Apologetics

On Christian Apologetics and Contextual Theology

For the adult ed. series on

Borg, The Heart of Christianity

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March, 2017

One way to understand Marcus Borg’s work is to see it as Christian apologetics. Apologetics is a type of Christian theology. It is not theology that apologizes for Christianity as the name might suggest. Rather, it is theology that seeks to make the Christian faith understandable and accessible to the people of a particular time and place. It is theology written to speak Christian truth to people of a particular historical, cultural, and linguistic context. Many Christians today may find the notion that Christianity must adapt itself to particular contexts puzzling or even just plain wrong. I mean, aren’t the truths of the Christian faith eternal and unchanging? That’s certainly what we’ve been taught that they are. Aren’t they? Well, yes they are, and no they aren’t. The foundational beliefs of Christianity are eternal. God is eternal. The Christian confession of Jesus Christ as the Son of God is eternal. Yet the specific human contexts within which Christianity lives and functions and to which it endeavors to speak are not eternal. They change all the time. A faith that cannot find ways to address the specific and changing worlds with which it is faced will die. Only a faith that can adapt itself to changing contexts will survive.

Perhaps this example will help here. The Christian Bible was not written using language and categories from Greek philosophy. It was written using language and understandings from the Jewish religious heritage. That heritage did not concern itself much with philosophical issues like the nature of reality (ontology) or with the question of how we humans can know anything at all (epistemology). At least it did not discuss those issues in so many words. It doesn’t address those philosophical issues in anything like the way Greek philosophy did. Christianity, however, quickly moved away from its Jewish base and origins into the world of the Greeks, Greek being the dominant language and culture of the eastern Mediterranean world in the first century CE. As a result, and in order so speak meaningfully to a Greek world, Christians began to use language from Greek philosophy to talk about God and Jesus Christ.

We see them doing that, for example, in the Nicene Creed. That Creed dates from the year 325 CE and the First Ecumenical Council. The Nicene Creed was formulated in Greek by Christian bishops thoroughly steeped in Greek culture. Thus we find Greek words in that creed like “homoousious,” usually translated as “of one being” or “of one substance.” The root word behind that word, “ousia,” means substance as substance was understood in the Platonic philosophy of the fourth century CE. That word appears only rarely in the Greek originals of the New Testament texts, where it means only something like “goods” or “property.” In the New Testament it has none of the meaning it had in Greek philosophy. The Nicene Creed used the word in its Greek philosophical meaning. That Creed was written by Greeks for Greeks not by Jews for Jews, so it spoke in the contemporary cultural idiom of the Greeks.

In the year 451 CE another Ecumenical Council, the Fourth, issued another creed of a sort sometimes called the Definition or Formula of Chalcedon, Chalcedon being the city in Asia Minor where the Council met. The Formula of Chalcedon dealt with the identity of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Trinity. Like Nicaea it used language from Greek philosophy, having like Nicaea having been written by Greeks mostly for Greeks. It says that Christ has two “natures,” using the Greek word physis for nature. It says that these two “natures” appear in one “Person,” using the Greek word “prosopon.” The one “Person” appears in one “hypostasis,” an essentially untranslatable Greek philosophical word that is also sometimes translated as “person.”

The words physis, prosopon, and hypostasis all had specific but quite complex meanings in Greek philosophy. They spoke meaningfully to the original Greek audiences of the Creeds, but the people who produced the Bible over the centuries would have understood them not at all. Neither do most people today. Take the word prosopon, translated as person, for example. We translate it as person, but it didn’t mean anything like our modern psychological sense of what a person is. The word originally referred to the masks Greek actors held before their faces to indicate the character they were playing or the character’s emotional state. We call that object a mask not a person. Prosopon came to mean something which expresses the nature of a thing or person. Fifth century Greeks would have understood that that’s what prosopon meant, or at least the educated among them would have. The people who produced the Bible would not have understood it at all, for Jewish thought had no equivalent; and all of the biblical authors (except probably for the author we know as Luke) were Jews. We don’t understand prosopon today either unless we’ve made a point of studying its meaning. We translate it as person; but we mean something very different by person than the Greeks meant by prosopon, so we read the Nicene and Chalcedonian Creeds differently than their authors and original audience did. The language of Nicaea and Chalcedon spoke to the people of their times and places. It didn’t speak to Jewish people of its time, and it doesn’t much speak to us.

That’s contextual theology. Theology must speak to the people of its context, that is, of its time and place. When it does it may not speak much at all to people of a different time and place. Theology that seeks to reimagine the faith so that it speaks to the people of its time and place is called apologetics. That’s what Borg is doing. It’s also what I do in my books Liberating Christianity and Liberating the Bible. People today say that the world is changing. It is more accurate to say that it has already changed, it’s just that not everyone knows it yet. The kind of Christianity that Borg calls the Earlier Paradigm is a kind of Christianity that spoke to people in our country primarily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is the Christianity probably all of us were taught as we grew up in the church. What far too many people haven’t realized yet is that the world has moved beyond it, and Christianity must move beyond it too if it is to survive.

Most Christians don’t know it, but that Christianity that we were all taught is not ancient Christianity. It is actually quite modern Christianity. It is grounded in certain assumptions about the nature of truth that are modern not ancient. They come from the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they come from the Scientific Revolution that was such an important part of the Enlightenment. Those assumptions include most significantly the belief that truth consists only of facts. Because in the time of the Enlightenment and ever since science has made so many astounding discoveries about the natural world that we take to be fact, truth got reduced to fact. People began to assume that the Bible must be speaking about facts because only facts are true. Thus, if the Bible is true it must be factual. That’s why some Christians cling so desperately to a belief in the factual truth of, for example, the six days of creation story with which the Bible opens. They cling to believing that it is factually true because for them if it isn’t factually true it contains no truth at all. These Christians don’t know that in the time when Genesis 1 was written it would have occurred to no one that the purpose of such writing was primarily to convey facts. The purpose of such writing was to convey what theologians (other than Borg and some others aiming at a popular audience) call mythic truth. Mythic truth is truth told through story not through factual reporting. It is truth to which a writing points, a truth that lies beneath and beyond the writing to which the writing points but which it can never fully capture. European culture, and through it the dominant North American culture, lost belief in that kind of truth in the Enlightenment. That’s why we were all taught, for example, that the story of Noah and the ark happened as a matter of fact just as the Bible supposedly tells it (supposedly because in that story there are actually two versions of how many animals Noah was to take—you can look it up) when actually the author of that story surely never considered that he was writing fact just as the authors of either of the creation stories in Genesis ever considered that they were writing fact.

Our loss of an appreciation of mythic truth is just one example of how Christianity that spoke to a world that had lost that kind of truth no longer speaks to a great many people today. The world has changed. One of the ways in which it has changed is that the leading elements of western culture have rediscovered mythic truth. Borg calls it metaphoric truth, but the technically correct term for it is mythic truth. Using the intellectual tools developed in the Enlightenment we have discovered that it just isn’t possible to believe that everything in the Bible is factually true. No, Joshua didn’t make the sun stand still in the sky because the sun doesn’t actually move across the sky. It just looks to us like it does. See Joshua 10:12-13. But we have also rediscovered that many—not all but many—parts of the Bible that surely are not factually true are nonetheless profoundly true. The creation story of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 is a prime example. Many Bible stories are more true than any mere fact could ever be. They are more true because they speak of God, and God ultimately transcends all of our meagre facts.

Other examples of how the Christianity of the modern, rationalistic world has become outmoded could easily be given, but I trust the point is made. The world changes. Culture changes. Christianity must and throughout its history has changed to speak to new and newly emerging worlds. Christianity in western Europe and North America has been doing that for at least a century as the reality that the world of modernism was changing into the world of postmodernism started to become apparent. Bog’s book The Heart of Christianity is a very good popular introduction to how contemporary Christianity has changed in response to a changed and changing world. It is a good example of popular contextual, apologetic theology.

What Is Modernism"?

This is a piece I wrote to help people uninformed about current Christian theology prepare to read Marcus Borg's book The Heart of Christianity.

What is Modernism?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

March, 2017

In his book The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg uses phrases like “modern” or “the modern period” as though everyone understood what he means by them. I rather doubt that everyone understands what he means by them unless they have taken the trouble to study the matter and learned what they mean. So I want to give a brief introduction here to the notion of “modernism,” a word that points to all of the things Borg and others mean by words like “modern.”

To understand what modernism is we need to understand that an enormous shift in how people understand the world took place in western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Historians call this shift “the Enlightenment.” It is perhaps an unfortunate term. It suggests that before the Enlightenment people lived in darkness. Indeed, I have seen a Soviet writer say of a man (on whom I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation) who worked in the field of public education that he brought not enlightenment to the people but “endarkenment.” Dark is the opposite of light, yet we must understand that people who lived before the Enlightenment weren’t necessarily “in the dark.” They just understood things differently than did the people of the Enlightenment and everyone whose world view has been shaped by it. That “everyone,” by the way, includes all of us. We are all children of the Enlightenment whether we’re aware of it or not.

We start with a brief review of how people in western Europe understood the world and the nature of truth before the Enlightenment, that is, in what we call the premodern period. In the premodern period the most profound truth was understood to come to us through divine revelation. People knew about God not because they reasoned their way to an understanding that there must be a God and to an understanding of the nature of that God but because they believed God had revealed Godself to them. That revelation came in different ways depending on whether a person was Catholic or, starting in the early sixteenth century, Protestant. What Catholicism and Protestantism had in common was a belief in divine revelation as the source of profound truth. Premodern people could be very rationalistic. The great theologians of what we call Scholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas were rationalistic in the extreme, but they applied rationalistic analysis to what they took to be revealed divine truths. Thus, when Anselm wrote his book Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human) he assumed the divine identity of Jesus Christ as revealed truth. He didn’t reason his way to it. He reasoned his way to what he thought it meant (an understanding, by the way, that essentially took over western Christianity and is even today what most people, but not most postmodern people, think Christianity is).

In the premodern world most people probably took the accounts in the Bible to be factually correct. They took them to be fact because they had no reason not to. The Scientific Revolution that was such a big part of the Enlightenment hadn’t happened yet. For example, it looks to us like the sun revolves around the earth. The Bible says the sun revolves around the earth and that Joshua made it stand still. So for premodern people the sun revolved around the earth and Joshua made it stand still. Premodern people probably took the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis to be factual. Science had not yet discovered all the clues about the evolution of the human species, so they had no real reason not to take that story as fact.[1]

Premodern people mostly took the Bible as factual, but they didn’t think that factual truth was primarily what the Bible was about. They understood that it contains truth far more significant than mere factual truth. They usually called that truth “allegorical” truth. They saw the great stories of the Bible as allegories, as stories that point beyond their mere facts to far deeper truths. They did not limit the truth of the Bible or the truths of the Christian faith to mere facts. They knew to look below the surface of the stories for far deeper truths.

The Enlightenment can be said to have started in 1637 CE when Rene Descartes, a Frenchman, sat in his study and wrote in French “Je pense, donc je suis.” A few years later he said it in Latin, "Cogito ergo sum.” In English it’s “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes had set out to reason his way to truth because he had given up on religion as a way to truth. He took, or at least said that he took, nothing as revealed truth. The only thing he took as a given was his own existence. He knew he existed because he knew himself to be sitting there thinking. Hence “I think, therefore I am.”

Descartes rationalism, his claimed use of his own reason as the way to truth, became the distinguishing criterion of the Enlightenment. Human reason became the guide to truth in virtually every field of human endeavor, something it had never been before. Adam Smith applied reason to economics and came up with capitalism. John Locke applied human reason to politics and came up with a political theory that formed the basis of the American Constitution. Scientists like Isaac Newton and a great many others applied human reason to the study of the natural world.[2] They discovered new fact after new fact about that world. Indeed, what they discovered was taken precisely as established fact. The notion developed and became universally accepted that a scientific fact was an established, indisputable fact. Scientific fact was truth no one could deny. The belief in the infallibility of scientific fact actually isn’t very scientific, for science sees its “facts” only as hypotheses that can be challenged and changed when newly discovered data disputes them. Einstein proved that Newton’s theories of gravity actually missed the mark, but in Newton’s time and long thereafter no one knew that they did or believed that they could have. They and so many other scientific discoveries were taken as established fact.

Scientific truth as factual truth was so powerful that truth got reduced to fact in every area of human endeavor. Everyone wanted the truth of their field of study, whatever it was, to be as solid as scientific truth appeared to be. That meant it had to be factual truth. Even the truths of religious faith got reduced to factual truths. People came to believe that if the Bible wasn’t factually true it contained no truth at all. Premodern people never have believed that way, for what they called the allegorical truth of the Bible would remain even if the apparent facts in it turned out not to be facts at all.

The conviction that there was truth deeper than fact mostly got lost in the Enlightenment. A central part of modernism is the belief that only facts are true. That’s why so many Christians cling to the untenable belief that everything in the Bible must be factually true. Take the six days of creation story with which the Bible opens for example. It is impossible that that story is factually true, but people cling to its factuality by doing things like saying that the days that it names are actually geologic periods. The Bible doesn’t call them geologic periods. Still, if they are geologic periods they can be factually true. Turning the days into geologic periods in no way solves all of the factual problems of that story, but people cling to it anyway.[3] They cling to it because they are children of the Enlightenment. For them only facts are true.

The reduction of truth to fact that was a central feature of the Enlightenment took over western Christianity. We see that takeover in starkest relief in the beliefs of Christian Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is a product of late-nineteenth-early-twentieth century American Christianity. It’s central tenets appeared only in a series of pamphlets published between 1910 and 1915. It insists that Christianity consists of five essential beliefs. They are:

1.      The inerrancy of the Bible.

2.      The literal (that is, the factual) nature of the biblical accounts.

3.      The virgin birth of Christ.

4.      The bodily resurrection (and ultimate return) of Christ.

5.      Christ’s death as a substitutionary atonement for human sin.

Fundamentalism is the Christianity of modernism reduced to its most basic beliefs. It is Christianity stripped of all truth but factual truth. Not all western Christians by any means became true Fundamentalists, but the factualism of Fundamentalism was shared by almost all American Christians during the time most of us grew up and were introduced to the faith.

Western culture has moved beyond modernism. At least its cutting edge has, and all of western culture will. One central feature of what we call (for lack of a better term) postmodernism is the recovery of truths deeper than mere factual truth that was a characteristic of the premodern world. Borg calls that deeper truth metaphorical. I call it mythic or symbolic, those being the technically correct terms for this kind of truth. Whatever we call it, it is a feature of premodernism that is also part of postmodernism. One significant difference between premodernism and postmodernism in their understanding of truth is that postmodernism accepts scientific discoveries as true in the realms of human knowledge to which they apply. Those discoveries hadn’t been made in the time of premodernism. Thus, postmodernism knows in a way that premodernism did not that the earth is not the center of the universe. We have no problem with it being a tiny planet orbiting an insignificant star far from the center of one galaxy out of an almost countless number of galaxies in the universe. We have no problem with the earth being 4 billion years old. We have no problem with the equivalence of matter and energy, as in E=mc². We have no problem with human beings being the result of a very long process of the evolution of species. Premodernism knew none of those things nor a great many more. Modernist Christianity in its most elemental form has to deny them, or most of them, because it insists on reading the Bible as inerrant fact. What Borg calls the emerging paradigm accepts scientific truths because it knows that, while they may be more or less factually accurate, they are not the only kind of truth. There is truth that is far deeper than they are that is not inconsistent with them.

So that’s what modernism is, for our purposes at least. It is human reason and science raised to the level of ultimate truth; and it is the reduction of truth primarily to fact. Borg’s “earlier paradigm” is the Christianity of modernism. His “emerging paradigm” is at least the beginnings of a Christianity of postmodernism. The Christianity of modernism cannot survive more than maybe another hundred years or so because modernism has had its day and is fading into history. Postmodern Christianity is on the rise. We’d better pay attention.

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[1] Not all premodern people took it as fact. The Church Father Origen, in the third century CE, said he thought taking it as fact was foolish. His voice was, however, that of a small minority of people. Most people took the story of Adam and Eve to be fact.

[2] There were scientific precursors to the Enlightenment. By the time Descartes wrote Cogito ergo sum astronomers from Copernicus to Galileo had already upended the earth-centered universe that everyone had believed in.

[3] One quick example. Genesis 1:3 has God creating light on the first day and “there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” Evening is when the sun sets. Morning is when it rises but the sun isn’t created until the fourth day. See Genesis 1:14-16. The sun didn’t exist on the first day, according to this account. If this is a factual account, where did the light come from on the first day? Biblical literalism says “nothing is impossible for God.” In a sense that’s true, but in another sense it is the ultimate cop out of those for whom the Bible must be factually true. It doesn’t answer the question, it ducks it.

On Intolerance

On Intolerance

Conservative people who harbor destructive prejudices against certain types of human beings—women, Blacks, LGBT people, etc.—are fond of saying that liberal progressive people like me who condemn such prejudice are no better than they are because we too have our own prejudices. We too are intolerant of people whose views are different from ours. On the surface that seems like a valid (and challenging) observation. On closer examination, however, it turns out to be inaccurate because it conflates two different types of intolerance. It conflates intolerance of certain aspects of a person’s humanity with intolerance of opinions that are demonstrably false. I concede that I am profoundly intolerant of racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, disability shaming, class prejudice, and any other type of prejudice that goes to some inherent aspect of a person’s very being. My intolerance of those hatreds of who a person is in her very essence is essentially different from intolerance of the people conservatives view as less. Here are a couple of examples to illustrate the point.

I’ll start with racism and my intolerance of it. Racism condemns people simply because they look different from the people who are part of what is at least still a white plurality in our country. Race actually is a totally artificial construct that says nothing essential about a person’s humanity, but I’ll let that one go for now. Dividing people by race is a core part of American identity, and prejudice based on it is profoundly sinful. None of us chooses the race of which we are a part. I am white. I was born white. I’ll die white. I didn’t choose to be white, and I can’t choose not to be white. I just am white. Those statements are as true of a person born Black as they are of me. Black people are born Black. They die Black. They didn’t choose to be Black, and they can’t choose not to be Black. They just are.[1] Race (at least as American culture has always understood it) is an inherent, inherited part of everyone’s humanity. It isn’t wrong. It can’t be demonstrated to be false. It just is. Racial differences often come with cultural differences, and those cultural differences can and do enrich our lives and our cultures. As an old cliché goes, they aren’t to be tolerated, they are to be celebrated. Racism is an attack on a person because of an inherent, inherited part of that person’s humanity. The notion that Black people are less than white people is demonstrably false. Racist attitudes can be transformed. They can be overcome, and we desperately need to overcome them.

I am intolerant of racism, but that intolerance does not put me on the same moral level as the racists. Racism is not an intrinsic part of anyone’s humanity. It is an acquired attitude, not something with which anyone is born. As Lieutenant Cable’s song from the musical South Pacific says, “you’ve got to be taught, before it’s too late, before you are six, or seven, or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be carefully taught.” Race is morally neutral, racism is not. Race harms no one. Racism does. No one can hate a person because of her race without hating her as a person. I can, and do, condemn racism without hating anything inherent in a racist’s humanity. I don’t hate racism because racists are white (or because they are Black, for there are Black racists too). I don’t even necessarily hate racists. I hate racism. I hate it not because it is human but because it is evil. Racists hate Black people because they are, the racists believe, the wrong kind of human.

Not let’s look at what is for most of us liberal, progressive Christians the hardest kind of tolerance. People tell me I’m no better than the racists or the homophobes because I am prejudiced against Fundamentalists. People say I’m prejudiced because I don’t like biblical literalism. They say I’m prejudice I because the reject the way homophobes use scripture to condemn LGBT people. They say everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and I am wrong to condemn opinions that differ from mine. They say I am wrong not to want to associate with Christians who use the faith to condemn others. None of these contentions will stand up to close scrutiny. Fundamentalist Christianity and biblical literalism are not characteristics of a person’s humanity. They are learned beliefs, and they are demonstrably false. I won’t here go into how they are demonstrably false. If you want to know, read my book Liberating Christianity. Yes, people are entitled to their own opinions; but as the old saying goes, they are not entitled to their own facts. When a belief is demonstrably false, when it is based on what we are calling “alternative facts” today, it is right to reject it and even to criticize people who hold to it despite its demonstrable falsehood. Doing so is not rejecting anyone’s inherent humanity. Fundamentalist homophobes are as human as I am; they’re just wrong in their beliefs, and demonstrably so. My criticism of them is in no way equivalent to their condemnation of LGBT people. They condemn a person’s humanity. I condemn only a person’s false beliefs.

So let’s be done with this notion that rejection of false beliefs is morally equivalent to rejection of a person’s humanity. It isn’t. Let’s be done with bigots projecting their intolerance onto those of us who do not share it, for that’s what they’re doing. Critical thinking is not morally equal to uncritical condemnation of classes of God’s people. Critical thinking is not the moral equivalent of reading scripture to say what it doesn’t say. Critical thinking is not morally equivalent to reading the Bible as though it had been written in the modern world, which is what biblical literalists do. It wasn’t, and some of us have a capacity for understanding that it wasn’t and what that means. We are not prejudiced when we criticize views grounded in that fundamental misunderstanding of what the Bible is and what it isn’t. We are not prejudiced when we are intolerant of such a false view of our foundational text. We are just thinking Christians who use the brain God gave us to understand all aspects of our faith. There is unthinking, bigoted intolerance, and there is informed, critical rejection. They aren’t the same thing.

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[1] Yes, I know that some very light-skinned Black people sometimes are able to pass for white, but that doesn’t make them white. They’re Black people pretending to be white. That sad reality doesn’t make my contention here false.

The Church I Love

The Church I Love:

Reflections on Fifteen Years of Pastoral Ministry

February, 2017

My years of called Christian pastoral ministry will end, for now at least and probably forever, on March 10, 2017. That’s when my resignation as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Maltby becomes effective. I began called pastoral ministry on March 24, 2002, at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ. Fifteen years is not a lot of time in professional ministry compared to the time spent in it by people who entered it younger than I did. I was 55 when I started, and I’m 70 now. Not a great many years perhaps, but they were the most important and the most meaningful years of my professional life. They include enormous changes in my life: the death of my first wife, remarriage, seminary, a change of professions, ordination, my twin brother’s devastating stroke, the deaths of my parents, the marriages of my children, and the birth of grandchildren. My life looks little like it did fifteen years ago and virtually nothing like it did twenty years ago before I entered seminary. I have learned much in the last fifteen years, and I have experienced more than I have learned. I want here to reflect on some of my learning and some of my experience from fifteen years in the pulpit.

One of the most fundamental thing I learned over the course of my fifteen years in the pulpit is that churches are very strange places. They proclaim that their allegiance is to God and Jesus Christ. They say their purpose is to proclaim the Gospel and bring salvation to people and to the world. The people of a church gather to pray, sing hymns, and listen to someone preach what she or he thinks needs to be or at least what he or she wants to say on any particular Sunday. Churches believe that people become part of them at least in substantial part to worship God and to be in communion with other Christians. Some Christians don’t think of churches as earthly, human institutions at all. Most churches say Christ is the head of the church. They say the Holy Spirit creates and sustains the church, calling people to it. They say that the church is a divine institution, not an earthly one.

Yet there is no institution more earthly than the church. Individual churches can all tell you when they were founded, and they know they were founded by human beings. Churches function pretty much like any other volunteer organization. They need money to operate, so they work at raising funds in ways a bit similar to the ways other nonprofits do. Though they may be not for profit corporations, they have an organization usually specified in constitutions and bylaws just like any other corporation. They have a board of directors. It isn’t usually called a board of directors. It’s probably called a church council or by some similar title, but it functions as a board of directors. It makes most of the decisions for the church. In many denominations it functions between meetings of the formal members of the congregation, and there are some functions that only the members can exercise, usually including approving a budget, electing people to be officers and members of boards or committees, and calling or dismissing a pastor. In all these ways a church is a very worldly institution.

The churches I have known have had their structures and their formal ways of doing things, but often things aren’t actually done in those churches in those formal specified ways at all. People go off on their own hook and do something they think just needs to be done and they can do. Sometimes that Lone Ranger kind of working functions reasonably well. Sometimes everyone just knows, say, that Jerry mows the grass even though no formal body has ever asked Jerry to mow the grass or authorized him to do it. This kind of individual initiative can sometimes work well enough, but it doesn’t always. Sometimes people take it upon themselves to make decisions that truly are not theirs to make. Then others resent either what they have done or just that they have done it. Tensions result. Conflict results. People feel insulted or dismissed. It can be a real mess, and it is all very human.

Beyond that, the people in the churches often act in ways every bit as worldly as people do in any other organization—or worse. Church people know that there is no fight like a church fight. Sometimes the more petty the nominal subject of a fight the nastier the fight becomes. Churches have been torn apart by fights over the color of the carpet in the sanctuary or by even less significant issues. The people of most churches can tell you appalling stories of how people in the church have on occasion treated other people in the church. Churches sometimes split into warring camps. Sometimes those splits are over important things like how to read the Bible and the nature of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Sometimes they’re over who gets to be on the  board of deacons or some other substantially less significant issue. Whatever the nominal issue is, these fights can get really nasty. They sometimes drive people out of the church. They sometimes make the church a very unpleasant place to be. There’s no fight like a church fight.

Beyond that, as a denominational regional executive I know is fond of saying, in a church the issue is not the issue. Churches are far from immune to the human tendency to divert divisions and disagreements from their actual substance onto some seemingly less significant issue and then to fight over that stakeholder issue. A fight over the color of the carpet might actually be grounded in a tension between older, long-time members of the church and newer members who want to take the church in a new direction. The real issue is rarely easy to discern beneath a nominal issue, but an ability to see beneath a conflict to the real issue is a vital skill for churches to have.

Churches are, for the most part, extremely averse to change. We church professionals all know the saying “‘We’ve never done it that way before’ are the seven last words of a dying church.” In truth the only thing really constant in human life is change, or at least change in every person and every institution is inevitable. Institutions that do not change die, and dying is of course itself a profound change. Yet churches hate to change, or at least most of them do. Even when they say they are open to change they usually aren’t. Beyond that, when they are open to some sort of change the change they’re open to is often only to go back to the way things were in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when that big sanctuary the church built back then and still has was full on Sunday morning and there were dozens or even hundreds of children in the Sunday School. They don’t want to hear the undeniable truth that the world has changed and the church will never look like that again, at least not in any of our lifetimes.

Churches often resist change even in quite trivial things, but they tend to be even more profoundly resistant to change in more significant things. Most of the people in most of the churches today learned a version of the Christian faith that was widespread and largely unquestioned by most church people in the early decades of the twentieth century. In its most extreme form that version of the faith was Fundamentalism, but even in churches that aren’t truly Fundamentalist certain assumptions about the faith similar to those of Fundamentalism prevail. These include the ideas that Christianity is the only true faith; that the fundamental human existential dilemma is sin, forgiveness, and how we get to heaven when we die; that Jesus Christ is Savior because he came as the Son of God` to suffer and die as an substitutionary atoning sacrifice for sin in order to procure divine forgiveness that could and would not otherwise be given; that the Bible speaks facts that are to be understood always literally, that is, factually, and that there are no errors or contradictions in the Bible. Better Christian theology moved beyond all of those assumptions about the faith a long time ago, but most churches haven’t followed and don’t want to follow better theology’s lead. They don’t see why they should follow. They don’t understand that if they don’t follow they will become utterly irrelevant to the world in which they live and work because the world has changed but they haven’t. The church’s resistance to change in its foundational theology may well be the reason it finally dies altogether.

I am well aware that all of that paints a pretty bleak picture of the church. There is much in the life of the church that is bleak, that is depressing, and that makes us wonder why anyone would want to have anything to do with it. Yet I have devoted the last fifteen years of my life to professional work in the church, and many of my friends and colleagues in ministry have been doing that a lot longer than I did. If the church is so bleak, why do we do it? Well, I think we do it first of all because we have convinced ourselves that God called us to do it, and who are we to deny God? Professional ministry is a bit like teaching in that it is a profession that you really shouldn’t go into unless you can’t live not going into it. If you perceive that you have a choice, don’t do it. For most of us the pay is lousy and any job at all is getting harder and harder to find. The profession has virtually none of the prestige it used to have. Most of our culture thinks church is irrelevant at best and pernicious at worst. Yet a great many wonderful, bright, capable people devote their lives to it. Why? Ultimately because for all its drawbacks and shortcomings we love the church of God, the church of Jesus Christ. Ultimately we devote ourselves to it because we know that those drawbacks and shortcomings are not the true church and are not what the church is about. We do it because we know what the church at its best or even when it’s just not at its worst can be and can offer people that no other institution can.

The church is a human institution, but it is not only a human institution. It is an institution in which people really do experience the presence and the gifts of God. It’s not that we can’t find those things outside the church, but they are what the church is about in a way that no other institution or place is. In church we really can and do find and worship our divine Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. In church we really can and do find our spiritual home. The church must never ignore the world and must always seek to speak divine truth to it, especially in times like these when that truth is so desperately needed; but in church we can also find an escape from the world. We can come into the presence of God in a place and a time away from our usual worlds. In church we can find the peace and hope that are so badly missing from secular culture. In church we can find, maintain, and strengthen our connection with ultimate truth, ultimate reality, the reality behind reality, the depth dimension of reality that gives life meaning and purpose, that is, with God.

We humans are all both immensely strong and almost unimaginably weak and fallible creatures. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about a lot more than this, but it is also about grace and forgiveness. In church we can learn and really know that God is there with us and for us. In church we can find the strength that comes from God that will get us through whatever is it we must get through in our lives. In church we can know that God forgives us when we fail. In church we can know that God suffers with us when we suffer and is there to love us and sustain us through whatever suffering we face in life. Church people sometimes say that what they want from church is something to get them through the coming week. Giving people that something is certainly not all that the church is about, but it is part of what the church is about. The Christian faith lived in church can give people what they need to get through the coming week. It can give people what they need to get through the rest of their lives with peace and courage. No other institution has doing that as part of its foundational purpose. No other institution can do that like the church can.

Church can and sometimes does supply people with needful things that our culture lacks. Most importantly church can and sometimes does give people the community that most Americans don’t have any more. We live isolated lives. It wasn’t always so among us. We used to live in smaller towns and in extended families. Most of us don’t any more. Most of us can live in a neighborhood our whole lives and barely know our neighbors. Churches, especially but not exclusively small churches, can be the community that we need and mostly lack. I have often said that if everyone knew what a good church can be and do for people in times of trouble they would all go out and find one even if they didn’t believe any of church’s faith at all. I’ve seen it over and over again. When a member of a church is in trouble the other people of the church step up. They pitch in. They’re there for their sister or brother in Christ from church, sometimes even if they don’t even know that person all that well. People go to visit. They bring food. They donate money. They do chores around the home of a person who can’t do them herself. They give rides to the doctor and even help pay the bills when that is needed. They pray together, and their prayer brings them closer to each other and closer to God. The church being a living community is today perhaps its primary reason for it continuing to exist, and in church all of that caring is grounded in faith. It is grounded in the love of God that gives it form and gives it strength.

Church people do good work in the world. For the most part they do acts of charity rather than acts aimed at creating a more just world, but they do many acts of charity that help a lot of people. Just what they do varies a lot from church to church. Common charitable activities in my experience include food drives for local food banks, donating backpacks and school supplies at the beginning of the school year, and giving gifts of food and clothing at Christmas time. Many churches have other charitable programs that are a central part of the life of the church. People not affiliated with a church contribute to charity too, but most churches make sure it’s an important part of their life.

Then there is that part about speaking to the world. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is about grace and forgiveness. It is about personal strength and hope, but it is about a great deal more than that too. Far too many people in far too many churches don’t want to hear about that “more”. They want to focus on Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for sin and don’t want to hear that that focus makes his life and his teaching irrelevant. Well, it does, because in that way of seeing him it’s only his divine identity and death that matter; yet our New Testament gives us a lot about Jesus’ life and teaching, and that teaching is grounded in parts of our Old Testament, particularly in the words of the Hebrew prophets. Why does the New Testament do that? Because God insists that we know it. Because God insists that we live it. During his life on earth Jesus was all about social justice. Time and time again he turned the understandings and expectations of the profoundly unjust world on their heads. He upended the cultural norms of his time and of ours. He said blessed are the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers not the strong, the rich, and the warmakers that the world so adores. He said love your enemy and resist evil with creative, assertive nonviolence, rejecting the violence in which so much of the world lives and to which so many people look for salvation. He included women in his inner circle of followers in a time when women had no power and no standing. He said imitate the hated Samaritan when he does what is right. He said welcome back the one who has strayed with no questions asked. He knew we need bread, and he gave it to people; but he said we do not live by bread alone. He called us to life in the Spirit of God, and that Spirit called him and calls us to work to transform the world from the kingdom of wealth and power into the kingdom of God, a kingdom of justice and peace. Many church people don’t want to hear all that in church; but it’s there in our Gospel, and the church at its best proclaims it and lives it like no other institution does or can.

So what have I learned in fifteen years of professional ministry? That for all its faults and failings I still love the church. I love the people of the church. I love the God who grounds the church, is present in it, and works through it. The church is far from perfect. It is too human to be anything close to perfect. Sometimes when you’re in a church, and definitely sometimes when you’re trying to be its pastoral leader, it will drive you nuts. You’ll get frustrated. You’ll want to quit, and sometimes you will. I have resigned from two called pastorates in my time as a minister, albeit for different reasons each time. Yet I have not left the larger church, and I never will. The church is my spiritual home. In its worship, scriptures, sacraments, music, prayers, and communal life I find my connection with God. I can’t imagine my life, or my death, without God; and I can’t imagine them without the church. I may never again serve a church in a called position. So be it. I will still serve the church. I will still live in the church. For me, and for so many of us who still love the church, it cannot be otherwise. Thanks be to God.

Reflections on the Inauguration of Donald Trump

Reflections on the Inauguration of Donald Trump

The unthinkable has happened. Donald Trump, New York wheeler-dealer, con man, misogynist , bigot, egomaniac, American fascist, is now President of the United States. He became President less than two hours ago as I write this post. He now has his hands on the controls of enough nuclear warheads to destroy all life on earth several times over. He has the power to issue executive orders that will stop all progress toward climate health, remove protections of minorities who work for government contractors, and do so many more destructive things; and he will use that power to make the world a less heathy, less safe place for all of us. He makes promises he cannot keep. No, Mr. Trump, you will not "bring back" the industrial jobs we have lost, for you cannot single-handedly change the economic structure of the world. Trump's America first, last, and always ideology will not make the United States a better place, for the whole world today is so interconnected that you cannot isolate our country from other countries without disastrous consequences. Trump says in one breath that NATO is obsolete and with the next promises to respect our country's traditional alliances. I want to believe that the American people are not as stupid as he thinks we are, but he's probably right that we're stupid enough for him to get away with his massive dishonesty. We did, after all, make him president. Donald Trump becoming President of the United States is a tragedy the ultimate consequences of which will unfold in the coming years. One thing we know for sure: We have elected a man who not only doesn't understand the Constitution of the United States but probably doesn't believe in it. A man who never thought he'd actually become President and who would much rather be a dictator than the head of the executive branch of the government of a constitutional republic. With the possible exceptions of November 22, 1963, and June 6, 1968*, this is the saddest political day of my life.

My daughter and several Facebook friends tell me don't wallow in sorrow. Have hope. Gird up your loins and prepare for battle, in effect if not in those precise words. Prepare to work for what is right against a government that will now mostly do what is wrong. They have a point, I suppose. There is great work to be done to protect vulnerable people about whom President Trump gives not a damn. There is work to be done to protect the environment as much as we can against rape by the greedy that Trump will now surely unleash. There is work to be done to protect women's rights and LBGT rights against the destructive acts of government that now doesn't believe in them. There is work to be done to protect people with disabilities against the words and acts of a President who only mocks them. There is work to do to try to stop Trump from getting us involved in yet more foreign wars. Yes, there is much work to be done; and we must do it.

We must do the work. Someday. Today is not that day. Today is the day for coming to a true understanding of just what has happened to us, or rather what we have done to ourselves, and to mourn it. Today is the day for understanding that Donald Trump is not different from other American presidents in degree but in kind. We have never had a true fascist as president before, but we do now. The bitter, fearful, angry, racist, misogynist, and utterly uninformed and unthinking parts of the American electorate have never before been able to make a fascist president, but they have now. The divisions in our country have always been there, but they have never before elected such an utterly unqualified man as president. Trump is disqualified from being president both by knowledge and experience on the one hand (he has none) and by temperament and personality on the other. He is an ignorant bully. He knows next to nothing of how government works. He knows even less about how the world and America's foreign relations work. He knows nothing of the limitations of power, both presidential power in our government and American power in the world. Today is the day for understanding all of that and grieving it. Grieving the loss of American ideals. Grieving the loss of American dreams. Grieving the suffering that the Trump administration will surely inflict on our most vulnerable citizens. The work starts tomorrow. The grief starts today.

*The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

A New, Sad Song

My song on the day Donald Trump becomes President of the United States:

My country, 'tis of thee,
Dear land that used to be,
Of thee I sing.

Thou hast betrayed thyself,
Sold out to fear and wealth,
Stored thy best values on the shelf,
Tears of sorrow sting.

Called to Act

This is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Day meditation I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on January 15, 2017.

Called to Act

A Martin Luther King Day Meditation

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 15, 2017 

Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-11 

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. 

Let me ask you a question: Why is it so hard for people of faith to speak up? I mean, we have trust in what we understand to be the most profound truth there is or ever was, the truth of God. Yet in my experience and in the experience of so many others we people of faith mostly keep quiet. Oh sure, some aggressive evangelicalistic types talk loudly and incessantly about how everyone has to believe like they do and think like they do to avoid spending eternity in hell; but that’s not the kind of speaking up I mean. I mean speaking up about the things that God really cares about. Things like social and economic justice. The things the eighth century prophets lifted up and proclaimed to the people of their time. The things Jesus mostly spoke about, about caring for people in need, about loving God and our neighbor as ourselves, with absolutely everyone, especially the ones we think we hate and the ones we condemn, being our neighbor. We know what God wants in all those areas of human life, and we know that God wants us to speak up about them; but mostly we don’t do it. Especially in less conservative, less evangelical churches we don’t do it. And I wonder why not? We say it’s because we believe in individual freedom of conscience, and everyone has a right to her or his own opinions. We say because the Gospel isn’t political, never mind that it really is. I think mostly because we’re timid. We’re uncomfortable with public speaking of any kind and really uncomfortable with public proclamation of prophetic truths. Whatever the reason, we mostly clam up and don’t publicly address public issues about which our faith really has a great deal to say.

It has always been that way with people of faith. We see ancient Hebrew writers wrestling with it in our scripture readings this morning. The prophet who speaks to us across the millennia in our passage from Isaiah knows that God has formed him to be God’s servant in the world, formed him like a sharpened sword and a polished arrow. He knows that God wants him to proclaim God’s truth to the world, as he puts it do it as one in whom God will display God’s splendor. But he doesn’t want to do it. He says “I have labored to no purpose; I have spent my strength in vain.” He doesn’t want to do it because he thinks nothing will come of it. But God isn’t about to let him off easy like that. God says that this prophet will go not only to Israel but to all people to proclaim the faithfulness of the Lord God. True prophets are always reluctant prophets, and this prophet just wants to keep quiet. God says: Nope. That’s not what I created you to do.

Then we have Psalmist of Psalm 40. He too knows that God doesn’t want him to keep quiet. He says God has put a new song in his mouth to praise God. He says he wants to do God’s will because God’s law is within his heart. So he says: “I did not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly.” He has God’s truth. He has God’s law, and he doesn’t keep quiet about it.

Folks, God doesn’t want us to keep quiet about God’s truth today either. In fact, I am convinced that today as much as ever, or maybe more so, God calls us to speak. Indeed, God calls us to do more than that. God calls us to act. God is always calling God’s people to speak and to act. Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. Dr. King was one who heard God’s call to speak and to act. He heard God’s cry against the brutal injustice of racial segregation and racial discrimination. He spoke against those evils with the words of prophets, with Jesus’ words, with the great words of the Jewish and Christian traditions about justice and peace. He spoke against hatred and discrimination with an eloquence few have ever matched. We all know some of his words:

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood….

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!...

And all the people say Amen! Magnificent words. Powerful words. Words of God’s truth for all people in all times and places. King spoke them far better than I can, but we are all called to speak them. God does not call us to be silent. God calls us to speak.

But Martin Luther King knew that God calls us to do more than speak. He knew that God calls us to act. In April 1963, King and many others were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, for violating a state court injunction that prohibited demonstrations in that most segregated of all American cities. While he was in jail he read a letter from eight clergymen, mostly Christian but also one Jewish rabbi, calling on him and his people to stop acting. To stop demonstrating. To carry on their struggle for justice only in the thoroughly racist courts of 1960s Alabama. King replied with a long essay that we know as A Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It’s not in the form of a speech, but it is one of the most powerful prophetic statements of God’s call to us to act for justice in all of American history. People told King just use the courts. They told him give it time, you’re moving too fast. They told him don’t do things that provoke the authorities to acts of violence against you. They said quiet down. Wait. Don’t be so pushy. Don’t be so public. And Dr. King replied to all that with the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom of God. He quoted Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” He said we are not violent, but the guardians of racism and segregation are. So be it. It is always the right time to act for the good, the right, the just. It is always the right time to act to end the suffering caused by injustice. It is never the right time to sit idly by while wrong rules the earth and oppresses God’s people. For King’s courage in speaking and even more for King’s courage in acting I say Thank you God. Thank you for your prophets of justice. Thank you for your prophets of nonviolent resistance to evil. Thank you for your nonviolent prophets of peace.

Dr. King was murdered almost fifty years ago. He spoke to the people of his time and place. He spoke of the ills of his time and place. But folks, it’s not all that different today. Yes, our country has made significant progress in race relations. We will soon mark the end of the presidency of our country’s first Black President, and that is significant. But as President Obama said last week American racism is far from a thing of the past. Institutional racism puts enormous numbers of young Black men in prison, numbers grossly disproportionate to their percentage of our population. Popular racism elects public officials who are themselves racist. The Senate will soon confirm as Attorney General of the United States a Senator from Alabama who was once denied a federal judgeship because he was too racist. The NAACP and Black Senators and Congressmen say he is still too racist to be Attorney General. Many overt racists love our President-elect Donald Trump whether he is really a racist himself or not. Racism is very much alive among us, and God calls us to speak and act against it just as God called Martin Luther King to speak and act against it all those decades ago.

There are other issues we are called to speak and act about too. Climate change and environmental degradation. Income inequality. Questions of war and peace. Immigrants’ rights. So many others. And maybe you don’t think those are proper issues to discuss in a Christian sermon. Well, they are. They are because the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about all of them. It is about social justice as much as it is about anything else. It is about care for the poor as much as it is about anything else. It is about nonviolent resistance to evil imposed by governments as much it is about anything else. Most of all it calls us to claim our voice on these issues and to act to bring about justice for the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the unheard. That’s what Martin Luther King did fifty years ago. That’s what Jesus did two thousand years ago. King was a Christian pastor, and he said “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” He condemned white church people like most of us for remaining “silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” Those powerful words from his Letter From a Birmingham Jail pierce my soul today. They convict me today. They convict us today. They convict us because they speak the truth. They speak the truth about our remaining silent, staying safe, doing nothing in the face of racism and other evils.

The Gospel’s call is different. It is loud, it is clear, it is strong. We are called to act. I don’t know yet exactly how we are called to act, although people all around us are already organizing, holding demonstrations and marches, mobilizing for justice in a time when justice is very much on trial among us. I don’t know how much courage I have to act, though I’m sure it is not as much as I’d like. But I do know that the Gospel of Jesus that I proclaim and preach calls me to act. It calls us to act. I don’t know if I will. I don’t know if we will. Perhaps with God’s help we will find the courage we need to do it. May it be so.