Glenn Beck and Social Justice

If you haven't heard about Glenn Beck urging his listeners to leave their church if the church's website mentions "social justice" in a positive light, you can read about it here.

Much has been made about his statements, and in response, I found myself getting into an interesting discussion of the topic on everybody's favorite social network. I feel pretty good about one of my responses, and have deemed it blogworthy. So here is my response to a friend, and maybe you, if you share a bit of Beck's skepticism about "social justice."

Thanks for the thoughts!

I agree that the term "social justice" can embody a lot of different beliefs, many of which contradict the Bible, or at least a reasonable interpretation of it.

When the church talks about justice, I'd rather use a descriptor like "Biblical justice", but even in adjusting the language, the social implications of the pursuit of Biblical justice are numerous and unavoidable. So a balance must be maintained. Pursuit of social justice without Biblical reflection can spiral into mere humanistic liberalism.

BUT, there are many, many, great churches out there that consist of many, many Godly people, who do have a strong emphasis on Biblically rooted social justice pursuits, and are not bothered by using the term social justice to describe what they do. One of my heroes of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, Jr., would not have been emboldened to pursue nonviolent resistance to a segregated America were it not for his strong vision of the Kingdom of God characterized primarily by love and justice with all their infinitely social implications. Catholic Social Teaching, one of the strongest components of the Catholic Church, is committed to a pursuit of social justice that is ardently on the side of the poor, radically pro-life, and attempts to embody the Gospel in all its many-sided compelling beauty.

So I hope we won't throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is a personal choice whether or not to align oneself with a church that is comfortable with self-identifying with the term "social justice," some of which are committed to a Christ-shaped Gospel commitment, and some of which are teetering on the brink of the aforementioned humanistic liberalism.

But Mr. Beck's exhortation for his listeners to see the use of the term itself as not only a red flag and a place to raise questions, but a reason to leave your church is...well...overstated, to say the least. It demonizes a whole category of churches, and in the process attempts to eliminate the need for discernment by making up our minds for us.

And I do think that if we take his words at face value, they are undeniably a play on the fears of his listeners: fears of liberalism, socialism, and even communism and Nazism. These are genuine fears, but exploiting those fears with church people from a political bully pulpit is something that I don't appreciate as a pastor. And I pray that these words don't come across as from my very tall religious bully pulpit :)

Emotions Matter

In the times leading up to and immediately after a political election, emotions swirl about at every turn. Conversations seem more heated, people seem on edge, and in many cases, we show sides of ourselves normally kept under wraps. People who normally seem diplomatic, passive, or even spineless are suddenly revealed to be aggressive and emotionally invested.

[Below see me exhibiting emotion...with a massive beard.]

I've found that being attentive in these times is a valuable practice. We may feel awkward because of the heightened emotion, but we also experience ourselves and others in different and perhaps more authentic ways. A common mantra of the last week has been one of relief: I'm sure glad the election's over. I'm sure glad the election's over. I'm sure glad the election's over. But is this because after fulfilling our civic duties, we give ourselves permission to just go to sleep?
Perhaps we need to hold onto some of our election time passion. Now I admit that some turn completely pompous at election time. Some use it as an excuse to pick fights and sling mud around. I'm not advocating for these things.

What I do advocate for something particular which comes out of a climate in which we cannot help but feel something. Even the most raging of moderates have strong emotional responses either for or against the grossly exaggerated political language of election time and the reality is that citizens actually have something concrete to offer the process and the conversation. The combination of "state of emergency" rhetoric and an empowered people is explosive.

What I'm trying to do right now, and what I hope we will do together as a community and in the church, is to pay attention to those strong emotions we felt during this election. What made our blood boil? I think it's hugely important to talk through these things, because they say a lot about who we are as a person. Those things that hit our gut say more about our identity than the processed logic that often ends up coming out of our mouths after we've toned it down. What made your heart soar? What made you want to throw stuff at your TV?

Do we have safe places where we can be honest about these emotional responses? I'm not talking about places where everyone agrees with us, either. We need people willing to offer alternative interpretations of our emotional responses. If we do, I think we'll find that our common humanity is more common than we realize. Look behind our dogmatic interpretations and allegiances to the parties and the issues, and we find that we all have histories, relationships and experiences that made us who we are.

And in identifying the history and the experience which has made us so passionate, we just might be able to begin letting go of the idea that our particular vision of how to "fix it" is the only way to go. And maybe we'll come out of it with a greater understanding of our own identity, and who God has created us to be. I think it's a decent place to start.

Eco-Theology 3

My third point is that many Christians simply do not take seriously the ecological implications of their theology.

This can start to look a lot like the first reason, but the difference is that rather than not seeing the connections between the different aspects of their theology, these people fail to see the impact what they believe theologically has on their lives at all. This is the saddest, and perhaps one of the most common deficiencies in today’s churches. What is learned in church is something that is perceived as “good for us” and “good for our kids” but has little effect on how life is lived. Put simply, these people have theological systems in their minds which are largely disconnected from their hearts. Therefore, an intellectual assent to a very orthodox theology which should lead to a very ecologically friendly lifestyle is given the backseat to convenience or fear.

Let's look at a hypothetical situation in the church. A leader of a trustee committee is gung ho about adding a bunch of new parking and plowing down some forest which contains rare foliage and is the habitat for many local animals. This trustee thinks that in order to spread the gospel, we take a "whatever is necessary" approach. There may very well be other trustees in the room who disagree with his assessment, but refuse to speak up because this guy is a respected member of the church.

Or because their business training tells them that it is good business for the church to have more parking spaces for growth.

Or because they are afraid that they cannot articulate their argument coherently, and do not want to be embarrassed by this respected leader in front of all the other trustees.

But they should.

And I hope they do. The gospel means more than just getting people into the doors of the church. A gospel lived well in the church community might just mean that this congregation sacrifices the parking spots as an act of living out gospel principles.

My three "possible objections" are by no means the only three reasons people don't take eco-theology seriously. I just tried to come up with a few primary ones to get the discussion going.

I'll post one more wrap-up for this series in the next week or so with some suggestions for moving forward and hopefully some helpful contributions to the discussion of eco-theology.

Living Jesus

So as the semester is approaching on Monday, I have decided to get a bit of a headstart on reading. I know once classes start, it's gonna be a whirlwind, so I'm at least introducing myself to some of my books.

I've started working on a couple books for my Christology class. I was excited for the class to begin with, but after beginning the readings, I'm even more excited. The first book we have been assigned is Living Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson, and it is right up my alley. The basis premise is that in our quest to learn Jesus, we have, for the last 100 years anyway, begun with the wrong question. Before we get into historical method and source/redaction/form criticism, we need to ask a far more basic question; "Is Jesus alive or dead?"

Johnson argues that if Jesus is alive, as so many of us confess, then we ought not treat him as a historical (dead) figure when trying to learn about him. Rather, we take what we know of who Jesus is through the eyewitness accounts of his disciples and friends, continued over the past 2000 years through the work of the Holy Spirit in his church, also combined with our own experience of Christ in the context of the church, and now we're closer to being able to learn Jesus.

The whole historical Jesus quest always struck me as odd, and Johnson has put some solid feet on that which was only an inkling in my relatively uneducated mind. I'm also beginning to read Jurgen Moltmann's The Way of Jesus Christ, and in his prologue, he explains that he named the book what he did just because Jesus is so dynamic, and cannot be nailed down as "known" in some static sort of way. Jesus is always known in a dynamic relationship, not as a static, distant historical figure. So I'm getting the same sort of approach from two different angles, and I feel theologically energized by it.

Dear God, what have I become? I just used the term "theologically energized." Oh yeah, I became a seminary student again. My fellow nerds and I will retire to the nerdery with our Greek lexicons.

Church and Culture, Part 2

One of my dearest friends, affectionately known as Gus, wrote the following in response to my first post on Church and Culture. (Note: Gus generally does use his shift key occasionally, but neglected said key due to the informal nature of the blog comment). I found it to be quite well put.

"the thing i think we need to learn to do is to learn to see truth and beauty everywhere it exists (as you suggest) and then re-learn to see the beauty of the gospel...not just a vitamin-fortified cure for what ails you, but a sweeter song than is actually possible to sing apart from this amazing life in God...then as we readily look for truth and beauty we can sing this sweeter song as we live in the midst of other people's lives...I just dont think we know how to recapture the beauty of the gospel, so it still seems lame, trite and out of touch with the truly "profound"...if the gospel is not more beautiful than anything else, I am not sure I want it"

I don't really need to expound on this a lot, but I want to dive further into the idea of the beauty of the gospel "live[d] in the midst of other people's lives." It harkens in my mind the metaphor laid out by Rob Bell in NOOMA Rhythm / 011. Bell's thesis is basically that many of us have a far too distant view of God, as if he's somewhere else and intervenes occasionally. As a corrective, he invites us to look at life as a beautiful piece of music that God is putting together, and we all can live in tune with this great music when we live in the story of the gospel of redemption, when we live in tune with God's score.

Whenever I watch the film, it always challenges me to think that if I am truly living in tune with the "sweeter song," which reflects God's glory perfectly, that my life and the life shared by my community (church) would actually be attractive, exciting, sweet and beautiful.

I mean, if God really knows what he's doing, then if we follow him right, our lives will be the best lives possible. We'll be blessing as many other people as possible, loving as much as possible, seeing beauty everywhere possible and knowing its source. It does not diminish the fact that the call to discipleship is a hard one, wrought with sacrifice and tough calls, but if we truly believe that making these tough sacrifices is exactly what God desires of us, then won't our lives be better on the other side of that decision?

Perhaps if we are able to stop being paralyzed by fear, to truly live out the liberation that is proclaimed by the Gospel we profess, then we will be part of a song whose beauty nobody can deny. It is not a song invented by the mind of one great genius, but the sound of thousands upon thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand singing the same song, each of us using our creativity within the structure of the greater piece of music.

What this looks like practically will be addressed in the near future, but in the meantime, let's play the song together.


[Also, see thoughts from David Fitch on this exact same topic, including plans for a forthcoming post on Kevin Vanhoozer's book on the topic of the Church and cultural engagement]

Church and Culture

I have some thoughts ruminating in my head about the church and cultural engagement.

Last night I was talking to a group of guys, and we had been talking about testimonies and life stories and all that, and one of the guys told a testimony story he had read somewhere (he couldn't remember exactly where). The story goes that a man was walking past a church one day and heard the music of the song "Cocaine" by Eric Clapton blasting out of the church. Being a huge fan of the song, he decided to enter and see what it was all about. It turns out that the church had put Christian lyrics to the song and were singing it as a congregation. The man ended up becoming involved in the church, and he said that he would never have set foot in the church had it not been for "Cocaine." As my friend recalled, the spin the man had put on the story was that the church needs to engage culture more, and his story was a glowing testimony to the possibilities that stem from that.

Before I critique, I want to make clear that I am all about the church engaging culture. My critique comes from the how and with what purpose aspect of this idea.

Here's what I've been ruminating on. I think that to a large extent, some fairly large sections of church are engaging culture in just this way much more than ten years ago (at least in my experience). I know less and less Christians who only listen to Christian music and shop at Christian bookstores and wear tons of Christian t-shirts. There has been so much valid critique of Christian subculture that a lot of people are taking notice.

But I wonder if our unplugging from a Christian subculture and engaging the media of the broader culture is actually achieving some of its supposed purposes. One of the purposes of being attuned to broader culture is so that the church can engage in conversation and exchange stories with people outside the church. It is one of many ways to make a common human connection with people who, for various reasons, would not tend to darken the doorway of a church, or even interact with a Christian for that matter. I know that this sounds like a manipulative and utilitarian view of art and media, which I do not necessarily agree with, but acknowledge that this is a very real motive for many Christians to "get involved in the secular world", and therefore want to address whether it is actually happening.

Here's what I see happening. Christians broaden their own horizons and begin to see truth in the art of the world. They see that Christians don't have the corner market on all truth, and find God and truth at work in the art of people who are not professed Christians. These same Christians adopt the phrase "all truth is God's truth" as a mantra, and their lives are enriched, and so they talk to their friends, who happen to also be Christians, and introduce them to this liberating idea.

Yet rarely do they use this newfound love for all things beautiful (not just all things labeled Christian) to connect with the people they believe so desperately need to know the triune God to whom all truth and beauty points. I guess what I'm saying is that I see the church being enriched by this bursting from the box of Christian subculture, but when it's not coupled by a missional emphasis, it still only blesses the church.

When our overall approach to the church is to bless ourselves and not the world, then it doesn't matter how connected we are to this culture.

If salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? Listening to Arcade Fire, no matter how great that may be, won't do the trick. What do you think?