Faith and Brokenness

Twice in the last week, it's surfaced in conversations or readings or multimedia, this peculiar relationship we Jesus people have with human brokenness.  That we're kind of a little messed up as a species is one of the roots-rock assumptions of Christian faith, and one that I honestly resonate with.   We mess things up constantly, as our hungers and angers and anxieties and desire for control lead us to inflict all manner of harm to one another.  We're capable of compassion, but we also live behind existential walls, and become so folded into our own subjectivity that we fail to see others as they actually are.  Ours is a world of shadows and projections, which become the ground for both our own self-wounding and the injustice we inflict on one another.

The heart of who Jesus was...his work in the world...is God's restorative and redemptive intent for all of us.  Christianity operates under the assumption that there's something not quite right, something in need of transformation and growth and healing.

Which is why I struggled mightily with two different perspectives offered up this week, from two progressive folks I generally appreciate.

The first, from my good-hearted progressive friend Mark, who wrote an earnest little piece on his Patheos blog that defied the idea that we are broken at all.  It was bright and cheerful and affirming. "Christianity has it wrong," it boldly announced. There's nothing wrong with you just as you are, he asserted, channeling our dear departed Mr. Rogers more than just a little bit.  You are just fragile and distractable.    It was intended to be provocative, to be challenging, and it was.

On the one hand, I see the point in not beating people down with endless talk of their sinny sinfulness. That's too often a tool for controlling others, for shutting them up and cowing them into submission.  There must be hope and grace and promise in the Gospel, or it is not the Gospel.

On the other, well, it's just not real.  "There's nothing wrong with any of us" doesn't resonate with anyone who's ever struggled with addiction in themselves or loved ones, or with anyone recovering from abuse.  "We're all just fragile and distractable" doesn't get at the deep injustices we inflict on one another.  And if there's nothing broken in us, why would we need to change anything, either personally or socially?  The concept feels...well...not very progressive.

Then there was the second, from emergenty-prog-faither Peter Rollins.  I've never read or listened to his stuff, but having encountered an absolutely lovely Jack Chick satire-tract he produced, I immersed myself in his thoughts for a while.

Here, I was again torn.  I like Rollins aesthetics, and his Oirish accent stirs my ancestral heart.  His is a deeply enjoyable mind.  Sure, much of what he has to say feels intentionally paradoxical, the kind of Zen koan teachings that create within themselves irreconcilable tensions.  To be orthodox, be a heretic.  To know something, don't know what you know.  To be centered, destroy your center.  To lead, refuse to lead.  That kind of thing seems to be his schtick, and it's a great way to stir thought, even if it does remind me a wee bit of the Sphinx from Mystery Men.  More than a wee bit, actually.

But when he says, "embrace your brokenness," I honestly can't get there.  Because brokenness sucks.  It hurts.  It wounds, and passes on wounds.  It is not an abstraction, or a theological construct.  It's human souls in pain.

Sure, we can take up our crosses, and simple pain-avoidance can't be the Christian path.  Suffering often comes, socially and spiritually, when we challenge that which must be challenged.  But just as I don't think we should tolerate social injustice, I also don't believe that a disintegrated, shattered existence is something we should just shrug and accept.  It is what it is?  That's not an organic path to healing and deeper, more gracious living.

Which, I am convinced, is kind of the point of both faith and Jesus.

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?

Bad Data

This weekend, two new movies will arrive in our nation's Cine-MegaPlexes. One is part of a familiar franchise, one that's moved countless buckets of popcorn and cheez-drowned Nachitos over the past decade. The other is one-a dem furrin' films. You know. Moody. Existential. Independent, with a director who views it as deeply conceptual and who has a particular vision as an auteur.

The cinematic extravaganzas in question are Saw VI and Antichrist, and while they may seem to appeal to different audiences, they are cut from the same cloth and of the same genre. In an excellent essay in the WaPo yesterday, movie critic Anne Hornaday pegged the connection. Both are what cinephiles have come to describe as "torture porn," films that focus on the relentless and graphic depiction of the bloody torment of other human beings.

Both movies attempt to make the case that they are, in fact, furthering human understanding. The underlying premise behind the Saw franchise is, apparently, that the threat of a slow and horrible death inflicted on our helpless body by a sadistic psychopath enables us to better appreciate life. A few years back, I remember one of our Sunday School teachers suggested integrating that into our third grade curriculum. It didn't go over well.

Antichrist is a bit less like something written by Dr. Phil's sociopathic younger brother. It's more intentionally obscure, more aware that it is not a movie. It is not meant to entertain. It is Film! It is Art! It's array of misogynistic and increasingly harrowing images have something to do with the power dialectic between reason and emotion, male and female, sexuality, self-affirmation and self-mutilation. Though it's made by a Dane, he's evidently one of those Danes who hasn't discovered the pleasures of a good beer. It feels more High German, with a vision probably expressed best with some long technical made up word, like, say, dafoeingeweideblutforterungschafft.

Sigh. We Americans are just so..provincial.

Here, I feel a strange desire to go all Father Ted standing self-righteous with a sign outside of the theater. It's painfilth! It's degrading hurtsmut! Stay away! Down with that sort of thing!

I won't do that, tempting though it may be. But prog though I am, I can honestly see no reason to watch films that serve up meticulously presented brutality for our prurient delectation and amusement. I mean, jeez. I had to watch the Passion of the Christ once for church, and I never ever want to go through that again. Torture porn is a spiritually blighted genre, one into which Jesus-folk should wander only with deep caution. Better yet, stay away.

Some of my fellow progs might disagree. I am being judgmental. Prejudiced, even, given that I won't go see those films. Art that expresses human suffering is still art, they might say. Speech that revels in and celebrates inflicting mortal pain is still speech, they would suggest. What right do I have to make value judgments about things that other people enjoy or find expresses the human condition?

Discernment is just so...unpomo.

I am convinced, though, that storytelling and the images and ideas we take in transform us as persons. They are not passive expressions of what is, but help form us and shape us. It's part of the reason Jesus told stories to get his point across, eh? When we take in images of brutality and cruelty as a form of entertainment, it coarsens us. Stunts us.

It is, in programming terms, bad code.

Homosexuality, Orientation, and Choice

During the hurly burly of the summer of 2008, I managed to read this article, which details a recent study on the neurophysiology of homosexuality. Obviously, the researchers in question are interested in doing more research, and make no definitive claims about causality between orientation and brain structure. But that there is a seemingly meaningful correlation between gay male brains and heterosexual female brains is nonetheless fascinating. That a similar correlation exists between lesbian brain structure and the structure of heterosexual males just adds to the sense that there is in fact something real at work here.

As my own denomination prepares to plunge once again into the fray over the ordination of gays and lesbians and the gay marriage issue, the continuing witness of objective neurobiological research like this makes the assertion that homosexuality itself is a choice seem more and more tenuous. On the radical left, there are many "queer" activists who are utterly unwilling to accept that homosexual orientation is not something chosen. On the fundamentalist right, homosexuality is declared a "lifestyle choice," something analogous to being drawn into a cult, and from which you can be deprogrammed.

Both of these perspectives don't seem to reflect the reality of homosexual orientation, and are instead rooted in an existing bias. The "choice" that gays and lesbians face has very little to do with orientation itself. It has more to do with the way that they respond to their orientation. Individuals who tend towards same-sex attraction have to find a way to respond to that orientation...and it is there that Christendom needs to determine what responses are permissible within a Christian moral framework.

If you've read my previous blogging on this issue, you'll know that I reject the two extreme positions. I reject the idea that any and all expressions of human sexuality are acceptable in the eyes of God. Here, I part ways with the radical left, which asserts that morality is contingent and essentially meaningless. Sexual behavior that is predatory or radically self-seeking is inherently sinful. It tears not just at the fabric of society, but also represents a radical violation of the love ethic, which is itself an expression of God's nature. I apply that standard evenly to heterosexuals and homosexuals. If you act sexually in ways that treat another child of God as an object, you sin, and God will hold you accountable.

I also reject the position that holds that homosexuality is inherently sociopathic, that any and all same-sex interactions are automatically evil. Here, I am explicitly rejecting the position of Biblical literalism. That does not mean that I reject Holy Scripture as the rule of life and faith, but that I understand it's authority in a radically different way.

From the core principles of scripture, I hold that either celibacy or covenant relationships are acceptable ways to set boundaries around our sexuality. As not all of us are called to celibacy, covenant relationship is a more viable approach. Those covenant relationships allow us to express our hardwired sexuality freely within their boundaries, and give us the moral basis for stepping away from destructive and disrespectful desire. That moral core is something that Christians should apply to all human relationships.

Will You Will or Will You Won't Be Mine?

"There is no deadlier weapon than the will! The sharpest sword is not equal to it! There is no robber so dangerous as Nature...yet it is not nature that does the damage: It is man's own will." Chuang Tzu

Sin is, at its essence, a corruption of the will. The orthodox Christian position is that our desire is flawed, not our bodies. Sin is a matter of software, not hardware. Our flawed desire takes the form of that "blind self-love" that Calvin describes, or the pride that Augustine condemns. Whenever love of self is placed above love of God and neighbor--we sin. That is at the heart of what Paul speaks about when he describes sin as living kata sarka, or "in the flesh." (Romans 8:5) We orient ourselves towards our own physical desires, and allow our own needs to rule over the needs of others.

That can't be understood to mean that the fulfillment of physical needs itself is evil. It isn't wrong to be hungry, or to eat. But the Ultimate Colossal Burger at Ruby Tuesday's has more calories than most sub-Saharan-Africans get in a day...and that's before your side of fries and half-gallon of soda.

It isn't wrong to feel sexual desire. Sharing that intimacy with a partner is good, and the potential for the creation of new life is a blessing. But when other human beings become just a means to our own pleasure, and all we think about all day is bangbangbangbangbang, then we live not according to our physicen kresin, our "natural functions" (Romans 1:17), but according to sin.

So now I'll weave this thread into my prior musings--where does this leave us relative to homosexuality? The condemnations of the "homosexual lifestyle choice" that arise from many Christian leaders have at their heart this understanding of sin as a flaw of the will. That's why the emphasis on homosexuality as a choice must be vigorously repeated and defended. This, of course, flies in the face of what science and our God-given ability to examine our world shows us-but so what?

Common sense on sexual identity seems to have a sharper edge here. Take me, for instance. I'm a heterosexual male. I have always been attracted to women. Sometimes--sophomore and junior years in high school come to mind--that attraction has been so intense as to be almost a form of madness.

I could no more choose to be attracted to another man than I could choose to be a duck. It isn't how God made me. If you're similarly heterosexual--ask yourself the same question. Could you make that choice? Didn't think so. Choice, volition, and will have nothing to do with orientation itself.

If that is so, then how is homosexuality itself a sin?

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Defining sin, of course, is a favorite Christian pastime, coming in a close third after macrame and Salem-style barbeque. We're all sure we know what it is, and we're all double extra sure plus to let all the sinners around us know that we know.

As the caricature would have it, Christians fall into two distinct camps on the subject. On the one hand, you have progressive, social justice, organic Guatemalan llama's milk Christians. For them, sin is primarily a corporate thing, something systemic and thus a bit on the amorphous side.

On the other, you have the fundamentalist, bible-believing, it's either Jesus or H-E-double-toothpicks Christians. For them, sin is primarily a personal thing, something to do with your own walk with God and whether or not you've had your altar-call card punched enough times.

That's the caricature, anyway.

But the Christian view of sin isn't just about our collective injustices or our individual moral failings. Sin isn't a particular behavior or pattern of behaviors, but something somehow integral to the human condition. Scripturally, sin begins before the word sin is ever used.

It starts, of course, at the beginning, so to the beginning we must go.

So we traipse back to the beginning, to our two stories of creation. Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3—the ancient priestly story of creation, told as part of the temple liturgies—is all about the goodness and power of God. God makes and affirms all of creation as good, and while one Hebrew text includes a caveat in Genesis 1:31 that specifically excludes Howard Stern, scholars are divided on the authenticity of that codex.

It’s in Genesis 2:4, with the beginning of the second story of creation, that we see scripture’s explanation of why God’s good works seem so freakin’ messed up. It’s the story of the Garden and the Fall, even more ancient than the priestly tale, a story that would have been told and retold around the campfires of the nomadic Abiru peoples. Here, God isn’t towering and glorious, spoken of in rhythmic liturgical cant. He is close, intimate, One who walks through the garden at the cool of the day. He creates the ‘adam, meaning “creature of earth,” not through a divine command, but with hands crusted with the loam of the earth and the warm life of his breath. He sets him in the garden to care for it in all of its goodness, warning him only to stay away from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

When the ‘adam needs a helpmate, God creates the ‘adamah, (the feminine form of adam) and things are briefly hunky dory. Then comes the passage that bugs the bejabbers out of every committed herpetologist.

The serpent—not Satan, that’s a later theological construction--arrives, and settles down to chat with the adamah. Interestingly, the snake doesn’t actually ever say anything that isn’t technically true, nor does it tell the adamah directly that she should eat from the tree of good and evil. It poses one question: What may you eat? Then it truthfully tells the adamah that the fruit won’t kill her (not right away, anyway), but will give her the knowledge of good and evil, just like God. So she chows down, and the adam, who’s been standing around the whole time listening in, eats too. Boom. There we have the root of sin.

But what is that sin? Is sin a flaw in how we are made, in the bodies that God knitted together from dust and breath? Or is sin something wrong with our minds, more a matter of our will?