some preliminary information about this exciting new discovery of a previously undocumented religious tradition.

Its adherents call themselves “Judeo-Christian,” but have no name for their religion. It appears to have originated in the United States in the last twenty or thirty years, but its roots may go back at least to the post-WWII era. Judeo-Christians do not seem to espouse any particular doctrine; must of their language is vaguely theistic, but any notions of deity seem secondary to what they call “values.” They regard Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, and the Jewish prophets as the originators of these values, but no emphasis is placed on any soteriological function of Jesus or observance of Torah. 18th century figures called the “founding fathers” also seem to play a prominent role in Judeo-Christian self-understanding. The relationship of the founding fathers to the historical political figures of the same names is unclear. The chief Judeo-Christian observance seems to involve a veneration of certain public spaces in North America.

Their understanding of sacred space seems to involve a high degree of sensitivity to ritual pollution, which must be prevented at all costs. Judeo-Christian apologists have petitioned the New York City government for the protection of an ill-defined sacred precinct from other religious observances, which they deem sacreligious. These apologists give no indication of what their licit observances are in these spaces, or what their ultimate plans for them may be. This may suggest that there is an esoteric aspect to the Judeo-Christian religion. It remains to be seen whether the presence of a possibly esoteric religious group with unknown aims will cause tensions with other Americans.

I am very excited by this new discovery, and I look forward to sharing the outcomes of my ongoing research!

Intinction

Paul and the evangelists changed a few of the details for stylistic purposes, but here’s how it really happened:

On the night in which he was betrayed, our Lord took bread, and after he had blessed the bread he broke it, gave it to his disciples and said, “Take. Eat. This is my–No, don’t eat it yet. Hold onto it for a minute. This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Well, the eating is in remembrance of me. Not hold onto the bread and looking confused. You’ll see in a second.”

In like manner he took the cup, gave thanks, gave it to his disciples and said, “Drink from this, all of you. This is my–No! You’re not actually supposed to drink from it. That’s gross. Take the bread I gave you and dip that in there. But be careful to keep all fingers from touching the wine. Which is actually grape juice, by the way. No, you idiot, I mean your fingers. It doesn’t matter whether the bread that is my body includes my fingers or not. Anyway, drink from this, all of you. By which I mean dip in this, all of you. This is my blood of the new covenant, pour out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in remembrance of me.”

And so as often as you eat of this bread and drink of this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

And don’t you Episcopalians and Lutherans look down on me for using grape juice and dipping, because that’s what Jesus did!

Another Straight Guy with an Opinion on Gay Marriage

I hope my Facebook friends will keep the links coming, because it makes this really easy. Right now, I’ve got a few people discussing Theodore Olsen’s Newsweek article “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” Now I happen to have some opinions about this article, and the topic of gay marriage, and I see no reason not to voice them. But I do need to at least make clear my own social position with relation to the issue. I am a straight, single man (and while we’re at it, I end up in the “privileged” column on any other set of boxes that might be checked as well). I point this out because this debate, at least in the mainstream forums, is more or less characterized by straight people arguing with other straight people about gay people. And I’m about to be one more straight person opining about gay people, and I’m even going to say something that is open to the criticism of being heteronormative. Well, dems da breaks. Can’t really do shit about it, but the privileged position that some people (myself included) have in the conversation and the marginalized position of others at least ought to be acknowledged and lamented. But brevity has not ceased to be the soul of wit, so on to my thoughts on the matter.

I think this is a great article, and I hope you will read it (and be persuaded by it). Most of the debate on my facebook wall has been about whether the argument qualifies as “conservative.” I happen to think it does in important ways, but I think the more important point is that the argument ought to be of interest to conservatives. Perhaps a more fitting title (and a more important point) would be the current subtitle: “Why Same-Sex Marriage is an American Value.”

The article begins from what it calls the conservative premise that monogamous marriage is the normative basis for family, in such a way that the state has an interest in recognizing and promoting it. I happen to agree with this premise, which I guess makes me conservative (and this is where I am possibly open to the charge of heteronormativity). Granting this premise, the reader is asked what what about marriage makes it socially normative and worthy of the government’s recognition and promition, and whether that entails that it be a heterosexual union. The article’s contention (which I wholeheartedly agree with) is that none of the goods of marriage which the state has an interest in promoting require that the union be heterosexual. You can read the article yourself for the details. Most arguments to the contrary seem to involve an appeal to dogmatic authority, religious or otherwise. Such appeals are not admissible in American jurisprudence. Therefore, excluding homosexual couples from legal marriage is arbitrary and discriminatory, and may God and the Supreme Court grant that it is quickly done away with.

I would make two further points, that are not found in the article. First, I would argue that failure to extended the rights of marriage to gay couples will actually jeopardize the very thing it is ostensibly trying to protect, namely, marriage as a cultural norm. If gay and lesbian couples cannot be married, they will live together and raise children without being married, as rapidly increasing numbers of heterosexual couples do. We find ourselves in the rather ironic situation in which the so-called gay rights agenda is actually arguing for the normativity of marriage, while as I see it, the so-called pro-family agenda is seeking to undermine it. Make no mistake, marriage is in trouble in this country. The divorce rate is catastrophic (you see? I can be conservative every now and then), but perhaps more alarming is that for a variety of reasons (none of them having to do with homosexuality), straight couples are increasingly living together and having children with no thought of marriage. This is especially true of poorer, less educated, non-white couples. Marriage is becoming something of a privilege even among heterosexuals (take a look at this article for an interesting exploration of the causes). I think it largely has to do with a failure to appreciate the social, economic, and religious benefits of marriage (as this second article argues). At any rate, I think there is a danger of an increasing perception of marriage as irrelevant, and certainly not normative. Those who purport to be defenders of marriage ought to take all the help they can get, if its benefits are not to be lost.

Second, I am somewhat skeptical of the sharp line that some people want to draw between civil marriage and religious marriage. It is always an act of religious significance, which I’ll have to get into some other time. But I for one do not want the government being the arbiter of religious significance. If the argument against gay marriage is that the state has an interest in upholding “the sanctity of marriage,” which is allegedly undermined by gay marriage (which is wrong, but that’s for another day), then that is seriously screwed up. Since when is the government qualified to pronounce on such matters? I hardly trust these people to get the mail delivered, and the so-called conservative position is that I’m supposed to want them to start meddling determining what is holy? Next time I hear someone who thinks the government should protect the “sanctity” of marriage complain that public health care is invasive on the government’s part, I will not likely be able to retain my calm!

Coakley on Gender and Theology

I didn’t know this had been posted online, otherwise I would have linked to it sooner. This is the manuscript of a talk that Sarah Coakley gave at my school last year when I had the good fortune to be in attendance (it’s a PDF, and you have to scroll down a couple pages). It was probably the most excited I’ve been about theology in a long time. Ben Myers lists it as the best theological essay of 2009 (it was actually given in 2008, but no matter). Read it!