*sigh*
Where to start?
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In retrospect, qb’s glad he started his Walter Brueggemann era by reading The Prophetic Imagination a couple of years ago. That’s where Brueggemann, a preeminent Old Testament scholar from the Atlanta metropolitan area, lays out his most sweeping homiletical themes. And those themes resound gloriously in The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word.
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One of the most obvious characteristics of big-box, evangelical Christianity is the banality that issues from its pulpits under the transparent guises of “cultural relevance” and “practical application.” Topical sermons to which qb has been witness over the past ten years include how to be a better and more faithful husband/wife, how to evangelize Bart Simpson, how to manage money, how to raise children, how to be happy at work, how to deal with conflict and troublesome people, etc. All of those things, as far as they go, and perhaps with the exception of the Bart Simpson thingy, are good in themselves. Nothing wrong with doing a better job at any of them. Still – and this has been lamented many times in many venues – decent, practical instruction on all of those things is something we can get from many other sources, including the paradigmatic Dr. Phil and his patroness Oprah. Good instruction on practical living is a market that the church does not corner, and – if we are honest – our preachers are not always exemplars of the tips and techniques they espouse.
Plus – again, if we are honest with ourselves – we’re not tremendously well known for our success, at least in statistical terms like divorce, prodigality, teenage pregnancy, drug use, etc. Sure, there are flashes and islands of holy brilliance, but they are the exceptions and not the rule. We do not differ all that much from the surrounding culture. So the preaching doesn’t seem to be having much of an effect, despite the fact that it is almost always framed as the centerpiece of our corporate gatherings on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. Our preachers are, by and large, young, handsome, smooth, polished, hip, self-confident, market- and technology-savvy, well trained in the nuts and bolts of secular executive leadership, ambitious…with beautiful spouses and seemingly flawless children. And they feed us a steady diet of culturally relevant, practical application of the least controversial texts in the Bible.
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And we are starving, emaciated shells of “the church militant.” As Dallas Willard, N. T. Wright, Alan Roxburgh, and many others have observed, the cultural mainstream no longer flows through our churches. Our influence seems to be ebbing, if in fact it was ever as strong as we’d like to imagine.
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Into that vacuum steps Walter Brueggemann, a vise-jawed bulldog with a cheerful chip on his shoulder. He has made his living studying the Jewish prophets, and he insists that we listen to them. Today. Creatively. And with a view toward God’s eternal, redemptive purposes of justice and communal virtue. He has an uncommonly high view of the preacher’s task, which is his central focus in The Word Militant. His single-minded objective is to restore the truly prophetic dimension to the weekend pulpit – not exclusively by haranguing the assembly and cracking the whip, but in the sense of the Jewish prophets, who teased, cajoled, playfully insulted, told riddles, and spoke magnificent poetry. The goal, he says in The Prophetic Imagination, is to “nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture.” The way to restore Christianity’s impact, he seems to be saying, is backward, backing away from the insipid gruel of so-called practical instruction and toward the idiosyncratic, mysterious imaginations of Amos, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Ezekiel.
Lots more to say on this in a future post or two.
qb
If you’re not familiar with Richard Beck’s blog, you might want to check it out from time to time. He’s a psychology professor at ACU and has unfailingly interesting takes on Christianity from that vantage piont. Here is a post that qb wishes qb had written, in defense of the introverted minority, turning the floodlights on one of the pernicious assumptions of the modern evangelical megachurch culture. Beck concludes that some of the things we do in our corporate assemblies are neither morally, psychologically, or theologically neutral…and could be rather destructive.
qb
For heaven’s sake, don’t tell me how to live, piont-by-piont.
Instead, invite me into a world larger than my own, a world suffused with the character and intentions of a good, gracious, and purposeful God, to whom the life and teachings of Christ bear witness. Do not spoon-feed (and therefore patronize) me; instead, force me to think, to reason, and to wrestle. Force me to appropriate the text for myself, to make it my own, so that I develop the musculature by which I can learn to live without behavioral formulae and rote prescriptions. Do not seek to make me dependent on you. Show me a map, and teach me to use it rightly, but do not presume to navigate it for me. Show me the grand horizons, the notable landmarks, and the goal, but not the path itself. Who is to say that perhaps God would not have me thrash the willows or break new trail?
Thanks. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.
qb
P. S. Keep an eye out here. Brueggemann is coming! In two volumes: The Word Militant: Preaching a Decentering Word and Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Amazon’s two-day shipping can’t get ‘em here fast enow.
It occurred to me that the gentle reader may not detect the winsome tone of the last paragraph below. So in order to clarify that a bit without insulting the gentle reader’s intelligence, qb would like to give a bit of a hint. Some years ago, my eldest sister gave my mom a birthday or Mothers’ Day gift, a framed piece of needlepiont artwork that said: ”[Mom's name]: A Woman, but an Intellectual.” That just about captures the spirit of this post.
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Back in the day, qb used to preach quite a bit, especially (alas) during the college years. I surely cannot claim to be a serious and formal student of rhetoric and homiletics, but both are subjects of great interest to me, both vocationally and otherwise. And of course, the recent and extended anguish over what has transpired at our former church home is intimately tied to the “performance” and integrity of the man in the pulpit, so my antennas have been tuned by the resulting cynicism to detect flabbiness, rhetorical manipulation, arrogance, and implicit intimidation that seem to pass by unremarked.
Moreover, my recent entry into seminary at ACU has exposed me to a great many rhetoricians from outside my rather narrow religious tradition, which is NOW broadly characterized by preachers who claim to see biblical literacy as essential but whose homiletical approach is defined more by cleverness, titular shock value, and three-piont rhetorical technique than the other “virtues.”
So I owe a great debt to my friend Ben, who is in the first place responsible for my entering ACU and all the serendipities that have ensued; but now in the second place for introducing me to the preaching of Dr. Samuel Wells, Dean of Chapel at Duke Divinity.
What a magnificent breath of bracingly fresh air. He is Anglican (high church), reads a script from the pulpit (humility), is British (dry, unforced wit), has a crackling baritone (easy to listen to), possesses a relaxed cadence (ditto), tends to topics of great depth and importance (gravitas), and exhibits a remarkable degree of prophetic courage. I commend his YouTube homilies to both of my readers, especially if you, like qb, are growing weary of the insipid, cloying gruel that passes for preaching in the era of the modern, evangelical, therapeutic megachurch.
Wells; Wright; Chris Webb of Renovare; and of course C. S. Lewis. Quite a pantheon. And all Anglican. I wonder if there is anything to that.
qb
One little snippet from the seismic drama unfolding in Massachusetts tonite.
During his acceptance speech, Senator-elect Brown invited the nationally recognizable Mitt Romney to the dais to thank him for his help during the successful Senate campaign. It took a good 5-10 seconds for Mr. Romney to make his way through the mass of supporters on stage. But Mr. Romney did not move all the way to the dais for an exhibit of triumphalism; he stayed at least a row back, well off to the left of center stage, and shook hands with Mr. Brown between the folks on the front row…and then immediately disappeared into the background, well out of the spotlight, well out of sight.
Mr. Romney should have been president this time around. Not only is he a competent executive; he possesses a keen sense of humility and self-deprecation. Quite a contrast with the White House’s current occupant, eh?
And kudos to Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), who has called for a “stop” to all votes on health-care legislation until Mr. Brown is seated. qb chooses to interpret that move as a sign of class and not political calculation. Well done, Mr. Webb; I hope you’ll stand firmly on that ground.
qb
This draft address – a work in progress, subject to continual editing and refinement – represents not my own intentions but rather serves as a repository of all of the great ideas that together form a political philosophy that qb could support. It is the presidential platform that would command qb’s steadfast and energetic allegiance. qb wishes someone who believes in these same things would run for the presidency in 2012 and win, and then deliver this address to lay out a coherent, constitutionalist agenda for a just and prosperous nation. qb
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Monday, 21 Jan 2013
My fellow Americans:
Today I have pledged before God and before you that I will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. I take that to be my most solemn responsibility as the temporary steward of this magnificent office, an office that serves as one of the visible symbols of this nation’s unique self understanding. But it is by no means the most visible, and it is by no means the most important symbol of our precious Union. The Stars and Stripes, though magnificently symbolic and worthy of honor in their own right, likewise do not comprise the most important symbol of the United States. Among all of the symbols that we hold dear, it is the Constitution alone that guards that honor. It is our Founders’ prize achievement, embodying as it does the hopes and aspirations of a free and self-determining people under the providence of the Almighty. If our Constitution falls, whether suddenly by force of arms or gradually by the inexorable forces of erosion and neglect, the United States of America yields its place and its role as the “shining city on a hill” on which oppressed peoples across the world for the last 224 years have longingly cast their collective gaze. The sanctity and integrity of the Constitution must be, will be, my highest priority for the next four. I therefore pledge to you that when the winds of convenience, or even the mounting gales of plurality opinion, would have us steer another way, my administration will seek to keep our collective eyes fixed on those high and noble principles of individual liberty that have by God’s grace permitted us to be the prosperous and generous nation that we are today.
Contrary to the caricature that modern liberals have drawn of us, we who revere the Constitution do not think of it as a static document. The Constitution itself has sown the seeds by which it responds to evolutions of political thought, and we have before us today the plain and unmistakable evidence that, when compelling ideas have been adequately refined by the fires of public debate, we are both willing and able to amend and improve the terms in which we express our national self-understanding. We must always be open to new and substantive ideas; as fallen humans with fallen institutions, and with the persistent evils and stubborn injustices that still cry out to us for resolution, we dare not presume to have issued the final word on the building of the City of God.
At the same time, we must be wary of any encroachments on the integrity of the Constitution and the solemn and deliberative process solely by which it is to be amended. If our Constitution is to have any lasting force in climactic days of war or external conflict of any kind – may heaven forbid! – its integrity must be nourished and strengthened by the unwavering, daily attentiveness of a jealous citizenry, courageous officials, and dispassionate judges. In this regard, I pledge to be the first among more than 300 million equals in sounding the alarm when our Constitution comes under siege, and I will appoint to the executive and judicial branches of the federal government only those who have demonstrated that same commitment and who are unafraid to articulate their commitment with clarity and passion.
It is significant, therefore, that our great nation is not called simply “America.” America is a wondrous place, from the shores of Hawaii to the shoals of Maine, from the North Slope to Key West, from Lake Superior to the Rio Grande. But what we call “America” is only geography. No, our Founders gave birth to a nation that we know not as “America,” but as the “United States of America,” a nation forged from the consent of thirteen diverse and sovereign States who nevertheless found among themselves the compulsion to unite in energetic commerce, mutual deference, and common defense. Our federal government was conceived, not as an end in itself, but as a means to protect the general sovereignty of its member States; and in ratifying the Constitution those States granted their newborn federal government a sharply defined and narrowly tailored set of enumerated powers. Fellow citizens, we must return to those patterns of thought and action and invite our great States to reclaim the presumption of prerogative in all areas except those in which the States have explicitly delegated their sovereign authority through the Constitution. To do so is a Constitutional imperative, but it is also a practical necessity.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
qb
Copyright 2010 by Brent Walter Auvermann
Some months ago, a friend and I were discussing his pickup, which was still going strong after a bunch of miles. He had replaced doors, pumps, mufflers, hoods, windows, gaskets, manifolds, etc., throughout the years – even the block, at one piont – and eventually the question came around: when do we cease speaking of that pickup as the same one he originally bought? Eventually, if he replaces every single part on the vehicle with a new one, it’s not the same one any more; it’s a totally different one. Yet he bought the one he bought. So where is the threshold at which the pickup goes from the original one to the utterly different one, and on what basis do we establish that threshold? Do we wait until the last rivet has popped until we say, ok, when we replace this last, original piece, the pickup suddenly transmutes from the original to the different one? Or at some intermediate piont?
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N. T. Wright tells us in Surprised by Hope that this debate has been going on a long, long time. Centuries. Millennia, even. Among the church fathers: Origen, Tertullian, Aquinas, all of ‘em. Incredible. There is nothing new under the sun.
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Let’s say qb weighs 100 kg. (Wishful thinking, but it makes the arithmetic simpler. Heck, let’s just redefine a kg as 2.5 lbs instead of 2.2, and we’re on solid footing. Pass the guac.) Current nutritional guidelines suggest that a guy my age should take in about a gram per day of calcium (Ca). At any piont in time, qb’s body contains about 1 part Ca in 70, or 1.43%, which is on the order of 14.3 kg. So qb’s body, in a real, biological sense, is a reservoir of elemental Ca that “turns over,” on average, about every 14,300 days, or 39.2 years. That’s pretty slow turnover, but it does suggest that, assuming the turnover reaches every corner of qb’s Ca reservoirs (primarily the skeleton), qb’s body today does not have a single molecule of Ca remaining from when he was 5.8 years old.
Other elements turn over a lot faster. qb’s a reservoir of carbon (C), also, with about 18 kg of elemental C in the body at any one time. Assuming no weight gain (!) at a caloric intake of 2,500 kcal/day of simple-sugar equivalent, qb’s body has a C throughput of about 600 g/d. The turnover rate of the carbon pool in qb’s body, then, is about 30 days. Oxygen probably turns over even faster than that; I don’t want to spend the time calculating it.
So here’s the bottom line. Except for obnoxious things like the mercury (Hg) qb ingests with sashimi-grade tuna and the cadmium (Cd) qb consumes in the form of sea salt, the statistical likelihood that any molecule in his body is an original one is about, well, zero. My body is not what it once was…at many levels, but especially at the level of structural composition.
And yet, qb is still demonstrably qb, with a few notable exceptions and regrets.
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In biblical terms, resurrection, says Wright – and he calls on the biblical witnesses as well as the church fathers – is not a matter of some spiritualized existence apart from a material body. It’s not a ghost floating on a cloud plucking a harp and passing through doors. It is a solid, material body, utterly reconstituted by the Spirit of God after an extended period of death. It is not revival, or resuscitation, which imply that death didn’t really occur after all; it is the overcoming of death, not the avoidance or skirting or fortunate evasion of it. It is, quite literally, new creation from the elements of which life is made.
So to the question of “to cremate, or not to cremate,” we can confidently say this: no matter. Your body today isn’t the same body it was 30 years ago, and it won’t be the same body 30 years from now that it is today. If God can create you in the first place by the agency of the Spirit hovering over the dark, brooding waters of Genesis, he can take the elements he needs to REcreate you from anywhere he likes. The continuity between that old body and the new body is still a mystery tied to your identity, but not to the precise molecules that he cobbled together to form you in your mother’s womb.
Relax. Burial? OK. Cremation? Fine. Scattering ashes into the river Rhone? No problem.
qb
It’s fair to say that two of them are Danny Glover and Pat Robertson. Good grief.
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Glover I can understand; he doesn’t presume to give me any reasons to listen to much that he has to say. But Robertson is another matter entirely. Some Christians are rushing to defend him in an odd sort of way, by giving the righteous tut-tut to other Christians who dare to repudiate Robertson’s words. Here’s how qb responded to one such challenge:
…Nobody ought to get any extra credit at all for suggesting publicly that we all pitch in to help Haiti. That is massively self-evident.
But this isn’t an isolated incident or innocent “slip of the tongue.” It is merely the latest of a long string of preposterous associations that Robertson apparently loves to make in his self-appionted role as America’s prophet of doom. Here are just a few that you may recall:
“I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags in God’s face if I were you, This is not a message of hate — this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor.” (speaking on “gay days” at Disney World, 1998)
“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city. And don’t wonder why he hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for his help because he might not be there.” (responding to the city of Dover’s rejection of Intelligent Design in schools, 2005)
There are many other examples of Robertson’s trigger-happy rhetoric, which always seems to piont in the direction of a ruthless and petulant form of Calvinism, which brings not just reproach but also shame and derision upon the community of faith, the bride of Christ.
BTW, we have several examples in Scripture of public figures being denounced in public without going through the prescription of behind-the-scenes discipline in Matthew 18 and elsewhere. We are not called to follow a formula; we are called to be discerning. In this case, the weight of the ACCRETING evidence demands that Robertson’s repeated nonsense be called what it is, and publicly.
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On the brighter side, at long last the pseudoconservative David Brooks has written a worthy piece not overly influenced by his infatuation with the president’s persona and faux eloquence. The tragedy in Haiti, he says, has little to do with natural disaster per se and everything to do with cultural forces, notably including a religious culture without the Christian’s inaugurated eschatology, which gives purpose and meaning to human life in general and virtue in particular.
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Check out the graphic (Figure 22) at the bottom of p. 15 of this report. Incidentally, Haiti comes in with the third BEST – meaning LOWEST – per capita ecological footprint.
qb
Garpez, in the Shell station at Harvey Rd. and the Highway 6 bypass, College Station, TX 77840; open from 7am to 2pm only.
(They have a new location on Wellborn Rd., just north of Stotzer Parkway and Cafe Eccell, which is open from 10am-10pm. qb didn’t try it.)
The reviews over at Urbanspoon and Yelp are right on the money. This is good stuff. There’s no machine back there pressing little balls of dough into tortillas; they really are hand-rolled and tender, if a little small. For breakfast: the carne guisada taco has a chunky stew of savory beef; fresh salsa has a bit of a kick; and the basic egg-potato-bacon taco is perfect. Two tacos for about $4. Friendly and small, in a convenience store. Wish it opened earlier in the day, but it’s worth the wait.
qb
Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has a new column in which he lays out a defense of European social democracy. His central piont appears to be this: the empirical macroeconomic data do not support the contention that social democratic policies – the modern welfare state, essentially, with its punitive tax rates and generous (with others’ money, we must add) so-called “safety net,” or hammock – significantly impair economic growth and national prosperity. He says Europe’s not doing too badly despite the sizes of governments relative to the corresponding GDPs. Ergo, he says, conservatives shouldn’t be wringing our hands about Obamanomics and the socialization – nationalization – of the U. S. health care system. After all, Krugman writes, all the long-time democracies have national health care, and they’re doing just fine, thank you.
Let’s concede Krugman’s empirical piont for the sake of argument. qb doesn’t buy it, but qb’s not an economist.
But Krugman’s argument is only marginally relevant, if at all.
The American experiment was never principally about prosperity, anyway. The Founders, and the Pilgrims before them, viewed liberty not merely as a means to a more important end, such as prosperity, but as a worthy end in its own right. It was the royal oppression, not primarily the economic results, that gave rise to the insurrection against King George and his tax policies. It was the right of religious conscience – liberty of thought and association – that animated the colonists. “…Yearning to breathe free” was the piont, not achieving some arbitrary threshold of wealth.
Of course, though he hides behind the skirt of “not statistically different,” Krugman’s own performance data for the U. S. consistently exceed those of European nations in strictly numerical terms. Those differences might in fact be real; he just can’t prove it (or so he would have us believe). Very well; scientific method, and all that. But it wasn’t scientific method that filled the Mayflower. It was the clear air of political self-determination. Krugman doesn’t get it.
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Krugman is, in his heart, a technocrat. He would have us believe that we ought to leave governance to the scientific cognoscenti, the technical elite, who alone can tell us what is good for us, what “works.” We ought to trust them. Like Krugman, Obama thinks of the Constitution as an impediment to progress, which they define in redistributionist terms.
But history tells us that when government is given an inch, it takes a mile. Our founding documents are the product of genius precisely in that they focus squarely on what government must NOT do…for the sake, and even with the consent, of the governed.
On this, George Will emphatically agrees.
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Look, qb’s been to Europe. I love the food, the wine, the history, the languages, the art, the sophistication. But I wouldn’t want to live there, not for a minute. I love liberty too much. And I want my country back.
We cannot rely on the Supreme Court to vitiate this expansive claim on individual liberty; kill the health-insurance bill, and start over. With Madisonian principles, and Ockham’s razor, superintending.
qb
