Archive for the 'Christianity' Category

“Acceptance of abortion owes more to Rosie the Riveter than to Roe”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 1, 2008
in Christianity and Politics
. 10 Comments

Continuing the theme of yesterday…I love me my complementarians:

Why is it that abortion is so prevalent and accepted in America today? What are the reasons that women “choose” to abort their babies rather than give birth to them and mother them? It wasn’t because one day a madness overtook the female sex and caused them to turn on their young. It was much more insidious and slow-moving than that. There are many moments we could point to in history, beginning with Eve’s emancipation by eating the forbidden fruit, for the genesis of the impulse to selfishly rid oneself of every encumbrance, including male headship and clinging children. But I think that the acceptance of abortion can trace its foundations more to Rosie the Riveter than to Roe v. Wade, which was only the culmination of independent roots that finally blossomed into wholesale slaughter of innocent children. Governor Palin leaving her home to become governor of Alaska, and “choosing” to run for second-in-command of the most powerful nation on earth, is not a coup for the prolife cause, despite her personal convictions, but it is the death knell of the the biblical family as an American institution, and will only bring grief to those who are trying to hold together the shreds of that family vision in the midst of a perverse society.

Bold emphasis mine.

Is it just liberal wishful thinking that leads me to suggest that these views are held by a not-insubstantial percentage of very conservative Christians? I don’t think so. The majority of evangelicals don’t have a problem with the notion of a woman president or vice-president. But in a very close election, the refusal of a few very traditional complementarians to vote for a woman on a national ticket could prove decisive.

And I’m done with this topic.

Shattering the glass ceiling of complementarianism: some thoughts on Sarah Palin, John Knox, and the difficult position of the Christian social conservative: UPDATED AGAIN

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 31, 2008
in Christianity and Politics
. 16 Comments

This was going to be an update to Friday’s post, but I’m bumping it into its own slot.

Didn’t take long to find our friends in the complementarian community bemoaning the Palin pick.

If you believe that women should submit to men, shouldn’t have teaching authority over men and so forth, then you are going to have a hard time accepting Sarah Palin as vice-president. To be a complementarian, after all, is to embrace the idea that men and women were created for distinct roles. Palin, who seems eager to court Hillary Clinton voters, sends a message with her life and her career that neither her sex nor her status as a mother of five should serve as a barrier to holding what could quickly become the most powerful post in the world.

Some conservative Christians have long suggested that public policy ought to reflect traditional biblical values. Many complementarians believe that the same rules that bar women from pastoral office bar them from high political office, though that position is not universally held. (The great Reformer John Knox famously made that point five centuries ago in his attacks on Bloody Mary and Elizabeth I.) As she made explicit in her pandering Friday tribute to Hillary Clinton, Palin wants to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all; social conservatives tend to believe that ceiling is God-ordained. Though the Obama-Biden ticket is far better on women’s issues than that offered by their GOP rivals, there’s no question that a Palin victory will, in some significant way, do violence to the antiquated notion of women’s submission to men. (Yes, I get that the veep is in some sense submissive to the person at the top of the ticket — but we all know the frailty of a single human life, particularly a septuagenarian one. From an actuarial standpoint, Palin has a not unreasonable chance of becoming the most powerful person in the world within the next four years.)

If you’re a social conservative, voting for Obama-Biden is almost unthinkable, given their views on abortion, gay rights, and so forth. McCain is hardly a darling of the religious right, though he has kow-towed to them with increasing vigor. Yet if one has qualms about the notion that women and men can do the same public work equally well, how can one vote for McCain-Palin? Trust me, as a progressive feminist evangelical, I don’t want Sarah Palin to win. But if she does, I know that her election will be celebrated as a historic milestone for women. And it will be a milestone on a road many of my most conservative friends — the “John Knox complementarians” — are reluctant to go down.

May I suggest that my complementarian friends stay home on November 4, or vote for a third party?

Kyso at Punkass made the same point earlier; I didn’t find the post until after making my own.

UPDATE: Check out “Ten Reasons I Don’t Want to be VP”. And yes, just wait a minute, and you’ll hear the chorus start that says “Sarah Palin’s daughter wouldn’t have ended up pregnant if Mama had been closer to home, able to monitor the family.”

UPDATE #2: From a Reformed (Calvinist) perspective, a post called Biblical Standard for Civil Magistrates.

A Pentecostal in the White House? Some thoughts on Palin’s religious journey

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on August 30, 2008
in Christianity and Politics
. 15 Comments

On another note, Sarah Palin seems to have had an interesting spiritual journey. Born and baptized a Catholic, in her teens and young adulthood she attended an Assemblies of God church. (No word whether she has been baptized twice; AG doesn’t recognize infant baptism.) It’s unclear, according to this Christianity Today article, exactly what Palin’s theology is these days.

The Assemblies of God is one of the world’s largest Pentecostal denominations. If elected as vice-president, Palin would go farther in American politics than any previous leader with Pentecostal roots. (So far, former Attorney General John Ashcroft holds the distinction of being America’s highest-ranking charismatic.) It’s worth noting that Pentecostalism goes a long way towards explaining Palin’s balancing of socially conservative views with a strong belief in women’s capacity to lead. Like most Pentecostal denominations, going all the way back to the Azusa Revival a century ago, the Assemblies of God ordains women as pastors. Palin, born a Catholic, left a denomination that denied pastoral authority to women in order to join one that embraced women as leaders — while still holding to traditional social views on issues like “life” and sexuality. Unlike among the Southern Baptists or conservative Calvinists, it’s not unusual in Pentecostal circles to find women who are both church leaders and mothers of young children. Palin belongs, it seems, to that tradition.

The press simply calls her an “evangelical.” But that’s far too broad a term, as we all know. Given that Palin seems to have enormous credibility with Christian conservatives, it’s worth asking some questions about her theological views. After all, while many Pentecostals reject superficial “end times” millenarianism, others — including many affiliated with AG, a denomination to which my third wife belonged and with which I am very familiar — are anxiously awaiting the Rapture and the various stages of Tribulation. Someone who anticipates the imminent end of the world is, I think we can agree, a dangerous person to have one heartbeat from the presidency.

For all his myriad failings, there’s no evidence that George W. Bush ever held millenarian, apocalyptic views. I am prepared to regard faith as an essentially private concern, save when it leads to contempt for the responsibility to care for the earth for generations to come.

Primates on limits

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 28, 2008
in Anglican Communion, Christianity and Environmentalism
. 0 Comments

The 2008 Lambeth Conference in England enters its final week, and it is still unclear whether the worldwide Anglican Communion will hold together. I blogged my thoughts ten days ago. Many sites are covering the conference; check out Episcopal Life, the Guardian, Integrity USA’s, or Kendall Harmon’s.

Fights over women bishops and same-sex marriage are getting most of the coverage, but I’m relieved that the Archbishop of Canterbury himself is still willing to focus on other, perhaps even more vital issues. In Saturday’s Guardian, Rowan Williams offers a terrific reflection: A New Spiritual Politics of Limits. The archbishop writes:

We live in a world of finite space and finite resource. Endless trajectories of growth are not realistic; and our own rising “oceans” of food and fuel prices are a stark reminder that scarcity is not someone else’s problem in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

Somehow, conventional political discourse has not dealt with this very successfully. Time was when part of the wisdom of conservative politics was about limits, realism, adjusting to certain givens in the social and material environment, and moderating expectations. Unfortunately, this proved all too often to be a way of recommending the disadvantaged to accept their fate; and progressive politics was thus frequently allied to a passionate belief in endless possibilities of self-improvement and more sophisticated control of the environment. You have only to think of the utopian aspirations of the French Revolution or of the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

And when a drained and abused environment takes its revenge, we seem often very confused. Rather bizarrely, the environmental family of issues is seen in some quarters as a sort of liberal conspiracy, another turn of the screw for liberal guilt, and therefore to be treated with the same robust scorn as all other fashionable and self-indulgent moralising. But at the same time, a progressive politics still finds it very hard to let go of its legacy. If emancipation and the advance of human capacity don’t simply mean economic growth without limit, what do they mean?

Excellent question, and I appreciate the dig at so-called “conservatives” who are, in practice and in theory, anything but when it comes to their attitude towards conservation for the good of our planet and all the life upon it.

The Archbishop wrote in response to something raised by the Bishop of Polynesia: rising ocean levels are, within a short time, going to make much of his island-chain diocese uninhabitable. In that light, some of the quarreling over pelvic morality seems, well, self-indulgent at best and shamelessly irresponsible at worst. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church USA raised this same issue in her Easter Sermon this year. Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote:

We are beginning to be aware of the ways in which our lack of concern for the rest of creation results in death and destruction for our neighbors. We cannot love our neighbors unless we care for the creation that supports all our earthly lives. We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space. When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific, are we truly sharing good news?

And all God’s creatures said, Amen!

Christians are fond of saying things like “God will provide.” And yes, as a believer, I trust that God will provide. But we make a huge theological error when we confuse divine provision with carte blanche to exploit the earth and its creatures. Scripture grants humans dominion over the earth — but to exercise dominion is to be, literally, like the Lord. When God gave Adam and Eve stewardship over all of creation, it was in order that they might love and cherish it with the same intensity and care that He showed and shows for His creatures. And when we fail to exercise “just dominion”, we fail to honor the God who commended this earth and all of its creatures to our care.

Archbishop Williams concludes:

Contrary to what some would say, religious belief is in significant measure a way of acknowledging limits that are shared by all human beings – the limits involved in bodily dependence on a friendly environment, and in the fact of death. Faith proposes that finding your way within these limits (including awareness of death) is how we lead lives that have some claim to rationality and – to use the religious word – grace.

That’s a message desperately needed.

“Do Me, Do Me Right”: part one (very long) of a four-part series on Christianity and sexual ethics

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 17, 2008
in Christianity, Favorite Posts 2008, Sexual Ethics and Christian Faith Series and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 25 Comments

This is part one of a four-part series this summer on Christianity and sex. Part Two will look more closely at issues of sexuality and global justice, part Three will look at how to reconcile contemporary sexual ethics with Scripture and tradition, and part Four will provide a whole bunch of good readin’ for further study.

Christian sexual ethics are much on my mind, on the minds of many of my students and youth group kids, and this summer, very much on the public’s radar as well. Next week, we’ll mark the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI’s famous Humanae Vitae, the encyclical that declared virtually all forms of contraception to be incompatible with Catholic teaching. In many ways, Humanae Vitae was the first blow struck in the reaction against the liberation movements of the 1960s, and it was the seed for much contemporary conservative thought about the meaning and purpose of our bodies and our lives. From a progressive standpoint, its fortieth anniversary is not cause for celebration. (But in all fairness, if you want to read a fine — but very, very wrong-headed — encomium to Humanae Vitae, visit First Things for this Mary Eberstadt piece.)

And of course, the Anglican Communion is on the verge of major schism this summer over, above all else, the issue of sexuality. A church that survived numerous revisions to the prayer book, a church that bravely embraced contraception way back in the 1930s, a church that largely held together when women began to be ordained in the 1970s, is now at last falling apart over the issue of homosexuality. Tied up in the near-certain schism is the basic disagreement among Christians about what constitutes “ethical sex” in the eyes of God. There seems little chance of a resolution that will both keep the church together and, at the same time, be congruent with how two very different groups of Anglicans see the role of sexuality in our lives.

In any case, I’ve been thinking about (and studying about, and writing about) Christian sexual ethics for many years, since I first took a course on Patristic Theology at Berkeley in 1987. I became a Roman Catholic the following year, and then had a tortuous series of peregrinations that led me to — and through — the Assemblies of God, the Mennonites, and the Episcopalians. (I’m just your average, run of the mill “charismatic Anabaptist Roman Anglican”.) Though I continue to worship at a variety of Christian churches today, I am now involved in the work of the Kabbalah Centre. And of course, I have a Ph.D. in Christian history, though that doctorate focused more on the ethics of war than on the ethics of sex.

I also come to the discussion as a heterosexual man in his forties, four times married, thrice divorced. I come as a college gender studies professor who works closely with Christian and non-Christian students alike, many of whom, I am happy to say, have chosen to see me as their mentor. I come to the discussion as a former Episcopal youth leader, who spent seven years teaching workshops on “Sex, All Saints Style” to high schoolers at the largest Anglican parish west of the Mississippi. So I bring a lot of experience, passion, and yes, baggage, to this subject.

From a theological perspective, though I’ve never been a Methodist, I come to the discussion with a healthy reverence for what’s often known as the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral”: Reason, Experience, Scripture, Tradition. The “Quad” suggests that any understanding of God’s call on our lives needs to rest on those four things. Many Christians from across the theological spectrum have embraced the Quad as a sound method for discerning right thought, right speech, and right action.

So after all that build-up, what am I ready to say about Christianity and sex?

If there’s one core principle I derive from using the “Quad”, it’s this: in the end, God cares more about the content of our sexuality than he does about its form. Traditional Christian sexual ethics are often discussed in the context of what Christians can and can’t do. Modern conservatives will often say things like “the only form of genital contact sanctioned by God is that which happens in a marriage between one husband and one wife.” The implication is clear: if you get the “form” (heterosexual marriage) right, then the sex that follows is licit. If you haven’t got the form right, then sorry, Mabel, sorry, Ernest, you’ve “fallen short of the mark.”

But “form-based” sexual ethics clearly have their problems. For example, it ignores entirely the great likelihood that coercion, disrespect, and force can take place within marriage. The Catholic church did not start condemning marital rape — or even acknowledging that such a concept was possible — until the second half of the twentieth century. Is a situation in which a husband demands sex from his wife against her will somehow more congruent with the spirit of Christ than a situation in which two unmarried people make love with mutual enthusiasm? If you’re a stickler for “form-based ethics”, you bet. For the most traditional of theologians, marital rape is less of a serious sin than homosexuality or pre-marital sex, because form matters more than content. (And when was the last time you heard Focus on the Family put out a series of messages against intra-marital coercion?) Continue reading ‘“Do Me, Do Me Right”: part one (very long) of a four-part series on Christianity and sexual ethics’

On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 7, 2008
in Abortion, Christianity, Faith, Having children and Sports
. 18 Comments

UPDATED Reminder about comments policy:

This comment thread is open to feminists and those who are feminist-friendly only. Thread-derailing to advance an anti-feminist agenda has no place here. I’ve been remiss in enforcing this recently, but am going to be better about it out now.

On the Fourth of July, KJ Lopez at the National Review Online offered up what she calls “A Good Girl Role Model”. (One assumes, after reading the piece and being familiar with K-Lo’s work, that the adjective “good” modifies “girl” rather than “role model”. Lopez is from that school of social conservatives who wish fervently that there were more “good girls” — in the classic sense — running around. Or, better yet in the right-wing world, not running around.)

Lopez tells us the story of Agata Mroz, a former Polish volleyball star who died of leukemia shortly after giving birth.

When Agata was 17, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a collection of disorders that prevent the bone marrow from producing sufficient blood cells. Some forms of MDS progress to leukemia, and Agata’s did. In the prime of her sports career, Agata needed to take a sabbatical in 2007 to fight the disease. The first part of her treatment involved many blood transfusions. When her fans discovered that she needed blood, they formed a queue to be donors, giving 3,170 pints.

Her condition worsened as she was preparing to marry Jacek Olszewski on June 9, 2007, leaving her too ill to go on a honeymoon. Because of her illness, doctors cautioned her against getting pregnant, but she tried anyway. She was realistic about her slim prospects to beat the disease and, if she were going to die, she at least hoped to be able to give life.

She became pregnant soon after marrying. “The news about the child made me feel lucky again,” she said in a February news interview. “I felt happy that I would know what it is to be a mother and that I would give my husband something good of myself.”

A few weeks later, doctors discovered her cancer had progressed. They told her that she urgently needed a bone marrow transplant, but she opted to wait until after delivery to receive the transplant lest she imperil her child’s life. She clearly knew the risk she was taking, but considered the reward worth the danger, putting her child’s life above her own. She gave premature birth to a daughter, Lilliana, on April 4.

Agata died on June 4.

It’s a bittersweet story. Who among us would question Agata’s decision? She did what she wanted to do, making a conscious choice to get pregnant despite the huge risk and to forego lifesaving treatment in order to ensure her daughter’s well-being. I honor that choice as a good and valid one. I was moved reading the account Lopez shares.

But what is so infuriating is the clear sense that Agata’s decision wasn’t a choice, but a spiritual requirement for any woman who might find herself in a similar tragic predicament. For Lopez — and indeed, for many Catholics, a woman is required to put the life of her unborn child ahead of her own. It isn’t so much a “choice” as a divine mandate. Lopez’s piece concludes:

In his homily, the celebrant of the Mass, Bishop Marian Florczyk, said that Agata’s life is a witness of “love of life, motherhood, the desire to give life and the heroic love of an unborn child.”

It is all that. I’m not raining on Agata’s parade, of course. But Lopez doesn’t entitle her piece “A Mother’s Choice”. She calls it “A Good Girl Role Model”, driving home the point that young women ought to aspire to be as radically selfless as Agata to the point of de-valuing their own lives. Continue reading ‘On motherhood, choice, and the celebration of Agata Mroz’

“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2008
in Christianity, Faith, Family, Favorite Posts 2008 and Youth
. 25 Comments

Last week, I posted about the Calvinist notion of rebelliousness as the gravest of sins, quoting both Richard Mouw and Augustine of Hippo. Mouw and Augustine excoriated themselves for childish destructiveness, not so much because of the damage they did to the objects they attacked but because of their sheer glee in defying authority.

My mother, a retired professor of philosophy, now in her seventies and an atheist since her teens, wrote to me with a different insight about the meaning of rebellion:

I don’t know if I ever told you this story. It is my earliest clear memory; I was only two and a half years old. It was Christmas Eve 1939, and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving to Grandfather Roeding’s for dinner. I think I had a slight cold. For some reason I had no shoes on but I did have socks and I started to take my socks off. My mother told me not to, but as I continued to remove them, I had this sudden enormous sense of myself as a self. I could take my socks off If I wanted to! I was a separate person. I was genuinely — if only briefly — aware of my own separate consciousness. I’ve certainly never thought of it as a sin. I disobeyed in the revelation that I could disobey: A deliberate act of free will. I’m sure I had done quite a few naughty things before that but this was an act of independence rather than of malice.

Do you know the medieval theory that there can be no true love in marriage? True love involved giving freely and nothing in marriage can be giving freely since everything, according to medieval doctrine, is already owed. Similarly, in our childhood there is a sense that everything good and well behaved is already required of us. We disobey not because we are depraved but because in the tiny sphere of our capacities, only disobedience is free, only disobedience is an expression of our autonomy. I have never forgotten that moment of realization that I could choose not to obey.

The bold emphases are mine.

I am truly, in so many ways, my mother’s son! And though my mother and I disagree about a great many things, I think she’s absolutely right about the essentially healthy, life-affirming function of the kind of childish disobedience she describes here. I am not a philosopher like my parents or Richard Mouw (though I did suffer through a lot of graduate work on medieval English scholasticism). What I do believe is that we must distinguish healthy rebellion from wanton destructiveness. My mother’s defiant removal of her socks, in the face of her own mother’s stated warnings, is evidence of a desire for healthy autonomy; Mouw’s smashing of his grandparents’ plants is less positive because it is the expression of autonomy through the willfull destruction of life (however feeble and unsentient that life may have been). Rebellion for the sake of establishing independence is, in other words, only sinful when it involves deliberate harm to that which is created, good, and valuable. There are different kinds of rebellion. Continue reading ‘“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy’

Loving the whole earth, loving the single place: a long response to Gregory Rodriguez, quoting Abbey and Hauerwas

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 27, 2008
in Books, Christianity, Environmentalism, Ethnicity, Globalism and Traveling
. 5 Comments

I normally like the perspective that L.A. Times’ columnist Gregory Rodriguez takes. But he wrote an op-ed eleven days ago that really irked me: Rootless to a Fault. Here’s a portion of it:

Here in the U.S., highly skilled workers and wealthy entrepreneurs from around the globe contribute mightily to this nation’s productivity and creativity. Their presence in our cities, and ours in theirs, has fostered a greater appreciation of global cultural diversity. It has spawned a vibrant cosmopolitanism that broadens our collective concern for people who live beyond our borders.

But this cosmopolitanism is not without its dark side. Increasingly, many of our big cities’ creative elites — both native and foreign-born — see themselves as citizens of the world. Our intellectuals are exploring the declining significance of place in the new globalized world order. And this brave new world cries out for an answer to the question: Does a person who swears loyalty to all cities and nations have any loyalties at all? I’ve always been struck by the fact that the same people who rightly criticize multinational corporations for having no sense of responsibility to place never seem to express the same concern about the equally “unplaced” creative elite.

A few years ago, I was at a fancy dinner party and found myself the only one at the table who held only one passport.

Rodriguez goes on to make a jarringly wrong premise: those who see themselves as “citizens of the world” are somehow dramatically less engaged in civic activity than those whose horizons are smaller and whose loyalties more narrowly defined. He opines:

Without denying the benefits of globalization, we should remember the beauty and strength of parochialism.

It’s all well and good to love the world, but real social solidarity is generally found on a smaller scale. And it’s not just the unskilled immigrants we should be concerned about. We need to find ways to encourage the highly skilled ones to form a sense of attachment and commitment to their new homes. On top of that, we natives must remember that there is no honor in escaping engagement by becoming a citizen of the world.

First off — and I could be wrong — I smell a tiny whiff in Rodriguez’s piece of an old anti-Semitic canard: the notion that the “wandering Jew”, cosmopolitan to a fault, undermines the stability of whatever society in which he finds himself, because his loyalties are eternally elsewhere. Though that is surely not Rodriguez’s intent, there’s no denying that jeremiads against “jet-setting elitists” who have no commitment to place are not new, and that in the past, many of those attacks have been aimed quite explicitly at Jews. Gregory ought to have known that.

But what I resent about the piece is the notion that loyalty to the world and all of its creatures is somehow incompatible with deep concern for the well-being of particular places. Rodriguez posits what is frankly a monstrously false dichotomy: parochial and engaged or cosmopolitan and unconcerned. Indeed, I assure Greg that there are those among his readers who are devoted to Los Angeles and its well-being without feeling any need to elevate the needs of L.A. above those of the entire planet!

I am a dual citizen, holding UK and US citizenship. My brother, his wife, and children hold a serious array of passports: Mexican, Austrian, British, and American. I have many friends who also have two nationalities, and I have a few acquaintances who have three. And no, we are not all part of some transnational global elite. I’ll be waiting a long time for my invite to rub elbows with the super-rich at the Davos Economic Forum. Of course, my dual citizenship is not without significance to me: it not only gives me and my family options about where to work and live, it reminds me that I do indeed have multiple loyalties and multiple commitments. But my devotion to any one place is not less because of a devotion to many. I have been fortunate to have been able to see much of the world, and am fortunate to have friends and family scattered across many continents. But that sense of belonging to the globe rather than to a country doesn’t mean I am any less passionately devoted to the well-being of Pasadena, or to my students, many of whom have never been on an airplane much less outside of the Western Hemisphere. Continue reading ‘Loving the whole earth, loving the single place: a long response to Gregory Rodriguez, quoting Abbey and Hauerwas’

Of pears and plants, rebellion and depravity: a response to Augustine and Richard Mouw

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 24, 2008
in Christianity, Environmentalism and Youth
. 13 Comments

Fuller President Richard Mouw is perhaps the one modern theologian who can make Five Point Calvinism seem not only winsome, but reasonable.

The first “point” of Calvinism is the doctrine of total depravity, the notion that wickedness extends to our deepest self. It doesn’t mean, of course, that each of us is incapable of doing good. Total depravity, the way most Calvinists explain it, is the idea that there is no aspect of our person that is not touched by sin. None of us can, in this life, escape from the influence of wickedness by our own efforts; grace alone is the one thing that keeps us from being totally consumed by depravity.

In a post this month, President Mouw shares how depravity manifested itself in his own childhood:

Recently I went through some old family photos and saw a picture of myself riding a tricycle in the backyard of the first home that I can remember. I know I could not have been older than four years old at the time—probably closer to three—because we moved away from that home (actually an upstairs apartment) not long after my fourth birthday. My mother planted a small garden plot in that yard, and one day she worked with me to plant some seeds. She showed me how to dig holes and do the planting, and she instructed me about regularly watering the ground. She also helped me to block off that area with sticks and string, so that no one would walk on the planted area. And she warned me: “Do not ever step on this ground where you have planted the seeds, or the plants will not grow!”

One day when I was playing in that yard, I looked to make sure my parents were not watching, and then I stepped over the stretched string, and I deliberately stomped on the ground where I had planted the seeds. I can still remember the spirit of rebellion that motivated me. I was stomping on the ground precisely because I knew it was an act of disobedience. I also remember often lying awake in my bed in the weeks after I did that, fearful that the plants would not grow and worried that my rebellion would be revealed. I even prayed some childish prayers for deliverance, although I do not think they included any elements of confession and repentance—just something like, “God, please, please, make those plants grow!” I was greatly relieved when one day the green shoots suddenly appeared in the place where I had stomped my feet.

I tell that story to say that while I did not go from a wicked lifestyle to a pattern of holy living in my youth, I did need to be redeemed from a rebellious spirit that was grounded in my sinful nature. And it was not a rebellion that was motivated by any particular angry feeling I had toward my parents. It was a spirit of rebellion against authority as such, one that was grounded in a very basic desire simply to do something that was wrong.

It’s a similar story to the one St. Augustine, writing 1600 years ago, tells about his famous pears:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night–having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was–a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart–which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error–not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Bold emphases are mine.

My mother is a retired professor of philosophy, and was a good friend of the Mouws in the early 1960s. Year after year, she taught Augustine to her students — and though she didn’t always do so publicly, she regularly expressed exasperation with the way in which the bishop of Hippo (and now, her old friend the president of Fuller) interpreted childish rebelliousness as so inherently depraved. My mother, an atheist from adolescence on, found Augustine’s self-flagellation wildly unnecessary at best. As she pointed out, if he condemns pear-stealing with such venom and self-loathing, what vocabulary will he have left for greater sins? What words are left for murder, for rape, for acts of genuine cruelty against sentient creatures, when the strongest possible language has already been employed to describe a puerile act of third-rate vandalism? Continue reading ‘Of pears and plants, rebellion and depravity: a response to Augustine and Richard Mouw’

“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2008
in Christianity, Faith and Favorite Posts 2008
. 3 Comments

At the end of a long post about changing her views on abortion, Mermade asks:

…sometimes I do worry about whether or not I am indeed deviating from the narrow path (see Matthew 7:13), but no longer view the “narrow path” as being politically conservative in a secular culture. I am still trying to figure out what Jesus meant when he said to enter through the narrow path. Any interpretations you guys have of that are very much welcome.

Well, lots of folks can give interesting lectures about the various gates into the city of Jerusalem that existed in Jesus’ time. The number of treatises and dissertations that have been written about the physical location and theological significance of those entryways is mind-boggling. But since we tend to use the idea of the “narrow” and “wide” gates metaphorically in contemporary Christian culture, I’ll roll with that, and offer a reflection that doesn’t cling too narrowly to traditional interpretation.

“Wide” gates are those that many people can fit through at once. “Narrow” gates are those that, perhaps, only one person can get through at a time. A simple and reasonable reading of the passage is that Jesus is doing what he does throughout Matthew: turning conventional wisdom on its head and suggesting a radically different interpretation of what it means to live a righteous life. Matthew, of all the Gospels, is the one most concerned with reaching the Jewish listener. Jesus challenges the parochialism and ethnocentrism (these are not anachronistic terms to use here) of his followers, suggesting throughout Matthew that active commitment to loving the entire world (rather than just one “people”) is the central component of his message. Continue reading ‘“Enter through the narrow gate”: culture, tradition, and the Christian paradox of other-centered individualism’

Called to a higher allegiance: the welcome new evangelical manifesto

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 12, 2008
in Christianity and Politics
. 6 Comments

My father’s former student Richard Mouw (president of Fuller Seminary, philosopher, theologian and blogger) announces the release of a very fine statement that deserves more attention than it has yet received: The Evangelical Manifesto, a Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment. The full text is on the website in PDF, a summary is here. Signed by Dr. Mouw and many other leading evangelicals, it is a most welcome manifesto.

In the introduction, it says We Evangelicals are defined theologically, and not politically, socially, or culturally. Amen, amen, amen. When I continue to describe myself as an evangelical — one who is pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, pro-environment — I am regularly accused of misrepresenting the “evangelical” brand. This splendid manifesto reminds us that to be an evangelical is to believe a few key things about Jesus of Nazareth and His role in our lives and the redemption of Creation; there are no litmus tests — not even on abortion or homosexuality — that define the movement. Continue reading ‘Called to a higher allegiance: the welcome new evangelical manifesto’

The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Christianity, Marriage and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 14 Comments

Jeremy Pierce posted an interesting piece yesterday: Sex and Duty. He’s taking issue with some aspects of my take on the 30-Day Sex Challenge. My basic point was that desire and duty are mutually exclusive, particularly where sex is concerned. I argued that the Pauline doctrine of mutual submission and the apostle’s words in 1 Corinthians 7 do not constitute an obligation to be sexually available to a partner when one is not in the mood.

One mistake I made in the original post gives Jeremy an opening to challenge my position. Casually taking Matthew 5:41 completely out of context, I wrote: Challenging spouses to “go the extra mile” for each other is a biblically and psychologically sound notion.

Jeremy jumps on that:

This Pauline view can be easily motivated by Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly by the Golden Rule (do to others what you’d want them to do for you) and the extra mile (if someone asks you to carry something a mile, do it for two miles, and if someone asks for your coat offer up your shirt too). Jesus speaks as if this sort of thing is a typical characteristic of his followers, and those who don’t do this are failing to be like citizens of the kingdom of God out to be. I can see how someone would apply such statements to the case at hand by arguing for a duty to have sex even when one isn’t interested for the sake of the sex.

But this is not duty for the mere sake of duty. It’s duty for the sake of the other person. If a person motivated by love for another person has a duty to do what’s loving for the other person, there may well be times when that involves having sex when one otherwise wouldn’t have been interested, and Jesus’ teaching does seem to include cases like that. I’m not sure why cases of voluntarily being willing to have sex when one isn’t interested should be exceptions to the kinds of loving acts he commands in those passages.

Of course, as Walter Wink and other theologians have pointed out, much of Matthew 5 is concerned not with how we treat those whom we love, but those whom we hate. Wink points out that the challenge to go the second or extra mile had a specific meaning:

Jesus’ third example, the one about going the second mile, is drawn from the relatively enlightened practice of limiting the amount of forced or impressed labor (angareia) that Roman soldiers could levy on subject peoples to a single mile…

It is in this context of Roman military occupation that Jesus speaks. He does not counsel revolt…

But why carry his pack a second mile? Is this not to rebound to the opposite extreme of aiding and abetting the enemy? Not at all. The question here… is how the oppressed can recover the initiative and assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed. The rules are Caesar’s, but how one responds to the rules is God’s, and Caesar has no power over that…From a situation of servile impressment, the oppressed have once more seized the initiative. They have taken back the power of choice…
Continue reading ‘The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”’

More on the “Godmen” and the heresy of the hyper-masculine Christ

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2008
in Christianity and Men and Masculinity
. 2 Comments

In October 2006, I wrote a post about the “Godmen” phenomenon. That post begins:

Godmen is, according to the organizers, “a series of testosterone-fueled Christian men’s gatherings across the country. Their purpose: to reassert masculinity within a church structure that they (the organizers) say has been weakened by feminization.”

Uh huh. Or, in other words, Godmen is about giving men who feel overwhelmed and challenged by a Gospel message of egalitarian justice a chance to worship God without having to let go of the very things that Jesus asks them to surrender.

Now, happily, Christianity Today has a very critical piece up about the Godmen and other similar groups anxious to “reclaim Christ” as a hyper-masculine role model. (Cap tap to reader David, who sent me the link.) Brandon O’Brian, writing in CT, makes good sense here:

The masculinity movement would have us emulate the glorified Jesus—the one who will return on horseback and brandish the sword of judgment. That is certainly the Jesus we worship. But it is not the Jesus we are commanded to imitate. The only times Jesus appears in Scripture as a warrior are in his pre-incarnate debuts in the Old Testament and post-resurrection glory. Our model of behavior, then, is the suffering Son, not the glorified one.

That’s good. And further signs that Christianity Today, the flagship journal of American evangelicalism, is open to genuinely egalitarian principles:

Arguing for common characteristics between men and women is not to argue for identical roles. I don’t intend to downplay the significant differences between the genders or the distinct challenges in discipleship that men and women each face. I mean that if courage is Christlike, then men and women should both develop courage…

…we should mistrust any interpretation of Scripture that simply confirms our instincts. If it is more natural for a man to be aggressive and a woman to be passive, then a genuine encounter with Christ should challenge a man to become gentle (Gal. 5:23) and a woman to become bold (2 Tim. 1:7). The challenge of discipleship is extended equally to both men and women.

A-flippin-men. Bold emphasis is mine. And while I’m not sure how “natural” masculine aggression and feminine passivity really is, the reminder that a relationship with Christ challenges each of us to become fully and completely human is most welcome.

The enemy of desire is duty: against the 30-Day sex challenge and “Relevant Church”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 20, 2008
in Christianity, Favorite Posts 2008, Marriage and Sexuality
. 31 Comments

Marvin Lindsay sends me a link to the 30-Day Sex Challenge, famously initiated last month at the Relevant Church in Tampa, Florida. The challenge was simple: all married couples in the congregation were asked to have sex with each other each day for thirty days. These days were specific, mind you, running from February 17 to March 16. Presumably, the couples of this congregation are resting up this week for Easter? (Marvin’s take on the whole thing is here.)

First off, the name “Relevant Church”. I can’t think of a name for a Christian gathering I’ve liked less; it’s pandering and patronizing and offensive. It’s one of those terms (”Enlightenment” is another) that immediately creates unnecessary barriers by implying that if you aren’t with us, you’re the opposite of whatever virtuous thing it is that we proclaim to be. It’s one thing to call yourself a Christian Church, as that term doesn’t automatically imply that all others aren’t; to call yourself “Relevant” reveals the disdain you hold for the poor folk down the street at “First Baptist” or “St. Timothy’s”. I think I’m going to start a congregation called “Good Looking Hipster-People Church”, and see how that goes over.

Anyhow, on to the sex. Continue reading ‘The enemy of desire is duty: against the 30-Day sex challenge and “Relevant Church”’

Running alone on Palm Sunday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2008
in Christianity and Faith
. 14 Comments

It’s Holy Week, and we’re heading towards the earliest Easter (in the Roman Calendar) since 1913. Yesterday was Palm Sunday, and for the first time in a decade, I wasn’t in church to mark the memorial of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.

Lately, I’ve taken to telling people I’m “between churches.” It sounds like “between jobs” or “between relationships”, and honestly, sometimes, that’s how I feel. In the decade since I came back to Christ, I’ve been in senior leadership in two churches, and twice ended up resigning that leadership as a result of butting heads with staff. When I left All Saints Pasadena last summer, I pledged I wouldn’t seek out any leadership post in my new church (whichever one that was to be.) And I went to a few churches (especially the Warehouse community), where against all of my ENFP instincts, I sat quietly in the back.

What happened was predictable: when I sit quietly in the back anywhere, I end up losing interest. My mind wanders. The only way I can honor a commitment to show up is if I’m placed in a position of trust. If I know other people expect me and are relying on me, I’m there. If it’s just little ol’ me sitting in a chair in the midst of a large group, I instantly find excuses not to go. My faith is too fragile and too individual to get me to church as a “worshipper among worshippers”; being a leader is usually the only thing that will guarantee my appearance. Continue reading ‘Running alone on Palm Sunday’