Reading the Quran: People of the Spirit

That the Quran doesn't present a critique of the actual Christian Trinity is not surprising.   The odds of the Prophet Muhammad actually encountering the orthodox Trinity in the popular Christianity around him were slender.

How slender?  I put it at roughly the same odds as encountering a discourse on the social location of the Cappadocian Fathers in Joel Osteen's sermon this Sunday.  So like all good prophetic literature, the Quran is a critique of what it encounters.

But that the Quran explicitly challenges Mary as the de facto third person of the Trinity means that the third person of the Trinity isn't really part of that particular conversation in Quran.   What is that?  Within Christianity, the third person is understood as the Holy Spirit.

What is that?  Well, honestly, many Christians would struggle to tell you.  Oh, sure, maybe they'd quote you snippets of that Yoda speech about the Force.  But Christian popular theology doesn't really deal effectively with the Spirit.

This is unfortunate, because the Holy Spirit is absolutely vital to Christian faith.   The Holy Spirit features prominently in two of the four Gospel accounts.  Its arrival in the Luke/Acts cycle provides the cohesion between the story of Christ and the story of the church.  It is a central theme in the Gospel of John.   It is also a vital and central theme in the seven authentic Pauline letters.

In both its essence and its effect, the Holy Spirit is God's generous, creative, transforming love.  That love is the essence of what binds us together as an authentic community of the Way.  It is what allows us to truly encounter the Holy in the reading of our sacred texts.  It is present with us as a source of strength, and a source of comfort.  It provides us with the single governing purpose of our existence, because it is...as understood within the dynamics of the Trinity...both present with us and fully and completely God.   Without the Spirit, you just can't follow the Way that Jesus taught.  You also can't be in covenant relationship with God, because what is the first of the Ten Commandments but the command to let nothing come between us and our Creator?

Although the Quran describes Christians as People of the Book, we aren't, not really.  We are, first and foremost, People of the Spirit.

While not directly addressing the role of the Spirit in the Christian understanding of God, the Quran does talk about the Spirit.   Where it's discussed, it is described as Ruh, which I will take to be etymologically related to the Hebrew term Ruach.   In the Hebrew, that word means "breath" and "spirit" and "wind. "  In the Greek of the Gospels and Epistles, the term is pneuma, which bears almost identical polyvalent meaning.  It forms and shapes the structures of created time and space.  It provides the animating ground of all life.  The essential lifegiving and shaping power of God, it is.

Dang, now I'm sounding like Yoda.

In the Quran, ruh surfaces with less frequency that in the texts of Torah and the Gospels/Epistles, but it is there.    How is it presented?  It is the source of the Quran, and the foundation of Quranic authority.  As such, it can be neither human nor djinn.  If it is to be authoritative, it must be inseparable from the authority of God.  (An-Nahl 2)   It is what permits the Prophet Muhammad to receive Quran (Ash-Shu'ara 192-194) as an unmediated revelation directly from God.

As noted in prior posts, the ruh also appears in the context of Jesus, in both his life and his conception.  In his conception, the Quran preserves the chastity of Mary by having her conceive through the Spirit, which continues to be fascinatingly orthodox to this liberal Christian.   In his life, it is the Ruh-ul-Qudus that gives Jesus the ability to teach with authority.

The role of the ruh in the life of Muslims isn't deeply explored in the Quran.  The Quran seems to waffle a bit on whether or not the ruh can even be described, (Al Isra 85) a verse that seems to place connection with the Spirit of God outside of the boundaries of day to day obedience to God's commands.  Don't ask, it's beyond you, says the Quran.  In that, this sura appears to present a view of the ruh that bears little resemblance to the accounts in the Johannine literature, Paul, and the Lukan story of the early church, none of which seem to struggle at all with describing the role, place, and nature of the Spirit.  If that was the only answer of Islam to the place of the Spirit, my view of the faith would be significantly diminished.

But elsewhere, Quran articulates a concept of Spirit that is remarkably similar in both concept and language to that of the Gospels and the Prophets.  In Al Mujadila 22,  we hear of a faith not externally obeyed out of fear of coercion, but "written on the hearts" of believers.  That faith is supported by the strengthening presence of the ruh.  Such a faith creates what Quran describes as the Party of Allah.  This, quite frankly, much more like it.  I'm down with that.

Theologizing aside, why does this matter?  Within my own faith, it matters because whenever over the two millennia of Christian history Christians have subordinated the Spirit to ecclesiastical or textual authority, bad things have happened.  When we've given final authority to church doctrines and power and hierarchies, Christianity has looked very little like what Jesus taught.  When we've given final authority to our texts, we've been torn by disputes and debates and hatreds.

Subordinating or dismissing the Spirit has and will always turn human beings away from the love that is God's nature, and towards the hatred and violence that is antithetical to our created purpose.

And from that, it is to violence and war in the Quran that I will turn next.

Total Depwavity

So the question got pitched to me from a brother on FaceBook this week:  what did I think about the concept of total depravity?

For those of you not immersed in the language of 19th century Calvinism, total depravity is the idea that human beings are of themselves utterly irredeemable, so epically craptacular as to be completely incapable of being in right relationship with God and one another.

To repair that breach, there's just not a single thing that human beings can do.  Good works don't matter.  Trying to do right doesn't matter.  We're just out of luck.  In order to make things right, we have to just rely completely on Jesus.  We are depraved on account of we're deprived...of Jesus.  

This concept, derived from Paul and Augustine but mostly from John Calvin, gets quickly taken out to the conclusion that there's just nothing good about people at all.  We're just uniformly nasty, wretched, miserable hell-briquettes.  This truth extends particularly that chatty and affable Muslim guy you laugh with at the office.   Oh, and Gandhi.  Calvinist God hates him some Gandhi.

Here, though, Calvinism once again goes well beyond Calvin himself, and misses two key points of that admittedly challenging doctrine.

So let's play around in Calvin's brain for a while.  In his Institutio Christianae Religionis (XI.II.iii), Calvin does lay out where he stands on the subject.

First, Calvin clearly and repeatedly notes throughout the Institutes that nature, creation, and humanity itself are good things.  Creation is the first book, evidence of the glory and goodness of the Creator.  As part of creation, homo sapiens sapiens was made to be good.  Our reason is a blessing.  (VI. xiv.20)  Our purpose as human beings is not nastiness, and in our created nature, there is strong good.  Calvin hated neither humankind nor creation.  In fact, Calvin also kinda sorta loved the writing and thinking of folks who weren't Jesus folk at all, particularly Plato.   He was perfectly capable of seeing value in the works of reason, and of seeing goodness in the world.  As he puts it:

In every age there have been persons who, guided by nature, have striven towards virtue throughout life.  I have nothing to say against them even if many lapses can be noted in their moral conduct.  For they have by the very zeal of their honesty given proof that there was some purity in their nature...These examples, accordingly, seem to warn us against adjudging man's nature wholly corrupted, because some men have by it's prompting not only excelled in remarkable deeds, but conducted themselves most honorably throughout life.  (XI.II.ii.3)

Second, Calvin did argue that sin was a basic characteristic of humankind, but he wasn't doing this as an abstract theological exercise.  He did so for a particular reason.  According to Calvin, we just can't not sin.  (XI.II.iii.5)   Even the best among us are far from perfect.  That isn't, however, something that we're supposed to lord over other people.  The purpose of teaching depravity is not, not, not to condemn others.  This isn't something you sneer out at someone whose life is in ruins.

It's for those of us who might have allowed ourselves to be convinced that we're somehow better than the rest of the world.  It's a big theological smack in the chops for the pious, the reverent, the upstanding, and the church-going.  Calvin puts this out there for the same reason the Apostle Paul did, as a challenge to pride and self-righteousness among the faithful.

Personally, I still resonate to this for a variety of reasons, making me perhaps one of only two or three progressive Christians who don't just reflexively reject the concept.

I'm deeply aware of how intensely we are, as sentient beings, separate from one another.  The existential boundaries between us are an insurmountable wall, topped with electrified razor wire.  Like you and I, right now.  I can string together these symbols, which you can observe on your screen and understand as shared concepts.  If you're nearby, near enough to be physically present, I can talk to you.  I can see you.  I can hear you.  I can smell you, your stress or your ease.  That last one gets more intense in the summer months.  Hoo boy, does it ever.

But knowing you?  As you know yourself?  I can't do that.

At best, I get an approximation, an image, cast in my mind, knit together from observation and my own intuitive gut-sense.  For this reason, when Paul and Calvin tell us we can't uphold the Law, I don't think of Law as Torah.  I think of law as the Great Commandment.  How can I love you as I love myself?  How can that be, when my knowledge of you is so imperfect and filtered through my own assumptions?

So I fail before the Law, even when law is understood first, foremost, and only as love and grace.

But it goes beyond relationship, and into my own self.  I'm not what I could be.  I am deeply aware of my own limitations as a being, and also of my failings when it comes to living out of the value set that I profess to define my own existence.  Love of God and neighbor does not define my every action and thought.  Particularly thought.  There, deep writ in the neural firings of my cortex and the stirrings of my lizard brain, there are angers and lusts and anxieties that snarl and hoot and cower in most unholy ways.

From that self-awareness, I'm aware that my actuality and my potentiality are very different things.  The self that I could be, were I to be both internally and externally conformed to the radical compassion of Christ, exists only intermittently.  It is the state of being towards which I strive, but when in fleeting moments I do find it, I am deeply aware that finding it is an act of grace, a moment of mystic union, for which I cannot truly claim responsibility.  Those moments are a work of the Spirit.

So.  That's what I think about it.  That help, Kyle?

Beloved Spear Bible Puzzler: The Chosen

My discarded sermon concept for this week came in my reflections on Luke's story of the teaching of the Lord's Prayer. In keeping my message nice and simple and straightforward with a memorable takeaway, I neglected to pitch out this little Calvinist puzzler:

In Luke 11:1-13, Jesus presents his approach to prayer. That involves an attenuated Lord's Prayer, followed by a statement on the value of persistence, followed by the assertion that the thing we are to seek in prayer isn't bling or success, but the Holy Spirit. It's clear that what matters is the intent underlying prayer, a desire for connection and meaning that stirs an individual to seek after and pursue relationship with God.

As I reflected on that desire for the Holy Spirit during my sermon prep, I found myself wondering about the theological tautology that seems implied in this section. Desire for God is, I would hold, a gift of the Spirit. But if only those who are stirred by the Spirit seek the Spirit, and it is the seeking of the Spirit that is necessary for humankind to be in right relationship with God and one another, that seems to create a closed circle of engagement with the Creator. Almost, it seems, to the point of necessitating the use of terms like the "elect."

My Bible study on Sunday wrassled with this one for a bit, and folks came up with several interesting responses and reactions. I managed to avoid the use of the term prevenient, despite having spent seven years at a Methodist seminary.

What thinkest thou?

Emergence, The Spirit, and the Trap of the Klatch

There's been much to do lately in my denomination about the intersection between the "emergent church" and the Presbyterian Church. To hear it from some, it's the great hope of the church. The synthesis between this postmodern and socially-networked movement and the mainline church will, finally, bring in the young people.

Meaning, people under the age of 40. Sigh. I'm not even young by Presbyterian standards anymore.

There are articles about it in Presby magazines, and on the Presby website. Folks are eager to embrace this new movement. Of course, given the rapidity with which Presbyterians do things, this new excitement more or less coincides with the death of the emergent movement.

Truth be told, we're not a particularly lively critter lately. There's some puttering around on the presbymergent Facebook page, and a few meetings of good hearted fellow travelers. But the contagious energy and passion that drives and grows a movement? I wish I saw it, but I don't.

Where I still struggle with emergence, in either it's generic or presby manifestations, is in two particular areas.

First, that I just can't seem to find anyone else who's willing to write or say: emergence is a manifestation of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Yeah, I know, progressives and mainliners get all stammery and awkward when that topic comes up. We'd rather talk about interpretive frameworks and the dynamics of community and a relational church. Those things are nice and comfy and process-oriented. But somewhere, someone needs to be saying: "I've had a dream. I'm feeling a calling. I feel God moving in this." They don't need to be getting all glassy-eyed and Benny Hinn about it. We're just not that thing, thank the Maker.

But if this isn't about God working something new to transform and further our understanding of the Way Jesus lived and taught, then it's...well...not really worth paying attention to. It's just another incursion of cultural expectations into the life of the church. Yeah, it comes out of liberal academe. But if that's all it is, it's of no more spiritual value than the cultural phenomenon of the megachurch, and with considerably less influence. Maybe I haven't read enough. Maybe the forty presbymergentish bloggers whose feeds feed me just haven't gotten around to saying it or pointing me towards someone else who does. I'll keep listening.

Second, and related to the first, if the idea of relationality and the transforming power of Spirit-lead dialogue is to have any impact on the church, then it needs to be expressed in a very different way. Best I can tell, emergent conversations tend to be conversations among the like-minded. Little circles of young and youngish progressives gather to suck down Starbucks and light candles and read Rumi and do drum circles and talk amongst themselves about how crappy and abusive the rest of the church is. Sometimes, those same progs go and klatch with older progs in crumbling mostly-empty buildings. Candles are once again lit. It's all very cozy and safe. It's a fallout shelter for progressive Christians in a megachurch-nuked America.

But transformation only occurs when you graciously engage with the Other. That means making a point of getting out of our comfortable klatches and pushing outward into ones that aren't quite as easy. Can we share the value of Spirit-driven relationality with that fundamentalist blogger? Or that atheist with a chip on his shoulder? Do we reach out to that young Korean who's burned out on the relentless demands of the church she grew up in? Or that soldier who has returned from war with a shattered faith? Or that mom who goes to a Big Parking Lot church because it's kids program is a well-oiled machine that fits well with little Tyler's soccer schedule? Or the blue-haired matriarch of that little country church with 22 members?

Entering into dialog with folks who are Not Us in this era of social media is not logistically hard. Just spiritually challenging. Those conversations require us to speak our truths and have them tested. They require us to listen to others, and to speak the grace that we know in ways that might speak to them. Our faith does not ask us to limit our conversations to those who are us. Or to only value and show grace to those who are like us.

In fact, we're required to do exactly the opposite.

Fighting That Nasty Little Inner Pharisee

Following the successful launch of a great new service program by a member of the church, I trundled off to our local clothing closet this Saturday to grudgingly put in my monthly court-mandated community service hours. Though the lawyers for the Apple store did push for hard time. Hey, it's not my fault I thought that "open source" meant "feel free to take what you want."

Well, actually, no. I really enjoy charitable work and volunteering. It is work that clearly serves a purpose, that directly benefits those who are struggling and in need. In this case, putting clothes on their bodies. It is work utterly free of mammon's coercion, done for no other purpose than the love of it and of others. It is work that fulfills a really rather specific faith mandate to provide material care, and to be a part of the Gospel process of liberation from suffering. I'm not quite a Salvationist, like the folks over at the Salvation Army whose theology mandates volitional care for others. But I'm close. Church needs to proclaim the Gospel and transform people's lives through that gracious message. I'm down with that. But also and at the same time, it must express itself in practical care for others, in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and visiting the prisoner. If it doesn't do both, it isn't really church. If it does, it is rich and Spirit-filled.

My struggle yesterday was that I didn't bring that gracious Spirit with me when I went. For the first four years of my ministry, my congregation was so wrapped up in Korean psychodrama that it just couldn't seem to muster any service work at all. My outlaw fraternity did more community outreach than my congregation, which ain't sayin' much. Outside of giving cash from the endowment, we did jack-diddly-nothing. Finally, this last year, I started pressing for us to regularly run a food drive, which we've sort of done. I also started encouraging the church to volunteer at the local faith-based clothing closet.

There was some initial involvement. But for the past four months, a grand total of two folks have joined me in doing it. Once it was a kid doing it because he had to. The other time it was my Jewish son, who likes volunteering, and is eager to join me whenever he can.

I'm aware I'm not reaching out enough. Talking about it with lay congregational leaders, talking about it during bible studies, preaching sermons on the necessity of service, announcing it during services, highlighting it in email newsletters, and pitching it through Facebook event invites and notifications...these aren't enough. Only going from person to person, and asking each individual directly if they're going to volunteer every single time we're going to do it seems to work. After a wise soul told me early on that this was the only way people were going to come, I followed his advice. I did that for a while. I did that for a few months.

But there are limits to how far I'm willing to take pastoral suasion. If after over a year people have experienced it, and still aren't coming without arm-twisting, then the voluntary element of volunteering isn't real. If you don't serve with a free will, then it cannot possibly be what it needs to be. Yeah, I could keep noodging and hassling and guilting people into it. But I've never been interested in people faking it out of sense of obligation.

This leaves me with two troubling conundrums.

The first is having to admit to myself that I am the only person in the congregation who cares about this particular service opportunity. It's a bit vexing, because I really like it, I really enjoy it, and it's just a transparently good thing to do. It connects us with our community. It clothes the naked, which would seem like something we'd realize matters to Jesus. But I am self-evidently the only one who cares. Ah well. Egos are such irritating things, and try as I might, I can't always shut mine off. The church is, after all, finally doing other service work on site, through the calling of someone who has joined us in the last few months. So even if my efforts have proved fruitless, the Spirit is at work elsewhere in the church. I take some solace in that.

The second is not to allow my irritation to impede my own efforts. I personally need service ministry to be fed spiritually, but there is no point in doing it while ensconced in a dark cloud of pissiness or judgmentalism or smugness. And though I hate to admit it, it was getting to me this weekend. On the way to the clothing center, certain in the knowledge that it was, once again, just going to be me, I could feel that narsty little inner Pharisee embittering me. Judging others. Telling me that I, in my noble me-ness, should be Proud that I'm The Only One Who Gets It. But there is no Christ in such thinking. There are plenty of folks who live out their faith that way, governed by the demons of self and self-interest. It's a dark cloud of smug delusion.

So I resisted that pesky little demon. I challenged and centered myself. I reminded myself of the point of it all. I focused on the sorting and hanging of clothes the way you'd focus on a repeated prayer, losing myself completely in it. And the anger and bitterness and selfishness faded. And the clothes were sorted and set out for those in need.

It really is most effective.

The Grey Ghetto

I spent some more time today visiting with an older member of our church who's living by himself at a nearby assisted living facility. Dick has no family and can't hear, and doesn't wear hearing aids, so you've got to write things out to communicate with him. It was lower tech this time, as I had the foresight to step away from using my iPhone and just dragged along a legal pad and a big ol' Sharpie. Yeah, I was kickin' it old school, but what matters to me is what works.

When I got there, he was out of his room, so I searched around the facility and finally met up with him eating lunch. He was at a table with four other folks, but they were all...well...lost in their own worlds. They were silent, folded in on themselves.

Dick didn't even look up at first when I tapped him on the shoulder and sat down next to him. He gradually brightened as I wrote him note after note in big bold letters, writing him questions and responding to his statements. But it took a little while. He's just so used to being alone and unable to communicate that it takes a few moments for his mind to warm up to the presence of another.

It was good to fellowship with him, and I'm committed to spending more time with him in the coming months. The visit resonated interestingly off of a blog post I read yesterday about intergenerational congregations. Too many of our churches are either young or old. We've got the hipstermergents and the old grey mainliners neatly separated into different congregations. Even in the heady corporate world of the JesusMegaCenters, their immense flocks are carefully divvied up into target marketing demographics. Kids with kids. Teens with teens. Young Adults with Young Adults. The church is a very neatly and intentionally divided house.

What that means is that the church is mirroring our culture. The boundary-shattering presence of the Holy Spirit is ignored. We fail to be the place for the young to learn just how poorly our culture treats it's eldest. Our old old are warehoused, conveniently sealed away from a society that is obsessed with youth and the young. When I go by to visit, I almost never see anyone younger than me there. And I ain't young.

This is a failure on two fronts. It's the loss of the young that they haven't been taught to see value in aging, in a life fully lived and in some of the deep wisdom that that creates. We obsess over ourselves and our own lives, and in doing so, we miss out on a significant opportunity for personal growth. A society that discourages mingling of the generations is a society that condemns itself to making the same mistakes over and over again.

More significantly, the ghetto walls around the old hide away something that we all need to see. We need to see how the elderly are treated. We need to see the impacts of isolation from the broader society, and the impacts of predatory profiteering on a population that can't often assess the quality of the care they receive.

The young need to see it, because unless things change, that life we so carefully avoid because it bores us/freaks us out will be our life one day. Is this how we want to live? Is this how we treat people who we care about? If our relationships with our elders were stronger, we'd feel this. If our commitments to our elders...be they family or friends...were stronger, we'd look at how our culture treats the aging with mortal horror.

It makes both Soylent Green and Logan's Run look almost utopian.