Unity and continuity in creation

This is just a meditation that's been percolating in my brain the past several days.

It began, oddly enough, when I was reading about how on August 21, Muslims will begin the fast of Ramadan. The mention of fasting got my thinking about how the use of food really is so integral to religion.

In the Christian tradition, the Eucharist, or Lord's supper, has always been a central part of worship. How interesting is that? Eating food is a sacred act of worship. Of course, it's been a part of numerous ancient religions, so it's hardly surprising, but it is interesting.

Food is pretty much life. That much never needs saying: without food, you die. So of course we would worship God by eating food. For the Christian in the Lord's supper, it's a way of saying Jesus is our true food. Thus Jesus is our life.

So naturally the next time I sat down to a meal (by myself--I've noticed how often I eat alone as a grad student) I pondered just what it means to eat food. Now this is probably not a thought that occurs to most people, but after all, I am a math grad student.

Maybe the stress of qualifiers coming up this week is really getting to me.

Anyway, what it really means to eat food is that matter that was outside of you is now inside of you, and it is now causing chemical reactions that fuel your life. You're taking stuff that was doing one thing, and you're making it do something else.

Matter doesn't ever go away--it just gets rearranged. This is a scientific fact that is also seriously spiritual. It's funny that we have this word "universe" to describe reality. It's a tacit acknowledgment that there really is unity to creation.

All that ever really happens in this universe is that matter gets rearranged into different forms. It would appear God spoke matter into existence but once; the rest was just housekeeping.

But housekeeping is precisely what it's all about. Everything we do is merely organizing the world around us into something. In fact, most of the organizing we do we can't even control.

From the time we are conceived a tiny cluster of cells starts working diligently to take nutrients from the outside, put them inside, and organize them into this beautiful thing known as the human body. This process continues on into old age--every time we eat, that's what's happening.

Okay, so aside from the fact that I enjoy contemplating freaky things, why do I care about this? Well, the reason is that I care about who and what we are as humans. I am interested in how we as humans think about ourselves, because I think it has real consequences.

We humans draw this distinction between "natural" and "artificial," a distinction which may be, well, artificial. We're part of nature. We are created, through and through. There is no part of us that was not created. We are part of God's continued housekeeping.

Everything we do, therefore, is part of nature. Many of us see ourselves as looking over nature, studying it so that we may understand and manipulate it. Others of us see ourselves as looking up to nature, inferior to it, and learning from it. I think we ought to see ourselves as parts of it.

There really is only one universe. What is a human? A human is a continued allocation of the matter in the universe into a thinking, feeling, relational being. We are part of a whole.

But that doesn't mean our purpose is simply to be dissolved back into this whole. It matters how matter is ordered. God said, "Let there be light," and then he separated light from dark. It is good for the universe to have parts, for exchange to take place, and for order to occur.

All of this causes me to meditate humbly about the sovereignty of God and the will of human beings. Behind everything, there is God--ultimately matter is one, and it is all in the hands of the One God.

But the human will does genuinely exist; it is created, just like all that exists. Human thought is part of that endless exchange of matter that causes the universe to have meaning. Perhaps, then, God is ultimately behind every human thought, but not in a way that makes it not our own.

If we are made in our creator's image, we ought to be good housekeepers. We ought to create intentional order around us. We ought to love beauty, harmony, and health. Our actions have real consequences, and contribute greatly to the ordering of this universe.

I could talk about so many areas of life this self-understanding affects: economics, science, art, politics, and so on. Maybe I will eventually write about all these things, but lately I'm most interested in how it affects religious practice and thought.

In particular, how might this way of understanding ourselves affect what we think "truth" really is? I think this thought needs a whole other blog post to write about, so I'll save it.

(To be continued.)

Power and pacifism

I listened to an old emergent podcast featuring Brian McLaren called "Power, in ways we don't understand." Overall I thought it was wonderful, and much of what McLaren is saying resonates with me.

Not that this is the subject of my post, but I was really excited about how he explained what the gospel really is. I don't have a transcript of the whole thing in front of me, so I'll have to paraphrase something he said.

The gospel today is primarily personal, with the emphasis on saving souls. Then there's a rather large footnote on how to have a better life here on Earth before you get to heaven. Then there's a bit smaller footnote on how to improve our communities, and then a tiny little footnote on how the gospel impacts the whole world.

McLaren proposes thinking about it the other way around--start with what the gospel means to the whole world, then think about what that means for our communities, and then about what it means for our individual lives.

Along the way he stumbles onto this global issue of war and peace. As McLaren looks up to Stanley Hauerwas on many things, he also finds himself attracted to Hauerwas' pacifism.

McLaren says he is a "pacifist sympathizer." He also says pacifists are "ahead of their time." I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he says something like we need a "peace race" rather than an arms race. This kind of attitude seems pretty typical among the emergent strain of Christainity.

I'm not sure what I think. We live in an interesting time in which to formulate opinions about war and peace. A lot of liberals have been crying out for the past eight years that we failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, and we're repeating our same mistakes.

But let's be honest, the lesson a lot of conservatives learned from Vietnam is that pacifism seems to come wrapped in a package of absurd liberal philosophy that simply doesn't work in real life. Vietnam didn't teach America to be pacifists; it taught us that pacifists are weird.

I say this as a 23 year-old inhereting the conversation that was going on decades before I was alive, but this is what I hear through the maze of opinions.

Iraq isn't exactly my generation's Vietnam. There has been no draft (and no draft dodging). Both the Hawks and the Doves have expressed their opinions from the comfort of their own blogs. Hardly any opinions of the war, good or bad, are forged out of any sort of practical experience.

That's all relative, of course. There are many brave men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps their opinion contain something in them that the rest of our opinions don't. It's just hard to say. But we do have a volunteer military. I think the dynamics would be very different if everyone were called to serve.

Anyway, how do we as Christians think about war? I get disturbed often by people who are way too decided. Either the Bible clearly teaches that war can be justified--I mean, just look at all the slaughter that God commanded Joshua to carry out--or it clearly teaches pacifism.

The words of Jesus on this subject are minimal, and at best they are cryptic. He did say, "All who take the sword will perish by the sword," (Mt 26:52) but this does not immediately condemn soliders. After all, those who perish by the sword are often given great honor because of it.

My own opinion at this point is that I cannot accept either "just war theory" or pacifism. How can theory really justify anything to do with killing people? It's like the problem of evil--it doesn't have a truly good explanation because it isn't good.

I have already expressed on this blog my frustration with ethics that try to come up with hypotheticals and "solve" them. I think the desire to solve hypotheticals is culturally conditioned, and it's something I think we need to train our culture out of as much as possible.

The way I view ethics these days is this. We are like a pianist sitting down to play. The music is already there in the keys of the piano; they just have to be struck in the correct order, with the correct timing and dynamics.

But what shall I play? thinks the pianist. He has this notion of beauty deeply embedded in his heart, and he wants to make that become real. He ponders this for a moment, longing for some perfect melody to come to mind. At last he takes a deep breath, and starts to play.

Is there any perfect melody? Is there any piece of music or art that can ever fully express the idea of beauty that is embedded in all of our hearts? Perhaps not. But the fact that the pianist listened to that longing in his heart, and then started to play--that is what made him a musician.

We long to see heaven on earth. As a Christian, I believe we will see it. But the only way we can make ethical decisions is to both desire to see heaven unleashed and then to act. Theoretical concerns do not make an action ethical or not.

Who is the soldier to boast that he was perfectly justified in killing his opponents? And then again, who is the pacifist to judge a nation for defending itself? Why do we all see this big need to justify ourselves, as if anything in this dark, corrupt world could really be justified?

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist who plotted to kill Hitler. There was a man who understood ethics. There was a man who longed for heaven in his heart, and then tried with all of his might to somehow bridge the unbridgeable gap between heaven and hell.

To all the soldiers out there, I applaud your bravery. And to all the pacifists out there, I applaud your idealism.

We all have our cross to bear.

A wise quote from a conservative economist

From a "random thoughts" article today by Thomas Sowell:

Someone pointed out that blaming economic crises on "greed" is like blaming plane crashes on gravity. Certainly planes wouldn't crash if it wasn't for gravity. But when thousands of planes fly millions of miles every day without crashing, explaining why a particular plane crashed because of gravity gets you nowhere.

Neither does talking about "greed," which is constant like gravity.

I've always appreciated Sowell for his realism. It's like poking a little hole in the over-inflated balloon of liberal modernism.

Notice, though, that this quote by no means suggests that we ought to do nothing about economic hardships. It only says we ought to correctly diagnose the cause, so we can make a correct prescription.

Nor does it particularly suggest that we shouldn't try to do anything about greed. If it weren't for people trying to fight back societal greed, perhaps greed would steadily increase rather than remain constant.

Anyway, it's just nice to hear Thomas Sowell's common sense every once in a while.

The cross of the thinking mind

"For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow."

Ecclesiastes 1:18

Lately most sermons seem to depress me. I don't know if it's the content, or the tone. Maybe it's just the format of a sermon--a guy gets up there and talks about what he wants to tell you about a passage for a while, and you get to sit and figure out how that's supposed to fix your life.

This morning I heard a very evangelical sermon on the good news of how there really is a point to life after all, and sure enough, it's to fear God, and keep His commandments. (The text was Psalm 25.)

Somehow this message reminded me of all those people who say religion is a crutch--"whatever gets you through the night" and all that. People need meaning in their lives. The sermon this morning was basically about how you find that as a Christian.

Those who claim not to need a crutch find meaning for themselves. They say there's no real meaning to the universe, but the meaning we create is good enough. We just have to brave enough to accept that that's all there is.

The Christian counters by saying that we have to be humble enough to accept the meaning that is there.

It's a cruel dilemma, don't you think? Do you take up a crutch out of humility or do you embrace the absurd out of courage? Both humility and courage are good, but both weakness and absurdity are evil, are they not?

I think I hear voices telling me, oh, but it doesn't matter what's more courageous or more humble, does it? What's important is which belief is true.

But let's get real, here. Who believes anything about God or the meaning of life without evaluating it using some moral compass? We all want to know what's good, not just what's "fact."

Sometimes, though, it seems like what's good is just wishful thinking, and what's true is depressing.

After all, no matter how joyful a Christian may be that one day Jesus will come again, the fact is, he hasn't so far, and it's been 2000 years. There has been a lot of destruction and evil in that time. How can you avoid feeling some bitterness?

And no matter how certain an atheist might be that life is worth living only for the meaning we create, the fact is that if there is no transcendent meaning, then life is still a joke after all. How can you avoid getting depressed?

The Greek philosophers had this triad they liked to talk about--truth, beauty, and the good. But what happens when in the real world these three are torn apart from one another? We all want them to be the same, but they're not. Not now.

So what can I do with all the knowledge I've gained about just how far from good life really is? What do I do when there don't seem to be any answers--when all the good answers seem false, and all the true answers seem evil?

Somehow the image of Jesus stretched out on his cross comes to mind.

The mind craves harmony between truth, beauty, and goodness. If that harmony isn't there, what else can the mind do other than take up its cross and follow Jesus? It must stretch out its left hand toward the good, and its right toward the truth, and nail itself firmly in place.

Then it must bear the crucifixion--that horrifying tension between what we hope for and what we see.

A metaphor about scripture

So lately a lot of religious questions have been on my mind, and at the root of all of them is this fundamental question about how Christians approach scripture. This question is so basic that it usually just gets passed over.

But I have seen a lot of different approaches to scripture. Arguably, there is one for every person, but practically we can say that many people agree on a certain approach or another.

The evangelical approach that I've mostly been surrounded by in the churches I've attended is attractive in its simplicity: the Bible is true and authoritative, so take every word and try to make sense out of it.

As I understand it, this approach was solidified by the Reformers, such as Martin Luther--unless you can prove something by scripture and plain reason, the Church shouldn't believe it. I'll say why I have problems with this approach in just a bit.

There are many other approaches. The liberal approach is to treat scripture with either skepticism or sometimes patronizing--as if our primitive ancestors in the faith didn't understand God as well as we do now. There are some liberal interpretations I sympathize with, but I find the basic approach problematic, and a bit arrogant.

The Catholic approach is attractive for its continuity: the Church has been interpreting scripture for centuries, so you might as well start where they've left off. I don't agree that we should simply start where someone else has left off, but I do think it is a tragedy how far our culture tends to get from remembering where we came from.

And now there's this "post-liberal" or "emergent" way of interpreting scripture, which perhaps I most identify with, but I'm not sure. As I understand it, this way looks at scripture as a story, one which we enter into so that it becomes our story.

So, what exactly is my problem with the good old evangelical approach to scripture? A number of people who are close to me have been wondering, so I thought I'd compile some of my thoughts into a nice little metaphor.

The scriptures are really not just one voice, but a choir of voices singing various parts. The more I read, the more I learn about just how much scholarship goes into understanding these different voices.

The voice of Qoheleth ("the Teacher") in Ecclesiastes is different from the voice of David in the Psalms. The voice of Paul in his epistles is different from the voice of John in Revelation. The voice of the Prophets is different from the voice of the Proverbs.

The voice of Jesus towers over all of them.

There are harmonies among these voices, but there is also dissonance. Sometimes different parts of scripture just don't seem to say the same thing. Personally I find it hard to reconcile God telling Moses to kill a man for breaking the Sabbath law (Num 15:32-36) with Jesus having his disciples pluck grains on the Sabbath (Mt 12:1-8) and advocating nonviolence (Mt 5:38-29, 26:52).

But dissonance can be a beautiful part of music, and tension can be a beautiful part of the Bible. If you were thinking as you read those scripture references about how you can easily reconcile those different passages, then that's a sign you don't want to see any such tension in the Bible. You don't want dissonance in your music.

Whatever the particular merits of your method of harmonizing these different texts (and we could go through hundreds of examples), that's not what I'm really getting at. I'm really just asking, why exactly are you set on making it harmonize? Or worse, why force all of scripture to sing in unison?

What I see as I learn about the amazing number of different Protestant traditions is that a huge number all come out of this same mentality: the Bible simply has to fit into exactly one stream of thought from beginning to end. The scriptures have to sing in unison.

So then what you get is a bunch of people arguing over which melody the Bible is singing. Only one melody is allowed, so if there's any dissonance, someone is wrong.

But the sheer number of Protestant denominations in existence points to the fact that this task is impossible. The scriptures aren't singing in unison.

Of course, there are many many people I love and respect who will continue to hold out hope that one day we'll have all of these theological controversies figured out, and the One Interpretation of scripture will be commonly accepted by all "true" believers.

That's fine if you want to believe that, but then I worry that we'll get into wars not only about what scripture says, but who's really "in" and "out." It's so easy to think that maybe those people don't agree with my doctrine because they're just not really faithful to God. That would explain everything! But it would be horribly wrong in a great number of cases.

So I feel compelled by my conscience to listen to all the dissonance as well as the harmony (beyond just the unison) of scripture. And just as listening to music is both active and passive, so it is with reading scripture; we bring our own experiences and learning to the texts, and we respond to them, and we are shaped by them. It's interactive, not one way.

It's just a lot more complicated than taking the Bible seriously or not taking it seriously. If those were the only two options, that would make life simpler, but life is more complicated. Whether that's good or bad I can't tell. Maybe it's a good thing--God seems to like richness and complexity.

But after all, it really is all quite simple. Love God, love your neighbor as yourself. What more is there, really?

Oh man, it's about time

Teaser from DMW on Vimeo.

You have no idea how psyched I am about this.

A Bit Clunky

Now apparently some environmentalists aren't so sure about this whole "Cash for Clunkers" business. Fox News (who else?) reports on some of the potential screw-ups:

"Disposing of old products, a step required by most incentive and rebate programs, also has environmental costs," Gwen Ottinger, a researcher at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Center for Contemporary History and Policy in Philadelphia, wrote in an opinion article published in The Washington Post on Tuesday.

"It takes energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes," she wrote.

...

"Cash for clunkers is a historic mistake for America because it misapplies billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize more fuel inefficient cars that are bad for our dependence on foreign oil and bad for the environment," said Edwin Black, author of "The Plan: How to Save America When the Oil Stops -- or the Day Before."

Black told FOXNews.com that lawmakers had the right idea to get more fuel efficient vehicles on the road but executed it poorly. He said it's too early to say how many vehicles purchased get 18 to 20 mpg rather than 30 to 35 mpg.

So basically a lot of cars are just getting scrapped--and when I mean scrapped, I mean, "the government is advising car dealers to replace a trade-in's engine oil with a lethal sodium silicate solution and run the engine to ruin it before giving to selling the car to a scrap dealer."

Meanwhile, we don't even know for sure if people are actually buying more efficient cars. So this doesn't make good environmental sense or economic sense. We're basically just trying to push a failing U.S. automobile industry (using tax money) and wasting a whole lot of usable materials.

If you were hoping to buy a new car one of these days, well then, good for you. Here, I'll help you pay for it. Right around when I get my next paycheck--those taxes they withhold should do the trick.

I guess it just gets to me a little to see things go to waste. Anyone who knows me knows I always eat everything on my plate, I drive a car that gets at least 35 miles a gallon, and I pretty much never spend anything that wasn't already in my budget.

So why shouldn't I complain when the government is wasting tons of resources, and spending tons of money that will ultimately come from the American people? Does anyone even care how much $2,000,000,000 is anymore?

No, we do not need to just do something to help our economy and the environment. If we're going to do something, let's put some careful thought into what we're doing and not shove a ton of legislation through in a matter of months.

*sigh* The problem is that so many people who are in panic mode will take what they can get, and trust the government even with poor planning. In the long run, of course, this is absolutely a terrible attitude. But politics is always based on the short-term. Maybe that makes politics inherently flawed; I don't know.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do, blog about it?