MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

God as disposition and beauty

Belden C. Lane writing about the theology of Jonathan Edwards:

He preferred to describe God more dynamically as a "disposition" to communicate love.  It is truer, he would have said, to think of God as a communicative "act" than as an existing "thing."  God is not so much a self-contained and static entity as an impulsive beauty delighting more than anything else in sharing itself. . . .  God's essence is a "disposition" to multiply the enjoyment of beauty.

Storytelling and social media

I have claimed that one of the reasons I enjoy blogging and social media is that we can tell our stories more easily and share in them.  This author criticizes social media from a perspective of storytelling.  I think she protests too much, but her perspective is worth listening to.

The danger occurs when our stories are rootless. All we need to do is look at the plethora of new social rituals to see the evidence: gender reveal parties, food journaling, push presents, work out diaries and birthday parties for grown-ups. We talk about “personal brand” as if that is a real thing of consequence. These new rituals tell a story, but that story is all about you and your life. All of it is an attempt to ritualize daily life and give it a depth that is not there.

We tell rootless stories when we forget our stories do not begin with us. 

 

N. T. Wright on the Heaven Myth

If you have followed this blog or my preaching for any time, you may have heard me express my annoyance at attending supposed-Christian funerals where you don't even hear the word "resurrection."  These funerals always focus on "heaven," and do so in a way that I've found to be pagan.  A few years ago, after a particularly annoying funeral, I preached a sermon entitled "The Christian Response to Death."

An article in the Washington Post discusses the growing public awareness that contemporary Christian theologians on the right and the left have debunked the conventional myth of heaven.  On one hand, I don't think this is news.  I'm always surprised at how people are unaware of pretty common basic teachings that we receive in the university and seminary, but they are.  

The occassion was a new book by N. T. Wright, no radical liberal, but a strong scholar and thoughtful theologian.  Wright debunks the conventional heaven myth and recovers what he considers to be the original New Testament idea, rooted in first century Jewish understanding.

He even takes on the very popular John 3:16:

Other clues have been obscured by sloppy translations, such as the popular John 3:16, which says God so loved the world he gave his only son so that people could have “eternal life.”

Wright offers a translation that radically recasts the message and shows how the passage would have been heard in the first century. To hear it today is to experience the shock of the new: God gave his son “so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age.”

“And so it’s not a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught,” Wright said. “It is very definitely that there will come a time when God will utterly transform this world — that will be the age to come.”

I very much like this translation, though I'm also okay with "eternal life" as opposed to "everlasting life."  The latter is a very mistaken notion.  "Eternal" simply means "timeless" or "outside time" and describes a quality of present existence, not a length of time or an afterlife.   Jurgen Moltmann's discussion of eternal life in In the End, the Beginning: The Life of Faith was instrumental in changing my understanding of term.

 

Trinitarian love

Researching for this week's sermon, I came across this good description of Trinitarian love, which I think helps in responding to feminist and womanist concerns that Christian love has traditionally focused too much on self-sacrifice:

The love among the persons of the Trinity helps us to understand what wondrous love this truly is: concerned about others; not possessive or subordinating, thus allowing genuine space for the other to be; and superabundant, such that it can be offered without reserve. -- David S. Cunningham in Feasting on the Word

The Pizzazz of Creation

Yesterday a question from a congregant drew me back to my 2008 lecture at Wake Forest Divinity School on "The Pizzazz of Creation."  You can listen to a podcast of it here.

I develop a queer theological perspective on diversity and freedom and respond to various ethical issues, including abortion.  Listening to it again yesterday I was pleased with my intellectual work in the lecture.  I wish I got to do more of this.

Male desire for God

Reading in Belden Lane's Ravished by Beauty, I'm in the chapter on the Puritan school of desire.  The Puritans had a very passionate faith, which itself gave rise to their attempts to school and control physical passions, but that did not diminish their use of erotic language to discuss spirituality.  Here is quite an excerpt from the book, and not your normal misperception of Puritanical Calvinism:

Yet Puritan poet Edward Taylor could match [Cavalier poet Thomas Carew] just as readily with his own highly explicit sexual imagery.  He wrote of his heart as a "feather-bed . . . with gospel pillows, sheets, and sweet perfumes," prepared for Christ his lover.  Taylor anticipated union with his Savior through an ecstatic encounter that he admitted might best be compared to the intimate sexual experience of penetration and orgasm.  Asking God to grant the arousal of his spiritual "fancy," the Massachusetts poet prayed, "Yea, with thy holy oil make thou it slick till like a flash of ligthning it grow quick."  Shifting, then, from male to female sexual experience in his search for a language adequate to suggest the heights of rapture, he cried out to God, "O let they lovely streams of love . . . spout their spirits pure/Into my viall, and my vessel fill/With liveliness."

Unless there is something more in the unquoted text, I'm not sure why Lane thinks the final quoted lines represent a shift to female imagery, as they clearly fit within same-sex erotic imagery.  There are such fascinating resources in the Christian tradition.

Transposition of Gender

Reading in Belden Lane's Ravished by Beauty (a book I am really enjoying), I encountered a section on the transposition of gender in Puritan writing.  Here is the open paragraph:

Puritans knew that this process of risking themselves to metaphysical, open-ended desire could lead potentially to the radical transformation of the human person.  One cannot give oneself to sustained reflection on God as spouse or God as revealed in natural beauty without breaking into a rash and poetic language, without being forced into a new identity shaped by the exercise of prolonged desire.  Entry into the spousal and nature imagery of the wisdom tradition in Scripture led the Puritan imagination to a transposition of gender and of species that could be as provocative as it was creative.

I have encountered similar developments in queer theology, in Alien Sex by Gerard Loughlin (where he draws on Patristic sources), in some of the new perspectives on Paul (particularly in the writings of Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Judith M. Bassler).

Lane writes that in Puritan spirituality there was a "gender polymorphousness" that in some ways reinforced and in some ways subverted patriarchy.  The ultimate working out of the theology should be, and pretty much was, a suggestion of something better.

Contemporary 1ueer, particular trans persons, should delight in these gender polymorophous elements of the Christian tradition.

The Necessity of Performative Praise

Reading Belden C. Lane's Ravished by Beauty and enjoyed what I read during lunch today about John Calvin's views on the necessity of performative praise to maintain the created order.  Here are some excerpts from what Lane writes:

The world remain profoundly vulnerable, constantly on the verge of chaos as a result of human sin.

God sustains what he creates by the very act of taking delight in it.

[Calvin] could even say, "If on earth such praise of God does not come to pass . . . then the whole order of nature will be thrown into confusion and creation will be annihilated."  The continuity of the earth rests on the capacity of the created world to participate in the delight that God takes in all God has made.  If God's creation of the universe is not consciously and deliberately celebrated, it remains radically at risk.  From Calvin's perspective, then, what we call ecological viability depends upon the exercise of praise.  The world is sustained by worship.

If the idea is that praise and worship propitiates God in some way, and, therefore, God sustains the world in existence, then I don't like that idea.  God isn't that needy and childish.

But what I do like are the ecological implications of this idea.  When we mistreat creation, rather than delighting in it or joining with it in praise and celebration, then we put the created order itself and God's work at risk.  That idea will preach in 2012.

Triune Atonement: Christ's Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation

Triune Atonement: Christ's Healing for Sinners, Victims, and the Whole Creation by Andrew Sung Park
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a good, concise survey of atonement theory. The first part succinctly surveys the historical options, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each model. Then Park presents his own views. I found it a helpful summary of many of the key points that any contemporary atonement theory will need to consider.

He developed his atonement theory in relation to the Korean concept of han. I've seen this done before, and continue to find it helpful. He also emphasized the importance of the atonement for the entire creation, including animals, which is not something one often sees.

His unique contribution is his discussion of the Paraclete and the role of the Holy Spirit in continuing the atoning work of God and Jesus. He describes the Paraclete as the wounded healer who has experienced the pain of the cross. That is a fantastic idea which I have never encountered before. It will give me great insights into preaching the Holy Spirit in the future.

I wish I had seen this quote for our Lenten "Tend the Soil" theme at church: "We are of soil. When we sin, the soil is polluted. When soil is polluted, we are polluted too."

My high school Sunday school teacher taught me that salvation is not "fire insurance." Park has a few quips similar to that: "Salvation is not a Hawaiian vacation" and "Salvation is not a futuristic ego trip."

Last week I wrote most of the study guide for our upcoming atonement class at church. Yesterday I was putting some finishing touches (I thought) on it, when I realized that I want to restructure the entire thing. Glad I've been working on this well ahead of time.

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Red Lighting Bolt

On Palm Sunday I included in my sermon my story of the Cooper Site and the red lightning bolt painted on the skull of a bison.  This is the oldest work of pained art in North America, around 10,000 years old.  I first learned of the find and visited the site in 2007.  The skull itself is at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman.

That week, while working on the sermon, I was googling to find out more and discovered the book by the lead archaeologist.  I ordered it and have begun reading it.  The Foreward by Solveig Turpin adds to the spiritual and theological reflection of the lightning bolt:

The lighntning bolt blazened on the bleached and dried bone of an earlier kills is a talisman that has ethnographic analogs among the more recent Plains dwellers who use magic to lure bison to their death.  Red ochre, the paint of choice, has magic connotations; bones are essential elements in resurrection themes in hunting and gathering belief systems of the present and the past; and geometric signs are often a symbolic representation of trance, another basic principle in animistic religions.  This simple design gains meaning from its context, which in turn legitimizes the concept of hunting magic and its role in economic and social success.