Disciples Together, Constantly

I have a seminar class in which we’ve just finished reading the pictured book (order it from Amazon), by A.K.M. Adam (aka AKMA, see his website/blog). The final chapter was a bit of a deviation from the central theme of the book, but not altogether “other” than the rest of the book.

The chapter “Disciples Together, Constantly” caught us a little off guard at first, since the chapter was essentially a case for gay marriage and the title didn’t sound anything like that. But in retrospect the title made a lot of sense (you’d have to read the chapter to appreciate exactly what I mean . . . available in the CCU library soon).

One student remarked that it was the best case for gay marriage he’d read (not sure why he’s been running around reading these cases so as to be so discerning, but whatever...). The argument goes like this: God cares about our relationships with each other because God cares about our relationships with God. What makes our relationship with God one that he approves is our fidelity and constancy to God. Thus a human relationship achieves its ideal when we reflect those values of fidelity and constancy (note the word “constant” in the title).

Interesting angle, something with which we can all agree I’m sure. The big rainbow colored elephant in the description thus far is what to do with all those God-given genitalia. AKMA’s take on the natural law argument is not as well attended to as is his theology of human relationships in general. The central concern for AKMA is to focus on what constitutes a relationship’s falling short of the divine ideal. He states: “There are countless ways in which human relationships can fall short of God’s ideal, and these do not depend on the matter of who does what with whose genitals.”

Consider that what AKMA does is to expose the fact that Christianity tends to be so focused on the genital aspect of marriage as a big problem (the republican party rolls out this issue every time it needs to energize its voter base . . . engineering fear) that it breezily ignores what it is about a relationship that matters most to God. (I’m not even going to mention the divorce rates among this very same demographic . . . !)

I say “most” because it’s that part of our relationships which most represents human relationships to God: fidelity and constancy. That is, if a man or a woman is abusive or complacent in marriage, or not vigorously and daily, hourly even, attending to the maintenance and health of the marriage, daily sacrificing one self for the other, then it falls short of what is central in what God expects of our relationships in general, let alone of our marriages. And thus also such a failure compromises our relationship with God.

So read AKMA’s chapter and consider his presentation on the matter of human relationships, even if in the context of gay marriage. And ask yourself, how is it that people get bent out of shape about the genital aspect of marriage while all along accepting without question the failure to attend to the central elements of human relationships. Ask how it is that we so easily handle divorce (something the Bible refers to as a thing God “hates”) and how we tolerate impoverished relationships in which the partners fail to attend to each other’s needs and the needs of the marriage.

Apart from the fact that it is imperative for society that we get our relationships in order, it is imperative for Christian people to seek to reflect our relationship to God in every relationship we have through vigorous fidelity and constancy (neither of which are easy, but both of which are fundamentally necessary components in our relationships with God).

A Joke: from dinosaurs to Heidegger, but not seriously

I always wonder where Jokes come from (surely we all do). I assume they arise out of the evolution of a conversation. When I hear a joke or tricky saying, I often spend a lot of my subsequent thought time wondering how this came to be, what conversation was necessary, what subject matter and what development of ideas, etc. Anyway, this morning I was mucking around with my kids and we ended up with the joke (not that they got it):

What do you call an existentialist? A Daseinosaur! HAHAHAHA!

. . . get it, because it's a kind of old and outdated way of thinking . . . daseinosaurs! . . . hilarious!

Oh dear . . . whew! Anyway, it started out when my kids and I were imagining a story about a family of "designosaurs" who were architects and very upstanding and proper members of a middle class, suburban neighborhood. Even though they're actually dinosaurs, none of the neighbors noticed that little fact because the designosaurs wore spectacles and normal clothes to mask their reptilian identity. Oh the crazy things those designosaurs would get up to in the effort to mask their true identities and behaviors (eating goats chained to trees, being very very big, having rows of six inch long teeth, the usual stuff dinosaurs have to hide when they live amongst us).

So it evolved from that to other words that sound like dino, and thus "Dasein" which interestingly, for those who don't know, is itself a morphed word from Da Sein (which means "being there" or "there being" but in its morphed form became one of Heidegger's buzz words).

A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad

My wife recently sent a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in which she is pointing out the problem of the current Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) director's position on "haves and have-nots." The director, Rosa Blackwell, recently claimed that CPS was made up of haves and have-nots. Stick with me here, this is not about CPS or school budgets.

The thing about CPS is that it's so dog poor and terribly governed that to claim that someone is one of the "haves" is like trying to decide which homeless person in Cincinnati has it too easy. So as per the published letter, referenced above, my wife wrote the following statement:

"Her [Rosa Blackwell] division of CPS schools into "have" and "have-not" schools is small-minded; and judging by how she's managing things, her response to slavery would have been to make everyone equal by making everyone slaves."

Now I thought that was a delightfully crafted point. However, it appears that it has bothered some people (White people) for reasons we can only assume are race based or based on the pain of slavery. It so happens that Rosa Blackwell is a black woman . . . not that I see color, a la Colbert . . . and God. But I thought that the statement was not racist at all; indeed, for me it uses the pain of the reality of slavery to illustrate a current political failure. For those who know us, we are not Americans, so maybe we're missing something. But is it now the case that we may not even employ an historical event in the context of our conversation and debate? Is it that we fear that we might suddenly start enslaving people again? Or are we just so ashamed of slavery in US history that we dare not mention it's name? A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad.

Are we psychologically capable of surviving Internet?

I saw this picture today on my Yahoo! page (yep those are her toes broken in her infancy and folded and bound under her feet). After the initial grossed-out shock, I was struck by the fact that the Internet brings every weird, gross, disgusting and horrifying thing that happens in the world front and center into my normal daily experience. Now this particular image is not that bad . . . relatively speaking. Unless you have a foot fetish in which case you're likely already on the floor quivering in horror . . . or delight—who can tell what you freaks are thinking.

After seeing this, I started to wonder whether we were psychologically capable of handling the ceaseless flow of disconcerting imagery the Internet facilitates. I've seen some amazingly horrible things on the Internet: beheadings in the Arab world, people's bodies being maimed, the close-up bodily remains of gruesome murder victims, diseased body parts, the ugliest dog in the world and of course the countless vile skanks that seem to find their way into the news or the Google search pages.

The first response I had was "well, hey, that's real life, mate!" But I wonder whether this is an appropriate response. For example, most people who have to witness a beheading first-hand likely have beheadings as a part of their discourse. So I propose that there's an element of cultural conditioning there. People who see gruesome murders first-hand are in general either people who do them or people who investigate them (not saying cops are conditioned, but they're "prepared" even if the preparation is poor and they are counseled to assist their getting over it).

But further to that, someone who sees a beheading in Iran may not also be exposed to the myriad other forms of horror the Internet avails. That is, just because it's real life, does not mean that we're capable of dealing with every horror known to humanity. Yet on the perch from which I view the Internet I can flick from a beheading to an exploded cat to the world's fattest woman in the time it takes to click a button. Are we capable of dealing with the entire world. After we've been sullied by this experience we may find ourselves in the dilemma of Nietzsche's madman asking "who will wash away the world?"

emergent church and emergent terrorism: coincidence or conspiracy???

“Terrorist cells just aren’t what they used to be.” That’s what you’ll hear from some of the older, traditional and conservative terrorist. Back in the good ol' days, when the whole Libyan army was essentially a terrorist organization it was efficient enough to bring about the famous Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am 747. This large government sanctioned organization lumbered its way to a single famous bombing: moderate success at best.

Along comes our more familiar foe, Al Qaeda. In comparison to the Libyan army, it was lithe and flexible, but still an easily identifiable organization struggling to maintain its complex internal coherence and its fidelity to a theologically charged ethos. Nonetheless it ultimately failed to flex and conform to the rigors of the emerging political paradigm (think lots of bombs in Afghanistan and Iraq), and thus the form Al Qaeda assumed at the beginning of the “war” largely fell apart in favor of something more dynamic: younger, emerging terrorists say that the failure was due to the lumbering and oversized nature of Al Qaeda’s corporate structure: too much focus on learning certain creedal statements, too much focus on too many programs all trying to make people identify with Al Qaeda as an organization over and above their identification with the Islamic jihad. In short, the militants weren't being sufficiently missional, it was all about bossy boots bin Laden and his ability to stamp his imprimatur on the organized resistance, Al Qaeda. So defending Al Qaeda lost sight of the mission to defend Islam against the Western devils.

So the natural response to Al Qaeda’s structural downfall and focus on organization over mission (think old fashioned and out-of-touch), the emerging terrorism is based on small missional groups enthused by ostensibly in-touch, hip new leaders. Leaders who can speak the language of, and identify with today's young terrorist: meet therefore Fatah al Islam: lean, mean young and vibrant. Fatah al Islam casts off the shackles of the over-stuffed structure of Al Qaeda. Gone are the old fashioned ways of screaming Allah Akhbar (God is great) and shaking a fist, stone or AK47 at the TV cameras. Welcome the new contemporary style chant complete with dance routines: “In unison, they lunged in one direction, turned and lunged in another. ‘Allah-u akbar,’ the men shouted in praise to God as they fired their machine guns into a wall” (though it appears the anonymous, pointless shooting of guns, like a small dog scraping its hind legs, remains de rigeur).

Today’s emergent terrorists, unlike the Al Qaeda purists, are all about the new urban reality, rising out of the hard knock life of Lebanese and Palestinian slums, and spurning the silver spoon suburbanites of the bin Laden brigade. They spit on the lumbering bulk of mega-cells . . . it’s not terrorism with small groups, it’s terrorism of small groups; they shake their fists and guns and vehemently repudiate their soft and self-involved ways . . . it’s not a terrorism of programs and pretence, but of missional fervor and “reality.” They sing and chant about their new found missional agenda with lots of first person structures like: I do this for you, you do that for me. I love/die for/kill for/serve you and you give me what I want alone here in my room with no one else but you and me and it’s all about you and it’s all about me and it’s all about me and you and you and me and when the music fades and it’s just about me, Allah, it’s just about you and me Allah, Allah Akhbar, Allah, Allah Akbar Akbar Akbar, Allah Akbar and here I am coming back to the heart of terrorism and it’s just about me and I’ll do it all for you.

So, emergent church or emergent terrorism: you decide!