Year: 2015

Making Peace with Church

Steve Mittelstaedt

I recently watched an online panel discussion, Making Peace with Church – Finding Grace and Authenticity in an Age of Skepticism . The event was sponsored by Regent College, in Vancouver, BC, and Christianity Today Magazine. It is well worth the time.

The participants discussed what “church” actually means and why Christians need to be engaged with it. Much of the discussion was anchored around millennials, a perspective represented by panelist Erin Lane who discussed what making peace might mean for them. The back-and-forth included an insightful exchange between Lane and panelist Darrell Johnson, which laid out what is necessary to build trust with church leaders. Issues of alienation and betrayal were also discussed.

Burrow Mump, Somerset, England
Burrow Mump ruin.

Contained in this is the implicit question of why peace might need to be made in the first place. The need for peace assumes the presence of conflict — conflict without genuine reconciliation.

An an observation by panelist Scot McKnight grabbed my attention and seems relevant to this question. He described modern church culture as “fellowships of the sames,” where we meet “with people who are like us” and have the same preferences for music and preaching styles, and share similar cultural outlooks and similar economic standings. McKnight contrasted this with the early church. He characterized it as “a fellowship of differents,” who “did not naturally belong together” but rather were brought together into a “transformative community.”

I have long wondered if what passes for diversity within modern Christianity is merely balkanization. We have enormous diversity of thought, culture and practice between churches, but not much within them. We can choose to go where we like, so that’s pretty much what we do.

Panelist Hans Boersma nudged an aspect of this when he commented on denominational choices. Boersma observed that “…there’s sin behind the origin of our many denominations, our divisions.” He went on to advise “…not to strike out on our own with certain consumer choices too quickly but to be faithful to where we’ve been placed.”

The operative concept packed inside Boersma’s admonishment is consumer choice. The marketing and entertainment culture that subsumed modern society following the development of imaged-based media has become the air which we breathe but do not see. It may not be the origin of the balkanization of Christianity in the modern world but it is a significant accelerant.

Those of us who sit in judgment of others’ exercise of consumer choice tend to be unaware that we may have merely inherited someone else’s consumer choice, either those of a parent, or of a friend/significant other who introduced us to a particular church. Social preference has turned “neither Jew nor Greek” into choosing to be around only Greeks. McKnight’s “fellowship of sames” is the fellowship of an affinity group.

The problem with doing church as an affinity group is that it plays straight into our ancient history. Before we were citizens of nations, we were ethnicities and people groups. Before that we were kinship-based tribes and clans. And before the domestication of animals and mastery of agriculture, we were small kinship bands, a state which probably accounts for most of our history as a species. Affinity groups can easily slip into very tribal behaviors. Boundaries form to protect “us” and exclude “them.” Common perceptions and habits of interaction get reinforced and social pressure gets applied to conform to accepted norms.

But modern tribalization as affinity groups may be a step down from this. For good or ill, we are often attracted to people who behave in ways we got used to while growing up. Which unfortunately includes attraction to people with shared similarities in dysfunctional family histories and social habits. Their misbehavior feels normal. This dysfunction is apt to include overlapping blind spots — as participants in an affinity group we can lose an appreciation of our personal frailty. We forget what we have been forgiven and cease to forgive.

This is not a recipe for healthy navigation of inevitable personal and group conflict. The “fellowship of sames” deprives us of any real experience of God’s help in navigating real differences.

Without exposure to real difference we also lack experience in navigating real reconciliation. And the reconciliation of God and man becomes somehow insufficient for man and man. The end result is not peace. It is only armistice, with the participants avoiding notice of each other across the minefields and barbed wire.

Perhaps in addition to talking about how to make peace with church we ought to be talking about what it takes to make peace in church. We need to regain the “fellowship of differents.”

Personal Relationships (below the surface of “church”)

Steve Mittelstaedt

Lots of people are critiquing church and lots of people are leaving.  The critiques run the gamut from worship to doctrine to cultural relevancy.  In of itself this is nothing new. But something seems to be crystallizing in a growing number of formerly committed but still believing Christians described in an article by Thom Schultz on developing research as “done with church.”

It has occurred to me I might be missing something far more basic.  Thinking about how Christianity spread underground in a frequently hostile ancient world could provide some clarity.  Historical accounts are generally focused on specific events behind these events are often hints of something else.  The writing of Eusebius of Caesarea are no exception.  Eusebius documented the imprisonment, torture, and martyrdom of his teacher Pamphilus, along with members of his household.  These included the slave Porphyrius who spoke out after the condemnation of Pamphilus asking for the burial of the bodies.  There was more connecting Porphyrius and Pamphilus than their relative social positions would suggest.

Over a period of roughly 300 years Christianity grew from a local splinter sect within Judaism to become a very large minority within the Roman empire at the accession of Constantine. But in the interim treatment of Christians varied from times of toleration to periods of targeted persecution. Christians weren’t always direct objects of persecution. Sometimes they were swept up in general campaigns to restore traditional Roman values which included worship of traditional gods. Judaism was tolerated because it was backed by the history and traditions of the Jewish people. But once Christianity became distinct from Judaism it was viewed as novel superstition and inherently impious*. A refusal to sacrifice to Roman gods carried at least a possibility of impoverishment, imprisonment, torture, and death.

An aspect of Roman judicial process heightened this risk. Rome frequently relied on informants who might benefit from their involvement. These included accused criminals, delatores (paid a fee or a portion of asset confiscation), and slaves, who could benefit by emancipation. The testimony of slaves would be verified by torture which would serve to dampen but not remove the incentive.

The incentive to inform provided by the judicial system meant that persecution need not be driven by direct edict by an official. Trajan advised a governor not to hunt for Christians, but to punish them if they were denounced and convicted. If a local official was known to be hostile the prospect of personal benefit could drive the process of denunciation, particularly as Christianity penetrated the households of the well-to-do. In this context, involvement in Christianity would take on aspects of a criminal conspiracy, albeit one which placed a suicidal premium on telling the truth when caught. It would necessarily spread through networks of personal relationships between people who knew and trusted each other.

And spread it did, across class, racial, and economic boundaries, driven by belief in the resurrection and aided by a bit of corrosive equality unique in the ancient world:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female–for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Gal 3:28).

As Porphyrius and Pamphilus appeared to be. The question about why people are leaving church might hinge on answering questions about the state of our personal relationships.

Would those relationships survive contact with a hostile government?  Do I know people in my local church well enough to trust them with my personal safety?

And would they trust me with theirs?

*For an overview of see Christian Persecution at UNRV History and Anti-Christian policies in the Roman Empire.

Awe (and arrogance)

Steve Mittelstaedt

In a post at Biologos Daniel Stork Banks sketches out a personal journey.  It starts with the sense of awe at the natural world he felt as a child growing up in a non-religious home, continues with encountering with young-earth creationism at university, and then onto engagement with theistic evolution. He notes sharing that sense of awe with Richard Dawkins, as expressed in the book The Greatest Show on Earth (2009).  Banks further comments that “…we cannot afford to surrender our awe of the universe to atheists like Richard Dawkins who want to explain it by leaving God out.”

I completely agree, particularly since my engagement with Dawkins’ writings was rather different.  Several years ago, I read (most of) Dawkins’ earlier book, The God Delusion (2006), in an attempt at engagement with a different point of view.

For the most part the book appears to be an ideological assault on religious theism. Granted, superstition, evil and stupidity packaged in religious trappings provides an enormous amount of ammunition for the assault.  But this approach conflates thinking about the existence of God with religious belief and obscures honest discussion of either one.

In looking past the ad hominem aspects of the approach the core of Dawkins’ argument appears to be what he labels the “God Hypothesis” and its alternative:

  • …there exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it…
  • …any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.1

This packages an assumption that creative intelligence is necessarily complex.  The clearest statement of Dawkins’ thinking on the matter appears to be this:

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.2

The assertion ignores historical Christian thinking on the nature of God and far smarter minds have composed volumes to address the issue.3   Dawkins closes the argument by appearing to simply dismiss God’s existence with the question: “who designed the designer?”4

I would like to offer a cosmological observation in response to this question in light of what has been learned about the universe during the past century.  What is now known about the cosmos neither proves nor disproves God’s existence but it does settle at least a few of the speculations which have rattled about in philosophy and religion during the past 2500 years.

We exist inside of a spacetime box with a defined absolute boundary slightly less than 14 billion years in the past at the Big Bang.  The box also has a likely functional boundary some billions of years in the future when all the energy stored everywhere in the universe is expended.  Other boundaries may exist as well.

We may be able infer limited aspects of realities outside our box but all that does is push those boundaries out a bit. The who or what which gave rise to what we live in is necessarily outside those boundaries.

Complexity and causality are features of the inside of our spacetime box.  We have no reason to believe they would have any meaning at all when applied to God.  As Dawkins surely must understand this, The God Delusion appears to be little more than a blunt tool to bludgeon the reader into accepting an arrogant and militant point of view.

Genuine awe requires humility. I may attempt to read the later book in hopes of finding some.

Notes:

  1. Dawkins, Richard (2008-01-16). The God Delusion (p. 52). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
  2. Dawkins. (p. 178).
  3. For an example see Alvin Plantinga’s review in the The Dawkins Confusion at Christianity Today. This unfortunately requires a subscription to read but probably be found elsewhere.
  4. Dawkins. (p. 146-147, 188).