Scotty Doesn't Know

I am a nerd, and I watch nerdy internet videos. Among these is The Big Picture on The Escapist. MovieBob uses these videos as a forum on his favorite nerd topics. This week, his video "I Don't Know" lists the top five things he is asked to comment upon but will not because he frankly doesn't know enough about them.
The list is the following: Power Rangers, Television, Manga, Music, and Dr. Who. I respect Bob for having the respect towards his viewers that compels him not to comment on or potificate concerning things of which he has no knowledge.

Oh. Oh, dear.


This inconsistency is something my friends and I have seen a good deal of, and I think it is high time we became more vocal about it. Since so much of what I'm saying is taken from my good friend Mason, I will simply quote to you what he said to me on this topic concerning how he feels about laypersons giving their utterly unfounded and uninformed opinions about religion, theology, philosophy and ethics to him:

"Look, man, if I walked into McDonald's and started telling you how to run the fryer, you'd be pissed off. That's your job. You've been trained to do it, you do it well, and you do it all the time. I simply don't have the qualifications to tell you how to do it better, because I don't have your training. But that's what you're doing if you walk  up to me and spout something about God or ethics. You don't tell a doctor about medicine, or an attorney about legality, or an artist about impressionism versus surrealism. Where do you get off talking to me this way about my field?"

Note, what I'm concerned about here is not people asking questions of religious professionals, people willing to learn. Rather, I am concerned that there is an increasing feeling that philosophy and religion are fields that have no actual experts, since the study of these topics is only the study of opinion. Encountering folks who have this attitude is fracking infuriating, but worse is the fact that many of them are public figures to some extent who take it upon themselves to talk about fields they have little to no expertise in.

Joel Osteen, for example. Who has never attended a seminary and has no degree from any institution of higher learning. Yet this man interprets the Bible for millions? To be clear, education does not a good theologian make. Rick Warren has a Master of Divinity and a Doctor of Ministry, yet his theology is (in my opinion) so fundamentally flawed that its proliferation has damaged rather than aided the proclamation of the Church in this country. I would, however, say that part of Warren's success is precisely because there is no longer any conceit in the public mind that a view of religion can actually be wrong.

It is, in my mind, high time that the Church publicly confess what is believed by Christians throughout the world. We'll probably get mocked for it, but I might have one less congregant try to shove the Platonic ascent down my throat because it is "biblical".

Reality

Just read C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, chapter 13, which has to deal with pains and pleasures as wake-up calls to reality. Also have been reading some work on theology by John McClure (Mashup Religion). McClure posits a motion beyond semiotic meaning, a postsemiotic way of viewing theological invention. I found the clash between the two interesting.

McClure is trying to understand how to talk about God in interesting ways, doing theological invention through sampling of various traditions as inspired by musical mashups. I'm not entirely sure what need McClure is attempting to address with this attempt, and wonder how many issues such an approach may create. After all, the abandonment of systematic meaning, and therefore of internal consistency, really seems to me to be the abandonment of any attempt towards meaning at all. Without consistency in symbol use, logic flies out the window. Without logical progression, consistent reference by the symbols in use, or other conventions of language, it is unclear to me how anything can actually be communicated at all. But what seems to really have been lost is the idea of reality. McClure talks about the creation of reality through language, and while this is valuable, if language becomes incoherent so must be the realty thereby created. But I think the real issue is pastoral, and comparing McClure's concerns with Lewis' illustrates this clearly.

There is pain and pleasure, and these are real. To jettison the idea that there are common facets to human experience, to become a splitter between peoples and ideas to the extent that McClure seems to, ultimately sacrifices our commonality as human beings. While I am willing to allow a great deal of separation between people, I will draw the line at the fact that people remain people. Attempting to rely upon a framework that has so thoroughly abandoned the real seems to me to risk abandonment of those who rely upon the proclamation of Christ in the Church. What is real, what must be treated as real, is the need of those who are in despair and in need of the comfort of the Gospel.

Liturgy... EPIC?

I rant.
I try, I really do, to be understanding and supportive of ideas other than mine. Even when I find them utterly moronic or banal. I really do try to see things in the best possible light. I will try to do this with anything that I talk about here. I will certainly not succeed. For that I apologize.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about E.P.I.C. and the liturgy. EPIC is an acronym popular in the circles of the emergent/emerging church (or so I'm told), and seems to be in Leonard Sweet's vocabulary, among others. The acronym stands for where the Church is believed to be heading, namely that it will become Experiential, Participatory, Image-driven and Communal. Some say the Church will become "more" EPIC, implying that some of this already exists. I know this is a broad conversation to have, but I want to throw in my two cents.

Why now? Well, first off, an article in the Lutheran spoke about EPIC in application to our liturgical practice this month. The article is by Tom Lyberg, a pastor, and is titled "Liturgy is the 'what': Be ready to adapt the 'what' for the 'why' of worship." This article begins on the same page as an article by one of my teachers which was about the biblical foundations of the liturgy and how those foundations are communicated to the assembly of believers ("Our Lutheran liturgy: raising a shout for its Bible roots" by Timothy J. Wengert). In this juxtaposition (shoutout to all the Lathropians), I believe a very important tension is revealed. This is a conversation that we must have as a Church.

To be blunt, I need to draw a distinction between disconnection and ignorance. As a Church, we cannot afford to attempt to defer our responsibilities by looking for excuses such as cultural change and the dawn of the "inventive age" (a term full to the brim of hogwash if the eponymous book is any demonstration of its worth). Yes, there are problems with the articulation of what it means to be Church among the wealthiest people on the planet. (I included that caveat because so many of the issues being addressed, supposedly, by those who part of the "emerging/emergent" movement are unique to those who have access to the most advanced technology and education in human civilization's history.) Yes, we are seeking new ways of being Church in a changing cultural, national, and global landscape. But we cannot do this while remaining utterly ignorant of Christianity as it has been articulated and has existed for two millennia.

I am afraid that it is this ignorance, among the public at large, the congregants in pews, and the pastors in pulpits, is what is truly at the heart of the postmodern crisis for the Church in America (which I believe to not be a crisis at all, but that seems to be the mentality, so let's go with it for now). Compare the articles by Wengert and Lyberg. The latter advocates applying the EPIC model to our liturgy, which must adapt to changing demands and expectations. But Wengert had, not two pages before, clearly demonstrated that the Lutheran liturgy is already EPIC.

Lutheran liturgy is Experiential. What else would you call a proclamation of forgiveness? Hearing Scripture? Eating and drinking Christ's body and blood?
Lutheran liturgy is Participatory. What else would you call a hymn of praise, the prayers of the people, the great thanksgiving, the sanctus, the peace?
Lutheran liturgy is Image-rich. What else would you call our use of symbols, in language (prayer and Scripture) and matter (from the bread and wine, to the table and font, to the arrangement of the assembly itself)?
Lutheran liturgy is Communal. What else would you call a gathering of people around a common event, for common reasons, toward common ends? Indeed, theologically I would argue that the event of Church which occurs in the assembly of believers creates community, in a way that only the action of God can.

The question is not about whether or not liturgy is EPIC. The question is whether our people are seeing the liturgy at all. This is because it is impossible to engage something that is in a different language. Try watching a period drama set in, say, Feudal Japan, in Japanese, with no subtitles (and let's assume you know nothing about Japanese history). You would have only the vaguest notion of what is going on. This is true of liturgy - having no access to the tradition from which liturgy springs makes the liturgy a foreign language and event, rather than a present expression of a common heritage.

The problem is not just our liturgies (though they do need continual renewal). The problem is ignorance of Christianity and its history. Until the Church decides to handle that problem in America (especially the United States), we will be caught between irrelevance and abdication of our Christian identity.

Lent and God's Bow

So a long while ago I started this up as kind of a curiousity, trying to understand what this whole "blogging" thing is. I mean, most of my 60-year-old professors have better phones than I do, so I'm not what you might call "high tech". (Oh, and I love euphemistic quotes, so get used to that, I suppose.) I'm also not a Luddite. I thought that this Lenten season might provide me with an opportunity to practice some public theology and get more into what a "blog" might be at the same time. My idea (starting yesterday, which this is the post for, I can make up my rules) is to post once per day until Easter begins. I wonder if that will happen, since schoolwork will certainly become stressful. On the other hand, at least one thing comes up per day that I wish to talk about, so this could be fun! Right?

The readings for the first Sunday in Lent really bring up a bunch of themes. Hopefully you heard something about life change, about Baptism, about God's mercy, or something similar in the sermon yesterday. But I want to talk about something a friend of mine loves to point out: the rainbow. You know. God's bow. As in God's bow, the weapon.

It seems to me that folks might profit from realizing the point of the Noah story is that God isn't going to try to force people to be good "or else", since God already tried that. The effect of the destruction which the flood caused was not a change in the surviving humans, but a change in God. So repugnant was the loss of God's beloved creatures, that God decides never to do it again. No more will there be the threat of divine judgment on all the world, for God loves the world and cannot bear to destroy it.

Compare this to the language that you might hear from some people calling themselves Christians in these days. You know the thing - "won't be water, the fire next time." The Home Alone (or was it Left Behind?) stuff. Which version of God aligns more with the description of God's character in this passage which immediately follows tremendous violence on God's part? I think that it is obvious that this is a shifting point, where God (in the narrative of Genesis) realizes that creation is in trouble that is too big for simple purging, or simple destruction. I might go so far as to say that God's promise to Noah, here perhaps seeming so odd in the context of the constant flow of promise, judgement, and changing strategy that God displays in Genesis, is an apocalypse in the original sense. This promise of God to abandon warfare against creation is a small glimpse of the heart of the Creator. It is in this promise that we make our Lenten journey.