Go, Thomas! Go!

The biggest paradox about the Church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution.

Human traditions all tend toward stagnation and decay. They try to perpetuate things that cannot be perpetuated. They cling to objects and values which time destroys without mercy. They are bound up with a contingent material order of things—customs, fashions, styles and attitudes—which inevitably change and give way to something else.

The presence of a strong element of human conservatism in the Church should not obscure the fact that Christian tradition, supernatural in its source, is something absolutely opposed to human traditionalism. —New Seeds, chapter 20

I haven't gotten around to watching Obama's acceptance speech yet; I'll watch it as a podcast when I have the time, as I will McCain's. But a Kingdom-sympathetic, bridge-building, space-spanning person like myself can't help but raise a thumb upward for Greg Boyd's brief comments on division, polarization, empire and Kingdom.

I gotta tell you that I read through some of these posts, like the one immediately prior to this one, and I think, "Geez. That's a little spastic." In my defense, lately I've been writing posts in little ten-minute bursts, and I'm not terribly good at carrying a single line of thought along from burst to burst. But let's see… where was I?

I've been aware, since I was a kid really, that words are just labels that the majority of people agree to use to refer to certain things, and that we consider this agreement to somehow be concrete and meaningful. As I recall, it really struck me one day as a kid when I was thinking about the names of colors, and it became obvious to me that just because you and I agree a lemon is "yellow," that doesn't at all mean that you and I perceive the physical, "true" color the same way. What if, in fact, in your brain you're perceiving it as what I perceive as blue? Maybe your yellow and my yellow aren't the same at all by way of our physical senses, but we call both "yellow" because we've been taught to do so? And this is actually what happens, and can be demonstrated—is demonstrated all of the time—when two people argue over an "in-between" color that falls in the dividing line between more easily agreed upon colors. We brush this off as thinking that one of us has never been taught our colors; colors like vermillion or mauve or what-have-you. Certainly sometimes this is the case, but I would venture that often it also shows we have applied the same labels to very different perceptions. I once had a shirt that to me was absolutely without doubt brown. My spouse was convinced without doubt that it was purple. There was no in-between in either of our opinions. Apparently, what I have learned to label brown and purple are fundamentally different things from what my spouse has learned to label as such.

In this context and to carry the previous post's discussion further, the discussion concerning explicit definitions diluting things into nonexistence, suppose we talk about the color red. Let's say there's a range of, I don't know, a hundred different wavelengths of light, measured in angstroms, that I learned to label red. Supposed there are a hundred and fifty that you have learned to label as red. We never notice a problem between the two of us as long as we refer to colors which fall into the overlapping areas of our respective perception/label systems. But one day we can't agree on "red," so to remove ambiguity, we work together until we get that number of angstroms to a set of twenty. And then ten. And then one. Now we've gotten somewhere. Forgetting for a moment that our "scientific" devices for measuring down to the angstrom, and the concept of angstrom itself come into play, we now have defined, for once and for all, a single color "red." But what happens to the other ninety-nine I called "red," and the other hundred forty-nine you called "red?" What we have done, effectively, is almost entirely removed "red" from our lives. "Red" means something very, very, very precise; something that, for the most part, no longer exists. Do we now find labels for everything else that was "almost red?" Do we now have to come up with a hundred forty-nine new colors? Do we call them all "red-ish," or do we step backwards and say, "Close enough. They're all red?" And having done so, does "red" really mean anything particular anymore? At some point, we would hopefully agree that there are a bunch of things we agree to call "red," even though we know we don't see them the same. We agree to share a word, with the understanding that it refers to a poorly defined, shifting, somewhat arbitrary set of things. We go wrong only if we continue to believe the word represents reality, and/or the word itself is real.

Enter the previous post. Take a label like Christianity, or man or woman, and now apply the math. By and large, we agree to use these three words (and all other labels) to refer to sets of poorly defined, shifting, rather arbitrary sets of things. By and large, this method of getting along and engaging in workable but far from precise dialogue is successful. But sometimes it is not successful, and where we go wrong is in believing that the labels are magic and precise and take precedence over that to which they point. In truth, we don't have enough words to cover the gambit of Christianity. Neither do we have enough to cover the gambit of gender. There is nothing we have which points precisely to what "Christian" may or may not always be. There is nothing we have which points precisely to what man or woman may or may not always be.

I have picked three labels which are very basic to our views of life. Of course I have not picked them at random. In today's American culture, the three are swirling in the windy front of an immense storm which is already beginning to rain down upon us. Mark my words: barring any totally unforeseen realms, it is Christianity versus gender—the ideas of labels, definitions, perceptions and reality—that are going to be the main event of Christian doctrine in our lifetime.

And so now I'm waaaaay off from where I started, but that's okay. I'm always thinking about these three labels engaged in battle, so it's no surprise they finally found their way to a post. It seriously is the battle Christianity needs to acknowledge and bring to peace in our lifetime. Christianity must deal with this one battle before the next big one comes: "what (or who) is truly Human?"

Okay. So this post is nothing like I originally intended…

I was intending, as I finished up the "One Thing You Lack" series, to post a series asking what it means to be a Christian. My motivation was mostly personal, in that I've pondered the question at a personal level for a long time. Is it a set of doctrinal beliefs, is it the practice of particular religious rituals (which would include, say, "going to church" on Sunday), is it following Jesus (if so, what does it mean to follow?), a combination of these, or something else entirely?

But I've decided that there is far too much risk that, in trying to go at the issue in a way that attempts to be somewhat methodical, I'd say things I have no business, no authority, no right to say. And, as this post will demonstrate, I've found myself getting onto a different tact all together.

So what I've decided to do for starters is to simply step back and observe my own existing opinions on the issue, and formulate them into statements. As best as I can tell, the following three cover my views of "who is a Christian." To my satisfaction, a person is a Christian if:

That person believes her or his self to be a Christian, and

(That person believes intellectually that Jesus was sent by God to in some way achieve mankind's salvation, and that person desires and claims that salvation for his or her self, and/or,

That person chooses to make Jesus of Nazareth the main determining factor as to how she or he lives life, and/or,

That person has undergone one or more formalized rites accepted as placing one into a Christian faith tradition.)

Let's see… yep. That about covers it for me, and what is interesting about my response is that it doesn't really say much. My list is not terribly far from "If somebody says they're a Christian, then they are a Christian." More on this point later, but for now to whatever degree my view may be correct, I can say that being labeled a "Christian" doesn't say much about us. What's in a word? In this case, not necessarily very much.

I'm wondering if this is why some Christians work very hard at defining Christianity in excruciating detail and then drawing lines, saying "this and only this is true Christianity." Perhaps it's their way of trying to make some sort of ordered sense of things. They don't want, or can't bear, to say that "being a Christian" doesn't really have to mean much at all. So, In a certain way, I can grasp this and accept it as the way some folks are. To them Christianity is serious business, and they want to keep it that way. So they define all the ways that help keep it serious, and discard everything else as not Christian. Simple, neat and tidy.

Please don't think I'm being condescending. At least not yet. I'd say that by far, Christians who attempt to protect the title "Christian" are doing so for very good reasons, and for the most part I can relate to them. After all, whenever I see somebody like, oh… the Christians who went to the funerals of war vets and said their deaths were a good thing because they were fighting as puppets of a nation which accepts (what these Christians) see as immorality, I get pretty motivated to stand upon a soap box and say, "That's not Christianity! Those people aren't Christians!" From my viewpoint, they're making a mockery of Christianity in the midst of a world which needs the very opposite. Trust me, there is a part of me that would like to put them in their place, as defined by me. There's a part of me that would like to scratch their eyes out and write them off. But. When I am intellectually honest, they are Christian in—at the very least—a religious sense. And what's more, I must at some level—whatever it may be—accept them. I cannot claim to hold my personal views of Christian living while I reject these other people. If I rejected them, I'd be much like them. I choose differently. I choose to be inclusive in my faith; not exclusive.

My inclusive approach explains, in part, my list above for being a Christian. My qualifications are explained more fully by my noting that I am accepting a very large, very general, world view of Christianity in which Christianity is a religion. In a world almanac, where Christianity is listed along with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and scores of other religions, what is it that places a person in the "Christianity" box? We have to think of this, in order to address the practical question of the word Christian. And this is why I say that really, the word doesn't mean much. Being a Christian may mean nothing more than a simple checkmark in a box on a form. It tells us little more than nothing.

And this is really the first layer reason as to why this topic is big. It's difficult to nail down the playing field for where, in what context, to define "Christian." I've chosen here the high-level field. Is somebody a Christian just because in a list of five boxes, with the fifth being "other," she or he checks "Christian?" Well, for certain purposes, yes, and it may be a checkmark made with very, very little conviction of any kind behind it. Like I said, it tells us little more than nothing. Words are like this. We cannot, must not place much stock in a label. Ideally, it would be nice if we could get away from them altogether.

In the long run, being a Christian means whatever it means inside of a person, and the range of meanings is therefore now and always limited only by the number of people who are willing to form a definition. In this sense, the word can become one of dubious merit in terms of conversation, except for being a starting place for dialogue.

And finally, an interesting paradox. When we want to avoid or "solve" this issue of the word Christian being at risk of meaninglessness, the instinctive response in our modern minds is to "define" the word. When this doesn't seem to work, we assume the problem is that the definition is too broad. So we tighten it. There is some sort of conventional wisdom, a common sense, that tells us all we need to do is to define the word precisely (as if "precisely" is meaningful per se), and there will be no more confusion. But here's the paradox: it is often the case that the more rigidly, the more precisely we try to define a term, the more meaningless we make it.

Let's take an example that is a little more clear-cut and universal than "Christian." Let's take the word "man." Most people will say, there are men and there are women; you're one, or the other. And of course, there are qualifications for each, which of course are created to keep the two words properly defined and separated. Separation is, by the way, one of the roots of the meaning of "gender," so perhaps we should expect nothing else. Anyway, so let's say here is a set of qualifiers for being "man":

You don't wear dresses. You don't wear makeup. You don't wear earrings. You hunt. You like fast cars. You like sexy women. You don't cry from physical pain. You don't scream when you see a bug. You don't cook. You like to eat red meat. You love beer. You're courageous. You like watching sports on TV. You like dogs. You hate cats. You like action movies with blood and gore. You hate romance movies. You don't like to share your feelings. You'd rather have sex than do anything else. You fix your own cars. You take out the trash. You believe cleaning house is women's work.

I realize some of the above qualifications seem ridiculous, but for one thing they are placeholders for any one of a number of more sublime qualifications, and for another thing they are all part of our conditioning none the less. Now consider the possible combination of answers to the above qualifications. The number of possible sets of yes/no answers? About four million. Four million chances to look at somebody else's answer sheet and say, "You claim you're a man, but you're not: a man would <fill in the blank>." And so, what is a man? In the end, what we find is that the definition of "man" is so exclusive that there is no "real" man, and eventually the idea of "man" becomes meaningless. There is nothing left but a mythological prototype, the single imaginary individual who embodies "manhood," the one in four million; a creature who is culturally reinterpreted, revised and recreated as time and generations pass. The entire concept of "man" is nothing but an elaborate formulation of an incredibly complex sociological system, and yet remains as something held to be absolutely fundamental to what "human" means—even though it is (sorry!) a fiction. And, to be fair, the same thing holds true for "woman," which in some ways should be even more obvious as to its fiction. After all, if you're not 5'9", 135-ish, 36C, have a flawless complexion, exude sex appeal, have two cute kids, and love nothing more than to spend time in the kitchen cooking up heart-healthy delicacies for your family, which version of the four million kinds of pseudo-woman are you?

Sorry. Pet peeves of mine. I digress.

The reason for the example is that "Christian" is like this. I am willing to bet that there are self-proclaiming Christians who could list one hundred independently answerable yes/no qualifications for being a real Christian. That would leave, oh, let's see… I think about a million, trillion, trillion possible sets of answers. Seriously. That's the order of magnitude we're talking. Along the same lines as the gender discussion above, where in all of creation does this leave the label of "Christian?" To my mind, diluted into an utterly meaningless one.

What's in a name? I'd like to think there is room for names to be deeply meaningful. But at times I'm not so sure. I feel the need to continue this post soon…

If I had to claim at present an area of research for my degree, I'd say that ostensibly it's about "Building bridges and spanning spaces." Supposedly I concern myself with internarrative spaces and the breakdown of communication between discourse communities. And, of course, magical ways of forming connections across these gaps: a little something I impressively label "memetic bridging." Yeah. Thumthin like that.

I truly do find internarrative spaces fascinating. But I have to admit that sometimes they're just plain disheartening. When you study the differences of frameworks in ardent opponents, sometimes it's simply frustrating and you just wonder why the groups can't see what each other is saying. But what's really unsettling is when you try to grasp the supporting structures of each framework in certain cases, and also examine, on each side, the critiques of the respective opponent's framework. This is not so much frustrating as it is simply mind-numbing. It becomes obvious why, in certain meetings of certain communities, the end result is that each group decides the best thing is to just do their own "thing" and leave one another alone.

I've been reading a present debate on the internet between two guys who belong to one Protestant tradition, one guy in the Bible Belt and one guy way out west. The former is, in my point of view, a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying fundamentalist, while the latter is… well, more conservative than I am but a flaming, hell-bound liberal in the eyes of the former. Same religious tradition, same Bible, and about 170 degrees off from one another. This could be considered the intriguing, even frustrating, part. But, the reading of the interpretations that each has of the other's words, and the comments of people who are reading the debates, is the mind-numbing part. Beyond the fact that everybody is writing in English, there is almost no framework which exists to support effective dialogue.

Yet both these groups fit into a big bucket the secular world hears say, "Come unto us in the name of Christ, and find the Truth."

Time for me to go sit and rock in a corner, hugging myself, trying to find a happy place.

IF I AM to live in this physical world and see it rightly, see each created thing as a manifestation of God’s glory, I must see that the world, both in its visible forms and in its hidden forms, is part of the word of God. I must then take what I see and I must love what I see; not love a particular thing as if for its own sake, but love it for the particular word or words of God it is. I do not need to love the things of this world, but I must come to dearly and passionately love the spirit of God as it shows itself to me within and through them. Once I have seen and learned to love what is before me, I must welcome this love into my heart that it may compel me to act in accord with God’s word all around me. If I cannot do this, the meaning of all these things will be lost to me and I will not hear his voice. Each utterance of God around me will fall upon my deafness and remain only a thing that exists to serve me, pleasure me, profit me, or submit its own life and death to me. I will mistake my own voice for that of God.