For the Joy of the Journey

In addition to View from the Front Porch, I am introducing a new weekly feature entitled Misconceptions. An idea which comes from reading Factuals: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. Learning that things are better in this world than we think they are is a much needed but generally resisted message because of deeply held misconceptions. Using reliable data, Rosling addresses and refutes ten major misconceptions that shape our view of the world in negative ways. Each week, I will include a misconception and a reality that refutes it.

Shifting Christian apologetics to newer questions:
…the future of Christian apologetics must look beyond answering the questions of modernity, such as the existence of God, the historicity of Jesus, and the veracity of Scripture. These questions are the product of the Enlightenment era when the primary concerns raised against the Christian faith were related to rationalism and scientific empiricism. While these types of questions should retain a proper place in the practice of contemporary apologetics, it is important to recognize that postmodernity asks new questions. These questions include, but are not limited to:
* How do Christians account for the colonization of the Western world, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the enslavement of Black people, all in the name of the Christian faith?
* Is Christianity the white man’s religion?
* How should Christian leaders respond to the sex scandals, racism, and abuses of power that have left a generation of believers disenchanted with the institutional Church?
* How should Christians respond to the cries for justice among marginalized communities, rather than merely dismissing them as liberal?
* How can Christians preach a message of unity and reconciliation when the Church itself is so divided?
These are the types of questions being asked by the postmodern skeptics of our time, Christian and non-Christian alike. These questions should not be interpreted as a threat to the Christian faith, but an opportunity. They are an opportunity for the institutional Church to look more like the bride of Christ, and for the God of justice to speak into the injustices of our world today. They are an invitation to engage in an apologetic that is more concerned with “gentleness and respect” than merely “giving an answer.” They are an indication that Christian apologetics must shift its approach from having all the answers, to being present in the questions. To quote a conversation I had with Dr. Dale Coulter, “what we need are not ‘apologetic experts’ given how much expertise is being questioned, but ‘family doctors’ who live with the people and show their concern through their concrete practices.” This just may be the best defense for the Christian faith in our postmodern age.
Scot McKnight

God in a box
Our trouble is not in knowing God, but, in that He has made Himself known, how do we live with what He has said? The reality and presence of Christ are not abstract or hard to know and find. They are present, even obvious. And that is where our discomfort begins.
And with the discomfort, others will beg us not to “put God in a box.” We prefer to have Him elsewhere, imaginary, pliable, and congenial. But He loves us too much to stay out of the Box. God is in the Box. Listen to Him.
Fr Stephen Freeman
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2022/09/02/god-and-the-box-2/

Misconceptions
a wrong or inaccurate idea or conception
What do you need to hunt, capture, and replace misconceptions? Data.

Poverty in the world.
What is your perception?
In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has …
A: almost doubled
B: remained more or less the same ?
C: almost halved

Over the past twenty years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved.

Often opinions are nothing more than unsubstantiated feelings, illusions that things we knew are things we only felt.

To point out the flaws and deconstruct the edifice is easy work. To build something better, something true, something whole, is hard work, indeed, and it has received almost no attention. Building a civilization is among the hardest tasks that human beings ever undertake. Destoying them can be the work of an evening.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Scientific & Poetic Knowledge
…the difference between scientific knowledge and poetic knowledge. There are many ways to frame this distinction. “Scientific knowledge” describes knowledge that is “outside” of us: such as objective, verifiable, experimental results. “Poetic knowledge” (by far the harder to describe) refers to the knowledge we have from the “inside.” It is what we know because it is us, or because we have a participation in its life. Scientific knowledge gives us an ability to master and control the world around us. It also gives us a knowledge that is “alien” to us.
…poetic knowledge is acquired by union with and attachment to the object; scientific knowledge is acquired by distance and detachment from the object.
Living in a world of machines can be wonderfully abundant but lonely and isolating. Even when we study other humans, with scientific knowledge we place them in a category that we loathe: that of objects.
Richard Rohr (?)

a tourist or a pilgrim?
The tourist is impatient, jumping off the bus and taking pictures, getting a quick experience, hopping back on the bus, and then readying for the next stop. 
The pilgrim wants time to see, hear, smell, and taste an experience.
I think of my students who come from a digitized world and think learning can be crammed, but it can’t. The patience of slow Bible reading, slow reading of important scholarship, and pondering over what has been read — these are what lead to theological formation. Cramming is for the tourist; pondering is for the pilgrim.
Is your life a tourist or a pilgrim?
Scot McKnight

View from the front porch

Ive been thinking a lot about reality, what is true and real. Here are a couple of quotes I came across recently:

It really is a war on reality. People who believe that reality is socially constructed come to believe that lying for the sake of building a socially just world is fine. And so, we find ourselves committing suicide as a civilization.   
Rod Dreher

…our culture reminds us that we must never doubt ourselves, and if per chance there be any doubt, we should simply follow our tribe. These seem to be the first two principles of contemporary reflexive moral reasoning. They feel right, but are they? 
Paul Nessleroade

I believe “war on reality” captures the essence of our cultural conflict.
An assumption that “Whatever your truth is  is true for you.”, means they are not lying —  it is true — it is their belief. as a result, “Invoking truth (reality) is rude and condescending.” Their belief  is true, but it is not real, it is a mirage.“…an illusion of something that is real.
It should be no surprise conflict ensues.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

GOOD NEWS

Loneliness
…mass loneliness is a perversity. If a bunch of people are lonely, why don’t they just hang out together? Maybe it’s because people approach potential social encounters with unrealistically anxious and negative expectations. Maybe if we understood this, we could alter our behavior.
My general view is that the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.
David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/opinion/social-life-talk-strangers.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220826&instance_id=70280&nl=the-morning&regi_id=98699252&segment_id=102419&te=1&user_id=979ff7ea8eb24fcd7abe710b579081f5

Celeberity
…we need to shift from a culture formed by “success” to a culture formed by “character.” The word success has too often transformed churches and organizations and institutions and seminaries from formation locations into launching pads for entrepreneurial types who want to use the church’s platform to build their brand. Maybe everyone of these types needs to spend two months a year in a church in rural America and do what the majority of pastors are actually doing.
Scot McKnight

Gospel
The gospel proclaims the presence and power of God in our lives through the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit. The actual spiritual union we experience with God in the Holy Spirit goes well beyond a declaration that God loves you. Again, love is an affection, a feeling. And while feelings are important, something more is available to us in the Holy Spirit. Through the Holy Spirit God is with us and empowers us. Presence and power. These gifts are available to all who believe the Good News.
To be sure, Christians display a lot of diversity about what sort of “power” we have access to through the Spirit. But for this post, we can keep it simple and stick to what all Christians believe, that the Holy Spirit gives us a strength to carry the burdens of our lives that we would not otherwise possess on our own. The gospel is more than a message of God’s affection. The gospel is the offer to share in God’s very own life.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-gospel-minus-x-equals-part-7.html

Contempt (https://amzn.https://amzn.to/3PN7ioB )
We are dwelling in an age of contempt.
Contempt for others forms a death-dealing cancer in our culture, in our churches, and in our society – but also in ourselves, the ones contempting others (if that’s a verb).
We dwell today in a world of hot hate and cool hate, and surely more in the cool hate than in the hot hate. Hot hate turns into road rage and sudden outbursts; cool hate seethes and foams and goes indirect and passive. It turns into snark and sarcasm and verbal putdowns.
Kim cites John Gottman’s four horsemen of negative interaction – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He thinks contempt is the deepest problem. It creates a world of the superior and the inferior, a world of us vs. them. Contempt kills. Others and ourselves.
What Kim knows is that this contempt has invaded the church in “motive attribution asymmetry” (we know we love others but others hate us). So we misunderstand and misattribute. Motive attribution asymmetry is made worse by “online disinhibition effect,” words Orwell would despise, but we can get by the stodgy words to the truth: when we get online it’s much easier to express hatred and contempt and to attribute motive to those we don’t even know.
God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one wants seems to want this gift. We’d rather have religion, and laws, and commandments, and obligations, and duties. I’m sure many of us attend church out of duty, but gathering with the Body of Christ is supposed to be a wedding feast. Do you know how many times in the four Gospels eternal life is described as a banquet, a feast, a party, a wedding, the marriage feast of the Lamb? There are fifteen different, direct allusions to eternal life being a great, big party. 
Richard Rohr

“It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so the rest lies with God,” C S Lewis

View From the front porch
A bit of poetry:

From where does my praise come?

…from the bounty of my circumstances?

…from the strength of my health?

…from freedom and liberty?

…from my goodness and rightness?

Hallelujah!

So dear God, keep from me

…poverty

…sickness

…imprisonment

…failure and sinfulness

If not, where then would my praise come from?

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

View from the front porch
Fredrick Buechner 1926-2022
I’ve been thinking about Fredrick Beuchner who died this past week. Only slightly acquainted with his life and writings, reading tributes has made me aware of how limited my appreciation is for people outside of my echo chamber, and missed opportunities to enjoy the infinite wonder and beauty of humanity. I enjoyed this tribute particularly :
https://www.christiancentury.org/article/reflection/frederick-buechner-s-many-benedictions
Also:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/21/us/frederick-buechner-appreciation-blake-cec/index.html
 
Buechner never stopped searching his own life for clues to the presence of God. This quest became one of his overarching themes: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.”

“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”
Fredrick Buechner “Beyond Words.”

“We are our secrets,” Buechner once wrote. “They are the essence of what makes us ourselves. They are the rich loam out of which, for better or worse, grow the selves by which the world knows us. If we are ever to be free and whole, we must be free from their darkness and have their spell over us broken.”

‘If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.’

“If more pastor-theologians were as brutally honest about their broken lives, as Fred Buechner was,” he wrote, “…I dare say the church would be a healthier place.”

He once said that faith for him was not like undergoing some version of “Christian plastic surgery” where all doubts are removed, but more like waking up every morning asking himself, “Can I believe it all again today?”

The digital revolution has generated massive increases in information, more modest increases in knowledge, and a huge deficit in wisdom.
Jonah Goldberg

Laughter
The trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis recalls a revealing backstage moment. “It was me, Willie, B.B. King, Ray Charles and Eric Clapton,” he says, all shooting the breeze — “and Willie said: ‘Well, gentlemen, I think I’m the only one here who actually picked cotton.’” Everyone burst into laughter.

Morality
In the face of the moral complexity and difficulty of the true Christian moral call, we’ve created a hierarchy of values. It’s not that we absolutely reject kindness or humility or decency. It’s not that we’re going to condemn the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—it’s just that they’re “secondary values.” When push comes to shove, it’s our vision of justice that matters. 
Christian young people are often taught that they should be countercultural. The youth group version of that admonition goes something like this: When the world is profane, your speech is clean. When the world is drunk, you are sober. When the world is promiscuous, you are chaste. How do you know we’re Christian? We don’t cuss, drink, or have premarital sex. 
But the call to counterculture is much more comprehensive. When the world is greedy, you are generous. When the world is cruel, you are kind. When the world is fearful, you are faithful. When the world is proud, you are humble. How do you know we’re Christian, by our love. 
David French
https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/christian-political-ethics-are-upside?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Faith
Faith, as we see in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus’ usage of them, is much closer to our words “trust” or “confidence” than it is about believing doctrines to be true. Simply believing doctrines demands almost no ego-surrender or real change of the small self. Holding confidence that God is good, God can be trusted, and God is actively involved in my life is a much more powerful and effective practice. This is the practical power of biblical faith. Faith-filled people are, quite simply, usable for larger purposes because they live in and listen to a much Larger Self.  
Richard Rohr

Transparency
Elijah is transparent and honest with God. His words are a livid accusation and agonizing lament. What I want us to appreciate is the quality of gut-level honesty. God can handle our honesty. In fact, I think it is one of the most fundamental things God wants and expects from us. He knows already. To the extent we are not fully disclosing ourselves to God we are withholding, and to that extent we are protecting God from our pain; which is another way of saying we are hiding from God. And when we protect God from our pain we will develop one of two broken responses: We will internalize it or exercise it on others. We can’t handle that. Neither can they. God can and will. 
J D Walt

Contemplation
Father William McNamara’s definition of contemplation—“a long loving look at the real”—became transformative. The world, my own issues and hurts, all goals and desires gradually dissolved into proper perspective. God became obvious and everywhere. 
Contemplation is a way to hear with the Spirit and not just with the head. Contemplation is the search for a wide-open space, a space broad enough for the head, the heart, the feelings, the gut, the subconscious, our memories, our intuitions, our whole body. We need a holistic place for discerning wisdom.
The effect of contemplation is authentic action; if contemplation doesn’t lead to genuine action, then it remains only navel-gazing and self-preoccupation. 
Richard Rohr

Joy
One more observation about joy … To translate the beatitudes with the word “happy,” …short-changes the sense of the term makarios. Notice who is blessed and notice if we connect them to our senses of happiness: the poor, the persecuted, the mourners, the meek… etc.. No these are social groups without status and they are the ones upon whom Jesus says “God’s favor” rests, which is the theological theme at work in the term “blessed.” When we know God’s favor rests on us we can live in joy in spite of our circumstances (which does not mean we can’t work to change our circumstances). Joy is a term that pokes out of the ground when tension, persecution, and suffering are the topic of discussion.
Scot McKnight on https://amzn.to/3PN7ioB

One of the reasons people feel distant from God is because their doctrine tells them that the faith is mainly about personal salvation….once you’ve attained that, there is nothing left to do. The truth is that “getting saved” is just one step in a long process of transformation and fellowship with God is found in working out that salvation ….you need His help to love your enemy and be happy about it…
Phoenix Preacher

“The reward of the search is to go on searching. The soul’s desire is fulfilled by the very fact of its remaining unsatisfied; for really to see God is never to have had one’s fill of desiring Him” – Gregory of Nyassa

STILL ON THE JOURNEY