In Search of Questions

My Greek professor at Harding started out our studies by pointing out that Greek would not answer any of 'issues-oriented' questions we had. All of us hoped that the syntax of the language would clear up all the doctrinal lines that we wanted to have layed down in stone. We were sick of wondering if our church was actually doing things right, and all of us had the illusion in our eyes that perhaps Greek would give us the ammunition to prove the Baptists wrong. Our professor denominationally loyal as he was, still informed us that this would not be the case. We all stared with eyes glazed over so as to ask, "then why the heck do we need to learn it?" Then came the annoying yet wonderfully true words, "Studying will not answer your questions, so much as just teach you to ask different ones."

I think my whole education, and all the reading I've done since has shown that to be the case in life. Rarely if ever do we get answers to the things we assume are important. I used to think it a crucial question to know whether instrumental worship music was wrong in God's sight, or whether baptism was essential to salvation. A few years later I'm amazed that so much of my thought was controlled by questions that I now feel are utterly ridiculous.

I spent my early years as a Christian with all my questions focused on God's plan of salvation, which was broken down into 5 easy steps resulting in a lifetime of church attendence and mediocrity. Or, I was focused on preaching the word, gaurding the truth, and spreading the good news across the world. Yet, I never thought much about humanity as a whole. I never probed into God's emotion toward poverty and isolation in human existence. I never thought to question the fragmentation of families, societies, or our world at large. I was so focused on church and what I perceived to be 'Truth', that I never asked questions of the true nature of Love, or the true mission of Jesus, or even of the character of God.

I never knew what questions to ask. Years later I look back on my former concerns and feel disgust at the triviality of them.

"The gospel . . does not simply provide an answer to our human quesitons, but even transforms this human, all-too-human, questioning. It is a criticism, purification and deepening of human requirements."

I'm amazed that a few short years ago I thought the mission of God consisted of imploring people to sexual morality, church attendance, general propriety, and not cussing. I think for the past year I've been awakening, perhaps bitterly, to the reality of how far I have been from understanding the true call of the gospel, as though its essence consisted of some moral decency and not something far more demanding. I've been learning that I was focused on the wrong questions. I think in a lot of ways I'm searching for new ones.

Maybe despite all the ambiguity I have towards Jesus, I feel quite confident that he knew what questions to ask. I don't get the impression that he wasted much time focused on the wrong things. He's definitely my Lord in that: I can search all over, but not find a mind or life as purposed as his was toward the right things.

An Apology

I've got this teacher right now who in her lectures incessantly points out that "The answer is always in the question." She means on our multiple choice tests if the question is asking about a chronic condition, we should look for the answer with the word "chronic" in it. I think this is really interesting in light of the theology I've been reading on the side. I'm currently splitting my time between Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Hans Kung's On Being a Christian. In the latter, I just got done with a long section on the modern sciences and humanism, with the challenge that they pose to religious faith. When it all comes around toward the end of the section, Kung takes a very courageous stand on the existence of God. First let me say by God he has no intention of implying 'God the Father'. By God he is starting with the simple idea of an absolute transcendent reality. A reality that ultimately gives meaning to existence, and in some way assigns a direction to life. Kung tries to give a firm, philisophically sound argument for the reality of God. The cool thing is the way he uses philosophers, especially Kant, to offer the structure to his argument.

The funny thing about it is that he ultimately comes to the conclusion that the answer is in the question. In short, the question of God relies on the presupposition that God is. Here's what that means: Man's attempt to apprehend God and God's existence is based on man's experience. We find ourselves in a world where by experience we learn to interpret what is "real". The problem is that in using ourselves as the absolute starting point, we have no means by which to justify our experience as being truly reflective of reality. (we could easily transition here to the Indian concept of samsara, but we'll save that for another day)

When man declares atheism in any of its forms, man ultimately is inadvertently placing himself at the universe's center as the true judge of what's real. The problem is that this leaves man as the ultimate end and purpose of existence. Man is thus required to supply his own meaning to existence. We revert back to the age old question of "What is the meaning of life?" The result is the same it has always been with one of two possible answers.

1) Nothing. That being, life has no ultimate purpose or direction and thus man's existence is one of absurdity. In this case we can take any number of ideologies to add whatever meaning we would like. Maybe Nietzsche suits us best and we delve into egocentric self-gratification that results in an inevitable competition between egos in which the fittest wins, and evolution proceeds on to the "superman". Maybe Thomas Jefferson is a better choice and we all need to pursue happiness as individuals among a society . . . even if at the mercy of capitalist ideology that results in oppressive imperialism, ecological violence resulting in a slow suffocation of the planet we live on, as well as generalized discontent with such human systems of "meaning". The 'maybes' could go on forever, and ultimately maybe they should, because it's all the same anyway: because any meaning that man supplies for himself is only a creation of his own and can never apply unilaterally, and if it is only partially applied, then it is hollow. Nihilism is then the fact that we may blind ourselves to, but which nonetheless remains the ultimate end of our existence.

2) God. Not automatically in any religious sense, but instead in the sense of a prevading reality that is the meaning of human existence. God is purpose and direction that is not merely our creation.

The problem is, if we ask the question of God's reality, we are supposing that our experience of existence carries some weight by which to make such a judgment, and in this we are presupposing that existence itself has meaning by which we can decide such a question. In essence, to ask the question of God rests in the authority that such a God provides to interpret our experiences.

One thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't lend the slightest weight or the least sense of victory to religious people. Just because God exists doesn't mean you know anything about him. All our metaphors, anthropomorphisms, myths, claims, creeds, and theories of God are not proved in the least by the simple reality of God. Such consequences of God have been warred over, and on a few rare occasions discussed respectfully between religious people. And at this point in the history of our planet, the last thing we need is more fanatacism over the human endeavor to understand the Reality on which we rely. Assurance of God does not afford us arrogance. Instead, with humility, we all can begin in the very least with assurance of God being the ulimacy of reality based on the fact that we even ask the question.

Where Have All the Artists Gone?

I remember a few years back realizing that the best sermons I had ever heard came not from a preacher, but from Caedmon's Call: a Christian band that was probly my favorite band at that time. It wasn't that the messages of their songs were truly all that profound, but instead just the fact that they came to me subtly in music.

There are lots of reasons for my aversion to preaching. I could go on and on with the personality conflicts and my general irritations at it, but I won't. The truth is I don't like preaching for a variety of complex reasons, and I'm only aware of a fraction of them. Recently though, I came to a better understanding of why. I finished reading this book called Finally Comes the Poet. The book itself was fairly technical, and aimed purely at preachers looking to improve their craft. Yet, it was the gist of the book that I found powerful. The idea is that we have lost in many aspects our life a sense of poetry. We have become confined to prose. The author did not imply this in a purely literary sense, but in a representational kind of way wanted to show ways in which our lives have become limited. We have had our lives, and especially our spiritual lives, reduced to rigid rules and formulae. This is prose. In a sense, we all live lives reduced to a conformist expression based on what is acceptable and normal. Prose still has meaning. It still has truth. Yet it is confined. It is life lived in a stifled reality.

In contrast, there is the spirit of the poet or prophet. His point is that the role of the Old Testament prophets is parallel to that of the Greek poets. Either of which could serve as a refreshing model for preaching in our day. Poets live outside the constricting reality of mundane experience. They offer up a vague, emotive representation of things as they are, and even more of things as they could be. Their call is presented with language subtle and free enough to reach beyond our reasonable concepts and invoke our hearts and imaginations into action!

This means first that we can read Scripture in an entirely new way. We are not confined to a singular meaning behind the words of our Bibles. Instead of one specific implication, Scripture is given in the language of poetry intended to free our hearts to think outside our accepted reality. Regardless of what prosaic reductions we have caged our experience in, the Bible frees us to see beyond. We are not confined by scientific dogma, just as we are not confined by literalistic assertions that fundamentalists would impose on the Bible. The language of Scripture is the language of freedom to open up entirely new realms of thought and action.

In this we can also find another truth: We live by poetry. Poetry is not just a realm of ambiguity and unfamiliar words. Poetry is art. It is a desire to rise above painting by numbers, to let our colors bleed over the blackened lines of coloring books, and to take authority to live life beyond what convention would allow us to. Our world is filled with a system that markets us with "meaningful things". As people unsure of how to find depth within ourselves and in our own experience, our world offers us depth based on what some other expert would give us, for a price.

Our lives are easily controlled by catalogues, fashion trends, celebrities, and the opinions of "experts". From so many outside sources we find thick black lines laid down for us with instructions to color inside as we would like. We find grammatical rules controlling the speech by which we should be freed to imagine. And, that is what poetry does. By poetry we are set free into the dreams which we may then speak and act out into reality.

We come to church with the desperate need to find a new poetic voice. We have lived for too long in the preconceived notions of our popular culture. We need to hear something refreshing. Something that sets us free.

Instead we often hear a bland, prosaic rephrasing of the same old crap we've dealt with our whole lives. We are presented with life as structure. Life as grammatical correctness. Life as a molded, cookie cutter reality. Life ordered from a catalogue. We receive Bible classes packaged neatly into quarterly series. We receive sermon titles tritely copying slogans from our consumer culture. We receive worship broken down into increments of time, with no sense of freedom, no place for improvisation, no room for syncopation to break the same numbing rhythm we've heard for decades.

Scripture is presented as a legal document, with clauses and factual preceding cases limiting its potential to mean something new.
Advice is given as a formula that applies to all normal situations.
Life is treated as a series of moments to be lived in propriety before judgment comes.

Opposed to this, the question remains, where are the poets? Where are the artists? Maybe the Body of Christ has too often run off those it needs the most to speak to it words of life, and open its eyes and hearts to a reality surrounding us, one of freedom! Maybe we should stop paying preachers who extrapolate life from Scripture in outline form and thus deprive Scripture and the audience of any sense of life, indeed of God. Maybe instead we should hire poets, whose ambiguous words contain enough grace to open up our eyes to a world completely different than what our own ideas had previously allowed us to see. Perhaps we need less bludgeoning with doctrinally sound interpretation, and instead need a gentle artistic proposal that opens up our minds to find our own interpretations in the freedom of God's Holy Spirit.

The Essential Function

Well, churches are in decline. This is a sign of something. Lots of believers are taking this as a sign that Armegeddon, or something worse is on the way. It means the anti-Christ is possibly here, or soon to be born. Others are taking it as a sign that religion is showing its outdated nature and is finally being forgotten. Neitzche prophesied God's death centuries ago, and we are just now catching up. Some, are taking church decline as a sociological problem: churches aren't managing to be relevant enough to draw people in. Thus the triumphant rise of church marketing and preachers ripping fashion and dialects off the latest Apple ads on TV . . . God save us.

We live in an age where religious institutions are doubted. Even in the midst of my beloved Texas, where the church reigns supreme I get the feeling that there is a haunting discomfort to many in the religion industry; as though troubled days are ahead. My preacher often talks about how "we're losing our young adults", and he's far from being the only preacher who shows concern at this state of affairs. In fact, most preachers I've listened to say something similar on a fairly consistent basis. Part of me trust that they are concerned for good reasons. Part of me wonders how much they are concerned for the fact that, should our country continue to secularize, they might not have a pay check. Or, that their check might not be substantial enough to send their kids to private school and private universities.

So, what of it? Should I be concerned that the Church, at least on American soil, is declining? Should I mention here the fact that I don't really go to "church" anymore? Believe me, I am a spiritual and religious person. I have faith. Yet it's true, I find traditional church now to be a basic waste of time. And, I feel oddly unapologetic about that. I see our secularizing culture, and I can't say it really bothers me. I recall having a conversation with a friend not too long ago about how truly refreshing it was, as a Christian, to have non-Christian friends. Almost like we needed both and had been trapped by our religious cliques for too long. We needed a breath of fresh air, apart from the stale lifeless air inside our church walls. How ironic.

I feel I should also address how many people these days claim a personal spirituality. Being secular does not automatically make people irreligious, as opposed to what church culture would have us believe. Our society is now more aware and more hungry for the spiritual realm than it had been in quite some time. Note all the shows on TV dealing with spiritual themes. Note all the movies dealing with the occult. Note even the general interest in non-traditional views on Christianity, the Da Vinci Code being only one of many examples. Our society is far from being disinterested in religion.

Anyway, all that is brought on by the new book I'm reading. What I read today was not anything new, but it was said exceptionally well. The point was that the apparent decline in religion is actually no decline at all. The leading sociologists of our time all agree that religious tendencies in our culture are just as strong as ever, only they are being channeled outside the church. For example, the fervor we witness in ecological activism, or the desire of certain people to overcome poverty are very religious in their attitudes.

What we see instead of a total decline in Church (and religion in general) is a complete change in its function. Whereas before the Church made attempts to be the sole purveyor of authority in all aspects of life, it now has had to accept a thoroughly non-authoritative approach to all activities. This is an agonizing redefinition for those who would cling to tradition, one that is being met with the most obtuse and indignant resistance. Yet, society has seen what a pathetic and ruthless monarch the Church can be, and has wisely chosen to deny it that role as far as is possible. So what now? The Church cannot be a dictator any more, not even a quiet one. Instead, it must find a new function outside the realms where it had for too long attempted to vie for power. Politics, law, education, among others are now for the most part secularized and therefore closed to religious persuesion. But, is this a bad thing? Could we not view it another way?

". . .Religion (or the Churches) has been liberated through the progressive differentiation of secondary functions (i.e. economic and educational) and could now concentrate on its proper task."

Instead of clinging nostalgically to our past when we religious people reigned supreme, maybe we could see the present, with all its irreligious contours, as a time of purification and liberation to be who we were meant to be all along! Only a fool of a Christian would state that churches with their checkered history had lived up to the Savior they claim. Now is a time of reclaiming our original heritage. Not that of dogmatic, self-assured Pharisees. Our heritage is a humble man of firm faith who loved others painfully. Our heritage is that of a man who chose no sides, in order to remain free enough to not be coerced into some ideological doctrine that sacrifices the fragile ones of humanity in the ritual of its own self-worship. Our heritage is not Church, but the Son of Man. Our heritage above Church is God's Kingdom. For if God's Kingdom is a ruin, then the Church, Christ's Bride, has no home, no shelter, no safety.

Let the Church die. If God raised the Groom, he can raise the Bride as well. Instead let us focus on the Kingdom coming. Let us set the world right, starting with the brokenness at our fingertips in the world we live in daily.

Instead of a concern for losing young adults, and a worry of losing what once was in regard to the role of the Church, maybe we should worry at the identity in Christ that we seem to have long lost and forgotten about: the essence that we have maybe never even realized we failed to grasp. Maybe the secular humanism that seems to have swept our world is good for us. We need it in order to discern who we were never meant to be, and need it more to grasp who we should have been all along. When we live up to that to which we have been called, to him by which we have been called, perhaps the world may follow suit: looking like Jesus as they learn to call on his name. . . .