Iraq an Unjust War?

This morning I read in an AP article that Jimmy Carter has called the US war in Iraq an unjust war. My first thought was, "Hello, Captain Obvious!" At this point saying that our involvement in Iraq constitutes an unjust war is almost trivial. But it has not always been so obvious.

Lest anyone accuse me of being virulently anti-war in all cases, and thus attempt to explain my opposition to this particular war in that way, I am publishing here an essay which I wrote during the events leading up to the war.

My best friend (who thanks to a strange twist of fate was living in my basement at that time. He used to joke that if we had kids we could threaten them with the ogre in the basement. Alas, Travis, now that we have a kid, the basement has no ogre!) was a Marine who eventually fought bravely in that war. My opposition to the war he fought in has no bearing on how proud I am for doing what he did. He, like many good soldiers, displayed the kind of courage and integrity that we should all honor. It is a shame that such courage and willingness to sacrifice was spent unjustly.

I wrote this paper in a college ethics class (taught by my good friend Brian Cubbage). The format of the class was to look at ethical theories and then apply them to concrete situations. When it came time to study Just War Theory it was obvious that the United States was, barring some sort of divine intervention (and yes, United Methodist ministers tried to arrange such an intervention), headed to war. Anyway, here is how I approached the subject at that time:

According to William O'Brien, who cites St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and the history of ethical thought concerning war to support his theory, war is permissible only under certain circumstances which would make that war a "Just War". These circumstances have to do with "the substance of the just cause, the forms of pursuing the just cause, the requirement of proportionality of ends and means, and the requirement of exhaustion of peaceful remedies." That is, for war to be justified, four conditions must be met:

1. The war must be motivated by a cause so weighty as to justify the taking of lives in a full scale war. The three causes that O'Brien quotes Childress as claiming would justify this are:

(1) "to protect the innocent from unjust attack,"
(2) "to restore rights wrongfully denied" and
(3) "to re-establish a just order."

2. The war will be either offensive or defensive. If it is defensive, then it is justified outright, because every sovereign nation, as well as each person in that sovereign nation, has a right of self-defense. If, however, it is offensive, then it is only justified if it intends to "protect vital rights unjustly threatened or injured." O'Brien does point out that several Scholastic philosophers once permitted religious holy wars, but that consensus is against justifying those now, contrary, perhaps, to the "jihad" of al-Qaeda.

3. The scale of the war, and the way in which the war is waged, must be proportional to the cause of the war, the objective of the war, and the threat posed by the opponent in the war. It is permissible only to use as much violence as is necessary to accomplish the objectives, and no more. And, of course, civilians must not be targets, and every attempt must be made to keep them out of harm's way.

4. War is only permissible when all other peaceful remedies to whatever problem or situation is to be solved or resolved by that war have been exhausted. War is a messy business, and it involves killing, making it morally very weighty. This killing in war is only permissible if it the only way to achieve an end which might justify the killing. Peaceful solutions must be tried first.

The question is, in light of possible US involvement in Iraq, is war, in this situation permissible? Many involved in the US cause claim that the world changed on September 11, 2001, and, to a certain extent they are right. Each action changes the world, to a degree, and, certainly any action which takes the lives of so many people enacts a great deal of change. However, did September 11th change the nature of ethical conduct? I hope not. I believe that for a group of terrorists to dictate a new morality with a series of violent explosions would be an even greater and irrevocable tragedy than the senseless killing that took place. My mother always told me that two wrongs don't make a right, and, the events of September 11th notwithstanding, I'll take her at her word. Is the US justified, according to the "Just War" theory, if it decides to wage war on Iraq?

The first thing which must be examined is "the substance of the just cause." Why is the US threatening Iraq with war? This is a more complicated question than it, at first appears, and many people have many different theories about the answer. However, I will assume that, this time, our country is not lying to us. If that is the case, then there are two answers to this question. The first is that Iraq was, in part, involved with the al-Qaeda terrorist network, and is active in funding terrorism and terrorist acts against the United States. As such, the US is justified in responding to the attacks against it, and is retaliating in self-defense. This, it is hoped, will discourage others from attacking us.

The second cause is perhaps more serious. It is claimed by both the US and Great Britain that Saddam Hussein, the leader of Iraq has, or intends to get "weapons of mass destruction;" and that, if he has them or gets them, he intends to use them. They support this claim with a number of factually verifiable claims, including that he has used chemical weapons on his own people. I believe that these two claims, and particularly the second, meet Childress' criteria of protecting the innocent from unjust attack. I'm not sure about the claim to self-defense, because I don't know that US officials have demonstrated a strong enough link to al-Qaeda, but, if Saddam Hussein is the sort of threat that officials claim he is, then the end of protecting the innocent from unjust attack, particularly the severe attack from "weapons of mass destruction" would justify the means of war against Iraq, providing that all other conditions for a "Just War" are met.

So, on to the second condition: The proposed war would be an offensive war, all claims of self-defense aside, because it would be waged in Iraq. As such, for the war to be a just war, it would have to meet conditions which would justify an offensive war. It is difficult to, in this instance, separate the first from the second criteria, and the argument used in the first works here. If Saddam Hussein can be demonstrated to be an immediate threat to innocent people, then, providing that all of the other conditions for a just war are present, war against Iraq would be justified.

This brings us to the first real problem for the US cause: It is assumed that Saddam Hussein is a threat, and that the threat should be eliminated. That is something that most sane people agree on. However, for the US cause to be justified, any war must be both just, and limited. The scale of the war must be such that it does not create larger moral problems than the ones that it eliminates. It must be understood that Iraqis are people, morally speaking at least, with the same claim to rights as US citizens. And, while Iraq's leadership clearly poses a threat to the innocent people in the United States, as well as other nations, the innocent people of Iraq must be taken into account as nations such as the US decide how to deal with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Any war which does more damage to innocent people than most probably would have been the case without the war is most likely not a "Just War." While the rights of innocents must be protected, in protecting those rights, the rights of other innocents should not be trampled.

This is a problem because, though we have advanced weapons which are supposed to be "smart", or accurately guided, many innocent people were killed in the US action in Afghanistan last year. That being the case, it is difficult to claim that the same thing won't happen this time, particularly when the United States overtly censored media coverage of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. However, if the United States could wage a limited war in which few if any civilians were harmed, and the media were given the freedom they need to cover any incidents of civilian casualties so that we would know that every effort was being made to wage a limited war, this is probably not a fatal problem for the US cause.

The more fatal problem, at least temporarily, is found in the fourth criteria. In order for a war to be just, all peaceful remedies must be exhausted. While there are other problems, this is clearly the biggest, and, while steps are being made to correct this, leadership in the United States seems far too anxious to go to war prematurely. Some peaceful remedies have been sought, including UN resolutions and trade embargoes. However, when the United States announced that they were prepared to go to war unilaterally, without the aid and support of the United Nations, that short-circuited many possible international peace efforts, such as weapons inspections, which are only now becoming realistic options again.

It is too early to tell whether or not a potential US war against Iraq will be morally justifiable. However, it cannot be ruled out. The threat posed is sufficient enough, assuming it is being correctly advertised, to consider anything in a "worst case scenario", including a limited war. However, that war must be limited, and, must take place only when all of the facts concerning the threat Iraq poses are known, and only after all reasonable peaceful measures have been taken to eliminate the threat.
____

As you can see, I (and many others like me) was once prepared to believe that, assuming that a few basic conditions were met, the US could be justified in the war in Iraq. Alas for our nation and our military, it is now obvious that those conditions were not met.

In my paper I wrote:

I will assume that, this time, our country is not lying to us.

That assumption should not seem so foolish now. Alas, it has become obvious that our presidential administration systematically manipulated and fabricated intelligence, deceiving so many of us into suspending our disbelief and (at least tentatively) subscribing to an unjust act.

I also wrote:

It is assumed that Saddam Hussein is a threat, and that the threat should be eliminated. That is something that most sane people agree on.

But, inspired by manipulated and fabricated intelligence, I overlooked that whatever threat Hussein posed to our security was already being addressed effectively. We now have no credible evidence at all that Iraq under Hussein had anything close to a functional weapons of mass destruction program. Absent that program - particularly given the crippled nature of the Iraqi military - Saddam Hussein and the nation of Iraq posed an insufficient threat to US national security to justify anything like a war.

But even with my flawed assumptions about the honesty of this presidential administration and the credibility of their intelligence reports, the conditions laid out in my paper for a just war were still not met. Consider these conditions:

1. [I]f the United States could wage a limited war in which few if any civilians were harmed, and the media were given the freedom they need to cover any incidents of civilian casualties so that we would know that every effort was being made to wage a limited war, then the war might but justified.

2. In order for a war to be just, all peaceful remedies must be exhausted.

The US waged a war in which, during active combat, more than 10 times as many civilians as soldiers were killed. While I believe that the US, particularly the soldiers involved, probably made an attempt to prevent excessive civilian casualties, they were (as is the nature of a war fought first and foremost through air strikes and bombing runs) unable to prevent a high civilian death count. Thus the conduct of the war was not sufficiently limited to be morally justifiable.

Additionally, as I feared in my paper, the US rushed to war without letting peaceful solutions run their course. The great tragedy of this is that, after the fact, it now seems like the peaceful solutions would have been sufficient to solve the problem.

Iraq had not weapons of mass destruction, and no credible connections to al Qaeda. Thanks to our military involvement in Iraq, however, it has become a "breeding ground" for terrorist organizations, radicalizing populations which could have been moderate under different circumstances.

Populations unite against a common enemy. By the way in which we have waged this avoidable war we have given many populations in the area around Iraq an enemy against which to unite.

I hereby apologize for the charitable assumptions I made about the credibility of our presidential administration, and for not mobilizing against this war until it was far too late.

The primary question facing us now, however, is not whether or not this war has been just (it has not been), but what we can do about it. We must of course hold those who dragged us into this mess accountable. The tragic irony here is that those who campaigned on restoring credibility to the office which Bill Clinton's foolishness with an intern supposedly destroyed have done more to undermine the credibility of that office than anyone since the Nixon adminitration.

But we must also find some constructive course of action in Iraq. We can't just break it, say "Ooops!" and walk out like nothing happened. To that end I am thankful to the many military personnel still working in Iraq to restore that country's infrastructure and return it to autonomy. We owe it to them to get them home and out of harm's way as soon as it is feasable to do so.

Depth From Princess Pinky!

My sister-in-law, the mother of three beautiful Jedi Knights or Sith Lords, the fantastic Princess Pinky, queen of the mall, just wrote this excellent post. I won't tell you what its about, but I will give you this teaser:

Momma, why can't everything be pink?

And when will the bunnies be back?

Is Abby (her cousin) going to die before me?

These are questions my four-year-old daughter asked me Sunday as we were on our way to church.

Do yourself a favor and read this ode to theological parenting.

In case you missed it the first two times, you can find the post by clicking on this link: More Questions Than Answers.

A Lenton Prayer

Here is my prayer for this Lenton season:

Lord,
When I am strong
make me weak;
for when I am weak
You are my strength.

Lord,
When I am rich
make me poor;
for when I am poor
You are my wealth.

Lord,
While I yet live
help me to die;
for when I die to myself
in You I rise.

This Lenton season let us participate in the 40 day period in which Jesus prepared himself for his ministry, just as we prepare ourselves for his suffering, death, and resurrection.

Violet Burning DVD review, plus a shameless plug

A couple of weeks ago I got the new(ish) live DVD by the Violet Burning. I've been meaning to write some observations and a kind of review of it, but frankly I've been stumped.

I should immediately disclose that I'm a big fan of the Violet Burning, and have been for well over a decade now. It would not be an exaggeration to say that their music, along with the music of other such honest artists as Mike Knott (and his various projects, like the Aunt Bettys and LSU) and Adam Again, by giving me the spiritual permission to feel however it was that I felt, saved my life as a teenager.

While these were "Christian" groups - in the sense that the groups were comprised of people who identified themselves as Christian, and in the sense that they were at least nominally affiliated with "Christian" record labels - they were also honest about their struggles with their faith, and with integrating their faith into their daily lives.

So much in "Christian" art and music has been an attempt to portray an ideal world and an idealized experience of faith. In seeking to "honor" God, artists and labels have edited out anything which God (or the paying customers) might find distasteful. There has also long been the flawed notion within Christendom that to portray a behavior is to endorse a behavior. As such, to discuss doubt or sin might be to encourage your audience to sin, or to plant a seed of doubt.

This has inadvertently cut all of the meat [note: as a vegetarian, my tongue is here firmly in my cheek] out of "Christian" music. To deny human tendencies toward sin and human experiences of doubt is to strip the Gospel of all of its liberating power. These artists (and many, many others), in standing in such sharp contrast to the mainstream of Christian music, gave me a Christian artistic expression which I could actually buy.

The first band that I ever really loved was Nirvana. Before I encountered their pensive angst I thought that I had loved music, but I had really only parroted or rebelled against my father's tastes. I had picked groups like Led Zepplin, REM and the Beatles because my dad had good taste, which rubbed off on me. I picked groups like Def Leopard and Van Halen because I had no taste, despite my father's best intentions.

But when I heard Nirvana, all bets were off. Their bottled up rage, and their indiscriminant expression of it, hit me right where I was. My body was changing, my mind was racing, my voice was cracking, my life was confusing, and I was angry about it. I wasn't angry at anyone or anything; I was angry as a state of being. I had a kind of ontological rage which was perfectly expressed in the music of Nirvana, the soundtrack of my adolescence.

But I also had a kind of religious encounter, an experience of the presence of God, and an experience of Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I embarked on the long journey of sanctification, a journey on which my rage had no place.

The Violet Burning was one of many artists which helped me give honest vent to my anger. The didn't deny the power of that emotion, nor did they condemn it. But neither did they endorse it. The experienced it, and its antidote. So I have long been a fan.

But the problem with being a fan, and setting out to write a review of sorts as a fan, is that fans often grossly misjudge a band's work. They (we!) tend to err in one of two ways. Either we

1.) heap gushing and infatuated praise on the mediocre work of a once great artist, or we

2.) misjudge the daring and adventurous work of an artist shedding its metaphoric creative skin, and stretching artistically.

When I err, I tend to err with the later. For instance, I am a huge King's X fan. I own (and semi-regularly listen to) every King's X album. But ever since Tape Head, when I first listen to a King's X album I hate it. That's because with each new album they discard their former sound. What a great way for an artist to stretch and grow (and alienate fans!). But it disorients me. I've come to admire their former sound. I've grown accustomed to it, and added it to the soundtrack running constantly in my mind. As such I listen to the new material with some expectations for it, and those expectations are initially frustrated. As such I need to trust that they know what their doing.

So I listen to each new album several times, forcing myself to notice each new detail, asking myself why they would chose to make this sound instead of all of the other possible sounds. By the tenth listen, or so, I'm sold. Pure genius every time. Of course! I say to my self. Why didn't I see it earlier? I didn't see it earlier because my mind was still clouded with my expectations for it. Until those expectations have been so frustrated as to depart forever, I can't really hear the new music. Because to hear it, you have to listen to it with an empty mind, devoid of poisonous expectations.

So, a couple of weeks ago I ran into a little bit of spare money, and spent it on the Violet Burning's live DVD, The Loudest Sound in My Heart. The title sums up their sound perfectly. The Violet Burning is where mysticism meets modern rock. Ethereal sampled sounds and sonic dissonance lay behind layered crunch guitars and moving distorted bass lines. The acoustic drums dialogue seamlessly with sampled digital percussion, driving the band and rocking the sound.

But principally the group is about Michael Pritzl's haunting vocals. Blessed with a powerful voice, nearly limitless range, a poet's heart and the stage presence of a veteran actor, Pritzl brings the audience into the heart of each song, ushering them into a kind a mystical musical experience.

Pritzl has long been the Violet Burning, writing the songs and surrounding himself with various willing and able musicians. But now, armed with the stable lineup of Daryl Dawson on bass, Doug Heckman on guitar and Jason lord Mize on drums, the Violet Burning has finally released a product which aims to capture the power of their live performances. [note: not to sound like a gushing fan or anything, but the two best rock shows I've ever seen were both by the Violet Burning, and both sported this lineup, which has been together since 2002] This brings me to what has stumped me for the last two weeks, and kept me from writing this earlier. I can't decide whether or not the DVD really does capture the power of a live show by the Violet Burning.

The sound comes from single live show in Vienna (and can also be found on a live cd by the same title), and, despite the inherant difficulties in getting a good recorded live sound, is almost flawless. The picture, however, was compiled in a unique way over a three year period in venues from around the United States and Europe.

At each show they put two camcorders on stage, and had several different people film with them throughout the night. After three years the had enough good footage to edit it to correspond with the soundtrack from the recorded Vienna show. The result is very creative, but often disjointed and jolting.

They make no effort to get the picture to look like one of their live shows, and make no effort to cover-up their methods. This is to their credit, and speaks to their integrity and creativity. However, flying from shot to shot, angle to angle, show to show within each song could give the viewer one hell of a headache. After all, for any single song you fight have visual footage from three years of live shows, some during the day, some at night, some indoors, some outdoors, some at festivals, some in clubs, some in churches. Additionally a number of different effects have been applied to each visual feed. The result is a picture as distorted as their screaming guitar sounds.

At first, sad to say, I hated it. But having spent money on a product by such a dearly loved band, I also hated that I hated it. But I was also determined no to let my expectations (and my past experiences at shows by the Violet Burning) ruin my experience of this product. So over the past two weeks I have forced myself to watch it almost every day, and I have to say that, like the best in creative rock, it grew on me.

I loved the sound from the get-go. Starting with the fantastic love song "Gorgeous" (my wife's favorite song, by the way), it grips your heart and never lets go. "Moon Radio," "Berlin Kitty," and "Fabulous, Like You" rock like nobody's business. Driving modern rock, like the best of U2. Truly powerful rock and roll. But the slower songs are even more powerful.

My favorite moment was "Gone Gone Gone," a tortured song which wrestles with the reality of balancing the divine calling of music with having healthy relationships. Consider this line:

Hollow songs in holy words are all I've ever known.

But, of course, his other, the partner in dialogue with the song, wants more than that. How do you balance your loves? Must you choose between a stable domestic life and the demons that drive rock?

The Violet Burning is at their best when they are using dynamic changes to create an atmosphere that invites the listener into the world of the song. This creates an emotional experience, a mystical encounter with the music itself serving the sacred. In this sense the Violet Burning is one of the most "Christian" bands around, even if they are more of a cross-over group. Their music does not speak about their relationship with God, it invites you into that relationship.

This is particularly evident in "Forty Weight," a sing which first appeared on their worship album,Faith and Devotions of a Satellite Heart. Sung almost as a canon, it layers prayer on top of prayer, using powerful mytstical images:

Oh God be merciful to me
Lift me from the earth and cover me
I wait for you

followed by

Lord, my cup is empty
Won't you come now and fill me up

These and other prayers alternate, then stack on top of each other, layering into a frantic crescendo of devotion.

The DVD (and the cd) also features a song resurrected from my favorite album of all time, their 1996 self-titled album, "Underwater." That album more than any other work captures what I think is the heart and soul of music. Each song is both secular and profane, offered to God but mired in the depths of the human experience. "Underwater" is a quintessential track from that album, and I loved hearing a new incarnation of the Violet Burning playing a new interpretation of that song. The lyric fits the music perfectly, and captures the essence of this mystical encounter, this merging of the secular and the sacred.

The song is an image of the religious life as a fight, trying to breath in water. As such it captures the imagery of baptism. Under the water the voice of the song asks a poignant question:

Is it healing me or drowning me?
The more I live the less I know

After wrestling with the distance between the images and the sound I finally decided that, if their experiment doesn't work, then they've still recorded and released a fantastic live album. But ultimately, even if the creativity of the DVD's images were brought about by fiscal reality (they are a truly independent band, with no label paying for the production costs up front), I think that it does work. I think that the strange and often distorted and disjointed images, taken from a series of live shows over a three year period, while not capturing any single live performance, usher the viewer into the kind of experience that they would have at a live show by the Violet Burning. And what an experience that it.


POST SCRIPT:

[note: from here on out my not-so-mad computer skills are being put to the test because my son destroyed my mouse. I went to the store, bought a new mouse, tried to install it, and for a series of reasons which make no sense to me (and probably have to do with the fact that the mouse I bought was somehow defective and will be returning to the store from which I bought it as soon as I finish typing this) it doesn't work, either.]

This pseudo-critic (finally got to that post script) has put his money where his mouth is and put something new into the world. While I am not a musician, I do dabble in music, and my twin brother is one hell of a musician. So I wrote a few songs, got together with him to put them to music, and have now posted some of the resulting demos (written between 2003 and 2004 and recorded in 2004) on myspace. You can find them by going to my myspace site.

I've added a sidebar item to this blog with a link to that site. You can find it under the heading Sandalstraps' Songs, just before you get to the Theology in/of the Culture War section.

Please check it out. I hope you'll like it.

On the Dangers of Functionalism

Discussing Eliade v. Functionalism in the comments section of my last post reminded me of a paper that I wrote last summer, after I got mad at Durkheim while taking a shower. I shopped the paper for publication that fall, only to find out that, isolated as I am from the academic community, that dragon had already been slain.

E.O. Wilson makes a cameo appearance in the paper because he represents a kind of resurgence in functionalist approaches to religion. Scholars of religion have now long distained functionalism, but evolutionary biologists like Wilson, having not yet had their functionalist views challenged as rigorously as the functionalist scholars of religion, are trying to reduce "religion" to its evolutionary function.

Anyway, here is the paper I wrote last summer. If you're more interested in funny stories about my family, try back later. I'm working on one, I hope.

There are a number of religious theories which attempt to identify the function of religion, and then understand religion as a whole in terms of that function. This approach to subjects is, of course, not limited to religion, but the dangers of this approach are most apparent when it is applied to religion.

Examples of a functionalist approach to religion include the theories of Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx, among many others (a recent example would be someone like E.O. Wilson, who tried to understand religion in terms of evolutionary biology, but we will not consider his theory here). No person or idea can be accurately reduced to a simple summary; that is the danger in writing about what a person wrote or said or thought. However, to understand what I mean by the dangers of functionalism we do have to have some sort of working knowledge of the kinds of functionalist theories of religion that I have in mind. So here are some brief and admittedly limited treatments of functionalist theories of religion of Freud, Durkheim and Marx.

Freud attempted to understand religion in the terms of his theories on personality and psychoanalysis. Its function, then, was understood in the way that it contributed to the development of personality. To Freud, religion served as a kind no longer necessary paternalism, keeping humanity (in general) in a state of infancy. Religion is then reducible a psychological device in which, according to Daniel L. Pals, “we attach our own hopes, virtues and ideals to an imaginary supernatural being we call ‘God’ and in the process only diminish ourselves.” Religion’s function, then, is to serve, much like a neurosis, as an unnecessary and unhelpful coping mechanism. Whatever positive purpose religion may have played in the development of humanity (again seen in general terms) has long since passed. Religion now has an almost entirely negative function, and is reducible to that function.

Not all functionalist religious theories hold that religion is such a bad thing. Emile Durkheim tried to understand religion in terms of sociology, and developed a theory of religion which was certainly not as negative as Freud’s. Durkheim, in an attempt to arrive at the most “primitive” form of religion, and so understand the most basic, fundamental nature of religion, did a great deal of work with Australia’s aboriginal population and their religion. He then took his observations on the “primitive” religion that he encountered among that indigenous population and applied it to all religions and religion in general. Durkhein observed that religion (as a whole and each religion in particular) is social, and serves a social function. The sign and symbols of any religion, as well as the rituals, indicate and communicate the values of the culture represented by that religion. So religion has a social value, as the holder and sharer of the social values of a society.

Karl Marx understood religion through the lens of his theory of dialectical materialism. For him religion was just one of many means by which the upper classes oppressed and exploited the working masses. Religion’s function in the context of this oppressive exploitation was to serve as an opiate, a mind and pain numbing drug to take the focus of the oppressed masses off their situation in the here and now. Religion promised future reward for present suffering, and offered a kind of comfort which would not disturb the economic order. Religion, to Marx, was a major obstacle in the way of the coming revolution, keeping the workers from seeing how dire their situation was and rising up against their oppressors.

Each of these theories, along with the many other functionalist theories of religion, is compelling in part because they contain some truth. A good functionalist theory of religion correctly identifies a function that at least some expressions of religion play or have played in some cultural context.

Freud, for instance, reminds us that some religious people use their religion as a way to escape from taking responsibility for their own moral actions and development. For these people religion does play a paternalistic role, keeping them from having to think for themselves, keeping them from having to grow up morally and emotionally, and keeping them from having to become authentically human.

Durkheim reminds us that religions have an important social role in their societal context. The values of the dominant religion in any culture tell us a great deal about that culture. Durkheim also reminds us that the role of a religion in a culture is not just to reflect that culture, but also to dictate to that culture. Religion can be instrumental in informing and reforming the values of a culture. Their social role, then, is twofold: to reflect and to affect. The relationship between faith and culture, then, can be accurately described by Durkheim’s theory.

Marx offers us a searing but often accurate depiction of the influence of religion on simple minded people. Any religion, such as the Christianity in the Europe of Marx’s day, which focuses primarily on the afterlife to the exclusion of the here and now, can be used as a means of exploiting the oppressed. If one’s faith constantly points one to heaven instead of earth, then one can be blinded to the injustices on earth.

So, each of these theories, and functionalism in general, offers us some insight into the role which expressions of religion play in their context. But each of these theories is also limited to the perspective of the person creating the theories. This is the sad truth of any theory, which demonstrates the danger of over-arching theories.

Functionalist theories of religion, like all theories of religion, tend to see religion through the lens of whatever happens to most interest the person creating the theory. Freud, whose main interest was psychoanalysis, saw religion through the lens of his theories on human psychology. Durkheim, whose main interest was sociology, saw religion through the lens of sociology. And Marx, who brought us communism, saw religion through the lens of economic exploitation. That Freud, Durkheim and Marx each crafted theories of religion which were colored by the lens of their interests and respective areas of expertise is not surprising, and does not discredit their work. But it does remind us that any theory of anything created by anyone is limited to a single perspective, no matter how broad that theory pretends to be. This is why every functionalist theory of religion identifies a different function as the means by which to best understand religion.

Additionally, functionalist theories of religion provide us with a view of religion which is often unrecognizable to religious people. They fail to take into account the experience of religion, and fail to account for the perspective of those who experience religion from the inside. In this way their perspective is particularly limited. It is certainly worth asking whether any description of a religion which does not account for the experience of that religion is, in fact, too limited to be an accurate description. In other words, do scholars miss the point when they look at religion entirely from the outside? I suspect that they often do.

The real problem with functionalist theories of religion, however, is ultimately not found in the conclusion of the theory, whichever one you are looking at. Rather, the real problem is found in the often unstated assumptions of functionalism in general. This is particularly apparent in functionalist theories of religion, whose success rest on these assumptions:

1. There is such a thing as “religion” as a whole, which is distinguishable from individual religions.
2. Religion (as a single thing) has an identifiable function (and presumably only one).
3. Religion is reducible to that function.


The first assumption, that there is such a thing as religion, almost requires a kind of Platonic form of religion, in which all individual expressions of religion somehow participate. Any description of this “form” religion must be sufficiently broad to cover all of the things which we identify as religions, or else it runs the risk of using the term “religion” in such a way that no one would recognize it. But how could such a broad term be narrow enough to exclude many objects of devotion or sources of meaning which are certainly not considered religious?

I grew up going to University of Kentucky basketball games. These games, in the minds of many Kentuckians, have an almost religious significance. A friend of mine even observed that they have a kind of liturgy, with everyone rising and sitting in unison in response to prompts. The entire crowd would chant in unison, and would even lift up heartfelt cries of joy or pain to some unseen deity in the hopes that it would affect the events on the court. Could any theory of religion be sufficiently broad enough to cover every single instance of what we would call a religion and yet leave out the experience of die hard Kentucky basketball fans? Could any theory of religion which included rooting for a basketball team as a religion be taken seriously as a religious theory?

Mircea Eliade argues that there is no such thing as religion, or, at least it makes no sense to speak of it. But, there are religions, which are best understood on their own terms rather than as a part of some overarching theory of religion. This view is, at the very least, a great deal more respectful of individual religions than the broad functionalist theories, even if it does not allow for us to make as many connections from religion to religion.

The second assumption, that religion has an identifiable function, rests on the first assumption. If we cannot identify this thing, religion, then we cannot say that it has any function, since we cannot say that it exists at all. But, as problematic as this is, there are other equally problematic assumptions. The first is that all religions serve the same function. This is, at the very least, not obvious. Do indigenous religious traditions, which are often tied to a particular land and associate the sacred with that land, serve the same function for indigenous peoples as Christianity, which often undermines any attempt to connect the sacred with anything earthly?

Another problematic assumption contained within the assumption that this thing religion has a function is the assumption that different expressions within the same religious tradition serve the same function. Can fundamentalist Islam, with its connection to terrorism, possibly serve the same role as the more Westernized, liberal Islam that it does not even recognize as Islam? It is certainly not obvious that a religious expression which tends toward a violent exclusivism has the same function as a tolerant, peaceful and almost pluralist religious expression. There is a complex variety of religious expression within any religious tradition which undermines this assumption.

The assumption that religion has an identifiable function implies, at least within any particular functionalist theory, that religion has a single function. Yet it is not obvious to me that even a single expression of religion has only one function. The experience of religion does many things for many different people, even within the context of a single faith tradition. A friend of mine used a religious experience to break the chains of chemical addiction. This was, for this person at that time, one function of religion. Not all religious people need deliverance from that kind of addiction, and not all who turn to religion for help with addiction find any comfort. Another person I know used a religious experience to help overcome the grief of divorce, which is a very different thing that overcoming chemical addiction. Each religious person has a different experience of religion, and each person uses that experience in different ways. Coming up with a theory of religion which takes all of these kinds of functions into account would require that the identified function of religion be so broad that it is trivial. This is one of the reasons why each functionalist theory of religion, despite its internal definitive claims, identifies a different function for religion.

The most problematic assumption found in functionalist theories of religion is the third one, that religion is ultimately reducible to its function. This assumption is problematic in part because it rests on the first two assumptions, neither of which is safe. But, more importantly, even if the other two assumptions were true, this assumption would still not follow from them.

It is safe to assume that there is a thing, coffee, in which all blends of coffee somehow participate. Or, at least, we can safely come up with a working theory of coffee which accounts for each individual instance of coffee. It is also safe to say, at the very least, that coffee has some sort of a function in the lives of coffee drinkers, and that, by and large this function is describable. We might say that drinking coffee, in the lives of coffee drinkers, is a kind of functional “pick-me-up.” We might even say, somewhat less safely, that while coffee might have other functions such as a pleasing taste and a social role in bringing coffee drinkers together in places like Starbucks, this “pick-me-up” function is the primary function of coffee, so it can be understood best in terms of this function.

Does it follow from all of this that coffee is reducible to its function? Of course not. To describe coffee in terms of its function is to reduce it to merely a chemical stimulant ingested in liquid form through the mouth of a tired person for the purpose of getting through the day. But this does not describe the experience of coffee. It doesn’t describe the infectious smell of coffee, which even appeals to me despite the fact that I don’t like to drink coffee. It certainly does not account for the phenomenon of decaf. The experience of drinking coffee, or even smelling coffee, or sitting in a coffee shop with people who are drinking coffee while you try not to smell it lest you buy a cup only to remember that you still don’t like the flavor; this experience is so much more rich and complex than any functionalist account.

Drinking coffee cannot be reduced to merely its function, even if a single function for drinking coffee can be established. How then can the experience of religion, in any of its many manifestations, be reduced merely to a product of its function, even and especially since no single function can be found for such a complex experience?

The real danger of functionalism, then, is that in its method it oversimplifies complex experiences, and fails to give an accurate account of those experiences. In providing a one-size-fits-all model for understanding religion it fails to account for the diversity of religious expressions and experiences. Of course, in refuting all functionalist theories with this single argument, I am at risk of doing the same thing.

Contact

Last week Sami and I went to Circuit City (what an exciting way to start a post!). This, in and of itself, is proof that if your wife doesn't share your policy of throwing out all mailed advertisements before reading them, then they might have at least some chance of getting to you. Bored, and out of legitimate reading material that wouldn't make my head hurt more than it already did, one day I started leafing through the piles of unsolicited coupons and catalogues that my wife refuses to throw away. In that pile I found a DVD ad from Circuit City, claiming that they would have RENT (follow the link to read about my relationship with that musical/movie) for the low, low price of $14.99.

RENT finally came out last Tuesday, and so, enticed by the ad (which for once did not deceive or disappoint) we found our way to Circuit City. While we were there we saw one of my all time favorite thought provoking movies, Carl Sagan's Contact, for $5.99. Since the only thing I like better than buying movies is buying good movies for ridiculously cheap prices, we proved that my anti-commercialism is all talk, and snatched it up.

Carl Sagan was a first-rate scientist (despite all of the jealous grousing about him from other scientists toward the end of his life), who earned his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Chicago, taught at Stanford (genetics), Harvard (astronomy), was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and the Director of Laboratory for the Planetary Studies at Cornell University, and served as a long time consultant for NASA. He was also behind the landmark astronomy series Cosmos, which made the Big Bang theory comprehensible to hundreds of millions of layman (and infuriated "serious" scientists, who thought that Sagan, in presenting a view of the cosmos which people like me could actually understand, had "dumbed down" astrophysics).

Sagan even combined his interest in astronomy and genetics to create a new (hypothetical) field of study, exobiology, the study of the biochemistry of alien life.

This alone might make Sagan the "starry-eyed" mystic of the scientific community. But in addition to his fascination with potential life in other parts of the cosmos, Sagan also took religious criticisms of science quite seriously. That is not to say that Sagan was swayed by the cosmological views of any religious tradition. It is instead to say that he saw that religion had a kind of function in the lives of people, an important function which science had not yet been able to perform.

Science, at its core, is concerned with describing the natural world. Religion provides that world, and our experience of it, with meaning. Thoughtful religious people have long insisted that while science is a valuable tool it, by virtue of its aims and methodology, is not concerned with and cannot provide ultimate meaning.

Sagan had the intellectual honesty to see the value in that criticism. But he also had the kind of bold, creative vision to not let the criticism stand unchallenged. Why can't science be concerned with meaning? Why can't science, and scientific insights, touch us in the same existential places as myth? Why can't, in other words, science have a religious or even mystical component?

Contact, both the novel and the movie which followed, can be seen as Sagan's bold attempt to answer those questions. Contact can be seen, like the best in science fiction, as a kind of intersection between science and mythology. Contact is Sagan's way of arguing, in the form of a story (like the best myths), that scientific observations and discoveries can, in fact, provide our experience of life with the same kind of ultimate meaning as religion.

Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religions from the University of Chicago and author of The Sacred and the Profane, argued that religion is fundamentally concerned with encountering the holy, the other. In Contact Sagan provides us with a totally natural encounter with the other in the form of contacting advanced alien life. This encounter, this contact, has profound implications both personally and corporately.

The movie, which is more concerned with character and plot than the book, follows fringe astronomer Ellie Arroway, played magnificently by Jodie Foster. One of the most moving scenes in the movie, which sets up Ellie's motivation and Sagan's approach, involves a young Ellie and her ham radio. She is a young girl whose mother died in childbirth, and she reaches out with her radio to see how far her signal can reach, and who she can contact with it.

One morning she reaches a man in Florida. Impressed by the distance, she wonders how much further her signal can reach. Could it, potentially, reach beyond the limits of Earth? Could it, in fact, reach her deceased mother?

The adult Ellie, the scientist Ellie, listens to the stars in search of extra-terrestrial life. Though she is an atheist, her work has the air of a divine calling. She in fact recklessly endangers her bright career by her quest for extraterrestrial life, marginalyzing herself by her driven search to encounter the other. For Ellie, then, the implications of contact are personal.

But Sagan is less concerned with the personal implications, and more concerned with the corporate implications. He is less concerned with the meaning which encountering the other might have for individual humans, and more concerned with what it might mean for humanity.

For Sagan we have a collective existential problem, a feeling of being alone, isolated from other forms of intelligent life. Our fundamental loneliness is made worse by the fact the we really believe that we're alone, a belief which is not contradicted by any empirical data. It is here that Sagan begins to look much more religious, particularly in the form his arguments, made through his characters (particularly Ellie, but also through the unconventionally religious "priest" and author Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConaughey). Ellie, for instance, who has no faith in faith, exercises a kind of faith when she is asked why she believes that there is extraterrestrial life. She responds, "Because if there isn't, if we really are alone, well that would be a tremendous waste of space."

Here you see Sagan's faith in an ordered universe, a universe which makes sense and can be understood. But you also see his over-emphasis on rationality, particularly understood in human terms.

Humans, it can easily be argued, are not alone even if there is no life on other planets. This is because of the extreme diversity of life on this planet. And if you focus not solely on rationality, but include a much wider range of traits, you can see that we have a great deal in common with, and a fundamental connection to, much of the life which surrounds us.

Evolutionarily speaking this is obvious, as one of the core tenets of Darwinian evolution is that all life evolved from a single ancestor (and if ever there were a scientific theory which had religious implications, that is it). But this is also true in more experiential ways. I am united with all mammalian life by a shared set of characteristics. More broadly, I have sentience (the ability to experience pleasure and pain, and to express preference) with a wide variety of life-forms. More narrowly, I am part of one of many types of primates who care for and are concerned about their young and their mate.

So, even if per Sagan's terms we are alone, we are still not alone, since we are surrounded by other forms of life on this terrestrial ball.

But Sagan is concerned with:

a.) extraterrestrial life
b.) intelligent life, and
c.) extraterrestrial life which happens to be (and this is crucial) more intelligent and more advanced than we are.

For him it is this encounter with the more powerful and more intelligent other which has such profound existential implications. This is in part a response to a post-modern critique of science.

Post modernism looks at the advances of the modern world, and asks what they have gotten us. This view is best represented by the character Palmer Joss, who while appearing on the Larry King Show to support his new book, which is an attack on our technological society, is asked if he is anti-technology, or anti-science. He says no. He is not opposed to science or technology per se, but he has to ask this question:

Are we better off for our technology? Are we happier because of it?

His answer is that we are not. In fact, he sees us as being a great deal less happier despite all of our technological advances, because we have looked to technology as a kind of savior, and it has failed to be that savior. Technology is a tool, neither good nor bad on its own. Its value rests in how it is used.

Palmer's position reminds me great deal of that of the Swiss theologian Hans Kung (I still can't get this program to put an umlaut over that u!), who offered a great post modern critique of science and technology in light of the first and second World Wars. Kung argued that our reliance on technology as a kind of savior led to depression and disillusionment in the aftermath of these wars, whose catastrophic death tolls devastated Europe and were the direct result of our technology outpacing our ability to use technology in a morally and spiritually responsible way.

Sagan does not dodge this criticism. In fact he himself presents it. But he does answer it, and he answers it with a kind of faith. In his story it is the technology which is a tool rather than an end which makes the extraterrestrial contact possible.

But I am less concerned with outlining plot than I am with analyzing meaning. If you are interested in how the contact comes about, watch the movie. Here I am interested in what the contact represents. This is because, in the movie, I see the extraterrestrial encounter as a kind of religious experience. I have mentioned Eliade's notion of religion being fundamentally about encountering the holy. For Sagan, in Contact the holy turns out to be a part of the natural universe. The meaning-providing experience is not with something supernatural, but with something supra-natural. It is an encounter with a higher intelligence, an intelligence which will (it is hoped) help us reorder our lives and bring us back from the brink of destruction. But that intelligence is not found outside of the natural realm, but rather within it.

Here I think Sagan is offering a sensible critique of the religious perspectives which offered him such a valuable critique of science. Here Sagan is saying that science as the heir to religion can do religion better than religion, because it does not have to posit something outside nature, distant and removed from us.

The universe is such a fantastically large place that just thinking about its quite possibly infinite size can existentially disorient you. The astronomers of the "Deep Field Project" have, using the Hubble space telescope, discovered that visible space contains over 50 billion galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy, contains over 400 million stars. Our star, the sun, contains almost all of the matter in our Solar System. Our planet, which seemed impossibly large until very, very recently, contains less than 1/10th of 1% of the matter in our solar system. So when we compare ourselves to the enormity of the known (natural) universe, we are so impossibly small as to be insignificant. Cosmically speaking there is no real size difference between us and, say, the mites which live in our eyebrows.

With such a disorienting enormity of space, why would be want to posit some Being outside that space? What good would a God even more distant and removed from us than that farthest galaxies do for us? How could that possibly help our fundamental loneliness and insignificance?

So Sagan posits a natural other, a higher power which, being limited eliminates the nasty problem of pain; and which being inside the natural realm can more easily bridge the gap between us and it.

No, this alien life is not some sort of god, but it fills some of the same needs as a god.

What are we, as religious people, to do with the critique which, through a marvelous story (and sometimes our points are made best within stories, as stories draw us in to the perspective of the story teller in a way that linear arguments often cannot - one of the many reasons I have said that Jesus teaches in stories) Sagan has given back to us? We should certainly take it as seriously as he took our critique, and hopefully that seriousness will yield as good a result.

For my part I say we need to recapture the spirit of the ancients, and look for our God within the natural realm rather than outside it. I'll explain what I mean by that another time.

There's No Place Like Hell

As I was driving around yesterday, searching for my now six-year-old nephew's birthday present (happy birthday, Josh!) an old resentment (to borrow from AA's jargon) resurfaced. I saw a car which looked like a car that I often saw in the parking lot of the church I pastored, and it dredged up old and evidently still bitter feelings.

I could judge those feelings, and my attachment to them. I could describe in detail why it is unhealthy to hold grudges and resentments. But that wouldn't help. As unhealthy as it is to carry such feelings around, it is equally unhealthy to label them and judge them. I don't need to pass judgment on my experience, I need only to experience my experience, experience the rising and falling of these emotions, and then try to let go of them.

When I was a pastor I didn't often give altar calls. This is not because I was not evangelical. In my own way I am very evangelical. Each week I told my congregation that what happens inside the walls of our church is meaningless unless it carries over into our lives outside those church walls. Each week I told my congregation that inside the walls of the church, in the experience we call Sunday worship, we encounter the grace and peace of God. As part of that experience, I told them, we are called to be agents of that grace and peace outside the safety of the walls of our church, bringing each person we meet into contact with that grace and peace.

The altar is a place in which Christians (and members of other religions) have traditionally experienced God. As such it is an appropriate place to encounter God, and ought to be used as part of the worship service. However, the altar has also been abused by those for whom religion must always be tied with guilt. The altar has been used as a weapon against sinners, and as a false antidote to sinning.

My own experience with the altar is checkered. As a fundamentalist teenager, motivated by guilt and fear, I responded to every altar call that I ever heard given. But responding to those calls, those nudges by the Holy Spirit, never took my guilt or fear away. All it did was subconsciously communicate that the grace of God was not sufficient for me. That the last time I responded to it was not enough. It help create a cyclical addiction to a particular kind of guilt-and-fear-laced religious experience.

As a pastor, chastened by my own unhealthy experience of altar calls, I vowed to do them only when I could do them right. Of course, this supposes that there is a right way to do an altar call, and that I would some day (but not today) have access to that absolutely right way. I was quickly disillusioned of this, and decided to give sporadic altar calls, checking against all of the abuses of them known to me, while also assuming that I would mess it up in my own way, and that would have to be OK.

One of my last Sundays at Mt. Zion UMC, just before I discovered just how deep the divide was between me and my congregation, I gave an altar call. With my own unhealthy experiences fresh in my mind, I decided to place a kind of check on the call. I said:

Do not come to this altar because you are afraid of hell. Instead come to this altar motivated by a desire to authentically encounter the presence of God in a real way.

No one responded, and I didn't think much of it until the next week, when we were scheduled to have our Charge Conference.

A Charge Conference is supposed to be meeting over which the District Superintendent presides, and in which all of the official church business for the year gets done. People are appointed to serve on various committees, the pastor's salary is set, the state of the building and the parsonage is accessed, the church finances are examined, etc. It is an extremely important meeting for the life of the church, and it is decidedly not the time to air complaints.

However, for this Charge Conference a faction of the church, motivated by a desire to get rid of me, literally stormed the floor and took over the meeting under the threat of physical violence. They then, claiming they had been told to do this by God, aired their list of complaints against me. At the top of their list, sure enough, was my final altar call.

In their vindictive rant they quoted me as having said:

Do not come to the altar if you are afraid of hell.

The difference between that and what I actually said was just one word, but that one word makes all the difference in the world. They claimed that I was intentionally excluding the entire church from the altar, because I disagreed with them about the wrath of God. They claimed that I wasn't really interested in saving souls, because in cutting out the threat of hell I was removing the only motivation to seek God.

[note: at this point my writing was interrupted by a pillow fight with my one-year-old son. He grab a pillow off the couch a clobbered me with it, then started giggling. I had to get him back!]

For them fear of God - not the awesome respect for the Holy, the Other, the divine, but real terror of what God might supernaturally do to them if the stepped out of line - was the fuel for their religious machine. I have before called their God the whack-a-mole God, the God standing over and above humanity, with a supernatural mallet, waiting to bash our brains in if we stick our head up.

As their pastor I tried to give them a different vision of God and a different experience of religion, but they rebelled against that. And now that I'm not their pastor I can't have any control over the way that they see me, the way that they describe me to themselves and others. I can't challenge their misrepresentation of what I said in that altar call, and I can't challenge their misinterpretation of my teachings.

My emotional response to this is teaching me that, just like them, my machine needs fuel. And just like them, my machine is run on an unhealthy fuel. If guilt and fear drive them, then the need to control, the need to be understood, drives me. And just like with them, this fuel drives me to the edge of hell.

The fear of God - again, not the awesome respect for God which is sometimes characterized as fear - and the fear of eternal damnation lead to an unhealthy religious expression, a cyclical pattern of behavior which makes no sense to those outside it.

I was once on that cycle. Now I am on a new cycle. Now, rather than being motivated by an existential dread I am motivated by a need to control, a need to be right, and to be seen as right. And so when I think of the lack of control I had and have over that congregation's interpretation of me; when I think of my inability to make them understand me, what I was trying to teach them, and why I was trying to teach them what I tried to teach them; when I think of the fact that their misquoting of me will stand forever unchallenged; I feel resentment. The same resentment I used to feel toward the God who I thought consigned people like me to eternal damnation.

Life is full of all kinds of hells, and there's no place like hell.

But that's not how the story has to end. If hell is an irrational pattern of behavior based on unhealthy ideas, then the way out of our temporal hells is to break that cycle. That cycle is still broken by the grace of the God who tells us not to take ourselves or our mistakes so seriously.

Both of the errors presented here; the tendency towards fear and the need to control come from a lack of faith. We experience these things because we do not trust God. We either do not trust God to be good, or we do not trust God to be God. In doing so, in either case, we really fail to appreciate that God is God, and that we are not God. God's will, unmitigated by our fear or desire to control, is the operating principle of the universe.

To realize that is to experience heaven, to rebel against that is to experience hell.

What Can Migrant Workers Teach Us About Salvation?

This past Sunday I got to preach at the 8:45 communion service at my church, Fourth Ave UMC. I was planning to either reproduce the sermon here or blog about the experience of climbing behind a pulpit for only the third time since I resigned my pastorate and left professional ministry. But since I'm not an "either/or" or a "both/and" kind of guy, I've decided to skate a fine line between the two.

Part of that is due to the nature of my sermons. They are almost impossible to reproduce, because so much happens in the room but not on the page. I'm not a particularly dramatic preacher in the conventional sense. I don't jump up and down, I don't alternate between screaming and whispering, I don't make grand gestures with my hands. But, when I preach, it is dramatic in the since that, much like an actor, I communicate with much more than just the plain meaning of words.

As such, so much of the sermon never makes it to the page. In recognition of this, after I'd given a few sermons I stopped writing them down. Instead I would just write down a line or two, a brief sketch of the sort of thing that I'd want to say. Then I would sketch an outline of the main points, and how they lead to each other. And that's it.

No sermon on the page. Just notes which make since only to me. If I gave you the notes I wouldn't give you the sermon, since the sermon exists only in my head.

Because of this my sermons are/were fluid. I've given the same sermon at several different congregations, but it was never really the same sermon. In fact I've given the same sermon more than once on the same day in the same room, but it wasn't really the same sermon.

My sermon on Sunday was titled "What Can Migrant Workers Teach Us About Salvation?" The text for it comes from Matthew 20:1-16, the parable of the workers in the vineyard. The first time I preached from that text I was the youth minister at Epiphany UMC in Louisville, KY. I filled in for the pastor every time he went on vacation, which meant I got to preach there at least 3 or 4 times per year.

The sermon changed considerably when I took my ill-fated appointment to pastor Mt. Zion UMC, near Willisburg, KY (you know you are in the middle of nowhere when you have to say "near Willisburg," as I'm sure that many of my readers haven't even heard of Willisburg!). There it was part of a series I gave on parables as "teaching stories." Each sermon began with the line "I love stories," (the church, in fact, joked with me that they would change the bulletin to say "Story of the Day" instead of "Message") and then I would explain:

a.) what it was about stories that I loved so much, and
b.) what it was about this story that spoke to me.

Seems kind of cheesy, looking back at it, but it was one of the few things that I did there that really worked.

That's because I really do love stories, and I'm not alone in that. In fact, I think that everyone loves stories, which is one of the reasons Jesus taught with them so often. A good story can bridge the distance between opposing points of view. A good story can cross a cultural divide. A good story can even, as a kind of shared experience, bring mortal enemies together for a moment. Stories have a kind of almost magical power.

The Bible is full of stories, and as we grow those stories grow with us. My treatment of the story found in Matthew 20:1-16 - even though the text of that story remains of course the same - changed a great deal as I preached on it in different environments. The sermon I gave at Mt. Zion was very different from the sermon I gave at Epiphany (for one, I didn't use the awkward phrase "existentially meaningful concept of salvation at Mt. Zion). The sermon I gave this past Sunday at Fourth Ave. was very different from the one I gave at Mt. Zion. I have grown, and my understanding of the story has grown with me.

The great thing about a story is that - if it is a good story - while it has meaning, it doesn't have a meaning. A story, in other words, doesn't mean "this" as opposed to "that." It can't be reduced to a single interpretation, a single perspective, a single message, a single meaning. Rather it is the meaning that it contains. But it also teaches us something, and so communicates meanings, messages, perspectives and interpretations to us.

A story invites us in to the story-teller's point of view, and in doing so helps us to see things that we could not have seen otherwise. By showing us how one sees instead of just what one sees, the story communicates a great deal more than the lesson. This may be one of the many reasons why Jesus so often (if the Synoptic Gospels are to be trusted) taught in stories. I know that many times we wish that Jesus would have just come out and said whatever it was that he meant, but he used these great stories for a reason. They expand our understanding to the point that we can no longer reduce his teachings to "this" or "that."

The story found in Matthew 20:1-16, the parable of the workers in the vineyard and the subject of my sermon on Sunday, is an illustration of Jesus' point that "the first shall be last and the last shall be first" (Matthew 19:30 and 20:16). But along with that it is also a view of the nature of salvation. Jesus begins his story with "the Kingdom of heaven is like..." and then tells this story. So in this story we see the nature of salvation rather than merely a theological description of salvation.

So the question is, what does this story teach us about salvation? Or, as I put it in the title of my sermon, what do migrant workers (and this story about them) teach us about salvation?

That's right. While this story is about the kingdom of heaven, it is also about migrant workers. It is about a group of people who gather in the marketplace hoping against hope to get some work. So, to understand what this story has to say about salvation we have to be able to step inside the experience of the workers in the story, and then understand that their experience is our experience.

The traditional understanding of the story is that it is a kind of allegory (and it is always dangerous to deal with stories as allegories, since in an allegory everything must directly correspond to something else, which creates a whole set of interpretive problems that I won't go into here. Suffice it to say, with JRR Tolkien - who was accused of allegory himself - "I detest allegory wherever I smell it."). In this treatment, we are the workers, God is the landowner, the work in the vineyard is our work for God, and the day's wages is the eternal life which is our reward.

This is not a bad or wrong understanding of the story, but it is an incomplete one, which contains a few problems. If salvation is primarily seen merely as access to heaven after you die, and if the work you do for God is seen primarily as a labor not of love but for a wage, then a few things may follow which we would not want to follow.

1. Life here and now, if it is merely preparation for or a test for enterance to a new life, is meaningless. If our concept of salvation sucks the meaning out of life in the here and now, then it doesn't help us very much, does it?

2. If the work which we do for God is labor for a wage rather than a labor of love, God is more like an employer than a lover or a parent.

3. If all receive the same wage from our employer God, regardless of their work, then our employer God is unjust, even if it is within his (as the male landowner in the story) rights to do what he wants with his property.

So while it is helpful to understand that at the end of the day there is a reward for our faithful labor, if our concept of salvation stops here it is incomplete at best, empty and meaningless at worst.

In my sermon I told stories of people I know who's lives were not aided by this concept of salvation as merely a reward in the afterlife. I will spare you those stories, because they are so context dependent. The point I draw out of those stories, however, is this:

To understand salvation we have to understand that it is a solution to a problem. If you save me from drowning after I fall into a lake, then the salvation which you offer me is a solution to that problem. When we talk of God saving us we also talk of salvation as the solution to a problem. That problem is sin

Whatever else sin is, it is the obstacle between you and God. And the problem with the concept of salvation as merely access to heaven and eternal life is that it does not truly solve the problem of sin. This is because with sin there are ultimately two problems:

1. The penalty of sin, which the Bible tells us is death.
2. The presence of the sin itself, which stands between us and God, keeping us from God, and so from our own true nature.

Salvation as access to eternal life in heaven solves the first problem. It removes the penalty of our sin, and so (ultimately) removes the fear of death. Salvation seen like this rescues us from the threat of hell, and that is no small thing. But it does not yet make us creatures fit for heaven. This is because while the penalty of sin is removed, the sin itself, if salvation is understood merely in the terms we've used thus far to describe it, remains. Salvation, because it has not yet offered us anything in the here and now, has not yet given us power over our sinful nature.

To understand salvation, and our experience of salvation, better, let us look at the story (Matthew 20:1-16) from the perspective of one of the migrant workers:

At the crack of dawn you get up, but you've almost forgotten why you bother. You haven't had work in months, and you're starting to lose hope. You're not as young as you used to be. Your knees and back ache, and you start to wonder whether or not you can still do the work you used to do in the fields before the landowners starting looking past you to all of the younger, more able bodied workers. This culture can be unforgiving on the aging and the weak, and so you try your best to deny that you are both.

You head to the marketplace, wondering if perhaps this will be the day your luck turns around. But as you enter the marketplace you see all of the other people fighting for the same few spots as you. Each has the same aim. To be chosen. To be selected. To be wanted.

The landowners, the wealthy men who run the farms and vineyards that might need you help for the day, come into the marketplace looking for a few hands to fill out their work force. They immediately go after the young, the strong, the handsome, the able-bodied. Those chosen few have the chance to get picked up for more than a day. You're just hoping to con some poor rich soul into one day's work.

Perhaps, as the rich landowners look over the throng of potential workers, you try some subtle or not-so-subtle tricks to get noticed. Inside you are almost doing jumping jacks, yelling as loud as you can, "PICK ME! PICK ME!" Of course you wouldn't really do that, because such a reckless action would betray your desperation, and nothing could sabotage your hope of being chosen like the stench of desperation.

The morning plays out just like it did yesterday, the day before, the day before, and the day before, for as far back as you can remember, it seems. The landowners have made their morning rounds and selected the best and most promising workers from among the ranks of the unemployed. Its time to find something else to do with your day, again. But what? What could you do? As you start to wonder what your options are, as the other workers start to gather themselves and leave, one landowner comes back to survey the crowd again.

This landowner, it seems, did not pick up quite enough workers the first time around. The crowd has thinned some because of the workers who gave up hope, but there are more than enough able bodied workers, and you doubt that you can compete even with the ones that are left. How many jobs could this man have, anyway?

The landowner picks some more workers, and heads back out. Once again you've wasted a whole morning, waiting for nothing to happen. But just as you are ready to give up, that same landowner, the crazy one with too much work, comes back. Wanting to cast off all your remaining dignity and jump up and down, begging to be noticed, you start to approach the landowner. But how will that look? Won't that betray your desperation. Once again you force down that impulse, and try as subtly as you can to look like you would be a good worker.

But again you are disappointed. Again you are passed over. Again others are chosen, others are selected, others are employed, but not you. Another disappointment in a long line of disappointments. Another chance to see first hand just how worthless you are. Another chance to relive each of your past failures, as you contemplate how you got here. How could you be here? How could you be so unemployed, unemployable? How could you have squandered so many chances to be somebody, to do something with your life?

Despair sets in. You start to wonder why you bother to get up in the morning, why you bother to breath in and out each day, why you bother to continually go through the motions of a meaningless life. You have nothing better to do, nowhere else to be, so you lean against the wall in the marketplace and take a swig from the flask that numbs your pain and gets you through your days.

Society has lots of names for someone like you, but it seems to have forgotten your name. Do you even have a name anymore? You take another swig, which burns all the way down your throat. Then you throw your flask in disgust, put your head down, and go to sleep.

Someone taps you on the shoulder. It's the crazy landowner, and he wants to know what you're doing, just standing around the marketplace. Don't you want to work? Of course you want to work! Well, come on. You've finally been chosen, finally been selected. So you set of to work for the landowner, because he chose you. He gave you something to do, some way to fill your time, some kind of purpose and meaning.

If we see the story from this perspective we understand that, no matter what the text says, all of the workers did not receive the same reward. Sure they may have received the same wage at the end of the day, but their days were spent very differently. In fact, the worker who spent the whole day waiting to be selected may be in the best position to understand that the work is the reward.

This is what salvation is like. This is what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Salvation is not just what happens to us after we die, it's what fills our life with meaning in the here and now. Understood this way salvation is a life changing experience, which empowers us.

This understanding of salvation is consistent with the Wesleyan understand of the grace of God, which while understanding God's grace as one thing, divides it up into three categories:

1. Prevenient grace
2. Justifying grace
3. Sanctifying grace

Prevenient grace is the grace of God active in your life before you are aware of God. It orders your life in such a way that it brings you to a place where you can enter into a relationship with God. In our story it was prevenient grace which brought the worker to the marketplace and set up the eventual encounter with the landowner.

Justifying grace is the grace of God which removes the penalty of our sins. It is found in the traditional understanding of our story. Justifying grace brings us out of the pits of hell and makes it possible for us to experience heaven. But by itself it does not bring us into heaven.

Sanctifying grace is the grace of God which transforms us and makes us into a new creation. It removes our sinful nature and replaces it with the nature of Christ. Sanctifying grace makes us creatures fir for heaven. Sanctifying grace is found in the work.

This gives us a fuller picture of the story, and helps us see the power of stories. In stories we have not a single point but many points, many perspectives. Each of these perspectives helps drive us closer to the God who is more than just our idea of God, but who exists independently of our ideas.

I could here get into why I think that it is beneficial for us to see salvation in the way presented here. I could tell more stories about how seeing salvation in this way, as bringing meaning into our lives in the here and now and giving us power over our sinful natures, has been helpful to me and to many others. But I won;t because I've already written too much for one post, and because I am interested in discussion.

This is not my sermon. I can't recapture my sermon for this blog, and even if I could it would not be appropriate. This is instead a sketch of the sort of thing I said, and why I said it. I have here added things that I did not make as clear on Sunday and subtracted things which might clarify some unclear points here. But my hope is that all of that will come out in discussion.

I am particularly interested in hearing from people who are not persuaded by the Wesleyan/Methodist approach to "Christian perfection." I've outlined some strength, but there are weaknesses that I hope someone will offer for me so that we can discuss them and, in doing so, see why becoming too attached to any idea about God or anything else is dangerous.

The Bane of Digital Cable

Since this post reads uncharacteristically like a real blog, I've decided to add (in the High Fidelity spirit of "It's not what you're like, but what you like that matters") this:

Current listening:
Deitaphobia, Lo Fi versus Sci Fi
Morella's Forrest, From Dayton With Love
David Gilmore, Live in Concert (DVD)

Current reading:
Sunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Thank you, Brian Cubbage. Merry Christmas to me!)
Ken McLeod, Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention

Current watching:
Ghostbusters (Sami, can we please watch this tonight? It's been so long since we've had a movie night. I know the Olympics are on, but...)

This past Friday my mom called me to ask if I was interested in going to see Driving Miss Daisy at the Lexington Opera House. My parents have season tickets to the Broadway Live series, and evidently feel like they need to bribe me from time to time to get me to visit them (and more importantly, bring their youngest grandchild to visit them). I wasn't too interested in Driving Miss Daisy, but since it is one of my wife's all time favorites, and since we were offered tickets for the low, low price of visiting with my family, I couldn't turn it down. [note: I was wrong about Driving Miss Daisy. It was a fantastic show. Now I can see why it one the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. My bad.]

Because I'm a doofus, the tickets ended up being not exactly free. That's because, like a moron, I parked in a pay parking lot, but didn't put any money in the slot. Insert predictable parking ticket. I guess the seats were free, but the parking was pretty expensive. You know the show was good when I got us a parking ticket and Sami didn't even complain about it.

Never one to leech off my parents and then run (I really do enjoy visiting them, I promise) we spent the weekend with them in Lexington. The problem was, between the snow and the extreme cold, there wasn't much to do. Of course, my parents have digital cable, so who needs something to do? According to Dad, there were like 17 different college basketball games on, so why not just plop in front of the TV with our standard Wheat Thins and Slone's Signature Guinness Dark Beer Cheese and watch basketball until our eyes bleed?

As an added bonus, we could watch our beloved (and insufferable, this year) Kentucky Wildcats lose yet another winable game. Alas, UK disappointed us (not really) by putting together their best performance in recent memory, wiping the floor with South Carolina in the second half. But there were many more games to watch.

We flipped over to the channel promising The Florida v. Arkansas game, at which point I realized that, if you've got something like 900 television channels, some of them are bound to behave strangely.

Instead of Florida v. Arkansas (the only game in which I can ever remember rooting for Arkansas) we got an infomercial for Yoga Booty Ballet. I couldn't make that up. Click on the link to see what its all about. We watched it dumbfounded, unable to tell whether or not we had accidentally stumbled on some Saturday Night Live parody, or the genuine article. It was simply the funniest thing I've seen in my life, made all the more funny by the fact that it didn't seem to know how funny it was.

You simply have to buy Yoga Booty Ballet, no matter what it costs. The laughter alone will shape and tone your abs.

Other than that, I still have nothing of substance to say. A cold and severe sleep deprivation (comes with the parenting territory) have robbed me of my brain cells. Please forgive the banal blogging. And, don't forget to contribute to the discussion at Habakkuk's Watchpost. There have been a couple of really good comments lately. Food for thought, and all that.

Join the Conversation

The good folks at Habakkuk's Watchpost are having a discussion about my post, Scriptural Evidence For the Trinity?. Since I've been participating in that discussion/defending myself against accusations that I'm not a Christian, I haven't had or made the time to write another "real" post. One's coming, I promise. In the meantime, if you're bored, join the conversation.