I said something to the effect that I think one of the biggest challenges (because I don’t think there is one biggest challenge) is how we as the church will, and should, engage the web. As more of life moves into digital spaces, there will be areas we need to challenge and offer alternatives to, and there will also be areas where the web, and its effects on us, can improve our theology and spirituality. This will happen in ways at least as profound as it did in the aftermath of the printing press.

Now, I don’t know if you’re like me, but whenever I say something that might be heard by a number of folks, whether it is teaching a group of people, or calling into a podcast hotline, I tend to go over what I said later. For a little while after, I think about the words that I used, how they might be taken, how they might be mistaken, and what I could have said differently.

With this, I thought about it for a little while, but then a couple of days later I started to think about it again when I saw a completely unrelated tweet about how the web is “seeping into other places.”¹ That took my mind back a bit further to a quote from Jeffrey Veen, one of the web’s masterminds, who was speaking at a conference:

quotable @veen: “The web is spilling out into the real world… so let’s not fuck it up.”

Quoted by @davemcclure

This is one of those statements that won’t leave my mind, even though the tweet that quotes it was posted in March, far longer than the lifespan of most tweets. So in light of that, I want to continue my thoughts on how the web is one of the biggest challenges facing us.

The web is spilling into religion at least as much as religion is spilling onto the web, and we have barely begun the theological, spiritual, and overall cultural reflection that is necessary to understand those implications.² I want us to think about what this means, when we need to respond (because certainly we don’t always need to say something) and what our response should be when we do.

Specific issues for examination

From my perspective, there are a number of specific issues we can think about – and there will continue to be more – but I want to mention some of these.

Theological work

The leading folks in web and user experience design are working on many of the ways the web is spilling out into the real world. Some of them are now designing the experiences of physical spaces as often as they are the experiences of web spaces. Others are working to design web experiences that reach into physical space to make it better, or to help us retrieve valuable cultural modes we have lost in the modern age that again are viable for us.

Still others are working to design web experiences that bring physical things onto the web, or that blur the boundaries so that the web is more an extension than it is a distraction. These things, as far as I can tell, are some of the things Mr. Veen was thinking about. We can do these things well, or we can do them badly.

Theology itself can be affected by, and can affect, the web in these same ways. It will be a beautiful thing to start to see how this works, and I’m hoping to be one of the folks involved in this. It will give us new ways to think about God, and I don’t think we’ve even begun to see how much. But again, we could do it well or we could do it badly. We will probably do both in different areas, and we will need to be aware of which is happening.

More dramatically, maybe, are the ways the web will affect the church and the ways we think theologically about it. We’ve seen people start to observe these shifts in small ways, I think, but too often these observations look specifically at Facebook, for example, (I don’t fault the church or theologians for this, as the business world is the same way) instead of looking at a broader perspective of what the internet actually means.³ The ways we create new faith communities are already being affected by the web, and the more we observe and think critically about this, the more this will be able to happen in positive ways.

We’ll be able to (as we were before) create faith communities where we can avoid nuance, as this often happens on the web. But this is not the nature of the web, and we don’t have to design things that way. We can instead learn from the real, beautiful networks that are created as we design communities.

Life in the Spirit

I’m also increasingly convinced that the very ways we interact with the Spirit of God will be affected by the web, in good and bad ways.

The web is a place of “maybe.” There are few ideas that, if they can exist online, have no chance of success. In a negative sense, this is why it becomes easy for folks to put online communities on pedestals they don’t deserve, but in a positive sense it gives us unique ways to learn, connect, and exercise hope. This is always a good thing, but on a deeper level I think it can give us metaphors for thinking about the possibilities of God’s activity in the world and our relation to it. Not perfect metaphors, but valuable metaphors.

Justice work

Maybe the hardest thing for us to think about is how the web will affect the poor and oppressed among us, and what the church needs to know and do about this. The reason it’s so hard is because when we’re online, doing this kind of thinking, at this point the poor and oppressed are often not with us.

One beautiful exception to this is the relationships that are being built with the LGBT brothers and sisters that are among us, and taking part in our conversations online. They are helping us understand their struggles and advocate for them when we can, and this is powerful. To an extent, there are also exceptions as we can hear the voices of people of color, whether they are discussing racism in America or freedom in Egypt, and this is an equally powerful thing.

But as a rule, those who are poor and oppressed too often do not have access to our conversations and our relationships online because they are not online. Internet access is still prohibitive in many parts of America, and in many parts of the world.

Make no mistake – this is changing at a rapid rate, and it will continue to change. As it does, I’m hopeful that we will build the same kind of powerful relationships with these brothers and sisters, and that we will walk together toward our mutual liberation.

But this is also a place where the web could spill out in bad ways. It brings to mind yet another old tweet that I saved:

Today we treat being online as a sign of wealth. One day we will consider the freedom to be offline the same way.

@fernandogros

It’s somewhat possible that the web will become integrated into our lives enough, economically especially, without reaching into the real world in the positive ways that we can hope for. If it does, it may be that we’ll be spending our leisure time looking for ways to disconnect. Pilgrimages to offline places, and times of re-integrating with the physical world.

If that happens, it will again be the poor and oppressed who are affected most by this, as they will be the ones without the resources to make that disconnection happen.

This will be a space where the church must respond. We must provide space for people that, regardless of whether our optimistic dreams for the web’s engagement with the physical world come to pass and regardless of whether they have the luxuries to sequester themselves in the physical world from time to time, allow them to meet the embodied God, and live in embodied, mutual liberation.

What’s next?

This is only an initial set of thoughts, sparked by a question on a podcast and a tweet from a conference that I didn’t attend, and another tweet from a man across the world. But I hope you can see the importance of this conversation. The web is spilling out into the real world, and I think we in Emergent, specifically, have a lot of opportunities to shape the way we do things in light of this. I’m hopeful that we can be led to do it well.

1. The article it referenced is about how the web is expanding beyond the browser into mobile apps, tablets, and dedicated reading services like Readability, among other things.
2. Too many folks are running around telling us about how Google Makes Us Stupid, on one side, or The Internet Is My Religion on another side, and there isn’t much nuance. It is important to note that John Dyer, a web developer in Dallas, is releasing a book called From the Garden to the City that, to me, shows promise for doing that. I also think The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture from Shane Hipps, released in 2006, was a good effort as well. But again, we have barely begun.
3. A great start, I thought, was Thy Kingdom Connected from Dwight Friesen. From my own perspective, I recently reflected on user experience design and ecclesiology, as I think this is a fascinating place where we can learn a lot of things.

Beyond that, though, the whole thing makes me think back a little to earlier days of my journey as a follower of Jesus, in the first year or two as a Pentecostal in high school. Back then (1998 through early 2001, tapering off after that when I went to college) there was a lot of talk about the rapture in the circles where I ran. I read books and Study Bibles about it, knew dispensationalist theology fairly well, and in general lived under the assumption that the rapture could happen at any time.

I don’t remember ever speculating on when it would happen, or being concerned about when it would happen; I just assumed that it was there on the horizon because the people around me did, and I trusted their theology. Pentecostals saw it as a reason to pursue revival, hoping for the church to become a more Spirit-imbued body, ready to go with Jesus when he returned. I found that compelling because I wanted those kind of experiences. As an important sidenote, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the current rapture-seekers have anything to do with Pentecostalism.

Now, this expectation has been a hallmark of Pentecostalism since it started in 1906, though it has had its ebbs and flows as it has in every other movement. I’m aware of this, though by the time I reached college it was (at least in scholarly circles) acceptable to leave those doctrines behind. I’m thankful for this, but at the moment I’m interested in thinking about why it was ever such a big deal in the movement.

As I’ve said before, I’m not really a Pentecostal these days. I still pray in tongues, still seek the presence of the Spirit, still believe in miracles, and so on – so it’s not that I’ve abandoned Pentecostalism, but I can no longer deal with the ecclesiology or the theological and political ideas that usually accompany the movement, and this makes me something of an ecclesial vagabond. All well and good.

Anyway. One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Pentecostalism is that during the fundamentalist/liberal battles of the early 20th century when the movement was still developing, it went with the fundamentalists. Fundamentalism was deeply antithetical to Pentecostalism in its own theology, but Pentecostals overwhelmingly adapted the non-directly-related tenets of fundamentalist theology in their interpretation of the Bible, and eventually in things like politics.

I don’t necessarily blame them for this, as I don’t think either choice was a good one back then, but it is saddening. I wish they had been able to create a third way that didn’t succumb to liberalism or fundamentalism, and there are several reasons that I think this could have been the case (but it’s really hard to create a third way).

One of the core tenets of Pentecostalism is that God is active in the world in supernatural ways. How this manifests itself in doctrine has varied through the years and in the different tribes, but this wonderful belief has always been true. It has also always been the way Pentecostalism has viewed the Bible, and this (among other things) has led the movement to believe the Bible has, and has always had, something direct that the Spirit wants to say to its readers.

Back to eschatology. I think one of the deepest failures of dispensationalism is that it rests on the oft-unspoken and unrealized assumption that all of the Bible’s prophetic or apocalyptic language is irrelevant to the foreseeable context of its original readers. Thus, this is one of the damaging things about Pentecostalism’s embrace of early 20th-century fundamentalist biblical theology: while we’ve assumed that the book of Acts was a Spirit-inspired narrative of how the early church functioned and is relevant to how we should function today (which is one of the huge differences from that fundamentalism), we have not assumed that first-century eschatology was relevant to that same early church, but rather that it was written for us only, two thousand years after those folks lived in the same Spirit we seek.

The realization that prophetic language was primarily relevant to its original hearers is one of the greatest insights of people like N. T. Wright, Andrew Perriman, and others who have written more wisely on eschatology. While they all have different perspectives on what ways such language is relevant to us, the fact that they agree upon its primary relevance to its original hearers is a powerful thing for that relevance. It utterly changes the way we have to think about political theology (as much of this language is anti-Empire), ethics (as much of it is metaphorical), and of course how we think about eschatology in our own age.

Coming from a Pentecostal (post-Pentecostal?) perspective, I want to say that this fits better with Pentecostalism than dispensationalism does, because this is how we’ve treated our engagement with Acts. I think it fits other traditions (Anabaptism, of course, but many others as well) much better too, which is why I think it’s worth writing about. I’ve taught for years that any time we try to make definitive statements about how eschatology manifests itself in our own age, we’re on dangerous ground and shouldn’t be trusted.

My plea is for all of us to stop worrying about when the rapture (or whatever other event you like) is coming, because there’s no reason to assume such language is literal, and even less reason to assume that it’s about us. It makes us look stupid, makes our priorities antithetical to those of Scripture’s authors, and does irreparable damage to people who structure their lives around those assumptions when they turn out to be wrong.

Likewise, one of the things I love most about being a designer is user experience. It gradually came into my life, initially through A List Apart, and then through UX Week three years ago. But since then, it has increasingly become a passion of mine to create designs (as a visual designer and a developer) that improve the lives of real people, as this is what it means to me. UX Week, as well as other conferences, books, in-person conversations, and countless bloggers and Twitter folks have given me ways to think about that and practice it in what I hope are significant ways. I’m deeply grateful.

The other day, I was sitting with dear people at our faith community exploring the next stages of our own place. We were dealing with some complex data, and needed to start to figure out what the voice of God and our community was inside that data. In doing this, we had some seminarians, an accounting-type, a city planner, and me, and I felt this was a beautiful mixture.

As I looked at the things before us, it felt like user experience design had a great deal of things to say to us, and that the disciplines that we practice as designers could, along with the other disciplines, help us as a faith community to ask the right questions and create the right structures from our data. We then hoped to present these things to our community, and ask them to seek the voice of God for themselves and our community to see where it would lead.

I still think this, and I think we were able to get to the right places, but I wasn’t able to articulate what I wanted to bring from user experience design into our conversation. Realizing that, especially in light of my own feeling that one of the places that inspires my life is the intersection of design and faith, made me want to think about how to articulate it.¹

People at the heart

At the core of user experience are the users who experience the design. This is exemplified in visual design, product design, content strategy, (even sometimes in programming) and all the other areas where folks work to make things people like to use. The beautiful thing about this is that it often really does try to make people’s lives better while creating something they like to use. User experience has had a few years to think about activism. Many of its leaders are concerned about making the world a better place, and I think this is because they’ve learned to think about people as more than consumers. If the field realizes (even some of) its potential, it will affect all of us in ways we can’t yet imagine.

Ecclesiology does not (exclusively) have people at the heart of its thinking. Ideally, it has God at the heart of its thinking (though this is not at all a given). But missional ecclesiology (and others, over the years) has what God is doing in the world among the people that he loves at the heart of its thinking. It seeks to involve people in experience of, and pursuit of, the kingdom of God. Again, it thinks of them as more than consumers, and this is a deep shift that cannot be overestimated.

How we figure out what God is doing among people, and how to go with them toward the kingdom of God, can be deeply impacted by the disciplines of user experience. We can’t know what God is doing among people until we know them and find out from them, and this is one of the most important things good design can teach us to do.

Helping people to do more than consume

At its best, good design helps people to do things more than it helps them to consume things. It does involve consumption, as does any part of our economy, but this is not where it thrives. It thrives in helping people to do things. Google, Twitter, and Apple, to name a few, all do this. They give us things they want us to consume, but they also give us deep opportunities to do things in the world, whether it be learning to organize information or catalyze deep cultural change or create entirely new ways for us to do what we already need to do, or even simply to look at the world as a bigger place (all three of these companies do all of these things).

The church, as well, exists to help people do more than consume things. It typically just wants people to come in, consume religious goods and services, and then pay some money for them, but this is not where it thrives or where it is called to be. Inviting people into the kingdom of God means is inviting them into something that is far bigger than they are, and giving them opportunities to do something there.

Usable

I put this last, as I think it can be the easiest to misunderstand. Good design always creates things that real people can really use. Things that are unusable make it harder to do things, whether they’re beautiful things that change the world or stupid things that numb us into thinking there is meaning where there is none.

This doesn’t mean it has to be simple, though simplicity is a wonderful thing that most designs could use a lot more of. It means that the design should be as simple as it needs to be in order to be used and experienced properly. If we’ve added complexity for complexity’s sake that makes people frustrated, confused, or unable to do what they want, we’ve designed badly. But if we’ve been simple for simplicity’s sake and neglected features that are necessary, we’ve still designed badly.

This could lead us, again, to think of the seeker-sensitive church. And it’s true, they’ve done a great job at making usable things. One could walk into any megachurch in any suburb, and know exactly where to go, what to do, and what to expect next if it wasn’t the first time.

But can you imagine walking into one of those for the first time, without prior experience of Christendom? If you can, or if you’ve ever been involved in planning for one of them, you’ll know that the last thing they are is simple, and often they are simply not usable. And this is the question for us who seek to form communities for post-Christendom: how do we make our communities usable? How do they allow people to be invited into the kingdom of God without the equivalent of things that are not links but look like links, things that are links but don’t look like them, and forms that ask us questions that don’t make any sense (to name a few)?

Toward a user experience ecclesiology

In designing these communities, we in more missional settings typically have the freedom to be more organic and shape things as we go, but my argument is that we can consider these disciplines that allow us to think about how people will actually experience what we create.

This will lead us to ask questions that we wouldn’t otherwise ask, of ourselves as shapers of community, of others who join us, and further (as people who would at least like to be incarnational types) of the people around us who are not yet part of our communities. We’ll need to think about how to see people as deeply equal participants rather than consumers, how to help them see themselves that way as part of something huge, and also how to make our simplicity deep enough and our complexity understandable enough to reach into real lives.

We need to think about ecclesiology in a number of other disciplines as well, and they’ll all have deeply valuable things to contribute as well, but design can be one that gives structure to the stories we’re telling.

1. Initially, I thought a direct parallel of user experience design and ecclesiology would lead us to the seeker-sensitive church of the last century, most exemplified by Rick Warren’s Saddleback. I remember reading the story of his development of that church, and while I don’t have any interest in that model there was good content in there. But of course, it’s thoroughly an attractional model. Personas were created of the citizens of Orange County, and then programs were created to attract those folks. It has worked well for them of course, and that’s fine, but it’s not the kind of missional community that we have sought to create and be a part of.

There have been a number of really awful, and really beautiful, blog posts and reviews and tweets and whatever else people have decided to say. Probably far more than I’ve ever seen about a book that hadn’t even been released, and of which the vast majority of commentators had read little or nothing. It’s really… depressing, if you sit down and think about it.

But at the moment, I’m not as interested in the book. I’m interested in the event that was streamed last night, and specifically in some of the questions that Rob Bell was asked, and the ways he answered them.

As you may know, the web is often not the most nuanced of environments. One reason is that America is not the most nuanced of environments, especially in these hyper-polarized days. Another, related reason is how easy it is to live in an echo chamber in which you say things to people who agree with you, and they repeat them back to you, and occasionally you argue with people who disagree with you while making the people who agree with you agree with you more than they did before. Yes, it makes about that much sense.¹

It is also true, however, that the lack of nuance on the web is far from limited to the web. It is just magnified there. Even those of us who are admitted postmoderns, skeptical of metanarratives and of claims to know absolute truth about things (you’ll remember that the existence of absolute truth is not being questioned; just the claims to know it absolutely); who you might think would maintain nuance better than some, often fail to do so. We fail to hold conflicting ideas in tension, and let them stay there, if one side disagrees with what we’ve already decided is true.

I do it. You probably do it. I see it done on a daily basis. And I think this is a bad thing. Not always, and not in every issue. Some things are not nuanced. But many things are. Many things do deserve to be held in tension.

And this is why I was so pleased during Rob Bell’s event by several of his responses: he was talking about a deeply divisive issue (hell) on which everyone can find someone to disagree with, it was being streamed on the web, and yet he kept the ability, and repeatedly stated his case, for conflicting ideas being held in tension.

Case in point: there’s a question someone in the audience asks at around one hour into the video. It’s a very good question, especially in context of other questions the interviewer asked (I’m paraphrasing here in the question and the answer).

Question:

It seems like universalists are trying to reconcile God’s love with God’s wrath. But can God be both loving and just?

Answer:

Yes. There’s a human longing and desire for God to fix the world, essentially. To say no more greed, no more exploitation of the weak and vulnerable. We can’t have that here… you can’t do that here. Out. You also have this, side-by-side, God’s endless affirmation: God wants everyone to be saved. All peoples will be at the banquet. You have this longing, and a longing for justice, and they sit side by side.

The Western, modern mind loves “are you this or that?” Are you left/right, conservative/liberal. But the Hebrew, biblical mind is okay with both of these being true.

At the end of Revelation is a renewed, restored city where the dwelling of God is with people.. and there are people who are not in it. They are outside. And there’s a gate in the city, but it never shuts. What? This doesn’t get resolved, and it just sits there, and it’s important that we let it sit there.²

Do you see how different that is than most of our conversations around this?

There has been a conversation around hell since the church began, with people on both sides being considered orthodox, and people on both sides being considered heretics (often for reasons unrelated to their beliefs on this). The reason for this is that the Bible isn’t clear. It holds a tension, and if your beliefs stand on one side you will interpret certain passages in certain ways and have to do hermeneutic tricks to get past other passages, and vice versa. This is okay.

There are folks who recognize this, and say “I believe _____ because of these passages, and I realize I have to interpret these other passages in light of these,” but there aren’t too many who will admit that. Most say “I believe ____.” Most people, on both sides of this discussion, think we don’t need to be having the discussion anymore. Liberals because many of them have been universalists, or conditionalists, or some other thing for many decades, and because they have embraced specific methods of interpreting the Bible which they think are clear. Conservatives because they also have embraced specific methods of interpreting the Bible which they think are clear, and they think all orthodox Christians have always been exclusivists (which isn’t true, of course). Far fewer people are willing to say, “I don’t know,” which I think is a far better answer.

I’m of the opinion that we need to have the discussion about hell even now, in 2011, because so few of any tribe hold it with any tension. Karl Barth did, on the (somewhat) liberal side, and C. S. Lewis did, on the (somewhat) conservative side (in Mere Christianity), and they are often used as evidence that the discussion is old, which is true. But most who followed after them have not held tension well. So I’m happy that Rob Bell does, happy that he’s continuing the discussion (whatever specific conclusions he actually comes to, which most of us still don’t know as we haven’t read the whole book), and happy that he did it on the internet.

1. This is why the web is of questionable benefit for discussion about certain things. When it happens well, it happens really well, and it happens because someone has intentionally designed an environment for it. Yes. Designed. I believe this can become an important task for user experience designers.
2. Psalm 22 and Revelation 22 are where he’s getting these thoughts.

Recently, I read his last presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, given in 1967 in Atlanta, and I’ve found it to be possibly the most meaningful thing I’ve read in this volume. The radical nature of what King is saying combines with the relevance that all of it still has today, and indeed the fact that many of the issues he raises are worse today than they were then. I couldn’t find any audio or video to link to, I’d love to encourage all of you to read it here, in its fullness.

This should cause all of us who dream of better economic, political, and cultural systems to pause and see where his brilliant imagination was going these few months before his death. I’m not interested in the conspiracy theories here (though I think many of them are very likely true), but I am interested in how much of a threat King was, and remains, to the status quo.

The issue that I find myself more and more annoyed by, each year that I learn more about this man and his message, is that American cultural discourse has watered it down so much that we call it a “Day of Service” when we celebrate his birthday (not that he’d be against service, but that it is so much less than he did stand for), and randomly use him to justify violence and oppression and political stances that are antithetical to his own. People like to quote sections of his speeches that make us feel good about being Americans and all the things we do, and ignore the rest of what he had to say. The extent to which The King Center did not allow this was compelling to me, and I feel a responsibility to spread his words as well, in the hopes that his message will stand as it is.

Where do we go from here?

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
16 August 1967

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, 75 percent hold menial jobs.

This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Depiction of Blackness and Negro Contributions

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least 60 of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a “black sheep.” Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child 60 ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.

The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and to strip him of his personhood, is as old as the earliest history hooks and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper. To upset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation or Johnsonian Civil Rights Bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation. And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history. How painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black and I’m beautiful,” and this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

Basic Challenges

Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in terms of economic and political power. No one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From old plantations of the South to newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of this white power structure. The plantation and ghetto were created by those who had power. both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power — confrontation of the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like the U.A.W. to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on. What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.

This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Developing a Program?

We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s ability and talents. And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In I879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by the taskmaster, or by animal necessity. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes who have a double disability will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is eliminated .

Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

Commitment To Nonviolence

Now, let me say briefly that we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with their causes. Today I want to give the other side. There is certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can even see a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the Army to call on — all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people.

It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves. This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer and explanations that don’t explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country. And the other thing is that I am concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice. I’m concerned about brotherhood. I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can’t murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here,” that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?” These are questions that must be asked.

About Communism

Now, don’t think that you have me in a “bind” today. I’m not talking about Communism.

What I’m saying to you this morning is that Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the Kingdom of Brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of Communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit — One night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down in the kind of isolated approach of what he shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” HE didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic — that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

He said, in other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them — make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”

Conclusion

So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality, integrated education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!” — when nobody will shout “Black Power!” — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil-rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way

That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last

Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

In these thoughts, I’m coming from a specifically white and American context. I’m confident that the civil religion of this context is practiced, to some extent, by most people in that context whether they choose it, have positive feelings about it, or are aware of it at all. I’m even more confident that this civil religion is not synonymous with Christianity, even though most people, whether they are people of faith or not, see the two as the same.

Wikipedia has a useful article on civil religion, and though there are volumes written about it from a theological, political, or sociological framework this is as good a place to start as any. In its simplest sense, a civil religion is a set of beliefs that are embraced, practiced, and yet not official, in a country that doesn’t have its own established religion. It is primarily used to promote the interests of the State by getting its citizens to feel like those interests have virtues above and beyond politics or economics or whatever.

I’m not interested in saying that countries shouldn’t have civil religions. I don’t care either way. My issue is with the syncretism that most American Christians practice, and I want to expose this when possible and examine ways that we can get out of it. To clarify, I don’t think it’s possible (nor has it ever been done, to my knowledge) to practice a religion that is free of syncretism. The goal is to examine the parts of American civil religion that are antithetical to seeking first the kingdom of God through following Jesus, and see them as the heresies that they are.

This topic is something that I spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about, as do many others within the broader emerging church, but this is not new. Within church history, it dates back at least to the time of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the post-Constantinian Roman Empire, preferring to seek God in the desert rather than wealth and power in the cities. Since then there has always been a remnant that has sought to see following Jesus as submitting to an entirely different kingdom that is, itself, antithetical to the kingdoms of the world in what it desires, the means by which it seeks to get those desires, and the ways it affects those who follow it.

From that perspective, there is a serious problem with American holidays. Most of them serve, often as their sole purpose, to promote our civil religion. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Independence Day do this in blatantly obvious ways, and that would be fine if it weren’t so endorsed by the church. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard folks compare the deaths of American soldiers, “sacrificing for our freedom,” with the sacrificial death of Jesus, who died for his enemies – regardless of your preferred atonement theory. It doesn’t end there, as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is itself used to co-opt the legacy of a man who constantly sought to promote nonviolence, to the point of death, in order to promote the violent interests of the State.

The bigger holidays are not immune to this. Thanksgiving is, in essence, a celebration of the beginning of our unjust takeover of our land because we felt its inhabitants weren’t human. Black Friday (and the ritual of standing in line on Thursday, which I think will soon become Wednesday and Tuesday) and Cyber Monday are ways for us to intensify our already insane addiction to owning things, which is encouraged because it fuels our economy. Christmas is much the same.

Now again, none of this is new either. But the thing that strikes me as important to talk about is the massive fear that Christians have about Halloween, while desperately supporting the other holidays, especially Christmas. Yes, it has Celtic and other pagan roots. Yes, it’s deeply important to folks who believe different things. But really? Why does that holiday have to get all the attention? And why doesn’t it get attention because most of the candy and chocolate that is sold during that season is made by slaves?

This is the issue: it’s because most Christians don’t have a problem with America’s civil religion. As a whole, the church in America has such a lack of prophetic critique that it will support any holiday that serves the purposes of the State, especially if it can get a few irrelevant mentions of the birth of Jesus devoid of its social and political consequences, and it will fight any attempts to break the connections between Christianity and American civil religion.

We who would like something better than civil religion need to make something better. We need ways in which we can let “our thankfulness for our blessings move us to repent of the ways those blessings have come (and still do come) at the expense of others” as Julie Clawson said yesterday. We need to stop rewriting history, as Eugene Cho said, and instead figure out how to create other ways to express thankfulness.

And finally, as Advent starts, we need to remember that “the story of Christ’s birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love.” I’m thankful for Advent Conspiracy giving us something for that. Let it change the world.

This year strikes me as different than the last several, probably mainly because of the anti-Muslim talk that is plaguing our country these days, and the inability that so many folks have to separate fundamentalists who fly into buildings from folks who want to build a community center, and the ridiculous desire to burn the Koran in response to that community center.

In 2001, I was a freshman in college. A few months before, I had attended Cornerstone Festival for the first time, and one of the bands I saw there was Ballydowse. Ballydowse was a Celtic punk band based at JPUSA, the intentional community on the north side of Chicago that puts the festival on each year. Ballydowse sang songs about politics, economics, and society that were (and in general still are) very unique. They sang songs about Oscar Romero, George Macdonald, Iraq and the sanctions we placed on it, and a number of other such topics. They also operated a section of their website that provided a place for dialogue about these and other issues.

In the first couple of days after the attacks happened, the lead vocalist wrote a beautiful piece in response, seeking to encourage us to be slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen; in the hopes that we would have sought to respond in the right ways, rather than to answer terror with terror. While his words, being from a band in an underground music scene, went unheeded in the national conversation, they changed my life forever. Ballydowse’s website has been down for years, and the band no longer exists, but this year I managed to find an archived copy of his article. I post it here, as the formatting isn’t what it was when the site was operating, and it’s not very easy to find.

The power and beauty of his words have not been lost in these last nine years.

These were my thoughts shortly after the World Trade Centers horror. Since then too few have been rescued, and the death toll is in the thousands. It is very sad and our prayers go out to those families.

It is hard to begin speaking when so many arms are emptied of loved ones and for them our hearts feel only silent grief. It has been just a few short days since the world turned and Terror murdered so many. The Towers were no longer symbols. Suddenly, we realized that they were nothing, but the lives they contained were everything. These unique lives cannot be replaced even if a thousand towers, twice as high, rise again in our cities.

Who among us can describe such loss? The necessary transformation to a numerical body count will only be a vulgarization. Each one of my children, alone and unaided, outweighs the world. How can a mere number shroud such unfathomable depths of vanished possibilities? As the dead are gathered- and we hope against hope that more survivors will be found-already we know that over three hundred firefighters, police officers, and emergency personal were lost. This world is hard enough to doctor without this terror. The pain and accidents that come with our freedom fill the days of the service people with enough grief, we all wonder why humanity elects to add to such a brimming cup. As the days go on the numbers will rise. God be with these families and let us offer whatever we can, for those who still struggle in the hospitals wards or beneath the rubble and for those who mourn. That is our first response.

Beyond that let us be slow to speak, slow to anger, and quick to listen. The talk today is full of payments long due and vengeance swift preparing. As to the payments long due, it is one thing to speak of a nation’s collective responsibility for its words and deeds. It is another to overturn all constructive foundations that any such talk must have and embrace the murder. Let this point be clear- there is no past actions or present policies that can justify the targeting of innocent civilians in any nation’s cities. No cries to call America to justice for its past actions can be mingled with blood arbitrarily drawn from the mothers and fathers, sons and daughters of this land. The murders in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania contribute only to the glory of evil. The historical dynamics, the discussion of what lies between the birth and death of those who commit such deeds may form a bridge to understanding the temptations of rage but at the crossing of the line into terror, the actors must be left naked without excuse. Murderous actions cannot be dignified as necessities, they must remain unable to drown out the still small voice that offers each of us freedom to overcome our past.

However, to the cries for vengeance, we say remember the words of Chesterton, that shipwrecks are not avoided by doing Something, but by doing the right thing. We have done many a something these past years and have suffered no small number of shipwrecks. Yes. We must respond, but responding we must look to caution and restraint now more than ever. We have been deceived before. Pain and fear will grasp for the relief at hand, be it a healing courage or the maudlin delusions. The murder must be answered. This Terror is without excuse and it is our rightful enemy. But Terror is a coward and likes nothing more but to slip out the back door at the last minute only to re-enter through the front, guiding the mob and ensuring that all hopes of ending its eternal return are incinerated by the torches of vengeance.

Many voices are hearkening back to another day of infamy, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese Imperial Admiral Yamamoto had engineered the attack despite his misgivings about war with America. Shortly after the attack he is quoted as saying in regret “We have awakened a sleeping giant and have instilled in him a terrible resolve.” We are awake and the giant is forming. But there are giants and there are giants. Which giant we awaken and to what end our resolve will be the measure of our society.

This attack was rooted in hatred, in the ability of evil to remove all threads of empathy with the victim. It relied upon black and white delusions where god or virtue is completely united with the desired action. Terror seeks a specific response. Like calls to like. We must think long and hard about our response and refuse to awaken the giant that Terror desires for its company.

Whatever offer of true comfort for our grieving families, whatever sacrifice it takes to prevent actions such as this, we must make. Save the one that will be most tempting and most counter to true need. “We are never in greater danger than in moments when we deceive ourselves as to the real nature of a threat and when we summon all our energies for defense against the void while the Enemy approaches from behind” wrote Denis De Rougemont shortly after Hitler was driven from France. “It is the Devil who invents our moral sophistries, blots out our categories, transforms that habitual sin into a delirious “virtue”, into a fit of false innocence, into an exaltation of destructive power.” We must not offer our compliments to the Terror. We must not awaken it in ourselves.

Hannah Arendt, in the years after the Holocaust said how often people would come and tell her that they were ashamed to be Germans. She answered that she was ashamed to be human. Tuesday, as lives were hijacked and sacrificed to violence and force I was ashamed to be human. As desperate people, themselves no strangers to grief, danced in celebration I was ashamed to be human. And this morning, as Arab Americans who grieve along with us began to receive death threats in the name of freedom I was ashamed to be human.

The great myth of injustice has been it ability to instill moral strength with every lash of its whip. When men and women are placed beneath grief and pain, the outgrowth is not always noble. Any war against terror that does not seek to guarantee a continual renewal of enemies will demand to know whether the suggested tactics truly uproot more than they seed. We have laid siege to nations and encampments only to harvest hate. Let us seek to starve hate and see if we might not reap something desirable for our children’s future. No more bitter rage and collateral damages. The price of each human life must be marked according to its irreplaceable and unrepeatable value. And from this day forward any voice that says “Yes such and such is innocent of this crime, but the price of their lives is worth the reward”- that voice will be recognized as the call to seed terror and a great cry should rise against such tactics.

We cannot hope for absolute security. The chief weapon of terror is the human mind and a society secured against it absolutely is a cemetery. But, with Camus, we can resolve never to legitimize the terror. We are not speaking of forsaking action to prevent or answer terror. We are asking that we refuse any means that cannot be reconciled with the ends we propose. If the end we desire is the rule of justice then let the means be ruled by that same justice. If the end we desire is the rule of violence and vengeance unchecked then by all means we know what we can do to accommodate that desire.

Within hours of the horror voices are rising saying that for too long we have allowed security to take a back seat to civil liberties and that those days should end. Is Democracy to be defended by its death? Or is its pulse so low that a bed or a grave is of little difference? Proclamations of “We are one!” may sell papers but do not let the instant homogenizers sell the tensions and differences between us, for the tension is democracy itself. Now more than ever we must resist propaganda and support calm dialogue that does no violence to our plurality. To borrow from Pierre Joseph Proudhon, “in nations as in children reason seeks unity in all things, simplicity, uniformity, identity” but when the situation is not elementary, simple answers are popular lies. Without full depth of perspectives unbalance will drive us in circles slowly sinking beneath our own weight. Terror thrives when the exchange of ideas is replaced by “that august silence of all perfect orders” that Camus spoke of when “nothing anybody says will rouse the least echo in another’s mind.” If this is the unity that we are tempted with, it must be denied.

But that is not to say we might not come together and accomplish something. The self sacrifices that have filled the past days, the drama of flight 93 to the weary work in New York, have answered our shame with no small hope. If we did not rise to respond to this, if seeing these children wondering when mother or father was coming home we did not feel the fury we would not be human. But such precious worth cannot be entrusted to fury. Rather than surrendering to the fury, we must speak and act with power. That power will only arise where men and women speak and act together “where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.” We must forsake the doing of something and begin seeking right things to do. If we answer terror with terror, again deluded that a salty spring will bring fresh water, we send the vicious circle of eternal return around again.

Gustav Landauer said in times like these we must “be the type of innovators in whose anticipatory imagination that which [we] want to create already lives as something finished, tried and tasted, and anchored in the past, in primeval and sacred life. Therefore let us destroy mainly by means of the gentle permanent and binding reality that we build.” Let us starve the Terror by binding ourselves not to become it. Let us seek the actors of this terror and with severity end these actions but let us do nothing without the remembrance that children are not born ready to hurl themselves and others in fury against steel and concrete. It takes an entire species to allow such pressures to build and such techniques to be mastered. Those who did these things are uniquely responsible but we are all involved. Let us rely on the gentle permanence of humility and build a sense of forgiveness, by daring to ask what sort of pressures tempt humans to become bombs and why so many trace those pressures to these shores. And in turn acknowledging whatever honest examination uncovers. As we promise to answer the actions of others, as we must, let us promise to answer for our own as well.

These words were penned by Hannah Arendt on Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility half a century ago as the world still reeled in the horrors of the Third Reich. That her conclusions speak so fluently to us today bears witness to how little we have learned. She describes the only giant we may safely awaken.

“To follow a non-imperialistic policy and maintain a non-racist faith becomes daily more difficult because it becomes daily clearer how great a burden mankind is for man. Perhaps those Jews, to whose forefathers we owe the first conception of the idea of humanity, know something about that burden when each year they used to say “Our Father and King, we have sinned before you,” taking not only the sins of their own community but all human offenses upon themselves. Those who today are ready to follow this road in a modern version do not content themselves with the hypocritical confession, ‘God be thanked, I am not like that,’ in horror at the undreamed of potentialities of the [characteristics of terror]. Rather, in fear and trembling, have they finally realized of what man is capable- and this is indeed the precondition of any modern political thinking. Such persons will not serve very well as functionaries of vengeance. This, however, is certain: Upon them and only upon them, who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race, can there be any reliance when it comes to fighting fearlessly, uncompromisingly, everywhere against the incalculable evil that men are capable of bringing about.

The phrase is this: “God will not give you more than you can bear.” This sounds really nice in certain parts of the world. We get stressed, or we have a difficult situation, or some other thing that we don’t like and we comfort ourselves by saying that God will limit the extent of it before it becomes something we can’t handle. The problem, though, is that it isn’t true.

The phrase is derived from this passage:

These things [things in the Hebrew Scriptures] happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

1 Corinthians 10:11-13

So you can probably see how such a thing can be retold and mistold to say something that it doesn’t say, but clearly this is specifically about temptations to things from which we should flee; the idea is that there is always a way out of such things, whether we take that way or not.

Now, the reason that this misunderstanding prevails in much of America is that we have a warped understanding of how God works in the world in general and in our lives specifically. I’m beginning to think that all of us who find ourselves in relative comfort in America do this, whether we are on the liberal side of things or the conservative. This has deep implications for how we pray, how we respond to events, and how we deal with people who don’t live in the same kind of context that we do.

So while this post is about something broader than whether or not God will give us more than we can bear, it’s important that we establish firmly that this is not the case. Paul is believed to have written this. Paul was beheaded. Folks can’t “bear” being beheaded. They’re dead. Far beyond the life of Paul, though, the statement is a slap to the face of people, many of whom have suffered in unimaginable ways that have nothing to do with their faith or lack of faith, across the years and across the miles from the safe American lives of people who quote this.

That is a fairly extreme conservative position of God’s activity in the world. Many conservatives are not like this, but this kind of thought and similar ones (that God always protects certain people, for example) have deep implications for how people in our context think they see God moving in the world. The flip side is, of course, that God doesn’t do anything. Whether this is because of an entrenchment in anti-supernatural modernism like the Jesus Seminar kind of folks, or because of an inability to see anything divine in the arbitrary ways that the world often works and the people it often favors.

There are many people I’ve known that prefer instead of either of these to see God simply identifying with those who suffer and expecting people to do something about it (and this is indeed a powerful thing that we cannot afford to ignore and cannot fail to share with people). But these thoughts have been running deeply through my mind, as I’m convinced that all of the above views fall short of what is healthy for us in thinking about God’s involvement with us and our involvement with God.

I’m of the opinion that the Bible doesn’t give us an answer to this. I think it clearly indicates that God does work in the world, but it also indicates that God doesn’t always work in the world and it refuses to give us answers to why that is the case. From there, it gets murkier as various authors of Scripture bring their own perspectives and questions and desires to events, just as we do. I think we can learn much more about how to respond to events (in both good and bad ways) in light of the responses taken by various authors than we can about what God’s involvement in these events might be.

If that is the case, where can we, as spoiled Americans with small worlds who want God to give us parking spaces, or as spoiled Americans with bigger worlds who feel guilty that we have cars in which to park while thousands of people die of hunger everyday, view the activity of God and our involvement in it?

I don’t have hard answers for this, but I think I’ve begun to gain some insight that is worthy of sharing. Many of us in Emergent have learned that we need to get beyond typical contexts when we think theologically. We’ve learned that liberation theology in its various types has deep things to say to us, that we’ve learned how the bad parts of American theology have been exported and caused great damage to folks around the world, and we’ve thus tried to think in broader ways. This is a beautiful and essential thing that I hope to see continue.

But it occurs to me that we have not done this with our attempts to think about whether and how God supernaturally works in the world, especially in the poor and oppressed that we seek to empower. If you’ve ever been around or listened to such folks, from the various streams of church that they have created, you’ll know that they see God working in their own lives and the lives of people around them. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they are more likely to experience things that are obviously miraculous than we are, but in a broader sense they understand something that we miss.

The objection that some try to make to this is that such worldviews keep people in oppression, or they lead to dangerous theologies like the American prosperity people have. These are both valid points that need to be and are being addressed, but they do not stand up against the lives of those working for justice for the oppressed and living supernatural lives in these contexts. These are the people I want to learn from.

She hopes to teach on the collegiate or graduate level after getting a PhD, partly because she wants to help open the eyes of folks who come into these institutions to things they haven’t seen, and also partly because she can affirm folks that want to do new things. She has unique and deep skills and passions that will flow into the changes that need to happen in the broad higher educational system.

Along the lines of unique possibility, there has been a lot of recent attention given to Claremont School of Theology‘s project to educate ministers within Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and so on as well as in Methodist Christianity, allowing the traditions to teach students with their own faculty, but encouraging the students to learn from those in other traditions. Claremont is part of the mainline establishment, but lots of folks who are open to emerging things attend there, will attend there, or have commented on the implications of this project for the future. Some have said that this project is the future of the church.

I don’t buy it. Granted, the potential for this project is big. But it’s only big in that it can, and probably will, lead its participants to develop relationships with those who practice and lead other faiths and also participate in the project (certainly a small number of such practitioners), and to understand the faiths of these folks more authentically. This is a good thing, certainly. It’s necessary, and it’s possible that in some trickle-down way, it will eventually lead to less violence, hatred, and misunderstanding between the practitioners of these faiths. Also a good thing.

But do you see how that’s illustrative of the fact that this isn’t as big as it might sound? It’s a continuation of a trickle-down model of theology, ecclesiology, and cultural understanding. Graduates will hope to be the ones forming the theology, the ecclesiology, and so on that is consumed by their parishioners. There won’t be any attempts to create new systems that deal with the economic and cultural changes that will, in all likelihood, continue to change the way we do everything else.

I want to see a much more ambitious future from theological education. Theological education currently teaches students to be the dispensers of knowledge and the representatives of God to their communities. If it is to thrive, it has to learn to create communities that teach each other, represent God to each other, and create spaces for people to encounter God themselves (as Mars Hill says, “create spaces for the resurrected Jesus to speak to people” and “make sure we’re not blocking it for others”). I have enough deep experiences from undergrad, and I know enough folks who have been to graduate school and have had deep experiences, to be aware that institutions of theological education are, on their better days, communities that teach each other, communities in which students represent God to each other as much as possible, and communities in which space is created to encounter God.

But the communities that students are taught to lead, or taught to create if they are expected to create anything, are not like this. Ministers teach their communities, and their primary tasks are to dispense knowledge and provide symbols of God, whether through pastoral care, sacraments, or other things. Often the language that is used is not so blatant, but essentially the message is that ministers are still the representatives of God on the earth.

One of the most beautiful things about postmodern culture is that it isn’t primarily concerned with what people think they know. No one who doesn’t have roots in church starts attending because they agree with the knowledge that gets dispensed. It’s very possible for folks interested in such things to learn how to think theologically on their own. Further, another of the most beautiful things is that people don’t expect someone else to represent their spirituality. This is one cause of the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” people that the church is so afraid of. They don’t understand the idea that it takes an authority figure to represent God to them.

Do you see the potential that exists here? The kind of systems that could be created if we could dream bigger than the (admirable, but in practice often a bit cheesy when institutions do it) future of creating dialogue and friendships with people of other faiths? The kind of communities that could be created by an education like this? That’s my hope for the future of theological education, which could contribute to a beautiful future for the church. Granted, it may not be able happen until these institutions lose some things or new institutions and models arise, but too often this is how change works.

Rachel’s book is structured around her own story. She was raised in the strongest of evangelical apologetics, ready to defeat a host of arguments without listening to them and treat threatening views as dangerous views, and her own views as unquestionable. This part is called “Habitat.” But eventually, her critiques and questions of the views of others are turned on her own, and this part is called “Challenge.” Finally, she learns that her faith can change, and indeed must change. This, of course, is called “Change.”

In the first part, there are powerful stories of Dayton, Tennesee and the world of conservative evangelicalism, and of herself and other folks that Rachel has known. There are stories that will make you cringe, either because you remember the same experiences in your own life or because you can’t imagine such experiences really happening. There are stories that give glimpses into its cracks and dangers, stories that give glimpses into what it taught her, and stories that just make it look old in a world that no longer needs it.

One example is this:

With this assurance [that reality would always support their "biblical worldview"], we studied common challenges in Christianity, such as the problem of evil and the destiny of the unevangelized. These were treated as issues that atheists and agnostics might raise to try to undermine Christianity, not issues that believers generally struggled with themselves, so I had to be careful how I phrased my questions in class.

In the second part, the questions of skeptics become Rachel’s questions. She deals honestly with issues of hell, pluralism, the fact that the time and place in which we were born is the most likely factor to decide the religion we will practice, the guilt that can plague us when we begin to honestly look at the suffering of people in the world, and other questions that people with these frameworks really don’t like to think about.

This is a profound section, partly because it is willing to give us a glimpse into a deep wrestling with questions that have been equated with a faithful theology for Rachel’s entire life up to this point, and partly because it gives us a glimpse into how deeply we can encounter the love and grace of Jesus within these questions regardless of whether or not there are satisfying answers to them.

In the end, the same question that frightened and intimidated me as a child provided the clearest way out: What if I’m wrong? It was a question loaded with uncertainty, possibility, and hope, and it was a question to which I often would return. To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or worse. Sometimes it lures us into questioning God; sometimes it summons us to give him another chance. After I’d thought for so many years that good Christians are always ready with an answer, it was a question that eventually drew me back to belief.

So following this, the final section tells us how Rachel has learned that her faith can be flexible, that God is full of grace, and that it’s okay not to know things. One last quote to illustrate this:

And slowly I am learning to live the questions, to follow the teachings of a radical rabbi, to live in an upside-down kingdom in which kings are humbled and servants exalted, to look for God in the eyes of the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the imprisoned, the poor and the sick.

I hope I’ve expressed a bit of the profound theological and spiritual story that is in this book, and the freedom and beauty that is in its message. It doesn’t tell us that real faith is easy and lets us float above the hard parts, or that we can settle for a lifeless faith that offers nothing that can change us and nothing that can change the world. It offers us hope through the stories of folks Rachel has met and shares with us, through the parts of her own journey that she shares with us, and the ways that we can turn an honest look on our own journeys and know that Jesus is in them.

I’d love to encourage you to get this one. You can buy it on Amazon, or get more info on Rachel’s site.