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Love Wins!: Questions at Heaven’s Door, Ch 1-2

Posted on June 9, 2011 by megancastellan

Because of how the first chapter is laid out, I’m combining the first and second chapters of “Love Wins”.  Basically, the first chapter, entitled, ‘What about the flat tire?’ poses a series of questions which the book, as a whole, will answer, or attempt to answer.  (Spoiler alert.)

They are good questions, they need to be asked, and, again, Rob Bell is doing a noble, martyr-like  job in bringing them up to his community.  (Have you seen his YouTube page’s comment section recently?  His community hasn’t been so friendly.)
That being said, the questions are predicated again on assumptions  that aren’t examined.  Nearly all the situations Bell brings up are based around the idea of how you properly believe. What’s the ‘age of accountability’?  How do you know when you’ve sincerely said the Jesus prayer, and how do you know it’s worked? How are you saved, “saved” meaning “going to heaven to be with God and Jesus after you die”?
All of these are specifically Protestant concerns– more than that, they are 20-21st century American evangelical Protestant concerns.  (Fun experiment– ask any Eastern Orthodox Christian about any of what I just wrote.  See?  To make up for the fact that you just ran an experiment on them, in a gesture of ecumenical friendliness, promise to never again say the Filioque clause.).
In Bell’s defense, he makes the point that all of these things are, in face, problematic.  Have to say a prayer to “be saved”?  Ok, but what if you say it wrong?  Or you didn’t understand it?  And he’s right.  His questions are good.
My problem with what he does is that he doesn’t really deconstruct the assumptions– he just pokes them a bit.  He never asks what ‘being saved’ might mean, or, hey, how it probably means something really different for us today in middle-upper class suburban churches than it did for persecuted minority Christians in the Roman Empire.  Or for a slave in the American South in 1860.
Which gets me into chapter 3: ‘Here is the New There”. Which is about specifically about heaven.
:: takes deep breath::  When I read this chapter through the first time, I read the whole thing, getting progressively more excited, got to the end, and got really annoyed and frustrated.  Here’s why.
In Ch. 1, Bell poses all these questions about how someone gets saved, based on biblical quotes, wherein he conflates phrases like ‘kingdom of heaven’, ‘forgiveness of sins’, ‘age to come’ and ‘salvation’.  Which all mean entirely different things in context.  ‘Kingdom of heaven’, for example, means about 20 different things in Matthew, and that’s being conservative.
In Ch.2,entitled “Here is the New There,” Bell actually addresses that.  (Hooray!)  He points out that for a large part of the 1st century community, saying ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was another way of referring to God, and the reign of God on earth.  So there’s that.  (Hooray again.)
He also points out that it’s not like Jesus’s community had a clear concept of heaven-as-otherwordly-and-floaty-on-a-cloud.  Heaven, for them, was the complete manifestation of God’s will.  As he puts it.  Heaven, then, is achieved not so much by dying and getting transported somewhere else, but by doing God’s will on earth, and by participating in God’s recreation of the earth.
He follows this up by talking about how there are tons of different dimensions that we simultaneously participate in (via string theory), and heaven can be more real to us (sort of like being in love) than our present reality.
Ok.  It’s not that I disagree with Bell.  I don’t.  It’s just that I don’t think he goes quite far enough with some of the ideas he puts out there.  He’s pulling his punches.
If you are going to start to deconstruct the biblical passages that undergird ‘salvation theology’ then do it.  Tell me what exactly salvation means for Jesus. (Hint:  Jesus never says–Have a personal relationship with me.  We have jackets!)  Bell starts by pointing out that for Jesus’ community, it’s not otherworldly, but that also means it was material and physical.  It was in the here and now.
That is a huge statement to make, and it needs to be unpacked and explained, especially for an evangelical Protestant audience.  (Trust me.  I said that last night to a Lutheran college group reading this book and everyone stared at me.  Fun times!)  Bell never quite gets there.  He opens the door, but never goes through.
Also, an aspect that Bell never addresses is the communal aspect of heaven.  He brings up the story of the rich man and Jesus (Rich man asks Jesus how to enter heaven).  Salvation, being physical and not otherworldly-on-a-cloud-someplace, is also not just between me and Jesus.  When the rich man asks what he must do, Jesus responds by listing the commandments that have to do with our relationship to other people:  (don’t steal, don’t commit adultery, don’t lie, etc).  Salvation depends on others in a real way.  We are saved for each other, not from each other.

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Angli-leaks

Posted on June 2, 2011 by megancastellan

Thus far, I’ve refrained from commenting much on what’s happened in the Church of England over the past few weeks.  And by ‘refrained’, I’m excluding a Facebook status, and a ranting session to my friend in Montana.

If you’d like, Episcopal Cafe has done a very good job covering everything as it unfolded here.

Basically, if you’ll recall, in the summer of 2003, as The Episcopal Church here was getting excited over the election of V.Gene Robinson, the Church of England leaked the news that someone had nominated Jeffery John, a celibate gay man in a long-standing partnership, to be bishop of Southwark.  Chaos ensued, and finally, the +Archbishop of Canterbury stepped in and asked that he withdraw his name from consideration, “for the unity of the church,” which is what happened.  Anger was expressed at the time over the leak, because unlike in the American church, English bishops are appointed in absolute secrecy, or, at least, they are supposed to be.

Now, the late dean of Southwark cathedral’s family has released a memo detailing his take on what happened that summer.  And it reads like a 21st century version of Anthony Trollope.  You can read the memo for yourself at the link above, and I won’t repeat it here, but suffice it to say, no one comes out looking particularly pleasant, ++Rowan least of all.  Suddenly, his motivation shifts from church unity to looking like something much more upsetting.

In today’s Episcopal Cafe, Jim Naughton has an excellent piece meditating on the differences between what appears to have happened in Southwark and what’s currently happening in the walkabouts in Washington DC’s bishop election.  It raises several things that I’ve been pondering, now that I’ve gotten over my initial impulse to stage a cleansing re-enactment of the Battle of Yorktown.

So messiness will ensue whenever broken humanity is involved.  The question is, do you want to acknowledge this openly?  Or do you want to try to deny this and wait until it festers and breaks out in some horrific, even worse form?

Our Episcopal method of electing bishops might be political, but it is overtly political.  Everyone has a voice, and everyone gets to raise their voice to the rafters and make their case, even if (and I cop to this willingly) I heartily disagree with many of these voices and many of these arguments.  At no point, do we, as a church, expect the Holy Spirit to squeeze herself into a tiny back room filled with cigar smoke.  That’s a pretty tall order, and I, for one, don’t like to order around any portion of the Trinity.

So we argue and wrestle with stuff.  It’s unseemly, you might say.  But it’s also a sign of trust.  Trust in each other, trust in the Spirit, and trust that we will be led into the truth eventually, because God is still with us.  We don’t have to have all the answers right now.  (Herein the difference between a living faith and a stoic one, perhaps?)

If Jesus wrote fortune cookies, one of the better one-liners would have been “There is nothing hidden that won’t be revealed.  There is nothing secret that won’t be shouted from the rooftops.”  And man, he wasn’t kidding.  Generally, I’ve heard this interpreted to be something about how, at the Day of Judgement, everything we’ve ever done will be revealed to God.  Which, ok, that works.  But let’s give the 1st century rabbi some credit–this is also pretty pragmatic advice.

If you’re living an inauthentic life, it’s going to come up, at some point.  It’s going to wreak some havoc.  It just will. ::Insert pointed look at politician of your choice here::  Hypocrisy doesn’t work in the long run for humanity.  It hurts our brains.  We get bent into weird shapes and we get confused.  And humans are nothing if not easily confused.  We dearly love consistency.  Saying one thing and doing another is just hard to keep up for decades on end.  It has to come to an end at some point.  Someone is going to call you on it.  Whether it’s a single person being hypocritical, or an entire institution.  Or an entire planet.

Eventually, someone points it out.

And blessed are those people.  For, though they frequently get shouted down, cursed at, and run out of town on rails, they are doing the work of the Spirit.

 

 

 

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Love Wins: And so do tiny sentences, evidently.

Posted on June 1, 2011 by megancastellan

Remember that time I asked if y’all would be interested in my rambling thoughts on Rob Bell’s new book? Well, being as no one talked me out of it, I hereby begin a weekly series that shall be known as:
Love Wins! (You’d think more people would be happy.)

Part 1: Preface: Millions of Us
First off, let’s get this out of the way:
The layout is driving me up the wall.
I mean, really.
(Whole thing?
It reads like this.
Tiny little lines.
And questions? So many little questions?
Have you noticed?)

Either I am not trusted enough to read two complete sentences in a row, or he’s going for something akin to oral presentation in a written form (difficult to believe, given the overall vocabulary level of the book– that generally takes a lot of thinking/reading out loud in your head) or, option three, he’s segueing into a pseudo- poetical form, and trying to make the reader feel deep and insightful. Actually this would go along with a theory I’m beginning to develop about the way Bell is approaching this book, and its topic. More on that later.

Bell opens the book with stating something that should be apparent, but might not be, for the average reader of this book: Jesus’s central message is about God’s expansive love, but this central message frequently gets lost when surrounded by talk of heaven vs hell, and fiery damnation. So then, our struggle now is whether this heaven and hell stuff really is central (& biblical) to the message, or whether it is adiaphora. He points out that arguing and dissent is not new in Christianity, and that, in fact, the Bible records lots of debate, even with God. and, he argues that nothing he is proposing is new– it’s all been said before in the course of Christian history.

A few things:
Hooray for Rob Bell, given that he is a prominent evangelical pastor, and he is confronting this, most central, and most thorniest of issues for the Protestant-y community. That takes courage, and given the book’s reception, even before it hit shelves, he deserves credit for raising the issue. That being said…..

From reading the book, I am getting conflicting messages. On the one hand, Bell explicitly tells the reader that this isn’t new. On the other hand, the language he uses and the entire set up of the book suggests over and over that this is SHOCKING, SURPRISING, INFLAMMATORY information, that I need to be led to gently, lest my head explode. The text layout (as I mentioned before) strikes me as odd on this count as well. All short little sentences and lots and lots of questions. What are you trying to ease me into? Why am I going to need to be eased into this?!? Good Lord, man, WHAT IS HAPPENING?!?!?
At no point are there footnotes, citations, even explicit biblical verses (just descriptions). I’d expect if he’s trying to convince me of something that’s been out there before….that he’d show me these preexisting ideas. The way it reads now, despite the assertion of the preface, it seems like this is an idea, the rightness of which, has just occurred to him. (If so, honestly, even more credit to him. Changing like that is not easy. But in that case, he should cop to that. He didn’t just uncover the idea of universalism, bless his heart.).

Also, it’s striking to me, just in reading the preface, just how very assumed- evangelical this is. Which is not to say that it’s bad. It’s not. There are just many assumptions just under the surface that I don’t happen to share, being a non-evangelical, and not-so-Protestanty. For example, he makes the assumption that there is essentially a single story of Jesus unambiguously and harmoniously recorded in the bible, and that this Jesus can be easily and unequivocally understood by all people everywhere with minimal confusion.
Like I said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. My first reaction is that it’s sort of sweet, really. (Awww! Evangelical modernist assumptions!)
But it’s a big, huge assumption to make, and it guides a lot of his thinking. So, for example, he just goes ahead and cites Jesus, without making allowances for which gospel a parable appears in, what community wrote it or what their needs were, or (and this is sort of a biggie) the 2nd Temple Jewishness of everyone involved. This will come up more later, but suffice it to say that: Assumptions! Rob Bell has them.
As do we all.

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Question

Posted on May 25, 2011 by megancastellan

So, I’ve begun reading Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person who ever lived.   (I’ll say this for him:  The man is good at picking out un-nuanced subtitles.)

Would you, the blog-reading audience, be interested/willing to read my thoughts on what Sir Rob Bell doth say in this book, which has caused so much controversy in the evangelical sphere?

Because at the moment, I’m just writing emphatic margin notes.

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Adventures in Post-Modern Ministry: That Word Does Not Mean What You Think it Means

Posted on May 25, 2011 by megancastellan

On Saturday, I went to a lecture on Jacques Lacan and the use of metaphor and narrative in counselling situations.  Because I thought it would be fun!

And, also, given the number of times I preface conversations with, “But then again, I’m postmodern, so….”, I thought brushing up on actual postmodernists would be wise.

The day started out auspiciously–there was coffee!  Good coffee, readily available!  The day could commence!  (Sometimes, these things are dicey.)  In the process of acquiring said coffee (Sacrament #8), a woman came up to me, and without preamble, announced, “Your nametag is upside down.  That could be interpreted.”  She walked away, and I decided this lecture had just become the best lecture ever.  (For the record, it got caught on my hair.  I wasn’t trying to make a statement.)
In a nutshell, Jacques Lacan was a French psychologist who reexamined the teachings and writings of Freud in light of new philosophical theories of semiotics and deconstructionism.  ::crickets:::
And the fact that this previous sentence probably made little to no sense to many, many people would have made Lacan extremely excited, and proved his point.  Which was that language itself is isolating, and to be truly understood by another person was impossible.  This is also known in my small head as The Inigo Montoya Theory of Language (Or: The  “I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think That It Means” Problem.)
Basically, it goes like this:  I say something to you, using English, our common language.   You understand me well enough, being that English is our shared language, but you understand me imperfectly, because you cannot possibly understand all of the connotations, all the memories and associations and connections that are triggered for me by the words I chose, since they came from my entire lived experience, my family’s history, and everything I know of the world that is unique to me.  And, if I attempt to explain it to you, we are facing the problem of imperfect language again.  It’s a vicious cycle!  We’re all soooooo aloooone!  Sad mimes in berets!
So, then, Lacan and other French post-modernists would argue, we are continually talking past each other to some degree or another.  (Lacan, being a psychologist, would also argue that this also makes us sad, and can ultimately motivate us to have better lives, but that’s another story.)  To try to mitigate this talking-past-problem, we humans have developed the capacity for conscious metaphorical language, since our basic language isn’t conveying literal truth so well anyway.  (In fact, you could argue, and I would, that all language is metaphor; some just more conscious than other.)  Like me saying I was brushing up on post-modernism–I wasn’t literally brushing up on Lacan.  He’s dead, and that’s both disgusting and hard to do.  But it conveys something more concrete (see, another one!) to you than me saying I was re-learning Lacan.
And here’s where I think this applies to ministry.  As we’ve become more self-consciously post-modern (or, rather, many of us have, especially those among us who are youngish), I’ve noticed our metaphors becoming more self-conscious as well, and more elaborate, almost like we’re trying to construct an entire other language with more circumscribed meanings, to lessen the innate misunderstanding.  We actually want to communicate better, have that implicit understanding, and we have a growing awareness that people are different from us, and this understanding is actually not guaranteed.  So we try to manufacture ways around that.
My brother and I went for months on end, in high school and college, where we would mainly speak to each other in quotations from ‘The West Wing.’  Aside from the fact that we clearly have extremely good taste, I think it was an attempt to find a shared language, somewhere, given that at the time, we had almost nothing else in common, no common experiences to solidify our common language.  But the world of the West Wing was static enough that if we quoted that to each other, we knew what it meant.  But outside that static world?  Nope, we were ships passing in the night.
For preaching, this is huge.  For anyone in the church at all, this is huge.   If language is freighted with extra baggage, and we can’t assume any common meanings any more, then preachers have to be extra-special, super-duper careful.  And I mean it.  Anything said is liable to misinterpretation and confusion, and not just by the one guy in the fourth row who didn’t like you in the first place.
Tape the Prayer of Humble Access to your foreheads, people, and memorize it.
 In fact, maybe we need a new one for the 21st century:
“WE DO NOT PRESUME… that those words that meant one thing when we were kids still mean that same thing.
WE DO NOT PRESUME…. that the Bible verse that has been comforting to me is comforting to everyone.
WE DO NOT PRESUME…. that because I repeat a phrase over and over again, everyone knows what it means.
WE DO NOT PRESUME…that we can continue to use the same words and phrases with abandon and everyone will understand what we mean.”
The work of preaching is now as much about constructing a common language as it is about sharing the gospel.  We have to redefine ‘salvation’, ‘grace’, ‘love’ , even ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’, because we cannot assume a common, static understanding.
We have to reconstruct one for ourselves.

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