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Pub Theology Recap April 14

April 16, 2011 Culture, Philosophy, Pub Theology, Relationships, The Text, Theology Comments are closed

It was a surreal night at the pub, which began with the ominous hint that we might be meeting in purgatory. That clarified a lot of things for everyone, like why we’d all had feelings of being stuck, of going in circles, of having been here before. Or something like that.

The CEO Stout was back on the board, which pleased many folks, as did the Fat Lad, an imperial Russian oatmeal stout. I stuck with the Black and Blue Porter, a roasty porter fermented with Michigan blueberries. It’s better than it sounds (the blueberry is subtle).

So, a nice turnout this past Thursday, and we began with the question of anxiety.

First Topic: In what ways has your faith been influenced by anxiety? Fueled anxiety? Calmed anxiety? How has anxiety played a role in your spiritual journey?

The first respondent noted the way that faith can cause anxiety. The example was being in a challenging situation, and finding oneself wanting to pray or make some sort of request of God, even though she wouldn’t normally consider herself a person of faith. This then could cause a sort of anxiety: why am I doing this? Is there some deep-rooted spiritual reality within me, or is this just a culturally and socially-conditioned habit?

Another person noted that faith often calms anxiety. It is a realization that things which are out of our control are in God’s hands, and this brings an enormous sense of calm and well-being. That reminds me of something Jesus said: “Do not worry about your life… Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things… therefore do not worry about tomorrow.”

Someone countered with: “But if it’s out of your hands, why are you worried about it at all? Why bring in God to the situation? It’s out of your hands, so worry about the stuff you can deal with, and leave the rest alone. It will take care of itself whether God is involved or not. (And it often seems he’s not).”

I could resonate with all three of these comments, at least in part. On occasion there are times I wonder if I’m not just talking to myself when I pray (if I’m honest), or if God really is paying attention or cares… but at the end of the day, my experience more generally is that prayer does give me a connection with the divine, and my faith allows me to *trust* that God is there, whether I always feel it or not, and this does give me a sense of calm, and respite from anxiety. He’s working things out in his ways, his timing, and ultimately it’s not up to me.

What about you? How does worry or anxiety play a role in your faith journey?

Second Topic: Is theology simply archival, or is there more work to be done?

In other words, has all the real theology already been done, and our job is simply to dig in the archives, or the library, pull the dusty tomes off the shelves and memorize what’s already been accomplished? There was one sarcastic yes (it’s simply archival), but everyone generally agreed, theology must be an ongoing discipline, a necessary engagement for everyone and every generation. We didn’t spend much time on this, but my own sense is not that we reinvent theology every generation, but rather that we build upon the foundation we’ve already been given, with the occasional need to deconstruct former assumptions. We certainly don’t start from scratch. We have been handed a tradition, and it is our job to be faithful *within* that tradition, which does not mean being slaves to it, but reappropriating and rearticulating it for today.

Third Topic: “We have not allowed the meaning of the facts of our infinite universe to affect us and our view of God.”

This one came out of a paper delivered by Lissa McCullough at the Future of Continental Philosophy Conference, entitled: Affirmations, Negations, Counter-Reformations: How God Outgrew Religion. In other words, much of our theology was developed when the idea that man was the center of the universe and the crown of God’s creation was taken for granted. But once it was noted that the earth is not the center of the universe, nor even our own galaxy or solar system, this idea was necessarily strained. The contention in the paper was that “We have not allowed the meaning of the facts of our infinite universe to affect us and our view of God.” In other words, we haven’t experienced it. We still talk in ways that seem that God is concerned primarily with not only humanity, but each of us individually. That claim was pressed by Lissa, who noted that rather than being us who killed God, it was God who killed man, the God who is de-centered and apparently loves galaxies (of which there are, at last count, at least 500 billion), each containing millions of stars and possible worlds like ours. Her contention is that our God is too small, and we need to realize that God is clearly a universal God, not simply a tribal God. Giordano Bruno (b.1548), an Italian Dominican Friar who was also an astronomer noted that we must seek “joy in the infinite… joy in an infinite universe which is the image of a God who is not simply anthropocentric.”

Fourth Topic: “It’s impossible to escape the constraints of language and objectively say whether our beliefs are true or not. Whatever your choice, faith is required.”

In other words, we cannot move beyond language into the actual. All our words are approximations, attempts at describing the actual which is always in some sense beyond us, and certainly beyond our conceptualizations of it.
A couple of quotes help here:

“Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of humans—cannot.” – Richard Rorty

“The truth is that there is no answer in the back of the book to which there is assent, no final arbiter who will finally adjudicate rival claims – not in this life anyway. And most of those who want absolutes tend to accept authority only if that authority makes the absolute claims to which they are already disposed. At this point we only have perspectives on ultimate truth and not ultimate truth itself.” – Walter Brueggemann
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I think these are helpful perspectives for us to carry what many call a ‘chastened faith’, or a hermeneutic of humility. Yes we have God’s Word, as Christians, but there are endless interpretations of those words by well-meaning Christians throughout history. It seems when the church acts on certainty and an unwarranted confidence that its views and perspectives and understandings are absolutely right, it tends to cause serious problems in the world.

There are absolute truths, of course. But no one has indisputable access to them. We grasp them, as believers, by faith. A faith that is humble, but hopeful.

(And gets us out of purgatory).

Have a thought on the above? Leave your comment below!

LOST: The Bitter End

May 25, 2010 Culture, Entertainment, Theology Comments are closed

a reflection on six years of island magic

As I was kayaking on the lake the other day, a large jet flew overhead in the blue skies, and I half-expected it to break in half, strewing itself along the lakeshore. OK, someone has been a little *too* absorbed in a certain television show. But I knew that was the sign I had to jump into the blogosphere about the ending of LOST.

The overwhelming response I’m seeing to the LOST finale is disappointment. Yes, everyone is sad it is over, but many feel let down with how it ended.

Why all the fuss?

Well, the finale was going along smoothly until within the last half-hour, when we realize half of season 6 took place in some sort of purgatory or after-life. So what is the problem with that?

A couple things. One, the writers of the show said that we would not find out in the end that the whole thing was a dream or took place in purgatory or some sort of after-life. (So technically they were true to their word, but they came really close to crossing the line). Second, apparently most people share the broad assumption that what happens IN THIS LIFE is what counts, and anything after that doesn’t really matter.

Now, we are all of course a bit biased on this, as all any of us have ever experienced is this life, so that explains some of it. But I think we have a deep-rooted resentment as a society to the religious panacea of ‘heaven’ as the answer to all our ills.

Struggling with depression? Believe in Jesus and you’ll go to heaven forever. Who could be depressed knowing that? (OK OK, stop raising your hands).

Arguing with your spouse? Believe in Jesus, and you’ll go to heaven forever. (Where you can argue with him or her ad infinitum).

Want to know how to raise your kids? Believe in Jesus, and get them to believe in Jesus, that way, it won’t really matter how you raise them or whether they behave or not, because you’ll all be in heaven together in the end.

OK, you can see that we could play this game for awhile. But the point is, far too many have had this kind of thinking presented to them one too many times. We have been told that faith (of the Christian sort) really has more to do with what happens after this life than what is happening during this life.

Sounds appealing, right? (NOT!) Yet that is exactly the message that American evangelicalism has been peddling for years. Now, once in a while, they’ll make a concession and come out with a statement about something that does matter right now, like: “this war is God’s will” or “continue to abuse the environment, because, well, heaven is around the corner” or something else clearly useful and brilliant.

When this happens (the focus on heaven), the gospels are dissociated from this life and distilled to: “believe in the right thing or burn.” After awhile, people start to ask questions. Questions like, “Burn where?” or “Does hell exist?” or “Who says?” and eventually, “Who cares?” It begins to feel a lot like the kids in M.Night Shyamalan’s The Village who are told not to go in the woods because of “those we don’t speak of”, where the monsters are merely fictional control mechanisms.

Ironically, the more you explore the actual message of Jesus, you begin to realize that he – like us – was passionate most about what happens IN THIS LIFE. Why else would he teach us to pray about God’s will happening “on earth” as it is in heaven? Why not just pray for us all to go to heaven? Why would he teach us to ask for bread, the daily physical nourishment we need to live? The sooner we stop eating, the sooner we die and go to heaven, and that must be better than a good meal. Why would he, in teaching after teaching, focus on things like hospitality to the marginalized, peace rather than violence, generosity with money, loving your enemies? This sounds like nitty gritty, earthy stuff. Not spiritual escapism…

My hunch is, even Jesus would be a tad disappointed with the LOST season finale. “No, don’t you get it, it’s not all about heaven!”

It felt like the reverse of the Matrix, where for six glorious seasons we thought we were finally unplugged and alive and free. Something new and unknown and unprecedented was happening. But when it all came down to it, we got plugged right back into -you guessed it- “heaven.”

The church, with such a message, is increasingly seen as irrelevant. To have LOST end in a church, well, it couldn’t help but feel a little irrelevant.

Am I bitter about it? Well, I had my doubts going into season six, after I felt season five had presented itself as a brilliant ending to the whole show, with jughead going off and the screen going to white. Perfect.

That would have left us asking:

What happened? I don’t know, but anything is possible.

What did it all mean? I don’t know, but anything is possible.

I was never big on having all my questions answered with this show, and sometimes felt insulted when they were. This season seemed to try too hard to make those connections, and sometimes it worked, other times, well, not so much.

But all that said, LOST was a great ride, and I actually really enjoyed the finale up until Christian Shepherd opened his mouth.

Perhaps my criticism is a bit unfair, as much of what drew me to the show were the rich philosophical and theological overtones. Yet by making such an explicit move, it felt like they went a bit too far. But they had to end it some way, and really, there was just too much island folklore, crazy mythology and dharma secrets to make some grand unified theory that connected everything. I’m OK with being left hanging, and even knowing that events on the island never really ended, as Hurley was appointed the new guardian, and life was going forward from that point. So as far as how all that went – in this life – not so bad.

But the forces of good and evil, the seeming immortality of Jacob and the mysterious Man in Black, the “rules” that governed the island, the magnetic anomaly, time travel – all of that seems to have been for nought when we wind up in heaven after all.

Yes, what happens after we die is important, but every story ends there, and somehow we thought we were witnessing something original. Ending in heaven? That just made LOST seem ordinary.

In any case, LOST has ended.

I guess it’s our turn to leave.

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(But don’t give up all hope, as word on the street is that Season 7 is still a possibility)
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(Check out this more positive take on the finale: LOST Finale Explained Well, which I really do like and is supposedly by someone connected to the show)

Knowing God

April 21, 2010 Theology Comments are closed

Reflections on what it means to connect with the divine

Growing up in the church, I was aware of the cerebral nature of my particular faith tradition – the Christian Reformed Church – from an early age. Whether it was memorizing Lord’s Day Questions and Answers from the Heidelberg Catechism, or being able to answer doctrinal questions before the council when I was preparing to make a profession of faith – these are what constituted the heart of the Christian faith, as I understood it for a long time. In our circles, what mattered most to parents concerning their children was 1) that we stayed out of trouble; and 2) we memorized the catechism. As long as those two things were happening, it was assumed we were good Christian (Reformed) kids. Little was talked about in terms of an actual faith experience. Our creeds and confessions and formalized answers seemed designed to protect us from anything that could be termed an actual encounter with the divine.

Today it seems that two (among many) of the various struggles that churches across the denominational spectrum have are: 1) how to reach young people; and 2) how to maintain a particular theological and denominational identity in a world that is increasingly pluralistic and post-denominational, and decreasingly concerned about theological particularities.

Perhaps it comes down to a question of ‘knowing’. What does it mean to ‘know God’? Is it primarily being aware of the historical and theological distinctions of a particular tradition and being able to regurgitate these facts on demand? Or is it something else?

Personally, it was not in a catechism class that I first really encountered God. It wasn’t in brooding over the theological nuances and complexities of election. None of that penetrated my heart. None of that impacted my soul. It was all just a lot of ‘right answers’. But what good are answers to questions you’ve never asked?

Christian was a name I wore, and it gave me a vague sense of comfort, but that was about it. Faith was something I could give a nice, tight theological formulation of, but didn’t really hold. There was a sense in which I knew a lot about God, but didn’t actually know Him. And it seems to me that my church experience was geared to achieve exactly that.

For me, once I began to see and experience God in everyday life, once I realized that faith is a journey – one I had to experience myself – it seems I really began to know him. The more I encountered the person of Jesus, the more alive it became. And in that moment, it really didn’t matter how you defined it, or what they said about such encounters back in the late Middle Ages in Germany, or during church councils in the Byzantine era. This was real. This was now.

It seems to me that this kind of encounter was what captured the hearts and minds of the disciples and the early Christians in Jerusalem, Galilee, and various parts of the Roman Empire. Knowing God had nothing to do with answering a bunch of questions about God. It had to do with a transformative encounter. The ongoing impact and relationship with the man from Galilee was what fueled the movement, not a precise definition of a yet-to-be-articulated Trinity. If you had asked our ‘essential’ doctrinal questions in the late first century to a collection of disciples, they likely would have responded with quizzical looks on their faces, shrugged their shoulders, and gone about the business of living and declaring the kingdom of God.

Knowing for the early believers (in their Hebraic context) meant personal knowledge. It meant they were in a relationship rooted in an ongoing transformational encounter. It could be summed up in one word: love. That is how 1 John 4:8 can say, “Whoever does not love does not know God.” This kind of knowledge is not the same as other kinds of knowing. A physicist can be a terrible neighbor and spouse, yet be a brilliant physicist with a terrific knowledge of science. His moral life and actions do not impact this knowledge. Yet knowledge of God is always transformational: “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” A person with this kind of knowledge is not concerned primarily with defining God, but with living a life which God is defining.

And so I wonder if our continued emphasis on doctrinal and confessional statements derived out of theological feuds in the middle ages might ironically be the very thing that protects us from encountering God in the first place. Much like an oft-repeated prayer can keep us from turning on our brains to have an actual conversation with God himself, so might our theological presumptions keep us from having to ‘know’ God in the biblical sense. Knowledge of God is always partial. One theologian notes that it is much like an infant who knows and loves her mother, yet has no way to articulate that knowing, other than to be grasped and known by the mother. He rightly concludes, “It is ridiculous to imply that a baby can really only love her mother if she understands her.”

Now some will say, “But a child grows up and is able to articulate more things about her mother.” Certainly. Yet it is all centered around a relationship, around engaging with the mother in everyday situations. That is the key. The child will never sit down memorizing a list of dozens of questions and answers about her mother in the case that a quiz might be given. The absurdity of it scarcely needs mentioning.

It is God who knows us, and in being known, we know (in part). There is a world of difference between our understanding of God, and God as He really is. And it is precisely in our continued pride over theological correctness that we find ourselves in opposition to other Christians (not to mention other religious traditions) and disconnecting from young people who couldn’t care less about theological precision but care an awful lot about questions of identity and purpose, and about the economic, political and social realities of their world. They want to know what faith has to do with the world they’re actually living in.

I am not encouraging ignorance of, nor rejection of, our theological traditions. Rather, I am advocating moving beyond our preoccupation with theological knowledge and correctness, so that we might become more open to being engaged by the source of all of our speculation. And as He engages us, may we increasingly become the articulation of who He is to the world around us. That is a definition that matters to all of us.

Rev. Bryan Berghoef is the pastor of Watershed, a faith community in Traverse City, MI. He facilitates weekly Pub Theology discussions on Thursday nights at Right Brain Brewery, in Traverse City’s Warehouse District. This article originally appeared in Traverse City’s Record-Eagle.

Found and Lost

April 8, 2010 Culture, Theology, Travels Comments are closed

Reflections on the spiritual merits of losing your way

I recently traveled to a relatively large city that I was unfamiliar with: Belfast, in Northern Ireland. I had never been there before, so I watched a Rick Steve’s video on Ireland, perused a guidebook or two, and picked up a map of the city at the airport.

My first instinct was to chart out a plan for what to see in the city. So I made a list in my head. First stop: a used bookstore near Queen’s University, which was a gem of a place – old dusty books, some on shelves, some scattered haphazardly; dirty, marked-up tables with melted candles on them serving as both cafe and reading area. I nearly picked up an old Paul Tillich volume, but it proved to be out of my budget, so I settled on a paperback for three pounds – Violence, by Slavoj Zizek. Next I wandered over to the University to sit in on a class. Somehow I ended up in a lecture for Accounting 101 rather than Irish Culture in Art and Image (so much for planning!) Fortunately Zizek got me through the class. Then I stopped in at a pub for some food and my first Guinness in Ireland, as recommended by the guidebook. Great stuff. So far so good. All according to plan (mostly).

The next day I decided to do it a little differently. I left the guidebook in the hotel room. I refused to consult the map. I stepped out the door onto the street, and amidst the busy-ness of taxis, buses, and pedestrians, acted like I knew where I was going. I had no idea. I just walked. And walked. And walked. Noticed the shops, the pubs, the people. Saw several old churches. City hall. Turned up an alleyway. More shops. Should I keep going this way? I have no idea where I am. Yet as I was getting more and more ‘lost’, I felt a profound excitement – this was new territory, there were places to discover, and I felt as though on the edge of discovery. This was a journey. This was living. Planned is certainly OK, but the unknown somehow allures.

Is this not true in relationships? The relation to the other, says John Caputo, is “bracing but risky business.” He gives an example: When you get married, you are saying “I do” not only to who this person is, or who you think this person is, but to whomever or whatever this person is going to become, which is unknown and unforeseen to the both of you. In other words, it’s a risk – what Levinas called, a “beautiful risk,” yet a risk all the same. This willingness to go forward despite (and perhaps at some level because of) the risk is what leads us to call it beautiful. Caputo quips, “If it were a sure thing, it would be about as beautiful as a conversation with your stockbroker.”

I keep walking. Another street. Another small alley with stone pavers. What’s this? A cafe with outdoor seating. Old wooden tables. Flower beds awaiting spring. A man standing outside, smoking. I thought, ‘What the heck?’ and went in. Inside was more like a traditional pub. I walk up to the bar.

Bartender: “What’ll you have, mate?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“Sure – Cappuccino, Latte, Americano.”
“I’ll have an Americano – for outside.”
“Right then.”

I ended up having an enjoyable couple hours reading outside this small cafe, eating lunch, reading Zizek, and drinking good coffee. Further, I asked the guy smoking to take my picture, and we got into a great conversation. Introduced myself as Bryan and he said, “I’m Brian as well.” After complimenting each other on our great names, he asked why I was there, and I mentioned something about a conference on theology. Said I was a pastor. He said, “I grew up strictly religious, but I’m an atheist myself.”

I asked him if he had a good question for my friends meeting at the pub back in the States. He answered by way of telling me about a book he had written: A Dream of Jesus in My Cocktail, or something to that effect (still seeking publication). It’s about three missionaries to S. Africa who refuse to engage in the physical and social challenges facing the people, but merely offer them the panacea of hope after this life. Then the question: “Is it wrong to delude people if the delusion is serving the greater good?”

He had to jet, work was calling. I had another Americano and kept reading. After awhile the weather began to turn, so I decided to head out and explore a little more. Found a few other nooks and crannies, and some that came in handy later in the week. I learned the city with my feet rather than from a book. I saw it with my own eyes, not just on TV. I got lost. And in getting lost, something was found. Here I was at a conference which was exploring new ways to articulate the journey of faith, about exploring the sometimes fuzzy edge between theism and atheism, and I run into a local man who grew up religious and thinks he has left all that rubbage behind, yet clearly has not. A terrific discovery that could never have been “planned” or even “foreseen”.

I wonder how this relates to our spiritual journeys. My sense is that traditionally we like to go ‘by the book’. In other words, we’re on a journey, but the trail has already been blazed. All we need to do is look for the signposts left by all who have gone before. The discovery is all done. The theological trail has been marked. Just as there are no explorers discovering new continents on our planet anymore, so it seems there is no new spiritual territory to discover. In What Would Jesus Deconstruct, John Caputo asks, “When is faith really faith?” Great question, and I don’t have a simple answer for that. His response: “Not when it is looking more and more like we are right, but when the situation is beginning to look impossible, in the darkest night of the soul.” In our circles, we didn’t let people come back who admitted to having a ‘dark night of the soul’. We needed security. Certainty. And we had it, or so we thought.

But I wonder what kind of a journey this really is? Caputo ponders the nature of a journey: “If you knew very well where you were going from the start and had the means to get there, it would almost be like getting there before you even set out, or like ending up where you were all along.” Indeed. If it’s all charted territory, and there is no discovery – is it actually a journey? Or are we willing to traverse places where there are bends in the road around which we cannot yet see? It seems to me that this is the essence of what faith is about. If the path is already lit, if there are no moments of darkness, if the map has been drawn – then of what need is faith? True faith, at its core, involves radical trust. So if there is no element of risk, no venturing into the unknown, then our spiritual journeys have never really left home. Caputo continues: “Going to a place we already know how to reach or going with a tour guide who has mapped out every stop along the way, or along a paved road with guard rails, rest stops, and food stands where everyone speaks English, is hardly a journey at all.”

This extends not just to our personal faith lives, but to our churches as well. My experience in being part of starting a new church is that many people inevitably ask, “So what is the long-range plan?”, “What’s next?” or “Where is this thing going?” The understood (and hoped-for) answer generally has to do with stability, money, perhaps even a building. My usual answer has been, “I don’t know exactly.” We know what things we value, what kind of ethos we are seeking to have as a community, but as to how all that plays out – who knows? Indeed, who can know, as we have not yet been there. We seem to want to squeeze out any room for the Spirit, which Jesus noted “blows wherever it will”. We eschew the need for actual faith. We want to know if we’re investing in something that is “going to make it”, or “headed for success”, otherwise we’ll invest our time and energy elsewhere. So much for risk. So much for faith. Yet Caputo puts it this way: “The more credible things are, the less faith is needed, but the more incredible things seem, the more faith is required, the faith that is said to move mountains.”

And so as I wandered around Belfast with no real idea where I was going, it felt as though I were really on a journey. What was around the bend? Where would this street lead? Where would be my next stop? Who would I meet? The times that were not mapped out and were not on the itinerary were some of the highlights of my trip (we’ll have to save the story of Pete Rollins getting us lost on the way back to Belfast from the North Coast for another time). It was the moments in which I was, you might say, “creatively adrift”, and on a true adventure (ad-venire), in which the “incoming” of something unforeseeable was made possible. That is a journey worth taking, or as my friends at Ikon would sing: “I once was found, but now I’m lost.”

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A shortened version of this article was published in the Traverse City Record-Eagle.