Pastor's Puddle

"For Christian thought, then, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar.  Only in loving creation's beauty--only in seeing that creation is beauty--does one truly apprehend what creation is."--David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:  The Aesthetics of Christian Truth

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays on the American calendar.  One reason is that our commercial culture has failed to commercialize it, and our commercial culture fails at very little it sets itself out to do.  Since our commercial culture is a principality and power in New Testament language, I think I am sane to personify it as an entity with purpose.  I suspect one reason for this failure is Thanksgiving's referent beyond the sovereign self of consumerism.  One is thankful to someone or someones outside oneself.  Perhaps another is that gratitude implies contentment.  "The Lord is my shepherd, I have everything I need."  We are thankful for what we have, not for what we might have or would like to have.  Thanksgiving also implies grace.  We are grateful for gifts we receive which have no economic relationship to our own efforts, abilities or accomplishments.

Thanksgiving as a holiday is not explicitly Christian, but it resonates strongly with Christian thought and practice.  Non-Christians certainly practice giving thanks.  The quote above from David Bentley Hart suggests uniquely Christian ways of thinking about Thanksgiving, with an epistemology of delight.  Epistemology is the category of philosophy that studies how we know what we know.  How do we know, for example, that God is love?  How do we know the earth revolves around the sun?  Epistemology studies these questions.

What Hart boldly suggests is that, in Christian thought, the epistemological language, our language of knowing what we know about God is delight.  It is in delight that God creates all things, and it is in delight that we appreciate them, with delight forming a kind of language of engagement and apprehension in our relationship with God.  It is with delight God creates snowflakes (the first of the season falling as I write), and it is with delight that, in Christian practice, we appreciate their beauty and delight in them.  It is with delight God gives food to share and enjoy, fellowship to encourage, fire to warm, and, ultimately, God's own son to triumph over death.  The Christian practice of Thanksgiving delights in these gifts, and celebrates them daily, but perhaps especially in this season.

It is no accident that the central observance of Christian faith is called Eucharist, or Thanksgiving.  One of my favorite Psalms is Psalm 104, a psalm of joy and delight.  I commend it to us this season and throughout the year.

I heard a gospel song on WGCS last night that celebrated victory over hell through Jesus.  I found it a refreshing corrective to popular notions of hell among many Christians today.  So many of us seem to have been taught that hell is a tool God uses to punish evildoers, sinners, and those who refuse to submit or believe.  But the scriptures, and a long tradition of Christian thought, suggest to me that hell is not a friend of God's, but an enemy.  Jesus promises us that the gates of hell will not prevail against the church.  The Apostle's Creed proclaims that Jesus descended into hell, an invasion of enemy territory celebrated in the Eastern church on Holy Saturday as the Harrowing of Hell.  God did not create hell, but it is the domain of those who have rejected God's good will.  Yet even in that domain the light can still shine.

In Christian thought, evil exists only in a parasitic way.  God did not create evil.  Nothing or no one is evil in essence, only in corruption of goodness.  We might even go so far as to say that no one can rightly be thought of as evil or grotesque, only as corrupted.  Evil is a privation of good, whose source cannot be God, who created all things good.

I can imagine few correctives to the thinking of many Christians more important that this one.  As Christians, we certainly take evil seriously.  We are not to be naive.  But let us be clear that the source of evil is God's creation turning from God's goodness, not mechanisms God created for punishing the unworthy.

Nicholas Kristof, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, wrote this piece for Wednesday's edition.  Kristof makes a case to which I have long been sympathetic.  I post it here since it ties into my posts on human sexuality.    What role does family planning play in the Christian life?  Should birth control be freely available, even to those who we don't think should be sexually active?  What role has family planning played in your own Christian walk?  What role might family planning play in reducing poverty?

On the latter question, an old friend, Walden Bello, now a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, posted this rationale on facebook for supporting a bill making family planning resources more available.

I sometimes wonder why theodicy has become such a significant theological concern in our time.  We live lives of unprecedented quality, at least materially.  We are not subject to the ravages of disease and natural disaster and tragic accident in the ways our forebears would have been even 100 years ago.  Certainly, these awful things still happen, and tear us apart when they do.  But they seem to challenge our faith in a way they did not our ancestors who were so much more vulnerable to them.

I do not wish to diminish the question of why we suffer when God is good and all powerful.  It is an important place to begin theological inquiry.  I do think we have something to learn about ourselves by asking us why this matters so much to us in a time and place of relative health, safety, and prosperity.

I have several thoughts about why this might be true.  The most disturbing to me has to do with the consumerist and materialist culture in which we find ourselves.  If God is primarily a provider of goods and services for us to consume and enjoy, then it is clear God gets poor evaluations from Consumer Reports.  In Christian thinking, our relationship with God is not defined in consumerist terms, but in covenant terms.  Rather than "a God dishes out, we lap up relationship," we are to think of our relationship with God in mutual terms.  It is a relationship of shared responsibility.  Blaming God for suffering in the world makes about as much sense as me blaming Beth for all the problems in our house (in reality it is me or my dog that are to blame).

In a covenant relationship, life is shared.  We are co-creators with God, not consumers of God's lovely line of divine products.

I guess I wasn't quite done with Part 2, so I will do a quick Part 3.

"Blue families" are also more likely to make church part of their lives.  The "wait until you are married to have children" still holds strong for a significant segment of our population, at least in practice.  And that ethic is working quite well for those who practice it.  Before contraception was widely acceptable, wait until you are married meant don't have sex until you are married.  Now it means, if you have sex, be careful.

Can we agree on wait to have children until you are married as a sexual ethic?  It seems we have a consensus around this as a practice, but are we willing to teach it, and encourage others outside the church to live by it?  The irony in Red Families v. Blue Families is that blue families were happy to live by this ethic, and enjoy its privileges, but reluctant to claim it as normative in any way, or suggest that others should live by it.  But isn't this a form of, "I'm not responsible for them, they will have to make their own choices and live by them," one of the hallmarks of contemporary conservative arguments?

I want to say goodbye to this topic with a caveat.  Families are complex, and take many different shapes and sizes for many different reasons.  Single men and women choose to adopt.  A variety of events can make parents single parents.  These posts in no way are meant to ignore or dismiss the challenges of single parenting, nor its importance.  At the end of the day, parenting is hard, and its best not to take it on without lots of help.

As I suggested in my earlier post on the topic of human sexuality, any meaningful conversation about Christian sexual practices must turn at some point to the topic of contraception.  One of my most fascinating and paradigm shifting reads over the last several years was Red Families v. Blue Families by family law scholars Naomi Cahn and June Carbone.  No matter their views on abortion, no matter their opinions about homosexuality, no matter what they think about pre-marital sexual activity, many in my world are on the blue family side of this divide.  If Cahn and Carbone are right, the line in the sand in terms of sexual ethics in American society today is defined by college education and contraception.

To generalize a well nuanced and researched book, the authors outline two general paths to marriage and family life today.  One is familiar to many of us.  Young people graduate from high school and attend college (perhaps after a year or two of service or travel).  They may or may not be sexually active, but their primary goal in life is not having a family, but getting an education and perhaps establishing a career.  If they are sexually active, they will use contraception.  Rarely, women who choose this path will have an abortion.  Men and women both choose mates with care, and wait for marriage until they have already accomplished some initial goals in life (such as education, perhaps graduate school, travel, getting started in a career).  Once couples in this group do get married, the men and women are more mature, better established financially, and less likely to get divorced than the population at large.  Finally, if couples in this group choose to have children, they wait longer, and limit the number of children they do have, giving their children many advantages not enjoyed by children of  "red family" parents.  The "blue family" path to marriage and family has enormous economic advantages which show up dramatically in statistics.

The "red family" path to marriage and family is marked by the decision (or inability) not to go to college or use contraception.  Those who do not go to college have less motivation to delay family life, are less likely to use contraception, more likely to give birth out of wedlock, more likely to marry sooner, more likely to get divorced, more likely to have more than the average number of children, and more likely to parent with multiple partners.  Needless to say, this is not a path to economic prosperity.  Whereas in the blue model, planning, including family planning, is a high value, the red model embraces different values.

As a parent of school aged children, the red/blue contrast has been on display during these years of going to school events.  The older parents wait to get married, wait to have children, have fewer children, live in better houses, drive better cars, read books to their children, expect their children to go to college, have better family and social support when times to get difficult, and have children in a far better position to be successful in life.

This contrast coalesces in some ways around two different sexual ethics, and is profoundly shaping our culture.  How might we as a church engage this reality?  What bearing to explicitly Christian ethics have on this situation?

Christian Smith (Notre Dame) and Kenda Cressy-Dean (Princeton) have studied youth and young adults, and come to some startling conclusions regarding how these groups think about ethics.  Ethical beliefs among this group are increasingly individualistic and relative.  That is stealing (or sexual promiscuity, illegal drug use, violence, etc) is not okay for me, but who am I to say that it is wrong for anybody else.  When this group, again generally, does express a normative (that is for everybody) ethic, the rationale given is that immorality is self evident, as in "everybody knows it's wrong."  The particular ethic has been uprooted from its original religious or philosophical system of ethics.  The chilling thing, for those of us in the church, is that youth raised in most churches are no different.