September 2012 - Pub Theologian

‘Spiritual but not religious’ is a cop-out

September 30, 2012 Church, Culture, Philosophy, Practices, Theology Comments are closed

beach-meditation-story-top — “I’m meditating, dude!”

By Alan Miller, originally posted on CNN’s belief blog.

Note: Alan Miller is Director ofThe New York Salon and Co-Founder of London’s Old Truman Brewery. He is speaking at The Battle of Ideas at London’s Barbican in October.

By Alan Miller, guest post

The increasingly common refrain that “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” represents some of the most retrogressive aspects of contemporary society. The spiritual but not religious “movement” – an inappropriate term as that would suggest some collective, organizational aspect – highlights the implosion of belief that has struck at the heart of Western society.

Spiritual but not religious people are especially prevalent in the younger population in the United States, although a recent study has argued that it is not so much that people have stopped believing in God, but rather have drifted from formal institutions.

It seems that just being a part of a religious institution is nowadays associated negatively, with everything from the Religious Right to child abuse, back to the Crusades and of course with terrorism today.

Those in the spiritual-but-not-religious camp are peddling the notion that by being independent – by choosing an “individual relationship” to some concept of “higher power”, energy, oneness or something-or-other – they are in a deeper, more profound relationship than one that is coerced via a large institution like a church.

That attitude fits with the message we are receiving more and more that “feeling” something somehow is more pure and perhaps, more “true” than having to fit in with the doctrine, practices, rules and observations of a formal institution that are handed down to us.

The trouble is that “spiritual but not religious” offers no positive exposition or understanding or explanation of a body of belief or set of principles of any kind.

What is it, this “spiritual” identity as such? What is practiced? What is believed?

The accusation is often leveled that such questions betray a rigidity of outlook, all a tad doctrinaire and rather old-fashioned.

But when the contemporary fashion is for an abundance of relativist “truths” and what appears to be in the ascendancy is how one “feels” and even governments aim to have a “happiness agenda,” desperate to fill a gap at the heart of civic society, then being old-fashioned may not be such a terrible accusation.

It is within the context of today’s anti-big, anti-discipline, anti-challenging climate – in combination with a therapeutic turn in which everything can be resolved through addressing my inner existential being – that the spiritual but not religious outlook has flourished.

The boom in megachurches merely reflect this sidelining of serious religious study for networking, drop-in centers and positive feelings.

Those that identify themselves, in our multi-cultural, hyphenated-American world often go for a smorgasbord of pick-and-mix choices.

A bit of Yoga here, a Zen idea there, a quote from Taoism and a Kabbalah class, a bit of Sufism and maybe some Feing Shui but not generally a reading and appreciation of The Bhagavad Gita, the Karma Sutra or the Qur’an, let alone The Old or New Testament.

So what, one may ask?

Christianity has been interwoven and seminal in Western history and culture. As Harold Bloom pointed out in his book on the King James Bible, everything from the visual arts, to Bach and our canon of literature generally would not be possible without this enormously important work.

Indeed, it was through the desire to know and read the Bible that reading became a reality for the masses – an entirely radical moment that had enormous consequences for humanity.

Moreover, the spiritual but not religious reflect the “me” generation of self-obsessed, truth-is-whatever-you-feel-it-to-be thinking, where big, historic, demanding institutions that have expectations about behavior, attitudes and observance and rules are jettisoned yet nothing positive is put in replacement.

The idea of sin has always been accompanied by the sense of what one could do to improve oneself and impact the world.

Yet the spiritual-but-not-religious outlook sees the human as one that simply wants to experience “nice things” and “feel better.” There is little of transformation here and nothing that points to any kind of project that can inspire or transform us.

At the heart of the spiritual but not religious attitude is an unwillingness to take a real position. Influenced by the contribution of modern science, there is a reluctance to advocate a literalist translation of the world.

But these people will not abandon their affiliation to the sense that there is “something out there,” so they do not go along with a rationalist and materialistic explanation of the world, in which humans are responsible to themselves and one another for their actions – and for the future.

Theirs is a world of fence-sitting, not-knowingess, but not-trying-ness either. Take a stand, I say. Which one is it? A belief in God and Scripture or a commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of human-based knowledge, reason and action? Being spiritual but not religious avoids having to think too hard about having to decide.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Alan Miller.

What I meant to say…

September 26, 2012 Philosophy, Poetry, Relationships, Theology Comments are closed

“What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”
– Paul Ricouer

“Really?” you might ask.

I think most of us have a hard time believing that. How could anyone make such a statement?

Surely the most important thing is what the author meant to say when he wrote it. I tweeted this quote recently and someone responded in such a fashion. The meaning then is more important than the meaning now. I am inclined to agree. As a student of the New Testament (and the Hebrew Scriptures), and someone who preaches, I spend a lot of time working hard to understand what a text meant when it was originally written, in other words, ‘what the author meant to say’.

My assumption is that the more I can understand the original intention, the better job I’ll do of being true to that text. So from this perspective, what the text originally meant seems to be the most important thing! Upon first glance then, Ricouer, a French philosopher of language, appears clearly wrong.

But here arises the challenge of understanding what the original intent actually was. We don’t always get this exactly right, do we? Someone says something, and we want to know what they intended to mean. In reality, this isn’t always accomplished even in everyday life, in face-to-face conversation. We want to be understood, and get incredibly frustrated when we are not:

“But I meant to say…”

“You misunderstood me!”

“That’s not what I meant at all.”

One of the worst things possible is being misunderstood.

Yet if it can happen to us today, in face-to-face direct speech acts, how much more might the written word— indirect speech—be misunderstood? And even further, the written word from a different language and culture by an author who is now centuries and even millennia dead.

(Of course this is where, in an act of faith, one might trust that the Holy Spirit will step in and say, “What I meant to say was…”!) But for the purposes of this post, let’s leave that component to the side for the time being. (Invoking the Spirit is necessary, but can often be an easy out in place of the hard work I believe God calls us to do in understanding the text).

Since misunderstandings can (and do!) happen, it seems that our best recourse is to disagree with Ricouer, and assume the original meaning as intended by the author is the most important. After all, why would we spend all the time we do trying to understand this meaning if it were not the case? In fact, it seems such an open and shut case, that perhaps we should be done with it.

But… yet… perhaps…

Importance of the Now

Back to the original provocative statement:
“What the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say…”

We noted earlier that it seems almost intuitively obvious that this statement is wrong.

Yet I wonder… perhaps there is something to this after all.

I wonder, if our interpretation, our attempts at recovering what the author meant to say and thus declaring what in fact the text said and says, is, in fact, more important. Think of it this way: When a preacher preaches on any given text, and supplies it with meaning —that is the meaning the listeners take away. When a person reads a verse with their morning coffee and senses, “What I just read means [this] to me”—that is the meaning this person is taking away. In this sense, I think Ricouer is right. What the text says now is more important than what the author meant to say. In fact, this has to be the case. Think about it. What the text says now is all we have. The author is dead. The Apostle Paul cannot rise up when we read a selection from 1 Corinthians and say, “But what I meant to say was…!” (Though we surely wish he would!) What we have is our understanding of the text now. What we have is what the preacher interprets the text to mean. What we have is what we ourselves take a text to mean anytime we read the Bible. That is what we have. That is the meaning of the text here and now—and it is that meaning, not the original meaning, that goes on to have impact and live into the world.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that what the author meant to say is irrelevant or unimportant. Hardly! It is crucial. And we must work hard to attempt to recover that meaning in any reading and work of interpreting. But the facts are that we can’t sit down with the writer of Matthew when we open that Gospel and make sure we ‘get it’. It’s impossible. We can’t sit down with The Teacher when we read Ecclesiastes to make sure he was as skeptical as he seems. We can’t dissect a Psalm and have David back up our interpretation.

In that sense—a perfect recovery of what any given author meant (of a text in the Bible or any other text)—is impossible. The meaning we supply to the text is the meaning we have. That’s it! That’s the meaning that lives in the world today. And the meaning that lives in the world at any given moment is the more important meaning—that is the meaning that causes people to act in certain ways, to believe certain things, to commit themselves to a certain path. We simply don’t have the original meaning in full. What the text says now is more important, as Ricouer so daringly ventured.

And this actually squares with a Reformed understanding of preaching. There’s a classic statement that says, “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” (As stated in the Second Helvetic Confession.) I always thought this was a bit presumptuous, and laid too much emphasis on the role of the preacher. Yet, in light of Ricouer’s analysis, I think there is a lot of merit to this approach. When the community gathers, and the Word comes forth, and that Word is explicated, interpreted, delivered: we all have some sense that something sacred is happening, that God is engaging us, indeed, that God is speaking.

Consider Calvin:
“When a man has climbed up into the pulpit… it is [so] that God may speak to us by the mouth of a man.”

Or Luther:
“Tis a right excellent thing, that every honest pastor’s and preacher’s mouth is Christ’s mouth…”

Invisible Readers

Ricouer notes that through writing, “discourse escapes the limits of being face to face. It no longer has a visible auditor. An unknown, invisible reader has become the unprivileged addressee of the discourse.”

In other words, at one time, the text belonged to the writer—he wrote it down, and he shared it with people, and could inevitably correct misunderstandings if they engaged the writing in person. But once the work becomes widespread – such corrections vis a vis a face-to-face encounter with the writer, becomes less and less possible. And once the author dies, impossible. The text will reach readers that were invisible to the author, indeed, readers who did not yet exist.

Merold Westphal says it is this invisibility that gives the text an autonomy, an independence from authorial intention. This is known in interpretive circles as “the death of the author.” The absolute author (the one who knows what he or she meant to say) is not replaced by an absolute reader, but by one whose authority is limited, relative to a particular context, and without the presence of the author.

You and I are such readers when it comes to any ancient text (or even reading Steinbeck or Updike).

But here our interpretive journey takes another turn.

Perhaps the author him- or herself is not in full possession of the meaning of what they have written. Perhaps more is being said than even the author was intending!

Merold Westphal notes that “not even the author is in full possession of the whole that would give fully final and determinate meaning.”

In other words, perhaps what the author intended isn’t the whole of its meaning. (I would say this is particularly the case when it comes to Scripture.)

Nick Wolterstorff gives an example of this possibility of a multiplicity of meanings:

At dinner Mom says, “Only two more days till Christmas.” To her young children, who think that Christmas will never come, her speech act is a word of comfort and hope. But to her husband “she may have said, in a rather arch and allusive way, that he must stop delaying and get his shopping done. One locutionary act [vocal utterance], several illocutionary acts [words of comfort and hope, words of warning, even command], different ones for different addressees.”

Wolterstorff shows how a single utterance can have different meanings for different hearers, and they can each be right!

Merold Westphal notes that as Wolterstorff tells the story, Mom is the godlike author whose words have just the meanings she put into them. They mean different things to different hearers so that the meaning of her discourse is a plurality of different meanings. In godlike sovereignty she knows all the hearers and controls the meaning each receives.

Westphal then proposes:

But suppose they weren’t all at dinner and Mom didn’t know that Dad was in a position to overhear her. Dad would rightly take Mom’s speech act to be one of reminder, warning, and perhaps even command, though that was not the meaning she (intended to) put into her discourse. The meaning of the utterance escapes the horizon of its author and its original, intended audience precisely because of the invisibility of at least one additional audience. This is the situation of human authors in general, says Westphal, biblical or otherwise.

By now you’re incredibly uncomfortable with this analysis. You’re resisting this approach. You’re thinking that preachers and scholars are in an awfully important (and scary) position – because they most often are entrusted with helping us understand the text.

This is true. Yet in a sense we all are in this position, we are the invisible readers, at least those of us who read and engage texts (of any sort), especially the Bible.

But fortunately, there is more to it. We’ll get to this in the next post.

Harmony Brewing Co – this Thursday!

September 18, 2012 Beer, Books, Pub Theology Comments are closed

This Thursday, I am excited to facilitate a Pub Theology session at Harmony Brewing Company in Eastown, Grand Rapids. Harmony Brewing is at 1551 Lake Drive SE in GR. They’re a great new(er) brewery in Grand Rapids and I can’t wait to check out what they’ve got on tap. Looks like they’ve got some really cool things going on.

We’ll get things started around 8pm. Join us for some good conversation over a good pint!

UPDATE: We will also be back on October 4 and 11, and possibly a few more!

Check out some pics from Harmony below:

harmony2 — Black Squirrel University: Drink Beer. Listen. Discuss. (I like it!)

Come on out and join us, this Thursday at 8pm! Get your signed copy of Pub Theology, and check out this cool new brewery!

Way out West

September 17, 2012 Beer, Books, Pub Theology, Travels Comments are closed

While out West I had the chance to get the word out a bit about my new book. I put up a few flyers, sometimes without asking…

Here is a sampling of some of the places you might see a Pub Theology flyer:

portreyes — Communal posting board at Port Reyes Station, CA across from Station House Coffee

jackson_hole — At Mountain High Pizza in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Photo snapped by a friend’s mom who was there on vacation three weeks later.

bookstore2 — Posting board outside of San Francisco

bookcase — The Bookcase in Durango, CO is excited about Pub Theology!

grains_n_goods — Grains & Goods in Monte Vista, Colorado

two_chicks — Two Chicks and a Hippie Coffee Shop in Pagosa Springs, Colorado

Other places out West you may see a poster or a book:

Magpie News and Coffee, Durango, CO
Durango Bagel Company
Maria’s Bookshop, Durango, CO
Elysian Brewing Co, Seattle
Valley Bookstore, Jackson Hole, WY
Grand Tetons National Park, WY
Tumbleweed Book Store & Cafe, Gardiner, MT (just north of Yellowstone)
Some random coffee shop in the middle of Washington State
Espresso Coffee Stop, Capital Reef National Park, Utah
Moab Brewery, Moab, UT (claims to be Utah’s only microbrewery – turns out, not so.)
Pagosa Brewing Company, Pagosa Springs, CO
A truckstop in the middle of Kansas
Windows Booksellers, Eugene, OR

If you see a flyer or come across the book – snap a photo and let me know, we’d love to share it!

Take This Job and—

September 10, 2012 Church, Culture, Economy, Practices, Relationships Comments are closed

Ponderings in becoming bi-vocational

Lately I’ve been hearing from more and more places that bi-vocational is the way to go for churches that want to be as missional and fully engaged in their broader communities as they can.

(Not to be pedantic, but bi-vocational refers to people in ministry having a second job in addition to their pastoral duties to help pay the bills.)

David Fitch, at rethinkingthemission.com noted last week that:

“Leadership must migrate from a paid professional clergy that spends all its time in maintenance functions/ministry of existing Christians, to a bi-vocational flexible clergy that is able to earn (at least some of) its financial support in the marketplace. I believe this new relationship of money between people and leader changes the dynamic of an organization in many many ways that lead to mission.”

Kurt Willems at the Pangea Blog had a guest blogger who offered similar sentiments: Bivocational Ministry Makes a Comeback.

I have been thinking about this more and more because for my new venture of starting a church in Washington DC, it looks like I may well need to supplement my income from other sources, as funds are limited, and DC is an expensive place to live.

So far I’ve applied for jobs as an editor, adjunct teacher in religious studies, writer, floor scrubber, and something else I can’t recall… oh yeah, working in a bookstore (how could I forget?). (And in case you’re wondering if I’m hitting the big-time as an author, I get about $1 for each copy of Pub Theology sold, and the average new author book sells about 1,000 copies – which I have yet to reach. So if I’m lucky I’ll be able to take my wife out to a nice dinner with my annual cut, but it won’t pay the rent).

I’m hopeful something pans out, but as my resume highlights, I’ve spent the last seven years being a pastor, and I’m not sure many employers know what to do with that.

The argument for bi-vocationalism, as I gather, is that having the pastor have a ‘regular job’ in addition to pastor duties makes him or her ‘more regular,’ it breaks down walls of superiority, it gives natural inroads for relationships in the community, it shows you’re as committed to the community as everyone else, it breaks down the clergy-laity walls, and so on. Those reasons are very compelling to me as I consider this option.

Yet, as I wait for the phone to ring about a job I’ve applied for (even though I’m moving because I’ve accepted a job that can’t yet pay me), I wonder what others have experienced — and whether or not bi-vocational is mandatory for a community to be considered missional.

Carol Howard Merritt reflected on this issue as well at Christian Century recently. She asked, “Should bi-vocational ministry be the new norm?” In that article she ponders:

“As I think about the larger church, I often hear that bivocational ministry will be the reality for pastors entering the ministry. Our economic model is breaking down. It has become more difficult for a church with fifty households to support one pastor. Even when a minister is willing to live frugally, the cost of education and medical benefits keeps getting higher. So, many people jump to bivocational ministry as the answer.

That makes me pause. As someone who has been living in a bivocational reality for a while now, it would be good to have a long discussion about this and ask ourselves some important questions.”

She then asks:

•Are pastors truly nurturing two callings or are we baptizing a shift to part-time ministry? It is one thing to be called to two vocations but it’s another thing to suddenly pay your pastor part-time and expecting her to work bagging groceries on the side.

•Will this shift discourage younger pastors? Most mainline denominations have high expectations of their pastors. Which is good. We go through seminary requirements, ordination examinations, psychological testing, congregational internships, and clinical pastoral education. All of these requirements are costly and they made a lot of sense when people were entering a stable 30-year career with health insurance and pension. Does it still make sense to ask people to go through all of this while telling them that they’ll be lucky to get a part-time job at the end of it?

These are good and important questions.

I wonder:

Could it be that bi-vocational allows certain pastors to feel less guilty because they aren’t such a ‘drain on the budget’ of a smaller community? Definitely.

Could it be that certain people need other outlets for their areas of giftedness, and these other vocations give them deep satisfaction? Yes.

Could it also be that such outlets give them credibility with others? I suppose so, though a pastor ought to have enough credibility for his or her clergy commitments.

I’m not sure we have this with other professions – but then again, perhaps the argument is that we shouldn’t have a professional clergy. But then we ought to change our training model, expectations, and so on. I do think this is happening at some level, but the kind of communities of faith we will have on the other side of such a shift remains to be seen. I’m not sure how many are interested in moving to a completely lay model, where no one has theological or ministry training.

I have seen several friends attempt the bi-vocational path while also planting a church. Neither of these churches exists any more. There could be many reasons, but I suspect that having a leader who is spending at least half of his best hours working at a hardware store may not be the most ideal path. In such a setting is he able to give the best he has to his community, which —especially in its embryonic form— relies upon such a leader/facilitator to get things in motion? I’m sure there are some who can. But should this be the norm?

Another person noted the personal and professional disaster that a bi-vocational approach created for him:

I was bi-vocational for 12 years. Honestly? I would never do it again. The amount of hours I put in to pastor and work a secular job hurt my family and eventually my health. It was part of the cause of going through divorce, and part of the wounds my children suffered thinking their father didn’t have time for them. Even though the wounds of my children have been healed, the loss of a marriage and the loss of health still remain. So, glamorize it as you will, which I did when I was young, but coming on age 50, as I look back, I would absolutely never do it again nor would I think it was the will of God.

I noted in a discussion of this elsewhere

“Bi-vocational sounds great, but I’ve also seen friends (and their communities) struggle mightily b/c their time, energy and focus is pulled in too many directions.

I’m a little concerned that there is this idea that “pastoring is so easy, why don’t you just get a real job? (And be an amazing speaker/planter/counselor/theologian/spiritual mentor/chaplain on top of it).”

I’m all for a flat ecclesiology—we’re all ministers, no hierarchy, the whole nine yards—but there are some challenges when you don’t have someone theologically educated and ministerially prepared, or, having such a person and expecting them to do it for free or for peanuts.”

We like to think that a genuine community can exist where we are all the same. But we are not all the same. We have different gifts, and should use them accordingly. My gift is not carpentry, so it would be silly for me to try to spend time fixing roofs during the week so that I’m not such a drain on the budget. That doesn’t mean there aren’t options where I do have abilities to earn an income outside of the church, and I certainly am willing to explore those.

Someone posted recently seven jobs with full-time pay for part-time work as something pastors should look for. I clicked on the link. The jobs included: veterinarian, acupuncturist, master plumber and physical therapist. Sign me up! Because I obviously became an expert in Eastern medicine, plumbing, and performing surgery on cats while studying church history and homiletics.

My gifts are in relationships, counseling, writing, thinking deeply about theological issues and creatively about ministry, preaching, studying the text in its original context and helping us make sense of it in our own. These kinds of things would surely suffer if I spent half of my working hours bartending or accounting, or something else.

The church my wife and I started in Traverse City was the most missional, organic, non-hierarchical, communally-involved and led group I’ve ever been a part of, and it was my full-time job. We had an office inside a multi-use campus of buildings with a yoga studio, art galleries, coffee shops, cafés, wineries, accountants, environmentalists, filmmakers, bakers, and more. My ‘job’ involved hanging out in this place and rubbing shoulders with these people. In some ways I was the guy people could ‘go talk to’ if they had an issue, or the guy who could do your wedding or on-the-spot counseling, or be there simply to listen. Almost a campus-pastor, if you will, even though those people weren’t paying my salary. Yet my community felt it was missional to have someone like me available and present for our own people and the broader community we were naturally a part of. That felt pretty integrative and missional, and if I’d had to have spent half my time elsewhere earning my living, perhaps would have made less connections – and I’m not sure that that would have given me more credibility or made me more of an insider.

Was our faith community too reliant on me to make such connections? Perhaps. I don’t know. I’m simply exploring the question.

It is true that as a smallish community, we struggled to pay the bills, and I was the biggest expense. But I wonder if we would have been what we were had I divided my time.

I’m willing to be wrong, but I also wonder if its unfair to think that pastors can use all their gifts, maintain a healthy family, healthy relationships, and facilitate a community in which everyone’s gifts are used, worship is communal, and missional involvement in the wider community is expected of everyone » while also making sundaes at Dairy Queen.

Maybe there is such a person. Perhaps I’m about to find out.

—
Bryan is a pastor, writer, and church planter. If you’re interested in learning about his new church in Washington DC, click here:
Roots DC: an urban faith community.