My goal here is to answer the question “Tim, what exactly do you mean when you keep talking about our understanding of the Bible being dangerously influenced by a modern worldview?”

I am hoping this post will be of use to those with little preconceived notion of postmodern thought, as well as those with a negative preconception about it – and I also hope to speak to theological conservatives and liberals alike (though postmodern does sometimes critique and/or concern these two camps in unique ways).

I should also acknowledge up front that I draw heavily on the thought of N.T. Wright and Brian Mclaren, among others, though the articulation here is my own.

Interested? Read more…

A Football Analogy

Those who know me best know I rarely pass up an opportunity to use a sports analogy.

Imagine with me that you and your friend are die hard football fans. He has tickets to attend the big playoff game, while you end up on a family camping trip without the chance to even watch the game. When you return, you send him a quick note saying, “I saw the headline that we won 21-20 on a last minute touchdown, but haven’t heard any details. You were there – I want the low-down on how we won the game”.

Your friend responds a few minutes later with an e-mail: “Oh, man, it was absolutely incredible! With 15 seconds left on the clock, we were down 20-14, fourth and goal, the ball on the 1 yard line – the fate of the entire season resting on our ability to advance the ball 1 yard on that next play. Our quarterback had been injured earlier in the fourth quarter and so the back-up quarterback had come into the game, and the star halfback had also been hurt and wasn’t at full strength but was still out there – better to be in the game than on the sideline. Our team had modest success running the ball to the right side of the field earlier in the game, but pretty much every time they tried to run to the left side, they were stopped for a loss. And man, you should have been there! As they came to the line of scrimmage for that final play, the noise level was insane – eighty-thousand people standing and screaming at the top of their lungs! They lined up in a two tight-end set with two blockers in the backfield and ran the ball to the left side of the field – talk about a gutsy play call! I’m just glad he fought his way over the goal-line and we won the game.”

Now, fast-forward two-thousand years, and imagine a group of scholars analyzing your friend’s e-mail as a part of “The Footbology” – the lone surviving authoritative document about the game of football. The sport had not been played in centuries, but scholars were nonetheless able to reconstruct all the rules of the game, and even understood a great deal about the subtleties of football strategy. But their only experience of football was through the texts – none of them had ever seen (let alone played) an actual football game. If you were magically transported to their midst, how might you respond to their attempts to understand the text?

One scholar preceptively states, “We know for a fact that game was played in a stadium which seated only sixty-thousand people. Your friend’s comment that there were eighty-thousand fans draws into question whether he was even there at the game, or at least how much he was paying attention.” You try to explain, “he was just making a general point about there being a lot of people – of course he was at the game”, though you have a hard time convincing the scholar, because, in his culture, being numerically precise at all times is expected. He seems puzzled. “So are you saying that you didn’t expect your friend to be precise about numbers?”. “Well,” you reply, “when he says it was forth down, I assume he meant forth down – third down would be something very different. And unless he wasn’t paying attention to the game, I’m sure he meant ‘1 yard’ pretty precisely as well. But the number of people in the crowd – that’s different.”

You find another scholar responding to a differing account of the game which claimed the left offensive tackle had also been injured and was out of the game for the final play. That scholar argues that your friend clearly cares about listing the relevant injuries, but doesn’t mention the left tackle who would clearly be one of the most important players on a run to the left side of the field. You explain that people typically mention injuries to the primary positions like quarterback long before they mention anything about the offensive linemen – but you soon realize how something so intuitive and obvious to you is difficult to explain rationally to your puzzled scholar friend.

You stumble upon two other scholars from a culture in which sports are typically either “all about mental aspects and strategy” or “all about the physical aspects.” They are arguing about how to classify football. One emphasizes that your friend implies the “gutsy play call” was the key to success while the other lists a host of reasons for her position, including your friend’s attention to physical injuries. You’re puzzled at first by their categories and try repeatedly to explain to them that this distinction between mental-only and physical-only sports had never occurred to you because football relied heavily on both aspects.

Later, you encounter another teacher stating simply “The Footbology teaches clearly that it is ‘better to be in the game than on the sideline’” and as you slowly realize that this had become the underpinning of an entire worldview that pushed athletes to compete despite grave injuries instead of taking time to heal, you find yourself saying, “Wait a minute, you’re basing that on my friend’s statement about our running back? When I read his e-mail, it’s clear to me that he was making a point specific to that situation where the star of the team, even though not at 100% health, was still in a position to help his team in a unique way during a really critical moment. Even though my friend didn’t qualify his statement, it was clear to me that he wasn’t trying to make a general point.”

The separation these scholars experience from the original context – the world in which you and your friend live – presents them with an immense challenge when it comes to interpreting the text. Your journey to the future quickly gives you a healthy respect for just how much a readers’ own cultural assumptions effect the reading of a text.

Copernicus, Galileo, and a Lesser God

During the pre-modern era, the church taught that heavenly bodies revolved in perfect circular-based paths around the earth, and were perfect in form (without craters or other ‘blemishes’). This thinking was, of course, based heavily on Greek philosophy, but the church also had many scriptural texts to back up the teaching.

In the pre-modern mindset, this doctrine was of central importance because it spoke directly to God’s character. Their definition of “perfection” was tightly defined around the concept of perfect circles/spheres without any aberrations or deformities. Since God created the heavenly bodies, any claim that they contained blemishes was (on both an intellectual and deeply emotional level) an indictment against God as “less than perfect.”

Hence the problem when Copernicus argued for a helio-centric view of the solar system, or Galileo observed with his telescope that there were craters on the moon. Many people situated in that worldview faced the either-or choice between a dangerously un-scriptural view of God (a “less than perfect” God) and a “scripturally faithful” insistence that the scientists must be mistaken.

From our vantage point, it is clear that the astronomers’ observations were not, in fact, in conflict with scripture – that it was the faulty definition of “perfection” which caused the apparent conflict. But this would have been almost impossible for most people from that era to grasp, because their notion of perfection was engrained in their worldview at an almost unconscious level.

Eventually, with the onset of the modern era, the church began to embrace the validity of the observations, and thankfully our understanding of “perfection” shifted. We didn’t actually, as it turned out, end up losing our ability to think Biblically just because we jettisoned the Greek concept of “perfection”.

And during this period of shifting world views, modernity ushered in a host of new values: Emphasis of mechanistic processes, analytical thinking, and a predisposition to value conquest and control, eventually giving rise to the full grown consumerism we experience today. Most importantly, it ushered in the concept of “objectivity” – it taught us that a certain sort of “disembodied truth” is the most real and best sort of truth – that we ought to seek to view the world (and by extension the Bible) from a “disembodied view” outside of any human context.

For many of us, this notion that “truth obtained from an objective viewpoint” is the most important or “real” truth, is embedded in our worldview in a fashion similar to the pre-modern notion of “perfection” in its day.

But it is not (necessarily) a Biblical concept. In fact, a strong case can be made that it is in many ways an anti-Biblical concept. Yet most of us are completely unaware that there is any other way of looking at the world or of understanding scripture.

As such, questioning the assumptions of modernity feels to us like losing our ability to be “scripturally faithful”. After all, the thinking goes, it God doesn’t provide us with disembodied (ie “absolute”) truth in the pages of scripture, are we not left with a “lesser God”? (Or at least, “a lesser Book”?)

Recent generations of thinkers (modern day equivalents of Galileo and his telescope) have begun to articulate many reasons to be skeptical of certain claims made by modernity – and the church today is faced with a similar dilemma to the one it faced at the dawn of the modern era.

The Textbook and The Jigsaw Puzzle

As modernity shifted the emphasis to “disembodied” truth, a new genre of literature was born: reference literature. This genre, epitomized by the textbook or encyclopedia, quickly became important because it represented the optimal format in which to transmit “disembodied” truth.

Text books are precise and detailed. The concepts are laid out in clear and logical ways, progressing from elementary to more advanced topics in such a way that any ‘good’ student, from any culture, should be able to learn all the content, assuming she has mastered any prerequisite material. The textbook is written in a “disembodied” fashion (a “God’s eye view” of the world) – thus leaving no additional value to be gained from understanding the author’s background or values – instead, the text itself is designed to explain everything you need to know.

It takes only a cursory survey of Biblical texts to observe that many different genres are included in the Bible – and none of them are particularly similar to the reference literature genre so valued by modern thought. Instead, we find poetry, narratives, parables, letters, apocalyptic literature, and so on. None of these genres are particularly well suited to the truth transmission paradigm most valued by modernity.

So what has the modern church done? Generally, it has “translated” Biblical truth from its native form into modernity’s preferred form (most notably the “Systematic Theology” text book).

Do you see the major assumption that is being made here? Many of us grew up up in church and academic settings that fed theological truth to us ’second hand’ via the construction of a systematic theology which was ‘Biblically based’ but nonetheless a human-constructed translation of the Biblical truth into a form very different from the Biblical texts themselves.

This modern approach treats the Bible as a collection of jigsaw pieces, with the systematic theology providing the “image on the puzzle box top.”

Within the rules of the modern game, we argue about whether the pieces best fit this box top or that one. Liberals may argue that it’s important to determine which pieces simply weren’t part of the original puzzle, or which pieces were “altered” due to various factors, while conservatives may push back and advocate a take-the-pieces-as-they-come approach.

But all modern thinkers agree about the rules of the game: you take the pieces, you use the correct techniques to combine them, and you determine the correct box top image. Naturally, with these rules, if two people show up with differing box tops, one of them went wrong somewhere. The assumption is that, regardless of who or where you are, if you put the puzzle together “the right way”, you’ll end up with the “correct box top”.

Teaching someone to understand the Bible can, for the modern thinker, be reasonably be reduced to presenting them with the correct box top; Or for the student who wants to go deeper, teaching them the correct methods to arrange the pieces themselves. And, judging from the extremely wide range of conflicting box tops that have been generated, we should all be forced to agree that people (excluding perhaps our own particular camp) have generally failed to find the correct box top in a particularly reliable fashion (ironic, given the premise of modernity that adequate analytical skills alone will necessarily lead to the single ‘disembodied’ or ‘absolute’ solution).

The Mirror and the Sword

Modernity has done a good job of highlighting the strengths of reference literature as genre. But might other genres have their own strengths which are lost or minimized by modernity’s approach? In particular, what about the various genres of the Biblical texts themselves?

Might we find at some point that all our attempts to build our faith on “disembodied” truths leave us hungry for “embodied” truth? And might we find that the Biblical texts are already arranged in the ideal format to teach us these truths?

Imagine a master craftsman training his young apprentice, or a native of northern arctic waters navigating the freezing waters with an expert touch he learned from the generation before him and will pass on to the next generation. In both cases, the truth they are passing along is “embodied” truth. Rather then relying on modern textbook-style methods, they present the truth through interaction in a particular context. They emphasize a strong awareness of the nuanced details involved in every situation and teach the student to respond in a way deeply “relative” to these details, as opposed to an assumption that most situations can be solved by thinking in generalities.

Grasping such truth is costly – because it stems from prolonged interaction, it requires an investment in doing, not just analyzing. Hence it is a process that is not as repeatable or generalizable as our modern sensibilities would prefer.

But this process of engaging, of doing, of being, of embodying, is also more robust. Many Biblical texts have a strong scent of this type of truth, and with good reason. Jesus repeatedly scandalizes the establishment of his day by insisting that their “absolute” scriptural truths are subject to the law of love (Jesus’ breaking of the Sabbath, for example) and the particular needs of the people involved – he consistently acted in a way far to “relative” to the needs around him, and taught his disciples to do the same.

Often, the biggest truth we learn from the Biblical texts, if we have eyes to see, is who WE are. Of course, this flies in the face of the modern “rules of the game.” But might it not also be a deeply Biblical conception of truth? “For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in the mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed…” (James 1:22-25a).

“It is impossible,” the saying goes, “to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” For instance, when you’re explaining the science behind the environmental dangers associated with drilling for oil, the man made rich by the oil companies is likely to be among the last to understand you. A similar phenomenon takes root on a societal level. When a society has benefitted from a certain injustice or attitude, there is a subconscious but very real gravity pulling against thoughts that would critique the underlying situation.

For instance, as Randy Woodley, a Native American theologian, points out, American Christianity often “lacks a good theology of the land… A stolen continent is not really the best location in which to build such a theology.” Or put another way, “who we are” effects in a very real way “what we see”. Jesus makes repeated and pointed critiques of this nature directed at the religious establishment and ruling class alike, as in Matthew 19:24 where he says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Jesus’ parables contain truth that is ‘embedded just under the surface’, inviting the listener to engage further if they indeed have ‘ears to hear.’ Why would Jesus use such a genre for so much of his teaching? Why didn’t he just spell it all out clearly and efficiently? Why did he require so much from his listeners? Is it possible that the truths Jesus taught can’t be succinctly reduced to the kind of “disembodied” truth modernity so craves?

A similar case can be made for Biblical narratives. If I was given the task of writing a fourth “Lord of the Rings” novel, as faithful as possible to J.R.R. Tolkien’s three originals, how would interact with the original texts? I would immerse myself in them. I would do everything I could to fully and richly imbibe them, “put myself inside” the narrative, and imagine the perspective of each character while also looking at the big picture (key constants and shifts throughout the novels). Only then would I be empowered to begin writing a faithful fourth novel. Should we not view our responsibility to “live as faithfully as possible to the Bible” as a similar process?

Paul’s letters were written, often urgently, to specific groups of people because of specific pressing needs. You necessarily lose something when you try to extract the truths “taught by these epistles” and present them in a “disembodied” form. According to modernity, that’s “no big loss.” The modern attitude too often reduces the Bible to a completely passive element, like the dead frog on the biologist’s lab table.

Contrast this to a notion of the words of God as “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12).

You Still Haven’t Answered My Question

Frequently, self-anointed critics of postmodern thought will read critiques like the ones I’ve made above and say, “Those all seem like common sense observations – I think I agree with 90% of what you said. But the thing that turns me off is all the relativism.”

For instance, a friend named Ryan recently wrote to me:

“I guess I just have a hard time engaging in conversation or giving validity to books written by supposed theologians who’s main doctrine comes down to being a doctrine of not having a doctrine. It’s relativism and post-modernity at it’s finest invading the church. Perhaps I am a [Fundamentalist] when it comes to this issue (I certainly am not on all other things).”

Ryan makes a very self-perceptive and candid comment. An even more concise way for him to say the same thing would be “Perhaps I have a very modern viewpoint on this issue.”

For people in Ryan’s position, the same understandably frustrating scenario plays out again and again: They ask a question that is of great importance to them and their postmodern interlocutor seems to do everything except actually answer their question. Ryan recently such a question: “I have a gay friend and I want to treat him in a loving way, avoiding all the name-calling and bigotry, but I still ultimately believe based on the Bible that he will spend eternity apart from God unless he repents from his sinful lifestyle. How can it ultimately be loving to do anything other than confront him about the issue given that eternity outweighs everything else?” (my paraphrase). After 15 minutes of both of us typing furiously into our Facebook chat window and watching 6 point type flow by, I don’t think either of us felt like we’d really gotten anywhere. Ryan reminded me on multiple occasions, “You still haven’t answered by question.” And he was right.

In my defense, however, not all questions are valid in all contexts. “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” That question is appropriate assuming you’re talking to someone who has engaged in wife-beating, but is a loaded question otherwise. In a similar way, certain questions so encode their worldview (modern or otherwise), that they essentially cannot be answered directly without embracing the worldview in which they were generated.

As a result, a postmodern theologian is often put in a position where, instead of simply “answering the question,” they must instead ask the person asking the question to reconsider the worldview on which the question is based. Perhaps my conversation with Ryan would have gotten somewhere more quickly if I started by saying “Thanks for asking a sincere question, and caring about the answer. I think, however, that your question is loaded with respect to your modern worldview, so instead of trying to convince you to have a different answer, I’m going to try and convince you to frame the question differently. I’d like to suggest an alternate framing of the question that I think gets at the heart of what you’re really asking anyway, and I promise my reframed question will be just as applicable to daily life, though it may not be as focused on helping you obtain a generalizable answer.” Instead, I spent quite some effort babbling on about a “new perspective on Paul” and a first century understanding of life after death, much to the chagrin of Ryan who had asked what he presumed was a very straightforward question.

This is the seduction of the modern worldview – once you frame the question, there is often only one answer that follows. Since people are oblivious to the biases and assumptions implicit in their framing of the question, they feel a very satisfying sense of certainty and stability – and modern thought has historically led to “excessively high levels of confidence” heretofore unseen (the Holocaust, World Wars, etc). This also explains why, as a modern, it is such a painful process to begin to see your worldview questioned – to begin to see the cultural biases you thought you didn’t have – it feels like your whole foundation is shaking, and it’s natural that people feel a certain anger and desire to “make it stop.”

Even when you get past this initial stage of frustration, and modernity’s slick sales pitch begins to ring hollow, it can still be very difficult to begin to see the ways in which modernity has shaped our understandings. Reading, thinking, and praying are part of the process, but by themselves they’re unlikely to be enough. Most of us have very under-developed muscles when it comes to looking at the world through the eyes of someone outside our culture.

This is especially the case for people who grew up as I did, a White American from an upper-middle class neighborhood. In my world, there was no distinction between my “heart language” (cultural values of ‘my people’) and “trade language” (cultural values used in the wider society for commerce, etc). Consider how that differs from the way my wife grew up, as a Chicana who is fluent in the dominant American cultural values but also has a distinct set of cultural values inherited from her family. As a result, we White Americans often grow up tone-deaf to the multiple layers of culture that have been a central part of the way most humans in history have experienced life on earth (including Jewish people during the time of Jesus who lived on the fringes of the Roman empire). Additionally, as heirs of a society built in no small measure on injustices that have benefitted us at the expense of others, it is understandably difficult for us to stare our modern worldview in the face.

But this difficult and sometimes painful process can be a bit like the pains of childbirth, giving way to a deeper and richer understanding of Jesus, the Kingdom and God, and the Biblical narrative than we ever imagined possible.

Are We Really That Far Apart?

On many levels, the revolution has been underway for a long time. Modernity has already lost the pervasive grip it once had on our society at large. Postmoderns certainly do not hold a monopoly on “taking steps to compensate for the short-comings of the modern worldview.”

Many churches, spanning the entire spectrum, emphasize “life mentoring” — the kind of “embodied” truth I discussed above. Missions organizations are increasingly shifting their focus from “getting as many souls into heaven as efficiently as possible” to a more holistic approach to redemption. An increasing number of evangelicals embrace a range of social justice issues (racial issues, environmental issues, etc) born out of an understanding of past injustices. And in many academic settings, the modern “systematic theology” approach is being augmented or replaced with a curriculum teaching theology in it’s historical context.

These are all rejections of modernity – if not “postmodern” it is at least valid to refer to them as “anti-modern” tendencies. They fly in the face of modern values like “simplistic/repeatable teaching techniques”, “efficient/mechanistic designs”, “control/conquest,” etc. Given the many short-comings of modern thought, it should come as no surprise when people from a full range of conservative and liberal backgrounds intuitively take steps away from a full embrace of modernity. I get the sense my friend Ryan has, for instance, already done this in a number of ways.

And yet an amazing amount of energy is spent fortifying battle lines to “protect the church from the corrupting influence of postmodernity.” For someone accustomed to seeing postmodern thought as evil, one blog post is unlikely to convince them otherwise. But I’d invite anyone with this predisposition to reflect on why they are willing to so whole-heartedly place their trust in the modern view of truth.

Footnote

I’d like to address a few additional topics, but will do so via follow-up posts, as this post is already long enough.

First, I need to explain how the terminology I used above relates to the terminology typically used when discussing postmodern thought (I intentionally avoided terms like “absolute truth” and “relative truth” to avoid the common misconceptions they often generate). If what I present above as postmodern thought is different from what you’re used to, this subsequent post will help clarify things.

Second, I’d like to provide my take on the practical question Ryan asked about his gay friend, because I think it deserves a more direct response. I probably still haven’t spelled out as clearly as possible why his formulation of the question so strongly pre-supposes his modern worldview. So, in a sense, this post is just the starting point for a longer conversation.

Please stay tuned if these topics interest you, and as always comments/thoughts/critiques/corrections are welcome (I should probably be handing out some sort of prize to anyone who makes it to the bottom of such a long post!).

Something’s broken
Something inside you
And the last time I could feel inside
You know I felt it too

Here inside these walls
Where we’ve been told it’s safe to stay
We hold the pieces that still fit the puzzle box top
And we throw the rest away

But I’ve seen traces of our rescue just beyond these city gates
And baby, if we drop the weapons we’ve been selling we just may
Find there’s a deeper power at work here than our broken yesterdays
Do you still believe in life?
Do you still believe in life?

So let the healing begin
Hand your blade to the surgeon
There’s a cancer within us all

And it’s a war we’ll never win
If we just keep cutting ears off
With the swords that we’re given, uh huh

Here inside these walls
Where we’ve been told it’s safe to stay
The greatest story of love’s victory
Made a footnote to the blood of our crusades
The blood of our crusades

But I’ve seen traces of our rescue just beyond these city gates
And baby, if we drop the weapons we’ve been selling we just may
Find there’s a deeper power at work here than our broken yesterdays
Do you still believe in life?
Do you still believe in life?

There are traces of a new world breaking through these city gates
And baby, even if the walls begin to crumble we can stay
‘Cause there’s a deeper power at work here than the battle lines we’ve laid
Do you still believe in life?
Do you still believe in life?

It seems, my friend, that you feel weak
It seems the party line has teeth

And so you hold to your guns
Won’t you ever let it die
Before the killing is too hard to hide

And so you call on your bombs
Keep singing your songs
But don’t let the darkness hide what we’ve become tonight

We’re falling asleep at the wheel sometimes
Trading their peace for our peace of mind
As what we call freedom’s winds blow hard across this war torn land.

Your bridegroom calls for you to speak
Awake my child and learn to turn the other cheek

And find the fullness of life
Is not found in might
Of an empire’s walls of protection

It’s what we’ve known all along
Hear the old gospel songs
And understand that we all stand connected tonight

We’re falling asleep at the wheel sometimes
Trading their peace for our peace of mind
As what we call freedom’s winds blow hard across this war torn land.

In the final outcome have we all become monsters
Faith, hope, vengeance, and a grace that has fallen asleep

Is love really that weak?
We’ve got a grace that has fallen asleep
Is love really that weak?

After a number of years without much significant song writing, I’ve been writing a lot more in the last year, and am also (slowly and meticulously) starting to record these songs.

This one is called “Hearts and Stones”. The music is pensive and acoustic — musical influences include Steven Delopoulos, some early Dispatch albums, and perhaps also Bebo Norman.

When will we realize
we’re waiting for a season that’s arrived
For one who is returning
peace to shattered earthly lives
When will we find you here?
When will we find you here?

When will we realize
we’re killing over broken wells
While the lilies all still shine
and the birds all eat their fill
When will we find you here?
When will we find you here?

What if you really meant to lead us further than where we’ve arrived?
What if we’ve fashioned from your story something true yet still a lie?
What if the day of your returning really turns both hearts and stones?
What if you come to live among us here, where you come to bring us home?

When will we realize
we’re all part of the story that you tell
we’re all part of the pain
you know we’re all to blame
When will we find you here?
When will we find you here?

When will we realize
you’ve called us to be healers of this age
to open up our eyes
to hear the orphan’s cries…
the widow’s cries…
to see past death and feel the life that’s coming…

Oh, I still believe the story’s bigger
Oh, I still believe the story’s bigger

...[Christians and Muslims] have important concepts in common - for example, both believe God is omnipotent, all-merciful, and without any imperfection. Both claim to believe in the same God that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and the prophets believed and followed. But Christians believe that God is revealed most fully and gloriously in a crucified person, and Muslims believe God is revealed most fully and gloriously in an inspired book. Actually I've met a few Christians who seem to have a concept closer to Islam's, substituting the Bible for the Quran.

For some time I’ve been looking for better ways to articulate my intuitive critiques of traditional Protestant Christianity (conservative American Evangelical Christianity in particular). This distinction between God being most revealed in a person vs in a book gets at what is perhaps one of the core issues which I find important but difficult to articulate. Many conservatives I grew up with would likely say “what’s the difference?” and it’s precisely that unawareness that is at the root of many of the things that most bother me.

Though I wouldn’t have articulated it this way when I began my Faith & Politics series, the goal of that series is, in essence, explaining why these two approaches lead to very different actions/worldviews/political-attitudes (as will become more clear in the 5th and final post when I finally get there). Many perspectives outside the realm of politics are, of course, also effected — perhaps providing a good set of topics for another series of blog posts someday.

For now, without time to go into more detail, I thought I’d throw this out there and see what people think. Do you find this distinction helpful? interesting? misleading? heretical? not meaningful?

Today my wife forwarded me a link to this op-ed piece in the NY Times which I really enjoyed. You’ll have a hard time convincing me that the author isn’t right about at least three things: (1) the fact that health-care spending is higher in America then anywhere else is in very large part due to our diet/obesity based on our food policies, (2) this problem is much bigger than the under-the-radar coverage it usually receives, and (3) neither political party has shown much willingness to engage reform.

If either party were to take a constructive stance on food reform it would have a large impact on my vote. The motivation I blogged about previously (stopping the exploitation by large food companies of students especially minority students in under-privileged schools) only seems to motivate the political left. But as the NY Times piece points out, health-care reform (of either the Democrat or Republican variety) could bring about something we haven’t seen before: a big health insurance industry motivated to lobby for food reform — that perhaps is something that will get the attention of the political right. Perhaps my depressed hopelessness on the matter is not as well founded as I supposed…

Jesus was born into a world in which people did not think about politics, religion, and culture as separate things that could be compartmentalized as we moderns do. For first century Jews, the central political/religious/cultural questions of the day were “Why are we subjugated and oppressed on the fringes of the Roman Empire? If we are God’s chosen people, why has He not rescued and freed us, instead allowing a pagan world power to rule us? And what should we do about it?”

At least four views were commonly offered: For the Pharisees, the answer was “we need stricter morality” leading them to redouble their efforts to live in a holy way while pointing the finger at those responsible for the most flagrant moral decay around them such as adulterers and tax collectors. For the Zealots, the answer was “we need to fight more courageously — we’re clearly on the right side in God’s eyes, how could He not bless our military efforts?” The Essenes concluded “the situation is bad and only getting worse — we ought to withdraw to a place of isolation where we can at least setup our own sub-culture in right standing with God.” For others, including the Sadducees, the solution was a sort of realism that admitted “the power of the empire is what it is — we might as well learn to benefit from it” and many of them maintained their relative wealth as a result of aligning themselves with the Roman regime.

Jesus, however, rejects all four approaches! Instead, he teaches a new way he often refers to as the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. He rejects the other sets of answers yet still responds to the same Jewish questions of his day. In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say that most (if not all) of Jesus’ teachings were responding to, challenging, correcting, and providing a new alternative to the common religious/political camps of the day, especially the formal religious/political establishment. Of course, ultimately Jesus challenges his listeners to redefine their questions and realize that more than the fate of the Jewish nation is at stake, but this does not negate the fact that his teachings addressed the central Jewish issues of the day.

For instance, Jesus doesn’t just say “love your neighbor” in the abstract, he uses daring and insightful parables set in the specific religious/political/cultural context of the day to highlight cases in which the establishment’s party line (“the Jewish law”) undermines the very things it claims to accomplish (loving God and loving one’s neighbor). It is easy for us, two thousand years later, to split religious and political into separate categories and see Jesus’ teachings as falling entirely in the ‘religious’ category, but such thinking would likely have seemed absurd to Jesus’ first century Jewish listeners.

Why was I never challenged to see Jesus’ words and actions in this context growing up? Many reasons, perhaps, but I think it was primarily due to the emphasis my theological tradition placed on a set of questions that were central sixteen hundred years after Jesus, during the time of the reformers: “How does someone ‘get saved’? Is it based on works, or is it a free gift from God?” Swapping in these questions as the context of Jesus’ teachings leads to a reading in which the point of Jesus’ confrontation of the Jewish law was merely that “you can’t get to heaven by following the rules”.

This modified-context reading co-existed rather nicely with a “Christian” political culture that borrowed generously from the four schools of thought Jesus rejected. Most political attitudes I recall growing up centered around the “need for stricter morality” which led us to redouble our effort to live in a holy way while pointing the finger at those responsible for the most flagrant moral decay around us such as gays and abortion clinic doctors. There was also a strong sense that “we need to fight more courageously” knowing that we were clearly on the right side in God’s eyes — both in the context of ‘culture wars’ as well as a few literal military wars. We also, at times, embraced an ethic of isolation, focusing on setting up and maintaining our own sub-culture in right standing with God. And finally, we embraced the economic powers of ‘free market capitalism’ and learned to benefit from them — often borrowing our views on economic issues from conservative radio pundits rather than our pastors (let alone the words of Jesus!).

Having married our faith to political agenda of the day, we lost our ability to distinguish between the two — a situation with strong parallels (and similar symptoms) to the religious establishment of Jesus’ day. As we pay greater attention to the specific ways Jesus’ words engaged the Jews of his day, challenging their deeply held assumptions about God and pointing the way forward to truly loving their neighbors, perhaps these words will do the same for us.

There are so many texts which take on new meaning when read in this way, but I will focus on just one here: the text found in Luke 10:25-37.

Jesus tells a story in which we meet a Jewish priest who, we must assume, shows his love for God as best he knows how: by following the Jewish law. This priest was heading south from Jerusalem meaning he had likely just finished his two-week shift at the temple and was heading home. Along the road, he approaches a man who had been beaten nearly to the point of death. If the priest comes closer than four cubits and finds the man is indeed dead, he contracts ceremonial uncleanliness according to the law, requiring him to return to the temple for purification and bringing a certain amount of shame upon himself, the priesthood, and (in his way of thinking) even God. As if this wasn’t risk enough, he was only able to accept tithe in a state of ceremonial cleanliness — thus his salary depended on him not getting involved, and so he crosses to the other side of the road as passes by.

Jesus then tells of a second man, this time from a lower social class, who was not subject to the same ceremonial regulations as the priest. Unlike the priest, this man approaches for a closer look. However, he is unable to establish whether the beaten man is his countryman since the body is naked (lacking the distinguishing clothing that would indicate nationality) and unconscious (removing the possibility of talking to the man to establish his ethnicity). The establishment thinking of the time dictated helping one’s countryman but discouraged providing aide to foreigners (and thus aiding God’s enemies). This uncertainty discourages the man from getting involved (and was probably a factor in the priest’s decision as well). He is perhaps also afraid that the robbers are still close by, and probably is aware that the priest passed by without offering aide. In the end, he to passes without getting involved.

With a few short sentences, Jesus has unmasked the establishment’s claim to ‘love their neighbor’. Confronted with a naked, unconscious, and bloody body at the side of the road, they are paralyzed — the very religious/political convictions they deem honoring to God actually get in the way of loving the people God has placed around them. To drive home the point, Jesus has the audacity to introduce a Samaritan as the story’s hero. Few people were, in the establishment’s view, more certainly NOT in right standing with God. Yet in the structure of Jesus’ story, we see the Samaritan compensating for the wrongs of the robbers, the priest, and the other passerby. Wow!

Growing up, this parable taught me to take time out of my busy schedules to notice others, and to be willing to help those in need. Those are both great messages, but certainly much less than Jesus was saying in his first century context. Had Jesus directed a similar challenge at the community I grew up in, it would have perhaps sounded like this:

A young woman lived in the apartments a few blocks from her church. One day, after a loud argument easily heard by those standing at the bus stop outside, the woman's husband shoved her out of the apartment and down the steps, returning moments later to toss a suitcase down the steps and yell at her to never come back. She sat at the bottom of the steps sobbing and wearing nothing but a bathrobe. The entire sequence was seen by a pastor who was waiting at the traffic light. He was in town leading a weekend conference at the woman's church and was now driving home with a good friend -- one of the state's prominent Republican politicians. The pastor's heart went out to the woman, recalling how his mother had been abandoned in a similar fashion by his father. But he noticed her Mexican ethnicity and thought to himself "what if she's an illegal immigrant?" Fighting illegal immigration was one of his friend's signature issues, and they'd both advocated legislation making it harder for organizations to provide aide to illegal immigrants -- the potential scandal if they got involved and the woman was indeed an illegal immigrant would endanger both their careers. So the pastor said a quick prayer for the woman and kept driving.

A young worship leader who was leaving the same conference was waiting at the bus stop just a few feet from the woman. He contemplated helping her but the image of walking down the street holding a woman in a bathrobe sent shivers up his spine. He'd just come from a workshop session focused on "living above reproach" in which the speaker had emphasized the importance of avoiding sexually ambiguous situations (perhaps another reason the pastor didn't want to get involved). He was also intimidated by the woman's husband. And so he too said a quick prayer before climbing aboard his bus.

Another man at the bus stop was on his way to the airport after flying into town for the gay pride parade. He had pity on the woman and hailed a cab, taking her to a local hotel. He changed his flight to the next day so he'd have time to buy her some clothes (her suitcase was empty) and help her connect with the local shelter which could provide her with support. He left her with a bit of money and told her he'd check on her when he was in town again in a couple weeks -- that was three years ago and the two still speak regularly.

“Which of these men is living out kingdom values?” Jesus would ask. “The gay guy who actually helped her,” we would respond. “Go,” Jesus would say, “and do the same.” Exploring further how we might “do the same” will be the topic of the two remaining posts in this series.

I’m notoriously bad at staying in touch with good friends long distance. This means that when I do get the chance to catch up over drinks or a meal there’s always lots of ground to cover. I recall this being the case when I met one of my best friends at the Sandpiper restaurant in West Chicago a few years after we’d both gone away to college.

As we enjoyed our burgers I began telling him that I’d been wrestling with politics a lot and was beginning to see a lot of problems with the party line we’d both more or less advocated as high school students. After acknowledging the issues I’d raised, he responded, “Well, I wonder sometimes too, but like [my spiritual mentor] says, in America today you’re either for killing babies or you’re against it.” I think this was meant to reassure me. I don’t remember how I responded, but I remember having a very intense reaction on the inside — and a sudden awareness of just how much my political mindset had shifted from just a few years earlier when I’d been a passionate “single issue voter.”

For a lot of my friends who grew up in less conservative circles, the phrase “single issue voter” conjures up images of consumerist “express menu” Christianity at it’s worst — sort of the political equivalent of the HappyMeal. It sounds as if someone took a red pen to one of those “compare the views of the candidates on the issues” documents saying “there’s too much stuff here, let’s condense it down to the single most important issue so nobody gets confused about who to vote for.” For some “single issue voters” there’s probably more than an ounce of truth to that critique. As a whole, however, that understanding entirely misses the point of “single issue voting.”

I was first sold on the idea of “single issue voting” in the mid 90’s after hearing John Piper explain why he used the term. A candidate’s view on abortion, he explained, did not dictate his vote per se. Instead, a certain range of positions (in this case, all “pro-choice” positions) were such flagrant violations of his conscience that they disqualified a candidate from receiving his vote. In theory the day would eventually arrive when both political parities embraced a position he could live with. As a “single issue voter” I was in essence on a political hunger strike, abstaining from more normative political interaction until a goal of great importance was reached. The simplicity in voting that resulted in the mean time was a necessary evil, not the goal itself.

I found this view compelling primarily because it was presented as something that could be justified by the moral gravity of the issue alone, independent of any other context. After all, whatever is done by an official I vote into office is in some sense done in my name. Saying I care about the lives of the unborn while at the same time voting for a politician that supports the status quo would be a great hypocrisy, would it not? And so this line of thinking sealed my Republican support for a period of time.

But this type of thinking writes context out of the equation in a way that is very misleading. How would a voter apply this same logic in the hypothetical setting where one party supported “killing babies” but the other party supported something of equal moral repugnance, for instance “killing conservative Christians”? Or, less hypothetically, a setting where one party supported “killing babies” but the other party supported “killing criminals, killing Iraqis, etc”. Clearly context matters. The moral gravity of the “single issue” is an important part of the equation, but in choosing to be a “single issue voter” I was also making an implicit decision about the relative importance of all the other issues on the table.

I think it’s more helpful to see “single issue voting” as a tool which can (much like the literal “hunger strike”) provide a compelling and powerful voice against injustice when applied in the just the right circumstances — a tool which requires great discernment about the nuanced details of the context in which it will be used. Employing a tool like this blindly can, depending on the context, lead to an injustice, hypocrisy, and abdication of responsibilities even greater than the one the “single issue voter” is seeking to avoid (I fear that’s what’s happening in America today as I’ll discuss in a later post).

This probably would have been obvious to me sooner had I been in a church community that did not basically reinforce the idea that Republicans were right about most/all the other issues anyway, especially social and economic issues. For instance, I wonder how many “single issue voters” would still vote with a satisfied conscience if the Republicans were “pro-life” but were also “in favor of gay marriage” — I probably wouldn’t have.

My voting pattern could probably have been more accurately labeled “line in the sand voting”. I’m convinced many people, perhaps most people on both sides of the political spectrum, apply of variant of this type of voting — for some reason it’s most comfortable for us to articulate our position in terms of what we’re most against: “I could never bring myself to vote for a party/candidate that supports ___.” Over time, this kind of thinking is generally self-reinforcing, especially when the us/them dividing line is drawn in such a way that none of our close friends are in the ‘them’ category.

Even during my most enthusiastic Republican days, there was one data point that gave me great pause. I knew that during the same election that I was applying my presumably airtight “single issue voter” Christian values, the vast majority of African American Christians voted for the Democratic candidate. What could be going on with that, I wondered? The self-righteous explanation was that somehow most African Americans just hadn’t thought through the moral gravity of the abortion issue the way I had (or perhaps that they just weren’t as aware of the issues, or that their faith wasn’t as deep). Many conservative Christian voices suggested even more sinister options, often cloaked as theological criticism. However, the few African American believers I knew consistently left with the opposite impression: they spoke powerfully and knowledgeably about many issues of injustice I knew very little about, and there was an undeniable depth to their faith that I found very attractive.

This planted the seeds for the growth I was soon to experience at college learning from friends of various ethnicity and background. And it also set the stage for me to understand the words and actions of Jesus in a way that has challenged me more than anything else, and continues to do so. More on that topic in the next post of this series.

During my rare week off, I’ve been enjoying using Facebook to track down a number of long lost friends. This process has reminded me of the incredibly diverse range of political convictions held by people whose faith I respect or have looked up to in the past.

This range of political opinions probably shouldn’t surprise me given the two major challenges inherent in the American political system today. First, we live in an incredibly large country with a complicated history of both great achievement and great injustice (often depending on what people group you’re a part of). As I’ve blogged about before, certain issues play out very differently in the neighborhoods where I grew up than they do in the neighborhoods where my wife grew up, yet policies are often debated in a one-size-fits-all context. Second, our primary mode of input as voters is an essentially binary decision between two party platforms which sometimes feels a bit like deciding between “ordering one of everything on the Denny’s menu” vs. “ordering one of everything on the Starbucks menu”.

Even so, our votes and our political views effect real lives. Deeply. Both our lives, and the lives of people who are very different from us (and who we’re often oblivious to). My personal experiences over the past eight years (including marrying someone who shares deeply my faith but grew in a very different ethnic/social setting) have forced me to wrestle constantly with how my faith effects who I am politically.

I have decided to write a five-part series in which I will delve into the intersection of faith and politics in more detail. At one level, I’m using this format as a vehicle to share about my personal journey, highlighting ways in which the words and actions of Jesus have challenged me to rethink many of the political views I inherited from my community. However, I hope to frame the discussion in a way that is accessible to a full range of people: those whose faith motivates them to a conservative/right political persuasion, those whose faith motivates them to a liberal/left political persuasion, those whose faith motivates them to something that fits neither mold (left or right), and even those who do not share my faith at all — because I have friends I respect who fall into each of these categories. (I’m hoping to foster a constructive conversation by cajoling enough of them to read/comment on this blog).

In my next post, I will discuss the idea of ‘Single Issue Voting’ (both in the sense people most commonly use the term, and in a broader sense I find helpful). In my third post, I will give an overview of the words and actions of Jesus that have been most instrumental in shaping my perspectives on politics. I’ll devote my entire fourth post to what for many people amounts (somewhat unfairly in my opinion) to the ‘elephant in the room’: the abortion issue. And finally, with that elephant acknowledged, I hope to use my final post to point towards other political issues of importance, and to share thoughts on how we can rework our ethic of political engagement to more fully embody the mission of Jesus.

How to apply this in the voting booth will be an exercise left to the reader, but as you’ve probably guessed, I will be arguing for something beyond a simple conclusion of “vote Democrat” or (in particular) “vote Republican”. Given that I’m responding to the faith tradition in which I was raised (a heavily Republican church in a heavily Republican area), another suitable title for this series would be “Why Tim thinks the idea that Christian=Republican is a bad idea” with the possible subtitle “Why Tim is not convinced that ‘Single Issue Voting’ is any better.” Nonetheless, I am NOT arguing that we simply change the equation by replacing the word ‘Republican’ with something else. Rather, I feel Jesus’ words and actions call us to something that transcends such equations. Subsequent posts will unpack my thoughts about what that ’something’ may look like in America today.

Tim Stonehocker