Sermon responding to Friday's Sandy Hook mass killing of first graders

Children in Connecticut rampage, all 6 and 7, shot repeatedly

Pray Angrily, Renounce Violence, and Reduce Stigma

A Sermon Response to Friday's Mass Killing of 1st Graders in Connecticut

Sunday, December 16, 2012

When I was a chaplain, the parents of a 5 year old brought him to the emergency room, where he died in front of my eyes as the ER staff worked furiously to revive him. The cause of death was respiratory complications of H1N1 flu.  As the doctors were working to revive the boy, I found myself looking to see the face of my own 5 year old, Evan, on that table.  I wondered to myself why I was so intent in seeing Evan's face on that ER bed, gone forever. I knew it wasn't Evan, but there I was closely focused on the face of that boy wondering how it would feel if it were. I felt sick. 

Then I looked to the parents whom I would soon have to try to offer words of spiritual care.  The boy's mother was sobbing and flushed, the father was ashen, his face drained of blood, mostly keeping his arms folded and regularly turning away from watching the drama of resuscitation.  I was both of those parents inside myself, but was I really?  I felt so wretched for those parents and in doubt as to my abilities. As often happened to me in the ER, adrenaline took hold  and I struggled to slow my breathing in order to calm myself. I don't know if my being a father helped my words or not, but I did my best. I did my job. I stood vigil with the parents as they tried to understand, to accept. It was that moment when I hated my job.  The death of children made me question why God had created this moment, or created the way God did, and why God left me holding the bag to cover for Him/Her.  Is God unable to prevent these deaths?  Does God have that power but just does not choose in this case to apply it?    If the latter, why does she hold his followers up to the anger and ridicule of grieving people: you mean you believe your god could have helped our child but didn't????  So, I find that on the front lines of pastoral care, during family and social crises, when pastors and spiritual care workers are asked to justify God to others, we are tempted to shrink and say something like:

actually, God does not have all that power the Bible says He has. He Himself is limited by the freedom of evil, and He suffers with us, like Jesus suffered on the Cross. Look for God's presence with you and in you. That is the compassion of God who has taken on our flesh to experience what we feel, and maybe to guide us better in our human task of compassion.

But that explanation does not really cut it, does it?  Why worship or put your trust in such?  The reality is that people as they feel the gamut of emotions and anguish at death of children turn to the church for answers, and  yet we can give them very little but our prayers.  And maybe also we give them our "permission" to express their anger that they feel with God in these moments. That permission to express anger at God and our companionship and vigil, rather than our explanation of why God is either powerless or unwilling to prevent the most senseless death of children, is what Christian spiritual leaders may offer.  It's not much, it's very little, but it may be all that is allowed us.  That permission to "lament," to find fault with God, is part of our Biblical tradition in the Psalms of Lament, though I do not offer a quote from the Psalms in the immediacy of such loss. The Talmud notes, "The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.”  We keep our prayers brief and angry when children die. For children die senselessly.  They die in wombs because of some horrible failure of nature, they die in warfare as "collateral damage" from aggressive power. They die of neglect, and hunger, and violent abuse.   They die in all the circumstances, innocent of any sin that I can discern, innocent of any provocation to parents, to authority, to their parent's enemies, to God.  And sometimes they die close to home, and that's when we grieve more deeply and demand more explanation. Maybe we shouldn't, but we do.

I read the news reports Friday and the reactions of pundits, religious and political leaders and friends on social media.  The children in Connecticut who were killed were 1st graders, which is the stage of Evan now!  I had that familiar reaction: what if that had been Evan and his classmates?  I found myself cycling through the  dimensions of anguish: anger, sadness, and numbness.  It was not grief, or so I thought, because it really had not happened to me. I watched in the media as the reactions ran the gamut that I felt: fear that it could happen to mine, anger at the gun culture in America, and sorrowful petitions for prayer to all affected.  My colleague Rev. Diana Bell describes my state of mind when she applies Romans 8.26: ."for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words."

We demand explanation of God and it doesn't come, so we in civil society and in the church offer explanation.  It's the ease of gun access, it's the pervasiveness of gun culture, the program of 2nd Amendment zealots, it's the failure of the mental health profession, it's the failure of politics that de-funds social programs as it seems to structurally limit opportunities for universal human welfare. It's a problem within ourselves, the forces of violence and life-negating sin that infects humanity due to our estrangement from God.  I believe the explanation for what happened to those children at Sandy Hook involves all of those things and more. Because the church knows that it must offer more than prayer and some scripture reading on Sunday, the church gets involved in offering solutions based on some amalgam of these explanations.  On the conservative side, the church identifies systemic sin in the people that God is punishing as an explanation for the death, so its solution is to get back on God's good side as a nation and as an individual. On the liberal side, the solution is more government services for individuals who are mentally ill to cure, isolate, or otherwise pacify urges to violence and killing. Or more gun control.  Then there are the solutions that gun violence is only stopped by more guns in the hands of citizens, but I'd like to think,  naively perhaps, that particular option is beyond the pale in a religion of peace.

Since the news reports of Sandy Hook, I've been spending most of my weekend with my children.  We've been spending time singing Christmas Carols. Part of that sharing is to cement my bond with these gifts from God as their safety and welfare is risked by such a violent and sick culture of death making.  I also took them to the movie, "Rise of the Guardians."  I did so with trepidation. Beforehand, I checked  parental movie review sites to determine the spiritual message of the movie for children who  believe in Santa, but have been raised (at my insistence) without the Easter Bunny. The movie had both characters acting as peers in their protective role of children in the world.  

The "Christian parents' movie review site" offered relatively little warning about the movie. It was almost wholly positive of the movie's suitability for Christian children.  Yet, as the movie was concluded, the "protection" offered by the guardian Santa and Easter Bunny was revealed to be little but a more violent, forceful power than the bad spirit's power.  Is that a spiritual message for my children?  

I asked them, "Do you think that Santa would protect you by punching the Boogey Man harder than the Boogey Man punches him?"  My kids know a loaded question from their minister dad when they hear it. They answered, No.  Well, what is the protective power of Santa?  That one was a bit more difficult, but they've heard enough from me to finally propose, "love."  So then I asked them about the climactic scene when the children in the movie restored power to the guardians after they had lost it.  What had the children in the movie done?  My children could not remember, but I did. I recalled for them that the children stood firm, afraid but steadfast and non-assertive to the threatening dark clouds of power.  It was the children's steadfastness and non-provocation which saved the day.  That was a Christmas message, I suggested.  My boys seemed to understand, but I often wonder if we in the church believe our message of the power of non-violent steadfastness? Or do we instead adopt the culture's view that goodness just has more firepower than evil, like America against its enemies, or the white hats' transcendentally better aim than the black hats', or like Santa and the Easter Bunny's muscular force that vanquishes the boogey man in "Rise of the Guardians."  I don't know for a fact that my message that doubts these fundamentally American myths is what will keep my children, your children, or any other people safe from assault and death, but it's the message of hope that we've been given as an alternative to intensifying the arming and violence in our society, which is clearly not working.

So that's my first part of a message regarding the threat that our children and all of society is under: the church needs a consistent though realistic message of non-violence while it acknowledges the cost and eruptions of fear that reliance on non-violence entails. Fear is adaptive and natural, we need more intensively to acknowledge, and contrast it with the message of the armed-to-the-teeth, "shock and awe" practicing American hero.  We need to name the bluff that culture portrays as the ideal--violence and threat without a trace of fear. Yet there has to be a real acknowledgement of the certainty of blow back and the cycle of retributive violence that history demonstrates over and over again, in ever evolving historical and social contexts.  

Bravery based on non- violent faith risks, knowing the fear of uncertainty. This accords with my understanding of what God requires of us: steadfastness in the force of good, even knowing fully the reality of human history, where martyrs died and that good does not always triumph in the short term.  But the risk, the cost, the steadfastness, the fear, and yet the bravery of non-violence, solidarity, and prayer seems is all that God gives us to reform the guns and oppression of the world. 

For me, we in the church need to remove ourselves as a justifying organ of the guns and national security argument to focus mainly on chaplaincy and pastoral care to those recovering from the front lines of violent conflict and collateral trauma, and we need to promote a message against the taking up of guns in support of the  self. The children at Sandy Hook weren't protected from slaughter by this ethic of non-violence and refusal to bear arms, I fully understand. But I submit that we do not protect our children with a culture that proposes that the forces of good are just better armed than the forces of darkness and dysfunction, because this supports the endless violence of escalating culture of deadly force, "standing one's ground" laws, and preemptive violence. "Turn the other cheek" means something real and political.  It is not pie in the sky: it entails risk, cost, and sometimes injury, confinement, and death. Sometimes tragic death of innocent children. We don't go to pieces when a child in a foreign land is killed by an American drone (though there should be much more of our protest).  There is no other way than breaking the cycle of violence than with non-violence. Bull Connor will turn his fire-hose on some of us, Richard Daley will swing his blackjacks against some of our heads, and some people like Bradley Manning and Nelson Mandela will know the isolation of probably decades of prison for ripping away the veil of secrecy, lies and corruption that enable and excuse violence done in our names. Some individuals will lose, but we can be steadfast if not sure of our task and of God's ultimate power. 

Associated with removing arms and guns from society, we the church need to turn off the violence in our culture by refusing to economically support ever more graphic violent commerce in art and entertainment--enough is enough--including by getting our youth and young adults off of what looks to me like addiction (compulsion) to violent video games.  Political, economic, and social action will be necessary and may indeed fail in the short term, but even that failed social action might save lives. Action may require that Christians make pragmatic political alliances with people who think like Bill Maher, who tweeted in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook murder spree: "Sorry but prayers and giving your kids hugs fix nothing; only having the balls to stand up to our insane selfish gun culture will."  I disagree with the first half of that statement, but I take Maher's point that hugs and prayers aren't sufficient (though I affirm they are necessary).  I can make common ground with Maher's point of view, offensive as it is, if it results in meaningful gun control and a less overt culture of violence and killing.

As the questions and anger evolve today, the media and my friends are now beginning the expected refocusing on mental illness as the unaddressed problem within society which in part explains this tragedy.  Yet, notwithstanding that most mentally ill people are not violent, including those who are in active psychotic states, it is a fact that mental illness is stigmatized by incidents like these.  This stigma makes it less likely that people will seek treatment from the mental health field.  Stigma thus has some real effect on the recurrence of tragic violence and of the epidemic of suicide.  I cannot see how increasing firepower in our private homes and streets by arming citizens makes either epidemic from getting worse.

I will offer one specific, concrete suggestion for the church in the crisis of mental health in America. And that is, the church and its leaders need to take risks to open up about their own struggles with mental illness. According to the anecdotal and personal stories that I hear, depression is represented in pastoral leadership and in the congregations. Yet pastoral leaders feel they might pay a professional and economic price were they to open up to their congregations and to society with their struggles and their insights, even their triumphs.  Church members with the same struggle might move to support their leaders if they hear these stories, thus reducing the fear and stigma in the congregation. That is the role and task of pastoral leaders and our congregations, to take risks to change stigmas, fears, and dysfunctions of the times.  Stigma of the "abnormal" drives people with mental health issues away from treatment and the church. Where else but the church can challenge spiritual stigmatization and taboo?  Like every thing else that testifies to God's love, it will take our courage and commitment. May it be so.

To sum up the message of my sermon today: we the church have more to offer this crisis of mass violence against our children and our vulnerable that erupt in society.  It has more to offer than short, angry prayer, psalms, and pragmatic alliances for political change.  Those are necessary, but not sufficient.   The church is not a political movement, but rather an institution from our Lord Jesus Christ to offer testimony to the truth of God's entering our lives for the better, and the difficult, though that sometimes entails struggle and pain. If we offer our testimony to our own angry struggles with God and our debilitating struggles with mental illness, then our coming out the other side, we speak authentically and deeply to those who look to us for guidance in times of senseless crisis. And this is a message to all who struggle with mental illness: find ways to reduce stigma. Tell your story, understand that the vast majority of people who are in despair and in psychosis are moral agents, not inhuman monsters that we should be afraid of.  Telling our story requires risk. But risk is the price for social change, the change that we all want.  

Stop the cycle in every act of faith and love we can muster, for God takes on the ultimate responsibility for the cycle of violence when God says, "I will repay" (Romans 12.19). This sums up my understanding of God's awesome creative power: it acts gently now through love, but something is in abeyance. Something awesome, as the Prophet Amos (5.24) details of God's spoken words, like a prayer but certain: "But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."  

Come Lord Jesus!  Amen.

R. Dawkins boxing outside his weight, Protein, and the evolution of a pastor

[My intellectual journey from Darwin back to Darwin, meeting Jesus Christ and Richard Dawkins along the way. I say little of Jesus, but Dawkins really helps, though not in the way he intends.]

I was trained in what was called "Neo-Darwinian Biology" at the University of Michigan in the late 1970s.  I concentrated in Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and Anthropology, taking a major in Zoology.  I studied with a sophomore's testosterone-induced rage for E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology"  and Ethology with Richard Alexander.  I read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.  I took upper-level undergraduate classes in Genetics, I discussed the popular, sexist paraphrase attributed to an anthropologist in recent news that men wage war because women are watching. I took a graduate level class in biochemistry. This undergraduate training was the foundation of my worldview until after I turned 30 when I began to doubt the reductionist view of Neo-Darwinism.

Philip Johnson's book Reason in the Balance was assigned to me for graduate exams in the year of its publication, 1996.  In it, he posed a challenge for reductionist genetics.  He posed the problem of the folding and abiotic replication of proteins.  What follows in this paragraph is my understanding of the challenge and not Johnson's. (If you are uninterested in reading my formulation of technical problems, skip the bracketed text down to the final two sentences of the next paragraph).

 [I understood and continue to understand that proteins were incredibly unlikely to spontaneously arise by chance because their constituent amino acids had to be assembled in a certain order (and in a certain surrounding physical and chemical matrix) to fold into a structure that had adaptive significance for a living organism.  This problem of "origins biology" made sense to me from my undergraduate study of biology and biochemistry two decades prior.  Assembly of folded molecular proteins required some informational mechanism to guide any re-assembly, or evolution through natural selection could never "take off." In other words, proteins' originating by chance in a primordial, abiotic environment were improbable in a mathematically factorial sense.  Second, an even more complex system of information transmission for reassembly/replication had to be developed by chance IN CONCERT with the independent assembly of the protein.  Both of these processes were resulting from chance and not by biotic, metabolic evolution. Organic Evolution proceeds toward a threshold metabolic complexity if there is adaptive significance of an element (protein, structure, RNA, etc.) to a living organism. There is no "partial" adaptive value to either a partially folded protein or a partially instituted information transmission system in abiotic isolation. At least that's how I was trained.  I recognized a problem with the Neo-Darwinian synthesis: it could not even plausibly venture to explain the origins of life. To my understanding,  Evolutionary biologists since the 1920s dismiss this line of probabilistic reasoning as Hoyle's Fallacy.  However, it is not at all clear to me how partial proteins have adaptive significance outside of a cell or protocell.  More about this below.

[Since then, "self-assembly" of proteins and protocells have been proposed, but that does not seem satisfactory to me as a scientific explanation.  Remember, I am in the mid-1990s struggling with the chemistry of the origin of pre-biotic proteins and RNA and I am in my philosophy, not a Christian, not a theist. I am an educated, though not professional, Darwinian and Naturalist 20 years out of practice.  You may dismiss me as naive, amateur, and "unbright.", but it might be argued that my undergraduate training (graduated with the Bachelor of Science "with Distinction") at the University of Michigan did not meet the challenges of my layperson future.  My naturalism was shaken to the core by the implausibility of chance spontaneously generating this dual track, non-Darwinian system of single protein replication. And chance had to do this hugely improbable assembly of a single protein over and over until a hereditary mechanism could co-assemble and somehow harmonize with the protein's structure and amino acid kinematics in pre-biotic conditions. I then thought about the magnitudes of improbability due to randomness involved in the creation of a single protocell with metabolism and an information system that was heritable across generations.  Evolutionary Biologists, used to this incredulity, claimed that the origin of the cell was irrelevant to the truth of Natural Selection operating on extant organisms, which I still believe is established scientific fact.]

However, the problem of the origin of life and the neo-Darwinist failure to solve that problem or even propose a plausible research program shook my naturalism to the core.  A critic might term my intellectual doubts a fall into "creationism, intelligent design delusion." Or, perhaps more charitably, I could be seen as seduced by the "god of the gaps" for a divine explanation during that interim science had or has not yet adequately and experimentally settled. Yet the origin and maintenance of life is to me a qualitatively different philosophical puzzle than the operation of differential death and failure to reproduce--the culling or weeding out of the weak and maladapted.  How chance as a life-giving force in the generation of adaptive mutation and necessity of staving off reproductive failure or death is not solved by the wave of hand proposal of "self-organization."  When I tried this move with the wonderful Herman Daly, he said earnestly in a moment that I'll always remember, "I don't know what self-organization means."  He left it at that.

After this loss of confidence in naturalism, it took me 5 more years to advance to Trinitarian Christianity, for which I take no intellectual or spiritual credit. My calling to Christianity was effected by God's initiative, and I may write about that another time. I've testified to it in my congregation.

[But back to the protein folding problem.  Dawkins' discipline terms doubt like mine about the pre-biotic assembly of complex molecules a variety of Hoyle's Fallacy.  Dawkins accordingly proposes a "thought experiment," the "Weasel Program" to give an explanation to the pre-biotic operation of chance AND SELECTION in the creation of complexity (though not the massively (emergently?) more complex structure and assembly linked kinematically with heritable.informatics, e.g. proto ribosomal RNA)  He "demonstrates" the validity of this thought experiment with a computer program, the computer program selecting for the assembly of letters and spaces by selection and random copying errors the phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL.  This computer simulation leads to the evolution of the phrase in some relatively small number of digital iterations from a randomized start.  The reliance on scale of so-called Hoyle (im)probabilities in Dawkin's interpretation is demonstrated a fallacy by this computer-aided thought exercise.

[I am not a professional biologist, but this demonstration is absurd. I won't argue the particulars about the homological features shared and unshared between a partially assembled, folded protein and its surrounding abiotic environmental matrix compared with the partial assembly of complex of binary digital bits situated in a biologically inert silicon matrix with selection operating abiotically.  The physiochemical properties of a digital switch operating in human-designed hardware seem qualitatively vastly less meaningful and are not even remotely homological to the caustic and non-ecological (reducing atmospheric environment, etc.) properties of proto-biochemistry operating in a non-binary ontology.  I am unconvinced by the thought experiment on first principles of "Hardware" regarding "abiotic selection" even before the computer is turned and connected to a power supply.]

But here's the main point, and I haven't seen it argued before, but I can't believe it has not been. When I was taught biology by the professors at the University of Michigan, they emphasized over and over that science in general, and biological evolution in particular, is "non-teleological."  That is, there is no metaphysical form or biological ideal that evolution proceeds toward. (See especially Ernst Mayr (1988), Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Essay 3.)   Yet, a computer software program evaluating the outcomes of artificial selection and random copying errors for partial matches according to a template in the software--selecting the computer runs for any partial matching of the template letters and starting a new iteration preserving (selecting for) the facts of any partial match of the template until a full match is produced--is an (inanimate) teleological system! The designed goal is acting to feedback on the inanimate intermediate steps! Teleological design characterizes both the hardware (likely) and the software (certainly) of this experiment!  Dawkins, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science (sic!), seems on the face of it to make a teleological system a demonstration of a scientific mechanism, even an evolutionary principle of the non-living matter!

"It takes a lot of brass," to quote Bill Clinton, to append the epithet "fallacy" to a person's last name  (i.e. Hoyle) as Dawkins does in two of his books in concert with his misapplication of his own thought "experiment."  This compound fallacy ought to have some culturally and philosophically admonitory label applied to it. Or, and I'm being serious, Dawkins' Weasel Program supports "teleological selection," in other words "pre-planned design," though of a more Platonic eidos than a J (Genesis 1) metaphysics. Dawkins was not the first to use the term "Hoyle's Fallacy." But I'm reasonably sure he has not earned the warrant to repeat it.

Dawkins, of course, is one of the public celebrity atheists. He has, according to this source [with links to Dawkins publications], flirted with the idea of empowering the state to prevent "child abuse" by religious-indoctrinating parents, so I admit viscerally and existentially disliking his politics. But if Dawkins gets science as both an enterprise and a research program of methodological, non-teleological naturalism confused at the pinnacle of his very public role as the heuristic and intellectual authority of the entire scientific venture, why would anyone pay any attention to his theological assertions, in which he has little or no training or collectively-attested accomplishment, little or no reflective spiritual  sense of the numinous or metaphysical? He seems to me to have an  abrasive confidence in his celebrity and a publishing contract.  For me, Dawkins' Weasel Program "demonstration" reveals a cautionary tale about lack of philosophical discernment. I don't know that he can think "emergently" as the complexity theorists more recently have been proposing in biological models but are instead stuck in an outmoded and sterile reductionism.  Not a great basis for a theological research program.

Dawkins thus proposes in simplistic fashion what some portion of "bright" naturalists seem to believe, that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other". Stephen Hawking also seems to believe this is a reasonable research program, and he argues that science disproves the existence of a creator god.  

I cannot understand these acclaimed scientist's obdurate proposal of God/god as a scientific specimen.  Science proceeds methodologically by atheistic investigation. It a priori rules out guided creation or Sovereign revelation or supernatural mechanisms as part of its method.  I wish I could remember who first said this, but it seems to me irrefutable that "to use methodological atheism to prove metaphysical atheism is foolish."  Science cannot methodologically prove the non-existence of God just as it (and I) cannot prove the supernatural.  Scientists who claim to prove God's non-existence are, as Philip Johnson notes, "bluffing."

So, the Professor of the Public Understanding of Science cannot give me a useful biotic demonstration of the evolution of hemoglobin's assembly non-teleologically much less a hint of an explanation of the pre-biotic biochemical origin of life.  Much less the origin of self-consciousness and the sense of the numinous. He slips into teleology when carrying out a simplistic computer experiment (in the process seemingly satirizing what he cannot understand with his test phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL).  I cannot theologically or scientifically or rationally prove the existence of a divine creator. I can testify to a consistent and loving force in my own life that accords with the testimonies of Hebrew and Christian Biblical authors and answers most of my questions and accounts for more of my experiential observations in a way that is more existentially profound, elegant, and ethical than alternative reductionist explanations.  Dawkins does not have to accept my testimony.  Whether it's because his rationality is "brighter" than mine, I'll let others make up their own minds.

For the record: I don't believe Intelligent Design is a science. I don't believe it should be taught in primary education, and in secondary education only as philosophy or theology.  I don't believe intelligent design is methodologically compatible with the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, yet nor do I believe arguments from design are inherently  "anti-evolution." I do not hold with all intelligent design proposals, nor with all Darwinian hypotheses.  However, even though I assert that the two research programs, while incompatible methodologically (and politically and culturally for many), they are for me complementary.  I learn from both.  I am a professing Christian and I accept the complementarity of Science and Faith and understand the reality of both imperfection in humanity and nature and of the goodness of God from both.  To some, that makes me a liberal Christian and enemy to objective truth. To others, I am an expounder of intellectual bad faith because I believe in a god of their own creation which they've already rejected.

So I'll put it another way.  Darwin was a pre-eminent scientific thinker.  I believe that my theology of both creation and of the natural human urge to self-glorification and self-replication is broader and more nuanced by findings in Darwin's research program and evolutionary mechanics.  Moreover, my theology is more pastoral and compassionate because of Darwin's advances in intellectual history. Darwin added perspective to the major theological problem posed by Malthus, the tragedy of nature when resources limit the prospects of offspring of animals. Gerd Thiessen in Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach [1984] proposes an impressive Biblical theology of the Darwinian condition to which humankind is subject and which Jesus submits to in his ministry and on the cross.  

 E.O. Wilson has changed his views. He recently notes that the relative ecological success of social species, including humans, include processes of "group selection."  In the 1970s of my training, group selection was taboo for undergraduates to discuss. Dawkins today is scandalized that the taboo is broken in Wilson. But now, biological processes potentially can include moral mechanisms beyond just differential survival of individuals measured in the F1, kin selection, and gross reproductive and material resource amassing success. This biological evolution of groups is complementary with some of my theology of social action, intergenerational and trans-species care and responsibility, and economic justice.  I am in some sense coming home to biology, but the biology of groups is also coming part way toward my morality if I understand the development of  E. O. Wilson's thought.

 I look forward to new discoveries and naturalist understandings. Nonetheless, I'll venture to say that in my struggles with understanding, the problem of suffering (theodicy) is less of a problem for my Christian faith than the problem of the origin of life leading to the reproducing cell seems to be for Dawkin's reductionist neo-Darwinism. I'd think, considering his endowed public role, it behooves him to work more intensively through the intellectual assumptions and problems of his discipline's research program and leave theological and philosophical research programs alone for the time being.  Unless he wants to convert to the arguments from design, as teleology implies.  Dawkins seems like a moth to a flame when it comes to boxing with gods, throwing stones at the moon, and reveling in the ring of celebrity.

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Modernism, liberalism, idols of objectivity and the Presbyterian enemy

John Gresham Machen, dying in 1937, continues to be an outsized hero of "steely backbone" to various stripes of conservative Christians and their anti-modernist denominations.  Machen claimed that his favored brand of Christianity, Reformed (which he labeled "Calvinism") was the "objective truth" in matters religious. This truth, according to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Seminary which Machen founded, was authoritatively laid out in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646.  Not only that, Machen argued that so-called "liberal Christians" were of a different religion than the understanding of objectively true Christianity. Machen wrote out a treatise to that effect in his still-influential Christianity and Liberalism (1923).

The continuing popularity of this book in conservative Christian circles owes to a certain credulity with the argument that "liberal Christianity" has abandoned traditional doctrine entirely so as to become an institution of untruth and false teaching,  "Liberal, false christianity" is thus asserted to be concerned only with cultural acceptance and the primacy of "tolerance."  It is claimed in a caricature of mainline Presbyterian Church (USA) that the only sin PC(USA) institutionally denounces is schism and the "intolerance" of diversity.  See here for a recent example of this argument.  As if the PC(USA) does not regularly and deeply engage in the denunciation of and missionary struggle against systematic and personal sins of injustice, oppression, love of mammon, violence, and the political enablement of militarization of the Middle East and elsewhere.  In reality, the Machen followers seem hasty to point to personal sins of "relativism" and "tolerance" as if those are more egregious workings of untruth than "schism," and the systematic sins just listed.

In this appreciation of Machen and his historical legacy by John Piper in 1993, we learn that Machen at the end of his life regretted his use of the term "liberal" to label his anti-Christian "enemy of objective truth."  Machen wished he had used the term "modernism" to characterize the enemy of his fundamentalist Christianity.  And not just any form of modernism, but the contemporary "pragmatism" of his day.  Machen really did not have a handle on his language if he could not distinguish among "liberalism," "modernism," and pragmatism."   Yet Piper without awareness of the irony claims that the first lesson "we might learn from Machen" is

"Machen’s life and thought issue a call for all of us to be honest, open, clear, straightforward and guileless in our use of language."

Machen may have been "guileless in his language" but he bears some responsibility for the last 90 years of demonizing of "liberals" by his followers and in greater society.  So much polemics and demonizing about  a label!  So much follows that have led fundamentalist, "orthodox" idolaters of the Westminster Confession of Faith into the ethically dubious alley of anti-liberal political economy and to denunciations of the social gospel's concern for the poor and vulnerable.  I am considering making it a point to stop any further reading of tracts about "liberals" unless that term is defined and historically contextualized.  Ricardo? Jimmy Carter? Ritschl?  Milton Friedman? Obama? Spong? Donna Butler Bass?  J.S. Mill? John Dewey? Annie Lamott? Martin Luther King? Robert Rubin? All of these MIGHT identify with the term liberal, but with substantive and sometimes massively different truth and justice claims and programs.  A blanket demonization of varied forms and individuals who may (or may not) be liberal is lazy and unfair. Machen and his legacy contributes to that.

Radical Calvinism's claim to be "objective truth" rests on  first principles of Biblical literalism and infallibility and, according to Piper, the essentials of adherence to the five fundamentals of Calvinism.  I believe Calvin was one of the most socially and contextually perceptive interpreters of the Bible. However, nowhere in either Calvin or in the Westminster Confession of Faith do I find these "five fundamentals" justified as such. I have no other knowledge of five-fold doctrinal exposition of Calvinism outside of the tradition that flows from the popularizing of the Canons of Dort (1619), namely simplified "TULIP Calvinism:" " total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement (arguing the efficacy of Christ's atoning work was applicable only to the elect and not the unregenerate world), irresistible (or irrevocable) grace, and the perseverance of the saints. "  

I have respect for John Piper's exegetical skills.  His study, 

The Justification of God: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Romans 9:1-23 (1993) is a classic Reformed exegesis of God's absolute sovereignty over election.  I recognize and accept his exposition of Paul's inspired and holy use and interpretation of Exodus and its application to the church.  However, TULIP Calvinism is not the same thing as Reformed Calvinism and is not the same thing as the Westminster Confession of Faith, and I find it unreasonable to believe that either that Confession or the Canons of Dort completed once and for all the action of the Holy Spirit in doctrinal development and missionary calling for the Reformed Church!  Moreover, the Westminster Confession of Faith acknowledges that the Holy Spirit is historically alive and necessary for recognizing the truth.  "Creeds of men" are explicitly recognized as fallible by the Westminster Assembly in its Confession I.x.

So why is the Westminster Confession of Faith made the standard of objective truth for so called "orthodox" Presbyterians?    I suppose if I were to read Piper's or another Machen supporter's illustration of the working of  the enemy to truth or Gospel in the PC(USA) Confession of 1967 or Barmen  Declaration,  that PC(USA) institutionally confesses, I might have a better understanding of their perspectives.  Some conservatives hint that the PC(USA) is either the arch-enemy of "objective truth" or is rife with individual representatives of the enemy by its and their refusal to definitively list with historical finality the "definitive tenets of the Reformed Faith."  World Magazine's editor explicitly names its foundational struggle with the presence of the "liberal, truth trashing" enemy in Christianity. So much of this seems owed to Machen's mishandling of language brought on by what seems to me some of his followers'' inability to fully and humbly appreciate the continuing operation of the Holy Spirit since 1646--and alongside his and his followers' inability to maneuver in the modern culture of tolerance and intellectual humility.

I have one more point I'd like to make, and that is a point about "pragmatism."  Piper claims that Machen understood Modernism to be exemplified in pragmatism.  Pragmatism, among other implications, includes a philosophy and ethical operation in times of uncertainty and incomplete truth claims. Pragmatists recognize the value of diversity, deliberation, and tolerance of controversy in reaching inter-subjective agreements about courses of social action.  Pragmatism  is a threat to institutions that claim a monopoly on objective truth.  Pragmatism is indeed a threat to Biblical literalism and bibliolatry. (Bibliolatry I define as the denial of the Holy Spirit's working outside the letter of Scripture.)  Pragmatism, however, is not the only expression of modernity.  So Machen's book might be more reasonably read not as a complete polemics against modernism or liberalism (neither of which it presents fairly in scope or quality) in the church, but of pragmatism.  Modernity is not inherently anti-fundamentalist.  Some modern atheists and fascism, among other enthusiasms, make their own totalizing claims about objective truth.  

Some modernists are not pragmatists. I point to an example in the philosopher Andrew Levine, author of In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the Opium of the People (2011). Levine here and in his articles posted on Counterpunch.org argues that modernist representatives mostly in the 19th Century once and for all proved the death of God, and that liberal Christians are to be reproached for intellectual dishonesty--even if and when they might be allies for Levine's modernist cohort of philosophes in progressive political struggles.  Levine's is a form of modernism that is not pragmatic, at least as I understand the term and movement. It is rationalism that claims privileges for itself and won't make utilitarian or deontological alliances with "bad thought" holders.  Levine makes the totalizing claim that Christian faith is objectively untrue and, it seems to follow, ethically and politically without integrity.

Pragmatism, though, seems to me to be a reasonable program of modernity to come to grips with finite institutional, systemic, and individual capacity for wisdom and the recurrent tragedy of unchecked individual and minority power, even when we find it in the arrogance of Church.  Applying it to Christianity, pragmatism allows one method for recognizing and embracing humility that accepts the finiteness of all human institutions no matter how closed, or conversely, how deliberative.  This humility as to the truth to my mind serves the infinite God whose nature and Holy Spirit are alive, working in ways never totally grasped by any objective system or authority (or 17th C Creed). I can believe, as I do, that the Bible is a trustworthy and Spirit-inspired guide to ethics, countering sin, salvation/reconciliation (justification), and the atonement, election, and resurrection without claiming that I or my denomination or even religion knows "objective truth" in all meaningful applications.  That fundamentally is my understanding of the implications of Philippians 2.6-8.  Jesus Christ, the Word of God, did not see himself as equal with God and thus was objectively humble.  Not "objectively knowledgeable," at least in my Christology based on my reading of Scripture. Jesus denied knowledge ("Why?" from the Cross) of objective truth in matters of "times and places" (Acts 1.7, Mt. 24.36),  yet that does not stop some of His Armageddon-anticipating followers from claiming (or responding to) this as predictive knowledge.  Are the repeated frustrations of expected dates of Armageddon in fundamentalist circles enough to demonstrate the limitations of  "objective truth" claims in religion?  It is in my and many others' estimation.  These predictions are a scandal to outsiders to whom we must announce the message of God's plan of overcoming death.  Jesus warns us against these! Why is it still going on?  Why do we try to hasten the end by promoting forces seeming to bring on Armageddon?  That is not my meaning when I say, Come Lord Jesus.

To his credit, Machen apparently was dismissive of millenialism and chiliasm, while before him Calvin admitted that he did not understand the Book of Revelation and refused to write a commentary on it.  A whole Book of the Bible, Revelation, so privileged, studied, and expounded in literalist circles of Christianity, and yet the putative founder of fundamentalist's objective truthism, Calvin, admits a lack of understanding.  65/66 understanding of the Bible worked out in 65 commentaries, impressive as the achievement is to me in Calvin's work, is no claim to full, objective understanding of even 16th Century religious reality, much less 1st Century Judean reality.  Does this Christian faction argue that  the Holy Spirit moved definitively between Calvin in Geneva in the 1530s to the Synod of Dort in the 1610s (or Westminster Assembly in the 1640s), laying out the final deposit of objective truth in the so-called essential tenets of faith?  If so, what is the objective truth behind the Holy Spirit choosing that particular slice of northwestern Euro-male dominated, guild developing (Anglo-Dutch middle class coalescing) history to invest with the "treasures of all knowledge"?  Admittedly, that question reveals my bias.

One of my struggles as a Christian and a human being is my sense of anguish at the suffering and injustice in the world around me.  Anguish for me is the expression of sadness mixed with anger.  When I repress my sadness and am conscious only of my anger, I lack humility and love and privilege my own fundamentalism, which is the finite emotional and intellectual makeup of my soul, context, and history.  On rare occasions, the Holy Spirit comes and guides and comforts, leading me not into objective truth, but "all truth" sufficient for my role and calling in the world.  I have flaws, vices, limitations, and I also have gifts, context, and opportunities to serve God through charity, hospitality, and testimony. In no way do I believe that I am constantly enlightened by the Holy Spirit into the infinite purpose presupposed by claims to "objectivity." As a Christian called to faith by the Holy Spirit operating in soul, scripture, and society, I am to play a limited, personal role with a personal touch.  As I grow obedient and the Christ consciousness takes over more and more of my life, I grow in appreciation for the magnificence and glory of God's work around me. The Holy Spirit in relationship with the Bible works in me "contextually," with me a creature, a clay pot, limited, partial, flawed, "depraved," sinful, and all.  That is what makes me humble about what my truth says to other people and contexts.  "Liberal Reformed Christianity," to the extent it is not caricatured, to my mind lives out this humility and struggle for peace and social justice and I believe the Bible, Jesus, Torah, the Prophets, Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit demands this humility and ethical program of all Christians. If I am pressed, I will acknowledge that I am a "Christian with liberal politics"but I do not with that acknowledgement give up my fundamentalism.  I can and need to learn from others with different fundamentals. But they must first show me their fruits of the spirit operating ethically, socially, lovingly.

   Phil 2. 6 (NRSV)

      who, though he was in the form of God, 

    did not regard equality with God 

    as something to be exploited, 

    7      but emptied himself, 

    taking the form of a slave, 

    being born in human likeness. 

    And being found in human form, 

    8      he humbled himself 

Amos' Prophetic Critique is Applied to God's People

As a Reformed Christian, I receive God’s message through God’s Written Word. God through the re-birthing Holy Spirit has called me to this warning proclaimed by the Prophet Amos. This warning is the ethical foundation of my new blogging ministry, “Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon.”

“6 This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.” –Amos 2:6 (NIV)

“...selling even the sweepings with the wheat.” Amos 8.6

Such is God's concern with how economics impacts the poor. In Amos's denunciation, I believe silver is the Imperial commodity (coinage) mobilized by the elite to bring injustice against the innocent, the poor and needy who have special intrinsic value in God's eyes.  The needy are commodified when they are exchanged for shoes. In Amos 8.6, the people are denounced for not leaving the sweepings of the wheat for the poor to glean. It is a people who support the trading of human need for silver that is denounced.  The monarch and the people are united in this act. I shudder for all of us implicated in this accelerating and inhumane exclusion from life of our current political economy.

The application of this passage seems clearly to me to denounce  unregulated market systems that leave nothing for the poor. Neo-liberalism as a political economy that creates an idol of GDP growth measured not in welfare or in goods, but increasingly in pure financial engineering, proposes that no public resource may go unprivatized and no act of human relationship goes unmonetized, while no opponent to this creation of demonic mammon goes unpunished.

As an example, the lives of Central American peasants are impoverished by agri-business which claims yearly rents for the seeds of plants which they have modified, perhaps minimally.  Notwithstanding that these seeds are part of the natural gift of God to humankind prior to the advent of markets. Neo-liberal property rights regimes have privatized the genome of traditional peasant crops and turned them into rent-producing properties for the politically powerful. These agribusinesses seek even to evade legal and Constitutional oversight of their activities for the public health:

 "The [legislation signed into law by President Obama] provision protects genetically modified seeds from litigation suits over health risks posed by the crops' consumption." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57576835/critics-slam-obama-for-protecting-monsanto/  accessed on April 4, 2013.

The needy are having their natural usufruct rights stolen from them by corporations aided by lawmakers in Brazil.  Note the grief in the photo of this report.  Is the pornography in the grief we witness? Or is it hidden and off camera?  That is a stark moral choice I believe we must make, whether what is shameful is being dispossessed or being the dis-possessors.  For the maintenance of life as we know it depends on our choices.  The alternative is expansion of monetary relations into every community, ecosystem, and act of love that surely would signal a quickened death of the earth and neighbor.

Naming Love of Mammon in Society: the Focus of this Blog

"‘No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth (Mammon)." Gospel of Matthew 6.24.

MAMMON: Love of mammon (wealth) is in the understanding of this blogger a demonic spiritual force that infects human systems. It is an idolatrous false god because it leads people to distrust the living God of providential care. Love of mammon is the complex, schizoid interplay of fear and greed that works itself out in the desire to dominate others justified by appeals to security.  Mammon is the parent of Empire, and it operates through political, regulatory, and financial complexity, secrecy, and injustice. Mammon is not easy or simple to illustrate in or counter through story or moral narrative, as it works itself out systematically through complexity, secrecy, lack of transparency, lies and Machiavellian social rhetoric.  Mammon is perversely modeled by neo-liberal economics, which proposes a diminishing marginal utility of consumption that should relieve society of the sinful complex if it adequately described the commodity of money.. Instead, desire for mammon is never satisfied, never secure, and pathologically destroys the livelihood of community and the most vulnerable by mobilizing, commodifying, and regressively redistributing to the powerful ever more of social production and resources. Demonic Love of Mammon is the enemy of civilization, because it celebrates the animal, uncompassionate spirits of Social Darwinism: hedonism, freedom and domination for the well-off, death dealing denial of and deprivation for those born unprivileged or made "unfit" by systematic sin.

I am learning to hate the love of mammon as it operates systematically in abuses of power, economic rent seeking, and domination, but I continue my personal struggle with my own anxieties and attractions to commercial stimulation and hoarding.   I am not innocent, but I am increasingly aware.  My ministry in this blog, "Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon," includes my struggle for understanding by trying to name the love of mammon and hold mammon accountable according to the best of my abilities and ethical values I've learned from Jesus Christ, the Prophets, and Biblical and normative literature.  My ministry accepts that humankind is damaged, and  that accountability, shared and checked power, non-violence, and the personal and historical force of the Holy Spirit are necessary dimensions in the historical struggle against servants of mammon.



   Habakkuk 2. 4 (NRSV:)      Look at the proud! 
    Their spirit is not right in them, 
    but the righteous live by their faith.
    5      Moreover, wealth is treacherous; 
    the arrogant do not endure. 
    They open their throats wide as Sheol; 
    like Death they never have enough. 
    They gather all nations for themselves, 
    and collect all peoples as their own. 

In addition, though, I intend also to propose where I find hope and goodness in the announcement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God's loving power over the death dealing love of mammon.  Feel free to join me in discussion, and please give grace to those instances of absolutism that continue to seep into my blogging. I will try to let the absolutism be expressed by the scriptures.  

God be with you. Jesus is Lord.