Community of the Risen

Last night I watched Disney’s rendition of Robin Hood, and was struck by a few things that I had never noticed before.  First, I was struck by the economic implications of the movie.  When Little John asks Robin Hood how he feels about stealing, Robin retorts by calling stealing a “naughty word,” and that he should think of it more like “borrowing from those who can afford it.”  While they also do a good job of showing the true problem of Prince John not being the “true” king of England, it is interesting that they paint Robin Hood as a hero for stealing.  I say this because small children who watch the movie are having more than just a nice Disney movie experience; they are having their morality formed.  And I am not sure that there is great truth in the idea that we should “steal from the rich to give to the poor.”  I say this because I don’t think it gets to the heart of the problem.

The true king is gone, and a corrupt king is in place.

Stealing from the rich and giving to the poor only means higher taxes and an angrier corrupt king.  Perhaps a better movie would be Robin going after the king himself so he can no longer tax his fellow man.  But this would not make for a good children’s movie.

I don’t usually make predictions, but I have a feeling that Wright is going to hurt Obama.  It has nothing to do with Wright himself.  It has to do with what Wright said at the press conference a few days ago.  He said that politicians make decisions politically and pastors make decisions pastorally.  He went on to mention that Obama basically looks at polls and then decides how he is going to act based on those polls.  Whether it is true or not, the whole situation looks like Obama is distancing himself from Wright for political reasons, and that make people like me, who have a love for things like liberation theology, wonder how audacious Obama’s hope really is.  I know that he is a good man and that he wants change, but there was nothing worth “denouncing” in his speech at the press conference.  It’s going to hurt him in the long run because it makes it look like he acting out of fear of a drop in the polls.  Idealist candidates are always hurt when it looks like they are making decisions based on polls.

Obviously economics and theology are related.  There is no question that Jesus spoke a lot about money, a lot about resources, and a lot about how to be a good steward, and there is no doubt that economists and others have much to say about morality.  But should the two mix?  Or do they make strange bedfellows.

There are many angry economists who seem upset at theologians for doing bad math, and there are many indignant theologians who seem upset that economists simply do bad theology, but is there a way for the two to sit down at the same table and discuss this issue?  Here is, in my view, the main problem.  Theologians see economics as a means to the end of theology, while some economists see theology as a means or part of a means to understanding the market system.  For the economist, theology is just another variable or opportunity cost.  For the theologian, economics is just another theology.

And never, at least with this mode of theology, the twain shall meet.

But is there a back door?

Yes.  I think there is back door, and that is the mode of thinking that puts economics and theology side by side.  Economists begin to think theologically for theology’s sake, while theologians begin thinking of economics for economics sake.  What do I mean by this?  I mean that theologians often do not take the economy seriously enough.  They often see it as a road block on the road to God, but He can often be found in the market systems that so many theologians despise.  In the same way, those like Ayn Rand see religion as a kind of bump in the road to a more progressive and equitable society where all men work in a robust market system.  Rand has to start taking religion seriously, and the theologians have to start taking the economy seriously.

You should read Wes’ Paper here:

You Were Aliens

There are many theological systems.  Some are built on grace, others on hope, others on atonement, and many terms are interconnected to form a coherent whole.  Perhaps it would be helpful to think of theology in the contemporary framework of the world wide web.  On a website, there is an interconnected set of sub-sites that all find their root on a home page.  From the home page, if one can navigate through the maze of sub-sites, a person will find a locus of knowledge that centers around whatever the creator wishes.   The problem is, however, that a web-site is, by nature, limited in its scope of any subject.  The nice thing about them is that information can be deleted and added rather seamlessly (thus the rise of wikipedia and other open source software).  In the same way, any system of theology centers around a series of ideas and cannot, in and of itself, be an end.  Theology is only the study of God, not God himself.

When we read about the “peace of Christ,” the Pauline text also reminds us that it “transcends understanding.”  In other words, the peace of Christ cannot be understood in the way we understand facts and conceptions of reality. The peace of Christ ultimately transcends and eclipses all reality.  There can be ways in which we begin to understand this peace, but it is primarily experienced rather than understood.

Recently I taught my first lesson on the crusades in my intro to teaching class.  This is not a student teaching position.  I just show up once a week to help out with the classroom.  It is a social studies junior high world history class, and I have to teach two lessons.  I did the first one last week.  I was very surprised by the results.

I went through a brief history of Israel with the students, then we read one document from Pope Urban II and one document from the Arab perspective.  After this, we talked about bias in documents.  After the lesson my host teacher told me that the information had gone totally over the students heads.  I was stunned.  I had gone through the documents slowly because I wanted to make sure they understood the documents.  I had explained all the difficult vocabulary words.  What was the problem?

She suggested that I had made the crusades too religious.

“They don’t all have a religious background, you know,” she said.

I really didn’t know what to say.  I am living in a generation where it is a stretch for students to understand the religious aspects of the crusades.  The study flabbergasted me so much that I went to Barnes and Noble today to look at information on religion and education.  I picked up a book by Stephen Prothero called Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to know.  He believes along with others that these problems of religious illiteracy can be traced to “John Dewey and other progressive-era education reformers, who gave up in the early twentieth century on content-based learning in favor of a skills-based strategy that scorned the piling up of information” (4).  Prothero began to find that he could have “challenging conversations” at the college level without “common knowledge” (4-5).

We have to find ways to bring this “common knowledge” at the junior high level.  If we don’t inculcate students with proper vocabulary at the junior high level, I don’t think we will ever be able to reach students.

Reading this week in my California history book has been disheartening.  Once again, there was a time in US History when a minority race was set against the majority because of people’s fear.  Japanese were interned simply for the fact that they were Japanese.  The most interesting person, however, was Earl Warren who originally allowed for the injustices to go on as a governor of California, but later said it was the greatest mistake of his life.  He went on to become chief justice of the United States and fought for civil rights for all people.  It is interesting the way that people can change and grow to become better people.  In some sense we are all Saul on our own road to Damascus.  We have to be careful how quickly we write people off.  I think it is also important to remember, however, that the reason Warren gave into the internment was societal pressure.  We also have to remember that we are going to be motivated often by a “the will of the people” which can also be the “democratic tyranny.”  As Christians, we need to be able to stand for our rights.

When I asked a student in class the other day not to say “shut up” to another student, I was given a blank stare.

“That’s just the way we talk,” she said.

I was floored.  I didn’t really know how to respond.  I am thinking today about the difficulty of language and what place it has in the classroom.  After having thought about it, I have decided that when I become a full time teacher, I will spend an entire class period early in the semester analyzing with the students the relationship between language and social division throughout history.  Since the middle ages, language has been used as a weapon to divide society.  If we dislike someone, we have words with which to express that anger.  If we want to show that we’re smarter than someone else, we will use words they cannot understand.  We have created classes based on the way we talk.  For instance, historically certain words have been considered “taboo” in Christian circles as a seperation marker.  If you say certain words, you receive less respect within your particular Christian faith community.  It is not about what you mean when you say it, but merely the fact that you say it.

Thus we have quite a difficult mess on our hands.  How do we begin to bring students together in the classroom through language when it is precisely language that has seperated sub-cultures for so long?

I just got another article published at Jesus Manifesto, check it out.

Michael Cline is asking some hard questions at Jesus Manifesto.

Mark Montgomery has written some very good thoughts on how we are invited into God’s Kingdom.

Wes has written another wonderful thought provoking piece on Torture and Jesus at Kingdom Conversations.