This is not usually how wine gets discussed at the office...

I attended a Town Hall meeting at work today where the president of our business and his staff talked and took questions. As a part of the Q&A, someone stood up in the back and asked this question (I’m paraphrasing here):

“I’m reminded of an old wise saying: ‘do not put new wine in old wineskins, because the wine will expand, the skins will burst, and the wine will be lost.’ With some of these [new work things] being a sort of ’new wine’, are there ‘old wineskins’ we should be aware of and risk that we should mitigate?”

I immediately, of course, recognized the Biblical reference, and appreciated that the questioner didn’t explicitly call it out, but just kept the wisdom of Jesus’ saying. But it was striking to me how few people in the room appeared to recognize it, how it took each of the leaders in the Q&A a second to really parse through it, and then hearing people after the meeting commenting on that question and how deep and profound it was.

I’m not telling this story to complain about Biblical illiteracy; it is what it is in our world today. But I find myself thankful for the coworker who asked the question, and hopeful that the saying will worm its way into a few peoples’ minds today, maybe even to the point where they decide to look it up.

Had Jesus Never Lived…

“Truth is, had Jesus never lived, we could not have invented him.”

A remarkably persuasive thought from Walter Wink in The Human Being.

Jersak: the immutability and impassability of God's love

Just after posting yesterday and mentioning Thomas J. Oord in passing, Bradley Jersak’s “Cordial Pushback” on relational/open theology hit my inbox. While I’m not deeply enough into open theology or process theology to have an informed opinion on a lot of what Jersak’s saying, I did particularly appreciate this point he made about the love of God:

The biggest stumbling stones for RT [relational theology] teachers seem to be words such as immutability (that God’s essence doesn’t change) and impassibility (that God is not subject to fleshly passions). These terms have nuanced definitions that need to be handled with care lest we misrepresent them.

First, what is immutable? God’s love. God’s love is immutable in the sense of that God’s covenants are marked by faithfulness versus fickleness. He is not like other gods who turn away or turn against their subjects on a whim. The doctrine of immutability insists that God’s love is constant and infinite—always higher, wider, longer, and deeper than our comprehension. Thus, God’s love does not rise and fall or come and go—God’s love is an ever-flowing spring that never runs out.

Further, God’s love is impassible. This does not mean God is unfeeling or unresponsive (like cold, hard granite). No. We never say that. Rather, this means that the ever-flowing spring of God’s love is not conditional on our response. God’s mercy is not turned on and off by our behaviour. Nothing can separate us from divine love.

When God sees and hears our cries, we do see a response of compassion and care, where God ‘comes down’ to help. BUT that response arises from God’s own heart, from the depths of God’s loving nature. He is responsive, not reactive, and consistent rather than codependent. Simply put, impassibility means that God’s love is not subject to or jerked around by our passions. In Christ, we see the nature of God as empathetic (co-suffering) and Cyril will say he ‘suffered impassibly’—meaning voluntarily rather than constrained.

Just beautiful.

Zahnd: Believing in an interventionist God

Brian Zahnd has a post today that I needed to hear: I Believe In An Interventionist God.

In my journey out of evangelicalism and into some broader, more historic practice of Christianity, I have struggled with prayer. As I wrestle with questions about what even is God, really—thanks Teillhard and Ilia Delio!—and whether God’s nature is to compel anyone or anything—thanks Thomas J. Oord!—I vacillate between wanting to fall back on a sort of naive presumption of the evangelical god and wondering what even the use of prayer is. And yet, at some part of my core deeper than the intellect, I know there’s some real value, use, and need for prayer. It means something.

Zahnd observes:

Prayer is the oxygen of faith. When we can’t pray, we can at least say our prayers. When the tide of faith has receded far out to sea, liturgical prayers—prayers that we did not compose—can sustain us until the tide comes back in. It’s the vetted prayers passed down through the ages that best sustain faith in a dark night of the soul. The soul that can hold on to the prayers during the dark night will eventually arrive at a new dawn.

He’s right.

In this time the liturgical prayers from the Book of Common Prayer have been so valuable for me. For a closing prayer at the end of last week’s diocesan convention a priest broke out this beautiful familiar prayer from the Compline, and I was unexpectedly immediately in tears:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night,
and give your angels charge over those who sleep.
Tend the sick, Lord Christ;
give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering,
pity the afflicted, shield the joyous;
and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Zahnd understands the temptation to look around at the world and just ask “what’s the use?”. But that way lies a dead, shriveled faith.

[P]rayers go unanswered, children die of cancer, and even the most faith-filled suffer “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” God intervenes, but from our vantage point not nearly as often as we would like. It does create the temptation to fling our hands up in despair and say, “I no longer believe in an interventionist God.” I understand this impulse, but I think it is mostly an attempt to seal ourselves off from potential disappointment. We give up praying lest we be disappointed, or we pray such safe prayers that we no longer run the risk of being disappointed. But if we are to have any hope for a life of vibrant faith, we have to run the risk of disappointment. Faith by its very nature is a risky venture. So I choose the risk of disappointment. I do this because it is my experience that God can help me bear disappointment, but if I quit engaging with God by ceasing to implore divine intervention in our world and in my life for fear of disappointment, my soul begins to waste away. I don’t want to live in a world where God seems absent just because I don’t want to risk disappointment.

And I love that when Zahnd gets down to what he does believe about prayer and God’s engagement in the world, he ends at a conclusion that fits in just fine with Teillhard, Delio, and Oord:

I actually believe—though I cannot prove it—that God is in a constant state of intervention in the world. I hold to the seemingly outrageous idea that God is never not intervening in the world! God is love, and God is always loving the world. God’s intervention is God’s love. God’s intervening love may rarely (if ever) be coercive and controlling, but the intervention of love is there nevertheless. What God’s loving, though noncoercive, intervention looks like exactly is hard to tell, but I suspect that has more to do with our own spiritual blindness than with any imagined absence or ambivalence on God’s part.

I am slowly feeling my own reactionary, deconstructing pendulum reach the apex of its swing and head back toward a better resting place. Slowly finding my voice in prayer again. But I am supremely thankful for the written prayers—I like Zahnd’s word here, vetted prayers—that have sustained my faith in the interim.

Familiar hymns, alternate tunes

Yesterday in church we sang “My Hope Is Built On Nothing Less” as the recessional. But rather than singing it to the tune SOLID ROCK, which was traditional in my childhood churches, the setting in the Episcopal hymnal is MELITA, which is best known as the US Navy Hymn “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”.

My brain being what it is, it spent the rest of the afternoon processing through what other hymn texts have the 8.8.8.8.8.8 meter and could be sung to MELITA. While Hymnary lists hundreds of them, in the end my brain fixed on one and wouldn’t let go: “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”.

I mean, I’m not advising it would be a good match… but it’s a metrical fit. Kinda creepy.

Against the Machine: Paul Kingsnorth’s dangerous, unjustified dream

After hearing some online buzz about Paul Kingsnorth’s new book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, I got it from the library and sat down with it this week. And boy, do I have some thoughts.

Kingsnorth is an English writer in his early 50s who has variously been a journalist, ecological activist, Buddhist, Wiccan, and anti-globalist. He converted to the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2020. Against the Machine is categorized by its publisher as social science, but after reading it the first word that comes to mind is “jeremiad”.

Through the first two sections of the book I found myself frequently nodding my head in agreement with Kingsnorth’s description and critique of what he calls the Machine: the amalgamation of technology, capitalism, globalism, and the embrace of “progress” that have the tendency to dehumanize, to unmoor us from place, to tempt us to forget the realities that make us human. Think Wendell Berry (who is quoted in the epigraph) if Berry was a Gen X English Wiccan.

But then…

Then starting with part 3, Kingsnorth turns the corner toward offering critiques of modern systems and events, and here’s where he starts to go off the rails. It’s not that there isn’t some merit to most of his critiques. It’s that he cherry picks examples and quotes, doesn’t engage with the substance of arguments when he can just use an out-of-context quote to illustrate his point, and when facts are scarce he makes unfounded assertions and hopes you’ll accept them without challenge.

He spends a couple chapters arguing that Artificial Intelligence is, more or less, the Antichrist. He criticizes the advance of technology largely by treating the wild futurist predictions of Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil as if they would be implemented in every home tomorrow. Rather than honestly engaging with the transhumanist evolutionary thought of Pierre Teillhard, he quotes a throw-away one-line quote from Teillhard scholar Ilia Delio from a 2019 Vox article as if it sums up the whole position.

He inveighs equally against the political right and left, saying that they all promote The Machine, that it’s just a matter of scale and intensity. He decries fascism but in the next breath rails against progressive thought; he dismisses anyone who would utter the phrase “dead white men”, saying that “we know what happens” when a culture stops honoring its elders.

In one chapter he addresses gender and clearly positions himself as anti-trans. But rather than trying to engage the topic with any seriousness, his entire basis for his argument is a first-person anecdote about talking to a new acquaintance who relates discomfort at having a transgender son. And that’s it. Case closed.

Can we talk about reality?

Kingsnorth seems to idealize a pre-modern, pre-technical age, but doesn’t ever deal with the thought that the same scientific techniques that could be abused have also created great good and great improvement to human life. At one point he seems dismayed about the West “forcing” vaccines onto Africa. Might one think instead that vaccines have brought a significant improvement of life to Africans who otherwise might die from preventable diseases?

Take any of Kingsnorth’s arguments to their logical conclusions and it would seem we should be living in small hunter-gatherer clans with 30-year life expectancies and no more technology than maybe a wheel to help us along. He concedes that maybe living in towns would be OK if they’re no larger than the 150 or so people Plato describes being within the sound of a human voice, and he idealizes a sort of Dark Ages jack-of-all-trades substistent household. (Did such a thing actually exist?) The Machine he critiques isn’t an invention of the Enlightenment or even the Romans or Greeks; it’s been a part of human civilization for as far back as we have historical record. One might assume that, had he lived in a different time, Kingsnorth would be the cave dweller telling his next-cave neighbor that the folks living in the newfangled stand-alone shelter were hopelessly on the path toward inhumanity because they would never appreciate the earthy experience of breathing the smoke from a cooking fire while the fire’s shadows danced on the cave walls.

There are a few thin chapters at the end of the book where Kingsnorth tries to answer the inevitable question: “so what should we do”? He admits that he himself “cautiously accept[s] that using the technology of the Machine to resist the Machine can be of benefit.” And so his practical advice sounds familiar to what you will hear others saying, others in whom he might find allies if he hadn’t just spent chapters excoriating them. “Live on the margins.” “Speak truth and try to live it.” “Set your boundaries and refuse to step over them.” “Find our liminal spaces.” “Retreat to create.” “Be awkward and hard to grasp.” “Build your zone of cultural refusal.” It puts me in mind of what the kids say these days when someone is too wound up online: “touch grass”.

If Paul Kingsnorth is happy living his Luddite life in Ireland, God bless him. But after reading Against the Machine I can firmly say his vision for the world sure isn’t mine. Even if we could go back on millennia of scientific advances, the world would not be a better place for it. The challenge of humanity is not fantasizing about going back but in learning how to go forward.

Theology from love or terror?

A couple dots I connected yesterday: while the explicit evangelical gospel message I grew up with was very clearly taught in church as salvation by grace through faith in Jesus, via no merit of my own, the implicit message in all the community discussions was that salvation was only assured if your doctrine, and your ability to verbalize that doctrine, were good enough.

My grandparents on both sides were lifelong faithful practicing Christians, Methodist and Lutheran. And yet I remember my parents’ agonized discussions about whether or not those grandparents’ salvation “was genuine” because they didn’t articulate clearly the concept of “lordship salvation”.

Which leads me to wondering this morning: did I become a theology nerd because I was just really interested in God and religious beliefs? Or did I become a theology nerd out of some below-the-surface existential fear for my eternal damnation?

As I near age 50 it’s time to make lemonade out of those lemons, regardless. But it’s a sobering question.

Richard Beck on loving Christianity (and really, loving certainty) more than loving Christ

It’s been a while since I’ve linked a Richard Beck post, but man oh man does he nail it today with his observations about young, aggressive converts to Orthodoxy and Catholicism. (I’d venture that in previous years we could’ve said this about “cage stage” Calvinist/Presbyterian converts, too.)

A lot of the negative and aggressive energy inserted into these debates is from men who have become recent converts to Orthodoxy. You might be aware of this trend and it’s impact upon Christian social media. The main take of these Orthodox converts is that every branch of Christianity, from Catholics to evangelicals, is a theological failure. Heretical, even. Only Orthodoxy preserves the one true faith.

This conceit, however, isn’t limited to the very online Orthodox. There are also aggressive Catholics who denigrate Protestantism. And in response to these Orthodox and Catholic attacks, there have arisen aggressive Protestant defenders.

Here’s my hot take. I think many of these loud and aggressive converts are more in love with Christianity than they are with Christ. They love the creeds, the church fathers, the liturgy, the saints, the history, the culture of Christendom, the doctrine, the dogma, the theology, the Tradition. What they don’t seem to love very much is Jesus, as evidenced in their becoming belligerent social media trolls.

But where does the vitriol come from? Beck says it’s “fear, plain and simple”. I think he’s right on this, too.

This is one reason we’re seeing so many young men gravitate away from evangelicalism toward Orthodoxy and Catholicism. As sola scriptura Protestants these young men were raised as epistemic foundationalists. In standing on Scripture they stood on a firm, solid, and unshakeable foundation of Truth. The Bible provided them with every answer to every question. Epistemically, they were bulletproof. They were right and everyone who disagreed with them was wrong. This certainty provided existential comfort and consolation. Dogmatism was a security blanket.

Then they went off to seminary or down some YouTube rabbit hole and discovered that “Scripture alone” was hermeneutical quicksand. Suddenly, the edifice of security began to crumble. Where to turn? Where to find a firm and unassailable foundation? The Tradition! One type of foundationalism (the Bible alone) was exchanged for another (the Tradition). In both cases, the evangelical need for bulletproof certainty remained a constant. There has to be some “correct” place to land in the ecclesial landscape. It’s utopianism in theological dress. But the underlying anxiety curdles the quest. Especially if, once the “one true church” is found, the old evangelical hostility and judgmentalism toward out-group members resurfaces. The underlying neurotic dynamic is carried over. Fundamentalism is merely rearranged. In order to feel secure and safe I need to scapegoat outsiders. Their damnation is proof of my salvation, their heresy confirms my orthodoxy.

Yes to all this. One of the big challenges I’ve found myself facing as I left evangelicalism and joined the Episcopal church is to be ok with the uncertainty; to accept that each tradition has its own foibles and messes. Another Beck post more than seven years ago prompted me to write (among other things) that even the most erudite theologian must be wrong on at least 5-10% of their theology. And if so, then certainty of “rightness” as the (usually unacknowledged) base of my security of salvation is inherently shaky ground.

All these years later I am more convinced than ever that the “conversion” I need isn’t from one denomination or tradition to another, but a conversion from a confidence rooted in my own belief’s rightness to a confidence rooted in God’s love for me and evidenced by my love for Jesus and my neighbor.

The effect of high-control environments on a child’s personal development

Another quote from Holy Hurt that feels just a little too relevant:

[I]n religious and family environments that are governed by fear and control, some of the normal things that need to happen to help kids grow into healthy selves don’t get to happen. The developmental steps - even the basic ones around agency, self-responsibility and life choices, boundaries, rule breaking, and rebellion - are impaired through shame, punishment, fear, control, and restricted agency. If development is about becoming more of oneself, and in these environments the self is considered untrustworthy, sinful, or an obstacle to spiritual maturity, then these environments and the people in them will often do whatever they can to eradicate or impair the development and expression of the self.

As a result, these high-control environments often keep people stuck in a state of psychological and social immaturity…

Characteristics of Spiritual Control

My therapist (himself an ordained minister) broadly sorts churches into two categories: churches whose functional goal is control of people, and churches whose goal is life enhancement. It’s a broad brush, open for nuance, and certainly one that many churches (especially ones my therapist would put in the control category) would dispute. But as broad categories I find them helpful to think through the impact of how a church’s teaching and culture actually affect people. Regardless of labels or stated purpose, a system’s designed purpose is, ultimately, what it produces. (In Jesus’ words: you will know them by their fruit.)

With that preamble, I’ve been reading Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing by Hillary L. McBride, PhD. I’m only about a quarter of the way in, but yesterday I ran into the chapter where she discusses the characteristics of an abusive spiritual environment, and… oof.

Here are some examples of how control is enacted.

Interpersonal or Social Control

  • Cutting off relationship with others outside the group
  • Limiting the kinds of information people have access to, especially if it challenges the thinking of or control/power held by the leaders
  • Creating a strong in-group bias that renders those in the out-group as bad
  • Creating demands on time and community commitments that limit contact with out-groups

Financial Control

  • Requiring a portion of income to go to the religious group
  • Expecting people to volunteer excessively, even if doing so negatively affects other areas of their lives
  • Limiting women’s access to education or employment
  • Guilting or pressuring individuals to give even more money to the community and suggesting that in return all their needs will be provided for (by God or by the community)

Physical and Behavioral Control

  • Suppressing sexuality when not within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage
  • Defining and policing expressions of sexuality in general
  • Creating strict expectations about dress
  • Creating moral superiority around categories of food and eating behaviors
  • Holding expectations about leisure activities, including what can be read or watched, and shaming and devaluing behavior that is not “like the group”

Psychological Control

  • Shaming and devaluing development of or connection to the self, and communicating that the self (and self-trust or knowing) is bad or sinful
  • Forbidding critical thinking and encouraging self-policing of thoughts and emotions
  • Suppressing of emotion outside worship experiences
  • Praising blind faith while discouraging critical thinking or questioning
  • Making decisions for individuals about career choices, dating and marriage, or hobbies/giftings
  • Requiring giving authority for one’s life to the leaders
  • Promoting black-and-white thinking

When I compare those to my religious upbringing and adult life in conservative evangelical Christianity, by my count I have experienced at least 19 out of 20. And was taught that this was normal and good.

I’ve still got a lot of unpacking to do.