A jobless future? (Sunday Reflections for September 25, 2011)

The latest “inside the White House” book is David Susskind’s Confidence Men. It focuses mostly on the making of economic policy by the Obama administration as it struggled to respond to the “Great Recession.” One excerpt that has gotten attention reports President Obama’s belief that rising productivity is the primary cause of the current high unemployment. This stunned some of his advisors.

The prevailing view has been that unemployment rose as the result of a drop in economic demand. A view like Obama’s, however, could lead to the conclusion that growing unemployment is the result of improving efficiency. In other words, more people out-of-work is the unfortunate consequence of a highly productive economy.

There is no question that something is different about this recession. Not only is the basic unemployment rate staying high longer than usual, more people are staying unemployed for long periods and more people than usual are “under employed”—i.e. working part-time rather than full-time or working significantly below their previous pay or skill levels.

On the surface Obama’s belief doesn’t seem to fit with what happened. Unemployment jumped dramatically following the 2008 financial crisis. Obviously this wasn’t the result of a sudden increase in productivity. Yet as a longer-term phenomenon, Obama’s notion has some merit and may partially explain why unemployment is remaining so high.

Before this downturn, a growing number of economists and others have been expressing apprehension about the future of industrial society. Most everyone has cheered the constant stream of technological advancements which have sent efficiency and worker productivity soaring. Nearly every successful business tells stories of how, what it took 100 workers to do a generation ago, it now takes only 25, 10 or 5.

A well-known example is the picture of a typical assembly line before World War II, showing a place bustling with human activity. A similar picture today shows a place bustling with computerized machinery, operated or even just watched over by a handful of people. Computerization has had an even bigger impact in offices of all kinds. Digitizing and manipulating data and information are what computers are all about.

In the case of the assembly line, the obvious question is what happened to the 75 to 95 people who used to work there? Until now it’s just been assumed they found work somewhere else (or their children or grandchildren did). Yet even before this recession there had been a growing awareness that many of the new jobs available were not as good as those they replaced. Statistics now show a majority of households with stagnant or even declining inflation-adjusted income for the past two decades.

The growing concern, then, is that this is becoming the “new normal.” A recent blog post I came across discussed a book written almost twenty years ago, darkly titled The Jobless Future. The book analyzes this now familiar story of automation and job elimination. Its conclusion is that many of the well-paid professional, technical, and production jobs that raised living standards in the 1950s and 60s, and which have been lost, will not be coming back in anything like the numbers needed to maintain those living standards.

The authors do not, however, see this as necessarily leading to economic disaster. Rather, they say we are nearing the time when we need to radically re-think many of our assumptions about life and economic well-being. We are at a point where our society and economy can meet everyone’s basic needs, and even provide a “good” life, but we don’t need everyone working at traditional full-time jobs to do it. As the authors are quoted, “The aim of this work is to suggest political and social solutions that take us in a direction in which it is clear that jobs are no longer the solution, that we must find another way to ensure a just standard of living for all.” The blogger then goes on to say of the writers,

They are as interested in the "satisfying" part of the question as the "standard of living" part. They want to know what sources of meaning, worth, and value are possible for a whole civilization in which work and career are no longer the primary focus? It is an existential question as much as it is an economic one.

And, I would say, it is a spiritual question.

For a long time, people have been aware of the inadequacy of defining our lives by our jobs or occupations, even though we all do it. It is the standard question when meeting someone for the first time: “And what do you do for a living?” Implicit in the question is the assumption that we will then make judgments about a person’s worth and importance based on the answer: conclusions about income, wealth, education, intelligence, character, lifestyle, power and influence, etc.

We are also aware of the crisis many people experience at retirement. A moment people look forward to can nonetheless send them into confusion and depression, as they lose what had been their primary source of identity: their job. This experience, of course, is made even worse when a job is lost through unemployment, compounded by the resulting financial insecurity.

The immediate question is how to support people during this time of economic upheaval and transition. Sadly there has been far too much blaming the victim, with the unemployed being dismissed as lazy, stupid, dumb, or just “unlucky.” If high un- and under-employment is now inevitable, then this needs to be recognized and social policies adjusted for it. Otherwise we face the prospect of increasing social unrest that is the inevitable consequence of having 20 percent or more or our people having little or nothing to do.

In the longer-term, we are faced with the even more challenging question of what do we want human life to be? We are being faced again with the ancient questions of what makes us happy as individuals, and what makes for a good society. Thus far much of our increasing “free-time” has been filled with fairly passive and escapist entertainment. That’s not working so well now and it certainly isn’t going to be adequate in the future.

The question can make us anxious yet it can also be incredibly liberating: Who and what do you really want to be? In the future, with new freedom we probably can’t even imagine yet, our life will literally depend on how we answer that question.

Less words (Sunday Reflections for September 18, 2011)

ProgressiveChristianity.org is a network of people and organizations promoting an alternative to conservative and fundamentalist Christianity. Started in 1994 by an Episcopal rector in Washington, D.C., it now includes individuals and congregations from 17 denominations, as well as various independent and ecumenical groups.

Among the resources it provides is a summary statement of “8 Points of Progressive Christianity.” I thought you might find interesting their recently revised version of that statement.

By calling ourselves progressive Christians, we mean we are Christians who . . .

1. Believe that following the path and teachings of Jesus can lead to an experience and of the Sacred and the Oneness and Unity of all life;

2. Affirm that the teachings of Jesus provide but one of many ways to experience the Sacredness and Oneness of life, and that we can draw from diverse sources of wisdom in our spiritual journey;

3. Seek community that is inclusive of ALL people, including but not limited to: conventional Christians and questioning skeptics, believers and agnostics, women and men, those of all sexual orientations and gender identities, those of all classes and abilities;

4. Know that the way we behave towards one another is the fullest expression of what we believe;

 5. Find grace in the search for understanding and believe there is more value in questioning than in absolutes;

6. Strive for peace and justice among all people;

7. Strive to protect and restore the integrity of our Earth; and

8. Commit to a path of life-long learning, compassion, and selfless love.

This is certainly not the most elegant statement of belief or principles I have seen. It reads like it was written by a committee, which it probably was. Nor is it written “for the ages”—I’m sure it will be revised again. Yet I think that is one of its other points. Over the centuries, Christianity has become notorious for its endless production of doctrines, creeds and statements of belief. Theologians have then written millions more words interpreting those statements. (And Lutherans have been at the forefront of those efforts.)

A statement like The 8 Points is really an attempt to step away from all that. It is not systematic theology nor does it claim to summarize “The Truth” (in fact, it almost denies such a thing exists). It is more about behavior and attitudes than about intellectual ideas or beliefs.

My intellectual guru, English theologian Don Cupitt, has said that systematic theology basically stopped being written after about 1970, and I think he is right. The last two great Christian theologians were the German-American Lutheran Paul Tillich (who died in Chicago in 1965) and Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (d. 1968). They were the last to write “grand theology” that genuinely broke new ground or said anything original.

The few attempts made after Tillich and Barth have not really said anything new. Most theologians haven’t tried, however, because they have understood Cupitt’s point that the world has changed. Christianity, and religion generally, has run itself into an intellectual cul-de-sac. In other words, theology really just doesn’t have any new insight to offer about the world or human life in that world. That baton has been passed to the natural and behavioral sciences.

Unfortunately, it has been very hard for theologically-oriented churches to recognize or accept this new reality. Such churches are predominantly mainline denominations, like Lutherans, and Roman Catholics. We continue to insist on the importance of getting all our theological and doctrinal ducks in a row, when most people, including most of our own church members, don’t really care about such things or even understand them. Denominational offices and gatherings continue to talk and talk, and write and write. Yet fewer and fewer pay any attention to such efforts, which look more esoteric and antiquarian with each passing year.

A simple and kind of unrefined statement like The 8 Points is really an effort to say, “Let’s be done with all that.” It is an attempt to redirect the church away from an obsession with getting its thinking right and refocus on values and behavior. Of course, this is nothing but a scandal and a horror to those convinced that being a Christian is all about what you think or believe. Yet in my experience, while such people tend to very vocal, they are a shrinking minority.

I think the real weight behind a statement like The 8 Points is that it is not only more true to our times, but it is also more true to the biblical tradition. There is actually very little explicit theology in the Bible, and what theology there is certainly isn’t systematic. Only in the latter stages of the New Testament do we begin to see a fixation on “getting it right” in our thinking. Prior to that, and certainly in the life and teachings of Jesus, “getting it right” is all about our behavior, individually and as a community.

Apart from its specific statements, The 8 Points says that in the 21^st century Christianity’s value is to cause people to ask “How shall we live?” not “What do we think?” In doing so, progressive Christians aren’t charting a new path but getting us back to an ancient one.

9-11 plus ten (Sunday Reflections for September 11, 2011)

I’ve had a hard time knowing what to make of the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The New York and Washington media have been telling us this is a big deal. Since many of those in the industry experienced it personally, this isn’t surprising. Yet their perspective is inevitably skewed by the huge impact it had on those cities. If my experience is at all representative, I suspect the thoughts and feelings of much of the rest of the country are more conflicted.

There is no question the 9/11 attacks were stunning and horrific. Yet ten years later, “What did it all mean?” is a question we still wonder and argue about. 9/11 set off a dramatic chain of events for the country and the world: wars, economic upheaval, new security measures, and increased anxiety, to name some of the most obvious. Here again, however, the meaning and necessity of all these are still debated.

In evaluating important events, ten years is much too short a time to have genuine perspective. Yet I will hazard a guess that 50 or 100 years from now, the 9/11 attacks, even acknowledging their horror, will not be seen to have been history changing events. Rather, I suspect 9/11 will be seen as one example or symptom (though perhaps the most dramatic) of an extended period of global instability—a period that is probably still far from over.

Historians often disagree about which events are the actual turning points for some period. History rarely turns on a dime. Change comes gradually, yet often there are events where that change becomes obvious and inevitable. In this case, I suspect our most recent historical turning point will be seen to have been, not 9/11, but the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the time the Cold War ended, there were a number of observers who said we would soon come to miss it. Subsequent events have demonstrated the insight of their prophecy. As bad as it was, the Cold War did provide a power balance which drew in nearly every country on the planet. Nuclear weapons kept the US and USSR apart but it was the broader dynamics of Cold War politics which kept conflicts between all other countries from getting out of control.

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika all that came to an end. Decades long power balances were thrown out of kilter and nations new and old went spinning out in all directions. Perhaps the region most constrained by Cold War politics was the Muslim world of North Africa, the Middle East, and South-central Asia.

This area, more than any other, has demonstrated how many authoritarian regimes were kept in power by playing off the US and Soviet Union against each other. This year’s Arab Spring uprising is the most recent example of the region’s upheaval. A much earlier instance, of course, was Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida, whose original goal was the overthrow of the corrupt and US-allied monarchy ruling Saudi Arabia, the homeland of Islam.

Yet what the Soviet Union’s end really represents is not just new, head-spinning geopolitics but a whole cascade of social changes sweeping the globe. From modern cities to primitive villages, people everywhere are experiencing cultural upheaval unlike anything the world has known. Much of it is driven by an avalanche of new technologies, especially in information management, agriculture, communication, transportation, and health care. Many people are literally finding themselves being propelled from the 19^th century (or even earlier) into the 21^st century, with the trauma such rapid change inevitably causes.

The media has drawn attention to the role of cell phones and social networking in the Arab Spring. Ironically these youth-inspired revolts also demonstrated how far behind Al Qaida had fallen in appreciating the social changes underway in the Muslim world. That, as well as the destruction of most its leadership, is quickly making Al Qaida into a historical footnote and casting doubt on whether it will really have any lasting impact on the world.

Contemporary terrorist organizations and revolutionary movements, like Al Qaida, have drawn their strength from the fear and anxiety caused by the cultural changes in less-developed countries. 9/11 may come to be seen as the moment when people in the West were finally confronted by the dark side of our technological and economic transformation.

One reaction throughout the world has been the rise of fundamentalist and jihadist-type religion. This has been driven by a turn-back-the-clock desire to reverse traumatic cultural changes. The impossibility and irrationality of this is often ironically demonstrated by the use of modern technology by these “traditionalist” movements.

In any case, social upheaval is almost certain to continue for the indefinite future, whether inspired by religion, politics or economics. Even the most beneficial technological changes are going to continue to cause unpredictable, ricocheting consequences. We have much more to learn about how to manage those changes and minimize their unintended consequences.

Yet the answer to technology’s problems can’t simply be more technology. The greatest challenge we face is how to integrate technological developments with a moral perspective. While not yet officially acknowledged, it is becoming increasingly clear that the recent financial meltdown was the result of technologies used to hide the risky and even felonious nature of countless financial transactions.

Others point to the growing use of technology and its complexity to mask fraud and deceit in nearly every field and institution. Lying and cheating, of course, are as old as history itself. It is also true that they have tended to rise and fall in waves and that they are kept in check only by the intentional efforts of society. Al Qaida has essentially been eliminated but, if anything, the social upheaval and injustice which spawned it have only grown. We are, however, more aware of it, even if we feel helpless to do anything about it.

Yet we are never helpless. History and all the world’s religions testify that a commitment to genuine community, and the fairness and equality it requires, does make a difference and ultimately wins out. Our values do get out of kilter and we often succumb to looking out only for our own interests. Yet the voices of our consciences and our prophets challenge us to do better, and we know we can. Ultimately controlling technology is not our greatest challenge. Rather, it is the age-old task of controlling our egos and emotions with a commitment to justice and compassion for all.

He even associates with SNRs! (Sunday Reflections for September 4, 2011)

In recent years I’ve come to expect whining and complaining about the decline of Christianity from religious conservatives and fundamentalists. I was stunned—frankly—to hear it this week coming from a minister of a denomination that usually epitomizes acceptance and accommodation with modern culture, the United Church of Christ (UCC).

Two pastoral colleagues shared on Facebook a short “devotional” piece by Rev. Lillian Daniel, senior minister of First Congregational Church of Glen Ellyn, IL. These two friends liked it (as did many of their friends in reply). I was appalled. The essay was titled, “Spiritual but Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me.” Rev. Daniel apparently does a lot of traveling and gets stuck with a lot of annoying seatmates:

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo.

Next thing you know, he's telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and . . . did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

Like people who go to church don't see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn't interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? 

Yikes! I pity the next person who sits next to Rev. Daniel on a plane, especially if they’re not an active church member. Perhaps she just needs a vacation.

I quoted most of her piece so you could get its tone, because that’s what I think is important. The content is primarily sweeping and unsupported generalizations, both about “spiritual but not religious” people (hereafter “SNR”) and about the church. On the Facebook forum where it first appeared, most comments were supportive but a number were from people taken aback as I was. These echoed my thought that many are not religious specifically because of negative experiences with churches.

In her essay, Daniel presents an idealized, and even romanticized, conception of the church, especially as it’s expressed in actual congregations. The ongoing exposure of clergy sex scandals, the screeching judgmentalism of fundamentalists, and the stories any Christian can tell of congregational fights and schisms (to name just a few prominent ones) surely provide ample explanations of why people could be alienated from organized religion.

I also can only dismiss as nonsense Daniel’s assertion that there is no challenge to “having deep thoughts all by oneself.” Oh that more people would have such experiences! I hardly think we are over-supplied with deep thought. Nor can I accept her implication that the church is the only community where one can genuinely put spiritual thought to work. In fact, I think most spiritual work is hammered out in the crucibles of the family, the work place, government assemblies, and the countless informal “non-religious” communities of which we are all apart.

I think most of this is so obvious it hardly needs explanation. That’s why I am left wondering what is really going on with Rev. Daniel, who ought to be aware of all this. While I joked about her needing a vacation, I do hear burnout, frustration and discouragement in her rant. She is not alone in this in the church, especially among clergy.

While fundamentalists have been complaining for decades about the decline of Christianity and the rise of secularism, it is the mainline churches that have really taken it on the chin. I guess it’s not surprising that this would occasionally lead to the kind of venting Daniel engages in here. She’s picked the wrong target, though.

Of course, SNR folks can be superficial and shallow in their thinking and behavior. Yet they are hardly unique in that, even when compared with religious people! The SNRs I meet are a mixed bag but many are as sincere, thoughtful and socially engaged as the religious people I know. The reality which Daniel ignores is that the nature of religion is changing around the world. For those committed to traditional religious organizations and religious activity, this can be very hard to understand or accept.

Yet understand and accept is exactly what we must do, even and perhaps especially if we are in the church. Nothing in the world stands still, including religion. Recent scholarship has emphasized that Jesus lived in just such a cultural moment, with ancient religions increasingly unsatisfactory and ineffective.

Jesus accepted the religion of his time but was hardly committed to it. Indeed some scholars believe he actually anticipated the end of traditional religion, believing there was no need for religious institutions acting as go-betweens for God and humanity. Indeed it’s hard to make the case that the church which was created centuries after him is not something he also would have railed against.

The Bible shows again and again that it’s the religious outsiders who usually have the best insight into spiritual truth, not the folks invested in the success of religious institutions. For that reasons alone, rather than lecturing the SNRs we need to be listening to them.

Jesus business (Sunday Reflections for August 7, 2011)

Last week I caught part of a BBC radio program about business innovation, including the difficulty large legacy companies have staying competitive and even surviving. One guest interviewed spoke at length about the now commonly heard idea that companies need to know what business they are in. Often they make the mistake of focusing on specific products they make rather than the service those products provide for their customers. When clear about that service, companies can then continually refine their product line, even if it means dropping products the company has long been identified with.

The example he cited where this did not occur (at least not soon enough) was the two American one-time photography giants, Kodak and Polaroid. Kodak assumed it was a company that primarily made camera film while Polaroid’s identity was wedded to its instant picture cameras. Because of inflexibility in their corporate self-images, neither was able to adjust to the revolution of digital photography and camera miniaturization.

This was especially ironic for Kodak because at onetime it had invented a digital camera. Its corporate culture, however, couldn’t figure out what to do with it since it couldn’t imagine a photographic world without film. Like Kodak, Polaroid also possessed many technologies and products which could have been transitioned into the new digital realm but it just wasn’t looking in that direction. If these companies had understood themselves as serving the photographic community rather than as producers of specific products, they could have found the flexibility to pivot with new technologies and popular interests.

The Kodak/Polaroid experience has become an increasingly common one in the corporate world. The long-predicted collapse of Borders was also the result of its leadership being unable to adjust, in this case to the popularity of both online retailing and electronic book readers. For too long it assumed its business was selling physical books in large brick-and-mortar stores, rather than providing its customers reading material however they wanted to get it.

It’s not hard to see where I am going with this. Can you think of a “legacy” business that we are all involved in that is having trouble adjusting to new market and technological realities? For me this radio conversation raised some very practical, pointed and, certainly for some, disturbing questions about the contemporary church.

Just thinking about the church in these terms makes some people squirm and I know there are those who would reject this whole approach. For me, however, the questions are obvious and unavoidable. What business is the church in? Have we identified our self too much with particular products and not with the services we provide? Is our product identity blinding us to resources we have which would enable us to provide new products and services, better meeting people’s wants and needs?

In the past I’ve used the analogy of the church being like a buggy whip manufacturer that has been unable to adjust to the automobile age. What the BBC program made clear is how much such organizations’ problems are psychological. They have a mental block, a blindness, to the new world around them. They can’t imagine the world has changed in such drastic ways that people no longer need or want the products they had successfully offered for so long.

It’s the nature of religion to be about “eternal truths.” Historically, however, we are aware that every religion adjusts to changing times, sometimes radically, or they disappear. When “eternal truth” runs up against new conflicting realities, they are adjusted or forgotten, though that may not be publicly admitted. Those truths become like outdated products a company drops and replaces with more relevant ones.

The single “product” the church has most identified itself with is salvation. The meaning of salvation has often been somewhat fluid but the church has always liked the idea that, whatever it was, it was the only place you could get it. (I heard that notion again just this summer from our synod bishop.) People need what we have and they can’t get it anywhere else. No. That is the blindness that has bankrupted companies and is now sinking the church.

Like the veteran corporate and department heads of Kodak and Polaroid, the church is dominated by people (clergy especially but laity as well) who love what once was. Cameras without film, built into your phone?? Instant pictures on digital screens, not on a piece of ejected paper?? Churches that don’t save people?? Close your eyes, stop your ears, and these crazy ideas will go away. “What has been will always be.” Right.

What’s different about the church’s situation is that it has been in decline longer than any company has existed, at least two centuries. Within mainline churches certainly, most people know the world has changed and the church has not, yet we lack the imagination to think of the church and what it does in a new way.

One example: It’s debatable whether traditional Christian worship has a future, yet the church is unwilling to even consider recasting it in ways to make it more welcoming and relevant. Why can baptism only be the entrance right for church membership? Why not open it to anyone wanting a ritual of community blessing at the beginning of life? And why not do something similar with communion, making it into a meal of fellowship and spiritual blessing rather than an experience reserved for elect few?

The reason such changes are resisted is that both are still too closely identified as dispensers of salvation, a “prize” that only worthy people are entitled to receive. Unfortunately for the church, that “prize” is one fewer and fewer people are interested in getting. They’re not interested in jumping through the hoops the church puts up to get it.

The challenge facing the church is to be willing to throw open its doors and genuinely welcome anyone and everyone without condition. Let people’s needs guide its practice and self-understanding, rather than its identification with its “salvation product line.” Salvation, meaning, hope, new life and all the other ideas Christianity has used over the centuries still have meaning and value for people, but not in the classic, antique forms in which the church has preserved them.

Jesus is still one of the most popular and well known figures in the world, but not in the theologically straight-jacketed form the church hangs on to. Rather, people are attracted to him as a real person: inspiring, encouraging, challenging, puzzling, loving, hope-giving, welcoming—all the things that seemed to get people’s attention during his life. The church could do worse than to simply say: we are in the Jesus business. Then be prepared to dump any part of our “product line” that doesn’t contribute to that.

Talking to ourselves (Sunday Reflections for July 31, 2011)

“Why did I do that?” Not only do we all ask ourselves that question, we probably ask it more often than we care to admit. We also probably ask it more often than we even realize. Often the behavior in question is something trivial or just annoying but sometimes it is more serious. “I do not understand my own actions,” St Paul writes in Romans. It is an ancient problem, apparently.

If we think about it long enough, the frequency and apparent universality of this experience gets a little unnerving. “What do you MEAN you didn’t know what you were doing?” If you didn’t know what you were doing, just who is this you that we’re talking about? Is there more than one of you “in there?”

Thinking this way may give us a headache but the research of neuroscience increasingly supports the notion that yes, there is more than one of you “in there.” As reported on MSNBC.com, neuroscientist David Eagleman describes this reality in his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. According to Eagleman there are indeed many voices in our heads:

The only way to understand the brain is as a neural parliament, where you have different political parties battling it out to control your behavior. This can now be measured in the brain with neural imaging. We can see that there are all these competing subpopulations in the brain that are always battling it out. You can call this a "team of rivals," and I think that’s a much more nuanced view of ourselves. You can get a real understanding how it is you can argue with yourself and cajole yourself. When you stop to think about it, you might ask yourself, which "you" is you? It’s all you.

I think this gives us a much more nuanced view of others' behavior as well. We don’t have to fall into this simplistic path of asking, "What are this person’s true colors? Is this person a racist or not a racist?" For better or worse, it’s perfectly possible that there are racist parts of your brain and non-racist parts. You get a much better understanding when you understand that, as Walt Whitman correctly surmised, "I am large, I contain multitudes."

He had the spirit of that exactly right. Freud had a similar idea with the concepts of id, ego and superego. What’s different now is that we can actually measure and understand the processes going on under the hood.

In addition to questioning our own behavior we also question others’ behavior. “Why did they do that?” To this Eagleman says, they may have had “no choice.” Another discovery of neuroscience is that all brains are not created equal. Well of course we may say, but Eagleman is not just referring to mental ability or even personality.

Everyone’s brain is like a unique fingerprint. Every brain is the result of unique genetics and the social environment in which it developed. How we think, behave and react to situations and events is a function of our unique brain. You can probably see we are now teetering on the edge of that trickiest of subjects, human choice and free will. Eagleman doesn’t go down that road, however.

Free will is really about responsibility for our actions, whether to give credit or blame. From his study of the brain Eagleman thinks that’s kind of pointless because it doesn’t get us anywhere. The question rather is how do we encourage socially productive behavior and discourage anti-social behavior? When it comes to criminal behavior, the problem in Eagleman’s view is that we make few if any distinctions. The pathological criminal can only be taken out of society and “warehoused.” There’s nothing else we can do at this point. They are a small minority of the criminal population, however, yet most of the rest are treated the same way.

Nearly one-third of prison inmates are mentally ill and need treatment, though few get it. The criminal behavior of many others can be explained by unique factors for each person. They should be placed in rehabilitation programs that address those factors. Instead, most are lumped together often resulting in criminal and anti-social tendencies being cemented or even made worse.

Charging one’s opponent with “coddling criminals” or being “soft on crime” has become a standard campaign tactic. Yet there is little evidence that having created one of the largest prison populations in the world, our society is actually any safer or more just.

Conservative Christians often assume that the Bible requires us to classify people and their behavior as good or bad and that bad behavior must be punished. In fact, as the Paul quote above indicates, the Bible is actually very aware of the complications of judging, let alone understanding, human behavior.

While the Bible has a great deal to say about social injustice, criminal behavior and its punishment gets remarkably little attention. One could even say the Bible has a rather cynical attitude since nearly every one of its trial or prison stories is a case of abuse and injustice. At the end of Matthew, in the story of the separation of the sheep and goats, the true disciples are those who visited “the least of these” in prison.

Frustration and anger at criminal behavior is understandable but the evidence is mounting that our one-size-fits-all punishment system is accomplishing little and probably making things worse. The developments of neuroscience such as Eagleman reports give us reason to put our emotions aside to ask how we can actually deal with the problem of criminality in ways that would make our society better. While our own behavior or that of our neighbors may surprise us, it is actually becoming less of a mystery. There is profit for all of us in putting that knowledge to work.

He must increase (Sunday Reflections for July 24, 2011)

Last week via Facebook another pastor directed my attention to a Huffington Post article, “Why I'm Not a 'Fan' of Jesus.” It was by a Pastor Kyle Idleman, identified as the “teaching pastor” of Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, supposedly the fifth largest in the country. The article apparently summarizes a recent book/DVD he authored.

Idleman’s basic point is a familiar one and not without value: being a “fan” of Jesus is not the same as being a follower of Jesus. He observes that while three-quarters of Americans identify themselves as Christians, it’s pretty hard to tell that from their behavior or the state of our society. With all these Christians around, he asks, why are there so many hungry, homeless, with inadequate health care, etc.

One explanation for this discrepancy Idleman found in learning about a new kind of vegetarian, called a “flexitarian.” They don’t eat meat—usually. One woman interviewed said she considers herself a vegetarian but admits she likes—and occasionally eats—bacon. In Idlemans’ view that really means she isn’t a vegetarian whatever she might think of herself. Similarly, Idleman says that people claiming to be Christian, but living in ways that hardly show it, are not followers of Jesus but fans of Jesus.

The word fan is most simply defined as, an enthusiastic admirer. And I think Jesus has a lot of fans these days. Some fans may even get dressed up for church on Sunday and make their ringtone a worship song. They like being associated with Jesus. Fans want to be close enough to Jesus to get the benefits, but not so close that it requires anything from them. They want a no-strings-attached relationship with Jesus. So a fan says, I like Jesus but don't ask me to serve the poor. I like Jesus, but I'm not going to give my money to people who are in need. I like Jesus, but don't ask me to forgive the person who hurt me. I like Jesus, but don't talk to me about money or sex that's off limits. Fans like Jesus just fine, but they don't want to give up the bacon.

I understand and in some ways share Pastor Idleman’s frustration but I think he is barking up the wrong tree. Unfortunately he is engaging in a favorite activity of clergy and other church authorities going all the way back to St Paul: blaming the victim. The über-Christians who naturally end up in the church’s hierarchy are always complaining about the lack of commitment and understanding of the folks in the pews. Why don’t they get it? Why aren’t they as faithful and devoted as I am? Whining and scolding is a fine art in the church.

I give Idleman credit that he doesn’t follow the usual path of complaining about people’s lack of support for the church and its activities: Why don’t they give more? Why don’t they worship more often? Why don’t they witness and evangelize? Jesus spoke little about such things. Rather, like Jesus, Idleman focuses on people’s social behavior. Where are the fruits of their faith and commitment?

While Idleman’s approach is truer to the teaching of Jesus it isn’t going to have any better result. The reason is because he hasn’t identified the problem, which goes all the way back to the beginning. Regardless of what was said about the Christian life, over the centuries most people have equated being a Christian with belonging to an organization. Or in the words of an admittedly oversimplified yet basically true assessment: While Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom, what we got was the church.

Jesus’ message was that the reign of God was coming into the world in a new way, right now. It may be that he expected that to include some dramatic divine intervention in world affairs. In any case, he does not seem to have made any provision for an organized movement to come after him. Any “church talk” from Jesus was almost certainly put on his lips later by the gospel writers. And while in the gospels Jesus does make radical statements about disciples needing to deny themselves and take up their crosses (as Idleman says), Jesus also tells people not to follow him but go back to their homes and live out their new experiences of God’s grace.

In any case, out of the confusion following Jesus’ death came the church. First it was small and informal as we see in Paul’s letters but it quickly became a highly structured, hierarchical and authoritarian organization. And while there was always some presentation of the gospel and the call to a new ways of life, nonetheless what most people heard as it spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond was: Join the church and be saved.

The Reformation attempted to put a new emphasis on Christian lifestyle and personal transformation over against merely belonging to the church. Yet Protestant churches still required baptism and retained a simplified congregational structure. Thus being a Christian still meant receiving sacraments and “going” to church. Even for “born again” Evangelicals this could become as perfunctory as for any Roman Catholic.

Pastor Idleman’s push to transform Christians from being fans to followers seems like another trip around an old and well-worn track. Would he say that among the 20,000 that supposedly show up at his church each week, there are only followers and no fans? I doubt even he would make that claim.

Idleman is right, along with so many others, that we are in the midst of a religious and spiritual crisis. It is a crisis of purpose and identity, not for the church, but for Christianity. Shortly before his death Dietrich Bonheoffer, who decried the lack of commitment of German Christians, wrote enigmatically of the need for a “religionless Christianity.” He saw that the church had become an obstacle rather than the means to Germany’s spiritual renewal.

While there are exceptions like Pastor Idleman’s megachurch, overall church Christianity is in decline in the developed world. Belonging to an organization simply doesn’t meet people’s spiritual needs anymore. Yet what recent biblical scholarship has made clear is, that isn’t what Jesus was about anyway.

If people are genuinely going to become followers rather than fans of Jesus, they’re going to have to relearn who Jesus actually was. So far, as Bonheoffer, Kierkegaard, and many others concluded, the church has been mostly an obstacle to that reeducation. Encountering this ancient Jesus and a kingdom-centered Christianity, the church would be forced into the role of John the Baptist who admitted honestly, “He must increase and I must decrease.”

From Jesus to Christ and back again (Sunday Reflections for July 17, 2011)

(I am at last posting again. I have a several Reflections articles I need to catch up on but I thought I should start with the most recent first. Watch for more to come!)

FRONTLINE is PBS’s premier documentary news program. So it probably seemed odd back in the late 1990s when it broadcast a 4-hour series about Jesus and the early church. From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians (which a group of us watched last month) really did report news, however, as well as tell history.

The news was of the cumulative results of decades of scholarly research into that subject, and which was just then coming to a culmination. (When I was in seminary in the early 80s this scholarship was beginning to trickle in.) What had been found really was something new about the earliest years of the Jesus movement, but it wasn’t the kind of sudden discovery that might happen in a laboratory.

The study of ancient documents and archeological findings often takes many years to bear fruit. For example, shortly after World War II two ancient collections of documents, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library were found in the Middle East. Once they saw them, scholars knew immediately they were of immense importance. Yet it literally took nearly a half-century of study (and even physical reconstruction) to genuinely understand them. Many scholars did not even live long enough to fully appreciate what they were studying, and that study still goes on.

The question that scholars have been trying to answer is, Who was Jesus and what was the movement launched in his name about? Just asking the question shows we are in a different world from our ancestors. For centuries and generations the answer to that question had been found by looking at the church’s creeds. But that had stopped being satisfactory or adequate well over a century ago.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars began looking at the Bible with new honesty. Among other things, they had come to realize that the creeds smoothed over a much more complex reality about Christianity’s origins. The four gospels, as well as Paul, each had distinctly different understandings of Jesus. They also came to realize that figuring out where the historical Jesus was in the midst of this was much more difficult than anyone had imagined. Some concluded that such a task was impossible.

As From Jesus to Christ reports, what needs to be said first is that nothing new has been found that can be traced back directly to Jesus himself. We still have no physical evidence of him or of anything he did or said. It’s almost certain he never wrote anything. In fact, it could be said we have taken a step backwards because most scholars now doubt we even have anything genuine from his followers or disciples, either.

And this is unlikely to change. Scholars and archaeologists have literally gone over Jesus’ Palestinian homeland with a fine tooth comb. More important than their thoroughness, however, is the realization of how amorphous Jesus’ life and ministry truly was. He just didn’t leave much of a footprint—and probably couldn’t have if he wanted to.

During his lifetime the number of people he interacted with or even knew he existed was probably very small. The “crowds” the gospels report him attracting are almost certainly exaggerative ways of conveying how important Jesus had become for the early church years later. In fact, the evidence for Jesus’ historical life is so thin and ambiguous that there are some who have concluded he didn’t exist at all.

That’s probably going too far. Yet it is true we are unlikely to ever have a very clear or accurate picture of him. This is due both to lack of evidence but also because his own ideas were so quickly mixed together with those of other spiritual leaders and movements of the time, Paul and the gospel writers being the most well known examples.

What seems to be the case is that Jesus was a genuine social catalyst. He was a spark which found an ample supply of human kindling. Scholars now have a much better understanding of Jesus’ world and it is evident it was ripe for change: spiritual, religious, social, economic, political. At the same time, however, that world wasn’t as ready for change as Jesus hoped and envisioned. The new “kingdom of God” of justice and equality he believed he was inaugurating was certainly more than those in positions of authority would tolerate.

His death by execution then was no surprise. What was (and still is) a surprise was that Jesus didn’t then disappear into the dust of history. And perhaps that was the genius of his vagueness and ambiguity. He said just enough to enflame people’s imaginations and give them a vision and hope of a better world. Yet his message was open enough to interpretation that many different and even conflicting people and movements could rally around him.

Thus from the start, the movement and church that followed Jesus’ death was fractious, conflicted, and marvelously chaotic. No one then or since knew what Jesus was really up to. And we will never know. All we have are the bubbling ideas that erupted from him and those around him, and which have challenged every generation since to hope and work for a better world.

Over the centuries countless church authorities have thought it their job to reign in this disorderly mess and get it under control. It’s now clear, however, that the man who upset the tables in the temple believed that such holy chaos is often the only way God’s will ever gets done. The religious chaos afflicting the church today may well be just what Jesus would have hoped for, or even ignited himself.

Time to lose some Passion (Sunday Reflections for April 17, 2011)

Recently Michael Rinehart, an ELCA synod bishop from Texas, was discussing on his blog liturgical and preaching issues related to Palm/Passion Sunday. It seems to him that the trend is swinging back toward this day focusing exclusively on the gospel accounts of Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem. The Passion story then is reserved exclusively for Good Friday.

I don’t know if his perception of a trend is accurate but he seems to think this is a good idea. I believe he is correct in saying that this change occurred when attendance at Good Friday services had declined significantly. Growing up I only remember Palm Sunday but by the time I got to seminary the transition to Passion Sunday was all the rage.

I embraced the change (to the dismay of the senior pastor I worked with) and especially enjoyed the dramatic reading in parts of the full Passion narrative (usually replacing the sermon because of its length). For me, the high point (for lack of a better term) was always the moment when the congregation (taking the role of the crowd) shouted out, “Crucify him!” in response to Pilate’s offer of mercy.

Well, that was then. As the years have passed, my enthusiasm for all that has waned considerably. While I still appreciate the drama, I have found myself asking, “But what’s the point?”--not just what's the point of it liturgically, but also what is the point of the story?

Perhaps my attitude began to change when I served as interim pastor of a congregation in Omaha. We had a lay parish assistant who I respected a lot. She surprised me when she said she wouldn’t be at the Good Friday service (she attended nearly everything). “The story is just too sad,” she said. This was someone who probably could have explained Luther’s theology of the cross as well as many pastors, but for her the Passion story itself was just too much.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, biblical scholarship of the past two centuries has significantly challenged the traditional understanding of the events surrounding Jesus’ death. Basically scholars tell us we really just don’t know much about what happened. We do know, however, that a lot of what the gospels’ passion narratives say is unlikely and sometimes preposterous. In many places the gospel accounts contradict each other so obviously they can’t each be right; some of their reports then have to be wrong.

It’s now nearly certain that none of the gospel writers were eye witnesses to the events they report. (Mark, the earliest gospel, was written at least forty years after Jesus’ death.) Did they have eye witnesses as sources? We don’t know but that also seems unlikely. And what’s hard for us to understand is that they very likely didn’t care, either. Telling the message, the “good news” about Jesus, was their priority rather than historical accuracy, which is our modern concern.

In all likelihood, much of the detail in the gospels’ stories of Jesus’ last week was inspired by the writers’ Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament. Thus, rather than biblical prophecy fulfilled by the events of Holy Week, this scripture was the primary source for the gospel writers’ passion stories. They created a narrative with material from their scriptural tradition, which conveyed the meaning and importance of Jesus’ death rather than its history, which probably no one knew.

The question for us is whether the meaning and importance they saw (and the gospels themselves have differing views) is what we would now see or value. To me, there are at least two major problems for us today, and both contribute to the overwrought nature of the gospels’ telling of the passion story.

The first is the anti-Judaism present to some degree in each of the gospels, especially in the Passion stories. This problem has been recognized for a long time and, particularly since the Holocaust, various attempts have been made to remedy it.

Biblical scholarship has cast doubt on what role, if any, Jewish religious authorities would have had in Jesus’ death. Even the gospels strain to come up with a plausible connection, primarily because their own accounts of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee give them little to work with. It is much more likely that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities, probably because he did something which made them consider him a threat to public order. The table-turning incident in the temple is one possibility.

So why the hostility to Judaism in the gospels? Because they were written at the time of the split between church and synagogue. Divorces can be angry, messy affairs and this one certainly was. That most Jews did not embrace Jesus as the Christ became an awkward embarrassment for the early church. If Jesus really was the Jewish messiah, then why did most Jews not accept him? Thus began the meme of the messiah’s rejection by his own people, portrayed most dramatically in his Jerusalem trial.

The second problem is the theological interpretation of Jesus’ death. Again, the gospels have somewhat differing views on this (as does Paul). Yet they all agree that Jesus’ death was somehow necessary in God’s plan of salvation. Jesus’ death was a sacrifice for humanity’s sin like the animal sacrifices made in the temple.

Today I’m not sure this is even understandable by modern people. More importantly, however, it makes God appear as some kind of ancient bloodthirsty ogre. While some fundamentalists still revel in this image, most people find it repulsive and just bizarre. There is a lot of anger in the Bible but today we can recognize that much of it is our own anger and frustration projected on God.

The obvious rebuttal to that portrayal is, of course, Jesus himself. This supposed divine need for justice and judgment that sent Jesus to the cross is most noticeably absent in Jesus’ own teaching and human interactions. Forgiveness and compassion is the heart of his life and ministry. As this has been rediscovered in recent years, Jesus’ death has been reframed as the ultimate act of that compassion and selflessness. Jesus’ death is saving for us by vividly portraying and leading us to the life of love that is our human calling. God is not “satisfied” by Jesus’ death but heartbroken.

Can the gospels’ Passion narratives be saved? The disinterest in Good Friday and the resistance to imposing the Passion on Palm Sunday are pretty strong indications of how average Christians feel. I think we need to pay attention. The image of the cross is certainly important and powerful and should not be lost. Ironically, however, the stories that for centuries have swirled around it are now preventing us from seeing it. Somehow the church has to find a way to clear the air.

All hell (Sunday Reflections for April 10, 2011)

This coming week will mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. As we all remember from our history lessons, the conflict began on April 12, 1861 with the bombardment by Confederate forces of Ft. Sumter, located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The conflict would end almost exactly four years later on April 9, 1865 with Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, a few hundred miles north in Virginia. Symbolically, however, the war’s last shot came a few days later on April 13, with the tragic and pointless assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

I visited Charleston for the first time the week after Christmas. It’s a lovely and fascinating historical tourist Mecca, with buildings dating back to the 1600s. There’s little evidence now of the wreck it became at the end of the war as a result of the fighting prior to its capture by Sherman’s army. I saw Ft. Sumter but did not take the boat ride out to it. I did tour Ft Moultrie, however. Built during the American Revolution, Ft Moultrie had been evacuated by Federal forces for the more defensible but unfinished Ft Sumter. It was used by Confederates in the bombardment and saw service off-and-on until World War II.

Cleaned-up and tourist friendly, most historic sites have a bit of a Disneyland feel to them. The exception in Charleston came when we stumbled upon the old slave market building. It looked like any other building on any other block, as it was probably viewed at the time. It was just another business establishment, like the butcher, stable or dry goods store. It just happened that the business here was the buying and selling of human beings. Walking through the simple building and looking at the displays I couldn’t help thinking this was America’s Auschwitz.

Last week over five nights, PBS rebroadcast the award-winning, blockbuster documentary, The Civil War, by Ken Burns. It’s so easy now to forget the scale of the conflict and the resulting destruction of people and property. Over 600,000 died; more than in all the rest of American wars combined. Millions more were wounded, many with life-long injuries, especially the loss of arms and legs.

With the exception of Gettysburg (in Pennsylvania), all the major fighting was in Southern or Border States and the region was devastated. The Burns documentary was possible because the Civil War was the first major war anywhere to be photographed. Mostly taken after the fighting was over, the pictures are not much different from those of World War I or II: blocks of burned-out buildings, torn up railroad tracks, soldiers’ bodies lying in open fields or trenches, living soldiers exhausted and hollow-eyed, dazed refugees, and emaciated prisoners.

Famously Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman summed up the conflict saying, “War is all hell.” Unlike the early romanticized expectations of most civilians and politicians, many of the commanders on both sides knew what a protracted horror the war would be. Historians now see the American Civil War as anticipating the carnage of the world wars of the next century. The trenches of Verdun were foreshadowed at Petersburg and Grant’s nine-month siege. Concentration camps had their roots in places like Andersonville, whose commander was executed after one of the first war crimes trials. His defense: I was just following orders.

The Civil War was also one of the first “people’s wars,” which therefore required ongoing popular support. There is little doubt, for example, that the North would have ended the conflict had Lincoln not been re-elected in 1864, as looked very likely through most of that year. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta that September seemed to turn the tide, however, convincing enough voters that victory was in sight.

Nonetheless, the official explanations of the conflict by political leaders on both sides shifted as it went on: preserving the Union or defending states’ rights, abolishing slavery or defending slavery. Different people saw different purposes in the war, which showed that the war had really taken on a life of its own.

In both the North and South, many saw the war as a religious crusade: God was on their side. For the North, Julie Ward Howe summed up the sentiment in her stirring Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yet the religious potential for horror was also shown in the pre-war attacks of John Brown, who today would be labeled a terrorist or even jihadist.

Lincoln’s view was different. He had no known religious affiliation and rarely attended worship, yet he frequently quoted scripture in his speeches and framed events in theological terms. As he saw it, the war was God’s judgment on the entire nation. The whole country had practiced or tolerated slavery, and the conflict was the result of a moral breakdown across the board. There would be no winners in this war. Its conclusion, however, would bring the possibility of reconciliation and rebirth.

Lincoln, like many of the war’s generals, saw that war really solved nothing. It was a necessary evil. The real work, and the real chance for a better society and better lives for its people, would come after the fighting was over. After it had gotten it out of its system, the country could get back to its true purpose of being a commonwealth, a place of life and opportunity for all. War, on the other hand, was always and could never be anything other than “all hell.”