Archive | February, 2011

What is the Church confessing?

by on February 21, 2011

This Monday morning’s Moltmann outtake comes from The Church in the Power of the Spirit, in the chapter of that same name:

It is necessary to reflect theologically on the mission of the community and every individual Christian, and on the congregation’s order and special ministry for before anyone actually speaks and acts in the church or in its name, the church has already spoken and acted through its very existence, its visible organization and its public functions. The form of its fellowship and public functions, and the shape of its order and its ministries, are not merely externals and inessentials; they are no less important than the word and the sacraments. The church’s institutions and its traditional congregational forms can become a stumbling block for many people, even if–and especially if–they do not thereby make the things of Christianity itself a stumbling block. People demand the ‘witness of existence’– and rightly so. Through its order, its ministries and its organizations the church either confesses or denies the thing that it has to represent. So it cannot leave its visible form to the power of the state or the requirements of its particular social order, if it wants to be recognizable as the church of Christ as as the people of the coming kingdom. It is of course true that every historical form the church takes also bears the stamp of its particular environment. But that is not a reason for accepting that stamp passively and for leaving it to external influences. As the church of Christ, the congregation with all its own powers has to realize the social, political and cultural potentialities of a particular period in a way that is in accordance with the cause it maintains; so that through its physical and public profile as well people will be confronted with the freedom of Christ and will be invited to the messianic kingdom.

- p.290

When as a seminary student I read the sentence I put in bold above, I felt bowled over by all its implications for the Church today.  I felt at the time, and I still do to a large degree, that the current forms and ministries of the Church more accurately confess particularly American markers- extreme individualism, a corporate definition of success, a monetized form of popularity, and a charity-cloaked form of selfishness.   I say this not to berate (or at least, not entirely) but to stand in front of the mirror that is the American church landscape and allow it to reflect honestly back.  Regardless of whether some of these assumptions or conclusions are false or oversimplifying, they have become part of our “image” and they are, therefore, our concern.  For our task, as Moltmann reminds us, is to reconcile all the potentialities of our particular period in a way that manages to live in accordance with the cause of the messianic kingdom.  If our image is reflecting otherwise, we have work to do.

As a pastor, that one sentence is enough to keep me up at night.  Through Journey’s structure and gatherings and events and small groups, we are either going to confess or deny the very thing we seek to represent.  And I’m certain there are plenty of places where we’re denying it, despite our deepest intentions to the contrary.  This is where our only recourse is to pray for boldness enough to face the mirror, to have a posture that allows you to acknowledge your own reflection, and to have the guts to change what needs changing.

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Moltmann on Love

by on February 14, 2011

Happy Feast of Saint Valentine to you all!  A few apropos words on love by my valentine, Jurgie:

Love is the self-communication of the good.  It is the power of good to go out of itself, to enter into other being, to participate in other being, and to give itself for other being. If we interpret love as the passionate self-communication of the good, then we have distinguished it plainly enough from destructive passions. Love wants to live and to give life. It wants to open up the freedom to live. That is why love is the self-communication of the good without self-renunciation, and the self-giving of the good without self-dissolution.

Those of you die-hard Moltmanniacs know that he bases much of his theology on the divine sharing love of the Trinity and the perichoretic dance that happens in this mutual self-communication.  In this, the love of God, Jesus and Spirit not only sustain one another, but go out of themselves toward all of creation.  The love of God participates in the world, and in our own lives specifically, because that’s what the self-communication of the good does.  It is the power of good to go out of itself, because love’s purpose is to live and to give life.

I attended morning chapel with my 1st grader this morning, and of course the topic was love.  The chaplain described the idea of paying it forward by drawing on a white board with a line of hearts fanning further and further out, to explain how even our smallest acts of love carry very big things inside of them.  This is, in six and seven year old terms, what Moltmann is telling us as well.  Love pays it forward, because love’s very purpose is to carry that big force inside of it out towards others, seeking to live and to give life.  It reminds me of Mother Teresa’s well-known words of wisdom: “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.”  On a day when we could easily get lost in the saccharin and trite definitions of love’s sentimentality, may we be reminded of the power to change the world hiding in even our smallest acts of love.

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Mad Men: The Medium is the Message

by on February 8, 2011

Yes, I’m talking about Mad Men again.  And it’s not even on the air right now.  But my friend Jason Mitchell tweeted an article by the New York Review of Books and I felt the need to respond.  Because the author seemed to miss one of the most brilliant parts of the show, even as he wrote about it painstakingly for three pages.  You can read it in its entirety here (note: there are general spoilers) but here’s the part that made me shake my head in disbelief:

The problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering.

Oh, Daniel Mendelsohn.  Yes. You are correct.  Mad Men is trying to do two things at once:  It is trying to expose the shadow side of life in the 1960′s, and it is trying to do so within the slick and image-conscious aesthetic of advertising.  But honey, this is not sloppy.  It is attempting to do exactly what you said- invite us to be shocked by what it’s showing us, and eroticize it, too.  But this is on purpose, and it is one of the main reasons the show is so brilliant.  The characters are living imperfect, often repulsive, lives.  But they look soooo pretty that we almost –almost– forget.  (Maybe this is why the characters have to be so repulsive.  Otherwise, we’d be sure to forget.)  The viewer is thrown into the deep end and forced to experience two incredibly conflicting questions.  Do we loathe these repulsive people who smoke while pregnant and crack racist jokes, or do we appreciate them (and want to emulate them, even) for their dapper style and cool charm?

This is not contemptuous and pandering.  This is the way our culture IS.  Exhibit A:  Britney Spears.  Do we loathe the mother who can’t strap her child in a carseat or seem to get her act together, or do we appreciate the performer who can mesmerize an entire live audience better than just about anyone?

The 1960′s setting of Mad Men is a great part of the show’s appeal, certainly.  But one of the most powerfully subversive things it does is provide us a cushion of time and space from the present so that we don’t realize it’s exposing exactly what’s wrong with US, right now.  We are the people in the office.  We are the people in those relationships.  We are the people who buy magazines and watch television shows that allow us to peer into celebrities’  lives with a mixture of disgust and desire.  It’s a terrible side of humanity, really.  It’s everything that gets manipulated in advertising when we attempt to falsely bridge a world between reality and the image we want of ourselves.  It’s a disaster.  And Mad Men is the most brilliant show that has ever been written to expose it.  And they do it by placing stories of racist misogynistic people in impeccably decorated rooms and mesmerizing camera angles.  The medium IS the message, Daniel.  DUH.

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The individual is not a person

by on February 7, 2011

I realize I’m prone to these kinds of statements about Moltmann, but honestly, the paragraph below is absolutely mind blowingly fantastic. It’s so good, I’m not going to say any further commentary about the content itself, other than encourage you to read it, and think about the vast amount of application it has for our lives and the way we structure them if we want to live into the “social program of the Trinity.”  It is, to use a term I’ve coined for just such a moment, a Moltmann WWF Smackdown.  I have read thousands of pages of philosophy on human identity. None of them describe the problem with modern individualization and the true purpose of human identity and personhood as powerfully as Moltmann does here…in one short paragraph, no less.  Philosophers of the modern and postmodern age, consider yourselves smacked down.

For the last 200 years Western industrial society (and now modern society in general) has experienced one thrust towards individualization after another. The last of them bears the name ‘postmodern’. The opportunities for choice open to individualized men and women are enormously increased, and anyone who has the means can also take advantage of these opportunities. But this power is paralleled by the growing powerlessness of the individualized people, who can certainly look on at events and the world through the media, but can do nothing to change them. An individual is not a person, but–as the Latin word individuum says–something that in the final analysis is indivisible; it means the same as the Greek word ‘atom.’ As the end-product of divisions, the individual has no relationships, no attributes, no memories and no names. The individual is unutterable. A person, unlike an individual, is a human existence living in the resonant field of his social connections and his history. He has a name, with which he can identify himself. A person is a social being. The modern thrusts toward individualization in society promps the suspicion that a modern individual is the product of that age-old Roman principle of dominance: divide et impera- divide and rule. Individualized people can easily  be dominated by political and economic forces. There is only resistance for the purpose of protecting personal human dignity if people join together in communities and decide their lives socially for themselves.

These few pointers may suffice to show the public relevance of the trinitarian concept of God for the liberation of individualized men and women, and the relevance of the trinitarian experience of community for the development of a new sociality.

- Experiences in Theology, p.333

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