What do you get...?

While going through old papers, I found this little gem: a list of philosophical jokes of the form, "What do you get when you cross X with Y?" I believe that all of these were created by John Shook and myself in the fall of 2000, while we were driving back from a conference in Austin. I'm also certain that there were more. And if any readers of this blog are inspired to add you own to the list, please feel free. Anyway, here they are:

What do you get when you cross ...

...G.E. Moore with a producer of flash-in-the-pan pop music groups?

Here is a band. Here is another.

...An Aristotelian virtue ethicist with Diana Ross?

A philosopher who looks for the mean between the Supremes

...Leibniz with a dervish?

The best of all possible whirls

...Hegel with Albert Camus?

Thesis, antithesis, Sisyphus!

...Schopenhauer with John Stuart Mill?

The Principle of Futility

...Kant with a maker of meat pastries?

The Categorical Impenada

...Kant with Freud?

The anal-ytic/synthetic distinction

...Augustine with a fisherman?

The City of Cod

...Kant with a careless deep sea diver?

The Kingdom of Bends

...Descartes with an Olympic backstroke champion?

Cogito, ergo swim

Intellectual Archeology

This week my department has been moving into a new building. In a future post I want to say something about this move--specifically, about the building's controversial name and the failed efforts to change that name. But in this post I want to share the results of a bit of intellectual archeology.

My new office is smaller than my old one, and it doesn't have a closet. What this means, among other things, is that I have to go through those boxes of old papers and notebooks that have been sitting in my office closet for years. There is no place to shove them and forget about them, so I need to make some decisions about what I'm going to keep and what I'm going to discard.

This morning I started leafing through some old notebooks which were clearly from sometime in the 1990's. One of them looked as if it were nothing but my notes for an introductory logic course I was teaching--and I was about to toss it when I flipped to a page of scribbled thoughts.

I noticed several things as I read through the three notebook pages of unpolished ideas. First, I'd obviously been reading Simone Weil, probably Gravity and Grace (this was especially obvious with respect to the final scrawled paragraph). Second, some of the phrases were familiar--early formulations of ideas that I would later refine in different ways. Third, some of my thinking from back then is impenetrable even to me. Fourth, I've evolved alot in my thinking over the years. Fifth, some of the main themes in my thinking about religion and reason, themes which have found expression in my book and elsewhere, were first scribbled in logic notebook years ago.

So I thought I'd share the contents of those pages with readers of this blog. If you find the views expressed outrageous or absurd, feel free to take issue with the younger me. I may or may not jump to his defense, depending on whether I agree with him.

Although there's no dating in the notebook, changes in ink color or spacing indicates entries made on different days (although all but the final entry seems to be a development of a single of thought). To capture this, I have numbered each new entry consecutively. Other than that, the notebook entries are unedited. However, in a couple of places I've been unable to resist interjecting a comment. While the text from the notebook appears in italics, the occasional comments do not (and they are enclosed in parentheses). So here they are, in order of appearance:

1.

Consider the claim that human reason is not enough, that we must have faith.

This is at once one of the most important and most dangerous claims ever uttered: important because, when correctly understood, it teaches us that the absolute is beyond our grasp, and that to reach the absolute we must abandon the search and, instead, wait attentively; dangerous because, when misunderstood, it deprives us of both faith and reason, and leaves us more hopeless and helpless than the staunchest atheist.

(Did I really believe that staunch atheists were hopeless and helpless, or did I just say this because it had a nice rhetorical ring to it? From what I can recall about my earlier self, I suspect the latter. Also, since my earlier self could not have expected my later self to betray his trust by publishing what was intended as a private activity, I suspect he felt more freedom to indulge rhetorical flourishes such as these, just for the fun of it.)

2.

"Faith" is used in two senses. In one sense it is something that we do: believe without reason. In another sense it is something that happens to us when we permit it: when we empty ourselves enough to let the divine presence in; when we are seized, as it were, by God; when the light of divine truth illuminates the limits of our intellect and lifts us beyond those limits; when we are humble enough to let go and allow this to happen--which requires, of course, that we let go of words, forsaking our desire to neatly box experience.

Faith in the first sense deprives us of both reason and God. To believe without reason is to believe without human reason, but it is also be believe without divine reason. Faith in this first sense is either arbitrary--the deification of your will--or a submission to personal history--the deification of culture. It is what we mean by "idolatry."

(The ideas here find their way into my book--especially the idea that willful belief amounts to idolatry. See especially pp. 185-186.)

3.

To believe that God exists ON FAITH is either dangerous or irrelevant, depending on the sense of "faith." To believe that God exists by an arbitrarty choice of will is to vaunt your own will in a way that makes obedience impossible--true faith involves permitting God's will to usurp your own; this so-called faith is therefore the opposite of true faith. Such affirmations of God are not welcomed by God.

If, by "faith," we mean a connection to God which happens when we let go of our egos, then it makes no sense to say that we believe God to exist ON FAITH. It is like saying we believe the food in our mouth to exist on faith. We chew our food and let it nourish us. We believe IN it. But believing THAT it IS has no relevance once it is in our mouths. Likewise, believing THAT God exists has no relevance once He has entered us. Unlike food, the advent of God makes human beliefs irrelevant.

(The last paragraph of this entry puzzles me. Did I really mean "unlike food"? And was I really convinced that belief is irrelevant when one is in the grip of God? Irrelevant for what purpose? I suspect one would need to make some distinctions here in order for this to be acceptable. If all I meant was that the experience of being in the grip of the divine, and what one does in light of the experience, is more important than what one believes about it--that is something I can probably endorse today.)

4.

In the domain of beliefs, reason is our surest guide. To say that reason is not enough is to say that the most important truths are not only beyond reason, but beyond belief--they can be felt and known, but not propositionally, and not without divine intervention.

Divine revelation produces a species of knowledge that is not a species of belief.

(Here, I'm pretty sure I was deliberately trying to sound profound. If I were interested in clarity, I would have said that what divine revelation produces is an immediate experiential acquaintance rather than propositional knowledge--the distinction between knowing Fred and knowing things about Fred).

5.

This is not to say that all divine truths are beyond reason, or beyond propositional expression. There are things that we can say about God. Some of what we say can be evaluated with reason. Some of what we say is metaphorical, and can be understood only in the light of faith. Some of what we know in faith cannot be said.

6.

The act of creation is an act of withdrawal. Before creation, God was everything. In order to create, God must bring it about that there is something which He is not. To exist as part of creation is to exist at a distance from God. To preserve us in being is to perpetuate that distance. God creates out of love. God's distance from us is a sign of that love.

(This is pretty obviously my own restatement of ideas I took from Simone Weil.)

What I Might Have Said

Last week I gave a luncheon talk for the interdenominational “Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff” at my university. I’d been invited to talk about my book, but it occurred to me that for a group such as this it might be more meaningful to talk about how the book fit into a broader personal, spiritual, and intellectual journey.

After all, this was bound to be a group of people who had in one way or another confronted questions about the intersections of the religious life and the life of the intellect. And my book, whatever else it may be, is a milestone in my own personal journey to answer questions raised by these intersections. And so I thought it might be valuable to talk about the personal journey that took me from a child of agnostic preacher’s kids to the author of a liberal religious critique of the new atheists.

It was not a prepared talk. Instead, I took the informal luncheon format as an opportunity to explore in conversation with others a question I wasn’t sure I knew all the answers to. At some point I might try to write up the lessons I gained from that exploration, but what I want to discuss here is something that came up at the very end of the luncheon, when at least half of those in attendance had already left. I want to talk about what I might have said had the conversation not been abruptly derailed.

The line of conversation we were pursuing at that time was started by a thoughtful question from the minister who strives to maintain and mediate the fellowship (no mean feat, I think). It was a sincere personal question about interfaith dialogue, about finding the balance between personal conviction and genuine openness towards and respect for other faiths. Having written about this issue in a recent blog post, I shared some what I’d said there.

My answer prompted one of the more theologically conservative persons in attendance to speak up (let’s call him Jim). Jim pointed out that in John 14:6, Jesus is purported to have said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” After quoting this verse, Jim went on in something like the following terms: “When I am having conversations with people of other faiths, I must remain true to this foundation. And this means I have to let them know, as hard as it is to say and to hear, that unless they accept Christ as their Lord and savior, they won’t be saved.”

This comment prompted me to launch into a very brief overview of some of my thinking about Christianity and universalism. I began by distinguishing between two interpretations of John 14:6: the interpretation which takes the passage to say that no one comes to the Father unless they adopt the right beliefs about Jesus and/or make the right choices with regard to Him, and the interpretation which has it that no one comes to the Father except on account of the work that Jesus does on sinners’ behalf. While the former interpretation entails that only Christians who explicitly accept Jesus as savior are saved, the latter interpretation does not imply this at all.

I then confessed to being a universalist, at which point Jim promptly said, “That’s not biblical.” At that point I briefly sketched out what I took to be the explicit universalism of Paul, in Romans and elsewhere. And then I offered a metaphor that might be of some help in reconciling Paul’s universalism with the scriptural idea that it is Jesus alone through whom salvation comes. What I said, roughly, was something along these lines:

“Imagine that there are a number of people drowning in a lake, and a lifeguard—call him Chris—dives in and, one by one, rescues them all. Not everyone knows or acknowledges that it was Chris who saved them, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t save them. Their being saved doesn’t depend on these things. It certainly doesn’t depend on Chris leaving some to drown. If those who do recognize and acknowledge their savior have any advantage over those who don’t, it’s that they know whom to thank.”

There are serious limitations with this analogy as a basis for a comprehensive theology, but for the purposes that I was using it for—to show how it’s possible for salvation to come from one individual and yet to extend universally, even to those who know nothing about that individual—I thought it was pretty helpful. And it also expresses my Lutheran theological disposition that our salvation is rooted in something God does rather than in something we do. Our salvation is not on account of our works but on account of God’s work on our behalf—and believing the right things or explicitly “accepting Jesus as Lord and savior” clearly qualify as our works.

I want to take time to say something more about this “theology of grace.” In part I do so because it may help readers to understand my reaction to what happened next. But more significantly, I do so because what I have to say here is precisely what I might have said next, had the conversation not been derailed in the wake of a remark that led me to lose my composure.

One of the greatest fruits of a theology of grace is that it liberates us to think, to question, to doubt, to admit uncertainty, and to take challenges to our views seriously. If we believe that our salvation does not hinge on our getting it right, we become free to be humble, to admit our finitude, to admit our inability to get it right—in short, to be intellectually honest about the human condition. And as I see it, an absolutely crucial feature of the human condition is that the fundamental nature of reality is beyond our grasp. We can theorize and speculate in ways that are more or less in line with what reason and evidence reveal, but we cannot know.

Our enormous material universe might be catalogued, its structure and mechanisms and history described to the minutest detail, and we would still face the same fundamental questions: Is there more than this? Is this world of immediate sense experience, this world whose structures and patterns we can describe, just a surface appearance? Or is it just a small part of something far vaster that is beyond description? Or is it, instead, the whole story?

We cannot know. We can be moved by the voice in our heart that encounters a hopeful vision, the voice that says, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” We can treat its urgings as emerging out of the part of us that IS, rather than the part of us that experiences and knows—the self insofar as it is a part of reality, rather than the self that stands back from it in an attempt to understand reality. We can treat our deepest longings as if they are a homing beacon, and their YES as an instinct that immediately apprehends what the discursive intellect cannot grasp. Or we can be moved by the voice that says, “I’ll believe it when I see it”—knowing that this is something we can never, ever see.

We can be moved by longing or evidentialism, but we cannot know. And the theology of grace allows us to admit this. Paradoxically, if we are convinced of this theology, we are freed from the pathological need for certainty. And while such certainty may not be the root of all hostility and intractable conflict, it is one fundamental source of these things. When we can admit we do not know, we can come together and hear each other and be more fully open to each other’s humanness. And insofar as the theology of grace facilitates that, it bears pragmatic fruits that speak in its favor. We have pragmatic reason to live as if the theology of grace is true, as if our salvation doesn’t hinge on getting it right, because only then can we break free of the psychological forces that push us into trenches of false certainty.

All of this was lurking in the background of my thoughts as I laid out the metaphor of the lifeguard. And what Jim said next opened the door to elaborating on these ideas.

“But Christians,” he said, “have to choose their own lifeguard.”

I took him to mean that the lifeguard only swims out to rescue those who ask him for his help. I remembered a Lutheran pastor who strongly influenced me years ago, who tried to explain Lutheran theology by saying that, on the Lutheran view, if any of us have a right relationship with Christ it is because Christ has beaten down the walls around our hearts and seized hold of us from within. It is not by what we choose or believe that we become connected with the transcendent. That connection is forged because the transcendent loves us enough to reach through all our crud.

I'd found that message transformative in my own life. And so I said, “I disagree with that.”

And Jim replied, “Then you disagree with God.”

His facial expression as he said those words might, at a quick glance, have been viewed as smug. But I don’t think that’s right. Because I’ve felt that expression on my own face. It emerges when I’m containing something far more potent than smugness, something that’s surging up into my face in a tidal rush: The need to be right.

I’m no stranger to that need. In fact, I worry sometimes that it drives me more than it does most people. And that is one reason why I hold so fiercely to the theology of grace: as a ward against the more dangerous demons of my nature. (Again, I'm not blind to the paradox here).

But one of the forces that’s most likely to trigger my need to be right is precisely the kind of comment that Jim uttered in this exchange, in precisely the tone in which he uttered it. Like begets like. When he said, in essence, “If you disagree with me you disagree with God,” I felt the schoolyard impulse to reply with, “I know you are, but what am I?”

But just then, one of my friends from another department spat out his indignation in something along the following lines: “That’s just the kind of arrogance that fuels Dawkins and these other new atheists, giving their accusations against religion credibility!”

I sputtered something about these sorts of utterances being “anti-evangelical.” Then I went on to say that such a statement is a conversation-stopper. I said something along the following lines:

When you say to me, “If you disagree with me you disagree with God,” what I
think is this: “Here’s someone who isn’t open to genuine conversation, someone
who’s just in it to try to impose his views on me rather than offering reasons
and arguments and ideas that I can consider and learn from. This is certainly
NOT someone who will listen openly to my reasons and arguments and ideas—so why
should I bother to listen to what HE has to say.” That’s what goes through my
head. And so productive dialogue ends.

Openness begets openness. Self-righteousness begets self-righteousness. Entering an interfaith conversation with the assumption that one has the truth and that the point of the exchange is to make the other person accept it—well, that begets a similar response. Instead of a conversation, one has a battle of wills. One has polarized confrontations that are more about grand-standing than about sharing, more about impressing those who are already on your side than about building bridges across rifts of difference.

In fact, the trumpeting arrogance of Dawkins and the other new atheists doesn’t come out of nowhere, but is a response to those who end conversations about Darwinian evolution by saying, “This is not in line with my religious beliefs. As such, it conflicts with God’s truth.”

I said something along these lines, but I might have said it more eloquently had I not been caught up in the moment, allowing my emotional response to be dictated by Jim’s invocation of divine authority on his behalf.

And then the exchange ended. And the luncheon ended. And what I might have said about the theology of grace—how I am a better person when I live as if it is true; how it affords me the space to pursue my intellectual curiosity, to speculate in ways that draw from both reason and hope; how it frees me from the fear that arriving at the wrong beliefs will be disastrous (a fear that is at work in different ways among both religious believers and atheists)—none of that was spoken.

And, ironically, the reason it wasn’t spoken was this: in that moment when Jim declared that I disagreed with God, the theology of grace eluded me.

Acknowledgments

One thing I regret in relation to my book is that there was no “acknowledgments page” at the start. The effect of this is that some of those towards whom I am most indebted were not mentioned in the book. And so, I want to post my acknowledgments page here.

First, I would like to thank my wife, Tanya, who became something of an author’s widow during the months when I was most intensely engaged in writing, and who gamely took up the parenting slack on weekends so that I could go into the office to work. On game days when OSU football fans took over the university, including every available parking space within miles of the campus, Tanya would drive me within hailing distance of campus, our children in the back, so that I could hike through the throngs of fans to my office. And, when it was time for me to come home, she’d cruise up and down the major street just outside campus until I could make my way back through the orange revelry.

I would like to thank my department head, Doren Recker, for taking action to relieve me of my undergraduate advising duties so that I could devote my attention to writing. More broadly, I want to thank the members of my department for providing an atmosphere of intellectual encouragement and support.

I would like to thank my children for providing the emotional grounding that keeps me asking how my academic pursuits are relevant to the business of life. I would also like to thank my son for a particularly memorable exchange. One afternoon, while I was sitting at the kitchen table with the entire manuscript in front of me, proof reading, Evan sat down next to me and asked me what that HUGE pile of papers was (he was not quite five at the time).

“It’s the book I’m working on,” I said. And then, in a moment of pride: “One day soon, when you go to the bookstore, you might see Daddy’s book there.” My intent was to impress him, but he didn’t look impressed. Instead, he fingered one of the pages of the manuscript and asked, “Can I draw on these?”

Since then, of course, I’ve had some of the more extreme critics of my book all but say that its greatest value is as scrap paper. They might be pleased to know that my son agrees with them. Every writer should have an Evan around to jar them out of their pretensions of grandeur.

Finally, I would like to thank my intellectual mentors. I am, of course, indebted to my professors in college and graduate school who oversaw my early intellectual development, most notably Newton Garver who directed my dissertation on violence and Christian love, and who first introduced me to Simone Weil as well as to the essay on ideological violence by John Ladd which has so influenced my thinking over the years. I must also say that my understanding of science and its methods—which comes out in my book—was largely shaped during the semester Garver and I team-taught an epistemology course.

On a deeper and more abstract level, it is Garver who first introduced me to the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), which was born out of the collaboration of Quakers and prison inmates, and which offers experiential nonviolence/conflict resolution/community-building workshops in prisons as well as in various community settings. I cannot begin to understand how my involvement with AVP has shaped my personal and intellectual life, but I have no doubt that where I have succeeded in avoiding stridency in my philosophical arguments, I have AVP to thank. Where I have succeeded in being fair to my intellectual opponents, I have the listening skills taught in AVP to thank. And the spiritual impulse that lies at the heart of my book—to resist the urge to insist that all reasonable people must ascribe to the same worldview, to seek an intellectual space in which divergent perspectives can co-exist without insisting that those who disagree are either idiots or moral monsters—this is a spiritual impulse that has been nurtured in me through years of facilitating conversations about the meaning of life in prisons, addiction recovery groups, church youth groups, and other settings.

I am also indebted to a faculty member from the philosophy department at Ithaca College whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall (nor can I recall what he looks like). What I do recall is that when I went to Ithaca College for a job interview during my final year in graduate school (a one-year position that I didn’t get), this philosopher was giving me a walking tour of campus—and said something about being interested in religious hope. We proceeded to have a conversation about the concept of hope (he rejected the idea that it involved expectation, since we can hope for things that we don’t expect to happen), as well as about what role hope played in religious faith and religious life. I remember sitting with him on a grassy hillside and talking about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose thought at the time was a central focus of my research.

Beyond that, I don’t remember much about the conversation. What I do remember is coming out of it convinced (in a way I hadn’t been before) that hope was really central to understanding religion—a conviction that eventually evolved (through my engagement with other thinkers, most notably William James) both into my functional definition of God as that whose existence would fulfill the “ethico-religious hope” and into my pragmatic understanding of religious faith as the decision to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true.

But my most significant intellectual mentor is a friend I first met in graduate school, who has done more to shape the course of my intellectual life than any other individual. John Kronen was the other “God guy” among the graduate students in a very secular philosophy department. He was a few years ahead of me in the program and so defended his dissertation after my second year at SUNY Buffalo, but we continued to maintain a close friendship over the years, one characterized by intense and lively philosophical conversations which have often culminated in collaborative articles.

While my professors in graduate school introduced me to the most recognized figures in the history of philosophy, it was John who first introduced me to Schleiermacher and Hermann Lotze. It was John who first suggested that I read Plutarch’s essay, “On Superstition,” which he called “very wise.” I think that it was John who, more than a decade ago when I was putting together a course on ideological justifications for violence, suggested Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew as an ideal text to include in such a course. It was John who bought me Zaehner’s The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism and encouraged me to read it. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if up to a third of my theological library is comprised of books that John bought for me as birthday or Christmas presents.

I’ve learned that if John says, “Read this,” I will find it worth reading. Unfortunately, being a very slow reader, I cannot keep up with the list of works he recommends. But his track record of guiding me towards works that have influenced and inspired me is so remarkable that his recommendations (and gifts) consistently end up higher in the queue than do others.

John is one of the few individuals who read the entire manuscript of Is God a Delusion? as it was being produced. And while he (good-naturedly) bemoans the fact that I did not change the book in light of his criticisms, the reason for this is clear: So much of who I am intellectually is already shaped by John’s influence that, where we disagree (on such matters as intelligent design, for example), the disagreement represents one of those places where years of arguments and reading recommendations have failed to convince me.

Every scholar should, I think, have a friend like that.

What I Should Have Said

The other night I gave a talk at Tulsa University entitled “In Defense of Progressive Religion.” I thought about posting the text of it here, but I’ve decided against it for several reasons: First, it’s too long for a blog post, even relative to the long blog posts I’m prone to write. Second, most of the points I made in the talk are ones that should be familiar to readers of this blog or my book. Third, I think that a revised version of the lecture may be more appropriate for another venue where I’ve been invited to submit an article.

What I want to address in this post is a question I received during the question-and-answer period after the lecture. As I reflect back on my response, it seems to me to have been seriously inadequate. And since I cannot go back in time to offer a better reply, I want to post one here.

But first, we need a bit of context. Hence, even though I’m not going to post the text of my lecture, I need to talk about some elements of it which bear on the issue at hand.

In the course of my lecture, I advocated a roughly Hegelian view of how we should develop our beliefs so as to bring them more fully into alignment with reality (a method that Hegel developed in order to address what he saw to be the weaknesses with the enlightenment and the seemingly intractable difficulty surrounding what has come to be called “the problem of the criterion”—although I didn’t get into those details in my talk).

Instead of repeating what I said in my lecture (which is very close to what I have to say in a recent post), let me frame these ideas in more explicitly Hegelian terms. The essence of Hegel’s method for increasing our understanding of reality—a method I like to call “critical traditionalism”—is this: reality as it is in itself, while distinct from what we experience (which is always filtered through our worldview), impresses itself upon experience in ways that expose the inadequacies of our worldview. Thus, if we live out our worldview with a keen eye towards noticing the “contradictions” that arise within it as it crashes up against reality, we can modify it appropriately. But then the modified worldview has to be lived out in the same way. When worldviews are handed down from generation to generation, and appropriated by each new generation with an openness to revising them in the light of the fissures that living them out exposes—when that happens, the worldviews evolve towards an ever closer approximation of the “Absolute” that transcends all finite human perspectives and experiences.

The idea here is that the only non-question-begging way to uncover the weaknesses of a worldview is from within, by those who “try it on” and seek to live it out with an eye towards noticing when and where it doesn’t work. Those who offer an external critique of a worldview will, inevitably, do so in terms of their own worldview, which itself will inevitably be inadequate. Their focus will be on this other worldview and all the ways in which it fails to measure up to the criteria presupposed by their own worldview—but all the while, these criteria are being embraced dogmatically. Because worldviews are, in effect, the lenses through which we look at our world, they become as invisible to us as the glasses we wear—unless and until they distort what we see so much that we stumble. So, instead of railing against alternative worldviews, we should focus on critically refining our own by trying to become more fully aware of it and its presuppositions, and by noticing when we stumble and then trying to make adjustments so that we stumble less.

This is not to say that alternative worldviews should be ignored. What it means is that we’re just being dogmatic if all our energy is focused on pointing out how many inadequacies a different worldview has. When we create such a list of inadequacies, it will be in terms of certain standards of adequacy—and the standards of adequacy we employ will be those that flow out of our own worldview. To put the point in blunt and oversimplified terms, such critique amounts to saying, “On the assumption that my worldview is right and yours is wrong, we can demonstrate that your worldview is wrong.”

But other worldviews besides our own can be very valuable. To the extent that we can put ourselves in the shoes of those operating out of alternative worldviews and see the world through their eyes, we can broaden the scope of human experience that we have to work with as we endeavor to refine our own worldview. To the extent that we can take note of tendencies towards convergence among alternative culturally and historically situated traditions, we can discover trajectories of development which may say something about the reality that all of these worldviews are responding to. And insofar as the project of living out a worldview produces some of its most glaring failures precisely where it encounters and engages with adherents to different worldviews, our engagement with alternative worldviews may be instrumental in forcing the kinds of changes that move us into closer alignment with a transcendent reality. In short, we may learn from one another, especially if we really pay attention to each other and resist the knee-jerk propensity to just critique other views in the light of our own presuppositions.

And while we are not well situated to critique the substance of alternative worldviews without dogmatically assuming the adequacy of our own criteria of criticism, we are well-situated to point out the dogmatism that such a thing involves, and hence to challenge communities which cry “heresy!” and pronounce anathemas against every alternative worldview (whether those communities be our own or others). We are well situated to point out how the path of critical traditionalism becomes stunted when adherents to a tradition refuse to be critical, even in the face of experiences which expose glaring weaknesses within the worldview. And we are well situated to point out that disdaining all traditions in the name of “thinking for yourself” really just amounts to starting a new tradition while failing to consider what progress other traditions may have made over the centuries.

From this Hegelian framework, a particular religious worldview might be viewed as having its origins in a culturally and historically situated interpretation of a reality that transcends human understanding. As succeeding generations live out the worldview, inadequacies are discovered, and (sometimes grudgingly) changes are made. If so, then the pathway to deepening our understanding of the “Absolute” calls for (a) allowing all of these traditions to evolve in just the way that Hegel recommends: adherents to a tradition appropriate a worldview from the preceding generation, live it out critically, and pass a revised version on for the next generation to do the same; (b) following this procedure with the tradition that we have inherited; and (c) challenging anyone who imposes various sorts of impediments to progress—such as refusing to critically assess their inherited worldview in the light of experience, or denouncing those who do so, or directing all of their critical energies on other worldviews rather than their own.

In any event, what I was doing in my lecture was sketching out what such a Hegelian approach to religious traditions entailed, both in terms of a willingness to critically assess the teachings of one’s own religion and a conditional respect for alternative religious traditions (conditional insofar as it does not extend respect to traditions that staunchly resist critical development or have no tolerance for other traditions than their own, etc.)

But the question that prompted my inadequate reply related to a point I made about convergence. If alternative religious traditions are evolving in the light of inadequacies exposed by the collision between an inherited worldview and a reality that transcends direct human experience, then all these traditions are being molded by the same transcendent reality. And if that is the case, then—barring various impediments to progress—we should expect a convergence of traditions, a gradual narrowing of the gap of difference between them. Of course, there are always impediments to progress, and so it is an open question whether the convergence will ever be significant enough to allow for these traditions to achieve full congruence within the lifetime of the human species.

In the face of this possibility of convergence, and the kind of respect for alternative religious traditions that it implies, one young man in the audience asked, in effect, “What about Jesus?”

More precisely, he pointed out that Christianity is “Christocentric,” that is, it is a religion that makes Christ central. The nature of reality is understood through the lens provided by the story of Jesus’ life and death. To be Christian is to stand in a certain relationship to Jesus—the relationship of a disciple. And it involves believing certain things about Jesus—that He was more than just an ordinary man or a wise prophet, that He was the messiah, the savior of the world, the incarnation of God, the divine Logos, one Person of the Trinitarian Godhead. Or something in that vicinity (there are narrower and broader definitions of Christianity which allow for more or less flexibility in precisely how Christ is to be viewed).

The young man didn’t say all of this. What he did was ask a question along the following lines: “Jews are never going to accept that Jesus is the Son of God. So how do you think that this convergence is going to happen? Are Christians going to have to give up on the divinity of Christ? Doesn’t convergence require, in effect, that Christians cease to be Christian?”

My reply was essentially this, although probably worded less elegantly: “I can’t read the future. I don’t know what a convergence will look like or even if it will fully happen. What I can say is that, according to this progressive model of religion, you should not give up on your belief in the divinity of Christ without a good reason to do so.”

But there is so much more I could have said and should have said. Two things in particular come to mind. First of all, either there really is a sense in which Jesus was divine, and the earliest Christians were recognizing and responding to this (in their own culturally situated terms) as they formed their religious communities and shared their stories and, eventually, wrote their seminal texts—or not. If not, then in the course of living out a worldview in which the divine is perceived to have expressed itself in and through Jesus in a special way, a contrary reality will gradually wear away at this belief until at last it has eroded away altogether. But if Jesus really was divine, then the divine reality that transcends our experience will ultimately reinforce and refine this doctrine. It won’t go away under the pressure of living out a Christian worldview, because whatever contradictions emerge in the course of doing so won’t ultimately call for abandoning this doctrine.

Versions of the doctrine may have to be abandoned, as will versions of Christianity which combine with the doctrine in ways that don’t work. But if, in the course of living out your life as a Christian, the divinity of Christ facilitates rather than inhibits your capacity to live with integrity and honesty in relation to your world, you may be justified in believing that this is one of the things that won’t erode. You will be like Schleiermacher, the father of progressive religion, who respected alternative religious paths, who thought that each had something of importance to share with others about the divine—and who believed that the thing of most importance which Christianity had to share was precisely its central doctrine that God acted in and through Jesus, a human who was also divine, to effect the redemption of the world. If you agree with Schleiermacher in this, then adopting the progressive approach to Christianity should not lead you to fear that Christ will be lost in the process of convergence.

The second point I should have made in response to this young man's question was this: When we consider the claim that Jews are never going to accept the divinity of Christ, it may be worth asking why it seems so plausible to think this. And it does seem plausible. Although some Jews do convert to Christianity—my own brother-in-law, for example—it is hard to imagine a widespread transformation of this sort. This is true despite what I personally see as the intrinsic power of the core story of Christianity (which I sketch out, for example, here).

When I reflect on the narrative of Jesus’ life, I see a story of astonishing beauty that resonates with some of the deepest longings of my soul. But I know that most of my Jewish friends just won’t see it in these terms. There’s just too much ugliness that has been heaped over it—because the doctrine of Jesus’ divinity is intimately bound up with a history of persecution at the hands of Christians.

Consider it in these terms: What distinguishes Christianity from Judaism? Of course, there are numerous differences. But these differences trace back to one seminal difference, the thing that distinguished the Jesus sect from other Jewish sects in the earliest history of Christianity, despite their shared roots and overlapping Scriptures. And what is that difference? Obviously, it is a different understanding of who and what Jesus was and what His life meant.

But that one difference was sufficient to map out a history of social marginalization and oppression—a history that eventually set the stage for one of the greatest moral horrors in the history of the world. This is not to say that Christians perpetrated the Holocaust. The Nazis did that (although many Christians were quietly complicit as Jews were herded off to concentration camps, brutalized, and murdered). What it means is that the history of social marginalization within Christian Europe set the Jews apart in a way that Nazi ideology was able to exploit.

Anti-Semitism wasn’t born with Hitler and the Nazis. Its roots trace back to the earliest history of Christianity. As Karen Armstrong has noted in The Bible: A Biography, a vilification of the Pharisees became so potent in the earliest years of the Christian movement that it made it into the Gospels. Why? Armstrong puts it this way:

After the destruction of the temple the Christians had been the first to make a
concerted effort to become the authentic Jewish voice and initially they seemed
to have had no significant rivals. But by the 80s and 90s, Christians were
becoming uncomfortably aware that something extraordinary was happening: the
Pharisees were initiating an astonishing revival.

In effect, two Jewish sects survived the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem: the Christians and the Pharisees. And the Christians resented the efforts of the Pharisees to establish themselves as the true inheritors of Judaism. This fact was combined with another force that Armstrong notes in passing. In the efforts to reach out to the gentiles, the writers of the synoptic gospels “were too eager to absolve the Romans of their responsibility for Jesus’s execution and claimed, with increasing stridency, that the Jews must shoulder the blame.”

As Christianity distanced itself increasingly from its Jewish origins, the other surviving sect became identified with Judaism. But the old rivalry remained. And as the Christians became the empowered majority, that rivalry took on a new and more sinister shape. Fueled by the biblical passages which seemed to blame the Jews for Jesus’ crucifixion, the Jews were vilified and marginalized. The fact that they didn’t accept the divinity of Jesus was trotted out as a justification for social oppression. And so an anti-Semitic ideology was born.

And this history of oppression, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust, has shaped Jewish culture and identity in ways that would be hard to underestimate. To embrace the divinity of Jesus, given such a cultural history, could very naturally be seen as caving in to two millennia of social oppression and abuse. For many, it would symbolically represent selling out one’s cultural identity to the oppressor.

Now I don’t simply want to say here that this history of oppression provides powerful and understandable impediments to Jewish acceptance of Christ’s divinity, impediments that would interfere with such acceptance even if it is true that the doctrine of Christ’s divinity expresses a genuine insight into the divine. And I certainly don’t want to say that the prospects for convergence between Christian and Jewish worldviews depend upon Jews getting over their resentment so that they can come to see the beauty of Christian teachings. The point I want to make goes deeper than that, and follows the Hegelian spirit of directing criticism inward, towards one’s own worldview.

What I want to point to is a practical contradiction within the dominant Christian worldview, a contradiction that has made itself manifest in the course of a history in which generations of people have sought to live it out. The Christian worldview has from its beginnings urged evangelism, that is, sharing and promulgating the “good news.” But it has also laid down layers of crud that have made it essentially impossible for some people to hear this news, even if that news really is as good and beautiful as Christians claim (Christianity's more recent history in relation to gays and lesbians is also instructive on this point).

Such a contradiction demands internal criticism. If there are impediments to a convergent evolution between Judaism and Christianity here, I don’t think their main sources lie in Judaism. If the doctrine of Christ’s divinity has its source in a transcendent divine reality, then the capacity to appreciate this is blocked by crud. And it is Christian communities that, over the centuries, have been spewing out this crud.

As Christians, we need to turn our critical eye inward and ask why. And we need to transform our own worldview to repair this ugly fissure, out of which this ugliness has been allowed to pour into the world.

According to the Gospel of Matthew (7:5), Jesus offered up a saying about this kind of prioritization of self-criticism, one which strikes me as very wise: “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

In any event, when the young man at the lecture asked, "What about Jesus?", that’s what I should have said.

More of the Same...

For those who haven't seen it, I have a new essay in today's Religion Dispatches on the controversy surrounding Obama's back-to-school speech. In this essay I reflect on the possible role that the religion of fear may have played in motivating the paranoid response.

Obama's Controversial Uncontroversial Speech

Because of what happened on that day, almost all of us know that on the morning of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush visited an elementary school, talking and reading to the kids—and, I’m sure, encouraging them to study hard and stay in school, to take advantage of the educational system that our nation provides, and to develop the skills and knowledge they need in order to succeed and to contribute to the this great nation’s future.

I’m certain it was a thrilling experience for the children, at least until the tragic events of the day cast a shadow over the proceedings: The president of the United States of America, the most powerful political leader in the world, was coming to their school to talk to them!

Even children whose parents had voted for Al Gore (and perhaps believed the election had been stolen) were likely excited about the presidential visit. After all, even if one doesn’t agree with the policies and visions of a particular president, the office itself merits respect, as does the constitutional system which guarantees that the office-holder is elected through democratic means. At least that’s what my politically conservative friends would tell me when I’d criticize the Bush administration and its policies.

Had I been a parent at that school, there’s a snitty and less-than-admirable part of me that might have been tempted to keep my child home in order to protest the improperly elected usurper’s attempts to authenticate his sham presidency through the star-struck wonder of school children. Instead, I like to think I'd have swallowed back these partisan and unfair exaggerations in favor of letting my child enjoy the thrill of such an extraordinary visit: the President of the United States taking time out of his overwhelming schedule to meet with our kids. In fact, this seems like one of the most benign and admirable uses of the office of the presidency—to use it as a platform to reach out to our young people and encourage them to make full use of the educational opportunities our nation provides.

Now, eight years after the second Bush's fateful classroom visit, President Barack Obama is borrowing a page from the first President Bush by offering a live, televised speech to school children at the start of the school year—a speech whose message encourages kids to study hard and stay in school, to take advantage of the educational system that our nation provides, and to develop the skills and knowledge they need in order to succeed and to contribute to this great nation’s future. I've read the text of the speech, so I can confirm that this is pretty much what it's about.

Where I live in Oklahoma—which has the distinction of having been the “reddest” state in the union during the last presidential election—the announcement that Obama would offer such a speech became an occasion for widespread outrage. The event has been likened to Nazi propagandizing, and has been called an effort to indoctrinate school kids into Obama’s “socialist” agenda. Parents—and not just a few of them—threatened to keep kids home from school in order to protect them from this intolerable affront to human decency. And insofar as the attendance rate is one of the measures by which schools are evaluated and ranked, this is a threat that school administrators take seriously.

In the town where I live, the school district responded with the following policy: there would be no general airing of the speech, but individual teachers might choose to show it if they judged it a good fit with their lesson plan. But teachers who did so would need to inform parents in advance and offer an alternative activity for those students whose parents did not give them permission to watch. I'm sure there are plenty of parents who will do just that.

All of this is true even though the Obama administration has been assuring everyone from the start that the president’s speech wouldn’t be a partisan one. One wonders, in the face of this assurance, how the language of “propaganda” and “indoctrination” can take a foothold. Do Obama’s detractors really think he would lie about something like this? And if so, do they imagine that Obama could get away with such a lie, when the speech in question is being nationally televised and subject to the inevitable scrutiny of the news-hungry media, including Fox News, as well as every conservative blogger in the country?

Let’s be honest here: Barack Obama is far too politically savvy to put himself into that kind of political trap. And so, even before the text of his speech was made public earlier today, we could all be pretty confident that the speech would be exactly what he said it would be. After having read the text of it, I can testify that, while it's inevitably laced with personal anecdotes from Obama's life and inspiring stories of students who made the most of their education despite challenges (the kinds of "personalizing" narratives that Reagan popularized), the speech is essentially an effort to inspire young people to make full use of the opportunities that a public education provides.

None of this is the least bit surprising. I doubt that anyone who really reflected on the matter seriously believed that Obama would commit political suicide by using the school speech as a platform to advocate controversial policy initiatives.

Which can only lead me to believe that this furor about “propaganda” and “indoctrination” has been about something other than the content of the speech all along. What it comes down to, I think, is that airing Obama’s speech in schools carries with it a subtext: Here is a man you should listen to, someone whose opinion counts, someone, perhaps, whom you should even respect. And many opponents of Obama--despite the notion that the office of the presidency confers a certain measure of respect regardless of who occupies it--are appalled by the prospect of this message.

In many cases, the reason why conservatives don’t want their kids to look on our current president with an attitude of respect is purely political. They want Obama’s policy agenda to fail, and they think that if our kids look up to Obama, that attitude might “trickle up,” improving Obama’s political capital.

At least in a few cases, the source of this opposition is rooted in racism, most likely the covert kind that operates on the subconscious rather than the conscious level. Obama is a black man who is refined and eloquent and brilliant, and as such defies some of the more deeply embedded racial stereotypes. We tend to be fans of our stereotypes and prejudices, so much so that we long, unconsciously at least, to pass them on to our children. Obama’s speech threatens that.

In other cases, the source of the opposition is likely rooted in the kind of populism that disdains academics and intellectuals. The grim truth is that Obama is an intellectual to the core, a policy wonk who once helmed the Harvard Law Review and who can intelligently discuss Reinhold Niebuhr’s views on moral paradox with the best among academic theologians. And at some point in the course of American history, there has emerged a confusion between two things: on the one hand, the rare and distinctive intellectual achievement which renders some people more deserving than others of our attention simply because they know what they’re talking about; on the other hand, the patterns of social and economic privilege that systematically diminish genuine equal opportunity for every citizen.

Paradoxically, George W. Bush was a beneficiary of political and economic privilege, a man whose political career would likely never have happened if not for the familial connections and resources he could draw on—but he did not run afoul of the dominant American populism because he talked and acted like a regular guy. By contrast, Obama, who was clearly not a beneficiary of privilege, who worked his way up through the use of his native gifts and took advantage of the opportunities presented him to eventually become the first African American president, does run afoul of this populism. Obama comes off as if he’s smarter than most other people, not because he tries to show off, but because he is smarter than most other people.

Ironically, someone like Obama is precisely the kind of person with the authority to tell school kids that if they stay in school, work hard, become engaged in civic life and take advantage of the opportunities that they are given, they can grow up to be whatever their talents allow…perhaps even President of the United States. Such a message has far more authority coming from Obama than it does from someone who grew up in a wealthy and politically connected family. After reading the text of his speech, I can confirm that Obama takes advantage of this fact, highlighting his own personal struggles in order to accentuate the message that even the child of a financially struggling single mother can make it in this country.

Perhaps the kind of elitism that is represented by Obama is seen as a threat precisely because it is rooted in who Obama is rather than in who his friends and family are. Perhaps parents are subconsciously afraid that their children will see Obama and not only get the message that this is someone they are supposed to look up to, but end up actually doing so. Obama might just come off looking good in front of children across the country, even among those children whose parents have been so polarized against Obama that they want their children to think of Obama as the antichrist. Perhaps parents fear that the next time they claim that Obama threatens the very fabric of civilization, their kids will look at them with a healthy dose of skepticism.

If so, I'm afraid that, at least in most cases, these parents may be underestimating their own powers of indoctrination.

Journey to the Edge of the World

I begin with the end of the story: my six-year-old son returns to school tomorrow, having been genuinely ill for only a day. He is sleeping soundly as I write this, his forehead cool and his breathing normal. My daughter’s forehead remains similarly cool for now, although it’s impossible to know what tomorrow will bring. Since it’s inconceivable that she hasn’t been exposed, I’m anticipating a trip to the clinic with her any day now. But I hope not.

My son’s trip happened on Sunday. He was diagnosed with the flu. The test results were consistent with the H1N1 virus—that is, the so-called “swine flu”—and since that’s what’s going around at his school, that was the presumptive diagnosis. Because of his asthma and his history of pneumonia, he was prescribed Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug. The policy right now is to reserve anti-virals for the most at-risk cases. I believe this is in part because they worry about the evolution of resistant flu strains, and in part because they worry about Tamiflu shortages as this new strain of flu sweeps through the country.

The Tamiflu worked miraculously. On Sunday afternoon, before taking it, he was burning with fever. His cough was becoming increasingly croupy, his breath increasingly wheezy, and I was anticipating a night in the ER watching his little chest heave as he struggled to suck air through constricted lungs. We’d been through it before with him. The epinephrine breathing treatments they administer in the ER make his heart beat wildly in exchange for turning terrifying respiratory distress into merely scary respiratory distress.

At bedtime that same night, some five hours after receiving his first dose of Tamiflu, he was already breathing easier. And the ibuprofin we gave him was not merely taking the edge off his chills for a couple of hours, as it had earlier in the day. It was eliminating the fever altogether. By the next morning he was practically normal.

But for a little while on Sunday afternoon, before the miracle drug did its work, I was frightened. Partly this was a product of the media hype surrounding swine flu, but it was also rooted in observing my son’s distress. He had no memory of being so sick, of enduring the chills of rising fever and, more generally, the anguish of existing for a time in a body that’s a source of nothing but misery.

The ibuprofin helped, but it didn’t help for long. Between doses we’d supplement with Tylenol, but that was largely ineffective. And so, in the hours before we could give him the next dose, I looked for a way to keep his mind off his misery.

For bedtime reading over the last few months we’ve been working our way through C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Yesterday we finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the fourth in the series, at least if you begin with the prequel, The Magician’s Nephew). On Sunday, we were nearing the end of the book: King Caspian’s ship, the Dawn Treader, was sailing ever closer to the end of the world. The heroic mouse Reepicheep was anticipating his own private and irreversible journey beyond the edge, into Aslan’s Country.

As my son burned with fever and shivered uncontrollably, complaining that he couldn’t get warm no matter how many blankets he wrapped himself in, I sat next to his bed and read about the ship’s journey. He became still within his blankets, listening raptly as the ship sailed into the Last Sea. Whenever I paused in the story, either because my daughter bounded into the room to climb on my head or because my son asked a question that set me off on a rambling tangent, my son would rise for just a moment out of his flu-induced lethargy to issue a one-word order: “Read!”

And so I read. I read about Lucy seeing the minarets of the undersea city and the sea people astride their giant sea horses, and about Reepicheep leaping into the water to discover that it was sweet. And then, at last, the Dawn Treader came to the sea of lilies, what they came to call the Silver Sea, that lay just before the very edge of the world. And because the water was too shallow for the ship, the boat was launched, and the children from our world set out with the Narnian mouse, drifting through the blooming lilies towards mystery and wonder, towards the very end of the world.

And I looked over at my son to see that, at last, he’d fallen asleep. And I kissed his hot brow and breathed in the scent of him, and lay with my head against his, imagining that he was drifting through his own Silver Sea, blossoms all around him, towards the very end of the world. And I blinked back tears and shook my head, rejecting it even as I saw the beauty of it. And my fear made me try to wake him, but he wouldn’t wake.

And then I stood, and I said what I always say to him at bedtime: “Sleep well, little man, and dream of all the people you love and all the people who love you.” And then I stood over his bed for a long while, watching him breathe, seeing the serenity on his face, before turning away.

Half an hour later he bounded abruptly out of bed and staggered dazedly into the living, asking for soup.

My "Manifesto"--An Open Letter Written in 2005, on the Occasion of my Leaving the ELCA

What follows is an open letter, written in 2005 within days of officially leaving the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) for a congregation in the United Church of Christ. The move was in part an act of protest, a way of expressing my moral opposition to ELCA policies that, in my understanding, made God’s gay and lesbian children into second-class citizens within the life of the church. It was also made for a range of personal reasons, some of which are described in this letter. The letter was distributed via e-mail and I have really no idea how many have read it since 2005. I post it now in recognition of the historic votes that were made last week during the 2009 General Assembly of the ELCA, votes which overturned the policies that drove me into “exile.”

Dear Friends,

The other day, I officially became a Lutheran in exile. My family and I joined Fellowship Congregational Church in Tulsa, OK, making a commitment to drive one hour from home to attend a church that is open and affirming in its stance towards sexual minorities. Our experience at Fellowship has been wonderful, and I know that my family has found what is already proving to be a spiritually enriching church home.

Even so, my heart aches over this decision. In my heart and by my theology I am Lutheran. My heritage is half-Lutheran, and it is this heritage that I came to embrace in my adult faith journey. I have had and will always have a Lutheran identity and a personal commitment to the central Lutheran doctrine of justification by grace through faith, a doctrine which has been so beautifully and powerfully developed within the Lutheran tradition. I will always be committed to the future of the Lutheran Church. And yet I find that I must, for the sake of my conscience and the spiritual welfare of my family, worship elsewhere. I have resigned my position on the church council of my home congregation and said goodbye to a community that has been my church home since moving to Oklahoma in June of 2000. My heart aches, but I cannot see another way to proceed.

Why do I leave? There are many answers. Here is one: I leave because my wife and I cannot imagine raising our son in a denomination whose policies formally exclude non-celibate gays and lesbians from the ministry and withhold from same-sex couples the kind of sacramental recognition that heterosexual couples take for granted. We believe that such policies formally endorse the marginalization of human beings based on their unchosen sexuality, excluding some of God’s children from full participation in the life of the church. Our hopes that these policies might be change at the 2005 General Assembly were dashed, compromised from the start by timid recommendations from the ELCA Task Force on Sexuality, a procedural decision by the ELCA Church Council that would require a supermajority to effect any changes in current policies, and a clear indication that the majority within the ELCA stands on the side of perpetuating these policies. And so we left.

That is one answer. But it is superficial. It expresses controversial ideas as if they were matters of fact. It doesn’t explain why I think the current policies are wrong or why I think that the ELCA’s error is so significant that I, at least, must worship elsewhere. And so I offer a deeper answer in the hope that someone might hear, perhaps even be moved to fight for change.

Here are some things that I know: the sexual orientation of gays and lesbians is such that they can know fulfilling romantic intimacy only with those of the same sex. For most gays and lesbians, if not all, a change of sexual orientation is impossible—even for those of faith who for years fall on their knees and pray fervently for such change. If God miraculously transforms the sexuality of some, he is rather sparing with this so-called miracle. And, as Luther noted, celibacy is a gift given to few. As such, it is a gift given to few gays and lesbians.

How do I know these things? The social scientific research supports these views, but that is not the main reason why I believe them. I believe them because my gay and lesbian friends and neighbors have shared their stories with me, have told me what it is like to be gay and a Christian. I have tried to listen to them with the kind of compassion and attention that I think is demanded by a commitment to an ethic of love. I know that these things are true because my gay and lesbian friends have told me so, and I know them well enough to know they are not lying, that they have no reason to lie.

The ELCA’s policies relating to homosexuality are not nearly as offensive as those of other Christian denominations. The Southern Baptists, for example, declare with a confidence bordering on arrogance that “homosexual conduct is always a gross moral and spiritual abomination for any person, whether male or female, under any circumstance, without exception.” They hold that even the desire for same-sex relations is “always sinful, impure, degrading, shameful, unnatural, indecent and perverted.” For a time it seemed to me that it was enough that the ELCA’s stance was more nuanced than this, more fallibilistic. But it is not enough.

Historically, Christians have held that all forms of homosexual conduct are sinful. The implications of this teaching for gays and lesbians has been clear: they must suppress their sexuality. They must either enter into marriages with persons they cannot love, doing both themselves and their partners a profound injustice; or they must forego romantic intimacy whether they have the gift of celibacy or not. The current policies of the ELCA impose a requirement of celibacy on gay and lesbian clergy, a requirement that those fortunate enough to be straight need not observe. The ELCA imposes this requirement even though the Lutheran church has historically stood against clerical celibacy. Luther thought it was presumptuous to assume that God would call to ministry only those to whom He also gave the rare gift of celibacy. But the current policies of the ELCA formally declare that gays and lesbians in committed relationships shall not be ordained—declaring, in effect, that God would never call to ministry anyone who fits this description (as if we could know what God will or will not do).

The current policies of the ELCA also officially exclude gays and lesbians from participation in the only model of responsible sexuality that the Christian community has historically recognized: holy matrimony. As such, Christian gays and lesbians, as well as gays and lesbians more generally, grow up feeling fundamentally disconnected from their community, knowing that when they grow up, their dreams of life partnership and romantic intimacy will never receive the kind of social affirmation and support that their straight friends take for granted. Many feel like outsiders looking in a window at a feast they cannot join, like the little match girl in Hans Christian Anderson’s famous story. They feel cut off, and their sexuality is given no framework for its development and expression. Or, perhaps better, the only framework for understanding and expressing their sexuality that they are left with is the model offered by the secular world: media images that glorify objectification and reckless self-gratification, that say “do whatever feels good.”

These policies of exclusion are justified by two kinds of traditional appeals: appeals to Scripture interpreted in a conservative way, and appeals to inherited Christian theories about the nature and purpose of human sexuality. The ELCA, while acknowledging the controversy over traditional teachings, has chosen to err on the side of fidelity to these traditions rather than on the side of full inclusion. This choice strikes me as a dangerous mistake, in part because I think that commitment to a love ethic requires erring on the side of inclusion, but more significantly because I do not think that the justifications for the traditional views on homosexuality are very compelling.

The appeal to sparse biblical passages strikes me as a tragic misuse of Scripture, a misuse similar in kind to the historic use of Scripture to subordinate women. Yes, there are scriptural passages that put women in a subordinated place, that even preclude them from speaking in church. Yes, the subtext of Old Testament laws and stories is fundamentally patriarchal. But to treat these facts as sufficient to justify the subordination of women is to turn Scripture into a text suitable for the justification of moral horrors. And it is to ignore the broader themes of Scripture: themes of liberation, themes of compassion and love.

Any sincere holistic reading of Scripture reveals a clear commitment to an ethic of love. As such, it seems utterly clear to me that we must reject any approach to Scripture that leads to the endorsement of teachings that marginalize some of God’s children, that contribute to suicidal depression in gay teens, that stifle compassion and inspire otherwise good people not to hear the anguished cry of their gay and lesbian neighbors. Traditional teachings about homosexuality do all of these things. If our approach to understanding Scripture and its authority leads to these teachings, then it violates the ethic of love, and hence is a profound violation of the spirit of Scripture itself.

Scripture calls for us to love our gay and lesbian neighbors, to treat their needs as if they were those of Christ Himself. In other words, Scripture calls us to look beyond Scripture, to God and to our neighbor. If we attend to our gay and lesbian neighbors, we will hear stories of how traditional Christian teachings on homosexuality have crushed their souls. We will hear stories of how, rather than coming to them as a joyous chorus proclaiming the good news of reconciliation and redemption, the Christian church comes to them as a force of oppression and pain, as a life-deadening power. We will hear stories whose implications are more than clear: teaching that homosexuality is always a sin is itself a sin, because it poisons the lives of our gay and lesbian neighbors.

We do not hear these stories. While our gay and lesbian neighbors are crying out to be heard, to be received as full members in the life of the church, we ignore them in favor of discussing and debating the significance of Romans 1:26-27. This is a tragedy. We cannot afford to shout out Bible verses so loudly that we drown out the voice of Christ when He comes to us in the person of our neighbor. Any religion that, in the name of a high doctrine of Holy Scripture, cares more for isolated sentences on a page than it does about the anguished cry of our neighbors is, to borrow Martin Luther King’s language, a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.

But what about tradition, some may ask? What about the historic witness of the church? For two thousand years the church has taught that homosexuality is a sin. Can we so lightly ignore two thousand years of Christian witness? Isn’t the acceptance of homosexuality nothing more than the act of abandoning traditional Christian values in response to current trends in secular culture?

To these questions, I respond with a question of my own: Isn’t it more loving to begin our reasoning about homosexuality with sustained sensitive attention to the lived experience of those most affected by our doctrines on the issue—gays and lesbians—than it is to rely on traditional teachings that were fashioned at a time when the social and historical realities made it impossible to have anything approaching an adequate concept of what it is like to be gay? The sexual mores we have inherited from our Christian forebears were formulated at a time in history when no one really knew anything at all about homosexuality. Those who had a homosexual orientation would not have had any name for their experience, no readily available concepts for describing it, and no opportunity to receive a fair hearing. The conditions under which it has become possible to understand the gay and lesbian experience have emerged only very recently in history. To simply assume that our inherited theories and doctrines adequately account for this new data, without careful critical reflection, goes beyond respect for tradition and treads headlong into blind dogmatism.

For these reasons, I cannot condone current policies in the ELCA. For these reasons, it is not enough for me and my family that the ELCA agrees (at the discretion of the local bishops) to deliberately turn a blind eye to violations of existing policies while keeping those policies in place. It is certainly not enough to have a few ELCA congregations defy the policy with the understanding that they won’t be prosecuted for it so long as they do it quietly and do not make a public stand for the cause of our gay and lesbian neighbors. And it is simply naïve to think that the needs of pastoral care for our gay and lesbian neighbors can be satisfied by a scattered and localized embrace of them, one that occurs in a context that officially denounces any kind of unqualified embrace of who they are.

These are the reasons why I cannot accept the current perspective of the ELCA. By themselves, however, these things do not explain why I leave. After all, there are many who share my views who have chosen to stay and fight. A part of me wants to do the same. A part of me fears that leaving will mean handing the ELCA over to those who, out of a misguided devotion to tradition or scriptural authority, perpetuate the oppression of sexual minorities. A part of me fears that if too many like me leave the church, ELCA congregations will become even more hostile to sexual minorities, and children who grow up gay in the ELCA will feel even more excluded, even more rejected. A part of me fears that, because of this choice, some child I might have lifted up will be beaten too far down by the messages of exclusion, and in a moment of despair will choose death.

So why do I leave? There are many reasons. I have two-year-old son. I do not know what his sexual orientation will be. But if he should turn out to be gay, I do not want him to be that child who is beaten down by messages of exclusion. I do not want him to be told that belief in God and Christianity requires us to make second-class citizens of our gay and lesbian neighbors. I do not want him to be fed an understanding of the nature of Scripture and its authority which has us exalt two sentences from Romans above the life stories of countless gay and lesbian people who have experienced those sentences as a strangling yoke.

Such practical injustice infects even the most beautiful theology, degrading and distorting its meaning. The Lutheran doctrines about Christ and our justification before God have, as their backdrop, a normative understanding of God as a creator whose essence is love. The normative centrality of love is fundamental to Lutheran theology, without which none of that theology makes sense. But it seems to me that current Lutheran practice with respect to our gay and lesbian neighbors lifts up certain beliefs about the sources of divine authority (Scripture and tradition) higher than the law of love, thereby fundamentally infecting the heart of Lutheran theology: its understanding of God and the justification wrought by Jesus of Nazareth.

I cannot help but believe that practice speaks louder than words, and that when a formally endorsed policy violates the law of love, the implications for how core theological principles are understood by the faith community—how they will be understood by my son—cannot help but be compromised. The fact that so many Lutherans today have no authentic understanding of the meaning and significance of Lutheran theology, that their theologies are often closer to those of moralistic televangelists even though their pastors preach traditional Lutheran theology from the pulpit, speaks powerfully to these dangers. It seems to me that my son is more likely to understand and appreciate the essence of Lutheran theology if I share that theology with him while attending a non-Lutheran faith community whose explicit teachings may be less powerful articulations of that theology but whose practices, worship life, and social commitments are fully consonant with it.

There are other reasons why we leave, reasons that have more to do with our emotional lives than with reasoned reflection. After a difficult, often emotionally trying process of going through the “Journey Together Faithfully” study at our church, my wife and I were drained and in need of spiritual renewal. What we received instead from the ELCA was a dashing of our hopes. Worship in our home congregation became tainted by those dashed hopes. It became increasingly difficult to find there the spiritual sustenance and rejuvenation that we so urgently needed as a family. We were worn out by the fight, and because the ELCA was the battleground it was not the place where we could find the spiritual food needed to fight on. And because the ELCA refused to provide so many of our loved ones with the kind of unqualified welcome and affirmation that makes a place feel like home, it could no longer feel like home to us.

I believe that it is possible for people to disagree vigorously about important issues and yet still be fully participating members of the same community of faith. But the “issue” of gay and lesbian ordination, of holy unions, is precisely about who gets to be a fully participating member of ELCA. The policies of the ELCA say that I have that privilege but my cousin Jake does not. My best friend John does not. Other people I love do not. Can I disagree and still be a fully participating member of the ELCA? Yes, but only because I have the good fortune to be straight.

And this is the final reason why I must leave. The ironic truth is this: Were I gay, I would stay and fight for change. I would clamor at the gate for full inclusion. Were I gay, to leave the church would be to embrace the message of exclusion that current ELCA policies convey. And so, as a way to protest that message, I would refuse to leave. But because I am straight, the only way I can clamor at the gate in solidarity with my gay and lesbian loved ones is to deliberately step outside. The ELCA policies are discriminatory, but they discriminate in my favor. They do not exclude me because of who I am. And so, because I am straight, I must leave under my own power. To fight for change alongside my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, I must become an outsider with them. I must become a Lutheran in exile.

ELCA Vote for Greater Inclusivity Stirs Up a Storm

In Minneapolis on Wednesday, the General Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America passed an important social statement. The statement acknowledges the lack of consensus within the ELCA concerning the ethics of homosexual relationships and essentially extends to individual congregations the right to decide for themselves whether and in what ways they will recognize or bless same-sex unions. The vote passed by precisely the two-thirds majority that was required. And when I say “precisely,” I mean exactly that. A single vote the other way, and the measure wouldn’t have passed.

At the time that deliberations on this agenda item were about to start, an unexpected tornadic storm passed through Minneapolis, causing significant damage in several parts of the city. A confirmed tornado went through an area south of downtown. The Electric Fetus record store had its windows blown out…and the storm also caused damage to the convention center where the General Assembly was being held as well as to the spire of nearby Central Lutheran Church.

Predictably, these last two facts have caused a number of conservative religious pundits such as John Piper to paint the storm as a divine warning: it was, they claim, God’s way of telling the ELCA General Assembly not to pass the social statement.

That’s one theory--a theory which inspires me to wonder what the First Baptist Church in Mena, AK did wrong to warrant a million dollars worth of tornado-related damage back in April. Since the tornado hit on Maundy Thursday (the day during Holy Week when churches around the world remember Jesus' Last Supper), maybe God was trying to urge the church to rethink its theory that Holy Communion is merely a symbolic memorial. How dare they deny the ancient Church's doctrine of transubstantiation on the very day when the event which instituted Holy Communion is commemorated? Outrageous! How could God not smite them?

Oh wait. Lots of churches treat Holy Communion as just a memorial, and most of them weren't hit by tornadoes on Maundy Thursday. Hmm. And then there's the fact that the General Convention of the Episcopal Church approved some even stronger measures towards gay and lesbian inclusion back in July, and even though the convention took place in Anaheim, CA, not a single earthquake shook up the proceedings.

So maybe Piper's theory isn't the best one. Here's another: The storm was God’s way of warning opponents of the ELCA social statement that He is not happy with those who stand in the way of expanding the scope of agapic love. Because He knew that the vote would be so close, God rattled the rafters of the convention center to put the fear of God in those assembly delegates who were thinking about blocking this move towards greater inclusion and compassion.

Then again, maybe the ELCA General Assembly wasn't God's target at all. Maybe God was furious with the Electric Fetus record store. Who knows why? Maybe He thought the name was in bad taste. Or, since the Electric Fetus has been described as "iconic," He may have been expressing His wrath against graven images. More likely, it was because one of its employees is a secret fan of Air Supply.

Or maybe one of the drivers on I-35W, where the tornado touched down, was actually listening to Air Supply, inspiring even greater divine outrage. Perhaps the Electric Fetus employee hooked him up with the CD.

Of course, it might be that God was mad at the trees that were knocked down at 42nd and Portland. There is some biblical support for this. Jesus did, after all, curse an olive tree. Then again, since the storm system spawned tornado touchdowns in other parts of Minnesota, as well as in Iowa and other states, it may be that there are Air Supply fans elsewhere who inspired God’s wrath.

Or perhaps we should conclude that since no one was harmed in the convention center, God was actually protecting the members of the assembly from the storm so that they might complete the important work they had before them. Since injuries would have been more likely to take out delegates who voted with the two-third majority in favor of the measure, and since the measure would have failed if even one of these delegates hadn’t been present for the vote (had the storm taken out a few of the opponents, it wouldn’t have changed the result), we might conclude that God’s protection ended up saving the day for the advocates of greater inclusion.

We might even suppose, given the precipitous and unexpected nature of the tornadic storm, that it was spawned by Satan in an attempt to preserve policies of exclusion in the ELCA. Thankfully, God protected the good delegates of the assembly. Satan, furious at having his malign will thwarted, petulantly swatted Central Lutheran’s steeple on his way out of town.

Then again, maybe it was just a storm.