Music for A Secular Age

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Mark Love

Theology books built on the work of philosopher, Charles Taylor, are everywhere to be found these days. His book, A Secular Age, has provided a vocabulary that expresses well the moment we inhabit. In Secular Age he traces a complex story in the West, 500 years in the making, when the “social imaginary” moved from a presumption of belief to a presumption of doubt. This was no nefarious tale of atheists walking us down the primrose path to secularity, but was the outgrowth of Protestant theologians and Christian philosophers. Luther, Calvin, Locke, and Descartes all make cameos among a cast of hundreds. It’s not what they thought they were doing, but the result was that the world moved from being seen as enchanted to disenchanted. The self moved from porous to buffered, from interdependent to autonomous and self-possessing. Along with this, came a series of “splits” designed to accommodate faith in a world increasingly defined by scientific method. Facts are things that can be proven, everything else falls into the bucket of values, the container for faith. Facts define discourse in the public world, values occupy the private. Churches no longer occupy the public square, but hang out shingles in the suburbs, catering to the private and idiosyncratic values of individual religious consumers. This list of splits could be multiplied.

One recent response to the splits of the secular world, particularly among evangelicals, carves out a place for faith as an alternative reality with a different set of facts. While God is active in this world, the splits are still upheld through a denial of the reality of the other side. This world of faith, however, is only a slightly enchanted world, with some things being deemed supernatural (the realm of God), everything else being natural (secular?). Speaking in tongues is an enchantment, an accounting job is disenchanted or secular. “Values voters,” aka evangelicals, want to make gains in the public square, all the while upholding the autonomy of the self-possessing, expressive individual. In other words, they basically accept the terms of secularity, just hoping to make the world of faith more muscular than the secular.

One sign of this is the way Christian media is understood. The “mainstream media” and their pluralistic values can no longer be trusted to deliver a Christian view of the world. Christians now need their own trusted news networks. I would also point to the explosion of the world of Christian music. Of course, when Bach was composing music for an enchanted world, all music was in service of God. Now, there is secular music and Christian music. I think this distinction again honors the splits created on the path to secularity. A vast amount of “Christian music” is God-directed, but in a very “God and me” kind of way. For instance, comparing a contemporary church’s musical catalog is a long way from the Psalms which are rooted more in the everyday trouble and turmoil of life. I sometimes hear grumpy theologians like me say, “I see your praise team. Where’s your lament team?”

We know of Christian artists who have crossed over. Aretha and Whitney learned to sing in the church, and musically they didn’t stray far from their gospel roots. Same with Johnny Cash. These artists had”secular catalogs,” but also produced the occasional gospel album. They sang about murder and trains, or love and sex, and then they would do a separate album of gospel classics.

I have doubts about our ability to completely re-enchant the world, and even if this would be a good thing. Some aspects of the enchanted world described by Taylor surely give way to explanations provided by the world of critical method. For instance, I doubt that we will return to largely allegorical readings of Scripture given the light that critical methods of reading have shined on our understandings. Still, the church needs to learn again to speak of God in the ordinary day-in-and-out of life. Instead of re-enchatment, I wonder if a more realistic goal might be integration.

Back to music. I wonder if the way forward artistically might be with groups like U2 and Over the Rhine, or individual artists life Madison Cunningham and Bruce Cockburn. They sing about real life struggles–marriage, despair, violence, poverty, love, loss, meaning–but from a faith-filled perspective. I have friends in the music publishing world who are frustrated that artists are quick to be pigeonholed as “Christian artists” if faith themes are found in some of their songs. However, it is precisely these types of artists who might help us overcome the splits associated with a secular age. Unlike Cash and Aretha, they don’t have one foot in each world. There is only one world with multiple realities.

I think I’ll go listen Dylan’s, Oh Mercy.

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Conga Lines and Joy as Resistance to Despair

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Mark Love

I’m not much of a dancer. I did win a line dancing contest once, but my competition was the theology faculty at the seminary for which I taught. This is a little like playing members of the marching band in a game of horse. I didn’t have to be good to win. And I wasn’t. I’m not.

I’d like to be good at it because it involves music. I’d like to experience a live band the way my wife does, moving freely and stylishly to the performance. I’m probably too Church-of-Christ-white-boy to be good at it. Too many generations of “can’t go to dances” have altered the generational DNA. It’s just not in us. And if I decide to “dance like no one’s watching,” I’m pretty sure I look like an enthusiastic Elaine Benes.

Still, there are songs that move me physically. I find myself moving in spite of myself. Aretha’s “Chain of Fools,” the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout,” Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” the opening guitar licks to “Yellow Ledbetter” (Pearl Jam), “Reeling in the Years” (Steely Dan), and “Rocky Mountain Way” (Joe Walsh), and if I’m honest, “Uptown Funk” (Bruno Mars) and “Blame it on the Boogie” (Michael Jackson). All of these, and many others, make my head bob in what Billy Crystal calls “the white man’s overbite.”

I was at Yale a few years ago for a conference on human flourishing and heard Willie James Jennings talk about joy. He referred to joy as an act of resistance opposed to despair. One example he gave was the practice of slaves in “hush harbors,” secret places of worship in which joy was expressed as an act of resistance to the “given” of slavery. In that place, their bodies were their own. The experience of the hush harbor included bodies in motion and music, expressions of joy.

A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course for ministry majors, and we began each class session with music. The only stipulation I placed on participation was that some part of their body had to be moving as the music played. It was a semester long exercise in embarrassment. They didn’t know what to do with their bodies. I shared their embarrassment. We had no joy. Their was no resistance to despair in our hush harbor.

A few years later, my friend, Mallory Wyckoff and I taught a late night class at the Pepperdine University Bible Lectures (now called Harbor) using Jennings’ material. While the Pepperdine crowd tends to be slightly more hip than other “lectureship” crowds, there were still plenty of cardigans and sensible shoes in the room. Little did they know what was in store for them.

We had them identify occasions for despair in their lives, to hold them for a moment, and then to resist them through joy in the experience of music. We played two songs, one chosen by each of us. I chose “Chain of Fools,” the Aretha song that gets me to move. Mallory choose a song by her pretend boyfriend, Justin Timberlake. (Get help, Mallory).

We again stipulated that the one rule for participation was that some part of their body had to be in motion. A head bob, a toe tap, rhythmic clapping–any bodily movement. When the music started, people were slow to comply. A few moved into the aisles to dance. There were four older women sitting together toward the front who were having none of this nonsense. But as Aretha continued to sing, I urged people to resist the despair they had identified earlier in the evening. Like an evangelist urging a response during the singing of “Just as I Am,” I called on them to resist despair with their bodies. And I swear you could feel the release in the room. Now everyone, save the four women, were dancing. It was beautiful. Most of them were no better dancers than me, but there they were resisting despair. They hadn’t danced since 10th grade, but there they were practicing joy in our own hush harbor. There were tears and smiles and laughter. It was an amazing moment.

And then the song changed to Mallory’s boyfriend. And maybe the four women were just waiting for the right song, but they began to move. I actually don’t think it had anything to do with Justin Timberlake. They were swept up into the moment. But, wait for it…wait…

They started a conga line! As God is my witness! Now we had a conga line winding its way through Pepperdine’s Stauffer Chapel. It was unadulterated, over the boundaries, joy. It may very well be the only conga line ever spontaneously formed at a Church of Christ event. I know this, the gates of hell had no chance of prevailing in this moment.

This is the power of music. It evokes more than appreciation. It does more than soothe the soul. It moves the body, and in doing so produces joy. For me, this is certainly true of the way rock and roll moves through me, I remember as a boy the scandal that Elvis’ swinging hips produced among those self-deputized to protect society from such lurid impulses. If Elvis appeared on television, they would shoot him only from the waist up. The body in motion was only a symbol for sex, for lisciviousness, for waywardness. We had no hush harbors, and ironically this was our slavery. We didn’t know what to do with our bodies. We had purity, but no joy. We let despair run amok for lack of a conga line.

I think I’ll go put on some Bruno Mars.

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Understanding as the Telos of Mission

Posted on June 2, 2023 by Mark Love

Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by the word “telos.” It’s a Greek word that is sometimes used to stand in for “goal.” But it can mean other things as well, like fulfillment or completion or end, and so for me it’s a better word than goal, or any other single word. Ok, so now we can let “telos” carry this range of meanings and get to it.

For many, the telos of mission is the conversion of individuals. This is inadequate for many reasons, notably that the mission of God to reconcile all things whether in heaven or on earth, which includes things other than personal conversion. I have written often about this inadequate view of the telos of mission, and won’t belabor it here. I’m after different game.

Missiologists since the end of the World Wars of the 20th century have increasingly insisted that contextualization should be the telos of mission. David Bosch, in his important work, Transforming Mission, notes the relatively recent ascendence of the term and attributes its rise to the desire to overcome a legacy of colonialism in Western missions. Let me be clear, it would be a good thing to overcome a legacy of colonialism. In a similar vein, the noted missiologist, Lamin Sanneh, proposes “translation” as the appropriate telos of mission, specifically the need to translate the “message” of the Christian gospel into the conceptualities of local cultural contexts. The effort of Western missionaries to translate the Bible into local vernaculars, Sanneh rightly points out, served as a practice of resistance against colonialism, empowering indigenous people in spite of the imperial intentions of missionaries. Sanneh takes this valuable insight and makes translation more than a practice of mission, establishing it instead as a metaphor for mission in general. Missions should have as its telos “translation” in contrast to “assimilation,” the mission telos of colonial missions and other contemporary religions.

This sounds right, and I agree with Sanneh on much of this. Translating the bible and liturgies into local languages is a huge practice of good mission. And translation is a better focus for mission than assimilation as governing metaphors go. Translation, or contextualization, however, as the telos of mission is not without problems. I won’t take the space here to go into them with detailed explanation because I want to get to my own alternative proposal, but I see to be the basic issue as follows:

Put succinctly, contextualization fails to completely break free from aspects of the modern imagination that wed missions to colonialism in the first place. Notably, contextualization still imagines a subject-object world, in this case expressed as sender and receiver. While contextualization places more emphasis on the receiver than assimilation does, it still participates in a two-footed imagination with regards to the world (subject/object, sender/receiver). The weight is either on one foot or the other. An issue with these “two-footed” approaches (one among many), is that what connects the two is often an abstract idea, something general that must transcend the particularities of time and space. Sanneh, and his mentor Andrew Walls, reinforce my point here by insisting that what needs to be translated, or contextualized, is a message (as opposed to a social reality or a way of life). Walls goes so far as to say that translation requires that an “essence” of Christianity be extracted from the particularities of the biblical story. The very word con-text-ualization assumes a prior “text” that is to be expressed in local terms, often privileging, in spite of it’s intentions, the sender who gets to decide what message is to be translated. (Don’t get me started on meta-narratives).

What I would propose instead (drumroll, please) is that the telos of mission be seen as understanding and not as contextualization.That is, the gospel occurs when people of differing cultural backgrounds come together to make common sense of a story that is not their own. This would move the telos of mission out of an analytical stance and toward a hermeneutical one. It would move mission from a Christological focus to a Spirit-forward Trinitarian focus. It would abandon the quest for an “essence” to the faith and instead glory in the particularities of the biblical testimonies and the lives of those seeking understanding together. A stripped down “message” would not carry the weight of “translation,” but human “faces,” representing stories and lives, would be the test of understanding.

Let me make a few caveats or clarifications and provide a brief biblical example. I am choosing the word understanding because it ties together phenomenological and biblical insights. According to Heidegger, we exist in understanding. Understanding is ontological, not epistemological. Gadamer, who pictures understanding as a fusion of horizons (two understandings becoming a third), insists that a fusion of horizons always produces something new. This conforms better to the biblical notion of the gospel as the dynamic and ongoing announcement of an eschatological event. For the gospel to stay in the mode of “news,” it has to continue to produce new understandings. Reducing the gospel to a static message or abstracted essence makes it something other than news. I like Mark Heim’s notion that we won’t know the full meaning of the gospel until it has gone everywhere in every time. The very nature of something called gospel is to stay in the mode of news.

By “understanding” I don’t mean only “rational,” or even “cognitive.” As the last post demonstrated, Paul sees love overflowing with more and more understanding. Understanding, then, involves both bodies and communities. Heidegger similarly suggests that most of our understanding comes from being in the world (dasein), from allowing the world to appear before us, and by “taking care” in the world, which he calls in other places “love.” Understanding, then, is more than cognitive and individual, it is embodied and communal. It is similar to what Taylor and Ricouer refer to as a “social imaginary,” shared understandings that emerge from a repertoire of beliefs and practices. The notion of a social imaginary also moves beyond a two-footed, subject/object conception of reality. Mission as understanding necessitates a third thing, an in-between thing, or a surrounding thing that keeps us from imagining one thing working on the other.

One might read to this point and say that the missionary does bring Christianity as her own story to share with others. This is the banana peel, however, of good intentioned colonialism. As long as we think of the story of Israel’s messiah as our own, we are susceptible to colonizing others. Willie James Jennings (Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race) has powerfully demonstrated how making the gospel “mine” provided an opportunity for bodies to become racialized and sold as “objects” in a world being “taken” for Christ. More, Jennings suggests that such an abstraction of the Christian faith leads to antisemitic supercessionism (the church replacing Israel as God’s chosen people in the world). In other words, losing track of the sense that we have been grafted into someone else’s story carries disastrous consequences. Mission as understanding places the biblical stories between people, none of whom can claim it as a possession of their own.

I should also say that the telos of mission is Christian understanding. Again, let me say what I don’t mean by this. I don’t mean that the missionary brings the other to proper Christian belief, which may or may not happen. I mean that central to being Christian is to understand the other. The way of Christ in the world–humility, empathy, gentleness, mourning, mercy, meekness, peacemaking–is a way of loving that produces understanding of the other and the world which we share. In mission, an environment is created in which we exist together in understanding. Understanding in this sense is dynamic and reciprocal. The very effort to understand the other changes my perception of myself and the world. To be understood by the other is life giving, a gift of Christian understanding even if the other is not Christian. This quest for Christian understanding in my estimation is more persuasive than any argument designed to convince.

Peter’s visit to Cornelius in Acts 10 is a paradigmatic text in many ways. I’ll just point out here that the encounter profoundly changes Peter’s understanding. Peter moves from bewildered (by the vision) to cascading understanding–he comes to understand that no person is to be considered unclean, that the Gentiles (unclean) received the Holy (clean) Spirit just as he had, that the teaching of Jesus on the kingdom of God was larger than he imagined, that he was chosen to the first to proclaim good news to Gentiles, and perhaps most surprising of all, that the way Gentiles came to salvation was the way everyone would. None of this came by him figuring it out in his personal Bible study. In fact, the one thing that had been his own private experience (the vision of the unclean animals) left him bewildered. It was only through his encounters with others, Gentiles, Christian Pharisees, the church in Antioch, and the elders and apostles in Jerusalem, that understanding happened. And to Gadamer’s point, this fusion of horizons had produced something new. Good news.

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Love, Understanding, and Participation in the Life of God

Posted on May 23, 2023 by Mark Love

Just thinking out loud here, and trying to reverse engineer the bigger project I’ve been working on. So, you are generous to audit my raw notions.

The author of 1 John insists that the deal is not that we love God, but that God loves us. I take that to mean that there is a qualitative difference–a saving difference–between the way God loves and the way we love. After all, the same author claims that God does more than love, but rather that God is love. God’s entire life is love, expressed immediately within the life of God as Trinity, and toward us as God’s creation. Not only does this raise questions about the quality of human love, which we know is mixed in its objects and motivations, but it also makes God’s love prior to ours. We experience it, not through our efforts to love, but as a gift beyond our capacities.

Paul says similar things about God’s love. We know God’s love, not as an analogy to how we love, but as an expression of enemy love, hostile to God’s intentions, weak, sinners, enemies of God, Christ died for us. You can imagine that for a righteous person someone might actually give her life, but that’s human love, not divine love which wastes itself for the enemy. More, Paul says that God’s love has now been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Rom 5:1-11).

A recent favorite passage of mine is in Phil 1, where Paul prays that their “love might overflow with knowledge and full insight.” Here love produces understanding, not the other way around, which I think is how we would put it, ie our knowledge might overflow in love. To use modern categories that Paul would not understand, understanding is ontological, not epistemological. In other words, we understand God as much by how we live as by how we think. It’s not that the mind is not important, but as Paul puts it Rom 12, we are called to offer our lives as living sacrifices, which is our spiritual worship, which leads to the renewing of our minds. (Rom 12:1-2).

Which brings me to the genesis of this whole brainstorm. Paul suggests that faith lives in the reality, not of our knowing God, but in God knowing us. The most dramatic place where Paul makes this distinction is in Galatians 4:9. He reminds the Galatians that their life is different “now that you have come to know God, or rather that you are known by God…” Something of what Paul means in distinguishing between our knowledge of God and God’s knowledge of us seems evident at the end of 1 Cor 13:12: “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Again, there seems to be something of a qualitative difference between our knowing, which is only in part, in a glass darkly (KJV), and God’s knowing us. And again, it places the emphasis on God’s knowing to be prior to ours.

I would also suggest that “knowledge” here is not epistemological, but ontological. Knowing is not simply the ideas in our head, but more importantly comes through our participation in a way of life. (Love overflows with knowledge and insight). Knowledge, in other words, is a relational concept, not just an individual one. It cannot come only within us, but only in the network of relationships that precede our understanding. Here’s my claim, for Paul understanding is something we exist in. What we know in Christ is conditioned by God’s prior knowing of us. We live, move, and have our being in the reality of God’s knowledge of us. Both love and understanding then are realities in which we participate.

This sense of participation God’s love and understanding moves in sync with the apocalyptic mood of the NT. Paul certainly is a noted apocalyptic thinker, suggesting both that we live in the already-but-not-yet of the coming of the new age, but also privileges the initiative of God apart from which the realities of the new age are not possible. Because the reign of God cannot come through the will or desires of the flesh (human agency), the realities of God’s reign are only open to us as a participation in the realities of the life of God. God’s love and understanding, which comes before and transcends our love and understanding, is ours only by the Spirit of God, the agent of God’s future.

All of this is important to me as I think about mission. My dissertation demonstrated that Paul’s views of salvation correspond to certain instincts present in philosophical hermeneutics, while much of contemporary notions of mission are still wed to Enlightenment epistemologies. What I’ve written here would expand those insights, especially as it relates to the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean Luc-Marion. I know, I know. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it. And I won’t bother you with it here. Instead, I’ll end with some reflections by Luke Timothy Johnson from his book, Faith’s Freedom.

Johnson writes, “Why does Paul emphasize being known by God over knowing God? Perhaps for this simple reason:knowing God is compatible with the project of idolatry; being known by God can only come by way of gift, can never be brought under human control.” Johnson continues, “When we look closely at the primordial fear that generates the compulsions of idolatry, we perceive that it has a great deal to do with the sense that we are not known and loved… Paradoxically, however–and this is our enslavement–what we most desire at one love (being known and loved), we work the hardest to prevent at another. To be known as we really are is too threatening, so we struggle to construct a self that appears more real and substantial” (69). The liberating path to overcoming the compulsion to idolatry is faith, notably receiving as gift the reality that God loves and knows us.

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Despair that disguises hope

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Mark Love

I’m in despair. I have great hope. I’m not optimistic. There is a clear path forward. Yes, I am of two minds.

The topic is the state of the church today in North America. I browsed the “religion” aisle at Barnes and Noble today and was struck how “Christian” books could sit side-by-side on the same shelf. There in my line of view were Jesus and John Wayne, and a book calling Christians to stand their ground against “cancel culture” before it’s too late. There were anti-racist books next to Christian nationalism books. These contrasts seem to me to be less options within a shared faith, and more two completely different faiths. I’m not optimistic.

I am not optimistic that there are terms for reconciliation. But the greater problem in my estimation is the public beating the reputation of the church is taking. Part of the public damage is the de facto schism between these two or more versions of Christianity. But the bigger reputation problem, in my estimation is related to the ugliness of public Christian discourse. Though not all Christians are guilty of public ugliness, it is prevalent enough that all Christians are painted with the same brush. Fair or not, this is a problem for us all.

Evidence that this is our lot may be found in the series of “Jesus gets us” commercials, a multi-multi-million dollar effort to rehabilitate the reputation of Christians. I have no doubt that this massively expensive undertaking has strengthened something most people already believe, namely that Jesus gets us. Jesus needs little PR help. People think favorably of him. It has done little, though, to convince people that the “church gets us.” In fact, the irony is that some Christians have complained that the Jesus presented in the commercials is too woke. The irony here is that Jesus doesn’t get “us,” the “us” being Christians. Put the other way, these critics don’t get Jesus.

I doubt that this public reputation problem will improve much in my lifetime (I am, after all, on the back nine). It leaves me with the question of how best to spend my energies. I’m not sure, though I have some hunches that I’ll explore later. But I have a read on where we are, that could be mistaken, that gives me hope.

We are in a place of public humiliation. Our brand is diminished. We have sold ourselves into bondage, imposed exile on ourselves, and nailed ourselves to a cross. It is important to realize that we have put ourselves in this position. This is our own doing. “Secularists” didn’t do this to us. This isn’t the result of pluralism or globalization. This is a self-inflicted wound. To see ourselves as victims would be to misread the moment and fail to do what is needed the most, to be humiliated.

I imagine this is not yet all the way to hopeful yet as a proposal. Perhaps it would be more palatable if I had said “humbled” instead of “humiliated.” But I think “humiliated” puts us in better company. It puts us in company with Hebrew slaves dealt with ruthlessly in Egypt. It puts us in company with the Servant of Yahweh who was humiliated in exile. It puts us in company with the one who was publicly humiliated on a Roman cross. It puts us in the company of those whose only hope is God, the God who raises from the dead. We find ourselves where God does God’s best work. I have hope.

The wrong move, I am convinced, is to claw our way back to a place of prominence wherein we call the shots and control outcomes. Not only is it the wrong social goal for a group that follows a homeless Galilean peasant who dies outside the city gates on a Roman cross, but the effort will require only more of the same that got us in this place to begin with–more judgment, more condemnation, more moral superiority, more hypocrisy, more strange political alliances, more corruption related to the quest for power, more of all of the wrong things.

The church has ultimately nothing to fear in losing its life for the sake of the kingdom. It has much to fear in winning, in triumph, in grasping its life through its own doing, and as a result losing its life.

The way forward, I believe, is to embrace exile, but in a new way. It begins by confessing that the public critique of others is true and just. This does not make them right about everything. It’s only that they’re right about us in this case. No self-justifications, no defensiveness. Just saying the truth of the matter. We are no longer publicly trustworthy.

And for awhile, this means acting like exiles: not trying to make our lives bigger, the program grander, the show more spectacular, but to instead find simplicity and humility the shape of our footprint in the world. And it means to make league with all of the other disempowered, marginalized groups. As the “Jesus gets us” commercials have made clear, these are our people. To make league with them not to be their savior, but to share life with them, to find Jesus among them. Not to advocate for our own sake, but for theirs.

It will require that we hold still long enough for one version of Christianity to die so that another might emerge from the rubble. Again, the gospel teaches us that those who lose their life will find it. I remember Bonhoeffer’s line that the church enters the world, like Jesus, to die. My hope lies here, in the irony that this diminished church will in fact be a more powerful church. That humility and self-forgetfulness is more powerful than casting our shadow to appear bigger than we are. That this way is more winsome. But most of all it is more in line with the Jesus who gets us.

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“A Pandemic is a Terrible Thing to Waste”

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Mark Love

I attribute my title to Pat Keifert, who has said this in my presence time and again the past few years. He could stop at “a pandemic is a terrible thing.” And it is. Think of all the ways it has disrupted our lives. I am particularly mindful of those who had family members die alone in hospitals, unable to receive visits from family members. But the toll goes far beyond death and illness. Businesses were destroyed and jobs lost. School children learned in isolation, separated from friends and teachers, and more susceptible to anxiety and depression. Our country’s already fragile compact was further strained over masks and vaccines. The pandemic is a terrible thing.

A terrible thing to waste? I know few congregations who aren’t reporting a decline in membership since the pandemic began. It is tempting to blame the pandemic for this state of affairs, but I think it’s less the case that the pandemic caused decline in our churches, and more revealed the fragility that already existed. The fact is, congregations of all persuasions were already leaking members before the pandemic hit. The losses were more gradual and less universal, disguising the fact that our churches face uncertain futures. What I think Pat is pointing to is that the pandemic pulled back the curtain on our pain, revealing the true state of congregations in North America. Faced with the truth of our situation, our options become clearer. We can live in denial and rush back to the familiar ways through which we were experiencing a slow but sure demise, or we could seek a new way of being and doing. We could shake off the lethargy of the “way we always do it,” and find new possibilities for a new future. Congregations that rush back to the way things were before, according to Pat, are wasting the opportunity presented by a pandemic, by a crisis.

Scott Hagley, in his book, Eat What is Set Before You, suggests that mission is always the product of crisis. This is perhaps a corollary to the oft cited line, “mission is the mother of theology.” The uncertainties of a given situation give rise to new ways of being and doing, which in turn give way to new ways of conceiving of God’s presence in the world. Hagley does a wonderful job of tracing biblical stories in which crisis and uncertainty led to new ways of being and doing, particularly his narration of the book of Acts. Crisis breeds mission to those open to what the Spirit of God might be up to. Hagley will be at our Fall conference, Streaming, Oct 6-8, to make the connections and implications clear. rochesteru.edu/streaming.

Were that the pandemic comprised our only crisis. Wars, refugees, racial tensions, democratic institutions at risk, climate changes and disasters, and mass shootings are but the beginning of the long list of crises that confront both our neighbors and ourselves. They are all terrible things. Are they terrible things that could lead to a new participation in the mission of God? We have no choice but to explore together the possibilities.

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Mission in an Age of Crisis: Call the Midwife

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Mark Love

In our graduate program, we are careful about the metaphors for leadership we use. I believe that definitions of power and authority, which are not bad words in and of themselves, may be the thing that distinguishes Christian life and practice from other ways of being in the world. And, in large measure, Christians not only fail to distinguish themselves in the regard, but represent the worst of abusive forms of power and authority. We do our best to challenge the “leader as hero” metaphor, with all of its iterations (leader as visionary, leader as strategic planner, leader as guru). There may be aspects of these perspectives that are a part of being a leader in the mission of God, but when they rise to the level of an organizing metaphor, they become problematic.

There are several reasons for this, the main one being that the Triune God is a living God, and is always calling communities into a new future in God’s mission. The Triune God, therefore, calls and leads the church, not the heroic pastor. And because God exists in community, our discernment of the call of God also comes in community. We have for years used the metaphor of ecologist to describe the work of the leader. The ecologist is concerned with healthy environments that produce certain kinds of life. The pastor as ecologist keeps the congregational environment healthy so that the Word, or call, of God can continue to be spoken and heard, and so that the mission of God can be discerned and joined.

I think ecologist is a good metaphor. It corresponds to the notion of a living God. But good leadership metaphors should also reflect the moment we are in. And we are doing ministry in an age of crisis and dislocation. Metaphors, in other words, should also mark the pain we experience in liminality where we don’t know if we’re dying or finding new life. Shawna Songer Gaines is teaching me that “midwife” might be just the right metaphor. Her DMin thesis explored the work of actual midwives and pastors, bringing them together for conversation and reflection. What she learned will be what she presents at this year’s Streaming conference. rochesteru.edu/streaming.

In the opening of her thesis, she makes a very interesting observation. She was taught in seminary that the pastor “was the shepherd of the congregational flock. My role was to guide the sheep in and out of the pen, lead them into green pastures and beside still waters, and to protect them from the wolves and robbers.” Sounds familiar and right. But then she adds, “This metaphor seems to work in a church where congregations are full, pastors have a clear sense of where they are headed, pain is avoidable, and our innocence–like sheep–is unquestioned in the society at large.” She has set us up for a big turn. “But we find ourselves in a very different social moment.” We do indeed, one of pain and loss. For Songer Gaines, the metaphor of midwife is apt for a moment like this. It recognizes the pain we are in, but also suggests that the pain might be leading to the birth of something new. Our pain might be the necessary prerequisite for the new thing to be born. The difference between death and new life might be the capacity of the pastor to function as a midwife.

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Giving up Snark for Lent

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Mark Love

I’m not good at Lent. I have no great Lent advice and I always have a hard time thinking of something to give up. This is not because I lack possibilities, but because I have too many. Where do I start in becoming a better person? Those of you who know me likely have several very specific suggestions.

But this year, I’ve decided to give up snark as a way of making room for gratitude and generosity of spirit. I’m aware that the previous sentences run along the boundary of snarkiness. I know how much of my sense of self is tied to being clever. Public cleverness, with an edge, is a way to show others how smart I am. “Look at me, don’t I have a way of turning a phrase, of making you admire me?” I think at times snarkiness says, “I’m smarter than most of you.” Whether or not that’s it’s intention, that’s the way snark often functions rhetorically. It can be a form of self-promotion. And it’s often offered at someone else’s expense, the dumb ones, the ones that don’t get, the ones that don’t have a clue. In its worst forms, it promotes the self and diminishes the other.

Look, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. It’s not what I think I’m doing in the moment, but it’s often the practical effect. So, this year, I’m thinking of Lent as an opportunity to emphasize a more generous way of being with others. I easily slide into cynicism, into assigning less than the best motives to others. When it becomes pronounced in my life, I feel it like an illness.

The path to getting better, I think, is twofold. First, just practicing gratitude is a path to healing. Expressing gratitude, I once heard Randy Harris say, is the chief Christian virtue. It opens the heart to the world. It replaces complaining with appreciation. It helps me see my life as something given to me, a gift, and not something I have constructed out of my own ingenuity. This is a perspective I lose from time-to-time, and suggests that gratitude is not an attitude as much as it is a practice.

Second, I’ve come to think of generosity of spirit as a way to love those who are difficult for me to love. By love, I don’t mean have affection for, but to the extent that I can, to do what’s best for them. I need frequent reminders that people don’t wake up each day thinking, “Who can I screw over today? How can I make Mark’s life difficult today?” We’re pushed to assholeness by a variety of factors. There are evil, malicious people in the world, but most of us are just a bundle of contradictions who find ourselves playing roles that if given the chance would do something different. It’s just good to remember that. Again, this is a practice more than it is maintaining an attitude. I find Jesus’s advice on loving enemies in Luke a good way to practice generosity of spirit. Do something good for others. Be kind. Bless them. Pray for them. These are ways perhaps to embody Paul’s advice in Romans 12 to associate with lowly, not to think of yourself better than you should, but rather to consider others better than yourself.

This is hard work. It’s not in my spirit to do these things. It takes a holy Spirit. God have mercy on me, a sinner.

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The Backward Hermeneutics of Paul

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Mark Love

I’ve been reading posts from my students in their missional hermeneutics course. They are currently responding to Richard Hays’ book, Echoes of Scripture in Paul. I’ve read these posts alongside participation in a conference on hermeneutics I attended the last few days, and it’s got me thinking about a few things.

Hays suggests that Paul’s hermeneutical approach “seeks to overcome the estrangement between past and present by positing a diachronic resolution of the intertextual tension” (179). In other words, Paul allows older texts to speak in the present tense, overcoming the historical distance, and he does this not with methodological rules, but through certain theological commitments. These commitments allow him a certain creative liberty in using older texts in ways different from their initial usage. Hays suggests that “Paul provides us with a model of hermeneutical freedom.”

I have a former colleague who taught exegesis who claims Paul would have flunked his classes. I think he’s being somewhat sarcastic–somewhat, but I’m also convinced that if he wouldn’t flunk Paul, he would flunk his contemporary students for anything approaching the words “creative” and “freedom” in interpretation. I was taught that the text couldn’t mean anything it didn’t originally mean. In other words, there was one timeless meaning that could be uncovered through use of the right method. To this way of thinking, Paul is not a model for us in terms of the interpretation of Scripture. Do what he says, but don’t practice what he practices.

At the recent conference I attended, no one was holding on to this “one meaning around authorial intention” approach, which in my estimation was a step or two or three forward. Texts have a surplus of meaning, especially sacred texts. They don’t just represent meanings, they continue to produce meaning.

Instead, interesting proposals for theological readings of the text were offered. One call was to read them through the narrative of God’s redemptive work in Christ through the power of the Spirit. Narrative and Trinitarian! Cha-ching! Another proposal was more specifically christological, Christ becoming the key to interpreting the whole of Scripture. You know, it’s hard to argue against anything when the answer is Jesus! The first approach was similar to the approach taken by others (McKnight, Wright, both Tom and Chris, Goheen, to name a few). This narrative approach moves from beginning to end, or forward. The christological approach is less narrative and more thematic, arguing for a center, one ring that controls them all.

While these approaches have their merits, they are not Paul’s. At least, not according to Hays. Paul, Hays contends, has two theological commitments that inform his interpretative approach–ecclesial, and eschatological. These are related for Paul. What God is doing toward the day of Lord is creating communities that are no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free. The proof of the truth of his gospel is that Jew and Gentile praise God with one voice. This is the mystery hidden for ages, and now revealed through Christ, that Jew and Gentile are being built into a new spiritual dwelling for the Spirit of God, that Christ is the first born of a large, new family, and that all of creation is eagerly anticipating the eschatological revealing of the children of God.

For Hays, then, Paul is not moving christologically, but ecclesiologically. His organizing theme is the eschatologial identity of the people of God. You might quibble with Hays at this point. James Dunn has argued that there is no single theological center to Paul’s thought. Rather, there are multiple theological trajectories that move in and out, forward and backward, to inform Paul’s pastoral responses from situation to situation.

What there is more agreement on is that there is a narrative structure to Paul’s thought, but that it doesn’t move from beginning to end. Rather, it moves backwards from the end (Dunn, Hultgren, Beker, Hays, P Achtemeier, Sampley, Gorman, Brownson, to name a few). Paul thinks apocalyptically, that the future of God has broken into the present, judging the powers of this present evil age, which is perishing, and inaugurating, not a continuation or improvement on the old age, but an alternative to it–a new thing, a new creation with a new family(“The old is passing away, behold everything has become new!” 2 Cor 5).

I think that this “backward” reading is most responsible for Paul’s hermeneutical freedom. If the future is the horizon of interpretation for what God is up to, the past becomes less of a precedent than if you’re reading from beginning to end. If you’re reading from beginning to end, previous practices or positions possess more authoritative inertia. Issues like slavery, gender, and sexuality take on a more normative force. As Moltmann has pointed out, reading from beginning to end tends to honor the status quo, the future (futurum) being the outcome of the past, or the way things are. But an apocalyptic imagination (adventus), assumes a new thing is coming, a reversal of fortunes that provide hope to those on the underside of current arrangements.

There are other hermeneutical approaches in the NT, simply because there are multiple theological perspectives among biblical authors and their communities (another argument against a meta approach). Paul’s approach is important to consider, however, as a theological model for our own readings. His apocalyptic framework makes him valuable at the level or process and not just results.

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The Continuing Presence of Jesus in the World

Posted on January 4, 2022 by Mark Love

I read today a quotation emphasizing that Jesus has taken up residence in the human heart. I get it and I don’t think it’s wrong. The language of abiding in the gospel of John would indicate that Jesus continues to be present to his followers through a mutual indwelling. The problem, though, with the “Jesus in my heart” language is that we can internalize the saving work of God in the world. This turns salvation into a “Jesus and me” thing, and misses the larger social and material significance of the kingdom of God.

So, Jesus goes from being the marginal peasant who walked the dusty of roads of first century Palestine, embodying the kingdom of God, proclaiming a way of non-violence, creating new social arrangements by welcoming the unclean and sinners and tax collectors, providing space for women and children in the welcome of God, to living in the hearts of individuals. Jesus in the heart, in an age of expressive individualism, becomes a therapeutic presence, inspiring peace and tranquility, and personal, moral improvement. These are hardly things to put anyone to death over.

I guess if I were to play the other side, defend the “Jesus in my heart” expression of much of contemporary Christianity, I would have so say that God’s plan is to make the world better one heart at a time. But then I would have to explain how this expression of Christianity carries little of the radical social and material nature of the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed. I think at many churches you’re more likely to hear a sermon extolling the virtues of personal responsibility than you are to hear one on sharing possessions or turning the other cheek.

While I think I have something of Jesus in my heart, I think it is more in keeping with the incarnation, with the life that Jesus actually lived in the world, to think of his continuing presence as being with the prisoner, the hungry, the naked, the abandoned, the overlooked, the refugee, the poor and marginal, all those excluded in other realms of significance and power.

I was asked by a student a few years ago why incarnation isn’t a bigger theological warrant in our program. That seemed to him to be a pretty big oversight for a program emphasizing God’s mission. But our program does emphasize incarnation plenty if what counts is the life Jesus actually lived and the kingdom he actually proclaimed.

I know this is a grumpy old man kind of post. I have mounted a blatantly obvious soapbox. I’m not asking anyone to ask Jesus to please vacate their heart. If he’s there, that’s great. What I’m trying to suggest is that Jesus’ actual, ongoing presence in the world is bigger than your heart. In fact, you might want to see if the Jesus in your heart looks like the one who continues to be present in the world.

Ok, next post will have less snark.

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