Category: Richard Beck
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Richard Beck: In defense of heretics
I really appreciated this from Richard Beck today:
People don’t just wake up one day to suddenly and brazenly espouse a heresy. In my experience, you end up a heretic because there’s a gnawing theological issue that’s keeping you up at night. The burden and size of this issue often grows and grows until a lack of progress in its resolution becomes intellectually and emotionally intolerable…
…many people at this point do something very heroic and commendable. They become heretics.
It’s heroic and commendable because faith isn’t being jettisoned. A herculean effort is made to keep and secure faith. Sure, the price is believing in some rather contested, controversial stuff, but the win is keeping you in the orbit of God, the Bible, and the church.
All that to say, heresy might be wrong, but it can be awfully therapeutic. The mind settles and the heart calms and you can get on with the real business of following Jesus in your day to day life. Some people just need to believe in weird, quirky stuff to make the puzzle fit together.
Beck’s reasoning has validity, too, when it comes to beliefs that aren’t heresy but that are outside the theological mainstream of whatever community you’re in.
Our salvation is blessedly not on the basis of mentally embracing exactly perfect doctrine. I’m comfortable, as I think Beck is here, to trust that God knows the hearts and desires of those people seeking Him, and that if He sees it needful to bring my heart around to embrace some belief that I just can’t stomach today, He can do that.
As Beck says at the end of his piece, “a little bit of empathy, understanding and compassion around these issues would do everyone a great deal of good.” Amen.
Beck: A practical Lenten fasting routine
Richard Beck describes one of his concerns with traditional Lenten fasting and his rationale for working within it:
I have a rule of thumb I like to keep: Don’t let your pursuit of holiness pull you away from your family. As a part of this, I’ve always disliked how fasting pulls me away from family meals. Sure, I can sit at the table and talk while everyone is eating, but that’s just weird. Eating–actually eating–with my family is a profoundly important experience. I also don’t like how fasting affects my ability to accept hospitality when offered. When someone invites you to a table you should eat. Even if you’re fasting. So my normal fasting routine is this: Eat only one meal a day, family dinner at night. If you’re invited to eat with someone, accept, don’t decline because you are fasting. Otherwise, don’t eat during the week.
The impact to family meals has always been a big hesitation for me when thinking about this kind of fasting. I appreciate Beck’s reasoning here… makes sense and seems like something I could adopt.
Beck: bored with his doubts
The trouble with the incessant deconstruction at work within progressive Christianity is that, left unchecked, all it tends to produce are agnostic Democrats.
Strong words from one of my favorites, Richard Beck, this morning. Beck observes that the continual deconstruction of progressive Christianity doesn’t necessarily end, well, Christianly. And he does so in his typical relaxed fashion.
I remain very sympathetic to progressive Christianity. But a Christianity that doesn’t believe in anything–a Christianity that dilutes and dilutes and dilutes until you have a “Church of Christ Without Christ”–that Christianity just doesn’t interest me anymore. I’ve made a long and hard journey carrying my doubts, and now I’m just bored by them.
-- Journal Week 3: Losing Interest in Progressive Christianity
Jesus' Appeal to Human Emotion and Reason
Some really fascinating thoughts from Richard Beck this morning on Jesus’ appeal to human emotion and reasoning as a part of His teaching:
Jesus also used human experience as a hermeneutical and theological tool. In Matthew 12 Jesus enters a synagogue on the Sabbath and finds a man with a withered hand. The way the Pharisees interpreted the Sabbath laws prohibited Jesus from healing the man. But Jesus disagrees, and he makes an appeal to human experience to argue for a different hermeneutical approach to Sabbath keeping. Jesus doesn’t appeal to Scripture or tradition, he asks a question about how something would feel. “How many of you,” Jesus asks, “if a sheep of yours fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, wouldn’t pull it out?” Jesus asks the Pharisees to imaginatively place themselves in this situation, asking them to consult their feelings, experiences and reactions. Jesus expects this appeal to experience to lead to an affirmative answer: They would grab the sheep out of the ditch, even on the Sabbath.
This intrigues me. The conservative circles I inhabit are fond of dismissing claims to human emotion and reason as a hermeneutical tool. (Or at least when that emotion and reason doesn’t challenge the conclusions of the existing theological framework.) If we are totally depraved, the reasoning goes, our emotions and reasoning are also totally depraved and therefore untrustworthy.
I tend to think that our intrinsic moral reactions, while fallen, still hold the echoes of what it means to have been created in the image of God, and as such, they shouldn’t be easily dismissed. Beck gives me another angle here to consider that thought.
Beck: Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
A really good reminder from Richard Beck today:
…it struck me how emotionally reactive we are to social media, our feelings getting jerked around by the latest thing that breaks on Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes it is happiness and euphoria. Yay, our side is winning! Sometimes it is despondency and despair. Oh no, the other side is winning! … So let’s remember the wisdom of Thérèse of Lisieux. Our vocation is to be the heart of the church, not the amygdala.
Yes and amen.
Relax
Richard Beck had a great little piece the other day about being relaxed. It challenged me.
In yesterday’s post I included the word “relaxed” in a list of traits that I felt characterize what it means to be a Christ-like human being. But relaxed isn’t a word you hear a great deal in discussions of Christian virtue and character. And yet, I think relaxation is key, a foundational issue.
I think he might be on to something here. So how do we relax, you ask?
Jesus’s answer is twofold. First, trust. Trust that God will take care for you. Consider the lilies and the birds. Second, place your heart in a location where moth and rust do not destroy or thieves break in and steal. Your heart must be “hidden in Christ” in a place where death has no dominion. Trouble is, these recommendations strike us as pious platitudes.
Argument is offered to justify the felt judgment...
I’ve finally been catching up with Richard Beck’s Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality and I’m finding it fascinating. Beck is a professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University and his work usually sits at the intersection of faith topics and psychological study.
In Unclean he looks at the psychology of purity and disgust and how Christianity interacts with those built-in reactions (such as disgust) and how they shape our attitude toward sin and toward others. I’m only about 20% of the way in so far, but this paragraph caught my eye:
These dynamics [feelings leading to reasons, rather than vice versa] make conversations about God inherently difficult because our experience of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic, affect rather than theology. I think people in churches have always known this, and felt that people in conflict within the church were generally talking past each other. One reason for this is now clear. Very often, arguments and the warrants found within them are secondary to the felt experience. Argument is offered to justify the felt judgment of the sacred or profane. And as self-justifications these arguments often fail as acts of persuasion or forms of consensus-building.
I’m looking forward to reading more.
Richard Beck on Holiness and Hospitality
…the pursuit of moral purity often undermines the life of welcome as “sinners” and the morally “unclean” tend to be shunned and excluded. The church stories we all could share illustrating this dynamic would provide ample evidence of the dynamics Unclean [Beck’s recent book] was trying to describe.
So what’s the trick? How are we to pursue holiness in a way that makes us more hospitable rather than less?
I think a part of the trick is this: holiness is a first-person rather than a third-person enterprise. Holiness is a personal rather than public affair.
I think he’s on to something.
[Experimental Theology: Finely Tuned Instruments of Welcome]
Going after the dove sellers
The point being, while we know that Jesus was upset about economic exploitation going on in the temple, his focus on the dove sellers sharpens the message and priorities. Jesus doesn’t, for instance, go after the sellers of lambs. Jesus’s anger is stirred at the way the poor are being treated and economically exploited.
Seeing the people instead of the system
I’m still catching up a bit, but I definitely want to recommend this piece by Richard Beck wherein he examines how bureaucratic structures in the world tend to dehumanize us.
In each of the [stories above] human beings are not interacting directly. We are, rather, interacting through the power structures of the world. I don’t know the name of the man in my backyard about to turn off my electricity. And he doesn’t know my name. Our relationship is, rather, defined by our locations in a bureaucratic power structure. He’s an agent of the electric company. I’m an address on his work order. That is how our relationship is defined. A relationship stripped of its humanity. And as a consequence I have to work mightily to treat this man with respect. He isn’t to blame. But everything about this dehumanized interaction makes me want to yell at him. To direct my anger at him.
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? How easy it is to rage against people who are only trying to do their job. Beck calls us to vigilance:
On and on it goes. If we are not careful, if we are not vigilant, if we are not prayerful modern life will dehumanize us. It is a demonic force that must be resisted. I keep going back to something William Stringfellow said, we must struggle to live humanely in the midst of the Fall.
And he closes with a fantastic illustration that I won’t copy here, but that is worth reading in full; go take a look.