Cardiology and Ecclesiology.

I've had three cardiologists, not counting the one who put a stent in my Right Coronary Artery (whom I barely remember because I was kind of out of it).  I now visit my current cardiologist regularly, but thankfully now infrequently.  Generally, I do whatever they say to do.  I take whatever medications they say to take.  I eat and avoid eating according to their instructions (more or less).  Indeed, a good percentage of my daily behavior revolves around this advice.  I trust my cardiologist to set me on the right path to avoid another Myocardial Infarction ("heart attack") and thus stay physically functioning within acceptable parameters on this planet.

I do not "do my own research" beyond what I need to know to ask the right questions.  I most certainly do not dismiss my cardiologist's advice or orders as the biased product of some corrupt elite, and follow instead my own theories, feelings, and desires.  

(A friend of mine did this.  He had a heart attack and bypass surgery, and followed his cardiologist's advice for years, until he attended a seminar with a Dr. Atkins where he got the idea that it wasn't about the cholesterol at all, but carbohydrates.  So he changed his behavior back to regular fried bacon and eggs, but no bread....  Soon thereafter he had such a massive Myocardial Infarction that he was dead before he hit the ground.)

These days I hear a lot about people who reject this or that orthodoxy as hopelessly corrupted by the agenda of the "elite," with no purpose other than to keep them in control and increasing in wealth at our expense.  Experts, science, peer review, fact checking, scholarship, indeed anyone who went to college or got an advanced degree in anything all fall under suspicion as fatally tainted by "wokeness," a word they use to lie about some arbitrary philosophy which expresses the elite's power.

This perspective has always lurked in the Church, especially in Protestantism, but I notice it becoming more prominent today.  Protestantism inherently contains a "do your own research" strain that thinks of faith as a private relationship between God and each individual, and any person's interpretation of the Bible is as legitimate as any other.  Some now consider having gone to seminary a handicap for ministers, especially if this hifalutin knowledge tells people what they don't want to hear.  We have had people relying on charismatic influencers rather than accredited and ordained pastors for decades now.

We don't just see this on the populist right, but it infuses the thinking of "Progressives" as well.  Consider this quote, attributed to liberal icon Barbara Brown Taylor: "What if the church invited people to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?"  She goes on to basically say that the church's job consists of blessing people for what they are already doing in the world.  Thing is, if my cardiologists had that approach to their work I'd be dead.  I can't think of anything more horrifying than that my cardiologist would pay much attention to "what I already know" about my heart, which is next to nothing.  Why would I waste my time listening to people "tell what they already know of God" based, no doubt, on their own research or experience?  A lot of people are "already doing in the world" perfectly awful things for which we should most certainly not bless them.

In my experience, Presbyterians have such a deficient ecclesiology that it gets easily overwhelmed by influences from a culture dominated by the values, practices, and structures of Modernity.  We reflexively despise authority, suspect "religion," and devalue the gathering of believers, as if these were unconscionable restraints and restrictions on our individual freedom to do as we please.  They get in the way of one's "personal relationship with Jesus," a contagion we contracted from Evangelical influencers.  

We have forgotten the purpose of the Church.  Therefore, unless we just abandon it altogether (as much of the West is doing), we have to dream up some reason for its existence that makes sense to us.  It seems like the Church only becomes intelligible to Modernity as a social club, an educational institution, a cadre of activists, an ethnic enclave, a community center, a place to receive spiritual comfort or moral advice, or a nostalgic anachronism.  Some of these activities may relate to the Church's actual identity as Christ's Body, but all of them are derivative and secondary.  

The Church is where people, through worship and mission, discipleship and repentance, participate in the means of grace -- the Word, Sacraments, and prayer -- and so come into obedience and conformity with Jesus Christ and acquire the Holy Spirit.  

The Church therefore has a specific task requiring particular tools, expertise, practices, stories, and rituals.  It teaches a lifestyle.  It has this in common with cardiology -- and frankly any institution (another bad word) that has a purpose, from a bowling league to a Spanish class to a dance troupe to a string quartet.    

(One town I heard about had a group called the Quilting Club.  Originally, they  actually made quilts, discussed quilting technique, shared fabrics, and distributed quilts to needy families.  But over time, the subsequent generations became less interested in quilts.  They didn't have the time and the specialized knowledge was lost.  But they were still friends.  So the Quilting Club morphed into a group of women who met monthly for lunch.  Maybe they raised money to buy quilts to distribute at Christmas, but they really didn't have any interest in actual quilting.  They considered it quaint and quirky, a kind of secret among themselves, that they retained the name.  If you showed up and actually wanted to learn quilting, they wouldn't even know to whom to refer you.  In other words, a rock band calling itself "The Cardiologists" is unlikely to help me lower my blood pressure.  So a group calling itself a Christian church should be able to provide guidance and support for a journey of spiritual transformation, but don't necessarily count on it.)  

The thing about cardiology is that its practitioners share a common expertise and practice.  Though you might get some differences in personality, style, and approach around the edges, the basics of reading an EKG, making diagnoses, and prescribing medications are going to be largely the same whether I go to one in New Jersey or Germany, no matter what medical school they attended, or what book they read last week.  I can trust that they're not going to tell me that something they got off the internet or heard on a podcast means that now my heart would be cool with my smoking, drinking more alcohol, consuming mass quantities of fat and salt, and sitting on the couch watching TV all day.  

I trust the same things of a shamanic healer or a practitioner of ayurvedic or Chinese medicine, a Chiropractor or a yoga instructor.  I expect them to know their stuff and honestly give me their insights and advice from within that tradition and community of knowledge.  I expect them to have expertise.      

What if people came to church with expectations like I have when I go to the cardiologist?  What if we could assume the Pastor of a Christian church to have  competence to teach someone the Way of Jesus in continuity and partnership with his followers of every age?  Jesus commands his disciples to make disciples, to teach people to follow him by taking on specific attitudes and behaviors.  If someone asks me a question about following Jesus' Way, I should be able to give them a straight answer based on my tradition, community, and experience.

I depend on my cardiologist to answer my questions.  I expect them to have some expertise and information that I do not have because I haven't had their training or their experience dealing with people in my situation.  I tire of the idea that we in the Church can't do anything more than just join people in their questions.   We're pretending like the subject matter at church doesn't really mean anything in particular or specific, that it's just a bunch of answerless questions we struggle with together to find our own personal answers.  Uh, no.  I go to my cardiologist with questions... but I want to go home with answers, and a plan of action.  People need to know we in the Church have ana answer to their questions and his Name is Jesus.  We have a diagnosis and we have prescribed remedies.  We need to say, "This is how we follow Jesus, we do this and this and this and this.  

(Like when a minister said to me they "struggle" with the words of the Baptismal Formula.  I, a presbytery Stated Clerk, replied, "Struggle all you want.  But when you do a Baptism, you need to use the words."  Not because the Book of Order says so, which it does.  But because Jesus says so, and the entire 2000 year tradition of Christianity says so.  It's not a matter of interpretation or innovation.  It's not something open to our questions.  It's a matter of simple obedience.  If we can't do what he says in this obvious and easy case, how will we do what he says when it is difficult, challenging, and ambiguous?)

Yes, I realized of course that the Bible has many different perspectives and approaches.  But my job as a Pastor, except in Bible study, is not to say, "Well, Paul says this, but maybe that wasn't really Paul, and Leviticus says this, but Isaiah says something different, and then Jesus says this in Mark but this in John, so basically take your pick and do what feels right to you."  The community and tradition have determined boundaries of interpretation.  These are not impermeable or unchanging, but they do give us guidance.  The deeper the tradition goes, the more we should respect it.  Ultimately, Jesus Christ as attested in Scripture has priority.  A community of disciples should have clearly articulated standards and preferred interpretations, based on the texts and on the shared experience of what works.  

And humility means that, unlike cardiology, it remains possible that our presentation of the Way of Jesus will not work for everyone.  In the end, the soul is not a physical organ like the heart.  It is not as subject to the rules of chemistry and physics.  Someone may simply do better on another path.  In this case we let people continue their search elsewhere; we do not try and adjust or adapt our path to the point of threatening its basic coherence and integrity, in order to accommodate them.  Zen teachers don't become Southern Baptists because that's what people who show up prefer.

(It reminds me of a book by Thomas Merton: The Waters of Siloe in which he recounts the history of the Cistercian Order.  The Cistercians' practice includes establishing monasteries in different places, starting with a few monks.  If the place thrives, they praise and thank God.  But if it does not thrive, they eventually decide to close up shop and move on to somewhere else.  (Jesus teaches something like this in Matthew 10:14.)  They do not try to adapt the practices that are constitutive to the Cistercian way by changing them to suit what will better attract adherents in specific locales.  (Jesus also makes this point in Mark 4:1-20.  The sower doesn't change the seed to suit the different kinds of soil.  It thrives or it doesn't.)  

Basically, I hope for a Church that knows what it's doing and does it with confidence, and humility.  But does it, and has the integrity to share it with and teach it to those who ask.

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The Modern Conspiracy Theory About Christian Beginnings.

I recently read Victoria Loorz' book, The Church of the Wild.  The book actually has a lot of value in shifting our thinking and acting in a more ecological direction.  I found a lot to love in it.  But for some reason she feels a need to digress into early Church history with disastrous effect.  I reference this because it summarizes so well the story concocted under Modernity to "explain" Christianity and the Church.  Here is what she wrote. 

One of Constantine’s first agenda items was to get the religion in order.  He had attributed his military success to placing the symbol of the Christian religion on his soldiers’ banners and shields.  This led him to end persecution of Christians and eventually adopt the religion as his own (albeit on his deathbed.)  But at that time, there were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom, and that was causing conflict.  Plus, a religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too. 

The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire.  Dissenting voices were shut down.  And a war over the nouns of God was raging.  The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips. 

So Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea (now Bursa, Turkey, a lovely lakeside city).  The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about.  Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power. 

The Nicene Creed was the result.  These early church fathers—literally called the patriarchs—used language as a tool of dominance.  From what I’ve read, the whole lot of them were power hungry, cloying for position and recognition, and they attacked one another mercilessly.  These were the men who controlled the narrative.  The Nicene Creed was meant to settle the God-noun argument and condemn any who dissented as heretics.  And it’s been used since then as a statement of orthodoxy, with slight adaptations, throughout history. 

The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though.  For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued.  People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it. Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them “mad men” and persecuting them with a “divine authority.”  The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church.  These were called the Vulgate, meaning “for the commoners,” which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did. 

In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1.   Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word.  While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point.  Word (verbum) fit the objective of the “single supreme authority” of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church. 

After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard.  No.  They had been effectively shut down.  Word was better.  No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes.  Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word.  The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word.  The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word.

End of conversation.

Loorz, Victoria. Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred (pp. 119-121). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition. 

Here we get a succinct rendition of the standard conspiracy theory about Christian beginnings approved and propagated by Modernity.  We often hear this sort of thing from people deeply damaged by their background in conservative evangelical or Catholic churches.  In reacting against them, some, like Loorz, apparently feel a need to reject Christianity altogether.  To justify this, she misrepresents early Christian history in a simplistic, self-serving, and indeed pejorative and defamatory way.  I find it difficult not to take personally her gratuitous insults directed at the spiritual tradition I follow. 

Now, Loorz does not claim to write as a historian, so my critique here may seem unfair.  But I find it irresponsible for an author to simply repeat nonsense.  And she really doesn't need to!  Her book has a lot of value otherwise, and deleting this couple of pages would not have damaged her argument at all.  But a lot of writers exhibit this tendency.  Rather than focus on the good things they want to say, they seem to feel obligated to invent and frame an enemy to condemn and blame for their situation.  They will spin the historical record and even just plain make stuff up.  Loorz repeats some of the usual assumptions of Modern thought: the bias against communities and tradition, the assumption that only the worst forms of Western Christianity exist, the idea that somehow the Spanish Inquisition represented the basic agenda of the church from the beginning.  That sort of thing.  

In her blanket rejection of Orthodox Christianity, Loorz also defames a lot of the people she manages to quote favorably in other parts of her book, all of whom affirmed and lived by the same Nicene Creed that she has decided comes from a bunch of power-hungry men and their vicious, conniving Emperor.  This list includes: Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Thomas Merton, the entire Celtic church, Howard Thurman, and Richard Rohr.  One would think that perhaps she could have approached with a tad more humility these people and trust them to have a clue about their own faith.  But apparently she does not.  She seems to feel she knows better.   

"There were many different interpretations and expressions of Christianity throughout the kingdom."

Here we find a central part of the Modernist propaganda about the early church.  This makes it sound like it was a hodgepodge of groups, all with valid and roughly equal appeal and constituencies.  On the one hand, apparently many different groups did exist which had different takes on Jesus.  However, we find nearly all of them on the fringes of the faith.  On the other hand, while we have no way of getting to actual numbers, judging from the extant manuscripts and recorded contemporary testimonies, an overwhelming majority of Christians in the early centuries participated in the mainstream Orthodox tradition of the Apostles, who actually knew Jesus.    

"A religion that asserts a single ruling identity for the deity would be helpful to remind folks that there was a new solo emperor too."

Of course, prior to Constantine the emperor was considered a god, so for him to recognize another, higher God than himself would have meant rather a demotion.  Plus, it's not like Constantine ruled as the first solo Emperor who therefore needed to justify his reign by imposing monotheism; his predecessors were all polytheists.  The relationship between the Emperor and the Church remained complicated, shifting, often adversarial, and took centuries to get finalized, largely with the Church emerging in the higher position.  By no means did the Church simply carry out the Emperors' bidding.  Loorz' simplistic and uninformed depiction of this does her readers a disservice.

"The fight was on for who was going to control the narrative of the newly legal church of the Roman Empire.  Dissenting voices were shut down.  And a war over the nouns of God was raging."

No one "shut down" all "dissenting voices."  The Council of Nicaea included bishops who followed Arianism, a belief that Jesus was not coeternal with God but a human whom God uniquely blessed.  In fact, the Emperor probably would have preferred Arianism to prevail, and several of his successors did oppose the Church on these kinds of questions.  The fact that "dissenting voices" existed and needed to be heard is why they called Councils in the first place.  Loorz anachronistically reads her understanding of Medieval Catholicism and 20th century totalitarianism into the 4th century.  This tells us more about her than it does about the Church at that time.

"The doctrine of the Trinity—a conceptualization of a single God with three parts—was forming through debates and fights and power trips."

No one with a rudimentary understanding of Christian theology would say that the Trinity is "a conceptualization of a single God with three parts."  The doctrine appears in Scripture, but it did take a few centuries of conversations and debates within the Church to settle on a final, consensus articulation.  She pejoratively describes this process as "debates and fights and power trips."  Okay.  But that does not doctrine was dictated by the Emperor with "dissenting voices" "shut down."  She does not make clear how these "debates and fights and power trips" differ from the kind of "conversation" she advocates all over this book.  

"Constantine personally invited three hundred or so of the 1,800 bishops in the empire and escorted them, free of charge, to the imperial palace in Nicaea."

Loorz here slanderously insinuates that the Emperor personally cherry-picked the bishops and bought them off by wining and dining them to get their approval of his nefarious plan.  In reality, the Church selected the bishops, many of whom had bitter memories of brutal persecutions by the same soldiers that now welcomed them.  Two of them even came from Persia, Rome's traditional enemy where Constantine had no jurisdiction.

(Loorz says that "patriarchs" wrote the Nicene Creed; the Creed actually came out of a gathering of bishops.  She also expresses indignation that people back then would actually use terms like "patriarch" and "hierarchy," given their negative connotations today... as if she expects people in the 4th century to somehow have a clue about 21st century political speech.)  

"The bishops—all of them male, of course—were to come to agreement about the hotly debated hierarchy of the Godhead nouns, something their Hebrew predecessors never thought about.  Defining the noun-ness of God “correctly” was an ongoing obsession of men with power."

In those days, civic and religious leaders tended to be all or mostly male.  This was not something the Church or the Emperor connived to do for this specific meeting.  Loorz has this thing about languages based on verbs being better than those based on nouns, and she apparently feels that the desire for precision in theological language was "an ongoing obsession of men with power."  I do not know which "Hebrew predecessors" she means.  The prophets?  In any case, she prefers languages other than Latin and Greek, which she has decided are hopelessly patriarchal.  Fine.  But people spoke those languages at the time.  Does she feel they should have used some language she deems better but no one actually spoke?   

The Nicene Creed, of course, contains more than just these oppressive "nouns."  Some of the most significant aspects do concern actions: "was made," "begotten," "came down," "was crucified," "was raised," "proceeds," "is worshiped and glorified," "will come again," and so on.  Indeed, the most important word in the Creed, the one most hotly debated, was an adjective, homoousios. 

  

"The Council of Nicaea didn’t end the rivalry, though.  For another sixty years, the debate over how to arrange the nouns of three entities to describe one God continued.  People were excommunicated, exiled, and even killed over it.  Finally the emperor Theodosius I ended the debate by imperial decree in 380: Nicene Christianity became the official state religion, complete with harsh condemnation of anyone with different ideas of what Christianity looked like, calling them 'mad me' and persecuting them with a 'divine authority.'  The pope commissioned a revised set of Old Latin gospels to be used authoritatively by the Roman Catholic Church.  These were called the Vulgate, meaning 'for the commoners,' which is ironic because the commoners didn’t read Latin—only the priests did."

Loorz attempts to make the work of the early ecumenical councils sound ridiculous, as a silly debate over the arrangement of nouns.  Whatever.  (Insert eye-roll emoji.)  

    Maybe she refers to the schism of the "Oriental" Orthodox, who followed slightly different variations of Christology?  If so, misunderstandings mainly caused this tragedy and it indeed cost many lives.  They seek to heal this separation even today.  But nevertheless there remained more diversity within Orthodoxy than Loorz apparently knows about.  We see that from the different liturgies and missional approaches used, East and West.  But yes, the Empire's attempts to impose uniformity had terrible consequences.    

Loorz does not make clear that with her sentence beginning "the Pope" she is talking about events several centuries later.  The term "Vulgate" refers to the Latin version of the Bible held in common by the Western church.  It has nothing to do with a class distinction between "commoners" and priests.  And for a while Latin did serve as the vernacular language of the people.  It didn't become only for priests until centuries later, and then only in the West.

"In this sanctioned Vulgate version of the New Testament, the decision was made to use verbum (word) to translate logos for the opening hymn of John 1.   Verbum means just one single vocable, the smallest fragment of language that has meaning: a single word.  While it doesn’t make grammatical, contextual, or historical sense, it does make a point.  Word (verbum) fit the objective of the 'single supreme authority' of the now official Holy Roman Empire Church."

Loorz exhibits breathtaking historical ignorance here.  The Holy Roman Empire wasn't formed until around 800 CE around the Frankish Kingdom, in the West.  Neither does Loorz understand the difference between the Eastern and Western Churches.  The bishop of Rome does not take on the title "pope" until 1083.  By then he did not have any authority over the Eastern Church at all.  And I have no idea what she means by "single supreme authority."  Perhaps she got it from the novels of Philip Pullman.

After all, allowing Conversation (sermo) to define the essence of Christ could encourage those dissenting voices to be heard.  No.  They had been effectively shut down.  Word was better.  No back-and-forth, no room for dissent, no changes.  Just the one and only Word, the last word, the capital-W Word.  The inarguable Word, the end-of-discussion Word, the everyone-else’s-word-is-heresy Word.  The hierarchy chooses Word, and so it remains Word. 

This argument sounds just silly, as if everything hinged on one Latin term.  Especially since the original remains the Greek logos.  How can she complain about all this debating and fighting, and then complain about "no back snd forth, no room for dissent, no changes"?!  The Church's understanding of the essence of Christ continued to evolve over centuries.  "No dissenting voices"?! the Ecumenical Councils were vigorous debates between people holding different opinions.  I have in my library shelves and shelves of books offering different opinions about scripture and doctrine, over 2,000 years of vigorous conversation.  

Maybe she imagines that the Church refused to include some particular other "dissenting voices"?  Who, may I ask, does she mean?  Well, due to Loorz' association with people like Hal Taussig, I wonder if she doesn't somehow imagine that the Church should have included the so-called "gnostic Christians" some of whose books Taussig says we need to add to the New Testament.  I don't know.  However, mainstream Christianity separated itself from the gnostic movement for very good reasons long before Nicaea.

One of the things I have learned about people spouting conspiracy theories is that if you don't agree with them they whine about "not being heard."  The Church heard the gnostics loud and clear.  Irenaeus wrote a whole, long book about them and their doctrines, which he carefully studied.  They just refused to go along with them because it would have corrupted the core of the faith.  Maybe the Church did listen very carefully to the voices Loorz wants to include, and just decided not to follow them.    

I admit that I have little grace in my heart for people who get books published and then just willfully get facts wrong, using those errant readings to defame many good people.  She could have easily remedied this by spending an afternoon on Wikipedia.  Indeed the book would have been fine if she just deleted this whole section.  But she needed a scapegoat, I guess.  But if I can't trust her on this, how am I supposed to trust her about anything?  This passage doesn't even help the main argument of her book except to foment resentment and grievance, inventing evil enemies on whom to focus a death-ray of paranoia and rage, and blame for one's problems.  It made me impatient with the rest of her book, especially the pages-long conversation with the deer. 

All that being said, I otherwise mostly enjoyed her book.  And her notion of a "wild church" remains an inspired vision.  The Bible contains a great deal of chronically overlooked nature imagery that we certainly need to recover and lift up.

Loorz is free to go out and form her own religion.  She wouldn't be the first.  She is even free to call it somehow "Christian" or somehow connected to Jesus.  That's been done already too.  (Mormons and some Unitarians call themselves Christian.)  

But there are very good reasons why the Church placed the focus squarely on Jesus Christ and took the time and energy necessary to carefully articulate what this means.  The doctrines she dismisses as the product of a pernicious waste of bad men's time -- the Trinity and the two natures of Christ -- are actually essential and constitutive for Christians and Christianity.  They basically mean God is a community of mutual love and God was uniquely present in creation in Jesus.  In truth these doctrines, had she taken the time to study them at all, actually make her point.  For the communal love of the Trinity is embedded in all creation, and through the human Jesus' divinity we realize our own.  Jesus Christ reveals the radical Presence of God in creation and in humanity.  I would have thought that something Loorz would appreciate.

Of course, she would not likely have gotten any of that from her evangelical church.  Indeed, the meaning of these doctrines has largely been lost to the Western Church.  This is on us.  Her ignorance is understandable, at any rate.

It is the Church's job to recover these doctrines and articulate their deeper and broader meanings.  We need to be about this work and build on it in expressing a faith that does indeed see God's Presence in creation and works to walk on the earth more lightly in humility, thanksgiving, appreciation, listening, reverence, and peace.

+++++++

Culture/Stories/Heroes, Catechesis.

In a recent conversation on "The Gray Area" podcast, Ta Nehisi Coates and Sean Illing make the point that, "What happens in the larger world is a function of the stories we tell each other."  In the movie, The Apprentice, the character of Roy Cohn makes a similar point that there is no truth, only narratives.   

They refer to culture.  Our culture comes encoded and presented in the stories we tell about ourselves, the past, and the world.  Our culture shapes a lot of what we take as truth.  Culture is a complex of stories we tell about ourselves and our world.

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Many of the basic stories that underpin our culture -- Modernity -- valorize outlaws, rebels, settlers, pioneers, people who go against the grain and even break the law to win.  Copernicus.  Martin Luther.  Galileo.  Andrew Jackson.  Howard Roark.  Like how the lone scientist who goes against the corrupt orthodox establishment (is there any other kind?) gets presented as the hero of many disaster movies.  The starving artist who pursues his own radical vision against the stifling grain of conformity.  The woman who leaves her restrictive family and its oppressive norms -- and unexciting, dutiful husbands -- to find herself, like in Eat, Pray, Love, or The Bridges of Madison County.   America thoroughly buys into this model of the hero.  If they have to, such heroes will fight, lie, steal, betray, and kill in order to win.  They will most certainly transgress.  "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."  "I gotta be me."  "I did it my way."    

Hence, many of Donald Trump's supporters not only don't care that he has felony convictions; to them that makes him a hero.  He has a lot of money, he gets away with stuff, he's selfish, he breaks the rules and norms, he takes what he wants.  He wins.  Trump embodies a lot of the hero archetype prevailing in the Modern Age.   We idolized these figures in our entertainment and arts for centuries; now we act shocked, shocked! that people have actually come to think like this? 

If our basic stories are corrupt or false then only bad actions and bad actors make sense.  If our stories praise the outlaw who steals and wins how can we advocate for the order and generosity necessary for a society to function?  Therefore, we have to develop a counter-story of the brave law enforcement officer who keeps the outlaws from getting completely out of hand.  But notice how many of these characters themselves have to break or bend the law and resist the "hierarchy," "politics," and procedures.  Only good outlaws can control the bad outlaws, apparently.  It reminds me of the quip about the difference between Canada and the U.S.: in one the frontier was the north and the hero was a policeman, and in the other the frontier was the west and the hero was an outlaw, holds true.  Modern mythology needs and therefore synthesizes both of them.  Indeed, we build this false binary into the culture.  Both renegades and Mounties had the same larger goals: to displace and exterminate native peoples and exploit natural resources.  Our two party political system reflects this as well.  They share the larger goal while keeping in tension the story of the outlaws and the cops.     

After generations living in a culture that marinates itself in such narratives, who wonders that we have no trust in institutions, or communities, or traditions, or laws, or leaders?  Because the stories do not stay stories; they shape perceptions and actions.  We live by these stories.  We all innately want to emulate these kinds of heroes, at least unconsciously.  

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A lot of American Evangelical Christianity turns Jesus into one of these outlaw heroes.  To do this they have to use precisely selected passages from the Bible, ignoring or explaining away most of what Jesus says and does.  They have to find sometimes ingenious ways to neutralize his most important teachings -- like the Sermon on the Mount -- which do not fit into the Modern hero paradigm.  They cannot tolerate such an emphasis on humility; they cannot accept practices like turning the other cheek and loving enemies.  To attain success in American culture, we must accommodate the Modern hero myth, even at the cost of basically rejecting Jesus' actual teachings.  Thus some of them even invent a perverse identification between this corrupted version of "Jesus" and Trump.

In Reformed Christianity we have had the same problems.  Historically we also preached the Modern hero "Jesus" who supported America and advocated for Enlightenment values.  This reached perhaps its sad nadir with Christian chaplains convincing airmen to keep firebombing Japan even though it was clear they were incinerating civilians by the thousands.  We can find numerous accounts of Reformed Christian leaders preaching a heroic "Jesus" who bears little or no resemblance to the actual Jesus of the New Testament. 

But Reformed Christianity had the benefit of hearing the voice of Karl Barth which managed to turn some back to the Jesus attested in the Scriptures.  While this helped the Church to recover its authentic voice, it also meant the Church would gradually but necessarily fall out of synch with American culture.  We may identify many reasons for the precipitous and steady decline of the mainline church in terms of numbers of participants over the last few decades.  The influence of Barth and others has to be a factor.  The more preachers recognized and let go of the Modern hero version of Jesus, the less the Church's message found a hearing among Americans.  The Jesus of the Scriptures, who sided with the poor and marginalized, and whom the authorities crucified for sedition, simply did not compute.

The mainline Church started "declining" to the degree that it paid attention to the gospel rather than the culture.  If we want to reverse this loss of members, influence, and money, the accepted strategy means finding out what people want to hear and tell it to them.  Every other outlet of the media and entertainment knows this and acts accordingly.  In the Church it means conservatives cherish and preach a version of culture from the past, and liberals striving to be relevant to more recent and contemporary culture.  Neither shows any interest in following Jesus if it means losing its relevance to Modernity and its stories and heroes.     

Pentecostalism today represent the fastest growing segment of Christianity in the world.  This tells me that their style and message resonate most with whatever culture is congealing around us as Modernity disintegrates.  I wonder if Pentecostalism will have a function and role similar in the new version of Empire that Protestantism had in Modernity.  

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The early Church experienced Roman culture as toxic, murderous, and corrupt.  We have that sense embedded in Christianity from the beginning when Rome crucified its Founder for sedition.  They based their new culture on his resurrection, by which he defeated the Empire.  Christianity is therefore inherently anti-Empire and counter-cultural.  They knew that becoming a Christian did not involve some shift of attention and allegiance within the framework of Roman culture.  Rather it meant repentance,  conversion, and discipleship: a change of culture, a replacement of the basic stories that give people's lives shape and meaning.  And that means living and acting differently.  

In terms of this essay, it has to do with letting Jesus Christ define heroism for us.  He becomes the One we want to follow, emulate, and become, which happens by participation in a particular community and tradition.  It means living differently from the way everyone else lives.  

For this reason, joining a church involved a long and difficult process.  The convert had to relinquish one culture, laying aside a whole complex of stories and practices, ways of thinking and acting, values and aspirations, and take on new and very different ones.  They had to exchange the culturally approved action heroes for saints and martyrs of the Church.  They had to exchange loyalty to their nation, Empire, and government, for Christ and the Church.  They called this journey catechesis, and it could take years of study, conversation, prayer, ascetic discipline, and self-examination.

American Protestant Christianity sucks at catechesis.  Under the regime of Christendom, we assumed that Americans (with a few exceptions) were Christians.  We admitted little or no daylight between American culture and Christianity.  We still assume that a visitor to worship will not only have some clue about Christianity, but they will have a basically positive view of it.... and they largely don't have either.  Hence few even show up.  They come bearing baggage from whatever they managed to pick up about Christianity along the way, good or bad (mostly bad).  And we happily and gratefully make them members, and even elders (!), with barely a thought.  At most a new member class might focus on the polity of the particular denomination and the traditions of the local congregation.  But it would be difficult to get across a necessity for a person to change their whole culture when the church itself sports an American flag right behind the pulpit.  When all the members consider themselves Americans first and Christians... somewhere down the list.  A church without catechesis is a church happy to remain thoroughly embedded in the culture of a dominant Empire.  A church that does this sees its fortunes rise and fall with the culture to which it has bound itself.

Catechesis, repentance, conversion, discipleship.  We have to recover these practices.  We have to preach the biblical narrative of liberation, which means setting aside, and drawing out the contrasts with the cultural narratives that dominate Modernity and whatever expression of Empire comes after.  We need first to rescue our portrayals of Jesus from the corrupt renditions of right and left, and recover the "Jesus Christ, as attested in Holy Scripture" who stands at the center of the Declaration of Barmen.

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