Zimzum

In the morning, in a light-filled upstairs room of our old church building, I sat down with some of the kids of my church and began our confirmation class.  Our chatter was about confirmation itself, but I'd wanted to hear from them about how some of the pre-classes had gone.  Specifically, I was curious what they'd thought of the Nooma vids they'd watched.  These videos were old Rob Bell schtuff, nicely produced, thoughtful, and inviting, although pressing close on occasion to the edge of Velveeta.

They'd liked them, and had clearly retained information from them.  I shared, because it strikes me as odd, that the same Rob Bell who created those very helpful vids is now on tour with Oprah, part of her The Life You Want To Be Best Right Now This Weekend tour.

The class, as one, rolled their eyes in teen disdain.  "Oprah?"  Clearly, Ms. O is not regarded as the font of authenticity by the young.  They're not her target demographic, of course.  Few fourteen year olds can pony up $200-$500 bucks for a big stadium event, after all.

I pitched out another trial balloon, I mentioned the title of his forthcoming book.  My church has given out Bell's books to graduates in past.  They're solid, simple, accessible, and gracious.  This new one is a relationship book, co-authored with his wife:  The Zimzum of Love.

There was giggling.

I moved on, but filed that giggle away.  Reminder to self: if in the radiant yarp of this wild multiverse I ever find myself asked to tag along with Oprah on a tour, politely demur, lest the teens of thy congregation giggle at thee.

It got me thinking, though, about the word "Zimzum."  I'd not bothered looking into that term when I'd first encountered it on the cover of the Bell's book, assuming--erroneously--that it was some cutesy nonsense relationship word.  "The Dibbledop of Parenting."  "The OochGah of Growing Old."  Something like that.

But then I encountered it again providentially, in a science article about the dynamics of Many Worlds theory, of all places.  There, it was not presented as "Zimzum."   It was Tzimtzum, a term from Lurianic Kabbalistic theology that attempts to articulate how God makes space in being for that which is not God's own self.

So I looked into it further, as one should when serendipity serves up her peculiar harmonies.

As theology, tzimtzum is fascinating, and within authentic Kabbalistic practice and rabbinic conversation, it's a pretty sophisticated and heavily debated idea.  How can God be both present and not-present?  What are the self-imposed boundaries of that which is infinite and aware?  It's meaty, heady, non-trivial stuff, the kind of theology that bleeds over into scientific cosmology in ways I find pretty nifty.

And it's being repurposed, by a Christian, as a means of meting out relationship advice.  "Make space for your partner," it'll go, I'm sure.

I wonder at this.  I mean, it's not bad advice, generally.  It may well be a helpful book for some folks.

But the tzimtzum is an immensely complex, nuanced, challenging way of trying to understand the work of the Creator.  Will that complexity be honored?  Will the centuries of conversation about that idea be referenced?  We'll see.  I have not, after all, read the book, which isn't out yet.

I wonder further, though, at the co-opting of such theology by both Christians and pop-theology.  That wondering comes from my peculiar place as both a teacher of the Way of Jesus and the husband/father of a Jewish wife/sons.

The rabbi of my family's synagogue is a teacher of Kabbalistic understandings of Judaism, which come out in his storytelling.  He knows the language, and the stories, and the debates, the deep richness of that remarkably intricate and ancient way of understanding.  There is a dizzying, whirling, interwoven elegance to authentic Kabbalah.  It's a wild dance of ideas before the throne of God, as you lose yourself in concepts that swirl together like Sufis in qawwali ecstasy.  There is a depth to it that I honor.  But I also recognize that while it is a valid path, it is not the path I know well enough to teach.

If you don't have the depth and history and the complexity, it becomes something else.  It can become Madonnabalah or Oprahbalah, a shallow smorgasbord me-magick that is as removed from Kabbalistic practice as that fat golden prosperity Buddha at your takeout Chinese place is removed from the Noble Eightfold Path.

That's the challenge, whenever we take things from traditions that are not our our own.

The Limits of Co-Creation

I read through the article with interest, as I do with all articles about religious events.

It was a description of a journalist's attendance at a huge Oprah conference, part of a traveling inspirathon called the "The Life You Want Weekend."  It was a huge shiny neo-spiritual gathering, as tens of thousands of eager devotees poured into a stadium to hear Ms. O and her retinue dispense vital life-learning lessons.

The cost: between $200 and $500 a pop, in exchange for which the attendees got workbooks and weird glowing bracelets, not to mention exposure to levels of ambient atmospheric estrogen so high they temporarily eliminate the need for oral contraception.

I harbor no animus towards Oprah.  She's intelligent, driven, and capable, and the amazing success she's experienced over the years seems well-earned.  Her profoundly American message of positivity and self-empowerment may be big, self-promoting, and high-gloss-shiny, but it isn't evil, and she comes across as a sharper progressive fusion of Zig Ziglar and Joel Osteen.  She's willing to engage with spirituality, in a way that is both affirming and open.

Sure, it's tempting to snark and roll eyes, but the people she engages sometimes come frighteningly close to describing my own view of existence.  Yeah, Deepak is up there doing his Chopra thing, but the connection goes deepah.

I mean, sweet Mary and Joseph, Rob Bell?  Rob Bell's tagging along for the Oprah dog-and-pony show?  I like Rob Bell!  His approach to faith is so close to mine as to being almost indistinguishable.  I've recommended Rob Bell's books to people!  I still do.

Does that mean...am I...somehow...in Oprah-orbit?   How did that happen?

As I read through the article describing the high-gloss perfection of the event, something stuck with me.  It was a phrase, one of the inspirational statements uttered during the event.

"You co-create your life with the energy of your intention."

The language of co-creation is stock-in-trade for many progressive spiritual folk.  It speaks to our freedom, our ability to influence the direction of our lives, our fundamental empowerment as sentient beings to shape the world around us.

It meshes with my own view of the nature of both being and the Creator, and I'll confess to having used variants of that concept myself on occasion.  It's a good truth, a truth that reflects humanity at our best.

But I also know that while it is a truth, it is a contingent truth.  Meaning, it can be true, but it is not necessarily true.  If you're able to drop a couple of hundred bucks on an Oprahfest, then, yes, it probably reflects your encounter with reality.  It is also true for me.

If you are like a significant majority of humankind, though, it does not describe your reality.  The capacity to co-create is tied in to the blessings of liberty, and most of us are not free to act as we would choose.  If you are driven by hunger, struggling to simply survive, all of the "energy of your intention" is turned towards that end.

The Life You Want is to live, and not die of hunger or thirst this weekend.

If you are living under an oppressive regime, be it Putin's neoTzarist Russia, the bizarre Communo-capitalist fusion of the Chinese Central Committee, or the raw brutality of ISIS, you are not free to co-create.  You obey, and you keep your head down, or the energy of your intention will be met with the far greater energy of those whose intention is driven by their hunger for power over you.

And if, like so many Americans, you are scrambling to pay the bills, working three crap jobs with no security, with a barely working twelve year old car and a fridge that just died, your ability to be creative with your life is next to zero.

Hope is important, yes.  Being positive and seeing the potential in your life is important.  But for so many, the probability of living a life in which real freedom exists is so low as to be meaningless.

It is easy, in the shiny and carefully crafted narrative of co-creative self-empowerment, to forget this.

Ringing My Bell

At long last, I've read something by Rob Bell.  Meaning, not just a blog post or an interview or a Facebook status update.   An actual book.  Not his new one, not yet.  I will be, but I had some unfinished business.  I needed to read his last one, the one I made sure the graduating seniors from my wee kirk received before they went off to college.  I'd recommended that one on spec, and I figured it was about time that I actually knew what I was talking about.

Yesterday, I cracked open Love Wins at around one in the afternoon.  By three, I was done reading.

Not because I needed a break.  I was done.  Two hundred pages.  Two hours.  And that includes breaks to fold the laundry and do a huge pile of dishes.  It's always a huge pile of dishes in the Williams household.  They seem to breed like Tribbles.

Having recently read through a book by million-selling popular Christian author Stormie Omartian, I'd been struck by how simple and straightforward her prose was.

She has nothing on Bell.

Sure, he uses some more complicated vocabulary on occasion.  But the book itself was spare to the point of being spartan.   It felt, sometimes, like the kind of paper a professor might receive from their brightest student if all you'd given the class was a requirement for total pages.  The slightly large font coupled with lines that would occasionally be occupied by two word sentence fragments made for breezy reading.  It had less page density than, oh, gosh, something like "The Mouse and the Motorcycle."

This could have been a 98 page book, honestly.

But that didn't matter.  The white space was used judiciously and to good effect.

I can see, without question, why Bell succeeds.  He is, in my opinion, one of the best interlocutors for a more gracious Christianity out there today.  He seriously rings my bell, although not..um...in quite the way Anita Ward meant.    Why?   Well, several reasons.

1) He keeps it simple.  It's easy to go all complex when dealing with theology, or with the nuances of faith.  Bell knows, either by instinct or experience, that doing this means you render yourself less and less able to speak to a broad audience.  That's one of the great stumbling blocks of the old-line, and one of the reasons our voice is fading in our culture.  We have, I am convinced, an awesome and authentically important Gospel message.  But we've been steeped in academe too long to be able to get that across.  Bell doesn't make that mistake.  He doesn't make it simplistic, and he doesn't dumb it down.  But he knows that if you think something is important, the point of writing about it is to share that.   And that gets to reason number two:

2)  He's a damn good rhetorician.  I say that not by way of insult.  Rhetoric is nothing more than the classical art of persuasive speech, and Bell is skilled at it.  Ancient rhetoric taught you to use emotion, reason, and shared cultural references to sway an audience.  Bell does all of these things.  He tells stories, real stories of his life as a person, to establish common ground.  He shows a deep grasp of scripture,  from a historical-critical and textual standpoint, and also just respecting it as sacred story.

But his writing connects on a human level, too.  Take, for example, this video for his latest book.  It connects, deeply, with pretty much every American who ever owned and loved a beat-up old car.  That's a lot of us.  His writing does that.  It's effective at conveying what he wants to convey.  It doesn't resort to in-group language, not ever, not never.   He speaks in ways that the world can understand.

That matters.

3)  He keeps his eyes on the prize.   Bell talks about what matters, and then he tells you about Jesus.  He is, without question, evangelical.  What is simply stunning is that he's telling the world about the Jesus I've known and encountered, in a way that feels both right and authentically faithful.   God matters.  Jesus matters.  Our faith matters.

He doesn't, for instance, talk about "church."  Or "being church."  The focus is not institutional, or structural.  It's big picture stuff, the stuff that's fun to talk about, the stuff that people who aren't already embedded in a faith community actually do think about.

I didn't agree with him on everything.  But danged if he doesn't get what's important.

That's what matters, eh?

Why Love Wins

My reading list is insane.

Here, I'm not complaining about how many books are in the holding pattern.  I'm saying, "It's insane," as in, DSM-certifiable.   Having just dispatched statistician Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I'm now most of the way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.  Pascal is flawed but undeniably delicious, a delightful mind whose prose shimmers with a salon-sharpened wit.

The next book in the rotation?  A pastel-covered book by popular bestselling Christian author Stormie Omartian.  It's titled The Power of a Praying Cat, or something like that.   And yes, that's her real name, although I'm invariably tempted to write that surname O'Martian.

And then?  Then on to Rob Bell's Love Wins.  See?  Totally crazy.  Wild!  Wanton!  Utter chaos!

That last one I've been meaning to read for a while, particularly as my little church handed Bell's book out to our graduating seniors as they went off to college.  It seemed useful, a gracious and rational counterbalance to the callow dorm-room anti-theism they're likely to encounter.  But I hadn't read it.  Mostly, I've read reviews, some fluffy support, some raging bile, others more measured and balanced.

What intrigues me from my pre-reading, though, is that while Bell makes the theological case for the victory of God's love over all things, he doesn't appear to make the leap into the created order.

Of course we want love to win.  It's love, dammit.  But does it?  If we look out at the world, it often doesn't appear to be the case.  Love is for the weak and the bleeding hearts.   Love gets its [butt] kicked after school.  Love is cut down by AR15 fire as it puts itself between the children and the shooter.  And the kids still die.

Look out at the world.  It's red in tooth and claw, savagely Darwinian and seemingly loveless.  Partisanship wins.  Snark wins.  Hate wins.   But love?  Is there a rational case for the victory of the compassion that is at the heart of what Jesus taught?

Here, my wildly profligate reading has stirred a thought, one I'm chewing over in my mind.   Love wins because love is stronger.   Love is much, much stronger.  Why?

Because love can adapt, and hate cannot.   Love can change, and hate cannot.

A sentient being governed by love as a defining principle will approach another being as having something to offer.  It will encounter a new reality as a new opportunity.   If you love another, you can see from their perspective, moving beyond the confines of your subjectivity into a place in between.  We don't do that perfectly.  The existential walls between us are high.   But we can, nonetheless, get there.  With a little help, sure, but we can get there.

The individual governed by love does not exist wholly within themselves.   They may not embrace everything they encounter, but they're open to new things in every encounter.  That means that when the [poop] hits the fan, they're smart enough to duck, or to at least to close their mouths for a moment.

Love learns.  It grows.  It adapts.  It does not cling to biases.   That means that when the world changes, Love is ready.

Hate?  Hate doesn't do that so well.  Hate only knows one thing: itself.  A being governed by hatred is a being ruled by the self it already knows.  Difference and the Other are to be destroyed or subjugated.  Hate defines itself by rigidly clinging to what it is.  Hate wants power.  Hate wants control.  It seeks to dominate the world, to force the entire universe into the narrative of itself that is the only thing it is willing to hear.

And when it encounters the deep complexity of God's creation, hate rails and snarls and lashes out.  But what hate does not do, because it can't do it, is change.

Eventually, that means that hate is either destroyed by the change to which it cannot adapt or devoured by itself.

Love is what it looks like when sentient beings succeed.  Hate?  Hate is the defining feature of failed individuals, and doomed cultures, and species that have flirted with sentience and then regressed.

Lord help us.

Misunderstanding Universalism

You keep using that word...

One of the challenges of being in an oldline denomination is that gnawing sense that somehow we're no longer relevant.  Our conversations and the inner life of our community often seems isolated from the rest of the Jesus people around us.  For a community that likes to use the totally made up word "connectionalism," we often don't seem to be connected outside of ourselves.

But sometimes we are connected, despite ourselves.  As I listen in on the chatter both within the Presbyterian Church (USA) and without, I seem to be hearing a common theme playing out.  That theme has to do with the meaning and use of the term "Universalism."

 Among conservative Christians both within my church and without, there's a growing hue and cry about the creeping and pernicious influence of universalism.  Within my denomination the alarm is being sounded around our New Form of Government, a long overdue attempt to streamline our cumbersome Constitution.   That effort is what we Presbyterians are doing to fulfill Christ's mandate to go out into the world and make significant modifications to governing documents.  I think that's in Matthew somewhere.   Whichever way, many conservatives are alarmed that the new text might possibly imply openness to finding truth in other faiths.   Universalism!

Similarly, conservative Christians outside of our fellowship are full of burn-the-hipster-witch fury at the publication of Rob Bell's latest book, Love Wins.  They were cranking out the publicist-pleasing controversy before they'd even read it, but now that pre-publication book has been released, they're certain:  Rob Bell is a universalist.  Meaning, he's a heretic who goes past implying that non-Christians might not automatically burn in hell to actually sorta kinda saying it. 

This amazing conjunction of Presbyterian inside-baseball chatter and the rest of the American Christian world is striking not just because we are almost talking about the same things, but because we're all making exactly the same mistake.  If you have any sense of the history of theology, the term universalism does not even come close to meaning what conservative Christianity is now claiming it means.

Universalism is an old concept.  It surfaced early in the life of the church, perhaps most notably in the highly creative thought of Origen, an early Christian theologian from the second and third century who was ultimately declared heretical-ish.  Origen felt that God's love was so irresistable that no being, no matter how evil, could stand against it.  Even the demons, Satan, and Glenn Beck would eventually be reconciled with God.

That concept has resurfaced in Christianity numerous times throughout the two millenia of the faith, and bobbed up most notably in the post-Enlightenment era.   In the intellectual foment and classical liberality of the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea that all peoples would be saved gathered significant steam.  The radical tolerance and acceptance of other faiths that this implies still putters along amiably in Unitarian Universalist fellowships today.

Now, as I've said before, I'm not a universalist.  I just can't reconcile that "I'm OK, You're OK" concept with God's justice.  There are things that defy God's love and grace.  They will not stand in the face of God's all consuming fire.  Our actions are not without ultimate consequence.

But what I also can't reconcile with God's justice is this radically incorrect understanding of fundamentalist Christianity.  Universalism does not mean, as Inigo Montoya might say, what they think it means.

Here, they're not defining universalism as everyone being ultimately OK with God no matter who they are and what they do.  We're not talking about the lion and the lamb sitting down on a mossy, dew-speckled meadow in Thomas Kinkade heaven for an organic vegan picnic with Anne Frank and Hitler.

In the disputes both within and outside my fellowship, universalism is being redefined by fundamentalism as refusing to say "everyone who is not a professing Christian will burn in Hell forever."

It's a "hard biblical truth," they claim.  "We can't step back from proclaiming the Truth, no matter how hard it is to hear," they say, nodding earnestly.  But what is the truth of that truth?

It is a truth that stokes the fires of hell with people whose lives are full of kindness, who are peacemakers, and who manifest the ethic that Jesus lived and taught in their words and deeds.   It's a truth that defies Christ's own proclamation of the nature of the final judgment of all peoples.  It is a "truth" that stands radically opposed to the love of the stranger and the other.  It is a truth that assumes that God is not the font, source, and root of that love. 

That truth is certainly hard.  But it is not hard because it is the Gospel.  It hard because it is the farthest thing from good news.

It's amazing the things folks will say and do when they don't really understand something. 

Hell's Bell

Ah well.  I'd been planning on posting a few more "Your Pastor Is Not..." pieces, but for today, I'm distracted.  Distracted by the gentle flickering flames of Hellfire, as it were.   Outside of the ever-shrinking self-referential bounds of the PC(USA), the chatter in the Christian blogosphere has been spitting out controversy.

And oh, does we Christians love us some controversy.

The theological battle royale that has once again distracted Christians from their primary task of, you know, being Christian has to do with an upcoming book by Rob Bell.  Rob Bell, in the event you do not know of him, is the pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church.  He's evangelical, thoughtful, hopeful, and passionate about the Gospel.  He approaches the Gospel as good news, and pitches it in a way that neither insults the intelligence nor troubles folks who expect Good News to sound, you know, good.

Rob Bell is not...

Mark Driscoll

Here, it's important that we not confuse Rob Bell with Mark Driscoll, who leads the Mars Hill church in Seattle with testosterone-addled neofundamentalist fury, and whose primary Twitter hash tag is #greatbellowingmeatsock.

They are not even remotely the same guy.

What folks are up in arms about, apparently, is that Bell's latest book...or, rather, what they're inferring from the promo teaser and the book jacket...might possibly imply that Hell is not a central and significant part of Christian doctrine.  It's an outrageous and unbiblical heresy!  Without the burning toasty fires of Divine Fury applied to the toastable tushies of infidels, Jesus has no meaning!

It's just like John 3:16 says: God so hated the world that He had to kill His own kid so that He wouldn't have to stick unbelievers on a spit, boil them in the fondue flames of Gehenna, dip them in a vat of nicely melted aged sharp cheddar, and then munch them down.  Repeatedly.  Forever.

That's what both my fundamentalist and my new atheist friends tell me is the essence of the Gospel, and they know about Jesus better than anybody.

Now, there's no way to know what exactly Rob Bell has said, given that the book isn't out yet.   Looking at the pre-publication uproar, I find myself wondering, for a long instant, whether or not it comes primarily out of Bell just having a really, really good publicist.

I've read and listened and watched Bell, and from that foundation, I'm not sure I totally agree with him on everything.  My takes on Hell and Universalism may differ from Bell's in some nontrivial ways.  I'll know better once I've read the book.  But that Bell consistently chooses to focus on the grace and the goodness of the Gospel, and to place the joy of Christ at the heart of his proclamation, well...it's commendable.

Hell-based evangelism is and has always been a contradiction in terms.

I think he's well placed as a pastor in a church called Mars Hill, which draws it's name from an important moment in the Apostle Paul's ministry.  You know, Paul, who realized that to spread the Gospel, you can't jabber away at folks with in-group terms of art.  You have to find ways to express it that meaningfully speak it's promise to people who haven't been hermetically sealed away in the AmeriChrist echo chamber for their whole homebirthed/homeschooled/youthgrouped/biblecolleged lives.

 That is, after all, the essence of being an effective proclaimer of the Good News.