Email theology

by Tim Larsen

Is anyone else becoming an email theologian? It happens several times a month—I receive an email from a complete stranger soliciting theological advice. He or she is perplexed about some hot-button issue of Christian thought or living, sometimes volunteering that the issue is pressing in on them for personal reasons. I don’t think I’m paranoid, but occasionally I wonder if these emails are some sort of trap.

Most of us have developed skills for discerning when we can delete an email without opening it. One of the many lines in When Harry Met Sally that always makes me smile is when Jess—whose morning alarm clock has not yet gone off—answers the phone with: “No one I know would call at this hour.” In the same way, I have decided that no one I know would write “you” as “u,” so I automatically delete all emails with subject lines such as “thought u would enjoy this” or “u want belief what I found.”

If I can’t decide whether to delete an unopened message, then I have to wonder if the contents should be dismissed as a scam of some sort. Although I occasionally feel a little guilty about it, I assume that requests along the following lines are money-making schemes: “Praise the Lord! I’m a seminary student in developing country x who really wants to read your book y, but can’t afford it. Would you be willing to send me a complimentary copy?” Admittedly, this was made a bit easier by the fact that my first book was a technical, academic monograph on British Nonconformist politics 1847-67, which did not seem like it should be a high priority for a Nigerian seminarian with—judging from the email message—a decidedly imperfect grasp of the English language.

My uncertainty is this: does my email correspondent really want my advice because he or she is personally in need of guidance? Or is the writer testing me to see if I will say something that can be exposed as embarrassingly liberal or conservative or whatever?

I have fallen victim to at least one such sting operation. A man emailed me with an “awe, shucks” presentation, identifying himself as a retired, blue collar worker who was struggling to think his way through some big issues. He wanted to know whether or not Bonhoeffer was right to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler. I replied as if he were a sincere Christian trying to know how best to serve his Savior in a complex and fallen world. In fact, he was a polemical atheist doing research for a book that would expose the silly, counterintuitive and downright dangerous or unsavory things that Christians believe. My remarks are duly ridiculed in his published tome. I stand by them, but I would have written differently if I knew I were being asked to address publicly the objections of atheists rather than, privately, the unease of a perplexed believer.

On the other hand, there probably are people out there who sincerely believe that a professor of theology is a safe person to go with their concerns and confusions. I would dislike becoming the kind of academic who does not have the time or patience for the questions of earnest nonspecialists. Still, there is the practical call that has to be made regarding how one should answer—or decline to answer—any particular message. Is this a widely shared experience of ministers, educators and authors?

Tim Larsen teaches at Wheaton College.

Heavily accented

by Jason Byassee

I remember the first time I heard a British academic who wasn’t a genius. He misplayed a routine groundball of a question. He looked puzzled, then uncomfortable, then said something unintelligible. I’d heard many academics do this, but never one with a British accent. “What’s wrong with you?” I wondered. “Everyone with your accent is brilliant,” to use a Britishism.

The BBC has an article that explores the cultural cache of having an accent from somewhere—anywhere—in the UK, and hopes nervously we Americans won’t notice that the accent doesn’t instantly qualify its holder as a genius. While a Brit can herself tell whether an accent means you’re from the Oxbridge England of money and public schools and academia or from the hinterlands of hicks of the north, we Americans are clueless. If you’re from across the pond that’s enough for us: you must be brilliant, beautiful, dashing, and all the rest.

As a Southerner living in the Midwest I think about accents a lot, and our tendancy to make judgments based upon differences in accent. The smartest people I knew growing up all had southern accents. But up here, pour on the drawl and you’ll get looked at like you married your sister. A friend told me she liked me when we met in spite of my accent: “You were from the South after all.” When my wife fails to get the customer service she requires on the phone I remind her to drop the “ya’lls” and sure enough, she’s usually attended to much more courteously. It seems odd to me that the cultural relic of the uneducated, backwards Southerner persists: didn’t we give ya’ll Presidents Carter and Clinton? Civil Rights stars King and John Lewis (and most of the rest of them)? I once heard novelist Reynolds Price say, “Take the South out of American letters and you’re left with a big white fish.” Here in the Midwest I try and emphasize my Southern accent. It’s sort of a subconscious effort to stave off assimilation. But I may also be saying, “Look at me, a Southerner who has all his teeth.”

My mention of the Civil Rights stars gets to the problem. It jarred me once to hear Michael Jordan describe himself as a “country boy from North Carolina.” Can country boys from North Carolina be black? Whatever else the South has given the world, it has also bequeathed some of its most savage racism, which is still lurking in us white Southerners. Maybe we deserve the disparagement we get and then some.

What does an African-American accent convey? I’ve been reading Jeremiah Wright recently. In a sermon he teases out the meaning of various regional accents: Kennedy saying “Eeask not what your country can do for you,” or Johnson: “My fellow Uhmarikans.” Then Wright asks, “How many times have black people been ridiculed when they said, ‘I want to axk you a question’? There is no sk sound in West African languages” (What Makes You So Strong?). Yet the English accent, the Irish, even the Texan accent signify intelligence more than the remnants of the west African. It all seems “natural,” but it’s all learned, a racist script we’ve all memorized and continue to act out.

Wright’s sermon is called “Ain’t Nobody Right But Us” (Southerners and African-Americans, however much time we spend at universities, both try to hang onto the useful word “ain’t”), and is a stirring appeal to us to see that differences aren’t deficiencies. It is very hard to unlearn the cultural accretions and unspoken signifiers that come with accents, but reading Wright, or preaching from southern-accented luminaries like Will Willimon, can go a long way toward pulling it off.

Bad Christian music

by Lou Carlozo

What is it about Christian music that keeps its artists—and proponents—from taking a good look in the mirror and owning up work that falls far, far short on the quality scale?

I used to be an enthusiastic contributor and music critic to CCM and many other Christian music magazines, including 7 Ball, Mars Hill Review, Christian Single and Acaza.com. Yet today, my strong feeling is that the process of dishing direct, honest Christian music criticism has stagnated—and may even have gone into reverse gear.

My last experience writing for CCM was an attempt to review a Bethany Dillon record, "Imagination" (Sparrow). I sat with the CD a good, long time and did my best to embrace it on every level a critic should: the casual listen, the deep headphone listen, the lyrical listen, the spiritual content listen. It struck me, over and over again, as being a formulaic and stiff effort, a conclusion I could not escape no matter how hard I tried and prayed.

I understand the evangelical Christian music press works differently; there is a strong view that CCM and other magazines need to cheerlead artists who believe they are serving God and a higher calling. That said, it does no one good to squelch voices of dissent when they have something of value to contribute to the discussion.

My prayer is that CCM and other publications would be more bold in giving less-than-stellar reviews to the sacred cows of Christian music. If Michael W. Smith makes paint-by-numbers worship music, for example, will someone call him on it? If dc talk reunites and the results are bland, will a brave critic stand up and point out the flaws? I doubt it. More likely a rush of misguided writers will run up and try to touch the hems of their sanctified garments.

Louis R. Carlozo is a DVD columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and lead music critic for Christian Century. He sold most of his Christian music records at garage sales over the past few years, making next to nothing in the process.

I'm sorry (sort of)

by Debra Bendis

Peter Beinart admits that he succumbed to an “intoxication with the revolutionary potential of the United States” when, as editor of the New Republic, he endorsed the U.S.’s preemptive attack on Iraq. Kenneth Pollack, whose 2002 book The Threatening Storm persuaded many to endorse the invasion of Iraq, has also issued an apology of sorts:

“You know it’s something I wrestle with just about every day. I literally was wrong, along with a great many other people, about the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat. I was definitely wrong about it.” Unfortunately, Pollack was wrong in front of millions of Americans, who read his book or saw him appear as an expert analyst on Oprah and CNN.

A look at Beinart’s rather weak series of mea culpas might prepare us to resist the next misguided rush to war.

First, Beinart admits that he was willing to gamble on the war because he wasn’t gambling with his own life. Since my own son is a (thankfully unwounded) veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, I have a suggestion for Beinart and everyone else: the next time military action is proposed, assume that your son or daughter will be in the front lines. Are you still in favor?

Second, Beinart says, “I didn’t think I was gambling many of my countrymen’s [lives].” Whoops. Read history. Then make a note that war is always unpredictable: Ask how many lives are “a few,” and whether, if that number were to multiplied by 5, 10 or 100 times, and were to include many more who are maimed and damaged mentally and emotionally, whether the cause is still just.

Beinart’s confession to being “intoxicated with the revolutionary potential of the United States” reminds us to be skeptical about notions that the U.S. is somehow an exceptional nation with a exceptional mission in the world.

Finally, Beinart says, “When our fellow democracies largely oppose a war . . . they are probably right.” So the lesson for next time: Listen to what our allies are saying about our capacities and motives.

I know that all of us—academics, writers and publishers—may work with inadequate information and can make poor judgments. What angers me about public figures like Beinart and Pollock is that they underestimate the amount of power they wield. Their misguided opinions brought them fame and book royalties—and now a few sleepless nights. But an admission of mistakes is quickly presented and just as quickly becomes more archived literature. Meanwhile someone's kids are paying for the mistakes with their lives.

No more Jesus discoveries

by James Howell

I really wish they’d stop finding old bones that allegedly belong to Jesus, or old gospels that portray a different kind of Jesus, or film clips of Jesus being brutalized. Yeah, I know: the bones were found a couple of decades ago, the gospels even longer ago, and— oh, right… the Mel Gibson film wasn’t real either.

What bugs me is that the guy who produced Titanic can come out with a TV special that consumes two to four hours daily for a couple of weeks of my time—and we pastors wind up looking bad. In my heart, I love archaeology, I’m into science and it makes my day when settled truths are debunked. I’ve always grinned over the Simone Weil thought that “Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.”

But then somebody reads The Da Vinci Code or catches a caption under a photo in USA Today about new proof that Jesus had a girlfriend, and I look like a reactionary, and the church sinks right with me into the dark waters of obscurantism.

Then all the wrong people, those with fundamentalist proclivities, think I’m heroic because I’m defending the faith—but I don’t want them to like me. They are part of this loud chorus of voices that cry, “God is being shut out of American life,” or “The church is under assault.” Pretty mild assault, if you ask me—but then didn’t Jesus say we should “Rejoice and be glad” when we are reviled on account of Jesus? Why so much hand-wringing? In a culture where we usually elicit little more than a yawn, at least Jesus matters enough to get some pretty energetic press. Opposition and ridicule are better than boredom and irrelevance.

As for me, I’ll tell people calmly what I know about archaeology, the lineage of ancient manuscripts, and that Dan Brown really is a fiction writer. I’ll try to spend more time teaching how the Gospels came to be, that Jesus really is human in the Bible itself, what archaeology can and can’t do.

I’ve even tried to think out loud over items like the apparent truth that if Jesus were married and had a son, nothing in orthodoxy would change. Even the bones: are there ways of thinking about the resurrection that would be entirely faithful (and hopeful) that could coexist with the presence of Jesus’ bones in a tomb on the outskirts of Jerusalem—should that be proven one day? Or am I stuck in some lame reactionary mode I can’t even detect in myself? Can I discover ways to remain open to learn all there is to know, yet still faithful, but without appearing to be an ecclesiastical prelate impatient with Galileo and his heirs?

James Howell is senior pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Babel

by Rodney Clapp

When I turned on the recently released dvd of Oscar-nominated Babel, I expected that Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu would treat the themes of Genesis 11—hubris and tower-building and the confusion of languages. What I did not expect was how the film would make me ponder other biblical themes.

As its title intimates, the film is about the difficulty of communication. The narrative is sinuous, winding and curling back on itself like a snake. All the locales, from Mexico to the U.S. to Morocco to Japan, are finally connected, but the story is out of chronological order, as if the snake were chopped into pieces, then put back together and reanimated. You have to pay attention to make sense of it.

Paying attention is exactly what Iñárritu thinks is especially difficult to do in our world. His characters travel the globe, or at least cross borders, and are surrounded by a mélange of languages. Strange customs baffle and perplex them. The adults are jaded, and in multicultural situations they simply forego all but the most necessary communication. The children are amused, bug-eyed with wonder—and often scared.

One vein of the story takes us into the sensorily inundated world of Japanese teenagers. These kids are surrounded by video imagery—on the walls of skyscrapers, on screens in restaurants, on televisions—and by pulsing, urgent music. Even in the loudest, visually busiest nightclub, they are text-messaging on their cellphones. This is 21st-century Babel: a world shot through with media and messages, visual and audio and sometimes tactile, in a welter of languages. We urgently yearn to communicate, but the sheer volume and quantity of our attempts to connect overwhelm us and preclude most genuine communication. There is so much to tune in to that we generally just tune out.

Communication can also fail between those who know each other. The central protagonists of his movie are two spouses from San Diego, played by Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt. Their infant child has died and they do not know how to talk about it, so they stop talking to one another. If longstanding wife and husband, living and parenting together, cannot communicate, how can strangers crossing languages and cultures?

Guns represent another attempt at communication in Babel, one that connects no matter how much noise or interference stand between us: my bullet meets your flesh. In this film, a fateful bullet comes from the barrel of a high-powered rifle fired by a Moroccan pre-adolescent goat herder. He and his brother, bored on the hilltops overlooking their herd, are treating the gun like an especially loud and attention-getting toy. They take turns handling the rifle and shoot at distant rocks. Then they see a tour bus on the winding road far below them and, joking, wonder if they can hit it.

The horrible event that occurs leads Moroccan villagers to respond and help strangers with their most basic needs—offering points of contact across a yawning gulf of cultural and linguistic differences.

Iñárritu’s movie could be titled James 1:19—“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak . . .” In our noisy, bombastic world, we are quick to speak and reluctant to listen. But how much real communication occurs before we actually listen? Pentecost is often regarded as a great reversal of Babel, the restoration of communication across fragmented differences. But when I returned to the biblical text, I saw something new: The Galilean apostles spoke in their native language—various Parthians, Medes and Elamites heard them “speaking about God’s deeds of power” in “our own languages” (Acts 2: 9-11). The miracle at Pentecost was not one of speaking, but of listening.

Rodney Clapp is editorial director of Brazos Press.

Swearing it off

by Jason Byassee

It’s been a pleasure to get to teach Augustine at a conservative evangelical college. The students are sharp, spiritually serious without being narrow-minded, and fun to be around. They respect Augustine to the point of reverence—I had to give them permission to disagree with him.

In one class I started discussion by asking, “Why do people get so pissed off about the question of the influence of Platonism on Augustine?” I heard an audible gasp.

Then I realized what I had said. “Pissed off” may not be high on the list of crude terms, but the last thing I wanted to do was give these students a reason not to take me seriously. I knew I should respect the school’s ethos and students’ expectations.

After class a student came up to me and thanked me for using the word. She said it made me seem like a real person. Then she asked if we could meet together to discuss her future academic work in theology. My gaffe was the occasion for a deeper conversation.

Both reactions—the gasp and the gratitude—struck me as delightfully weird. I asked a few other faculty members if they had made similar missteps. One said he had never uttered such a word in class, but worries that he might, and he laughingly thanked me for reminding him not to. Another said he occasionally tells a story that involves a swear word, but he warns his students first. A third said he only uses swear words when quoting historical figures, so students can’t blame him—it’s those nasty polemicists from days of yore.

One has to respect care for language and an expectation that speech be edifying. At how many schools is that the case? Theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke is famous for his use of profanity. His behavior seems at times an intentional effort to show that Christianity isn’t about conventional piety. At other times it seems less planned and more an effort to entertain—as when he explains that “a-hole” is not a swear word among Texans. The practice still raises questions. Some students have appealed to him not to include blasphemies in his cursing; and women have told him that they hear the f-word differently than men do.

Swearing can certainly make be a form of intellectual laziness—as if one can’t figure out how to be demonstrative or funny without cursing. On the other hand, stringency on this point can lead to hyperpiety and overscrupulousness, to the extent that people worry more about potty mouths than about the number of people dying of preventable diseases or at the hands of U.S. foreign policy.

I’ve heard that Bono compares swearing to percussion: by itself it isn’t music, but music generally needs to include percussion to get the right sound. That analogy may assign too high a place to cursing. I heard that when Bono spoke at the Wheaton College chapel a couple years ago, he dropped the “s” word. I don’t know if people gasped. Most people probably expected that from Bono. I doubt anyone got to talk to him about it afterward. They probably let it slide and kept listening to him talk about alleviating world hunger. Which is probably the right response.

In search of folly

by David Heim

Why is it so rare to see religious humor in print? That’s a question we ponder from time to time at the Christian Century. We’d like to publish more of it. Is this a Protestant deficiency?

We know Christians have a sense of humor. In my experience, Protestant pastors are generally quick to see the humor that lurks in their serious work.

Pastors see a lot of calamity and human frailty and they know intimately the follies and contradictions of religious institutions. Jokes and humor provide not only a way of coping with these realities but a way of taking delight in God’s world—in spite of or even because of the ways it is deformed and fallen. In that respect, humor and laughter are closely related to the mystery of religious faith.

If that’s true, then again it’s curious that it is so hard to put religious humor in the pages of the Century. Is it because we all are too politically correct? Religious humor has to have some bite to it, after all, exposing a contradiction or a problem in some aspect of religion, and perhaps we don’t want to offend anyone. That concern explains why religious humor often takes the form of spoofing the people whom we think it’s safe to offend. So, for example, liberal Christians routinely have fun with fundamentalists. But that inevitably means the humor is obvious and predictable and not very amusing.

On the other hand, after the Century recently published what we thought was a humorous spoof of the “emergent church” (“The submergent church,” Feb. 6) a striking number of readers wrote to complain that the article was too close to reality to be funny, if indeed it was meant to be funny. So written humor can fail by being too obvious, but it can also fail by being too subtle. It’s hard to find that narrow middle ground.

Perhaps religious humor exists mostly in the form of jokes, and can rarely be sustained in written form. Or perhaps religious humor is by nature so radical and explosive, such a violation of decorum, that it thrives best in face-to-face situations.

Pastors writing badly

by Lillian Daniel

Why do pastors write so poorly for their own church newsletters? When I scan the monthly missives that cross my desk with the daily mail, I see their front pages, saved for the pastor, wasted on a throw-away paragraph, a canned story from the Internet or a few sentences from a reference book (“Webster’s dictionary defines Lent as …”)

These are not people who are writing impaired, mind you.

Many of them have grown their churches on the strength of fine preaching. They are people whose reverence for the Word keeps them up late in the night wrestling with images and arguments for Sunday morning. When you speak to them, they play with the language as only skilled practical theologians can, always seeking to convince the skeptical or construct a better world with the tools they have been given: their words.

So what happens to those words when they are required to grace that all-important front page of publications with names like “The Squire,” “The Pilgrim,” “The Clarion” and “The Parish Post?” They suddenly become illiterate. In fact, their lack of content is sometimes even the subject of the article itself. (“I didn’t really know what I was going to write about this week, and then my sister from Orlando emailed me this story about a little crippled boy whose father wanted him to play baseball…”) Or worse still, the tossed-off paragraph that begins with a statistic (“Did you know 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God…”) and goes nowhere. (“Well, I don’t know what those statistics mean, but I just thought I’d share them with you.”)

As a minister, I know exactly where this goes wrong. We get busy. We do the many things ministers do, and then pour our creativity into that weekly sermon, and sometimes at the end of all that, the well has run dry. Another 250 words for the newsletter is more than we can scrape from an empty jar.

But the reality is that churches and clergy will be remembered historically not through their sermons, but through those dreaded pastor’s pages. Fifty years from now, our sermons may or may not exist, but I guarantee you that in churches large and small, a volunteer archivist will have piles of newsletters organized by date over the decades, and we will be known, not for the hours we put into our sermons, but by the paragraph eked out after a long week.

Given that worship attracts about one-half to a third of our members on a given Sunday, more people are touched by that newsletter than by our worship. Those newsletters have a wicked long shelf life. They lie on people’s kitchen counters for a neighbor to pick up, they get sent off to relatives if a child’s name is mentioned within, and they are even perused by petty clergy colleagues with an axe to grind.

Sloppy newsletter articles are a rejection of one of Christianity’s historical treasures—the well-written epistle. We are a religion in which we gather to worship, to hear the gospel, the prophecies, the songs, and then, as odd as it may seem, a letter from a pastoral leader to a church. Today we know Paul by his letters, and not his preaching. We also know those churches. In their struggles, in their arguments and in their growth, they had a leader who wrote to them carefully, critically, lovingly and with all he had.

Lillian Daniel is senior minister of First Congregational Church (UCC) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

No more guilt by association

by John Dart

The recent launch of “Christian Churches Together” will not make the list of top ten religion stories of 2007. It could, however, rank high among the year’s most significant developments.

That’s because CCT seems to have pulled off a feat in ecumenism that would have been impossible a few decades ago. Organizers of the multidenominational group have shown that, in the right circumstances, church leaders can shed the fear of being labeled “guilty by association” with those who differ with them on the difficult issues of the day.

Participants began exploring their churches’ common core of beliefs and surprised themselves over how “Christian” certain liberal, moderate or conservative denominations were when they became acquainted with some of the best hearts and minds in church life. Starting in 2001, the group crafted a five-family structure of mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, evangelical and Pentecostal, and racial-ethnic churches.

Determined to present a common Christian witness in the U.S., the three dozen founding church bodies recently approved a consensus statement on reducing poverty that endorses both personal and governmental obligations (See my “Family reunion”). After its discussion on evangelism at the same meeting, CCT is expected to work on a similar statement in its Washington, D.C., meeting in early 2008 that interprets the double aspect of evangelism as personal redemption and social justice.

Time was when you could never get representatives from the Christian Reformed Church, International Pentecostal Holiness Church, Evangelical Covenant Church and Free Methodist Church to work with folks from the United Church of Christ, Episcopal Church, Armenian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. But those groups are among the founding “participants.” (CCT avoids the word “members” to keep the relaxed character of the fellowship.)

Some denominations are still mulling over whether to take part, notably three black Methodist churches. Out of respect for their hesitancy, the Methodists and Presbyterians are “provisional” participants, yet are actively involved in CCT.

The organization’s growing appeal is illustrated by two very different churches close to joining, according to CCT lead organizer Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary of the Reformed Church in America. They are the Church of the Brethren, a historic “peace” church affiliated with the National Council of Churches, and the Vineyard Churches, a relatively young charismatic fellowship of some 850 congregations.

Not everyone is so keen to catch ecumenism’s new wave: the Southern Baptist Convention is unlikely to sign on in the near future. The SBC never joined the National Association of Evangelicals, and it left the Baptist World Alliance a couple years ago over several issues, including supposed liberal stances (an accusation disputed by BWA officials).