Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Violence Erupts Over Gay Jesus Art

 

Kittredge Cherry reports on her Jesus In Love blog about violence that broke out at an exhibit of photos by Swedish artist Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin:


A group of young people tried to set fire to a poster at the cultural center that was exhibiting her photos of a queer Christ. Staff intervened and as many as 30 people joined the fight, according to news reports.

The recent melee broke out over her Ecce Homo series, which recreates scenes from Christ’s life in a contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) context. The conflict occurred in the Swedish city of Jonkoping, known as a center of evangelical Christianity.

Wallin’s “Sermon on the Mount” is one of my favorite images from Cherry’s book Art That Dares, which I blogged about in August. Buy a copy and sign up for the Jesus In Love newsletter here.

More provocative and enlightening images from Ohlson’s Ecce Homo series can be viewed on her website. The AIDS-victim Pieta and the gay-bashing crucifixion fit comfortably with compassionate liberal Christian sensibilities, but what to make of John baptizing a naked Jesus at the baths? Does it sully a spiritual moment with sexual innuendo, or reveal an unlikely place where Christ may be present? It speaks well of this photo that I can’t collapse it into a single meaning. Perhaps it illuminates how sex can be both transcendent and decadent–and how religion also contains the potential for vulgarity and excess.

All I know is, if the wedding feast of the Lamb is anything like Ohlson’s drag-queen Last Supper, I’d better start planning my outfit. (In heaven, everyone looks great in a thong.)


Episcopal Diocese Secedes Over Gay Issue


The Fresno, CA-based Episcopal Diocese of San Joaquin yesterday became the first full diocese to split from the national church over disagreements about the Bible’s view of homosexuality. The diocese, which is also one of the three US Episcopal dioceses that rejects the ordination of women, voted to place itself under the authority of a conservative South American congregation. Over 50 Episcopal parishes have seceded from the national church in the past few years to protest the trend toward recognition of gay relationships. CNN.com has the full story here.

I find it sad and ironic that in the name of upholding “tradition”, certain Episcopal congregations are playing fast and loose with our entire system of church governance, as well as dishonoring their vows to respect the authority of their bishop. There are many Protestant denominations that operate on a more congregationalist model, where individual churches are free to reshuffle their allegiance when doctrines or personalities clash. The Episcopal Church is not one of them.

Is the episcopate a flawed system? Do we want every person, every church, to vote their own conscience and pull up stakes when their superiors fall below some level of doctrinal purity? That’s a popular position, especially in hyper-individualistic America, but don’t call it historic Anglicanism. It’s more like those 1970s wedding vows where you promised to stay together only as long as you were both meeting each other’s needs for self-actualization.

And they say the gays are ruining marriage.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Holiday Edition


Ship of Fools has posted its “Kitschmas Gifts” list, featuring 13 products to make your special someone say “WTF??” My favorite are the Thongs of Praise. Nothing says “Not tonight dear, I have a headache” like panties with the Virgin Mary on them.

Not to be outdone, The Onion‘s holiday gift guide includes essentials like Bacon Strips Adhesive Bandages. (Not recommended for people with dogs.)

For the second year in a row, Going Jesus treats us to the Cavalcade of Bad Nativities. Paddleball Nativity, Leprechauns in the Manger, Sad Kittens Nativity and more!

Book Notes: Openly Gay Openly Christian


Rev. Samuel Kader’s Openly Gay Openly Christian: How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly bridges the gap between serious Bible-believing Christians and those who want to affirm gay and lesbian relationships. The latter group includes liberal churches and theologians whose relationship to the Bible is vague, superficial or outright antagonistic, which has tended to confirm conservatives’ fears that gay-friendly theology waters down the faith. Many evangelicals have never heard a solid Scriptural case for GLBT inclusion.

Kader’s scholarly analysis of “clobber passages” in Genesis, Leviticus and the Epistles makes that much-needed case, though in other chapters he repeats familiar pro-gay readings of the Bible that I think are strained and potentially distracting. Hunting for examples of same-sex pairings in the Bible (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) unnecessarily sexualizes all intimate bonds, a reductionism to which our culture has been prone since Freud. Moreover, while it’s true that Christians are free from all of the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus, Kader sometimes slips into trivializing the holiness code, arguing that Christians who eat shrimp or wear blended fabrics have no right to criticize gays. But these are minor problems with what is nonetheless a very valuable book.

Kader analyzes the key words in Hebrew and Greek that he says have been mistranslated as forbidding all same-sex intercourse. Using Strong’s Concordance to track where these words recur in the Bible, he recontextualizes the clobber passages and demonstrates that none of them describe a committed, monogamous relationship between two men or two women. For instance, the acts actually being prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20 are the fertility rituals of neighboring pagan nations, which involved temple prostitutes, and also possibly the practice of soldiers raping a defeated enemy king or military leader.

What gives this book credibility, besides the rigorous textual analysis, is that Kader sounds like a genuinely orthodox, evangelical Protestant. Rather than appeal to modern secular ideals of tolerance or a generalized Christian ethic of compassion, he emphasizes that the issue is legalism versus salvation by grace. Welcoming gays into full Christian fellowship is exactly the same kind of scandalous, progressive leap as welcoming Gentiles was for the Jewish Christians in the early church (see the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10). And it is justified by exactly the same evidence: the empirical evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those once considered beyond the pale.

Saints and Laborers


One of the pleasures of praying the Daily Office is the juxtaposition of Bible verses, prayers and spiritual readings that makes me reflect on familiar verses in a new way. 

Yesterday’s gospel was the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, in Matthew 20:1-16. That’s the one where Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a landowner who pays all his workers the same amount, whether they worked all day or only for an hour. This parable sometimes comforts, sometimes outrages, and always fascinates me. To feel validated as a human being, I need to believe two somewhat contradictory things: that God cares about fairness, and that God loves each of us unconditionally, in some way that doesn’t depend on our relative merits. 

The online Daily Office at Mission St. Clare includes brief biographies of saints and great Christian historical figures. To these, also, I have a complex relationship. Sometimes I feel deeply and personally cared for by these people whom I have never met, who faced martyrdom so that I could know the gospel. Other times I’m uncomfortably aware of how high they set the bar. Isn’t envy often rooted in fear that the same miracles will be expected of us as well? Saints and geniuses expose how the heights of endurance and achievement that we wrote off as safely impossible are actually within human reach.

I’d bet that most people wrestling with the vineyard parable, like me, automatically identify with the workers who did more than the average and felt shortchanged. Compared to the saints, though, nearly all of us are more like the late-hired workers, who should be grateful that they get an equal share in the kingdom of heaven despite their meager contribution.

Robert Orsi: Scholarship as an Act of Love

 

Catholic historian of religion Robert A. Orsi delivered the 2007 commencement address at Harvard Divinity School. His speech, “Love in a Time of Distraction”, is reprinted on page 8 of the Harvard Divinity Today summer newsletter, online as a PDF file here. This excerpt stood out for me:


Scholarship is the practice of disciplined attention to the world as we find the world, in its undeniable otherness and difference, but most of all in its obdurate and resistant presence. It is our privilege in the humanities and social sciences to go as inquirers into the company of other humans in the present and the past. We meet these men and women and children in the archives, in texts and in fragments of texts, and in the field. We find them always in the immediate circumstances of their lives, at work on their worlds; we find them in webs of relationship with each other that come to include us, once we have entered their worlds, in the present and in the past. And we meet them in the circumstances of our own lives, from within our own stories, gripped by our own fears and desires and hopes. “Research is a living relationship between people,” Sartre wrote. “The sociologist and his ‘object’ [which Sartre puts in quotation marks] form a couple, each of which is to be interpreted by the other; the relationship between them must be itself interpreted as a moment of history.”

Understood this way, scholarship is the practice of a particular kind of love. Veritas is Harvard’s motto, but the ground of veritas is amor. The love of your family and friends has sustained you these years; your love for what you were studying kept you going. Love is there, too, at the heart of our epistemology. The canons of modern reason insist that love is the nemesis of rationality; scholars must be objective, love is subjective. But the paradox of scholarship in the humanities is that the more we are present as particular persons and scholars to the world—the more “subjective” we are—the more the world stands forth in its realness and otherness—the more “objective” it is. The deepest challenge of epistemology is not an abstract “objectivity” but the fearlessness to be radically present to the other as we permit the other to be radically present to us. This is the sacramental dimension of scholarship; sacramental meaning the practice whereby the self comes face-to-face with the real.

The Depressed Christian


Christians prone to depression, as I am, can feel extra burdens of shame and doubt. We’ve heard the best news in the world, yet we can hardly motivate ourselves to butter our toast. Are we failing to work the program, or does the program itself not work? Are we setting a bad example in a world already inclined to believe that our faith is useless at best, harmful at worst?

Travis Mamone’s article The Boy with the Thorn in His Side at Relevant Magazine asks these exact questions. With humor and pathos, he describes how he read The Bible Code last year and became paralyzed with fear that the apocalypse was imminent. Though he eventually debunked that specific worry, he was disturbed by how easily the habit of panic returned, despite his faith:


When will this struggle be over? I had been dealing with mental illness for most of my life now, and I was getting sick of it. There was nothing else I wanted more than to just wake up one day and no longer have another anxiety attack. Ever! The Gospels report that Jesus once drove demons out of a man who hid in caves and cut himself with rocks. I thought all my demons were supposed to be gone.

And then it hit me: this is exactly like the thorn in Paul’s flesh!

I can’t imagine how my weakness and hang-ups can possibly give glory to God. When people look at me, I want them to see a strong man, a man whose life has been changed by God. More often, however, people see my failures and moments of weakness when I let the negative thoughts drag me down. What kind of testimony is that supposed to give?

Or maybe that’s exactly the kind of testimony I’m supposed to give. If I had the strength to battle my demons on my own, I would have never given my life to Christ in the first place. But the truth is I’m not. I tried to do it on my own, but just fell back into the same cycle of depression and getting better and falling back again. It wasn’t until I came to know God that I realized I didn’t have to battle it alone. In fact, the battle is not even mine to begin with; it is God’s. There are moments when it seems as if all is lost and the darkness is completely taking over. But then there always ends up being something to keep me going; it could be a Bible verse, a memory of being blessed, or a gut feeling that everything’s going to be okay. God’s mercy always shines through the darkness.

There a particular Bible quote that comes to mind: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:3-4). Maybe there’s some one out there right now, huddled up in his or her room, wondering when the darkness will end. Maybe this person is waiting to hear a story such as mine, a story that’ll make him or her realize, “Hey, I’m not alone!”

Today, that person is me. Thanks, Travis.

Check out Travis’ blog at http://tmamone.blogspot.com/. (What’s really disturbing is that the “What type of hipster are you?” graphic accompanying yesterday’s post looks exactly like me on a bad hair day. And you wonder why I’m depressed?)

Book Notes: The Gift of Being Yourself


Christian psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner has written an intriguing but too-brief inspirational volume, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, whose premise is that knowing God is inseparable from knowing yourself.

This might sound like New Age self-deification, but Benner’s orthodoxy is solid. Relationships require authenticity. If we are afraid to be our true selves, he says, we are also afraid to encounter God in prayer. This observation rang true for me because fear of myself has been a major obstacle to my prayer life. Sometimes it’s that I don’t want to know my own sins; other times, I’m afraid that I couldn’t process the intense emotions of prayer without losing my mental balance. Then the people whose affection I want to retain will reject me, saying, “Who is this depressing person who cries all the time even though her life is so fortunate? Obviously, whatever she believes, it doesn’t work.”

And then there’s the Psalmist’s question, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” I look at my weakness, the mundane concerns that so easily overwhelm me, and imagine that God must see me as, well, a schmoe.

Some strains of thought in Protestant theology are less than helpful for this problem. I do believe that Christ died for my sins. However, some ways of talking about substitutionary atonement and human depravity make the transaction appear formalistic, almost false: I am actually loathsome, to the extent that I am myself, but God accepts the legal fiction that He is looking at Christ when He looks at me. This sets up a dynamic of God in opposition to the self, which can perpetuate the feelings of shame and self-avoidance that I always thought the gospel was meant to cure.

Becoming aware of my inability to cope with my sinful nature was the prelude to my conversion, but it was not conversion itself. Conversion was the realization that my deepest self was separate from that sin, cherished by God and somehow protected from ultimate worthlessness, but not through my own efforts.

Hence Benner’s well-chosen title. We are meant to be ourselves, but our personhood is a gift, not an achievement. Moreover, the unique talents and inclinations we discover in ourselves are clues to our God-given vocation. (This insight also reassured me, as I’ve found it hard to root out the Kantian anxiety that God will prevent me from finishing my novel because my enjoyment of it is idolatrous.)

 

Much of the book is spent discussing ways we construct a false self. In language reminiscent of the Buddhist doctrine of “non-self”, Benner suggests that we become overly attached to particular personality traits and preferences, which we adopted out of habit, or because they were pleasurable, or helped us manipulate others. We assume that these traits are our fixed “self” when perhaps they are things we do in order to protect our egos, and could be changed.

Whenever we act as if it’s our responsibility to create a unique personality for ourselves, we end up shoring up the false self and hiding from our flaws. By contrast, accepting that our uniqueness is given to us by God, and that our primary identity is being a person loved by God, frees us to discover who God meant us to be.

This worldview is appealing enough that I wished Benner had included narrative examples of what a person’s life might look like before and after giving up the false self. He briefly outlines the Enneagram, a list of nine personality types and their characteristic sins, but doesn’t give specific guidelines for working with it, nor explain why Christians should take it as authoritative. The book is the first in a series that includes Surrender to Love and Desiring God’s Will. I will continue to explore his works in search of more practical advice.

 

A Royal Priesthood

Today is the feast day of Pope Leo the Great, bishop of Rome from 440 to 461 AD, whose writings played a significant role in clarifying the doctrine of the Incarnation. James Kiefer at The Daily Office shares this encouraging passage from one of his sermons:

Although the universal Church of God is constituted of distinct orders of members, still, in spite of the many parts of its holy body, the Church subsists as an integral whole, just as the Apostle says: we are all one in Christ. . .

For all, regenerated in Christ, are made kings by the sign of the cross; they are consecrated priests by the oil of the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the special service of our ministry as priests, all spiritual and mature Christians know that they are a royal race and are sharers in the office of the priesthood. For what is more king-like that to find yourself ruler over your body after having surrendered your soul to God? And what is more priestly than to promise the Lord a pure conscience and to offer him in love unblemished victims on the altar of one’s heart?

Perhaps we’d behave better in our theological disputes and in the daily administration of the church if we tried to look at one another as members of a royal priesthood.  As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours….Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses…for in him also Christ vere latitat — the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

Makoto Fujimura on Jesus and Monsters


Acclaimed visual artist Makoto Fujimura shares some profound insights about resisting the cultural imperative to choose between religious faith and the unfettered artistic imagination, in this article from Implications, the online journal of the Trinity Forum. Highlights:


If you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the mainstream, as avant-garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place them in opposition, pitting Innocence against the reality of the Experience. Artists are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness, and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world,” a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast with Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labyrinth. A remarkable film. It is not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war.

Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child . . . but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture, and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the twenty-first century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis.

While a hard term to define, the Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artist’s role in society, in our education of our children; and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

Read the whole article here. On a related note, the Internet Monk says “Bring it on!” to movies like “The Golden Compass”, the upcoming adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman’s atheist fantasy trilogy for young adults (i.e., the anti-Narnia):


I’m firmly in the camp of Chesterton on this one. The more the atheist talks, the more Christianity makes sense to me. When I listen to atheists describe their noble vision of existence in an absurd and meaningless world where their firm and rational grasp on reality can give meaning to all of us who walk the aisle to becoming “Brights,” I’m so grateful for the doctrine of total depravity I could write an entire musical about it….

Atheism has been around for a long time. It’s going be around for a long time to come. It’s going to make more documentaries. It’s going to have more best-sellers. I’m sure it will have its own reality show on MTV. Your kids are going hear from atheist friends, professors and employers. They are going to be a lot less reluctant to portray Christians as a threat to peace and civil society than they were in the past.

You need to get ready for the “new atheism” to become a factor in every facet of our culture. We won’t get ready for that if we protest The Golden Compass or the twenty atheist-friendly Hollywood products that are coming soon to a theater near you.

No, it’s time to love your enemy. (Atheists aren’t the enemy anyway. It’s time we quit falling for every panic monger who wants to tell us that some group wants to “attack the family” or “take away our rights.” It’s not true most of the time, and when it is, Jesus had plenty to say about the blessings of being persecuted.) It’s time to find ways for the light to shine winsomely. It’s time to be a servant for Jesus’ sake. It’s time to give a reason for the hope that is in us. It’s time to turn and face the atheist challenge and not protest, run away or declare war.

Atheism has a powerful appeal when Christians aren’t well taught, honest and engaged. Its message can be potent when you’ve lived like a rabbit instead of a watchman or a witness. Many of the Christians warning us of “Atheists Ahead!” may be afraid their own faith couldn’t survive reading Sam Harris’s book. Atheists make dozens of challenges to Christianity and Christians that are MUCH NEEDED and LONG OVERDUE for consideration in many Christian circles.

If that is the case, then I say buy the atheist nearest you a good dinner, because he/she is doing us all a favor by challenging that house of cards we’re so afraid might get blown over. Remember this: when the atheist finishes making his presentation to my students, they’ve just learned that it makes no difference what they do. It’s all a matter of chemicals hitting the brain anyway, and it goes no deeper. When I finish my presentation, there’s a reason to go to class, to study, to pass, to graduate, to do something with your life and even to continue on with hope if you fail. The atheist says eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. I say remember your creator in the days of your youth, because he will bring all things into judgment.

My talk sounds a lot better when they’ve heard his/hers. Don’t forget that.

(I for one would love to see a musical about total depravity. Perhaps starring Nathan Lane as Martin Luther?)