Chris E. W. Green on Christians as a temple for the sake of the world

Following up from yesterday’s post, here’s Chris Green again from chapter 2 of Sanctifying Interpretation. In understanding our Christian vocation, Green says, we need to see our role as not against the world, but for the world. (Emphasis mine in the quote below.)

Often, when we are talking about the church as called out from the world, we imply a contrast between the humanity of believers and the humanity of non-believers. Truth be told, Scripture itself often seems to speak this way. For example, Ephesians 2 contrasts ‘the children of wrath’ - those who are ‘dead’ in sin, ‘following the course of the world’, dominated by the ‘passions of the flesh’ (Eph 2.1-3) - with the ‘one new humanity’, which is created in Christ’s body as the ‘household of God’ (Eph. 2.15, 19). If we are not careful, then, we leave the impression that the saints have a different humanity ‘in Christ’ than does the rest of the world ‘in Adam’.

But such a reading misses the point. The line of thought in Ephesians 2 does not end with the contrast between the family of God and the children of disobedience. Instead, Paul goes on to insist that this ‘one new humanity’ constituted in and as Christ’s body ‘is joined together and grows into a holy temple… a dwelling place for God’ (Eph. 2.21-22). What is this temple if not a holy ‘place’ set aside for the world to meet with its God and for God to act on the world? The church, participating in the renewed humanity created in Christ as a priestly people, opens a space in the midst of the world so that heaven and earth, the new creation and the old, can touch. We are made by the Spirit the temple for the sake of others, so they can encounter Christ in the room he has made for them in our lives.

–Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 31

That last sentence is a feast! It’s not a new teaching, or anything contradictory to things I’ve been taught before, but that particular color on it: that others would “encounter Christ” when they encounter me. Wowza.

Chris E. W. Green on Vocation

I’m just digging in to Chris E. W. Green’s Sanctifying Interpretation, and while it’s a book I picked up because it was going to address Scriptural interpretation, I’m only two chapters in and blown away by his thoughts on human vocation. I’ve got several bits I’d like to share, but I’ll spread them out over several posts.

From Chapter 1, Green encourages us that the Christian vocation shouldn’t be distinguished too strongly from the human vocation:

I believe that a call to collaborate with God rests upon all of us just because we exist as the creatures we are. We are all of us as human beings made to mediate God’s holiness to the rest of creation, to work the works of God, to do what Jesus did, to be who Jesus is. To be human is to be burdened with this vocation. And in many ways - small and large, conscious and unconscious, intentional and inadvertent - all of us are more or less faithfully and lovingly in fact fulfilling our calling, although always only in part. In Christ, the Spirit places us under that burden, strengthening us for the bearing of it…


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 20

I love this thought that humans, even unknowingly, are frequently ‘faithfully and lovingly’ fulfilling the calling as humans to bring healing and reconciliation.

Green goes on to talk about the purpose of Christian vocation as something clarified or revealed from within the human vocation (emphasis mine in the quote below):

Our broadest vocation is not so much given to us at our baptism as we are at last truly given to it. Baptized into Christ, we are awakened to and sanctioned for the vocation we always already were meant to bear. Our narrower vocation - the work we are called to do as members of Christ’s body (e.g. bishop, pastor, or deacon; evangelist intercession, or teacher) - comes to us in our call to believe or is imparted to us in the event of ordination, but always with a view to the fulfillment of the natural human call. Within such an account, those outside the church are recognized to have the same broad vocation we do. For now, however, we find ourselves called out from them, but only because we have been singled out by God to share in the work of making room for them. We take on the ecclesial vocation always only on behalf of others - never instead of them, much less against them. We are the called out ones whose lives are dedicated entirely to collaboration with God’s work for those who have yet to hear or submit to the call. The elect are always elected for the sake of the non-elect. The church is a remnant of the world, gathered from the world to be both a temple and a kingdom of priests for the world’s sake.


Sanctifying Interpretation, p. 21

This is such a wonderful perspective. Would that the church saw their vocation, their service to God, never instead of others or against others, but always for the sake of others. The picture of the church as a temple and priests to bring God’s presence and message to the world, and the world to God’s presence and message, is one I’ll be chewing on for a while.

New on ChrisHubbs.com: The Bookshelf

I’ve tracked my reading in one way or another here on this site and then using Goodreads since 2007 or so. At some point Goodreads got bought by Amazon and its functionality stagnated; I’m still logging books there but not interested in investing in it as my continued long-term logging. I was casting around for ideas on book logging back during the holidays and ran across some spiffy static site generator ideas, which lead me to rolling out The Bookshelf at books.chrishubbs.com today.

The vast bulk of the functionality driving The Bookshelf was written by Tobias (aka Rixx), who maintains his own book logging site at books.rixx.de. He provides the source on Github. It was designed to scrape Goodreads for data, assuming that the user would have Goodreads Developer API keys. Goodreads no longer issues new developer API keys (stagnating, remember?) so that path wasn’t available. I ended up writing some Python to parse the Goodreads export CSV file (which contained all of my reading logs since 2007) and process it into a whole structure of Markdown files with associated metadata. Those are then the master data that Rixx’s site generator tools use to generate static HTML.

I love the layout and organization of The Bookshelf. You can look at reading by year, by author, by title, and by series. You can also look at statistics on titles and pages read. There is “to be read” functionality that is a bit raggedy-looking yet; I have plans to add my existing to-read bookshelf (above my dresser in my bedroom!) to The Bookshelf as To Read, but I haven’t gotten that done yet.

If history serves, The Bookshelf will be the most actively updated part of my website. I haven’t done a great job over the years at writing short book reviews, but I think this site and the workflow to update it will encourage me to do that. I’m sure a decade from now it’ll be time for a change to something else, but as an organizer and cataloger, I’m excited to have 15 years worth of reading data here.

My 2022 Reading in Review

Another year full of books! (Previous summaries: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007… argh, how did I miss some of those years?)

I got through 61 books this year, which feels like a bit of a down year. My “one book at a time” practice got me bogged down in some slow theology books, and then I got sucked into a cross-stitch project and a couple web projects at the end of the year which stole some of my reading time. (I finally came to grips with breaking up the long theology slogs with some fiction, and that helps a lot.)

Here’s the full list of reading, with particular standouts noted in bold:

Theology

  • Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church - Bridget Eileen Rivera
  • Happiness and Contemplation - Josef Pieper
  • The Aryan Jesus - Susannah Heschel
  • The Joy of Being Wrong - James Alison
  • Attached to God: A Practical Guide to Deeper Spiritual Experience - Krispin Mayfield
  • The Emergent Christ - Ilia Delio
  • The Beatitudes Through the Ages - Rebekah Ann Eklund
  • Let the Light In: Healing from Distorted Images of God - Colin McCartney
  • In: Incarnation and Inclusion, Abba and Lamb - Brad Jersak
  • Having the Mind of Christ - Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke
  • The Dark Interval - John Dominic Crossan
  • Love Over Fear - Dan White, Jr.
  • Faith Victorious - Lennart Pinomaa
  • History and Eschatology - N. T. Wright
  • Destined for Joy - Alvin F. Kimel
  • A Thicker Jesus - Glen Harold Stassen
  • Changing Our Mind - David P. Gushee

Dr. Ilia Delio’s The Emergent Christ is the one that had me thinking the most this year, and that will stick with me longer than any of the others. Her approach to thinking about God, evolution, and universal progress within a Christian framework blew my mind, and consistently challenges me to think about God and the universe differently.

Other Non-Fiction

  • Maximum City - Suketu Mehta
  • Music is History - Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
  • The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
  • How the Word Is Passed - Clint Smith
  • The New Abolition - Gary Dorrien
  • Reading Evangelicals - Daniel Silliman
  • Fearful Symmetry - A. Zee
  • The Joshua Generation - Rachel Havrelock
  • Belabored - Lyz Lenz
  • The Method - Isaac Butler
  • The Dead Sea Scrolls - John J. Collins
  • Strange Rites - Tara Isabella Burton
  • A Different Kind of Animal - Robert Boyd
  • The Dawn of Everything - David Graeber and David Wengrow
  • Bible Nation - Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden
  • Protestants Abroad - David A. Hollinger
  • Do I Make Myself Clear? - Harold Evans
  • White Flight - Kevin M. Kruse
  • How God Becomes Real - T. M. Luhrmann
  • Salty - Alissa Wilkinson
  • Blood In The Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks - Chris Herring
  • Searching for the Oldest Stars - Anna Frebel
  • This Here Flesh - Cole Arthur Riley
  • The Invention of Religion - Jan Assmann
  • The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim, George Spafford, and Kevin Behr
  • The Late Medieval English Church - G. W. Bernard
  • The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila - Carlos Eire
  • Strangers in Their Own Land - Arlie Russell Hochschild

Three women’s books stand out here: Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites, looking at how the current generation of young people are looking for religious experiences in places other than traditional religion; Cole Arthur Riley’s spiritual memoir This Here Flesh, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, describing a sociologist’s quest to understand Louisianans who have been devastatingly impacted by environmental destruction and yet persistently support the businesses and political causes behind that destruction.

Fiction

  • Unthinkable - Brad Parks
  • Lent - Jo Walton
  • The Last Commandment - Scott Shepherd
  • When We Cease To Understand the World - Benjamin Labatut
  • Everything Sad Is Untrue - Daniel Nayeri
  • Once A Thief - Christopher Reich
  • A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik
  • The Blue Diamond - Leonard Goldberg
  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built - Becky Chambers
  • The Coffin Dancer - Jeffery Deaver
  • Sea of Tranquility - Emily St. John Mandel
  • Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy - Becky Chambers
  • A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers (re-read)
  • Slow Horses - Mick Herron
  • The Last Agent - Robert Dugoni

Here the standout was author Becky Chambers. Her little Monk & Robot novellas sucked me in and made me happy. That prompted me to purchase her Small Angry Planet series and start in on a re-read. Chambers works in the best tradition of science fiction pushing for inclusion and acceptance of The Other and in using the exploration of a very different universe to make you think about how our own could be improved.

Coming Up…

I’ve continued to log on Goodreads this past year but I get the feeling it’s spooling down as it gets absorbed by Amazon. I’m working on a self-hosted book logging site - it’s actually live online right now if you know where to look but I’m going to do some cleanup on it before I publicize it. I’ll post here about it when I do!

Stanley Hauerwas on sin, character formation, and fear

From Chapter 3 of Stanley Hauerwas’ book on Christian ethics The Peaceable Kingdom, this wonderful insight into how we can think about sin as interacting with our own power, control, and self-direction (emphasis mine):

We are rooted in sin just to the extent we think we have the inherent power to claim our life - our character - as our particular achievement. In other words, our sin - our fundamental sin - is the assumption that we are the creators of the history through which we acquire and possess our character. Sin is the form our character takes as a result of our fear that we will be “nobody” if we lose control of our lives.

Moreover our need to be in control is the basis for the violence of our lives. For since our “control” and “power” cannot help but be built on an insufficient basis, we must use force to maintain the illusion that we are in control. We are deeply afraid of losing what unity of self we have achieved. Any idea or person threatening that unity must be either manipulated or eliminated…

This helps us understand why we are so resistant to the training offered by the gospel, for we simply cannot believe that the self might be formed without fear of the other.

This gets to the heart of a lot of the discussions I’ve had with my Dad lately about the first step in making a positive spiritual change (which might be what Hauerwas here calls “the training offered by the gospel”) is to be freed from fear. One needs to be secure in their standing with God and with their community to be able to change and grow. (The counter-example here is frequently seen: spiritual communities that make any interest in ideas outside the accepted orthodoxy grounds for exclusion and expulsion.)

Hauerwas continues:

Our sin lies precisely in our unbelief - our distrust that we are creatures of a gracious creator known only to the extent we accept the invitation to become part of his kingdom. It is only be learning to make that story - that story of God - our own that we gain the freedom necessary to make our life our own. Only then can I learn to accept what has happened to me (which includes what I have done) without resentment. It is then that I am able to accept my body, my psychological conditioning, my implicit distrust of others and myself, as mine, as part of my story. And the acceptance of myself as a sinner is made possible only because it is an acceptance of God’s acceptance. This I am able to see myself as a sinner and yet to go on.

This does not mean that tragedy is eliminated from our lives; rather we have the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence. For finally our freedom is learning how to exist in the world, a violent world, in peace with ourselves and others. The violence of the world is but the mirror of the violence of our lives. We say we desire peace, but we have not the souls for it. We fear the boredom a commitment to peace would entail. As a result the more we seek to bring “under our control”, the more violent we have to become to protect what we have. And the more violent we allow ourselves to become, the more vulnerable we are to challenges.

This is growth toward wholeness: “the means to recognize and accept the tragic without turning to violence”.

For what does “peace with ourselves” involve? It surely does not mean that we will live untroubled - though it may be true that no one can really harm a just person. Nor does it mean that we are free of self-conflict, for we remain troubled sinners - indeed, that may well be the best description of the redeemed. To be “at peace with ourselves” means we have the confidence, gained through participation in the adventure we call God’s kingdom, to trust ourselves and others. Such confidence becomes the source of our character and our freedom as we are loosed from a debilitating preoccupation with ourselves. Moreover by learning to be at peace with ourselves, we find we can live at peace with one another. And this freedom, after all, is the only freedom worth having.

Podcast Recommendation: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

For a long time my podcast listening has been almost exclusively nerdy tech podcasts mixed up with nerdy theology podcasts, with an occasional news or true crime mixed in to liven things up. Somehow I have almost entirely bypassed any that were music-related. (I did listen to a couple episodes of Song Exploder right after it debuted, but it just didn’t hook me.)

Somewhere along the line, Rob Weinert-Kendt on Twitter started linking to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by British host Andrew Hickey. It took me only a couple episodes and I was hooked.

The format of the podcast is one song per 30-ish minute episode, but each episode covers far more than just the titular song. Hickey provides background on the artist, the influences that formed that artist, stories about the creation of the song, and so on. You come away from the episode having learned a lot not just about a particular song but also about the developing music scene in the Americas (and, once you get in a ways, in Europe). He starts with the first inklings of what would become rock music as they emerged in the big band scene. (Episode 1: “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet.)

500 episodes is a significant feat for any podcast, and setting out that goal in the title of your show seems rather ambitious, but I’m willing to bet that Mr. Hickey has all 500 songs charted out, and the moxie to see it through. He’s currently up through Episode 157 (“See Emily Play” by Pink Floyd), and is publishing a lot of bonus material for Patreon subscribers. I’m learning a lot as I go, so even if some interruption keeps the series from completion, it’s still been an excellent investment of time.

So, if you’re interested in rock music, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is highly recommended.

Carter Burwell: polymath film composer

I was familiar with Carter Burwell’s name thanks to his score for the Coen brothers’ film True Grit, but I wasn’t aware of the full scope of his film compositions or of his backstory. A brilliant man who just picked up and learned lots of things. Just out of college and trying to make it as a musician while working a lousy warehouse job:

One day, Burwell saw a help-wanted ad in the Times for a computer programmer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit research institution whose director, James D. Watson, had shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering the structure of DNA. Burwell wrote a jokey letter in which he said that, although he had none of the required skills, he would cost less to employ than someone with a Ph.D. would. Surprisingly, the letter got him the job, and he spent two years as the chief computer scientist on a protein-cataloguing project funded by a grant from the Muscular Dystrophy Association. “Watson let me live at the lab, and he would invite me to his house for breakfast with all these amazing people,” he said. When that job ended, Burwell worked on 3-D modelling and digital audio in the New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Lab, several of whose principal researchers had just left to start Pixar.

The Polymath Film Composer Known as “the Third Coen Brother” by David Owen in The New Yorker

His royalties from scoring Twilight funded a house on Long Island, where he lives and works from home, composing on a 1947 Steinway D that came from the Columbia Records studio in New York. “I still fret about having replaced the hammers, but they were worn almost to the wood—some say by Dave Brubeck.”

Worth reading the whole profile.