The Wrath of God and the Presbyterian Hymnal

On July 31, 2013January 13, 2014 By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized25 Comments

The number one rule of the internet is: “Don’t feed the trolls.”

Hopefully, I’m not about to violate it, but we’ll see.

I came across an article this morning that got my kettle boiling (more than it usually is). It came from an online publication called The Blaze. I’m not familiar with this one, but they seem to have an affinity for conservative ideas, so far as I can tell from a cursory scan of their website.

The article is titled: Why Is a Major Church Denomination Banning Famed Hymn ‘In Christ Alone’ From Its New Song Book? It’s about the denomination I serve, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and our new hymnal that comes out this fall. I have several bones to pick with this article: some technical, some theological. Hold onto your hats, because here we go… (takes a deep breath):

First of all, the song wasn’t “banned” from our hymnal, it was voted out. The Committee on Congregational Song, after much discussion and discernment, democratically decided (9 to 6) not to include it. Such was the case with many other suggested songs. In Christ Alone is not prohibited from being sung in PC(USA) congregations. I have done so on several occasions. The choir even sang it as a special anthem at my ordination service. Songs that mention God’s wrath were not targeted for exclusion by the committee. They included Awesome God by Rich Mullins, which sings about “the judgment and wrath He poured out on Sodom”.

Second, the PC(USA) is not “liberal” or “leftist”. I should know: I am liberal. I sometimes wish the PC(USA) were more so, but it isn’t.

In reality, our church is extremely diverse in its theology and politics. We have evangelicals and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, folks who like traditional liturgy and folks who like contemporary worship. We’re a mixed bag of people who dare to believe that our differences can make us stronger and more faithful to Christ, if we let them. If anything, our leaders for the past half-century or so have been largely influenced by the Neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Niebuhr brothers. You can see this in several of our more recently added confessional statements: the Barmen Declaration, the Confession of 1967, and the Brief Statement of Faith. These statements reflect a theological middle ground between fundamentalist and liberal perspectives. You can call us equal opportunity offenders. Purists, fanatics, and extremists of all stripes tend to be equally frustrated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). We are what we are… deal with it.

Third, the problem with the original wording of In Christ Alone has nothing to do with liberalism or squeamishness at the idea of God’s wrath. The controversial line in the song goes like this:

“Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.”

I have big problems with that line and I agree with the committee’s decision to axe the hymn based on the authors’ refusal to allow them to change the words to “the love of God was magnified.” I reject outright the idea that God’s wrath put Jesus on the cross or kept him there. It was the all-too-human selfishness and violence of religious and political powers-that-be that put Jesus on the cross. It was Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence and his tremendous love that kept him there.

The original wording in the song is based on the theory of atonement called penal substitution, famously developed by St. Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. Anselm’s delineation of the theory depends greatly on its assumption of feudal notions of justice which we no longer hold. In that society, the severity of a crime was measured by the relative social positions of perpetrator and victim. Crimes against the nobility were punished more harshly than crimes against the peasantry. In Anselm’s mind, any crime against an infinitely holy God must necessarily be punished eternally. Drawing upon priestly and sacrificial language from the New Testament, Anselm presented Jesus as the perfect solution to the problem of justice: fully divine, fully human, morally stainless. His voluntary substitution of himself resolves the problem presented by the feudal theory of justice. Anselm’s use of this model was more apologetic than ontological. He was simply trying to make the gospel recognizable to people in his own place and time, just as we are called to do. However, we who no longer accept the feudal theory of justice are likewise not bound to accept penal substitution as the one and only interpretation of the significance of Calvary.

Here are my problems with penal substitution as a viable atonement theory:

First, penal substitution sets up a scenario where Jesus saves humanity from the rage (not the wrath) of an out-of-control, abusive parent. When all is said and done, the church gathers around a crucifix and hears, “This is your fault. Look at what you made God do. You are so bad and dirty that God had to torture and kill this beautiful, innocent person so that he wouldn’t do the same thing to you. Therefore, you’d better shape up and be thankful or else God will change his mind and torture you for all eternity. And don’t forget: this is Good News and God loves you.” If any human parent did that, he or she would be rightly incarcerated, even if the innocent victim was willing. If that’s what Christianity is, then you can count me out.

Second, penal substitution renders both the life and the resurrection of Christ unnecessary. If Jesus simply “came to die”, then we can conveniently ignore all those pesky red letters in our Bibles. We also might as well sleep in on Easter Sunday because the real work was done on Good Friday. God just tacked on the resurrection so that the story would have a happy ending. It’s little more than icing on the cake of atonement.

The atonement theory toward which I gravitate bears more resemblance to the Christus Victor model. According to Christus Victor, the powers of evil threw everything they had at Jesus to oppose and silence him. They did their worst, as they always do: dealing death to anything that challenges their power. To paraphrase biblical scholar Marcus Borg: the crucifixion was the world’s “No” to Jesus, but the resurrection is God’s “Yes”.

And God’s Yes trumps the world’s No every single time. God rejects the world’s rejection of God.

The miracle of the atonement wasn’t in Jesus’ blood shed on the cross. That’s just the world doing what the world does best: Killing. The miracle of the atonement is in the resurrection of Christ: the triumph and vindication of a Love, stronger than death, that endured the very worst that the world had to offer and kept on loving anyway.

This, my friends, is the love that wilt not let us go.

This is the Good News of salvation in Christ that I am called to preach.

There, on that cross, as Jesus died, the love of God was magnified.

I believe those words with all my heart.

I respect the authors’ decision not to have their lyrics altered, but I also respect the committee’s decision to set this hymn aside because of its deficient atonement theology.

Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal comes out this fall.
Click here for ordering information.

If you want some actual information on the committee’s theology and use of language, visit the Committee Statements page on their website.

In closing, here are the words of Chelsea Stern, one of the committee members, about what they know, pray, and hope in relation to the new hymnal (taken from the Hymnal Sampler, p.5-6):

This we know:
We know this hymnal will change lives.
We know this hymnal will inspire the church.
We know these songs will enliven worship in powerful ways.
We know the familiar songs will sing anew.
We know the new songs will speak truth.

This we pray:
We pray that as we sing together from this hymnal we will come to have a deeper sense of unity in the body of Christ.
We pray that the Holy Spirit will bring surprises and breathe new life into our churches through this hymnal.

This we hope:
We hope the cover imprint fades from greasy fingers.
We hope the pages become wrinkled and torn from constant use.
We hope our kids will sing from this hymnal – we hope our grandkids will too.

We praise!
We praise God for this collection of song and give God the glory!

alt/theism

On July 23, 2013July 23, 2013 By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized2 Comments

Image by Rennett Stowe. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

Reblogged from CNN:

How many ways are there to disbelieve in God?

At least six, according to a new study.

Two researchers at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga found that atheists and agnostics run the range from vocally anti-religious activists to nonbelievers who still observe some religious traditions.

“The main observation is that nonbelief is an ontologically diverse community,” write doctoral student Christopher Silver and undergraduate student Thomas Coleman.

Click here to read the full article

I had fun with this study because, although I don’t ascribe the label atheist to myself, I am not a theist in the classical sense. For those who may not be familiar with the terms: Classical Theism refers to belief in an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and personal deity who is responsible for the creation of the universe, exists separately from it, and interferes with its normal operations at least occasionally. Depending on who you ask, the God of classical theism might also be defined as omnipresent, immutable (unchanging) and/or impassable (incapable of feeling or suffering).

I really like a conversational strategy adopted by Unitarian Universalist minister John Buehrens: whenever someone says, “I don’t believe in God,” Buehrens responds, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in.” Most of the time, he says, he is able to say that he doesn’t believe in that God either. Likewise with me: if the classical theist concept of divinity is the only legitimate definition of the word God, then I would be forced to classify myself as an atheist. For various reasons, I reject outright the ideas of immutability, impassability, and separateness from the universe. I radically redefine concepts of omnipotence, omniscience, creativity, and personality in ways that would make them nearly unrecognizable to a classical theist. For reasons that I admit are not entirely rational, I continue to accept the quality of benevolence as central to my understanding of the idea of God.

There are two thinkers with whom I tend to resonate when it comes to talking about God. The first is philosopher/theologian Paul Tillich who famously declared that God is not “a being” but “Being Itself” or “the Ground of Being”. This is also vaguely reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas who said (not in so many words) that God does not “exist” but “is existence”. In more recent years, Forrest Church (another Unitarian Universalist) wrote in his book The Cathedral of the World, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all, yet present in each.”

Like most atheists, I have no trouble acknowledging that God is a mythical concept devised by human minds in a particular cultural milieu. I utterly reject the hypothesis that there is actually an “old man in the sky” who created the world, controls everything, and condemns earth to destruction and the majority of humanity to eternal postmortem torture as punishment for various moral and dogmatic infractions. If that’s who God must be, then you can call me an atheist.

When it comes to the six types of atheists, I might be classified somewhere between a 3 (seeker-agnostic) and a 6 (ritual atheist).

Regarding the 3 (seeker-agnostic) the article says this:

This group is made up of people who are unsure about the existence of a God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience.

Silver and Coleman describe this group as people who regularly question their own beliefs and “do not hold a firm ideological position.”

That doesn’t mean this group is confused, the researchers say. They just embrace uncertainty.

Regarding the 6 (ritual atheist) the article says:

They don’t believe in God, they don’t associate with religion, and they tend to believe there is no afterlife, but the sixth type of nonbeliever still finds useful the teachings of some religious traditions.

“They see these as more or less philosophical teachings of how to live life and achieve happiness than a path to transcendental liberation,” Silver and Coleman wrote. “For example, these individuals may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, musical opportunities, meditation, yoga classes, or holiday traditions.”

For many of these nonbelievers, their adherence to ritual may stem from family traditions. For others, its a personal connection to, or respect for, the “profound symbolism” inherent within religious rituals, beliefs and ceremonies, according the researchers.

If I had to classify myself as an atheist, based on my rejection of classical theism, it would probably look like some combination of these two categories. However, I don’t consider myself an atheist because even a combination of these recently expanded ideas is still too dogmatically confining for me.

So here I am: neither a classical theist nor an atheist. If there is a widely acknowledged category that most closely describes the place where I live, it would be panentheism (God exists within the universe and the universe exists within God). Unlike pantheism (God is the universe and the universe is God), panentheism leaves more room for mystery and transcendence beyond the realm of time/space/matter/energy.

However, because I like to challenge conventional labels and make up new words, I’ve been playing with the term alt/theism as a description for where I’m at. Don’t read too much into it or get your torches and pitchforks ready, this is just pure fun with words.

For me, as an alt/theist, faith in God is based on a meta-rational “hunch” about the mysteries of existence, connection, personality, and harmony. My hunch (which I cannot prove as fact but cannot reject as possbility) is that each of these experienced realities is derivative from some larger source or whole that can never be fully understood or explained by human reason. To this mystery, the language of my Christian tradition attaches the name God. My only hope in the quest for understanding is to approach the very tip of reason’s precipice and peer over the edge into the ongoing mystery with my eyes, ears, heart, mind, and mouth hanging open in wonder.

God-Talk

On June 11, 2013June 12, 2013 By J. Barrett LeeIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The most ancient shrine described in the Bible was a rock. As the story is told in Genesis, Jacob founded the shrine because of a dream. Traveling alone, he fell asleep one night in the mountains, with his head resting on a stone for his pillow. Perhaps it was one of those bright nights when the stars are thick and close, like a spangled quilt thrown over the earth. He dreamed he saw a ladder connecting heaven and earth, with angels climbing up and down. “This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven” he exclaimed when he woke. He set up the stone to mark the place and named it Beth El – the House of God. Another night, on another journey, Jacob tossed and turned in fear that his brother, whom he’d wronged, might kill him. An angel came in the darkness and fought him. Jacob survived the fight but limped ever after, and he gained a new name – Israel, which means “one who struggled with God and lived.”

The divine-human encounter is the rock on which our theological house stands. At the heart of liberal theology is a mysterious glimpse, a transforming struggle, with the oblique presence of God. “Theology” literally means “God-talk” and derives from theos (God) and logos (word). But talk of God is tricky business. The same Bible that tells of Jacob’s marking stone also warns, “Make no graven images of God.” God may be sighted by a sidewise glance, sensed in a dream, felt in a struggle, heard in the calm at the heart of a storm, or unveiled in a luminous epiphany. But the moment human beings think they know who God is and carve their conclusions in stone, images of God can become dangerous idols. In Jewish tradition, God is ultimately un-nameable, and some never pronounce the letters that spell out God’s unspeakable name.

In liberal theology, at the core of the struggle with God is a restless awareness that human conclusions about God are always provisional, and any way of speaking about God may become an idol. This is why not everyone welcomes talk of God. God-talk has been used to hammer home expectations of obedience, to censure feelings and passions. It has been invoked to to stifle intellectual inquiry and to reinforce oppression. For many people the word “God” stands for conceptions of the ultimate that have harmed life, sanctioned unjust systems, or propelled people to take horrific actions “in the name of God.”

-Rebecca Ann Parker in A House for Hope: The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century (Beacon Press: 2010), p.23-24

The Immigrant Apostles’ Creed

On April 21, 2013April 21, 2013 By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized18 Comments

Rio Grande on the USA-Mexico Border. Image by Bob Palin. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.

This was posted to Facebook by Neal Presa, the current moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA). I’m told it was originally written by Rev. Jose Luis Casal. Fruitful theological food for thought for anyone who cares about USA immigration policies.

Also worth reading on this subject is this sample chapter from Reading the Bible With the Damned by Bob Ekblad:

FOLLOWING JESUS, EL BUEN COYOTE: READING PAUL WITH UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS

And here is the Immigrant Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in Almighty God,
who guided the people in exile and in exodus,
the God of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon,
the God of foreigners and immigrants.

I believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean,
who was born away from his people and his home, who fled
his country with his parents when his life was in danger.
When he returned to his own country he suffered under the oppression of Pontius Pilate, the servant of a foreign power. Jesus was persecuted, beaten, tortured, and unjustly condemned to death.
But on the third day Jesus rose from the dead,
not as a scorned foreigner but to offer us citizenship in God’s kingdom.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the eternal immigrant from God’s kingdom among us,
who speaks all languages, lives in all countries,
and reunites all races.
I believe that the Church is the secure home
for foreigners and for all believers.
I believe that the communion of saints begins
when we embrace all God’s people in all their diversity.
I believe in forgiveness, which makes us all equal before God,
and in reconciliation, which heals our brokenness.
I believe that in the Resurrection
God will unite us as one people
in which all are distinct and all are alike at the same time.
I believe in life eternal, in which no one will be foreigner
but all will be citizens of the kingdom
where God reigns forever and ever. Amen.

Thoughts on New Year’s Eve

On December 31, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Uncategorized1 Comment

About to turn over another page in the calendar. Feeling stuck? Like life and everything else is just going around in circles without ever getting anywhere?

Not technically true.

Consider this: as each day passes, our planet rotates on its axis and moves forward in its orbit around the sun. Our sun is revolving around the center of our galaxy. Our galaxy, along with hundreds and millions of others, is being thrust further and further out into space by the momentum left over from the Big Bang.

Technically speaking: it’s a spiral, not a circle. You’ve never actually been to the same place twice. Your life is going somewhere.

Taken metaphorically, this gives me food for reflection.

For the past few years, I’ve felt increasingly drawn to elements of Process Theology, expressed by the likes of John Cobb and Monica Coleman, and what is coming to be known as the Evolutionary perspective on Christianity, which I have discovered through the writings of Michael Dowd and Diarmuid O’Murchu. As a result of this exposure, I find it difficult to espouse with much sincere conviction platitudes like, “God has a plan.”

It might sound especially strange to hear this from a Presbyterian, one of the theological descendants of John Calvin and the Westminster divines, all of whom were famous for their devotion to the doctrine of predestination. But then again, our Reformed tradition is constantly and consciously reforma, semper reformanda (“reformed, and always reforming/being reformed/to be reformed”).

Absolute labels like Omnipotence and Sovereignty create insurmountable theological and philosophical problems for many people when applied to a theistic deity. They can be barriers to authentic growth in faith.

Rather than believing in God as an all-powerful outside entity who controls everything according to a preordained plan, I have come to trust in the God who influences all things from the inside according to an evolving vision (or dream as I heard one friend put it), which is Love. For me, the almighty-ness of God lies in Her infinite adaptability. The victory of God is in the faithfulness of God. In other words: God wins because She keeps adapting and never gives up.

Creativity in pursuit of Love is the hand of God at work in the world.

Reflecting on these theological thoughts in light of my opening remarks about the earth, sun, and galaxy, I get the sense that we’re all going somewhere, even though none of us (maybe not even God) is entirely sure where…

Religious Liberalism 101: A Book Review of Paul Rasor’s ‘Faith Without Certainty’

On June 20, 2012June 20, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Book Review, Common Sense Liberalism2 Comments

I haven’t done a book review in a while, but I’ve been reading some good ones. Just yesterday, I finished Faith Without Certainty: Liberal Theology in the 21^st Century (Skinner House: 2005) by Paul Rasor, a Unitarian Universalist minister and college professor who currently works as director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom.

Enemies and allies of liberal theology are similarly inclined to use the term ‘liberal’ as a synonymn for ‘other’. Until the last year or two, I myself was completely unaware of the historical depth contained within the joint traditions of Unitarianism and Universalism. Knowing only what I’d been told from my evangelical upbringing, I had always thought that Unitarian Universalists (UUs) were ‘loosey-goosey’ and ‘airy-fairy’ liberals who had respect for neither tradition nor truth and adopted an ‘anything goes’ policy in regard to morality and ethics. I would tell jokes like:

Q: What do you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian Universalist?

A: Someone who comes knocking on your door for no apparent reason.

OK, I have to admit that I still chuckle at that one, even though I know it’s not true. UUs are deeply committed to their theology and ethics. If one knocks at your door, you can bet that it’s for a very good reason. What I discovered is that UUs (as well as other religious liberals) are committed to process over content. In other words, they’re more interested in how you live than what you believe. This is beautifully reflected in the UUA’s Seven Principles. I would love to go into greater detail about them here, but that will have to wait for another blog post. The UUA, while it represents the largest organized group of religious liberals, is not the only place where they hang out. There continue to be many of us who try to embody a similar flavor of religion within our respective communities. What matters is that we who identify ourselves with this label (‘liberal’) must be able to simultaneously hold and share a conscious awareness of who we are and what we stand for in a positive sense.

Given the myriad ways that the term ‘liberal’ gets thrown around without being defined, I’m grateful for Rasor’s concise and readable primer that actually digs into the real roots and trajectories of the liberal theological tradition.

If you don’t have time to read the entire book, the first two chapters after the introduction will familiarize you with what it is that religious liberals believe and how we came to embrace those values. Whether you’re out to support or criticize us, it’s important that you know what you’re getting into. Love or hate us for what we are, not what we’re not.

The remainder of the book lays out some of the challenges and frontiers that liberal theology is currently facing in its ongoing development. With the arrival of the postmodern era, liberal religion (as a decidedly modern phenomenon) is reevaluating many of its core commitments (in much the same way that evangelical Christians (another modern movement) are also doing via the ‘Emergent Church’ movement). Hard and fast categories, such as rugged individualism and universal human experience, are being questioned in the light of community, culture, and language.

Rasor is highly critical of his own liberal tradition in relation to issues of race and social class. Despite its value of diversity, liberal religion continues to exist as a predominantly white and middle-class movement. While his criticisms are honest and accurate, I wish that he had spent more time with them. He mentions social Darwinism and the rise of manifest destiny in America, but he says nothing of Eugenics or the Holocaust, both of which were fueled in part by liberal theology. These massive moral failures demonstrate that no one group, however utopian their ideals, is above the human tendency toward self-justified violence and oppression. My primary criticism of Rasor’s book is that it seems to minimize and/or ignore these most prominent failures of liberal religion.

On the other hand, I was highly impressed by Rasor’s distinction between liberal and liberation theologies. These two categories are often associated with one another in the common mind, mainly because of shared emphases on social justice. However, as Rasor observes, they arise from different historical sources, make use of different methods, and emerge with very different values and convictions. Liberation theologians tend to hold scripture and tradition much more closely, even as they criticize and reinterpret them. Not all theological liberals are liberation theologians (and vice versa). One need only look at the sermons of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador to see his deep commitment to the historical orthodoxy of Roman Catholicism. If anything, I came away from Rasor’s book with an awareness that the construction of a theology that is simultaneously liberal and liberationist would prove to be a most difficult task. Indeed, evangelicals would probably have an easier time of it, given the place they grant to the Bible in their theological systems.

All in all, I highly enjoyed Rasor’s book during my two weeks of vacation. I expect that I will keep it on my shelf and refer to it often as a concise introduction to what religious liberals actually believe.

Click here to order this book on Amazon.com

Not Just Another Pretty Picture

On June 4, 2012 By J. Barrett LeeIn Common Sense Liberalism1 Comment

Much like the underwater Jesus picture I posted yesterday, this is just another lovely image that I found somewhere online. I don’t remember where, which means it was probably Facebook.

What you see behind the church is what I like to call “the best view in the galaxy”. You’re looking out across the galactic core of the milky way. This is our neighborhood. It is the slightly larger speck of dust within which the speck of dust that the speck of dust that we specks of dust inhabit revolves around rests.

I’ll leave you to unpack that sentence at your leisure.

I also really like the church in the foreground. Something about it resonates with where I am in relation to my own spirituality right now. About a year ago, I made a conscious decision to start verbalizing a shift that had been slowly happening for almost a decade. The traditional metaphysics of orthodox evangelicalism have ceased functioning as part of my internal theological process.

These days, I consider myself a “recovering evangelical”. Not because all evangelicalism is evil, but because I can’t handle it responsibly. I know of many evangelicals who manage to live intelligent, compassionate, and healthy lives within that tradition. For whatever reason, I could not.

In it’s place, I’ve adopted the label “liberal Christian”. Some might also justifiably call me a “progressive Christian”, but I prefer the “liberal”. I’ve written about that choice of words elsewhere on this blog. I love my church, as well as the Bible, and the symbols & rituals of Christianity. Jesus continues to be a ubiquitous and central presence in my life, although I’m still figuring out how to articulate exactly what that means to me.

What I like about the above picture is its composition. The church sits in the foreground but off to the side. The big picture is the galaxy itself, of which the church is a part. In the same way, the Christian tradition continues to be a part of my big picture. It’s a big part, a dominant part, and the part in which I live, but it’s still just a part.

I’ve recently come to accept a series of possibilities that would have scared the hell out of me only a few years ago: There may come a day when Christianity ceases to be a living religion on this planet, a day when the human species goes extinct, a day when this planet is no longer capable of supporting organic life, and yet another day when the sun itself goes dark.

Jesus once told his disciples, “You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” He was speaking of the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem. His disciples thought that the temple and the nation of Israel were eternal institutions that would outlive history itself. God would never allow these things to be destroyed. Alas, the disciples were wrong. I can hear Jesus uttering these same words in relation to my congregation, my denomination, my country, my religion, my planet, my solar system, and my galaxy, ad infinitum.

“You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

Some parts last longer than others, but everything is is only a part of everything, and it’s all mortal. This wisdom of Jesus empowered his followers with the faith they needed to survive the razing of their ancestral home. They were ready for the Diaspora because they believed that, come what may, God would never be thrown down.

These days, I’m settling into a deeper trust that, even though my best ideas about God (including the word itself) will one day pass out of existence, the reality to which that word refers never will.