Bad, but not Evil

I’ve said before that I’m no great fan of the current pope, and that hasn’t changed any.  But when I read about people’s reactions to his various speeches in Jordan and Israel in the last week or so, I’m pretty much inclined to say give the man a break, it wasn’t that bad.  In fact, the only real criticism that I think holds any water (bear in mind, I have not read or listened to a single one of his speeches in its entirety, so there might have been something horrible I just haven’t come across) is that it could have been so much better.  I think Daniel Gordis has it right on the New York Times website:

The pope’s mistake was that he assumed the role of diplomat rather than religious leader. There was nothing technically wrong with what he said at Yad Vashem. But in choosing such carefully measured, tepid language, he said nothing that an ordinary diplomat could not have uttered. We heard none of the passion, the fury or the shattered heart that is the hallmark of genuine religious courage and leadership.

Exactly so.  The complaint that he didn’t cite the number six million is stupid, and in my opinion, the claim that he had a responsibility to speak more concretely or contritely is difficult to sustain.  No public figure can be obligated to break down in tears of remorse on significant occasions.  But it sure would have been nice.  He went as a diplomat, when he should have gone as a pastor.  He failed to read his audience.  It’s not a sin, but it is an unfortunately missed opportunity.  And laying aside the hundred of his actual teachings that I think are somewhere on the spectrum between wrong and abhorrent, the Vatican is suffering from a combined pastoral and PR failure.  They’re not big into meeting people where they are these days.  And as long as that keeps up, they will keep stirring up controversies with things that are probably not really wrong, but are incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t share the prevailing Vatican mindset.

Oh well.  Maybe Obama will visit Israel soon.

How my education didn’t fail me

(Update: less cumbersome title)

My facebook homepage turned up this report on the pool of available ministers in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the needs of congregations, and found (unsurprisingly) that they’re rather mismatched. There are more people in the call process than there are churches looking for pastors, more people looking for first calls than churches willing to accept someone on their first call, more candidates preferring larger congregations and churches in cities than large congregations and urban churches in existence, and so forth. It says that

The future leaders of the church will need to be flexible and creative, able to serve at a time of new denominational and religious realties. Among the types of ministerial leaders the PC(USA) will need: church planters; those who can transform older congregations into new ways of being; and those capable of “hospice” ministry, who can guide congregations that won’t survive faithfully through their final days.

It adds that “Particularly needed…will be tentmakers and racial-ethnic leaders, including those with doctoral training (who might be available to teach in seminaries) and proficiency in languages other than English.” Sounds about right, though I would add that churches need to be more willing to embrace the leadership of recent seminary graduates.

I would like to see some similar numbers on the United Methodist Church, which I bet would reveal similar trends, recognizing that the situation is complicated (simplified?) by the appointment system. But most of our churches are small and rural, and can’t afford or can barely afford to pay a full-time pastor. Every seminarian or recent grad knows about how difficult getting a first call is, and I am told that even in some UM conferences, full-time appointments are at a premium. Obviously, that sucks for people who go through seminary, often at great expense, and then find that they can’t make a living in ministry. Academics are in a similar boat. And since most of my friends are either seminarians, young ministers, or budding theologians, I encounter a lot of anxiety about this. And it is not without a sense of loss that I realize that I will not have the sort of career that someone with my talent and training might have been able to count on a generation ago.

That said, the idea of planting a church or revitalizing one kind of appeals to me. Or if I get sent to some tiny church (or being a Methodist, churches) in the middle of nowhere, I’ll preach their sermons, baptize their babies, hold their hand and cry with them in the hospital, and love every minute of it. And if things continue according to plan, I can teach theology in a seminary or religious studies in a college (or worst case scenario, high school Spanish, and maybe French, German, Portuguese, or Latin) to pay the bills.

I was told (actually in the same presentation the triggered my previous post–I swear, it was a great conference!) that my education has failed me. That what I and my peers have learned in college and seminary is too out of touch with the realities of the church to do any good. I believe that, with the exception of the complaint that it has not paid sufficient attention to traditionally marginalized voices, this statement is false, or at least no more true now than it has ever been. Every generation complains that their education failed them. In a sense, it’s education’s job to fail its students. It cannot anticipate what situations the students will face when they arrive in the putative real world. It can give you a knowledge of the texts of one’s tradition, of the width and breadth of ways of reading those texts, and some skills for preaching a sermon or providing pastoral care. But you will never read every important text in seminary, you will never figure out every thing you need to know about people or the world, and you will certainly not have adequately probed the mysteries of God. Perhaps the best that education can do is nothing other than to teach you how to be a student, so that you can start putting the wisdom of your teachers and your own experiences together into some shape all your own, and not just once, but again and again. And in my experience, people who can do that are kick ass ministers. The Latin word for student is disciplus.

I have had perhaps one of the most theoretical educations available. As an M.Div. (and still as a Ph.D. student) I took many more classes in theology, history, and historical-critical readings of the Bible than so called “practical courses,” and I did this at the University of Chicago of all goddamn places. At times even I’ve wondered about the merit of what I’ve been doing. I could have been learning about how to run a church. But the world in which my teachers learned how to pastor a church is giving way to a new one, and it turns out that what the church needs is pastors who are “flexible and creative, able to serve at a time of new denominational and religious realties,” and able to generate some income from another source. And maybe able to preach in Spanish, or teach a theology course.

So who’d have thought that being a bookish polyglot with a fondness for small towns and a talent for taking Christianity apart and putting it back together might make me more or less what my church needs in these times? Quick, somebody cross out my name and send this post to my DCOM!

Jesus and Paul and Stuff

I’m always amazed that one or two people still visit this site most days, given that I almost never bother myself.  But, I’ve got at least three posts half-formed in my head, so stay tuned.

To start off with, I’d like to reflect on something I heard at a conference last week.  A very prominent post-colonial feminist theologian had just given a talk on global Christianity and a theology professor from my own school had given a response, and when questions were invited, a friend and old classmate of mine from M.Div. days asked about the place of faith and justification in post-colonial theology and ministry, and received what I thought was a most inadequate response.  Both the speaker and the respondant noted that Jesus never talked about justification and said very little about faith, focusing his attention instead on marginalization.  They told us that we should base our Christianity on Jesus himself rather than Paul, seeming to be referring sometimes to “the historical Jesus” and sometimes to Jesus as portrayed in the gospels.

They may be right about the relative priority of social justice over justification, and I am willing to grant for the sake of argument that they have read the gospels correctly.  But I am sick of this nonsense I hear all the time that the gospels, particularly the synoptics (and more particularly, those passages which seem to lend the most support to the agenda of whoever is making this statement) are somehow a more authentic witness to Jesus Christ than the rest of the New Testament, with Paul usually being cast as the primary foil.  There are several reasons for this.

First of all, the authentic letters of Paul (by which I mean only those written or dictated by Paul himself) are the earliest artefact of the Christian faith we have.  The earliest of them predates the earliest of the gospels by about 20 years.  Furthermore, a professor of mine has argued that Paul saw himself as something of a living gospel (take a look at the letter to the Galatians, where he may be equating “Jesus Christ…publicly exhibited as crucified” [3:1] with his own presence among them as one in whom God reveals his Son [1:16. In most English translations, you’ll read “to me,” but the Greek permits “in me,” and this might even be less of a stretch] and who bears on his body the marks of Christ [6:17]).  Inasmuch as the gospel of Mark is also publicly displaying Jesus as crucified, it could be read as a replacement for the bodily presence of Paul (I will have to check and see if my professor has published this argument.  I’ll get back to you on that).  Even if you don’t buy this parallel, it does not stretch the imagination at all that the earliest generation or two of Christians did not need written accounts of Jesus’ life, since they had the apostles and other first-hand followers of Jesus among them, and that when the gospels were written, it was something of a replacement for the proclamation of the apostles and co.

Perhaps just as importantly, it is not as though the gospel writers recorded the acts of Jesus in an unbiased way.  They had their own kerygmatic agenda just as Paul did.  It may be an extension of Paul’s proclamation (as I believe is the case with Mark) or a nuancing of it or response to it (Matthew, Luke), or whatever the heck John is doing.  The most that can be said is that since they do whatever they’re doing through the medium of a narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus, they give historical Jesus scholars something to do, who might otherwise be among the formidable ranks of unemployed humanities Ph.Ds.  But even what can be reconstructed from them as “the historical Jesus” cannot be called the “real” Jesus to the exclusion of the Jesus of the proclamation of the New Testament writers (and you can even make that the “Jesuses” of the New Testament writers for all I care), but rather the Jesus that historians are able to reconstruct using the methods of modern historiography, which is required to simply remain agnostic on the points of most importance to most Christians.

Inasmuch as all of these texts consider themselves to be proclamations of the gospel of Jesus Christ (whether they really are, or how good a job they do, is a theological claim, not a historiographical one) and inasmuch as they reveal a certain amount of give-and-take among the various surviving voices in the early church, and inasmuch as it is not a settled question then or now “which Jesus” counts, I do not think it legitimate to speak of a “Christianity of Jesus” and a “Christianity of Paul” and privilege the former.  Neither one of these exists apart from the other in a form accessible to us.

I do not mean this as a charge against liberation theology, which I think can find as many resources in Paul and John as in the synoptic gospels.  Nor do I mean to deny that some sort of hermeneutical center is required in whose light to adjudicate between the texts of the various New Testament authors and whatever else a particular Christian or church holds as authoritative.  But if you are going to be so condescending as to act as though this center is obvious, then I am not really interested in talking to you.