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Pub Theology Recap March 3

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A glass of beer

The Northern Hawk Owl amber ale in the cask set the tone for a nice, low-key evening of discussion, with some potentially hot topics.  Great to have the wisdom of a philosopher again in our midst (C), not to mention the always insightful Presbyterian contingent (D and N), the resident a-theists (S & R), some new voices of wisdom (S, K and M!), and some of us who just like beer (J & A, and B).  Not to be forgotten was the late arrival of our local fashion and health consultants (B and E).  I am sure I have forgotten some others, but then I arrived at Right Brain at 2pm to reserve our usual seat -maybe I should rethink that strategy.

Topics:

Empathy

theories

freedom

where is Jesus?

hell

violence

evil

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In detail:

1.    Studies show that empathy is tied to our awareness of our own and others’ mortality.  Will heaven be without empathy?

2.    Was Jesus able to come down from the cross? Could he have blown it to a ‘million smithereens’ if he wished?

3.    A physicist: “One must always allow for alternative theories.”
A theologian: “Using God as an explanation is not an explanation.”
What do you think?

4.    ‘Freedom in Christ.’   What does(n’t) it mean?

5.    What does it mean to say: ‘Jesus is here’?

6.  “The traditional understanding of hell perpetuates the cycle of violence for eternity, and it is divine violence that does it.”  Are we stuck with violence and evil forever?

7a. “Instead of bringing God to ‘unreached’ places and ‘unreached’ peoples, I find countless missionaries who say that, while this was how they once thought, time and again they find that these unreached places are the very sites where they must go to find God and to be reached.  How many of us have learned too late that our initial idea, that by serving the world we will help bring God to others, has eclipsed the wisdom that in serving the world we find God there.”  Is it presumptuous to ‘bring God’ somewhere?

7b. “There is no empathy in heaven, because there is no mortality. There is no empathy in utopia, because there is
no suffering.”  In other words, those entering heaven will have to leave their empathetic sensibilities at the Pearly
Gates, because there cannot be empathy for those left behind. If there were, there would be regret and sadness,
and these are not permitted. What is interesting to note about the incarnation is that Jesus had to leave
‘heaven’ in order to properly empathize with us.   Is heaven sterile?

8.  “A story told often enough, and confirmed often enough in daily life, ceases to be a tale and is accepted as reality itself.”  Discuss.

This clears things up.

Through me the way into the suffering city,
through me the way to the eternal pain,
through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My maker was divine authority,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here.

– Sign on the gate into hell, in Dante, Inferno, Canto 3

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It’s been a couple days since, so I’ll focus the recap to heaven and hell.

Heaven was an interesting topic, as a couple of people felt that a utopian heaven of perfection would be theoretically impossible because different people would have different ideas of what perfection is, and therefore it would be impossible for everyone to be the same amount of happy all the time, forever.  In other words, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure – but how do you account for everyone without making someone upset?  Some also noted that anything that was repeated over and over forever would eventually become hell, even if it started out as your favorite thing (I do love Tetris though).  Others of us felt that God would be able to pull off something that gave each person meaning and satisfaction that would not result in stupefying boredom, and that the presence of God himself would preclude that (though isn’t he present now?).  We also noted that heaven (or the new creation), may well be outside of time as we know it, and so it is hard for us to think about what that is presently like, this side of things.

If you’re going to talk about heaven, hell, you naturally think about those who ‘don’t get in’.  Will people in heaven be aware of them?  Will this go over well?  (We noted that Jonathan Edwards and others said that the chief delight of people in heaven will be awareness of the suffering of the unrighteous in hell.  “Hey Joe – watch this guy – he’s going to really burn in a minute”  Can you honestly imagine?)  Will everyone eventually be reconciled to God or will some people remain in suffering forever?  Discussion on hell was interesting, particularly the fact that no one seemed interested in defending the traditional view of eternal, conscious torment, even as I attempted to articulate it.  Ideas of separation from God, of loneliness, of constantly needing more of your own space (a la The Great Divide), as well as – ‘maybe we’ve just made a lot of this stuff up by misreading texts and importing assumptions’.

There’s been a lot of talk about hell and universalism of late with Rob Bell’s new book impending.  A couple of good blog posts on hell have shown up this week, so I encourage you to read them over:

To Hell With It on Gathered Introspections, by the incredibly wise and wonderful Christy Berghoef.  (no relation)  Wait – she’s in the other room!   OK OK > she paid me to link to her post.  With dinner.

and

Can Anyone Explain to Me Why People Should BURN in Hell FOREVER? – by Kester Brewin

Check ’em out, and post your own thoughts on the above topics below, or join us next Thursday at 8pm at Right Brain Brewery!

Pub Theology Recap Feb 24

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Brewing up discussion

A nice night of discussion at Right Brain Brewery, with old and new friends, and a nice pint of Pie Whole – brewed with a whole apple pie from Grand Traverse Pie Company – a nice applely, caramelly, pumpkiny brew.  Discussion was so good, that we only hit the first three of seven topics.  We’ll hold some over for next week.

Topics for the night:

good / bad

amulets

meaning

sasquatch

Longer version:

1.    Ancient proverb:  “Every time something bad happens, something good happens as well.”
Does it?  Why?  What is your experience?

2.    The oldest known Hebrew Bible texts are silver amulets dated to about the mid-seventh century BCE.  Amulets were worn as charms against evil or injury.  Compare to usage(s) of the text today.

3.  “Much desire to seek after God is nothing of the sort.  For instance, to seek God for eternal life is to seek eternal life, while to seek God for a meaningful existence is to seek a meaningful existence.”
What does it mean to truly seek God?


OK so we didn’t really talk about sasquatch.  At least not for long.  🙂  Discussion about good and bad started out with someone noting that he used to think along the lines of the proverb quoted, that bad things were accompanied or followed up by good things.  However, after a series of seemingly senseless tragedies and difficult circumstances, he had moved to a more cynical place, where bad things ‘just happen’, without a deeper purpose or greater good behind them.

I noted that I like to think that a big picture view could step outside the bad things that happen and see them as part of a larger pattern or whole, and that somehow and someway God has purposes in what happens, and that even out of bad can come good.  And this is a perspective that we are not privy to in this life.  But I also noted that I have a very limited amount of what you could call ‘bad experiences’, certainly a lack of tragedies in my life – and that I’m not the best one to talk from experience.

Someone else noted that it is cruel and perhaps an insult to tell someone who is in the midst of a hardship that it is ‘for a purpose’ or that they have to just step back to ‘see the good’.  It’s not an easy thing.

Maybe bad things just are.  We live in a broken world.  Bad things happen.

But I do believe that God often can use hard situations to bring about good things, but I don’t think those bad things happen expressly so that we can experience something good.

Most people felt the old proverb might be true in a very general sense, but certainly not as an axiom of how things always go.

Regarding the ancient superstitious use of texts of the Bible, it was noted that people still have many superstitions, and that we may even (mis)use the Bible that way today.

Regarding the third quote, from Peter Rollins’ book How (Not) to Speak of God, generated some interesting discussion.  Someone asked if we are ever able to pursue God without some selfish or ulterior motive.  Can we pursue God just for God himself?  Or do the benefits – meaning, life, salvation, peace of mind – always blur our motives, or are the motives themselves? Is it wrong to seek God out of selfish motives?  Is this the one place where hedonism is permitted, as no doubt John Piper and others would assert?

It was a nice, low-key evening, and we’ll save the other topics for next time!

A reading from the backside:
“The weakening of God into the world, described in the
Pauline language of emptying (kenosis), is paradigmatically
expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the
birth, but also the death of Jesus.  Kenosis is not a one-time-
only event occurring in the life and death of Jesus but the
ongoing history or tradition inaugurated by this event.  This
process is ‘secularization’, which means not the abandonment
or dissolution of God, but the ‘transcription’ of God into time
and history (the saeculum), thus a successor form of death of God
theology.  Kenosis, as the transcription, translation, or
transmission of God into the world, means establishing the
kingdom of God on earth.

For example, the commonplace complaint that the secular
world has taken the Christ out of Christmas and transcribed it
into “Happy Holidays” is to be viewed as still another success
on Christianity’s part.  For now the Incarnation has been
translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which
the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails.
During the “holidays” this “spirit” of love becomes general
among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually
means: its application in the concrete reality of lived
experience.  The tolerant, nonauthoritarian and pluralistic
democratic societies in the West are the translation into real
political structures of the Christian doctrine of neighbor love.
When the transcendent God is “weakened” – or emptied – into
the world, it assumes the living form of Western cultural life.”
– John Caputo, After the Death of God

Post any of your own thoughts on the evening below!

LOST: The Bitter End

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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)
—
(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

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.

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