The Church of Soylent Green
You may have seen the cheesy 1970s movie "Soylent Green" about an overpopulated future where everyone consumes the titular product. By the end of the film, Charlton Heston's character figures out that recycling has gone too far. He stands among the throng and cries "Soylent Green is people!"
I was recently writing to a friend about the nature of the Church (capital C) and realized that the bizarre line has some relevance for Christ's followers in 2008. Some trouble-maker needs to stand up and cry, "The Church is people!"
Sociologists talk about reification. The term refers to a social version of "let's pretend" that eventually becomes reality.
For example, there is no such thing as the U.S. government. There is no physical object you can point to and say, "that is the government." The government is an enormous game of make-believe that we all play to make our world orderly.
Tomorrow, we could all get up and declare our homes the "Independent Nation of Your-Name-Here-istan." And the U.S. government would disappear in a puff of smoke... because it was never there to begin with. Our government is an illusion based on the fact that we've agreed to give certain groups of people rule-making responsibilities, handcuffs or gavels, and to go along with what they decide.
I fear we have done that with the Church. The Church started as a band of fishermen, tax collectors and ne'er-do-wells bound together by the grace of God. We have reified the Church into a bureaucracy. And that bureaucracy has taken on a life of its own, replacing the hand of God as the glue that holds it together. And we don't seem to have noticed.
As Christ's followers, we are no longer bound together by the God's grace, but by our partisan allegiances to administrative offices in Canterbury, Chicago, St. Louis, Wheaton, Rome, Istanbul, or points between.
Chuck Heston recently returned from whence he came. But maybe we need somebody like his character to stand up and remind us that our religious bureaucracies are an illusion, and that fundamentally the Church is people.
Pax vobiscum!
Posted by: Cloy on 5/04/2008 at 6:54 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
Fairness and a rock, Part II
In Saturday, April 26, issue of the Fargo Forum, the ruckus about the 10 Commandments monument at the Fargo Civic Center continues on the editorial page.
Janice Gilbertson chimes in with a letter to the editor that is either ill-informed or a remarkable example of distortion.
In describing opposition to the monument's presence on public property, she describes the Freethinkers' position as to "get rid of the Ten Commandments and put ours up instead."
Gilbertson has mistakenly used the word and, rather that the word or, in her description. Doing so fundamentally changes the equation.
(This doesn't seem to be an example of simply mistyping -- the rest of her letter is based on this incorrect assumption.)
The Freethinkers' position has always been:
- take down the monument because it's a government sponsored religious statement,
-OR- - open up the space so any religious or non-religious statements can be presented.
I prefer to give Gilbertson the benefit of the doubt and assume that she misread the situation.
Ironically, Gilbertson describes those who want to have the one-and-only monument in the public square as an effort to "shove their beliefs down the throats of the residents of Fargo." Isn't that what Freethinkers have been arguing all along?
Pax vobiscum!
Posted by: Cloy on 4/27/2008 at 11:35 AM | Comments (1) | Permalink
Fairness and a rock, Part I
When discussing and arguing, the Golden Rule still applies:
Never present an argument that you would not accept coming from others.I think that's also part of what Jesus meant when he talked about the Pharisee's laying burdens on others that they could never shoulder themselves. (Matthew 23:4)
Statements on the engraved rock in Fargo have once again reached such a fevered pitch that integrity and clear thinking go out the window. To recap:
- In the 1960s, the Eagles Clubs across America partnered with Hollywood to simultaneously promote the movie the "10 Commandments" and to make a public statement by erecting stone tablets on public and private property across the U.S. Stars of the movie even showed up at the unveiling of some of these monuments.
- In the 1990s, a group called the Freethinkers asked the city of Fargo to remove the monument, noting that government should not be in the business of promoting religious views.
- The city of Fargo decided to reject the request. The Freethinkers then asked to erect their own monument near the civic center, but were again rebuffed.
- The Freethinkers are back in court asking that the monument be removed. Their argument: if the public square is a place where ideas are expressed, then it should be available for all people to express their views. If it's not a place where views can be expressed, then why is there a rock there making a public statement.
A letter today by Tiffany Wisnewski declares:
"I believe that each person can and should have their own opinion and not have someone else's opinion forced upon them. Whether the Ten Commandments stands in a public place where everyone can read it is not forcing those commandments on anyone. Whether you choose to read them, live by those commandments, believe in those commandments or where they came from, is totally up to you."That's a good start, but by the end of the letter Tiffany has turned the tables on her own argument. Apparently if the Freethinkers want to have their monument on public land it would be forcing their views on others. She writes, "That is just fine, except when the fight to remove the Ten Commandments was lost, they came up with another tactic. Again, they are just trying to shove their ideas upon the public."
[The other problem with this statement is that the Freethinkers are not necessarily forcing their ideas on the public... because just like you and me, they are the public!]
Take a breath, Tiffany. You're arguing that the monument in Fargo is not a problem because people can disregard the message if they choose -- it doesn't force anything on people. Then you turn around and argue that the Freethinkers should not be forcing their views (and their monument) on the city of Fargo. You can't have it both ways.
My suggestion: remember the Golden Rule.
Pax vobiscum!
-Cloy
Posted by: Cloy on 4/26/2008 at 10:10 AM | Comments (3) | Permalink
Having it all figured out
Almost 25 years ago when I was working with a West Coast youth ministry, I had an interesting conversation with an articulate young lady who attended our interdenominational group...
"I go to the Christian church," she declared.
"What tradition?" I asked."Christian. We're not like those people who follow Calvin or Martin Luther. We don't follow the 'words of men,' we follow the Bible."
"That's terrific. How do you do that?""Well, we believe that the Bible should be understood as inerrant in its original manuscripts, that clear passages should be used to explain unclear passages. We also believe that the Holy Spirit will...."
"All of those rules for understanding Scripture... aren't they just the 'words of men'?""No, they're from the book of... they just make sense... well, my pastor says... Um, how about those Dodgers?"
This past week, the "Red River Bible & Prophecy Conference" made a stop in Fargo, and brought its own twist on the Christian faith.
Of course, the itinerary preachers don't see it that way. They believe that they have cornered the market on the truth. "They stick with the Bible and only the Bible, " one attendee declared.
We live in a universe that is not only more vast and complex than we imagine, it is more vast and complex than we CAN imagine.
To have an clear, inerrant, absolute understanding of the Creator of that universe is a remarkable feat. I have no illusions that I can ever be that brilliant. Maybe some day, but for now "I see through a glass darkly."
For those who can, I wish you God's grace in your journey.
Pax vobiscum!
Posted by: Cloy on 4/26/2008 at 9:08 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Dead means dead
Today's Fargo Forum ran an interesting article on the subject of resurrection. The article talked about different understandings of "life after death" throughout history.
The article stops short of presenting the historic understanding of death and resurrection as it was generally understood by early Christians, especially those who were of Jewish heritage.
Many of Christ's earliest followers understood death as the complete and total end of a human life. No spirit wandering around haunting old houses, no ghost who needed to "run to the light." Dead was dead -- the complete end of a whole, integrated human being.
It wasn't until Greek thinking -- and later the work of Descartes -- was adopted into the Western church that the flesh and soul concept developed. The church adopted what Gilbert Ryle later described as the "ghost in the machine" understanding of the human being.
I tend to think that resurrection is the key to understanding the afterlife. We die and all that we were is gone. "From the dust we come, and to the dust we will return." We are without hope, without consciousness, and without life. It is in resurrection that we get our lives back. We don't just get new skin (sarx in Greek), but we become a whole person again. (The word used in soma -- which is frequently translated as body, but it means the whole person -- not just the flesh and bones.) We were utterly destroyed in death... and our hope lies in receiving our whole being back as a gift from God.
In his book Whistling in the Dark, Frederick Buechner sums it up so well:
Immortality means death-proof. To believe in the immortality of the soul is to believe that though John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave, his soul goes marching on simply because marching on is the nature of souls just the way that producing butterflies is the nature of caterpillars. Bodies die but souls don't."He goes on to say that the biblical view is not that we have bodies but that we are bodies. Body and soul are united completely. When you die, 100% of you dies, body and soul, all of you with nothing left to go marching on. Buechner continues...
The Bible speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. We do not go on living beyond the grave because that's how we are made. Rather, we go to our graves as dead as a doornail and are given our lives back again by God (i.e. resurrected) just as we were given them by God in the first place, because that's the way God is made. . . The idea of immortality of souls is based on the experience of humanity's indomitable spirit. The idea of the resurrection of the body is based upon the experience of God's unspeakable love.Pax Vobiscum and Happy Easter!
Posted by: Cloy on 3/23/2008 at 11:00 AM | Comments (2) | Permalink